Tekst en foto’s door Freek Colombijn In 1992 bezocht ik Shanghai. In 2010 keerde ik terug in een stad die deels onherkenbaar was geworden. Het bekendste landmark van de stad was twintig jaar geleden de Bund, de boulevard die de westoever van de Huangpu volgde. Langs de Bund stonden, en staan, trotse kantoren, die aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw waren opgetrokken door westerse firma’s die zich met steun van hun regeringen toegang tot China verschaft hadden. Aan de overkant van het water, het Pudong district, was geen noemenswaardige bebouwing.
Door Maaike Benders In Birma (ook bekend als Myanmar, op Indonesie na het grootste land van Zuidoost Azie) worden op 7 november voor het eerst in twintig jaar verkiezingen gehouden. De huidige militaire regeringspartij greep in 1988 de macht en behield deze na de verkiezingen van 1990, die gewonnen werden door de partij van Aung San Suu Kyi. Het leger heeft haar sindsdien meer dan veertien jaar huisarrest opgelegd, en toonde zich niet onder de indruk van de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede die zij in 1991 kreeg toegewezen, noch van enige andere vorm van internationale en nationale druk.
Door Oscar Salemink Gisteren sloeg ik – genietend van een kop koffie en een Jumbo Stroopwafel Bereid met Roomboter (per stuk te koop bij de Seven Eleven om de hoek hier in Taipei) – de opiniepagina van de Taipei Times open, waar mijn oog viel op een grote cartoon, over ongeveer een derde van de (broadsheet) krant. In de cartoon wandelt een gezin – vader, moeder, kind – over een hangbrug naar een donkere muur met een poort waardoor licht schijnt, en bewaakt.
De ‘vader’ in de cartoon vertoont een opvallende gelijkenis met onze oerhollandse schrijver Kader Abolah. De titel van het artikel is ‘Europe’s complex fear of immigrants’, en is geschreven door ‘one of Holland’s leading writers [who] laments the way that the migrant dream has turned to suspicion on both sides’. De auteur blijkt niet de (besnorde) Kader Abdolah maar de (kalende) Abdelkader Benali, die dit opiniestuk had toegestuurd aan de Engelse krant The Guardian.
By Ursula Cats When I started my fieldwork as a Master’s student last year, I had many ideals and I mainly wanted to represent the women I was researching as “agents of change”. What I actually experienced was different. As I wrote in an e-mail to my supervisor Ellen Bal towards the end of my fieldwork: “I can clearly see the restrictions these young women have. I can see that they are active agents, but their impossibilities are also becoming painfully obvious.”
I have always had the motivation to support people who have fewer opportunities than I do. To gain more knowledge on developmental work, I decided to enroll in the Master’s program in anthropology in September 2009. It was not complicated to find a focus for my fieldwork: the women who had fled from Burma to Thailand. The anthropological theories I used, however, did not correspond directly with what I actually saw and experienced. Eventually I was able to gain a perspective based on the stories of the women themselves, which I used in my thesis to shed light on the situation of unrecognized refugee women from Burma.
In this final post in the context of Peace Week 2010 and the International Day of Peace, Gea Wijers shows how Cambodia mobilizes a curious ‘invented tradition’ in a long-running conflict with Thailand around an ancient temple.
Cambodia must be the only country on this planet to proudly portray a ruin on its national flag. The stylized image of mythical Angkor Watt (a Cambodian temple complex) in its hay-day says all that needs to be said about the Cambodian government. Its tendency to opportunistically cling on to a romantic national past that may never have existed. Its tendency to defend this past, despite its invention by colonial foreigners and against claims by neighbouring states. And, last but not least, its tendency to legitimize the resulting defensive policies by simply inventing more traditions. The case of Preah Vihear may serve as an illustrative example.
In the context of ‘Peace Week 2010’ we present a number of postson such subjects as war, conflict and oppression. Today, on the International Day of Peace, Thomas van der Molen discusses the conflict in Kashmir. The photos are by Dilnaz Boga.
Policemen sitting against a wall covered with freedom slogans
‘We hate peace!’, a young Kashmiri dissident exclaimed during my fieldwork in the summer of 2008. He was referring to what anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood observes to be a tendency for repressive authorities in Kashmir and elsewhere to practice ‘pacification’ as part of their state security agenda. In line with both the informants in my fieldwork, and Mahmood, I favor the language of rights and justice, rather than that of peace and security. The UN General Assembly, on the other hand, presents today’s ‘International Day of Peace’, or ‘Peace Day’, as an opportunity to mark ‘our personal and planetary progress toward peace’. Yet, the relevance of ‘Peace Day’ – and indeed the concept of ‘peace’ itself – to the inhabitants of the Valley of Kashmir is doubtful, as the Government of India perpetuates its policy of ‘pacification’.
Dinsdag 31 augustus presenteert Freek Colombijn zijn nieuwe boek Under Construction, een historisch-antropologische studie naar stedelijke ruimte en huisvesting tijdens de dekolonisatie in Indonesië. Een gesprek met deze docent antropologie aan de VU, over etniciteit en klasse in het koloniale Indonesië, het nooit ‘af’ zijn van steden (en onderzoek) en zijn speurtocht naar verborgen archieven.
By Gea Wijers Last week, on July 26, the trial chamber for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) found Kaing Guek Eav (68), alias Duch, the former head of the Tuol Sleng prison under the Pol Pot regime guilty of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva conventions. He was sentenced to 35 years of imprisonment.
As the prison records show, Duch may be held responsible for the deaths by torture, killing and malnutrition, of at least 15,000 people. How can it be that a person with this incredible death record gets away with “only” 35 years imprisonment?
Remnants of a destroyed government building in Bishkek (photos by Amieke Bouma)
By Amieke Bouma
On the 27th of June, a nation-wide referendum confirmed Roza Otunbayeva as the new president of Kyrgyzstan. The referendum was endorsed by most international actors, despite the fact that they had not sent any observers. This was deemed too dangerous due to the violent situation in the south of the country. The relative calm during the referendum therefore obviously caused relief. Only a week before, I had also been astonished by the quiet situation in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek. Ethnic violence was raging between the Kyrgyz and the large Uzbek minority living in the Ferghana valley in the south of Kyrgyzstan, in which an estimated 2000 people died, and another 400.000 fled their homes.
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