By Ewa Strzelecka and Marina de Regt – This June will be remembered as a month of celebrating Yemeni studies and dialogue in the Netherlands. The so-called forgotten war of Yemen became a war to…
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By Maaike Matelski – On 8 December 2022, Nickey Diamond visited the VU for two lectures. Nickey is an activist from Myanmar who recently started a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Konstanz, where…
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By Marina de Regt – “So this is Xmas, and what have you done, another year over and a new one just began”, John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang exactly 50 years ago. It was…
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On the outskirts of the old city of Sanaa.
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By Marina de Regt. “Marina, if I die, will you then forgive me for all the trouble that I caused you?” my Yemeni friend Amina wrote me ten days ago. I have known Amina since…
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By Marina de Regt While we were all busy watching the US elections in the first week of November, an armed conflict broke out on the other side of the world, in the already turbulent and instable Horn of Africa. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts to bring about peace between the almost 20-year stalemate between Ethiopia and Eritrea, ordered a military offensive in response to an attack launched by the TPLF (the Tigray People’s Liberation Front) on the national defence force. It resulted in hundreds of deaths amongst whom many civilians and thousands of refugees fleeing their homes in the northern part of Ethiopia crossing the border to Sudan. Last week, when the results of the US elections were finally clear, the conflict has caught the attention of the Western media. Within a very short time Abiy Ahmed’s image as a peacemaker is receding in the eyes of the international community, and he is being pressured to stop the military attacks. But what is really going on in Ethiopia, and how can we explain the fact that this young and promising Prime Minister felt forced to use violence?
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BY MARINA DE REGT “Marina, how are you? I am worried about you, how is the situation with Corona?” a Yemeni friend asked me last week via Whatsapp. It was not the first time that…
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BY FREEK COLOMBIJN More than two decades ago I published an article on the urban symbolism of Canberra, the national capital of Australia. When Australian states federated to become an independent state in 1901, it…
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Door Marina de Regt In het Volkskrant magazine van afgelopen zaterdag 26 januari j.l. doet journaliste Ana van Es verslag van haar bezoek aan Jemen. De Midden-Oosten correspondente valt hier van de ene verbazing in de andere: alle stereotypen over man-vrouwverhoudingen in de Arabische wereld worden volgens haar in Jemen bevestigd. Vrouwen moeten zich zwaar sluieren, ze moeten zich onzichtbaar maken, ze worden continu lastig gevallen door mannen, ze worden gedwongen jong te trouwen, ze kunnen niet buitenshuis werken, als ze werken wordt hun geld afgepakt door hun mannen en ze hebben geen enkele politieke invloed. Op ironische wijze doet ze verslag van haar ervaringen, en dat levert een smeuïg verhaal op dat het goed doet aan de borreltafel. Maar wat is de toegevoegde waarde van dit verhaal? En waar zijn haar conclusies op gebaseerd?
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