By Thijl Sunier Just over a week ago, after a period of relative silence, we could witness the start of another mediated Islam-hype with heated debates, demonstrations and (verbal and physical) violence. The apparent cause this time was the trailer on YouTube of an obscure movie titled “Innocence of Muslims” about the prophet Mohammed. The movie, in which Mohammed is depicted as a violent child molester, a rapist, a con-man and a homosexual, is the product of an obscure anti-Islam activist in the United States. The movie was designed to provoke Muslims deliberately by insulting Mohammed, much in the same way as the mad priest in Florida who burnt the Quran a couple of years ago. After the very-hard-to-find trailer was released, there was a small demonstration in Cairo in which the movie was mentioned along with other grievances against the US. It became a global issue only after an attack on the American embassy in Benghazi in Libya in which the ambassador was killed. Not very surprisingly this aroused strong reactions and a lot of media attention around the world, whereupon the protest spread to other countries. American magazines published grotesque cover images of angry mobs and raging Muslims. The whole circus of Islam critiques was mobilized to express their deep worries about the ‘ever increasing influence of radical Islam across the globe’.
3 CommentsTag: Conflict
Door Erik van Ommering. Hoe voel je dat een atmosfeer is veranderd? Dat de stemming verhardt, men gespannen is voor wat komen gaat? Zijn de straten rustiger dan anders? Klopt je gevoel dat er relatief meer groepjes jonge mannen rondhangen dan gezinnetjes en keuvelende dames? Hoe komt het dat de boulevard langs zee, normaal op een warme lenteavond het toneel van families rond waterpijpen, vrolijk gelach, luide muziek en krioelende kinderen, nu al om acht uur leeg stroomt? Kijken de mensen me aan met een blik van, weet je wel wat er hier elk moment gebeuren kan? Weet je wel dat er in de afgelopen weken drie brute moorden zijn gepleegd? Weet je wel dat de mensen camera’s installeren in hun winkeltjes, terwijl die normaal nauwelijks op slot worden gedaan? Het zijn de toespelingen, de roddels, de gespannen humor, de blikken, die verraden wat maar weinigen echt willen uitspreken. De bom staat op barsten. Dat kan over een maand gebeuren, of over een jaar. ‘s Avonds valt er een luid schot, vlakbij, in het hart van de stad. Het is stil. Het is een waarschuwing. Wie weet gebeurt het morgen al.
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Image taken from http://kimmoment.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/mayhem-madness-media-exaggeration/
By Tarryn Frankish Globally, the question of how to deal with the ‘dirty business’ of keeping things clean remains pertinent. In this blog I look to South Africa for insight into these questions as strikes around the globe by cleaning staff force us to think about the politics and ethics of keeping things clean elsewhere.
As a Desmond Tutu scholar, working at the Vrije University in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa I have the unique opportunity of spending time in two countries as I work towards my doctoral degree. My first trip to Amsterdam coincided with a strike by cleaning services in May 2010. More recently, as I was leaving Amsterdam in February 2012, the working conditions of cleaning staff were again in question. This question resonates with what I have come to know in South Africa. Striking similarities in the way ‘cleaning’ is organised in the Netherlands and South Africa became apparent to me during my stays despite the contextual differences between the two countries, wherein cleaning work is performed and negotiated. The situation in South Africa (and some of the similarities witnessed in Amsterdam) suggests much for thinking about the politics and ethics of keeping things clean in a global context.
Continue ReadingThe Politics and Ethics of keeping things clean: striking insights from South Africa
1 Comment Door Ton Salman. Op 13 en 14 maart van dit jaar komt in Wenen de VN-vergadering bijeen die opereert onder de naam van de Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Het wordt voor Bolivia een belangrijke vergadering van deze Wenen-conventie.
Het verhaal* begint ongeveer zó: in 1961 ratificeerde deze conventie het eerste verdrag over de bestrijding van gebruik, handel, productie en terbeschikbaarstelling van drugs en (later) psychotropische substanties als LSD en Ecstasy. Landen verplichtten zich drugs actief tegen te gaan – met uitzondering van medische toepassingen. Latere annexen specificeerden steeds nieuwere drugs. De International Narcotics Control Board werd opgericht om drugsproductie en –handel daadwerkelijk te controleren.
Pas in de loop van de jaren bleek dat er, behalve problemen als gebrekkige effectiviteit van de handhaving en corrupte autoriteiten die narco-belangen ontwikkelden, nog andere controversiële kwesties opdoken. Deze betroffen de nationale of culturele betekenistoekenning aan drugs.
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By Mohammed Amer – During my recent visit I saw rapid changes in Rawalpindi – a garrison city and headquarters of Pakistan’s military, which both revealed an expansion of the military’s influence and its increased vulnerability, affecting the collective psyche of the people.
In Rawalpindi I was staying in a lower working class neighborhood near Saddar, or Cantonment, which sits alongside an important road that links the city centre with the airport. That same road leads to the adjoining city Islamabad and it is therefore frequently used by military generals, politicians and visiting officials to Pakistan. In the last five to six years the road has been totally transformed and now hosts flyovers, overhead bridges and service roads. These transformations are related to and a consequence of the so-called ‘war against terror’ and impacts upon the daily life of the people living in its surroundings in specific ways.
Leave a CommentBy Pal Nyiri Acccording to a feature in Nandu Zhoukan, 36 thousand Chinese workers have been evacuated from Libya with an efficiency that, the paper claims, astounded the world. The largest operation belonged to China State Construction Engineering (CSCE, ??????????, which alone employed 10 thousand Chinese workers. The paper interviewed an engineer working at a smaller operation, China Transport Construction Group (????????), which employed a total of 5,000 workers in Libya. This engineer, from Henan Province, worked on the real estate project near Benghazi that comprised the construction of 5,000 houses.
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).
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Boeklancering Op 31 mei zal het nieuwe boek van Sandra Evers en Marry Kooy (redactie) ten doop worden gehouden. Dat zal gebeuren in zaal Z 009 van het Metropolitangebouw, om 13.45. Iedereen is van harte uitgenodigd! Meld je komst even op chagossians@hotmail.com.
Over het boek (dat vervolgens overal – onder meer in de VU-boekhandel– te koop zal zijn), het volgende:
“To make way for a strategic U.S. military base, the Chagossians were evicted from Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean in the 1970s. The U.K. made the islands available to the U.S. and the population was secretly evicted to Mauritius and the Seychelles, about 2000 kilometres away, where many have experienced poverty and difficult life situations. They are not allowed to go back home, only some short trips have been organised since 2006. Recently, the rich marine environment and coral reefs of the Chagos archipelago inspired the U.K. government to transform the status of the Chagos region into the world’s largest Marine Protected Area. But what about the Chagossians, who are locked in a political and legal battle for the right to return to the islands and recognition as a people to live in diaspora? After several law suits against the British government, the Chagossians have vested their hope on the European Court of Human Rights which will rule shortly.”
Leave a CommentBy Ursula Cats and Allegra Palmer January this year, a concrete wall collapsed in Pathum Thani, Thailand, severely injuring Charlie Tiyu, a man from Burma who lives in Thailand as an undocumented migrant worker. He broke his left hip and suffered internal injuries, including a crushed large intestine and a bruised bladder. And yet, his injuries were not the biggest of his concerns.
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Door Maaike Matelski Op 26 mei vindt in Australië de jaarlijkse Sorry Day plaats. Anders dan Anzac Day, de nationale herdenking van oorlogsslachtoffers waarvoor men landelijk een vrije dag krijgt en massaal om vijf uur ‘s ochtends bij een monument verzamelt, geniet Sorry Day relatief weinig bekendheid onder de niet-aboriginal bevolking van Australië. Sorry Day bestaat sinds 1998 en kreeg een nieuwe impuls nadat de toenmalige minister-president Kevin Rudd in 2008 publiekelijk en officieel excuses aanbood voor de decennialange praktijk om aboriginal kinderen bij hun ouders weg te halen om ze een ‘betere’ opvoeding te geven in een pleeggezin. Over deze ‘stolen generations’ wordt onder meer verslag gedaan in een rapport uit 1997 genaamd Bringing Them Home, alsmede in de op waarheid gebaseerde speelfilm Rabbit-Proof Fence.