The book of Genesis: “Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs: 1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. 2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz. 3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.”
Tzvetan Todorov examines the relationship of the avant-garde to dictatorships (excerpt in German) and also describes how Mayakovsky and Marinetti were brought together by their fundamentalism and determination to create from nothing. “The pair would meet again on June 20, 1925 and eat together. Their translator was unnerved: what could a Bolshevik and a Fascist possibly have in common? The meeting however took place in an atmosphere of “utmost congeniality.”
…
…art historian Ester Coen had explained that Futurism’s second wave (1919-44) is generally regarded as the less artistically significant of the two, as most of the movement’s major artists had died in World War I. But after spending several hours examining the enormous Milan exhibit, I come to think otherwise. To my aching eyes, the reinvention of everyday life doesn’t start with canvases but with the stuff of quotidian experience—graphic design, fashion, the decorative arts, even food—all of which the Futurists experimented with prodigiously during this later period. At least one-third of the unbelievably exhaustive exhibit showcases Futurist-designed posters, tableware, costumes, lighting fixtures—every inch of it a marvel of ingenuity and novelty.
Viewed from this angle, the Futurists actually did predict the future: Is not Target-esque “design for all” an outgrowth of the Futurist call for the immersion of art in everyday life? Can’t the dizzying success of “fast fashion” a la H&M be traced to the argument for “illusionistic, sarcastic, sonorous, loud, deadly, and explosive attire” made from inexpensive materials issued by the “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion”? (”The reign of silk in the history of female fashion must come to an end.“)
So why is this phase overlooked?
Because these were also the years that the Futurists became Fascists. When Italy entered World War I in 1915 and Marinetti’s infatuation with violence erupted into reality, his avant-garde started to deteriorate. Futurist paintings became more fragmented and abstracted; the movement’s ranks thinned when members enlisted; and in 1916, Umberto Boccioni, its brightest star, died during a cavalry training exercise, age 34. Meanwhile, Marinetti had started to align himself with Benito Mussolini. Playing to their shared faith in brutality, machines, and a vision of an all-new Italy, Marinetti made a risky gamble: If he supported Fascism, he figured, his movement could become the official art of the state. In 1919, he founded the Futurist Political Party—formally separate from the art avant-garde—which was soon absorbed into the Fascist Party, which went national in 1921. So it’s true: Marinetti wasn’t only a Fascist—he was one of the very first. It was a shaky and vexed alliance. Mussolini couldn’t have cared less about art, so Futurism never did attain “official” status. But more important, the very institutions Marinetti longed to destroy were those that Mussolini relied on to maintain his tyranny: tradition, family, religion.
…
Ever since Italy’s unification in the 1860s, food had played a crucial role in the country’s politics. During the 1920s and ’30s, in order to build a stable national identity, the Fascist regime actively discouraged exports and imports of non-Italian foods, severely limiting both the quantity and quality of foodstuffs available to the public. It was into this environment of impoverished patriotism that Marinetti issued one of his most radical texts, a lustily anarchic tome initiating a dead-serious slapstick revolt against Italian cuisine: The Futurist Cookbook. With it, he denounced pasta as “an absurd Italian gastronomic religion” that made people sluggish and lethargic and argued for “absolute originality” in food, as well as “a battery of scientific instruments in the kitchen.” Goodbye, beloved carbonara and checkered tablecloths; hello, chicken stuffed with ball bearings and carnation scent spritzed from spray bottles.
…
A handful of recipes—or “formulas”—featured [in the book]:
Drum Roll of Colonial Fish: Poached mullet marinated in milk, liqueur, capers, and red pepper and stuffed with date jam, banana, and pineapple. “It will then be eaten to a continuous rolling of drums.”
Words in Liberty Sea Platter: A watermelon half at sail across a sea of endive, with a tiny captain sculpted from Dutch cheese commanding a crew of calves’ brains cooked in milk. “The sea and the ship are sprinkled with cinnamon or red pepper.”
The Excited Pig: “A whole salami, skinned, is served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne.”
Tasty Preface: “A cylinder of butter with a green olive on top. At the base of the cylinder: salami, raisins, pine nuts and tiny sugared sweets.” (Yet more phallocentrism!)
White and Black: “A one-man show on the internal walls of the Stomach consisting of free-form arabesques of whipped cream sprinkled with lime-tree charcoal. Contra the blackest indigestion. Pro the whitest teeth.”
This man (pictured) is a modern-day fascist…
Declassified accounts of FBI interviews with Saddam Hussein … on the questions of WMD and links to al-Qaeda. FBI summaries of 20 formal interrogations and five ‘casual conversations” it held with Hussain in 2004, before he was handed over to Iraqi custody and hanged in 2006.
According to the transcripts, Hussain told FBI interviewer George L. Piro that he allowed the world to believe he possessed WMD because he did not want to appear weak to Iran, believing that Iran was planning to annex south Iraq. He also said that he had no dealings with al-Quaeda and called Osama Wheelie Binladen a ‘zealot’.
Hussein noted that Iran’s weapons capabilities had increased dramatically while Iraq’s weapons “had been eliminated by the UN sanctions,” and that eventually Iraq would have to reconstitute its weapons to deal with that threat if it could not reach a security agreement with the United States.
Piro raised bin Laden in his last conversation with Hussein, on June 28, 2004, but the information he yielded conflicted with the Bush administration’s many efforts to link Iraq with the terrorist group. Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot . . . that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”
When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.
PS. The Washington Post’s web site is fucking shit — worra design über fail.
Today, 96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Programme, the Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a 22 March decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry during the week of May 10, at best meeting 23 percent of required need.Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to 4,000 approved products prior to June 2006. According to the Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, Gazans still are denied many commodities (a policy in effect long before the December assault): Building materials (including wood for windows and doors), electrical appliances (such as refrigerators and washing machines), spare parts for cars and machines, fabrics, threads, needles, candles, matches, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses, musical instruments, books, tea, coffee, sausages, semolina, chocolate, sesame seeds, nuts, milk products in large packages, most baking products, light bulbs, crayons, clothing, and shoes.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528434
NB: The Israeli Supreme Court has previously ruled that reducing the average caloric intake of Gaza is not technically collective punishment by starvation, unless the average slips below the medical definition of starvation (a minimum amount of calories per day). Israel also defines pasta as “luxury” goods and won’t let it enter.
The Israeli Defense Ministry was put in charge of administering the drip-feed sanctions on the population of Gaza following the Israeli Government’s decision on 19 September 2007 to label Gaza an “enemy entity” or “hostile territory”. In response to vigorous petitions, appeals, and protests by Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, the Israeli military promised the Israeli Supreme Court it would not allow a “humanitarian crisis” to develop in the Gaza Strip.
Based on that assurance the Israeli Supreme Court decided on 27 January 2008 to allow the military-administered blockade and sanctions against Gaza to proceed.
CunTs all.
“The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.”…“At a time when German resistance to Hitler receives attention in the mass media, it is worth recalling that some participants in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler were right at the center of mass killing policies: Arthur Nebe, for example, who commanded Einsatzgruppe B in the killing fields of Belarus during the first wave of the Holocaust in 1941; or Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a cheery letter to his wife about the need to deny food to the starving millions of Leningrad.”
In The New York Review of Books: Holocaust: The Ignored Reality … Also contains often neglected facts about the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, the geographics of World War II’s mass killings, and about the Expulsion of Germans (”Vertreibung”) after the war:
“Although the expulsions were a case of collective responsibility, and involved hideous treatment, mortality rates among German civilians—some 600,000 out of 12 million—were relatively low when compared to the other events discussed here. Caught up in the end of a horrible war fought in their name, and then by an Allied consensus in favor of border changes and deportation, these Germans were not victims of a calculated Stalinist killing policy comparable to the Terror or the famine.”
Hat tip me hat tipping him hat tipping me.
I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don’t even remember having eaten.Just take a look at the most recent harvest from the tapes that the Nixon Presidential Library has released from the early months of 1973. The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon’s mind was not “compartmentalized” between one issue and another. For example, like most “family values” Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court’s finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.
As so often, his remarks about black Americans are crude and often sexual, while his innuendoes about his Jewish fellow citizens are more sinister. And, as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time—February 1973—the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don’t seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record—disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. “What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up.” To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism “in this country” is not located all that “deep down,” since it’s being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”
…
Bad—and revealing—as all this petty filth and bigotry undoubtedly is, it has a tendency to pale when set against the sheer brutal cynicism of the conversations about Vietnam. Nixon liked to talk tough in two distinct but related ways about this subject. To Charles Colson—another pious Christian among his consiglieri—he is heard on the tapes boasting that his massive bombing of North Vietnamese civilians would be vindicated and that those who opposed it would be held “treasonable.” (His famous confidential secretary, Rose Mary Woods, is on the tapes expressing the same hope for an arraignment of disloyal senators and congressmen.) But when talking to his most depraved of all associates, Henry Kissinger, he is full of cruelty and bluster when expressing his intention of applying pain to the South Vietnamese. If the South Vietnamese client president, Nguyen Van Thieu, would not agree to sign Nixon’s version of what was later to be called “peace with honor,” Nixon yelled on tape in 1973 that he would “cut off his head if necessary.” Thus, a huge number of American lives and an incalculable number of Vietnamese ones were thrown away to end the war on more shameful terms than had been on offer in the fall of 1968 (when Nixon had been in league with Kissinger and Nguyen to sabotage and oppose those very terms; for more on this, see my book The Trial of Henry Kissinger).
Bonus — Hitchens doing some ’stand-up’ from a few years back:
In Iran the dead will not be forgotten - the Ayatollahs will not fall this week, nor, I suspect, even this year, but the memory of this month will remain, and may even be remembered in Persian verse. It might read something like this:
XCI
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.’
[have now taken down the embedded video as the stupid shit keeps playing some advert shite with fucking audio annoyance piss and shit — go look for it yersell if you really want it like]
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/06/tony-blair.html
More here…That Graydon Carter’s hair is something to fucking behold like.
Fucking bleedin nora.
Hat tipped and worn with panache at an askew and cheeky angle to Nicky C. You certainly are wearing that cap at a jaunty angle, would you care to dance?
Michael Jackson/1993/Ian Penman/The Modern Review/Michael Jackson: Imitation Of Life
… a figure as sick as any America has ever produced or procured as an icon. Jackson is more Howard Hughes than Mickey Mouse, more late-Elvis than ET, and more symbolic of everything despoiled and uncertain about childhood in our century, than the harmless Spielbergian dummy he has for so long (been) painted. In a world that can no longer shock us (Madonna, Damage, Basic Instinct: why should adult stuff shock us?) squeaky-clean Michael has come to represent the creepy, shadow’s-spawn side of US celebrity.
… Michael’s young audience (whose street gestures, styles and music he ceaselessly recycles – sometimes literally rips off) is happy to accept cartoon imitations of human form and aspiration: he doesn’t dress well, his dancing is longer exceptional, his sexual projection is embarrassing – you’re embarrassed FOR him. In one video last year, you see him being sideline-coached on how to act like a turned-on adult, and any boy (even – or especially – a Gay one) who doesn’t know how to react to Naomi Campbell is way off orbit. Michael has no real glamour or allure: words like Dangerous and Bad roll on/off him without any real pleasure-zing of recognition.
What’s falling apart isn’t just Michael’s face but the face of what it represents: his corporate-Pop dream of eternally renewable identity as the ultimate commodity. (In the ’80s, it also appealed to all the new teeny bopper post moderns. Lofty-thinking chaps praised Jackson as the ultimate pop paradigm – he was, with Madonna, the ultimate thesis-fix.)
….America used to dominate us like a Lee Marvin sadist: it had no need of running interference from the emotions. Now it’s gotten this “Don’t you see I have to, because it was done to me” rap, and wants our wounded puppy tears. It wants pity, not awe. It used to be that you kept it zipped: now we have a “feminised” space of confession. It used to be that America’s crucified heroes stalked Death Valleys and New Frontiers. Now they work in electronic space, blip time, sealed inside the soundbite, the video and the Vanity Fair cover.
Apparently Nick Griffin wept when he addressed the fascist faithful following their capture of two seats in the European Parliament. Ah, the sentimentality that always accompanies brutality. I expect thoughts of his mother or the idea of harm coming to defenceless fluffy animals evokes a similar response in this vicious fuck. It’s always with same with these gangster types, don’t you find?
Another rather incongruous response is that from sections of the ‘liberal-left’ when confronted with this repulsive man and his fascist gang. Take the egg-pelting business. Just from the top of my head I can recall Michael Heseltine being sprayed with red paint; John Major being hit with an egg with such force it drew blood; Prescott having a bucket of water chucked over him by some one-hit wonders at the Brit Awards and then being hit with an egg on a later occasion; and most recently there was Mandelson having some green goo chucked over him.
Unremarkable, one would have thought, in a country that has a long tradition of dairy products and other sundry items being lobbed at the proud and the powerful - but when this happens to Griffin, all of a sudden it’s an outrage, it’s illegal, it’s playing into the hands of the fascists, behaving like the fascists? This is ignorant, masochistic - and strangely fastidious, coming as it sometimes does from those who spend much of the rest of their time striking a Jacobinesque pose.
We see the same sort of thing in relation to the issue of BNP teachers. The NASWUT have called for the teaching profession to follow both the prison service and the police in banning members of the BNP from serving. Ed Balls is giving it serious consideration, apparently. Some fear this may cause the ceiling of our liberty to collapse. Brett, for example, asks, “Are civil liberties only for nice people?“ [http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/06/23/are-civil-liberties-only-for-nice-people/]Um, no - but joining a particular profession isn’t the same thing as being a member of civil society. Anyway, BNP members are delinquent members of civil society and certainly are not suited to the teaching profession. Neil Robertson’s post on LC is more intelligent but the thread below displays the same strange phenomenon - this solicitude for the civil liberties of fascists.
The proposal to ban the BNP is probably just a piece of political posturing and almost certainly a waste of time - a large hammer to crack an almost imperceptible nut. Apparently only around 13 teachers were found on the leaked BNP membership list - and I bet most of them were PE teachers.* But it would have been nice if the masochistic liberals could have spared a thought for the children. Would you be relaxed about a BNP member teaching your child history, perhaps covering the unpleasantness between 1939-45? If so, I would hazard a guess that your child is an imaginary one. As for myself, in the unlikely event that I discovered my corporeal child was being taught by a BNP member, I’d be up at the school gate with a basket of eggs.
*When I was at school, PE teachers were all fascists who enjoyed humiliating fat people. When I joined the profession, they’d transmogrified into caring, sharing ‘pastoral care’ teachers. Who do they think they’re kidding? Nazis in highly-flammable clothing is what they are.
“As a helicopter circles overhead, the construction workers building the subway next to the city motorway are standing on multi-storey mobile homes, making the victory sign of the reformers, as are people in cars stuck in the traffic. When a group of young people on the motorway manage to send a unit of Basijis packing, the drivers sound their horns, some climb out of their cars and start dancing. People standing on the roofs of the nearby houses and the pedestrian bridge I am standing on, shouting ‘death to the dictatorship’. Then the military arrive. The demonstrators jump over the side rail, some escape in cars. I hear someone shout ‘everyone honk!’ Immediately a concert of horns breaks out. Militias are positioned on every street corner, in the North they’ve resorted to old men with white beards and lanky boys, no older than 15. The calls of ‘God is greater’ are louder this evening, and they continue longer into the night.”
“I will burn them if there are any there”
Egypt has decided to translate books by Israeli authors into Arabic. 27 authors have been selected for the privilege, among them David Grossman and Amos Oz. This might have something to do with the nomination of the Egyptian Minister of Culture, Faruk Hosni, for the UN post of director general of the United Nations cultural agency (UNESCO). Hosni recently assured the Egyptian parliament that there were no Israeli books in Egyptian libraries and if he heard evidence to the contrary, he would see to it personally that they were burned. Following much protesting against his nomination, eventually, Hosni apologised. To aid in the lubrication of this u-turn, the books will not be translated directly from Hebrew but from European languages (English and French).
Unesco is responsible for promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture.
* To put a ‘charitable’ spin on the attributed comment on book burning by Hosni … the comment of “I will burn them if there are any there” is an idiomatic way to convey a strong denial in Egyptian dialect. In this case, he was conveying a strong denial of normalization to an opposition MP from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hosni also had something to do with this invite for Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim to perform in Egypt.
Scurrilous tittle-tattle from Popbitch:
One of the things Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is most known for in political and diplomatic circles is his BO. He has been described to us as smelling “musty” and “like a billy-goat”. Our drunk Whitehall source this week gave an interesting take on the West’s attitude towards him. The Chinese are said to be appalled by Ahmadinejad’s standards of personal hygiene — it offends their cultural norms. And so, despite everything — democracy, freedom ‘n all that, Britain and the US don’t mind him staying in power. The Chinese are not likely to give political support to somebody so weird/smelly. Which will help delay Iran getting nuclear weapons.
Here is a different sort of goat, who seems to have had an unfortunate accident with the Grecian 2000, relaxing in a gentleman’s fashion with his friends:
This 68-page report tells the story of a decade of failure by the UN and others to provide adequate housing and medical treatment for the Roma, and the devastating consequences for the health of those in the camps.
A decade ago, the Roma living in the Mitrovica region in northern Kosovo comprised one of the most vibrant and distinctive communities in the former Yugoslavia. Their neighborhood, known as the Roma Mahalla, comprised around 750 houses, with an estimated 8,000 inhabitants. In the wake of the 1999 conflict, during which ethnic Albanians had suffered mass expulsions and killings at the hands of Serbian forces, there was a wave of retaliatory violence against minorities at the start of international rule in Kosovo in June 1999. The targets of this violence included the Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians (RAE), whom the Albanian perpetrators saw as “Serb collaborators.”
Fearing repression, the Roma Mahalla dwellers fled their homes, crossing the Ibar River to the north Mitrovica region, which remained under Serb control. Albanian crowds subsequently entered the Mahalla, looting the houses and then burning the whole settlement to the ground. The forces of the international peacekeepers (KFOR) who were stationed in Mitrovica at the time did not intervene to stop the pillage and arson.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provided assistance to the Roma internally displaced persons (IDPs), distributing food and organizing makeshift camps in Cesmin Lug and Zitkovac, to which many of the IDPs moved in October 1999. These camps were supposed to be a temporary solution until Roma houses in the Mahalla were reconstructed. Other IDPs spontaneously occupied abandoned army barracks at Kablare (next to the Cesmin Lug camp) and Leposavic, a town 45 kilometers from Mitrovica.
With the exception of Leposavic, all the IDP camps created were in the vicinity of the Trepca complex, a mine for lead and other heavy metals. The entire region has for years been known for environmental pollution caused by the mining industry. Cesmin Lug and Kablare were located right next to toxic slag heaps of lead-contaminated soil.
The living conditions in the camps were very difficult from the beginning. IDPs lived in small shacks made of wood, in wooden barracks, or in metal containers. They had no access to running water, only a few hours of electricity per day, a poor diet, and could not maintain adequate personal hygiene. At the same time, the proximity of the camps to Trepca and especially the slag heaps of leaded soil exposed them to lead contamination by air, water, and soil (especially when the wind blew from the direction of the slag heaps, or when children played in that area and brought contaminated dirt back into their houses).
The proximity of Trepca and the poor living conditions in IDP camps indicated a clear likelihood of lead exposure. UNMIK, the UN body that was the effective civil authority in Kosovo from 1999 to 2008, commissioned a report in November 2000 to provide recommendations on how to assess risk and means of mitigation. The report recommended comprehensive epidemiological studies, periodic environmental sampling, and robust medical monitoring and medical treatment for those in need. However, it concluded that the costs of any such strategy exceeded the financial capacities of UNMIK. During the period 2000-04, no further steps were taken to address the issue of contamination in the region.
In 2004 information about the deteriorating health of the IDPs in the camps began to emerge from local and international Roma rights activists. They started to bring to light cases of children with black gums, and with lead-related symptoms such as anxiety, concentration and learning difficulties, headaches, disorientation, convulsions, and high blood pressure.
Prompted by the alarming NGO reports, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an assessment of the situation in the camps in the summer of 2004, producing an internal report to UNMIK on how to manage the risks and recommending finding a more suitable location for the IDPs and to close the existing camps. WHO also initiated blood testing on children from the camps, which demonstrated unacceptably high lead levels.
In April 2005 UNMIK established a task force (comprising UNHCR, WHO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Mission in Kosovo, and the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force) to develop a framework for the relocation of IDPs from the camps. The task force came up with the idea of moving the IDPs temporarily to the KFOR-donated barracks in its former military camp known as Osterode, before returning them to the reconstructed Roma Mahalla. The Osterode camp was determined to be more “lead safe,” despite also being located next to the toxic slag heaps.
While offering better living conditions than the other camps, this solution did not move the IDPs from the center of contamination. In the spring of 2006 the inhabitants of Zitkovac and Kablare camps moved to Osterode, but the people in Cesmin Lug largely refused to relocate there, not seeing the point of moving to a location just 150 meters away.
Simultaneously, international donors funded the reconstruction of individual houses and blocks of flats on the site of the Roma Mahalla, which resulted in a group return of 450 IDPs from all the camps (as well as some other locations in Serbia and Montenegro), facilitated by the task force in June 2007. After an initial period of receiving assistance, the returnees found themselves unable to support their families. Most were not given assistance by the Kosovo welfare system, but they had to de-register in the north and lost access to the Serbian assistance they had been receiving. This, coupled with difficulties with finding jobs in south Mitrovica, made the returnees disillusioned with living in the Mahalla, which in turn discouraged other potential returnees. Many Mahalla returnees subsequently left, moving either back to the north or to various locations in Serbia or Western Europe, and leaving behind the reconstructed houses, some of which were subsequently looted.
During the period 2004-06 at least three rounds of testing of blood samples from children, (usually around 50 children each time) were conducted under WHO’s auspices. The test results are not publicly available, but according to WHO lead levels decreased over that period, especially for people in the Mahalla and the Osterode camp. The Roma continued to complain about lack of transparency in the process, an allegation denied by all international actors involved in it. In 2006 WHO organized two rounds of oral chelation therapy (medical treatment aiming to bind and remove heavy metals) on around 40 children from Osterode.
In 2007 UNMIK decided to discontinue further blood testing and therapy. Reportedly, WHO recommended this as it was under the impression that all camps’ inhabitants would be moved back to the Mahalla, where the contamination level is lower.
Roma leaders requested the Serbian Public Health Institute in Mitrovica (which had previously been conducting the testing under the auspices of WHO) to continue monitoring children’s lead levels, and the institute carried out two more rounds of blood testing, most recently in April 2008. The results showed continuing high levels of lead contamination (lower than before, but still exceeding acceptable or moderate levels) in children coming from all the camps as well as the Mahalla.
Efforts to seek justice and compensation for health damage caused by prolonged exposure to lead contamination have yet to produce results. A criminal complaint filed with the Kosovo prosecutor in September 2005 against unknown perpetrators alleging criminal neglect resulting in prolonged exposure to a highly toxic environment did not result in an investigation. A complaint filed by the international NGO the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) in February 2006 with the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Roma IDPs was ruled inadmissible on the ground that the court lacked jurisdiction over UNMIK-administered Kosovo. A claim filed in July 2008 with the Human Rights Advisory Panel in Kosovo (a semi-independent body created by UNMIK to deal with human rights complaints against it) was deemed admissible on June 5, 2009, but at this writing the Panel had yet to rule on the merits.
In May 2008 UNMIK handed over the management of the Cesmin Lug and Osterode camps to the Kosovo Ministry of Communities and Returns, which hired and funded a local NGO to run the camps.
The years of continuous failure of UNMIK and its international partners to find a durable solution for the inhabitants of the camps constitute multiple human rights violations, including of the right to life; the prohibition of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; the right to health, including medical treatment; the right to a healthy environment; and the right to adequate housing. This failure is the subject of growing international criticism, including from UN human rights bodies and experts.
To remedy these violations, it is vital that UNMIK and its international partners work with authorities in Kosovo, including in Serb-controlled municipalities, and with the leaders of the camps to urgently close the remaining camps, and move their residents to an acceptable location. It is also crucial that medical monitoring and treatment for all IDPs resume without delay. Roma IDPs should also be compensated for the health and other damages incurred.
In June 2009 displaced Roma will have spent a decade in lead-contaminated camps. The complex political reality in Kosovo and especially in the tense Mitrovica region does not change the fact that during a decade of international presence in Kosovo very little has been done to address appalling conditions in the Roma camps and especially the issue of lead contamination. For children and others living in the camps the consequences have been disastrous-not just ill-health but possible irreversible intellectual impairment. The Mitrovica Roma cannot afford to wait any longer.
Methodology
A Human Rights Watch researcher travelled to Kosovo in late November and the beginning of December 2008 to document the current situation in the Roma IDP camps of Cesmin Lug, Osterode, and Leposavic, as well as the return site in the Roma Mahalla.
Human Rights Watch interviewed the most prominent leaders in each of the camps, six other RAE community activists, and 40 members of the RAE community living there, 10 of whom were women. Most of the persons interviewed were ethnic Roma, while a few interlocutors described themselves as Ashkali (see Chapter IV, “Background,” for more information on ethnic self-identification).
Interviews were conducted in Serbian, Romani, and Albanian, through interpreters hired by Human Rights Watch. Interviews were conducted individually except in the Leposavic camp, where persons were interviewed in a group and in the presence of the camp leader. All individuals were offered anonymity, and the majority of individuals preferred not to give their names to us. Individuals were told that the information they provided would be used in a report prepared by Human Rights Watch and were told that they were free to decline to answer any questions or to end the interview at any time. Nobody we approached declined an interview, although parents spoken to preferred to talk about the conditions of their children, rather than letting Human Rights Watch interview children themselves. No money was paid for any of the interviews.
Human Rights Watch conducted in-person interviews with 10 national and 21 international officials, from the Kosovo Ministry of Returns and Communities, Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Ombudsperson Institution, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), the International Civilian Office (ICO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Mission in Kosovo, and the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR). We also interviewed representatives from the following NGOs: the Roma and Ashkali Documentation Center, Mercy Corps, the Danish Refugee Council, Norwegian Church Aid, and Movimiento por la Paz.
Further interviews were carried out by phone and email in January-February 2009, including with WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Kosovo Ministry of Health, the Kosovo Ministry of Environment, the Serbian Ministry for Kosovo and Metohia, and Serb-controlled municipal authorities in north Mitrovica. We also conducted follow up with civil society groups including Romano Them/Chachipe and the Kosovo Medical Emergency Group (a network of concerned activists including NGOs and academics).
Most international officials working in Kosovo interviewed for this report requested that we withhold their names, even when commenting on uncontroversial matters.
Human Rights Watch encountered significant challenges while conducting research on past efforts to provide medical treatment to displaced persons living in areas of lead contamination. The results of the blood testing done under the auspices of WHO in 2004-06 are not publicly available. Neither are the results of blood testing conducted by the Mitrovica Institute of Public Health in Mitrovica in 2008. Human Rights Watch was provided with a summary of the results of both sets of testing, but was denied access to detailed information about the results.
There is no publicly available detailed information on the past instances of chelation therapy administration, and Human Rights Watch was unable to obtain such information despite repeated requests to relevant agencies. Human Rights Watch relied on verbal statements of camp residents, local medical practitioners involved in the camps, and international officials working on the issue while compiling the medical history section in Chapter IV of this report.
In an effort to fully assess the impact of lead on the health of displaced persons resident in camps in north Mitrovica and the effectiveness of past efforts to provide testing and treatment for lead contamination in the camps, Human Rights Watch sought the opinions of independent medical experts in Europe and the United States. But because of the lack of statistical data available, the experts contacted were reluctant to comment on the approach taken by the international community to the medical problems in the camps. The information provided here on the symptoms, effects, and treatment of lead contamination is based on reviews of medical journals analyzing studies of lead contamination.
Light sensors cause religious row
A couple have taken legal action after claiming motion sensors installed at their holiday flat in Dorset breached their rights as Orthodox Jews.
Gordon and Dena Coleman said they cannot leave or enter their Bournemouth flat on the Sabbath because the hallway sensors automatically switch on lights.
The couple’s religious code bans lights and other electrical equipment being switched on during Jewish holidays.
They have now issued a county court writ claiming religious discrimination.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8103581.stm
They also said that their solicitors told them they had a strong claim.
Slavoj Žižek speaks!
When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…
In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?
There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.
Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.
Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.
The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.
There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).
Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.
And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.
The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.
An evil CunT
Saeed Mortazavi, an Iranian prosecutor notorious for his abuse of prisoners, has been put in charge of arresting and investigating dissidents, a figure known in Iran as “the butcher of the press” and gained notoriety for his role in the death of a Canadian-Iranian photographer who was tortured, beaten and raped during her detention in 2003 (not only did Mortazavi order Kazemi’s arrest, but he also supervised her torture and was present when she was killed).
Meanwhile, in Washington, the State Department confirmed, that not one Iranian diplomat, anywhere in the world, had accepted ground-breaking invitations from their American counterparts to share hotdogs at July 4 parties. The invitations have been rescinded following recent events as it happens.
Here’s a snippet from Baz O’Bama’s press conference earlier today:
This tired strategy of using old tensions to scapegoat other countries won’t work anymore in Iran. This is not about the United States or the West; this is about the people of Iran, and the future that they — and only they — will choose.
The people of Iran, not Fox News.
Thailand, South Africa, Gaza, Malaysia, Kenya, Egypt, and Turkey are among the worst places for refugees according to USCR’s just released World Refugee Survey 2009. In Malaysia:
Malaysian immigration officials continued to sell deportees to gangs that operate along the Malaysia-Thailand border. The gang members extort bribes from the deportees in exchange for smuggling them back into Malaysia, and sell those who cannot pay into slavery. Men frequently end up on Thai fishing boats, women in brothels, and children with gangs who exploit child beggars. At least 1,000 refugees and asylum seekers were among the deportees in 2008. Malaysia’s RELA*, a volunteer immigration enforcement militia, continued to engage in violent raids against undocumented foreigners in the country, and immigration officials caned at least six refugees—one of them a minor—for immigration violations.
* Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia.
