ECONOMICS: The Second Coming - The New African Land Grab, Colonialism Redux

The Great Land Grab:

Rush for LAND RIGHTS

The purchase and lease of vast tracts of land from poor, developing countries by wealthier nations and international private investors has led to debate about whether land investment is a tool for development or force of displacement.

THE FACTS: 

Over the last four years, there has been a significant increase in land-based investment, both in terms of the number of investment projects and the total land area allocated. Industrialized nations and private foreign investors have driven demand for arable land in developing regions, particularly in Africa, but also in South America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Governments are interested in the lands for purposes of food security and biofuel production. Both governments and private investors are attracted by policy reforms that have improved the investment climate in developing countries, as well as arbitrage opportunities afforded by the extremely low cost of leasing land in these regions.

While only fractions of arable land in developing regions are being used for agriculture, demand for strategic swats next to irrigation and shipping sites is growing with greater investment. These areas and other lands are frequently in use even though occupants’ have no legal rights to the land or access to legal institutions. As demand for land assets increases and governments and multilateral institutions promote investment in national lands, displacement and affected livelihoods are becoming serious sources of international concern.

WHAT WE ARE DOING ABOUT IT: 

Media coverage of land acquisitions has been sparse and lacking in investigative detail. The Oakland Institute is committed to increasing transparency about land deals including the terms of negotiation, theoretical consequences of investment, real impact on the ground, and ultimate impact on development in several African countries.

World’s Farmland Threatens

Food Security for the Poor

The Oakland Institute sounds the alarm on the threat that land grabbing poses to food security and livelihoods. Land grabs--the purchase of vast tracts of land from poor, developing countries by wealthier, food-insecure nations and private investors--have become a widespread phenomenon, with foreign interests seeking or securing between 37 million and 49 million acres of farmland between 2006 and the middle of 2009.

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Claims of African 'land grab'

spark controversy

By Brian Walker, CNN
June 12, 2011 -- Updated 0836 GMT (1636 HKT)
Click to play

Claims of African 'land grab'
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Think tank claims hedge funds buying African land cheaply, displacing farmers
  • China, Libya want to grow food, Oakland Institute says
  • U.S. universities among investors, institute director says
  • Company calls allegations "grossly inaccurate"

 

RELATED TOPICS

(CNN) -- A new report published this week claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their traditional lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by European hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food.

But some firms named in the study are hitting back, saying they are providing desperately needed jobs and cash to impoverished regions on the continent.

The Oakland Institute, a left-leaning social development think tank, says investors have bought up nearly 60 million hectares (148 million acres) since the financial crash in 2009 -- land equal to the size of France, in what it calls a "land grab" in Africa.

"The same financial firms that drove us into a global recession by inflating the real estate bubble through risky financial maneuvers are now doing the same with the world's food supply," said Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute.

"It's kind of shameful that while we in the Western world paint Africa as a basket case -- we talk about its hunger, we talk about its corruption -- but we are responsible for trying to steal the land and turn it into a breadbasket for the North" Mittal said, referring to developed economies.

The report, "Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa," focuses on seven African nations and claims to uncover a tangled web of deals being obscured by shell companies and governments.

It concludes that the alleged "land grab" is leading to the potential displacement of hundreds of thousands of farmers, often in deals with far-off government bureaucrats or naive local tribal chiefs.

"We're told over and over that the key to development is by helping small farmers," Mittal told CNN. "But instead, in this rush for mechanized farming, for growing bio-fuels, for growing grains for export, we seem willing to sacrifice women farmers and indigenous communities with no solutions for what happens later to them in Africa."

The study by the California-based group pins much of the blame on London-based Emergent Asset Management, which runs one of Africa's largest land acquisition funds, and is headed by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency traders and investment bankers.

European and U.S. agribusinesses are singled out for buying hundreds of thousands of hectares for future biofuel development.

And the report says the current rush for cheap land is also backed by China, Libya and other Mideast and Asian investors looking for ways to secure food sources and farming for their growing populations.

But Mittal says she was most surprised to discover deals by U.S. universities that she claims are investing in deals set up by hedge funds buying up some of the continent's best farmland on promises of annual returns of 25% or more.

Universities such as Harvard "have chosen to go ahead just so they can see their endowments grow," Mittal said. She called on university backers to honor goals of socially responsible investing and to hold back money in a campaign similar to the one that helped bring down apartheid in South Africa.

"It's time to get out of these funds and invest in ways that build communities and don't devastate them," she said.

Some of the companies and investors named in the report are disputing the claims.

"The allegations set out in the Oakland Report are grossly inaccurate," wrote Emergent's CEO Susan Payne in a statement e-mailed to CNN. "We are consulting our lawyers and will be issuing a full statement rebutting the allegations."

A spokesman for Harvard said he was unable to find any direct documentation for the claims in the study, and was seeking clarification for any involvement on its part from the firm that handles its endowment.

The report essentially says investors are being promised cheap land with no questions asked while the hedge fund buyers are searching for ways to displace traditional farms that often have no clear formal ownership for small fees and promises of employment.

The study's authors say that land in the war-torn Sierra Leone sometimes leased for as little as $2 per hectare.

"Foreign investors often employ local 'agents' or 'coordinators' to identify land for lease and negotiate leases with local communities, chiefs and landowners," the report charges.

"There is evidence that these 'agents' take unfair advantage of local traditions, perceptions and vulnerabilities in order to convince local populations that they will benefit from the lease deals, while refraining from discussing potential risks such as loss of farmland or negative environmental impacts," the report says.

Mittal pointed to Zambia, where she claims that 94% of the country's land is held informally through customary rights, and where land use and ownership must be negotiated with local chiefs.

"I was told that you would go with a bottle of Johnnie Walker, sit on the ground with him and clap three times and make your offering of whiskey," Mittal told CNN. "Then you have secured the title to the land with no problem."

The study also points to programs in Ethiopia where hundreds of thousands are being driven off their traditional lands and placed in new government-planned villages, while foreign investors move in to start new export-driven farms.

"We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as 'squatters,' are forcibly removed with no compensation," Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, said in a press release.

"This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism," Mousseau added. "The majority of the world's poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens."

However, one investor group tied to Emergent in South Africa says that the projects it backs are boosting incomes and market access in places once totally cut off from anything beyond growing enough food for themselves.

"We've really created something out of nothing in Africa," said Anthony Poorter, Africa director for EmVest Asset Management. "There are no shady deals."

He pointed to three land projects his firm backs in Mozambique, including a $12 million, 1,000-hectare farm (2,471 acres) that employs 350 people and provides rising income to the surrounding area.

"Our projects in Mozambique have caused a real boost to the income of local communities," Poorter said, pointing out EmVest tries to source as much of its labor and supplies locally as possible.

"The GDP of Matuba village has risen significantly and we are the biggest employer."

Poorter summed it up by saying, "We have people lining up for jobs every day, so it can't be that bad a place to work."

 

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Hedge Funds Create

Volatility in Global

Food Supply with

Land Grabs Across Africa

Financial backers – including U.S universities and pension funds – are lured by high returns and turn a blind eye to theft of land, displacement of people

Oakland, CA – Hedge funds and other foreign speculators are increasing price volatility and supply insecurity in the global food system, according to a series of investigative reports released today by the Oakland Institute. The reports are based on the actual materials from these land deals and include investigation of investors, purchase contracts, business plans and maps never released before now.

The “Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa” reports also reveal that these largely unregulated land purchases are resulting in virtually none of the promised benefits for native populations, but instead are forcing millions of small farmers off ancestral lands and small, local food farms in order to make room for export commodities, including biofuels and cut flowers.

“The same financial firms that drove us into a global recession by inflating the real estate bubble through risky financial maneuvers are now doing the same with the world’s food supply,” said Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute. “In Africa this is resulting in the displacement of small farmers, environmental devastation, water loss and further political instability such as the food riots that preceded the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.”

Mittal added that for people living in developed countries, the conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

“The research exposed investors who said it’s easy to make a land deal – that they could usually get what they want in exchange for giving a poor, tribal chief a bottle of Johnny Walker,” Mittal said. “When these investors promise progress and jobs to local chiefs, it sounds great – but they don’t deliver, which means no progress and relocating people from their homes.”

New reports and materials on these deals examine on-the-ground implications in several African nations including Ethiopia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Sudan – and expose contracts that connect land grabs back to institutional investors in these nations and others. In addition to publicly sharing – for the first time -- the paperwork behind these deals, the reports demonstrate how common land grabs are and how quickly this phenomenon is taking place. Investors in these deals include not only alternative investment firms like Emergent Asset Management – that works to attract speculators, but also universities including Harvard, Spellman and Vanderbilt.

Contracts also reveal a bonanza of incentives for speculators ranging from unlimited water rights to tax waivers.

“No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security, Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia said. “These land grab agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors.”

In 2009 alone nearly 60 million hectares – an area the size of France – was purchased or leased in these land grabs. Most of these deals are characterized by a lack of transparency, despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms.

“We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as “squatters” are forcibly removed with no compensation,” said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute. “This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism. More than one billion people around the world are living with hunger. The majority of the world’s poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens.”

These reports, as well as briefs on other aspects of land grabs, are available at http://media.oaklandinstitute.org.

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The Oakland Institute is an independent policy think tank whose mission is to increase public participation and promote fair debate on critical social, economic, and environmental issues (www.oaklandinstitute.org).

 

Issues: 
Understanding Investment Deals in Africa: 

 

 

 

WAR: The USA-Living In A Constant State of War

The Outsourcing of War

Posted: August 26, 2010 by Independent Global Citizen

I was interviewed by the news media to discuss my knowledge of the recruitment of thousands of Ugandans by American military contractors to be employed in Iraq. The recent withdrawl of United States combat troops in Iraq does not mean the end of American involvement in Iraq. This complex issue questions American morality in Africa and its role as an ethical superpower.
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To see the full transcript of my interview, please go to the Black Star News or the San Francisco Bay View websites.
·
UPDATE: Al Jazeera English featured a news report about Ugandans flocking to Iraq for jobs with third-party military contractors.  This report was done in July 2009, two years after I had learned about this Pentagon recruitment strategy during one of my visits to Uganda.
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Just So You Know

Who The Daddy Is*

*said by @tomgara
If there should ever be a global resource war, now that India and China have joined the West inlooting investing looting what they can in Africa, you know whose got the big guns. But as we know, having the big guns doesn't necessarily translate to assured victory.

FYI from The Economist:
ON JUNE 8th China's top military brass confirmed that the country's first aircraft carrier, a refurbishment of an old Russian carrier, will be ready shortly. Only a handful of nations operate carriers, which are costly to build and maintain. Indeed, Britain has recently decommissioned its sole carrier because of budget pressures. China's defence spending has risen by nearly 200% since 2001 to reach an estimated $119 billion in 2010—though it has remained fairly constant in terms of its share of GDP. America's own budget crisis is prompting tough discussions about its defence spending, which, at nearly $700 billion, is bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined.

 

 

 

 

 

VIDEO: Kesivan Naidoo (South Africa) « AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

Kesivan Naidoo

June 12, 2011

by Sean Jacobs

I first saw Kesivan Naidoo play at the Independent Armchair Theater in Observatory. I was living around the corner at the time. He played drums in Tribe, a band fronted by pianist Mark Fransman. Much has changed since then. Naidoo is now sought after and fronts his own bands. These include Babu and Kesivan and the Lights. The video above, from a 2008 performance in Grahamstown in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, shows Kesivan and the Lights taking on “Timelessness,” a composition by the late Bheki Mseleku.

And since it is Sunday, here’s a link to a 15 minute Youtube video of Kesivan and the Lights being joined on stage by trumpeter Feya Faku. BTW, that’s Fransman on the piano.

 

 

VIDEO + AUDIO: Dubstep: 3 collabos from one of SA's hardest working musicians, Zaki ibrahim > This Is Africa

Zaki Ibrahim

Dubstep: 3 collabos from

one of SA's hardest working musicians,

Zaki ibrahim (South Africa/Canada)

Zaki Ibrahim - Explode

Explode is the latest release from South London's LV, the trio behind the banging and much hyped Kwaito-inspired Boomslang on Hyperdub late last year.

This more chilled out, and arguably more international, new number on 2nd Drop features the honey-voiced South African soul singer Zaki Ibrahim, a familiar name to This Is Africa regulars.

The track was laid down at the Red Bull Studios in Cape Town. Speaking of which, Zaki also lent her vocals to the very dope lovestep/dubstep jam Dragonfly Slip, the lead track on the 4-track EP of the same name from one of the major players in South Africa's electronic music scene, Red Bull Studio's own Richard the Third.


Richard The Third - Dragonfly feat. Zaki Ibrahim by africandope

Last but not least, you can also hear Zaki's soulful vocals on the 6-track EP Wake With The Day, her recent collaboration with one of St. Petersburg's fastest rising jazz and electronica producers Koyla.

 

Zaki's new album drops in a few months. Damn, this is one busy lady!


WHERE TO BUY
Explode (EP)
- iTunes
- Boomkat
- Juno Records

Dragonfly Slip (EP)
- African Dope Records

Wake With The Day (EP)
- Juno Download
- Beatport

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PUB: Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize

The Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize

 
Bona Fide Books will award annually The Melissa Lanitis Gregory Prize for an unpublished collection of poems. The winner will receive publication, ten copies, a $500 cash award, and a reading at Lake Tahoe. Prizes are awarded upon publication.

The 2011 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize
Call for Manuscripts

48 to 100 pages
Accepting submissions June 1 through August 31

Guidelines:

  • Submit a previously unpublished, full-length poetry manuscript of between 48 and 100 pages.
  • Include two cover pages: one with the title of the manuscript only, the other with the title of manuscript, name, address, telephone number, and email address.
  • Include a table of contents and, if applicable, an acknowledgments page for prior publications.
  • Simultaneous submissions are permitted; please let us know right away if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. (Refunds will not be issued.)
  • A reading fee of $20 (US) by check or PayPal must accompany each submission. Multiple submissions are accepted; each requires a $20 entry fee.
  • More than one manuscript may be chosen for publication.
  • Submit via email or post.

Email submissions

Email your submission to submissions@bonafidebooks.com.
Please submit your $20 entry fee via Paypal below, or by check if you are submitting by post.
If sending a check, please make it payable to Bona Fide Books, Inc.

 

 

 
Mail your submission and fee to:

Bona Fide Books
The Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize
PO Box 550278
South Lake Tahoe, CA 96155  

 

All entries must be received or postmarked by August 31, 2011.

 

PUB: Best Summer Vacation Contest - Travel Contest 2011

Best Summer Vacation Contest Travel Contest 2011

2011 Travel Writing and Photo Contest to win one of three gift cards. Total of $500 worth of travel gift cards will go to the top three contest winners.

Let's Have A Contest! Share your special summer vacation experience. We will choose three winners who have the best summer vacation story and photo(s) to share.

1st place: $300 Travelocity Gift Card

2nd place: $150 Travelocity Gift Card

3rd place: $50 Travelocity Gift Card

 

Your travel story should be at least 250 words in length. Not sure if you can come up with 250 words? It’s easy…just have fun and let it flow!

You can enter as many times as you like. Just make sure each travel story and photo(s) are different from previous submissions. Bottom line…no spamming please.

 

Include at least one travel photo. Hint: You have a much better chance at winning if you include at least one photo. If your photo file size is too big, use Picnik.com to resize it before submitting here.

Don't Forget: Sign up Free for the Travel Insider Weekly. Monthly travel photo contests are announced exclusively to our subscribers only!

 

Click here to write your own.

What Is Your Best
Summer Vacation Experience?

Entering the contest is easy. Include your travel story below with at least one photo. Be sure to include your first name and location.

REMEMBER: After you click the submit button, the next page will ask you to include your e-mail address so we can notify you when your travel story is published.

Enter Your Summer Vacation Title Here:
example - My Awesome Trip to Costa Rica!

 

Share your summer vacation experience here! [ ? ]

Close Help

Entering your story is easy to do. Just type!...

Your story will appear on a Web page exactly the way you enter it here. You can wrap a word in square brackets to make it appear bold. For example [my story] would show as my story on the Web page containing your story.

TIP: Since most people scan Web pages, include your best thoughts in your first paragraph.

 

Upload 1-4 Pictures or Graphics (optional) [ ? ]

Close Help

Do you have some pictures or graphics to add? Great! Click the button and find the first one on your computer. Select it and click on the button to choose it.

Then click on the link if you want to upload up to 3 more images.

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

Click here to upload more images (optional)

 

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

 

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

 

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

 

Author Information (optional)

To receive credit as the author, enter your information below.

Your Name

(first or full name)

Your Location

(ex. City, State, Country)

 

Submit Your Contribution

Check box to agree to these submission guidelines.

 


(You can preview and edit on the next page)

 

 

 

 

 

PUB: Walkopedia - the world's best walks

WALKOPEDIA TRAVEL WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITIONS

Walkopedia has announced new competitions for:

The best travel writing about a walk or hike.

Prizes:  
Winner: a Daunt Books* book token worth £500
Runner-up: £200
Junior Prize: best under 18 entry: £200 (if not otherwise a prizewinner)
Best entry from a First Story** student: £200
(Runner-up): £100

*Probably the world’s best travel bookshop: www.dauntbooks.co.uk

**The excellent First Story charity was set up to nurture and inspire creativity, literacy and talent in British schools. See www.firststory.org.uk.

The best photographs taken on a walk or hike.

Prizes:  
Winner: £500
Runner-up: £200
Junior Prize: best under 18 entry: £200 (if not otherwise a prizewinner)

We expect to announce the winners in March 2012. We will publish the winning pieces and photographs on the Walkopedia website.

Walkopedia is not about peak-bagging or self-flagellation. We will judge your writing or your photographs based on how vividly and passionately they convey your experiences on your walk or hike. Whether you are writing about or photographing your wander through a city, a trek up in the mountains or even a quick walk to the shops, we like to see conciseness and humour in writing, and a lively and evocative eye for what's going on around you in all entries.

The judges for the travel writing competition are

William Mackesy, travel writer and founder of Walkopedia.
William Fiennes, best-selling author of Snow Geese and co-founder of First Story.
Serena Mackesy, best-selling author, travel writer and journalist.

The photography competition will be judged by Walkopedia staff.

Further judges may be appointed. The judges’ decisions will be final.

Entries and detailed terms of the competitions:

  • As long as your writing or photograph relates to a walk or hike you have made, you can describe or capture any event or scene you like.
  • Your entry must not have been published anywhere else, either in print or online.
  • Entries must be received by no later than 31 December 2011.
  • In the case of writing, entries must be less than 1,200 words.
  • Entries must be submitted in digital form.

See the entry form, below, and the detailed rules, procedures, terms and requirements for the competitions [anchor down].

Submitting entries

To enter the competitions, you need to:

  • register with the Walkopedia website as a new visitor (unless you are already registered as a member) (it is easy) - Click here
  • send an email including a completed entry form (see the form immediately below: you can copy and paste the form into your email) to:

More than one entry is permitted per person, but no person will be allowed to win more than one prize.

First Story students should submit their entries through First Story.

Entry Form for Walkopedia Travel Writing and Photography Competitions

(Copy and paste into an email and send your completed form to one of the addresses above)

Name:

Email address:

Tel no:

Country of Residence:

Date of birth (if under 18 at the time of submission of entry):

Is your entry written or a photograph?

Title of piece/picture:

Short explanation of where the walk was:

Any other information on the piece/picture?

Are you a First Story student?

I confirm I have read and agree to, and will abide by and comply with, all the terms of the competition(s).

 

WALKOPEDIA TRAVEL WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZES – DETAILED TERMS OF COMPETITIONS

These terms incorporate the statements made in the announcement of the competitions. In the event of inconsistency with the announcement, these terms prevail.

Entry deadline
Entries must be received by no later than 31 December 2011. Entries received after that date will not be considered.

Subject
Entries must relate to a particular walk or hike done by you, but are otherwise unlimited as to their scope and subject matter.

Prizes

For writing:

A *Daunt Books book token worth £500 for the winner.

£200 for a runner-up.

£200 for the best entry by a person who is under 18 as of the date of submission of the entry, provided that the relevant person is not otherwise a prizewinner.

£200 for the best entry by a **First Story student as of the date of submission of the entry, and £100 for a runner up.

*Probably the world's best travel bookshop: www.dauntbooks.co.uk
**The excellent First Story charity was set up to nurture and inspire creativity, literacy and talent in British schools. See www.firststory.org.uk

For photography:

£400 for the winner.

£200 for a runner-up.

£200 for the best entry by a person who is under 18 as of the date of submission of the entry, provided that the relevant person is not otherwise a prizewinner.

Some or all of the prizes will not be awarded if (in the Panel’s view) entries of sufficient quality are not received.

Walkopedia reserves the right to add further prizes, and to substitute non-cash prizes of a greater value than initially stated cash prizes, and vice versa . All cash prizes will be paid by cheque in pounds sterling, unless otherwise agreed with a prizewinner.

 

Entry length
Written entries must be less than 1,200 words.

Judges/decision
For the travel writing competition, Walkopedia will assess works and create a shortlist. The shortlisted works will be judged by the panel.
The photography competition will be judged by Walkopedia staff.

Further judges may be appointed. The judges’’s decisions will be final in all respects.

Announcing/informing winners
The winners are expected to be announced in March 2012.

The winners will be notified by email and will be asked to give details of where to send their prize. If a winner does not respond to Walkopedia within 14 days of being notified byWalkopedia, then the winner's prize will be forfeited and Walkopedia shall be entitled to select another winner (and that winner will have to respond to the email from Walkopedia within 14 days or else they will also forfeit their prize). If a winner rejects their prize, then the winner's prize will be forfeited and Walkopedia shall be entitled to select another winner.

Publication
We will publish the winning pieces and photographs, and all other pieces and photographs that we consider to be suitable, on the Walkopedia website.

Entry terms

By submitting an entry, you:

  • accept and agree to abide by and comply with the terms of the competitions;
  • confirm that the information about you in your entry form is true and that your entry is your own original work (which has not been copied), and does not contain any third-party materials and/or content that you do not have permission to use, and has not been published elsewhere (whether in print or online)*, and that providing those materials to us and publication of those materials by us does not infringe the rights of any person or any legal obligation; that those materials are not obscene, defamatory or otherwise in breach of any applicable laws or requirements;
  • *Excluding, for First Story students, publication made or arranged by First Story or by their schools, and other publication acceptable to the judges.
  • give us irrevocable permission and a non-exclusive, royalty-free worldwide licence to use and publish those materials on Walkopedia, and otherwise (in electronic and/or hard copy formats) in connection with Walkopedia’s operations and projects, as we see fit, and the right to use your name and town or city and country of residence for the sole purpose of identifying you as the author of your entry and/or as a winner or runner-up of a competition.

For these purposes, “us” and “Walkopedia” mean Walkopedia Ltd and such person(s) as may be its successor(s) as owner and/or operator of the Walkopedia website and operations from time to time (or any of them).

Entries that do not comply with the terms of the competitions are liable to be rejected.

Entry form
Please use the specified entry form. You can copy and paste it to your computer, complete it and submit it with your entry.

Submitting entries/contacting us

To enter the competitions, you need to:

  • register with the Walkopedia website as a new visitor (unless you are already registered as a member) (it is easy) - Click here
  • send an email including a completed entry form (see the form above you can copy and paste the form into your email) to:

You are responsible for the cost (if any) of sending your competition entry to us.

More than one entry is permitted per person, but no person will be allowed to win more than one prize.

Walkopedia staff and their relatives and associates may not enter the competitions.

We regret that Walkopedia will not be able to correspond about individual entries.

First Story students should submit their entries through First Story.

If you have any questions on the competitions, please e-mail us at info@walkopedia.net.

Miscellaneous
Walkopedia has full discretion as to the interpretation of these terms, which shall be governed by English law, and their supplementation where it deems appropriate, and any relevant decision by it in this regard shall be final.

In the event of an excessive number of entries, we may have to adopt alternative arrangements and procedures, but will still issue the prizes we have announced.

Entries on behalf of another person (other than a parent transmitting his/her child’s entry) will not be accepted and joint submissions are not allowed.

We take no responsibility for entries that are lost, delayed, misdirected or incomplete or cannot be delivered or entered for any technical or other reason. Proof of delivery of the entry is not proof of receipt.

The Promoter of the competitions is Walkopedia Ltd whose address is Icomb Edge, Bledington, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire OX7 6XL. Any complaints regarding the competitions should be sent to this address.

Nothing in these terms and rules shall exclude the liability of Walkopedia for death, personal injury, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation as a result of its negligence.

Walkopedia accepts no responsibility for any damage, loss, liabilities, injury or disappointment incurred or suffered by you as a result of entering the competitions or accepting any prize, Walkopedia further disclaims liability for any injury or damage to you or any other person's computer relating to or resulting from participation in or downloading any materials in connection with the competitions.

Walkopedia reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, these competitions with or without prior notice due to reasons outside its control (including, without limitation, in the case of anticipated, suspected or actual fraud). The decision of Walkopedia in all matters under its control is final and binding.

Walkopedia shall not be liable for any failure to comply with its obligations where the failure is caused by something outside its reasonable control. Such circumstances shall include, but not be limited to, weather conditions, fire, flood, hurricane, strike, industrial dispute, war, hostilities, political unrest, riots, civil commotion, inevitable accidents, supervening legislation or any other circumstances amounting to force majeure.

 

 

MEDIA: Can We Talk Without Pretending? - The Media Blow Up On The Gay Girl In Damascus Hoax

Gay Girl in Damascus

hoaxer - video

Edinburgh-based American student Tom MacMaster, 40, talks to the Guardian's Esther Addley via Skype, and explains why he pretended to be a lesbian Syrian blogger with the A Gay Girl in Damascus blog and claimed to have been kidnapped

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>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-hoax...

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My Heart's in Accra

06/13/2011 (9:21 am)

Understanding #amina

On Monday, June 6th, a post appeared on the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” announcing that Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, the “girl” in question, had been kidnapped, possibly by Syrian authorities. Bloggers, including my friend and colleague Jillian York, reported on Amina’s disappearance, and some of her readers and supporters began advocating for her release on Twitter, using the hashtag #FreeAmina. A Facebook group supporting her release gathered more than 14,000 followers.

“A Gay Girl in Damascus” was a fairly new blog, launched with a series of long autobiographical posts in February. The blog gained popularity in late April, with a dramatic post, “My Father, the hero” that detailed a visit from Syrian security forces who wanted to arrest the blogger for Salafist sympathies, and her father’s defiant response. Two weeks later, a writer in The Guardian described her as “an unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country”. The article raised her profile and brought her to the attention of CNN and other news networks. It also offered an explanation for how Amina had avoided arrest thus far, suggesting she had relatives in the Syrian government and in the Muslim brotherhood.

A Facebook poster was one of many online campaigns triggered by reports that a Syrian lesbian blogger had been kidnapped. Online she was known as Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari - but the real blogger has been revealed as Tom MacMaster, an Edinburgh University student.

Not everyone reacted to news of Amina’s detention by lobbying for her release. Some began questioning whether Amina actually existed. Liz Henry, a journalist and blogger who’s spent a great deal of time thinking about fictional blogging (she led an excellent session at SXSWi in 2007 on the topic), posted about her doubts on June 7th, the day after Amina’s detention was announced. Her uncertainty was crystalized by the discovery that Sandra Bagaria, who had been giving media interviews as a close friend and possible girlfriend of Amina’s, had never met Amina in person. Liz wrote:

I would hate to have my existence doubted and am finding it painful to continue doubting Amina’s. If she is real, I am very sorry and will apologize and continue to work for her release and support.

But it now turns out that Bagaria has never met Amina in person. They had an online relationship. As I see it, this could indicate various possibilities:

- Amina is as she appears to be, a talented writer living in Syria; perhaps with a different name and with the names of her family members obscured.

- Amina is someone else entirely in Syria.

- Amina is someone else; anything goes. Amina could be Odin Soli [a blog fiction writer who'd previously created a character "Plain Layne"] for all I know. In fact, wouldn’t it fit all too neatly?

- Amina is Sandra Bagaria.

Andy Carvin of NPR, who’s been tirelessly curating tweets about the Arab Spring since January, cast a wide net online searching for anyone who’d met Amina and person and came up empty. On June 8th, a woman in Croatia announced that the photos appearing on the web of Amina were actually pictures of her, taken from her Facebook account. While these doubts began to pile up, the depth and complexity of Amina’s online presence made it hard to doubt her existence entirely. On June 9th, Carvin tweeted, “I just don’t see anyone creating a sleeper-cell online persona years ago, waiting for unrest to start just to blog it. Some truth somewhere.”

Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty from Electronic Intifada and Liz Henry began sharing data and unraveling Amina’s identity, with help from Carvin and Jillian York. Henry’s post “Chasing Amina” and a long post on Electronic Intifiada connect the Amina persona to Thomas J. MacMaster, a 40-year old American student, and his wife Britta Froelicher. On June 12th, MacMaster posted an “apology” to Amina’s blog, acknowledging his authorship and making it clear that Amina was a fiction he created.

I hadn’t paid very close attention to the story this week – I’ve been away from my office all week, in meetings and at a conference. I’d been aware there was uncertainty about the abduction story, and was keeping an eye on Global Voices’s coverage of the story, wondering whether we would need to modify or retract our earlier story. (Jillian updated her original story and ran a story on doubts about Amina’s identity on June 9th.) But MacMaster’s “apology” caught my attention:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in this year of revolutions. The events there are being shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

That’s not an apology. That’s a pathetic, self-serving attempt by MacMaster to justify his actions.

MacMaster is on vacation in Istanbul and thus far, appears to have given only one interview on this matter. It’s likely we’ll get more information about his motives in future conversations. But his statement here is quite informative. He believes that writing as Amina allowed him to call attention to the dangers faced by activists and by GLBT people in Syria in a way that would reach western audiences. He’s critical of what he perceives to be shallow coverage of the Middle East and believed that creating a compelling heroine would provide a key “hook” for a story.

What’s peculiar about this is that there’s been an enormous amount of western media attention paid to the Arab Spring. While most news outlets were late to the Tunisia story, the Egyptian revolution was covered in depth, and key figures like Wael Ghonim have received widespread media attention in the US. While there’s been significantly greater coverage of events in Libya (an armed conflict where NATO forces are involved, something that invariably correlates to media attention) than to other revolutions, there’s been solid, steady coverage of events in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. We could all use more coverage of the Arab Spring and less of Anthony Weiner, but this seems like an odd moment to complain about undercoverage.

To the extent that there is undercoverage of Syria, it’s worth remembering that the country has closed its borders to foreign journalists. As I observed in analyzing media coverage of the 2009 Iran green movement protests, when countries close themselves to international media, there’s a tendency to report stories relying heavily on social media. Syria was the right place for a hoax in no small part because journalists were hungry for any information coming out, particularly information that could help readers and viewers connect to the story. Earlier today, Syrian/American anchor of CNN International Hala Gorani tweeted: “The most infuriating aspect of Tom MacMaster’s ‘hoax’ is claim media’s interest in #Amina reveals superficial coverage of Mideast. Please. Media were interested bc MacMaster’s lie put a human face on a story we cannot cover in person. That is why there was interest.”

Gorani was searching for a human face because it’s far more compelling to tell the story of a revolution in terms of individual struggles than in the language of mass movements. As humans, we’re wired to connect with personal stories. The story that helped spark the Tunisian revolution was the story of an individual fruit-seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose frustrations with his personal situation and his country’s shortcomings led to his self-immolation and death. We understand the Egyptian revolution through Wael Ghonim, and the tragedies of the Green Revolution through Neda Agha Soltan. These stories can obfuscate as well as illuminate – in the retelling, Bouazizi gained a college education and a computer science degree because those inaccurate details helped the story better represent the tensions and frustrations within Tunisia. Understanding a revolution through individual stories is always imperfect – the details of an individual life can’t completely represent the whole – but they allow us to connect to stories in a deep, elemental way.

Participatory media offers the possibility that an individual can tell her story to a global audience. There’s a gap between potential and reality. Speak in a language that’s not widely understood and your potential audience shrinks dramatically. And while we celebrate the possibility of social media enabling many to many communication, it’s probably better understood as enabling one to some, as most of us command fairly small audiences of friends and family.

To reach a broader audience, participatory media needs a helping hand. That’s what Nawaat, an activist media site run by Tunisian dissidents, did for the protesters in Sidi Bouzid. They translated and subtitled Facebook videos from Tunisian Arabic (a dialect that borrows heavily from other Mediterranean languages and isn’t understood outside the country) into French and Arabic, organized them into easy to follow timelines, and made it possible for Al Jazeera to use their footage… which made the revolution visible not just to people throughout the Arab world, but to fellow Tunisians, who otherwise wouldn’t have known what was going on given the country’s effective censorship of domestic media.

Global Voices has been trying to amplify participatory media since our inception in 2004. By aggregating, contextualizing and translating citizen media, we try to make Hala Gorani’s job easier, offering accounts from people who are telling their own stories in their own words. Even in a country like Syria, where blogging can be a dangerous activity, real, non-fictional people write about their perspectives and experiences – we’ve published two dozen substantial stories drawing from accounts of people in Syria and Syrians in exile since the Arab Spring began, and linked to hundreds of individual accounts.

MacMaster’s “apology” refers to “the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism”. Perhaps we’ll learn more about the target of his critique when he discusses his motives at more length. Part of the post-colonial critique Edward Said offered in “Orientalism” was a recognition of the danger of understanding the Middle East through the frames, accounts and preconceptions of Westerners, who consciously or unconsciously tend to define the Orient as “other”. As a response, we might choose to read western accounts of the Middle East with a critical eye, or to seek out more accounts from people of the Middle East to understand the region. But it’s hard to imagine a more orientalist project than a married, male American writer masquerading as a Syrian lesbian to tell a story about oppression and democratic protest.

By speaking in this assumed voice, MacMaster tells us, “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone.” Some gay Syrians disagree. Writing on GayMiddleEast.com, Daniel Nasser explains, “You took away my voice, Mr. MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know.” Further, by calling attention to gays and lesbians in Syria, he complicated the lives of people on the ground, worried that this could become an excuse for their arrest and disappearance. “This attention you brought forced me back to the closet on all the social media websites I use; cause my family to go into a frenzy trying to force me back into the closet and my friends to ask me for phone numbers of loved ones and family members so they can call them in case I disappeared myself.”

On the same site, Sami Hamwi rejects MacMaster’s apology saying, “What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us.”

I don’t think there’s much uncertainty about this last point. MacMaster’s project is going to complicate the work of anyone who tries to bring marginal voices into the dialog through citizen media. The question I’ve been most often asked since founding Global Voices is a question about authenticity: “How can we know that any of these people blogging and tweeting are real people?”

It’s a tough question to answer. At Global Voices, we’re reporting on the conversations taking place, not the facts on the ground – this distances us from the challenge of verifying individual facts, but doesn’t free us. As it’s become more common for pro-regime supporters in Syria or Bahrain to write in pro-regime fora, part of offering context is helping readers navigate a web of identities – people who we believe to be speaking in their own voices and people we worry are misrepresenting themselves. One of the best tools we have is iterated reputation: it’s cheap and easy for someone to appear on a message board, claim to be someone they’re not, offer a couple of posts and leave. It’s harder to construct an identity for months or years and establish credibility with that voice. Yet that’s what MacMaster did, and we, like everyone else, will be taking a close look at how we’re representing the identity of the people we’re featuring on the site.

The challenge is even harder for someone like Andy Carvin, who’s working with breaking news reports. In this case, verifying facts is the key issue, not just understanding the dynamics of the conversation. Much of Carvin’s work involves chasing down the identity of sources and getting confirmation from multiple voices. This is complicated by the fact that, when a revolution or a natural disaster comes to a place, people who’ve never spoken before enter the conversation. Iterated reputation may be impossible to establish when someone offers details on a plane crash or an earthquake as that person never previously spoke to an audience beyond a small circle of friends. This became a huge problem in the Ossetian war, where new blogs sprang up like mushrooms after rain, offering detailed “eyewitness” accounts that strongly favored either a Russian or Georgian interpretation. Crisis Media platform Ushahidi has been working on the problem of algorithmically verifying these sorts of reports, looking for cross-confirmation and trying to identify more and less believable reports, as part of a project called Swift River.

Needless to say, none of this is easy, whether individuals or algorithms are doing the work. Part of the success of MacMaster’s deceptions is that he had so many details right. Jillian York, whose partner is Syrian and who knows the country well, wrote, “[Amina's/MacMaster's] knowledge of Syria stood up to my tests. Her personality in private conversation was consistent with her personality on the public blog. Friends claimed to know her (one even suggested she knew her ‘in real life’ – looking back, the suggestion was rather vague, the boastfulness of someone who wants to get close to a story).” And, as York points out, the nature of MacMaster’s deception made it impossible to verify. Journalists can’t get into Syria, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that an out lesbian might be visible, but disguising her name.

Both citizen and broadcast media got Amina’s story wrong. The Guardian, in particular, has much to answer for: the May 6th story by “Katherine Marsh” lionizing Amina doesn’t mention the reporter never met Amina in person. Given the use of a pseudonym to protect the reporter and a Damascus byline, it’s hard to read the story as anything but a verification of Amina’s identity, implying the reporter met with her subject. As of this morning, the Guardian has run a long story on MacMaster’s identity, but hasn’t amended, corrected or retracted the May 6th story. Today’s story includes an explanation of the initial interview, which I think should have accompanied the original piece: “Katherine Marsh, the pseudonym of a journalist who until recently was reporting for the Guardian from Syria, interviewed Amina by email in May after being put in touch with her by a trusted Syrian contact who also believed the blogger to be real. Marsh said that many steps had been taken to try to verify Amina’s identity, including repeated requests to meet, at some personal risk to the journalist, and talk on Skype.”

Credit for discovering MacMaster’s deception goes both to citizen and broadcast media. The Washington Post had been pursuing MacMaster at the same time Electronic Intifiada and Liz Henry did, and their attempts to interview him generated some of the pressure that may have led him to end his hoax. Carvin works for NPR, focused on social media, and the hard work he and colleagues did in reporting the story speaks to the sort of old/new media cooperation that’s going to be critical to reporting in a participatory media environment. But the sheer effort necessary to debunk the story is going to serve as a caution to all news outlets that seek to use citizen voices to tell stories in the future.

That’s a serious problem. If you’re a whistleblower exposing corporate or government wrongdoing, or an activist in a developing nation, you may need to use a persistent pseudonym to protect your identity. More than one of Global Voices’s authors, over the years, has written using pseudonyms. In general, we’ve been able to meet these people in person and verify their identities and reasons to remain pseudonymous. In a few cases, we’ve featured the writing of people we were not initially able verify, like Sleepless in Sudan, who wrote as an aid worker in Darfur. (I helped her set up mechanisms to post to her blog without revealing her identity or aid organization affiliation to the Sudanese government, and Nick Kristof eventually verified her identity when he visited her in Sudan.)

MacMaster has just made it harder for people who need to write under assumed identities to do so and have their perspectives taken seriously. Zeynep Tufekci, writing about Amina, suggests that the story gives support to Facebook’s (inconsistent) insistence on a real-name identity. She suggests we consider the situation as “a reverse tragedy of the commons” – what’s good for the group (real identity) is bad for a small set of individuals (activists who need to protect their identity.)

In his interview with BBC Scotland today, MacMaster explains that “I really felt a number of years ago, in discussions on Middle East issues in the US, often when I presented real facts and opinions, the immediate reaction to someone with my name was: ‘Why are you anti-American? Why are you anti-Jewish?’ So I invented a name to talk under that would keep the focus on the actual issue.” He explains that he wanted people to listen to the perspectives Amina was offering “without paying attention to ‘the man behind the curtain’.” Thanks to his actions – whether they were stupid, naïve or malicious – people are going to be looking closely for the man behind the curtain in citizen media for a long time to come.


More links as they come in:

More from The Guardian on the difficulty of verifying blog sources, and their response to being alerted to the Amina deception.

The correction on this Guardian piece gives a sense for just how shaken that paper is by the situation – they’d run a picture of MacMaster on an earlier edition of the story, and have now replaced it with a graphic from Amina’s blog because they couldn’t verify that the photo actually was of MacMaster…

Elizabeth Flock and Melissa Bell interview MacMaster for the Washington Post’s blogpost. He’s more contrite in this interview than in his BBC Scotland interview. The Post interviewed his wife as well, who was evidently unaware of the deception until this weekend – they’re posting that piece shortly.

MacMaster’s first interview appears to have been with Turkish paper Al Hurriyet (in Turkish)

Skype video interview with MacMaster on Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-hoax...

Response to MacMaster on KABOBfest by Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui, who are “New York based writers and freelance-journalists that submitted a blood test and birth certificate to affirm that the above thoughts are their own analysis based on a lifetime of Arab and or queer and or American and or woman identification.”

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13 Responses to “Understanding #amina”

  1. gregorylent Says:

    too many literalists in this story. what if it were an art project? and what IS truth? and why so much effort and twitter hype around this, when far more serious issues are worthy of time and attention?

    people’s expectations were not met. so?

  2. Stiv Says:

    You need an editor. The word “musings” should have alerted me.

  3. Tim Friese Says:

    Ethan, I’m a longtime reader of your blog. On the subject of amplifying real people’s voices, I thought you and your readers might be interested to hear about the project Tahrir Documents (tahrirdocuments.org) that I have done some translation for. The site quite simply is a repository for documents coming out of the Egyptian revolution and subsequent protest movements. The documents include pamphlets, position statements, newsletters and many other genres coming from groups large and small. A global team of volunteer translators translates from Arabic, and both the Arabic original and the English translation are hosted on Tahrir Documents permanently.

  4. Understanding #amina » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented Says:

    [...] This article was originally published on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog. [...]

  5. “this is the face” « zunguzungu Says:

    [...] Hamwi and Daniel Nassar (two actual Syrian LGBT activists), Zeynep Tufekci, Mircea, Liz Henry, Ethan Zuckerman, Sappho, Maya Mikdashi, Jillian York, and Helen de [...]

  6. Elliott Says:

    ‘MacMaster’s project is going to complicate the work of anyone who tries to bring marginal voices into the dialog through citizen media.’

    Doesn’t it rather point to the level of scrutiny that has always been required of professional journalism?

  7. jm Says:

    MacMaster also gave an interview to The Lede, the NYT media blog. You can find it on their site today.

  8. Syria: Lesbian Blogger Amina is a Married American Man · Global Voices Says:

    [...] Reading: Understanding #Amina by Ethan [...]

  9. Popular on Twitter: The Amina hoax, the hamsterization of journalism and high-stakes Twitter » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism Says:

    [...] try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){} ABOUT      ARCHIVES      CONTACT      SUBSCRIBE      TWITTER http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/popular-on-twitter-the-amina-hoax-the-hamsterization-of-journalism-and-high-stakes-twitter/ THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT LINKS ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW: Ethan Zuckerman on the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax [...]

  10. Kobe Says:

    No one likes to be fooled and you, sir, bought it hook, line, and sinker. I understand your anger, but your flimsy attempts to demonize MacMaster resound like someone who can’t admit they were duped. It is my sincere hope that individuals like MacMaster continue to make journalists work to become better journalists by pointing out vulnerabilities in reporting. Chalk it up to a lesson and move on. Try exercising caution and critical thinking as opposed to naive credulity.

  11. Syria: Lesbian Blogger Amina is a Married American Man :: Elites TV Says:

    [...] Reading: Understanding #Amina by Ethan [...]

  12. marc Says:

    He is simply stupid. Full Stop. Do not buy his “novel”.

  13. George D Says:

    Kobe, GregoryLent, Elliot, trying to defend the erasure of real voices, as if truth is just a game, or a security exercise.

    It has been my experience that news sources everywhere depend on trust. I’ve handled a major human rights story that was impossible to independently verify, and found that the ability of news agencies to deal with us depended on the credible sources we could attach to the story. A degree of this is inevitable, it is the nature of things. Truth usually comes out.

 

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 June 13, 2011, 5:12 AM

‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact

An image of Tom MacMaster posted on Facebook.FacebookAn image of Tom MacMaster posted on Facebook.

Six days after a post on the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus triggered panic among its readers by suggesting that the blog’s author, who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian caught up in the protest movement, had been detained in the Syrian capital, a new entry appeared on Sunday that described the entire online diary as a work of fiction by an American man.

The new post, headlined “Apology to Readers,” was signed by Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old graduate student, who identified himself as “The sole author of all posts on this blog.” That would include four months of what appeared to be diary entries from Amina Abdallah Arraf, a self-described 35-year-old lesbian born and raised in the United States but now living in Damascus, and two posts attributed to Rania O. Ismail, a cousin of Ms. Arraf’s, who relayed news of her arrest to the blog’s readers last week.

In a telephone interview with The Lede on Monday morning, Mr. MacMaster, who is currently in Turkey, said, “I sort of by accident… created something that had a lot more interest than I had ever possibly expected and then when I tried to shut it down it just kept getting bigger.” He explained that he had initially created Amina, his Arab lesbian character, as “a handle” he would use when he wanted to contribute comments to online discussions. His aim, he said was to use the character to present “a perspective that doesn’t often get heard on the Middle East and that was also a challenge for me, as somebody who has aspirations as a novelist, to write in a voice of a character who is absolutely not me.” 

He got the idea to start a blog in the guise of his character, he said, when a Web site called Lez Get Real published two long comments about Syria that he had submitted in Amina’s name in February. That Web site published a long apology on Friday, explaining that its editors had helped to start the Gay Girl in Damascus blog. In the comment thread beneath that apology, one of the editors of the site explained that the blogger’s 135 contributions to Lez Get Real in recent months had all seemed to come from computers located in Scotland, not Syria. Mr. MacMaster moved to Scotland from the U.S. last year to study history.

Before Sunday, Mr. MacMaster had denied that he was the blog’s author when reporters from two publications, The Washington Post and The Electronic Intifada, confronted him with circumstantial evidence that seemed to connect him to Amina Abdallah Arraf. Both reporting teams had discovered that someone who claimed to be Ms. Arraf had asked several years ago for mail to be delivered to a house in Stone Mountain, Ga. which was owned by Mr. MacMaster at the time. (An old invitation to a barbecue at the house, posted on Facebook by Mr. MacMaster in 2008, is still online.)

Mr. MacMaster initially told The Post, “Look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, ‘Yeah,’ and write a book.”

After he published his apology on the blog on Sunday, Mr. MacMaster confirmed to Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian Web site, that he was indeed the blog’s author. His wife, Britta Froelicher, who is pursuing a degree in Syrian studies, later hinted to N.P.R. and confirmed to The Guardian that her husband was the blog’s author in an e-mail.

As part of an investigation led by Andy Carvin, N.P.R. had discovered that photographs of Syria sent by the author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog to a Facebook friend in Canada recently had been posted online in 2008 by Ms. Froelicher. Contacted by N.P.R. on Sunday, Ms. Froelicher pointed the broadcaster to the new apology posted on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog and said that the couple was still on vacation in Turkey, “and just really want to have a nice time and not deal with all this craziness at the moment.”

Mr. MacMaster told The Lede on Sunday that he and Ms. Froelicher had been drawn to one another by their shared interest in pro-Palestinian activism. Mr. Abunimah, the Palestinian-American activist and blogger who founded the Electronic Intifada, told The Lede on Sunday, “The fact that MacMaster had moved in Palestine solidarity circles for several years did help us uncover him. We initially found it notable that ‘Amina’ and her apparently equally imaginary cousin ‘Rania’ were part of our online social networks, and this made me concerned that it was hostile and was targeting us.”

He added: “It did not give us pause that MacMaster and Froelicher styled themselves as people concerned about Palestine. On the contrary once we suspected that there was a major deception going on, our concern was to protect our friends and communities from infiltration and harm.”

Mr. Abunimah was given some help in his research by another blogger, Liz Henry, a Web producer at BlogHer.com who suggested last week that the Gay Girl in Damascus blog might be fiction. Ms. Henry had guessed that the blog might be an echo of a hoax that was revealed in 2004, when a diary written in the voice of a young lesbian turned out to be the work of a middle-aged man. On Sunday, Ms. Henry suggested in a follow-up post that Mr. MacMaster might also be responsible for several additional online characters, including the editor of the Lez Get Real site who seemed intent on exposing him.

In the new post he published on the blog on Sunday, Mr. MacMaster called his fictional diary of a Syrian revolutionary an attempt “to illuminate” the uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, “for a western audience.” He also wrote: “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

In his subsequent interview with The Lede, however, the writer, who acknowledged having carried on a Facebook relationship with a woman in Canada in the guise of his lesbian character, said, “I feel bad for the people I hurt and led on.” He added that “one of the issues that’s most troubling for me” is the fact that his deception took place at the same time that Syria’s state-run media has argued that reports of a violent crackdown on dissent by the Syrian security forces have been fabricated by the foreign journalists or arebased on Internet hoaxes. “The fact that they can use this as an example of how the media makes up stuff really is something that troubles me,” he said.

He also said:

I would never have done any of it, in retrospect. The biggest thing that I regret is that there’s been a lot of media attention and there’s a a lot of media attention I believe like right now and you’re talking to me, rather than talking about the actual things going on on the ground in Syria.

It’s a regret. I regret that I’m detracting from the real story. The real heroes. I’m not important.

Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian woman who told The Times last week that she and the blogger posing as Amina Arraf had exchanged about 500 e-mails after meeting online earlier this year, responded to Mr. MacMaster’s admission on Twitter on Sunday night: “I’m deeply hurt. But now it’s time to take care of the ones that actually fight for freedom and deserve it.”

I’m deeply hurt. But now it’s time to take care of the ones that actually fight for freedom and deserve it. #arabspringMon Jun 13 01:38:03 via web

 

Another woman who thought that she had become friends with Amina Arraf through her blog and Facebook account, an Israeli blogger named Elizabeth Tsurkov, told The Lede in an e-mail: “Today has been quite a bad day and I’ve been actually censoring myself on twitter with expressing my anger and pain over this. I feel betrayed and shocked but mostly angry, especially because Tom seems to think that he hurt no one with this hoax.”

She added:

As an Israeli, my only way of getting to know and interacting with Arabs who aren’t Palestinians / Israeli-Arabs is online. I generally don’t interact this way with Israelis, but with Arabs, there’s really no other way. I have made friends (mostly through Twitter and Facebook) with people from almost every country in this region, but I have proof of the existence of only a small percentage of them. In the past, I never thought there was something risky about this; I realized that dissidents in this region have to use aliases or interact with people anonymously, but it never occurred to me that someone would be cruel enough to subjected people who care about the fictional persona he created to emotional agony as part of a hoax.

I reacted more strongly than most people to the news of Amina’s kidnapping because I felt that I knew the person who was kidnapped, but many other people who had simply read the blog were terrified. I’m not sure there is a way to protect oneself from such sociopaths, but I know that I will try to distance myself emotionally from people that I am not very familiar with online.

 

>via: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/gay-girl-in-damascus-blogger-admi...

 

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Second lesbian blogger exposed as a man

Paula Brooks, who claimed to be editor of LezGetReal.com, admitted to the Washington Post that 'she', too, was a man

A second supposedly leading lesbian blogger was exposed as a man masquerading as a gay woman, a day after the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was revealed to be the fictional creation of a married male student from Edinburgh.

Paula Brooks, who claimed to be the executive editor of a US-based lesbian site LezGetReal.com, told the Washington Post that "she", too, was a man – in this case, a 58-year-old retired construction worker from Ohio called Bill Graber.

The LezGetReal blogger's identity began to come into question last week as doubts over the Gay Girl in Damascus blog intensified, voiced, among others, by the feminist blogger Liz Henry, who writes at BlogHer.com.

Before starting the Gay Girl in Damascus blog in February, Tom MacMaster, the Edinburgh student masquerading as Amina Abdullah Araf al Omari, had written posts on LezGetReal.com.

Graber, masquerading as Brooks, had supplied information to a number of news outlets, including the Guardian, which pointed towards an Edinburgh IP address for the Amina blog.

But the LezGetReal editor's own conduct increasingly led to questions over her own identity. Material released online on Sunday, which resulted in an admission by MacMaster that he was Amina, also raised questions about Brooks, including speculation over whether the two were creations of the same person.

MacMaster, in a contrite blog post on Monday, even apologised to "Paula Brooks" as a handful of named victims of his deception.

Challenged on Monday by the Washington Post, Graber said he had started the blog after witnessing the mistreatment of close lesbian friends.

"I didn't start this with my name because … I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man," he said. He said his interaction with Amina was purely coincidental, "a major sock-puppet hoax crash[ing] into a major sock-puppet hoax." "Sock puppet" is the term used by bloggers to describe a fake persona adopted by a blogger who may also be posting under another name.

Amina often "flirted" with Brooks, the paper said – with neither man apparently realising that the other was also a man pretending to be a lesbian.

Brooks told reporters that "she" was deaf, and so telephone interviews had to be conducted through her "father".

The Guardian spoke a number of times to a man masquerading as Brooks's father, after which suspicions were raised that Brooks was a man and was also potentially posing as Amina.

Further investigations established that, rather like the supposed young woman in Syria, even close associates had never met Brooks, and that her claims to have a PhD in archaeology from Bryn Mawr college, a masters from Gallaudet University and a BA from Duke University, were false.

In an email to the Guardian on Thursday, during our investigations, Brooks said: "Now I have a real day job … and a real off blog life … and I will be real annoyed if you intrude in that … you get my message?" The blogger, who claimed to have three children, said her "father" was "totally up [her] ass" following the paper's inquiries.

In another email Graber/Brooks wrote: "Let me be clear here … we are both the victim of this 'woman's' scam."

Challenged directly by email on Sunday, before MacMaster's admission, about the allegations that she was Amina, Brooks confirmed that "she" was an avatar, or false identity, and directed this reporter to a blog dated 2007 that described a woman's experience of coming out.

It was headed with the following Shakespeare quotation: "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

Melanie Nathan, an LGBT and human rights advocate who was a partner in LezGetReal.com and had also been taken in by Graber, told the Guardian of her feelings of betrayal.

"I left the site because I believed that Amina 'the Gay Girl from Damascus' was not authentic," said Nathan.

"I told Paula – Bill – that Amina was suspect and she went ballistic on me and called me a bigot."

"I was completely taken in. She [Paula] is a person to me, a real person with this persona, with children."

"The whole gay community of bloggers is freaking out right now because everyone in some shape or form has encountered Paula Brooks. It has had a severe impact on the trust among the web of bloggers who are interconnected and work with each other.

"In my opinion, what Graber has done, to be a straight man calling himself a lesbian, is tantamount to impersonating an entire community."

Linda LaVictoire, a contributor at LezGetReal.com who writes as Linda Carbonelli, told the Washington Post: "I was completely taken in. I have been completely taken in for three years."

>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/14/second-lesbian-blogger-exposed-pa...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTERVIEW: Pauline Aweto Eze: "Stop violence against African women!" > theafronews

Pauline Aweto Eze:

"Stop violence against

African women!"

     

    Exclusive interview with the author of “Wartime Rape”

    Many aspects of African cultures seem to tolerate if not promote violence against women. A new book titled “Wartime Rape: African Values At Crossroads” by Dr. Pauline Aweto Eze explores some of these elements within African cultures that continue to perpetuate violence against women and how this is further instrumentalised and worsened during conflicts and crisis. The book is a call to reflection on these attitudes and practices, and a challenge to stop all forms of violence against women. It was published in Nigeria in order to raise funds in support of the new church building in Ovu Inland.

    The book has been launched in Nigeria, Italy and the UK. On 8th May it was launched at St Gertrude’s Catholic Church, Bermondssey, London, while on 16th May, it was launched at St Benet’s Catholic Church, Abbeywood, London.

    Here’s an exclusive interview Pauline granted The AfroNews.

    Pauline, I recently watched a video on YouTube showing Congolese soldiers justifying why they rape women. Your new book is titled “Wartime Rape”. Now, why do you think women and girls are commonly raped during war?

    Rape is never justifiable, even in times of war, when, as it were, the end justifies the means. In the video you refer to, reasons why Congolese soldiers rape women during the war range from being sexually starved for a prolonged period of time, simply doing what others are doing, obeying an explicit command, to some superstitious belief that they would be protected in battle when they rape women. It is curious to note that while these soldiers are equipped with some magic powers that would guarantee their success in battles, the only prerequisite for the desired result is to rape women. Like I said earlier, there are no justifications for the use of rape during war; this becomes more problematic and unreasonable when it comes to its use in African wars. For example these Congolese soldiers testify to their use of rape as a means of protecting themselves in battle, while at the same time, HIV positive Congolese soldiers have been deployed to rape and infest women with the virus. 

    The unreasonableness accompanying the rape of women during war is highlighted by the testimony of one of the Congolese soldiers in the same video in question. He said they had to rape women, simply because they were found in the combat zone. This is the opportunistic pattern I refer to in my book and this goes far beyond wartime to include everyday life and practice.

    Coming back to your question about why women and girls are raped during war, it is simply because it is an “instrument”, that is to say, a means of achieving a purpose or an end, which, in the instance of war is victory, subjugation, elimination, annihilation or humiliation of the enemy. The practice of the use of rape as an instrument of war is ageless across history and its use is generally defined by a specific purpose. For instance, in the Old Testament, women were raped as trophies of war. Generally, there seems to be some kind of evolution in the use of rape as an instrument of war that goes from its random use to meet the needs of men at war to include its strategic use as a standard operating procedure.

     


     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Pauline Aweto Eze, author of “Wartime Rape”

    Why did you decide to write on this subject?

    The title “Wartime Rape” is in response to the UN inquiry into rape as weapon of war in Africa in October 2009. Sympathisers of afro centrism saw this as a one sided and uncalled for attack, aimed at blaming the entire continent as an international scapegoat for her barbaric ways of being, thereby proposing and predilecting a defensive approach, while at the same time, adopting an offensive approach, especially towards Europe and America for pioneering worse cases of war and war rape.

    Rather than adopt an offensive or defensive approach, I opted for a retrospective approach, looking at the continent from within and identifying instances of violence against women, thanks to the instrumentalism of culture and tradition. In the same way, my book presents a qualitative leap and shift from the use of rape exclusively as a weapon of war, to its use in moments of apparent peace, as business as usual. In other words, rather than wartime rape, the book focuses on peacetime rape, with the former acting as a stepping stone, pointer or point of departure for the latter.

    In your book, you talk of different types of rape. Which is most common in Africa today?

    I mentioned four specific types of rape, namely date rape, marital rape, gang rape and war rape and introduced a fifth one, which I referred to as “mobile rape”.  Date rape is perpetrated by acquaintances, proposed marriage suitors or in social, school, work or even religious environment. This type of rape, understood in the west as product of blind date is rather unveiled in its African replica as perpetrators are both known and trusted, including respectable members and friends of the family.  Marital rape on the other hand is a taboo topic. Gang rape is common in African universities and higher institutions where cultism prevails; it is also common during war and conflicts. However, it is difficult to establish which among them is the most common, as the various categories are applicable, as the case might be, depending extensively on the target group of women, place of occurrence, motives behind practice and most especially perpetrators.

    Again, this is so because the stigma attached to rape victims makes it impracticable and extremely difficult and shameful for them to freely recount their experiences. While married victims of rape run the risk of being publicly disowned by their husbands, unmarried victims on the other hand, run the parallel risk of never finding a husband. It is particularly difficult to know with precision, the degree and extent to which marital rape occurs, since it is common place for men to resort even to physical violence to “take what belongs to them”. African cultures make it rather challenging to draw a line of demarcation between where the man’s exercise of his right of ownership ends and where violence, often culminating in rape begins.

    In effect, while marital rape is limited, so to say, to married women, gang rape could be said to be common in situations of conflicts. Mobile or transit rape could, without mincing words, be said to be the most common as all women, in all circumstances, in war as in peace are potential victims. In the same way, all men including those in highly visible positions of vested authority are potential perpetrators.

    How can we save our women and girls, especially those in countries at war from rape?

    In countries of war, it is rather difficult to envisage this, as present day wars are fought, not in battle fields but on the bodies of women, right in their homes and domestic environment. I do not want to sound fatalistic and simply relent to the acceptance that rape would always be used as a weapon of war. I think there is a problem with the way Africans go about it and this must not remain unaddressed if we want to retain some element of humanity and rationality in the eyes of the outside world.

    In my book I identified six peculiar characteristics of the African experience and extremist use of rape as war instrument: These are the public nature of rape, the intensity of brutality, the use and symbol of the machete as modern primitivism, the deliberate attempt at HIV infestation, the targeted rape of pregnant women and the killings following rape. In effect, while we cannot, to a certain extent “prevent” rape, we can, at least highlight the barbarism behind the African practice as unacceptable and dehumanising.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Please share with us the most touching story from a rape victim you’ve heard?

    I am not a sensationalist and I believe every story of rape is as unique, unrepeatable, different and shocking as it could possibly be, most especially if one is to go by African extremism and modus operandi. It is  de-humanizing  and absolutely atrocious to think of pregnant women being raped by those young enough to be their sons, only to be battered, maimed and eventually killed and shredded into pieces and displayed in public market places. These forever untold and unheard stories I believe are the most shocking and shameful.

    Many African girls and women are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Most of the time, they don’t know how to free themselves. What would you tell them?

    On the contrary, I hold the view that they do know how to free themselves and where to go for help, the first point of contact being the client himself. The point however is that they “cannot” free themselves, considering the fact that many other factors and actors are involved.  They cannot even toy with the idea of freedom, until their mission of paying back their huge debt is accomplished, otherwise their families   would be made to pay the ultimate price. Do not forget that we are dealing with human trafficking and modern day slavery here, so those with vested and invested interests would go any length to protect their criminal business.

    Domestic violence is widespread not only in African families and in European families as well. Of late so many cases are reported which may give the impression that domestic violence is increasing. Is the family increasingly becoming an unsafe place?

    Unfortunately, yes and this is rather disappointing for the African continent, where the family swings between the balance of its contradictory identity as both protector and perpetrator. The issue of domestic violence is not pertinent to Africa alone but while this can be reported and monitored in order to avoid repeated occurrences in other parts of the world, the bitter truth is that domestic violence is accepted as common place and condoned by a culture of silence and stigma.

    Please say something to rapists.

    Often, we think of the rapist as a die-hard criminal. In reality a rapist could be anybody, including boys as young as eight or persons with outstanding moral or even religious values and convictions. While it would not be an easy task to find words strong  and persuasive enough to touch the heart of rapists in times of war, as most of them, by so doing are only “obeying commands”, it would be worthwhile to call the attention of all potential rapists in times of apparent peace, who would simply seize any and every opportunity, with the excuse that women provoke them by the way they dress to reconsider the double standards of how they would want their wives to appear on the one hand and their girlfriends on the other.

    It is appalling to note that women in the 21st century cannot freely decide on what to wear without fear of bias, prejudice and rape. What is even the more inexcusable is the view that men hold. It is ridiculous to even think that women express the “need” to be raped simply because of the way they dress. What about finding out from her first rather than assume the unimaginable?

     

    By Stephen Ogongo Ongong’a

     

    CULTURE: The Gay Judges in Kenya* « AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

    The Gay Judges in Kenya*

    June 13, 2011

    by Sean Jacobs

    South Africa has an openly gay Judge serving on its highest court, The Constitutional Court. The Judge, Edwin Cameron, who has written a book about his sexual orientation also happens to be HIV positive and previously served for 8 years on the country’s High Court of Appeal. That’s an anomaly for court systems on a continent; a place where homophobia is rife. Now Kenya’s Judicial Service Commission (they make recommendations to government) have nominated a pro-gay-rights chief and a deputy chief justice to the country’s courts. As Peter Anaminyi writes on The Guardian’s Comment is Free site:

    Dr Willy Mutunga [in the picture above], the nominee for the chief justice position, is the current east Africa representative for Ford Foundation and was involved in facilitating the registration of a gay rights organisation. [He is also Muslim, is divorced and wears "a stud" in one ear.] As if this was not enough, Kenya’s Judicial Service Commission also went on to nominate Nancy Baraza as the deputy chief justice. What is her crime? Nancy has been outed. Not for being gay but for doing her doctoral research at Kenyatta University on gay rights. Needless to say, these nominations have generated the most intense debate surrounding any public appointment in living memory. It has forced a discussion on the issue of gay and gay-rights-affirming people and their suitability for public office.

    A new constitution–passed last August–resulted in the former Chief Justice resigning and a need for new appointments. The commission’s recent hearings have been televised live. There’s tons of video of the hearings online including of commission members’ obsession with Mutunga’s earring and going on about “activist judges” (rightwing propaganda originating in the US of course). Here’s an example from NTV Kenya:

     

    Here’s another from Citizen TV:

    Not surprisingly, conservative church leaders oppose the nominations, but both the president, Mwai Kibaki, and the prime minister and ” more significantly, the people of Kenya with an 80% affirmative vote in a poll,” support Mutunga and Baraza’s nominations.

    Anaminyi, writing on Comment is Free, predicts that:

    What may follow in the next 18 months is a constitutional challenge to the laws that criminalise homosexuality, based on the provisions of Kenya’s new constitution, which a legal expert has argued protects gay rights and even gay marriage. This will make Kenya, which is the highest single national recipient of US aid for HIV and Aids, the continental centre for a fully inclusive, evidence-based approach to the prevention and management of HIV/Aids.

    H/T: Bombastic Elements

    * In case you wondered (someone asked me on Twitter), the title of this blog post is deliberate; it lampoons some members of the Commission (with their questions) as well as conversative, mainly Christian, “clerics” in Kenya.