The 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize
with guest judge Jennifer Egan

The winning submission, selected by Jennifer Egan, will be read as part of the Selected Shorts performance at Symphony Space on June 8, 2011. The story will be recorded for possible later broadcast as part of the public radio series. The winner will receive $1000.

Story requirements

• Submit a single short story that addresses the theme, Restaurants and Bars.
• Your story must have a title.
• Make sure your name and contact information appear on the first page of your story. If you are submitting online, this information needs to appear on the first page of the attached Word document. Include page numbers.
• Your story must be no more than 750 words double-spaced (Times New Roman, 12pt font).
• Your story must be unpublished.

Deadline
All submissions must be received by March 1, 2011. To be specific, online submissions must be submitted by 5pm Eastern Standard Time. Mailed submissions must arrive with the day's mail. (Entries postmarked on March 2 will NOT be accepted.)

Where to submit your story
Submit your submission online

Mail to
CONTEST, Selected Shorts
Symphony Space
2537 Broadway
New York, NY 10025.

Mailed submissions must also include a check for $25, written to Symphony Space.  Online submissions must give credit card information to submit.  Stories will not be accepted without payment of the $25 fee.

Please do not send duplicate copies (online or snail-mail is sufficient). We cannot allow revisions to your story once we have received it. Due to the high volume of submissions and the small size of our office, we will not be able to notify you when we receive your story. The winner will be selected by Jennifer Egan and notified by early May. As soon as the winner is selected, his or her name will be posted to this page.

Note
Contestants who submit online or provide their email address will be added to the Selected Shorts email list - please let us know if you do not wish to receive email about upcoming programs.

The Prize
$1000 and two tickets to the June 8^th Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, when the prizewinning story will be read.

About this year's guest judge
Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling The Keep, as well as a short story collection, Emerald City. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was recently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.  She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons. Her new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was published in June and her short story Safari was selected by Richard Russo for Best American Short Stories 2010, to be published in October.

 

Call for Submissions: Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award

To honor the memory of distinguished Caribbeanists Gordon K. Lewis and Sybil Lewis, the Caribbean Studies Association has established a yearly award to be given for the best book about the Caribbean published over the previous three-year period in Spanish, English, French or Dutch. The nominated book should approach the chosen subject or aspect of Caribbean life conditions and situations from an interdisciplinary perspective, and should clearly show to have regional impact. Monographs in all disciplines and fields of Caribbean scholarship will be considered. Preference will be given to books written by one or more authors as opposed to edited volumes.

The deadline for submission is April 1, 2011.

Books must be submitted to:

Professor Linden Lewis 

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Bucknell University

Lewisburg, PA 17837

 

For more information, see http://www.caribbeanstudiesassociation.org/en/awards.html#Lewis_Prize

(In)visible Cosmovisions

The Graduate Students of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the University of Pittsburgh are pleased to announce the Third Biannual (des)articulaciones Conference:

(In)visible Cosmovisions: Dialogues in Afro and Indigenous Latin America and the Caribbean

October 21-22, 2011

Keynote Speaker:

Catherine Walsh

Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador

With the emergence of subaltern and postcolonial studies over the past quarter century, scholars have increasingly shifted attention to the political, epistemic, and poetic force of indigenous and Afro-descendent communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Nonetheless, the potential analogies and resonances between the worldviews, textualities, and recurrent political struggles of these populations remain largely overlooked and underexplored.

Considering the current historical conjuncture, in particular the ethos of multiculturalism and pluri-ethnicity in several republics, new constitutions, and the bicentennial, (des)articulaciones 2011 seeks to create a productive dialogue between these perspectives and explore new possibilities for decolonizing conceptual frameworks in the 21^st century.  Papers that address either indigenous or Afro-Latino/ Caribbean issues are welcome; discussions pertinent to the two are especially encouraged.  Potential topics may include, but are not limited to, the following areas of inquiry:

• Dialogues with Western philosophy and literary traditions
• Rereadings and rewritings of the canon
• Future directions for subaltern and postcolonial studies
• Indigenous and African diasporas and the politics of exile
• Intersections with gender, feminist, and queer concerns

For the purposes of promoting dialogue among participants, proposals for papers in English or Spanish are preferred.  Presentations are limited to 20 minutes each.  Please prepare your abstract for blind review; include a separate page with the title of the presentation, your name/s, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. Conference registration will be $20 for selected participants.

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract in Microsoft Word format to:

 des.articulaciones@gmail.com by April 1, 2011

Gaddafi Turns US and British Guns On His People

Hamid Dabashi: Gaddafi gained power as anti-imperialist, made deal with Bush and pushed neo-liberal economics

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Libya: The African Mercenary Question (Videos)

Written byJohn Liebhardt

This post is part of our special coverage Libya Uprising 2011.

One of the more distressing sub-plots in the ongoing two-week uprising againstColonel Muammar Al Gaddafi in Libya has been reports of the Libyan leader's alleged use of “African mercenaries” to prop up his falling regime.

Global Voices has covered stories of mercenaries from Serbia bombing civilians from airplanes. But the majority of speculation regarding mercenaries portrays them as “foreign” or “African” — meaning from Sub-Sahara Africa and “Black”. This storyline is echoed everywhere in international media, in Arabic media, and in online citizen media and videos.

Why put a Black face on the mercenary story when people in Libya are both light and dark skinned?

In an open letter to Al Jazeera posted on the blog Sky, Soil & Everything In Between, KonWomyn worries that the broadcaster's shorthand description simply has become “mercenaries from Africa”, instead of looking deeper into who these people actually are, and that this description is being copied in media around the world.

Fear is another reason these claims are widely perpetuated. In a comment on a blog post on Arabist.net about mercenaries in Libya, “Benedict” writes:

… in a climate of fear and scarce information, rumours that violence is being carried out by shadowy outsiders often spread widely (e.g. the rumours of ‘Arabs' beating protesters in Iran in 2009). Secondly, there are plenty of African migrants in Libya who may be seized as scapegoats by angry crowds, and there are also black Libyans, some of who may be members of the security forces.

Nonetheless, captured mercenaries in Libya have so far included people with identification papers from Tunisia, Nigeria and Guinea (Conakry) and Chad. In Ghana there are rumours that people in Accra had been offered as much as US$ 2,500 to fight for Gaddafi. And in Ethiopia local people have reportedly also been hired to fight. Here is a video of an alleged mercenary captured by locals in AL Barqa, Libya.

Uploaded by LAKOMTUBE on Feb 27, 2011

Gaddafi, Libya, Al Marj, Libya Gaddafi Libya Revolution Tripoli Demonstrators toke over main city square Gaddafi Thugs Libya Demonstration Protests Gaddafi Speech Tripoli Rebel Qaddafi Benghazi Arab Kufra libya A Libyan Casualty in Zawia Libya Unrest Uprising Libya Revolution Democracy Now Aljazeera Tahrir Square Algeria Police Mubarak Step Down CNN Fox News Aljazeera English Egyptian Reolution Tunisian Revolution Benali Mubarak Obama Police Shoot Fire Tears Gaz Revolution Arabs Islam Libya Protests Qaddafi Libyan Demonstration Revolution Egypt Tahrir Square Al Jazeera Mubarak Step Down Islam
مظاهرات مدبنة بنغازي ضد نظام القذافي - انتفاضة 17 فبراير 2011 لنجعله يوم للغضب في ليبيا - جيش غريان يعتقل المرتزق انتفاضة 17 فبراير 2011- لنجعله يوم للغضب في ليبيا - وصول قافلة المساعدات من مصر المرتزقة ذو القبعات الصفراء في شارع شمسة - بنغازي‬‎ مستشفى المركزي في طرابلس محرقة لجنود جيش ليبي استشهاد من شباب غريان ليبيا من العسكريين نساء درنة تتظاهر ضد القدافي قتل عشوائى لمواطنيين بعد ربط أيدي قتل إمراة أمام بيتها من قبل المرتز مصراته مع اصوات حرق مركز شرطة زاوية الدهماني مستشفي مصراتة مرتزقة القدافي مدينة الكفرة شباب ازوية الشهداء من سكان مدينة تاجوراء وحشية فشلوم والجرابة لقبض علي أحد المرتزقة وحمايته من مواطنين طرابلس سماء طرابلس طائرات حلقت

معركة المطار مصراتة القبض على مرتزقة كان يحاول التسلل

 

Map of Libya and the Mediterranean Sea

 

 

Destination Libya

For many in Sub-Saharan Africa, Libya has long been an employment magnet and also acted as a port of call for those wanting to migrate to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. An estimated 1.5 million people from south of the Sahara live in Libya, working mainly in the oil and construction industry.

Gaddafi is also financially and politically involved with governments south of the Sahara. The Libyan military has trained several rebel groups in the past, and has alsorecruited mercenaries on previous occasions.

In the early years of his rule, Gaddafi, who was affectionately known as “the Guide,” attempted to unify and Arabize the swath of land just south of the Sahara desert by pressing young migrants everywhere from the Sahel to Pakistan to fight as a single unit in wars in Chad, Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

Attacks on migrants

The immediate problem is that people in Libya from Sub-Saharan Africa have been attacked simply because people assume they are mercenaries. On the Ethiopian Review blog, several people commented on a post about Ethiopian mercenaries with fears that innocent refugees would become targets of mobs.

One commenter, “Ganamo” wrote:

Some of those could be innocent refugees. During uprising in a mob mentality people most often do not differentiate well between criminals and innocent foreigners. I have to say this because I believe it from learning it through an experience. While revolution must go on we must be carefully to stand for refugees. Specially Ethiopians in Diaspora since their government cares only for their money and abandons them on their times of need, while other countries are evacuating their citizens. Where will Ethiopian Refugees in Libya go?

Some bloggers and activists from Sub-Saharan Africa see the mercenary issue as opening a window into the chauvinistic attitudes of those from North Africa.

In the pan-African Myweku blog, N Thompson writes:

Africans in the main have been sympathetic and supportive of the desires of Tunisians and Egyptians in their protests. However, the African media and forums are beginning to ask if the prominence and publicity given to so called African mercenaries running amok amongst Libyan protesters pillaging and raping is beginning to tell a rather interesting story about the motives of some Libyan protesters.

On Sudan.net a question posted by a member of the forum – Is Libya racist? – has generated many emotional responses. Surely, isn’t the first rule of any revolution to garner as much international support from all quarters as possible?

That thought is echoed by Tommy Miles in New York, writing in the West-Africa focused, Tomathan blog:

In all honesty, I support the people of Libya’s righteous anger against the brutal Gaddafi regime. It will not be going out on a limb at this point to say they will succeed, and that the entire region (including Tchad, Mali, & Niger) will be better off without Gaddafi’s almost constant destabilization of his African neighbors.

But like much of northern Africa, in Libya there is a long history of fear, hatred, and oppression based on skin color. There is a distinct minority of “black” Libyans whose slave origins mean they are still regarded with contempt by some, as there is a large number of political and economic refugees in what is a relatively prosperous state.

One commenter on this post, going by the name “Arab”, disagrees:

A purely manufactured controversy. Libyans have also reported that there are European mercenaries and you conveniently forget that because it doesn’t suit your racism agenda. The point of making it known that they are African is identification, it has nothing to do with skin color (a classic case of projection of Western biases), but with identifying a threat (based on language, since “African” denotes a non-Arabic speaking person from the continent rather than a black person as you seem to think). Libyans are more than aware that there are Libyans killing them, after all fighter jets are not being flown by mercenaries nor is the elite army corps that is headed by Gaddafi’s son a foreign one. You would have served yourself better if at this time of great distress for the Libyan people, you remained silent until all the events are known, rather than push an agenda to insult people fighting and dying for their liberty based on nothing but speculation.

People in Libya have also shown compassion to some captured mercenaries. This video shows more than one man protecting an alleged fighter from an angry crowd (Warning: These are disturbing images).

 

Uploaded by QuatchiCanada on Feb 26, 2011

This video has no legal copyright because it came from Libyan citizens' mobile phone footage. YOUTUBE REPORTED THAT REUTERS HAS A COPYRIGHT ON THIS VIDEO (YOUTUBE USERS IN FRANCE WERE BEING BLOCKED FROM SEEING THIS VIDEO). Note that these videos come directly from people in Libya who used their mobile phone to video. No news agency has any right to claim a copyright on them.

Here is another one of Gaddafi's foreign African mercenaries caught in Tripoli, Libya by the Libyan citizens. Some of the men want to get revenge on him, but others want him to remain unharmed so that he can be used as evidence of war crimes. One citizen is covering him with his own body and saying to the others to leave him, "We need him, we need him."

 

 

One young mercenary from Chad, claimed in an interview with UK newspaper The Telegraph, that he had met men who said they would fly him to Tripoli in Libya for work. Instead, the plane was diverted to Al-Bayda, where he and his fellow travelers were handed weapons and told to kill protesters.

The Ridja blog from the island nation Comoros in Africa, takes up that theme [Fr]:

Dans une vidéo postée sur YouTube, un homme noir, présenté comme un mercenaire, reconnaît avoir été recruté par Khamis, l'un des fils du Guide, pour massacrer le peuple. Aveu véritable ou tentative désespérée d'un pauvre diable de se sauver d'une foule qui menace de le lyncher? D'autres films sur Internet montrent les dépouilles de supposés soldats de fortune morts au combat. Les sites des Libyens en exil parlent eux aussi de ces soldats étrangers, évoquant les rumeurs les plus folles, comme des salaires de 30.000 dollars.

In a video posted on YouTube, a black man, described as a mercenary, acknowledges having been recruited by Khamis, a son of the Guide, to massacre the people. True confession or a desperate attempt to save the poor devil from a mob threatening to lynch him? Other films on the Internet show the bodies of alleged soldiers of fortune who died in battle. The sites of exiled Libyans also speak of these foreign soldiers, referring to the wildest rumors, such as salaries of $30,000 US.

Vincent Harris in the blog Colored Opinions, a blog exploring African migration politics, says European leaders share some of the blame:

Europe has a heavy responsibility for the well-being of refugees in Libya. The reason I say this is obvious, European governments, like the Netherlands, helped Libya to create a buffer against subsaharan African immigrants to Europe. Who does not remember Gaddafi's recent visit to Italy? It seemed funny to see [Berlusconi] one of the most xenophobic presidents receive Gaddafi, but in reality the visit of Libyan president Gaddafi was in line with European policy to use Libya as buffer to counter immigration.

Of great concern to many, is that the mercenary problem may have only just begun. From the Arabist blog:

… if the regime suddenly collapses, how will the successors of the regime deal with several thousand heavily armed and unpaid mercenaries in Libya’s major cities?

Written by John Liebhardt

>via: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/03/01/libya-the-african-mercenary-question...

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Behind the Arab Revolt

Is a Word We Dare Not Speak

Thursday 24 February 2011

 

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Opinion

A revolution against neoliberalism?

If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated. 'Abu Atris' Last Modified: 24 Feb 2011 17:04 GMT Email Article Print Article Share Article Send Feedback

Ahmed Ezz, one of several NDP officials arrested since Egypt's revolution began [EPA] On February 16th I read a comment was posted on the wall of the Kullina Khalid Saed ("We are all Khaled Said") Facebook page administered by the now very famous Wael Ghonim. By that time it had been there for about 21 hours. The comment referred to a news item reporting that European governments were under pressure to freeze bank accounts of recently deposed members of the Mubarak regime. The comment said: "Excellent news … we do not want to take revenge on anyone … it is the right of all of us to hold to account any person who has wronged this nation. By law we want the nation’s money that has been stolen … because this is the money of Egyptians, 40% of whom live below the poverty line." By the time I unpacked this thread of conversation, 5,999 people had clicked the "like" button, and about 5,500 had left comments. I have not attempted the herculean task of reading all five thousand odd comments (and no doubt more are being added as I write), but a fairly lengthy survey left no doubt that most of the comments were made by people who clicked the "like" icon on the Facebook page. There were also a few by regime supporters, and others by people who dislike the personality cult that has emerged around Mr. Ghoneim. This Facebook thread is symptomatic of the moment. Now that the Mubarak regime has fallen, an urge to account for its crimes and to identify its accomplices has come to the fore. The chants, songs, and poetry performed in Midan al-Tahrir always contained an element of anger against haramiyya (thieves) who benefited from regime corruption. Now lists of regime supporters are circulating in the press and blogosphere. Mubarak and his closest relatives (sons Gamal and 'Ala’) are always at the head of these lists. Articles on their personal wealth give figures as low as $3 billion to as high as $70 billion (the higher number was repeated on many protesters’ signs). Ahmad Ezz, the General Secretary of the deposed National Democratic Party and the largest steel magnate in the Middle East, is supposed to be worth $18 billion; Zohayr Garana, former Minister of Tourism, $13 billion; Ahmad al-Maghrabi, former Minister of Housing, $11 billion; former Minister of Interior Habib Adli, much hated for his supervision of an incredibly abusive police state, also managed to amass $8 billion — not bad for a lifetime civil servant. Such figures may prove to be inaccurate. They may be too low, or maybe too high, and we may never know precisely because much of the money is outside of Egypt, and foreign governments will only investigate the financial dealings of Mubarak regime members if the Egyptian government makes a formal request for them to do so. Whatever the true numbers, the corruption of the Mubarak regime is not in doubt. The lowest figure quoted for Mubarak’s personal wealth, of "only" $3 billion, is damning enough for a man who entered the air force in 1950 at the age of twenty two, embarking on a sixty-year career in "public service." A systemic problem The hunt for regime cronies’ billions may be a natural inclination of the post-Mubarak era, but it could also lead astray efforts to reconstitute the political system. The generals who now rule Egypt are obviously happy to let the politicians take the heat. Their names were not included in the lists of the most egregiously corrupt individuals of the Mubarak era, though in fact the upper echelons of the military have long been beneficiaries of a system similar to (and sometimes overlapping with) the one that that enriched civilian figures much more prominent in the public eye such as Ahmad Ezz and Habib al-Adly. Despite macroeconomic gains, tens of millions of Egyptians still live in poverty [EPA]  To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state. What is neoliberalism? In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, the eminent social geographer David Harvey outlined "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the "proper functioning" of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them. Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions. And the application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did. Rhetoric vs. reality Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best. The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person. For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments. Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to "private" investors). Parallels with America The political economy of the Mubarak regime was shaped by many currents in Egypt’s own history, but its broad outlines were by no means unique. Similar stories can be told throughout the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor. Unemployment was a major grievance for millions of Egyptian protesters [EPA]  The story should sound familiar to Americans as well. For example, the vast fortunes of Bush era cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through their involvement with companies like Halliburton and Gilead Sciences, are the product of a political system that allows them — more or less legally — to have one foot planted in "business" and another in "government" to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred. Politicians move from the office to the boardroom to the lobbying organization and back again. As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to sell off the functions it formerly performed. It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry). So in Egyptian terms, when General Secretary of the NDP Ahmad Ezz cornered the market on steel and was given contracts to build public-private construction projects, or when former Minister of Parliament Talaat Mustafa purchased vast tracts of land for the upscale Madinaty housing development without having to engage in a competitive bidding process (but with the benefit of state-provided road and utility infrastructure), they may have been practicing corruption logically and morally. But what they were doing was also as American as apple pie, at least within the scope of the past two decades. However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system. It is the army that now rules the country, albeit as a transitional power, or so most Egyptians hope. No representatives of the upper echelons of the Egyptian military appear on the various lists of old-regime allies who need to be called to account. For example, the headline of the February 17th edition of Ahrar, the press organ of the Liberal party, was emblazoned with the headline "Financial Reserves of the Corrupt Total 700 Billion Pounds [about $118 billion] in 18 Countries." A vast economic powerhouse But the article did not say a single word about the place of the military in this epic theft. The military were nonetheless part of the crony capitalism of the Mubarak era. After relatively short careers in the military high-ranking officers are rewarded with such perks as highly remunerative positions on the management boards of housing projects and shopping malls. Some of these are essentially public-sector companies transferred to the military sector when IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs required reductions in the civilian public sector. But the generals also receive plums from the private sector. Military spending itself was also lucrative because it included both a state budget and contracts with American companies that provided hardware and technical expertise. The United States provided much of the financing for this spending under rules that required a great deal of the money to be recycled to American corporations, but all such deals required middlemen. Who better to act as an intermediary for American foreign aid contracts than men from the very same military designated as the recipient of the services paid for by this aid? In this respect the Egyptian military-industrial complex was again stealing a page from the American playbook; indeed, to the extent that the Egyptian military benefited from American foreign aid, Egypt was part of the American military-industrial complex, which is famous for its revolving-door system of recycling retired military men as lobbyists and employees of defense contractors. Consequently it is almost unthinkable that the generals of the Supreme Military Council will willingly allow more than cosmetic changes in the political economy of Egypt. But they could be compelled to do so unwillingly. The army is a blunt force, not well suited for controlling crowds of demonstrators. The latest statement of the Supreme Military Council reiterated both the legitimacy of the pro-democracy movements demands, and the requirement that demonstrations cease so that the country can get back to work. If demonstrations continue to the point that the Supreme Military Council feels it can no longer tolerate them, then the soldiers who will be ordered to put them down (indeed, in some accounts were already ordered to put them down early in the revolution and refused to do so) with deadly force, are not the generals who were part of the Mubarak-era corruption, but conscripts. Pro-democracy demonstrators and their sympathisers often repeated the slogans "the army and the people are one hand," and "the army is from us." They had the conscripts in mind, and many were unaware of how stark differences were between the interests of the soldiers and the generals. Between the conscripts and the generals is a middle-level professional officer corps whose loyalties have been the subject of much speculation. The generals, for their part, want to maintain their privileges, but not to rule directly. Protracted direct rule leaves the officers of the Supreme Military Council vulnerable to challenges from other officers who were left on the outside. Also, direct rule would make it impossible to hide that the elite officers are not in fact part of the "single hand" composed of the people and the (conscript) army. They are instead logically in the same camp as Ahmad Ezz, Safwat al-Sharif, Gamal Mubarak, and Habib al-Adly — precisely the names on those lists making the rounds of regime members and cronies who should face judgment. Ultimately the intense speculation about how much money the Mubarak regime stole, and how much the people can expect to pump back into the nation, is a red herring. If the figure turns out to be $50 billion or $500 billion, it will not matter, if Egypt remains a neoliberal state dedicated (nominally) to free-market fundamentalism for the poor, while creating new privatised assets that can be recycled to political insiders for the rich. If one seeks clues to how deeply the January 25th Revolution will restructure Egypt, it would be better to look at such issues as what sort of advice the interim government of generals solicits in fulfilling its mandate to re-make Egyptian government. The period of military government probably will be as short as advertised, followed, one hopes, by an interim civilian government for some specified period (at least two years) during which political parties are allowed to organise on the ground in preparation for free elections. But interim governments have a way of becoming permanent. Technocrats or ideologues? One sometimes hears calls to set up a government of "technocrats" that would assume the practical matters of governance. "Technocrat" sounds neutral — a technical expert who would make decisions on "scientific" principle. The term was often applied to Yusuf Butros Ghali, for example, the former Minister of the Treasury, who was one of the Gamal Mubarak boys brought into the cabinet in 2006 ostensibly to smooth the way for the President’s son to assume power. Ghali is now accused of having appropriated LE 450 million for the use of Ahmad Ezz. I once sat next to Ghali at a dinner during one of his trips abroad, and had the opportunity to ask him when the Egyptian government would be ready to have free elections. His response was to trot out the now discredited regime line that elections were impossible because actual democracy would result in the Muslim Brotherhood taking power. Conceivably Ghali will beat the charge of specifically funneling the state’s money to Ahmad Ezz. But as a key architect of Egypt’s privatization programs he cannot possibly have been unaware that he was facilitating a system that enabled the Ezz steel empire while simultaneously destroying Egypt’s educational and health care systems. The Egyptian army controls a range of businesses, ranging from factories to hotels [EPA]  The last time I encountered the word "technocrat" was in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine — a searing indictment of neoliberalism which argues that the free-market fundamentalism promoted by economist Milton Friedman (and immensely influential in the United States) is predicated on restructuring economies in the wake of catastrophic disruptions because normally functioning societies and political systems would never vote for it. Disruptions can be natural or man-made, such as … revolutions. The chapters in The Shock Doctrine on Poland, Russia, and South Africa make interesting reading in the context of Egypt’s revolution. In each case when governments (communist or apartheid) collapsed, "technocrats" were brought in to help run countries that were suddenly without functional governments, and create the institutional infrastructure for their successors. The technocrats always seemed to have dispensed a form of what Klein calls "shock therapy" — the imposition of sweeping privatization programs before dazed populations could consider their options and potentially vote for less ideologically pure options that are in their own interests. The last great wave of revolutions occurred in 1989. The governments that were collapsing then were communist, and the replacement in that "shock moment" of one extreme economic system with its opposite seemed predictable and to many even natural. One of the things that make the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions potentially important on a global scale is that they took place in states that were already neoliberalised. The complete failure of neoliberalsm to deliver "human well-being" to a large majority of Egyptians was one of the prime causes of the revolution, at least in the sense of helping to prime millions of people who were not connected to social media to enter the streets on the side of the pro-democracy activists. But the January 25th Revolution is still a "shock moment." We hear calls to bring in the technocrats in order to revive a dazed economy; and we are told every day that the situation is fluid, and that there is a power vacuum in the wake of not just the disgraced NDP, but also the largely discredited legal opposition parties, which played no role whatsoever in the January 25th Revolution. In this context the generals are probably happy with all the talk about reclaiming the money stolen by the regime, because the flip side of that coin is a related current of worry about the state of the economy. The notion that the economy is in ruins — tourists staying away, investor confidence shattered, employment in the construction sector at a standstill, many industries and businesses operating at far less than full capacity — could well be the single most dangerous rationale for imposing cosmetic reforms that leave the incestuous relation between governance and business intact. Or worse, if the pro-democracy movement lets itself be stampeded by the "economic ruin" narrative, structures could be put in place by "technocrats" under the aegis of the military transitional government that would tie the eventual civilian government into actually quickening the pace of privatization. Ideologues, including those of the neoliberal stripe, are prone to a witchcraft mode of thinking: if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic, but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell. In other words, the logic could be that it was not neoliberalism that ruined Mubarak’s Egypt, but the faulty application of neoliberalism. Trial balloons for this witchcraft narrative are already being floated outside of Egypt. The New York Times ran an article on February 17th casting the military as a regressive force opposed to privatization and seeking a return to Nasserist statism. The article pits the ostensibly "good side" of the Mubarak regime (privatization programs) against bad old Arab socialism, completely ignoring the fact that while the system of military privilege may preserve some public-sector resources transferred from the civilian economy under pressure of IMF structural adjustment programs, the empire of the generals is hardly limited to a ring-fenced quasi-underground public sector. Officers were also rewarded with private-sector perks; civilian political/business empires mixed public and private roles to the point that what was government and what was private were indistinguishable; both the military and civilians raked in rents from foreign aid. The generals may well prefer a new round of neoliberal witchcraft. More privatization will simply free up assets and rents that only the politically connected (including the generals) can acquire. Fixing a failed neoliberal state by more stringent applications of neoliberalism could be the surest way for them to preserve their privileges. A neoliberal fix would, however, be a tragedy for the pro-democracy movement. The demands of the protesters were clear and largely political: remove the regime; end the emergency law; stop state torture; hold free and fair elections. But implicit in these demands from the beginning (and decisive by the end) was an expectation of greater social and economic justice. Social media may have helped organise the kernel of a movement that eventually overthrew Mubarak, but a large element of what got enough people into the streets to finally overwhelm the state security forces was economic grievances that are intrinsic to neoliberalism. These grievances cannot be reduced to grinding poverty, for revolutions are never carried out by the poorest of the poor. It was rather the erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of markets. Mubarak’s Egypt degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly inadequate wages, particularly in the ever-expanding private sector. This was what turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined protestors. If the January 25th revolution results in no more than a retrenchment of neoliberalism, or even its intensification, those millions will have been cheated. The rest of the world could be cheated as well. Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next). 'Abu Atris' is the pseudonym for a writer working in Egypt. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

>via: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201122414315249621.html

 

Posted by: ivetteromero

What’s on Our Nightstands: Caribbean Erotic

Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose, and Essays, edited by Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley, was launched earlier this month (February 4, 2011) at Sister Space and Books in Washington, DC . . ., and, thanks to writer Linda Rodríguez Guglielmoni, this rich collection is now indeed on my nightstand.

I must admit that I have never been a great fan of erotic literature but I have always been fascinated by the theoretical approaches to this genre. When I read Anaïs Nin, ever so long ago (even before I knew about her Cuban heritage) I thought, “OK, this is very interesting; then I plowed through some of the winners of Spain’s La Sonrisa Vertical [The Vertical Smile] Award and smiled; then, when I read some of Mayra Montero’s erotic novels, such as La última noche que pasé contigo [The Last Night I Spent with You] and Púrpura profundo [Deep Purple, which won the 2000 Sonrisa Vertical Award], I really began to take note; and more recently, approaches to the erotic through Ana Lydia Vega’s and Mayra Santos’s prose, Opal Palmer Adisa’s poetry, and criticism by Mary Ann Gosser (on both Montero and Santos) led me to take notes, literally. And then there were those texts that I had not recognized as examples of erotic literature because I was approaching them from a completely different framework.

So now I must rephrase my comment: I am not usually a fan of erotic literature (and I began enjoying it when I started reading pieces by Latin American and Caribbean writers). Several contributions have made me reframe and revalorize erotic literature; the two that stand out in the past two decades for their comprehensiveness and solid contribution to the academic canon are Pleasure in the Word: Erotic Writing by Latin American Women (1994), edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (yes, my co-blogger) and Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose, and Essays (2010).

About the latter, Earl Lovelace writes, “The beauty of Caribbean Erotic is that it lifts the veils that curtain the many rooms of Caribbean sexuality; its genius is its skillful guidance through the lusty, bawdy, worshipful and spiritual wealth, as we lose our senses to find our selves.” I would like to add that Caribbean Erotic’s strength lies in its scope—in terms of genres, contributors, and geographic areas—and its delicate balance between offering the pure pleasure of a wide sampling of aesthetic production and a reflection on erotic writing per se. With poetry and short stories by a remarkably broad variety of writers, spanning from the established, readily recognized, and outstanding writers in the field to the artistically adventurous newcomers, this collection complements the creative pulsion with a fascinating gathering of critical essays by Carol Boyce Davies, Audre Lorde, Heather Russell, Imani Tafari-Ama, co-editor Donna Aza Weir-Soley, and Hanétha Vété-Congolo.

As Weir-Soley explains, in her introductory essay, “No anthology manages to be as fully representative as it would wish. These days it is probably impossible for even the most assiduous editors to know all the vast body of work produced by a diverse, translingual and transnational collection of writers who self-identify as Caribbean.” Thus, although the collection does not include pieces representative of the Dutch Caribbean, for example, it does achieve what it set out to do: “to reflect what has become more obvious in this our twenty-first century than ever before: that the differences between Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean nation states do not in any way diminish the significance of the historical, cultural, socio-political, and literary connections and contestations shared across the region.” As I read this pleasantly multifarious volume, I must say that I am quickly becoming an enthusiast of Caribbean erotic literature. Thank you, Opal and Donna! And thanks to all the contributors herein.

Publisher’s description: Caribbean Erotic is a revealing, wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of the many facets of the erotic in contemporary Caribbean literature. It includes poetry, short fiction and critical essays; work that celebrates desire, work that depicts realistically the psychology of, for instance, a woman whose desperate wish is that her abusive husband still desires her, and work that explores the role of fantasy in the erotic. Infidelity, self-respect, rape, self-love, lust and child-birth are other themes which are interpreted in the collection with honesty and insight. As an anthology, Caribbean Erotic is intended both to arouse pleasure and generate thought about what is, despite the touristic stereotypes, still a conflicted area of Caribbean literature and culture.

For purchasing information, see http://www.peepaltreepress.com/single_book_display.asp?isbn=9781845230890

You Have More Money in Your Wallet

Than Bank of America Pays in Federal Taxes

Saturday 26 February 2011

by: Zaid Jilani   |  ThinkProgress | News Analysis

Today, hundreds of thousands of people comprising a Main Street Movement — a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public employees, and other middle class Americans — are in the streets, demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on organized labor being pushed by conservative politicians. These lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining and cutting necessary services like college tuition aid and health benefits for public workers claim that they have no choice but than to take these actions because both state and federal governments are in debt.

But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets — it was Wall Street. And as middle class workers are being asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes and avoiding paying their fair share.

In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“:

[Gibson] explains, “I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”

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Indeed, as politicians are asking ordinary Americans to sacrifice their education, their health, their labor rights, and their wellbeing to tackle budget deficits, some of the world’s richest multinational corporations are getting away with shirking their responsibility and paying nothing. ThinkProgress has assembled a short but far from comprehensive list of these tax dodgers — corporations which have rigged the tax system to their advantage so they can reap huge profits and avoid paying taxes:

- BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. “Oh, yeah, this happens all the time,” said Robert Willens, a tax accounting expert interviewed by McClatchy. “If you go out and try to make money and you don’t do it, why should the government pay you for your losses?” asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. The same year, the mega-bank’s top executives received pay “ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.”

- BOEING: Despite receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn’t “pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes” between 2008 and 2010.

- CITIGROUP: Citigroup’s deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. “John Havens, the head of Citigroup’s investment bank, is expected to be the bank’s highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with a compensation package worth $9.5 million.”

- EXXON-MOBIL: The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Although Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, not a penny of those taxes went to the American Treasury. This was the same year that the company overtook Wal-Mart in the Fortune 500. Meanwhile the total compensation of Exxon-Mobil’s CEO the same year was over $29,000,000.

- GENERAL ELECTRIC: In 2009, General Electric — the world’s largest corporation — filed more than 7,000 tax returns and still paid nothing to U.S. government. They managed to do this by a tax code that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas. That same year GE CEO Jeffery Immelt — who recently scored a spot on a White House economic advisory board — “earned total compensation of $9.89 million.” In 2002, Immelt displayed his lack of economic patriotism, saying, “When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China….I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion.”

- WELLS FARGO: Despite being the fourth largest bank in the country, Wells Fargo was able to escape paying federal taxes by writing all of its losses off after its acquisition of Wachovia. Yet in 2009 the chief executive of Wells Fargo also saw his compensation “more than double” as he earned “a salary of $5.6 million paid in cash and stock and stock awards of more than $13 million.”

In the coming months, politicians across the country are going to tell Americans that the only way to stave off huge deficit and balance the budgets is by gutting programs for the poor, eviscerating support for the middle class, eliminating labor rights, and decimating the government’s ability to serve the public interest. This is a lie. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and income inequality is higher now than it has been at any time since the 1920′s, with the top “top 1 percentile of households [taking] home 23.5 percent of income in 2007.”

It is simply unfair for Main Street Americans who’ve already been battered by one of the worst economic crises in our history to have to continue to sacrifice while the rich and well-connected continue to rip off taxpayers and avoid paying their fair share. That’s why a Main Street Movement consisting of Americans who are fed up with the status quo is rocking the nation, and one of its first targets should be tax dodgers like Bank of America and Boeing. 

Mining Memories to Preserve the Past

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: February 21, 2011

Her memory is creaky, Dwania Kyles insisted, and most of the photographs that help unlock it are stored in her computer. But recently, sitting in a warren of rooms in Harlem as the light outside faded, she had a rush of recollections about her family and the night that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not come to dinner.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Dwania Kyles, who is among those participating in the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project, holding a photograph of her parents.

 

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Jeffrey Horne with photos that are being considered for the Digital Diaspora project.

 

 Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Thomas Allen Harris examines photographs owned by Lana Turner for inclusion in the project.

 

 

Ms. Kyles and Thomas Allen Harris, a documentary filmmaker, had donned white gloves to thumb through photographs of her parents in high school. “My parents left the promised land to jump into the lion’s den,” she said of their move from Chicago to Memphis to join the civil rights movement. On the evening in 1968 that King was expected at their home for soul food, her father, the Rev. Samuel B. Kyles, ended up with him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where King was felled by an assassin.

Mr. Harris and Ms. Kyles, a 55-year-old wellness consultant and songwriter who lives in Harlem, were in his office ferreting out information for the filmmaker’s Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project. Since 2009, Mr. Harris has traveled the country collecting photographs and stories from families, then putting those and filmed interviews onto his Web site.

Now, Mr. Harris is taking his show onto the stage, presenting the stories he’s collected to a live audience using interactive media and old-fashioned storytelling. On Sunday afternoon, after dry runs around the country, the show will have its debut at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. (The event will be streamed live to the Web site.)

At Harlem Stage and in future reunion cities, the enlarged photographs and accompanying stories will be presented to audiences who will be invited to trade family histories, ask questions and even identify people and locations. The project will also work as community history, with its glances at the places and people that define neighborhoods.

“It’s survivors and ‘firsts,’ ” the effervescent Mr. Harris said of the people he is documenting, few of them celebrities. “It’s the stories in history books and films about civil rights.”

As a kind of curator/master of ceremonies, Mr. Harris, who has made two acclaimed documentaries, “The 12 Disciples of Nelson Mandela,” about South African exiles who were part of the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement, and “É Minha Cara/That’s My Face,” about spirituality, looks to figure out which stories enlarge and provide context for many aspects of black life, from immigration to education to military service. “We are living with gold — one person in Atlanta came with a truckload of images dating back to the 1850s,” he said.

Photographs and stories can also be directly uploaded to the Web site, which features interviews with scholars, news about family reunions and images by black photographers.

A Harvard graduate who is in his ’40s, grew up in the Bronx and spent time in East Africa, Mr. Harris had long encouraged fans of his work to collect their own family stories, as he has done in his deeply personal films. It struck him that social media could be used to archive and share the results. His younger brother, Lyle Ashton Harris, is a prominent photographer and artist known for work that fuses aesthetic considerations and sociopolitical observation.

“All of my work is about identity, about how we represent ourselves to ourselves,” Thomas Allen Harris said.

“We take grandma for granted.” he said. “We need to understand that instead of looking outside ourselves for value, we can look inside.”

On Wednesday through Friday, Mr. Harris will set up shop at the Gatehouse, at 150 Convent Avenue, so people can bring him their family photographs and other documents (reservations are required, though there is a waiting list: email ddfrtv@gmail.com or call 212-281-6002). The photographs Mr. Harris selects will be digitized and put onto a DVD for their owner. All will be shown as part of a slide show at Harlem Stage, and some will be expanded into an interactive film for the Web site.

“The history of African-Americans has been told by so many people other than ourselves, and even in the telling it becomes abstract,” said Pat Cruz, the executive director of Harlem Stage. “With our family photographs, this opens up some doors as well as some eyes into what we are, on an intimate level.”

Recently, Mr. Harris received funding to complete another feature film, “Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.” It is an exploration of how black communities and photographers have used the camera as a tool for social change. Mr. Harris planned to show clips from the film at Harlem Stage on Sunday.

Both Digital Diaspora and “Through a Lens” offer visual counterpoint to the stereotypical, caricatured images of African-Americans that still circulate, said Deborah Willis, an art photographer and historian of African-American art and a professor at New York University. For participants, “it creates a reconsideration of what it means to preserve family history,” Professor Willis said. “Their excitement about sharing their history comes from a sense of providing evidence for those who might feel excluded, who feel they are not part of the larger discussion.”

The experience of telling and sharing stories and images can be revelatory and therapeutic, some said.

“You have to tell your story,” Mr. Harris told Ms. Kyles the other day, nudging her to recall that her father had knotted King’s tie an hour before he stepped out on the balcony.

“We were so excited about him coming to the house,” she said. Telling Mr. Harris about her time in Memphis, which included the lonely and humiliating experience of desegregating a school, was “healing,” Ms. Kyles said afterward.

Lana Turner, a 61-year-old real-estate agent who lives in Harlem, brought photographs of her parents to Mr. Harris’s office. Her father worked as a chauffeur, she said. She spread out images of him posed in front of an elegant, vintage car, and a 1952 photo with a group of natty men in suits who belonged to a chauffeurs’ club. Her mother, a chambermaid and a cook, wore a tiara in a photograph in which she and several other women were adorned in elegant white dresses.

“People took off their chauffeur’s uniforms or maid’s hats and they made joy out of a day that might have been drudgery,” Ms. Turner said softly.

The Turners were the kinds of unsung heroes who helped move the country forward, Mr. Harris said. “We need these stories,” he said, “to let the next generation know they come from a people who have made it by their bootstraps and made it for everyone around them, regardless of color and race.”

Dawit Kebede, Ethiopia's courageous, defiant editor

In spite of spending almost two years in the most appalling conditions in an Ethiopian prison cell with 350 inmates, Dawit Kebede is unbowed. Jailed for speaking out against the Meles Zenawi government, Kebede continues to fight for constitutional rights and democracy by running Ethiopia’s last remaining independent and critical newspaper. By MANDY DE WAAL.

The 21 months that Dawit Kebede spent in a jail cell with 350 other prisoners in Ethiopia is a stark reminder of that country’s assault on press freedoms. Kebede’s crime was that he wrote an editorial criticising his government following the post-election violence that swept Ethiopia in 2005. Many journalists were detained at that time and some chose exile after being freed, but not Kebede. When the editor-in-chief of Ethiopia’s only independent, political newspaper was released he waited two days and then petitioned the federal government headed by Meles Zenawi for a license to continue running his newspaper.

“The two days after my release were a Saturday and Sunday, so on Monday I went to the minister of information to reorganise my newspaper,” says Kebede from Ethiopia. “Unfortunately they were not happy when I asked them and they didn’t want to offer a license. I explained that it was my constitutional right to exercise my profession, but it took nearly six months for the government to make a decision and then they denied us a license.” Kebede’s an expert on the constitution in Ethiopia. He wrote to Zenawi to challenge the decision and was granted permission to publish once more.

“We started the Arwamba Times in 2008 and till today this remains the only newspaper critical of the government. It is the only newspaper that speaks about issues that relate to the rule of law, constitutionality and questions state operators about the development of democracy.” The Arwamba Times is a voice in the media wilderness in Ethiopia because most local newspapers have chosen to forgo challenging the government and focus instead on sports or entertainment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Arwamba Times front page.

 

“We currently publish 15,000 copies a week which means that Arwamba Times is the second largest newspaper in the country. The biggest newspaper reports on entertainment.” Kebede says the climate in Ethiopia is still one of fear. In part this fear is fuelled by the memory that in 1995 Zenawi’s regime massacred 193 protesters who were rallying against elections that were neither free nor fair.

“The people were peacefully protesting the elections and they died, and as editors we were asking why these people died when they were protesting peacefully. I was arrested together with the head of the coalition opposition for alleged involvement in subverting the constitution. The funny thing is that our constitution clearly states that no one may lose their lives unless they are punished by judicial organs. It was based on that principle that we tried to criticise the government's action which was not in favour of democracy,” says Kebede. “The government needed to explain why people lost their lives in an action that was unconstitutional.” But Kebede received no answers. Instead he was given a life sentence and thrown in prison with some 15 other journalists from eight local newspapers.

Today, while Kebede is out of jail, he isn’t a free man because he works under a presidential pardon which means his freedom remains threatened. Despite this, he remains fiercely critical of the government and won’t leave Ethiopia unless his life is under threat. “I have no choice in terms of staying or going. I have to do something in my life and contribute to the development of Ethiopian democracy and because of this I cannot leave my country or go into exile. I may have freedom when I am in exile, but staying here and exercising my professional duty is a greater freedom for me.”

Kebede’s current fight is against the country’s state-owned newspaper Addis Zemen which has been publishing false criminal allegations against the Arwamba Times. This is just one of the government tactics to try to stymie Kebede’s paper, which enjoys huge popularity. “One of the strategies of the ruling party is to undermine commercial advertising for those newspapers that criticise the government. There is a climate of fear so the business community is reluctant to advertise their products in critical press. They say they love what we do, but can’t advertise because the government would not view this kindly and it would hamper the way they do business in Ethiopia,” says Kebede. The government also limits international support by decreeing that local organisations have to be 90% funded by local business.

Watch: Spotlight on Dawit Kebede:

Kebede remains unflinching and continues to face-off against the tyrants. “What the government does regularly is create repressive legislation so that the development of democracy is discouraged. You don’t have the right to criticise certain political groups and as a newspaper all the government wants from us is to publish state press releases.” The punishment for contravening tough press laws is as much 25 years in prison. However, the laws are vague and open to interpretation which makes it easy for the government to make a case and in Kebede’s instance, push for sentences as severe as life imprisonment.

Where does Kebede’s passion and courage come from? “As a child of three or four I remember sitting with my father as he listened to the Voice of America.” It was his father’s curiosity and need to find the truth by listening to satellite news programmes on radio that fired Kebede’s initial imagination. The will to report the truth was cemented by a government that remains in power in Ethiopia and refuses to engage in a discourse about fundamental human rights or democracy.

Kebede’s uncommon courage saw him honoured with the 2010 Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award. Courage exemplified by the words he used in accepting the award: "Here are three things people should know about me. First, it is impossible for me to live without the life I have as a journalist. Second, unless it becomes a question of life and death, I will never be leaving Ethiopia. Third, I am not an opposition. As a journalist, whatsoever the governing regime in Ethiopia, I will never hesitate from writing issues criticizing it for the betterment of the nation." DM

Bill Cosby’s forgotten “militant” documentary

By Sergio, on March 1st, 2011

Ahhhhh the late 60′s… the good old days when all black people wore afros and were pissed off. And back during the summer of 1968, just a few months after the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, and the country tearing apart at the seams, with cities becoming charred ruins from racial riots, CBS broadcast the documentary Black History: Lost, Stolen or Stayed, which was narrated by Bill Cosby. The program was a sensation, and I still remember it. Nothing like it had even been done on TV before, and I’m hard-pressed to think of anything since.

And you have to consider that this was a very daring thing for Cosby to do at the time. He was the co-star of one of the most popular TV shows at the time, I Spy, and was considered by many to be a “safe and non-threatening” black man. So, for him to show his angry, militant outrage against racism and how black people had been portrayed in films, and their massive contributions throughout history ignored, was shockingly radical.

Here’s a clip from the show:

 
Needless to say the show was a huge sensation. It was so popular, and of course, so controversial that the network re-broadcast the program less than a month later, to an equally high viewership.

Later Lincoln Perry, better known as the infamous Stephin Fetchit (for you young’uns, a black actor from the 1930′s and 40′s, notorious for his highly offensive stereotyped film characters) filed a multi-million dollar suit against the network, claiming defamation of his character, which he lost. But when you think about what we see today, you can argue not only have things not changed, they may have gotten even worse. Here’s another clip from the program: