War in Syria - Who's Watching?

'Return to Homs' was screened in Brussels on Tuesday night as part of the One World film festival. It was a gripping and heartbreaking portrayal of the war in Syria from the rebels-eye-view.

About 200 people attended the screening at the Czech Representation to the EU. Only about half of those stayed for the panel debate afterwards.

Šimon Pánek, director of People in Need, the NGO behind the event, looked grim-faced and weary as he listened to Syrian opposition figures express their frustration with the international community for not helping them.

After 20 years in the humanitarian relief business, one sensed that he'd seen it all before. He referred to the siege of Sarajevo. Eventually something was done there.

Who knows how long it will take for 'something' to be done in Syria.

Overall, the event was an admirable and well-organized effort to raise public awareness of the war in Syria. One just wishes that it could have reached more people. There was no evidence of media coverage.

With so many conflicts in the world, where do you start?

At least another 200 people have a greater insight onto the war and will hopefully pass on their experience to family and friends.

Europeans have the luxury of choosing which conflicts to follow. How long before that choice disappears?

One World Brussels 2014 film festival runs until 02 April, tickets are free and the programme can be found here

People in Need

Review of the film

2014 War of the Worlds

The 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War deserves to be marked in many ways. Centeneries don't come around very often and when they do they're usually worth a second thought.

But what should commemorations of the first conflict that took on global proportions and slaughtered millions of men look like? Do we need big official ceremonies or small localized initiatives? Should we look at the winners or the losers?

Arguably it was the Great War which crystallized the modern concept of the nation. The idea that your only loyalty should be to your nation, and that other nations may be well and good, but they are no match for yours.

So it is no surprise then that the commemorations this year will have a distinctly national touch. Britain, France and Germany will all go their own way about doing it.

Meanwhile, the European Union has avoided organizing anything at all.

A spokesman for the Commission told news source Euractiv that this is because "... 2014 means very different things to different countries but... the President and Commissioners may attend specific events, if invited.”

It is sad that 100 years after the first major modern conflagration in Europe there can be no common drive to understand this history and learn from it.

Further reading:
Historian Richard J Evans looks at compelling parallels between 1914 and today
Journalist Simon Jenkins laments the glorification of the war in Britain

Paint It Black

Dark Romanticism - From Goya to Max Ernst

The Städel Museum, Frankfurt Main:  until 20 January 2013
Musée d’Orsay, Paris:  04 March until 09 June 2013

The exhibition 'Dark Romanticism' is a treasure trove of ghoulish art which is sure to leave even the most well-heeled gallery goer slightly unhinged.

If you are familiar with Gothic literature, such as Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’ or the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, then you will be in a good position to appreciate the major themes of the exhibition: the supernatural, death and horror.

As scientific and social progress faltered with the descent of the French Revolution into unadulterated violence, artists began exploring irrational elements of human nature. Therefore the major part of the exhibition is rooted in 19th century European art.

It begins with Johann Heinrich Fuseli’s painting ‘The Nightmare’ (1802). A woman is hounded by a demon and a vacant-eyed horse in her sleep. This evolves into Franz Stuck’s ‘The Sin’ (1893). A dark-haired nude stares from the picture, as an evil green viper hisses at us from her shoulder.

Spanish artist Goya features strongly. Despite sketches of dismemberment and rape, there remains a dreamlike quality in all his work which renders it immediately accessible and intriguing. Another highlight is the set of little black pen-and-ink wash pieces by none other than French writer Victor Hugo. His impressionistic doodles are a delight to behold and it is amazing that he considered his artwork to be a mere hobby.

Clips from early black and white horror films embellish the overall gothic mood. Nosferatu, Frankenstein and Dracula are all there along with some more esoteric footage. Not to be missed.

Arguably the curators have tried too hard to extrapolate dark romanticism into the later 20th century. Instead of showing Dali and Hitchcock, a room exploring the massive influence of gothic literature would have added an important dimension to the otherwise comprehensive show.

'The Nightmare' (1802)

Human Rights Watch Report 2012: Europe

Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its 2012 World Report on Friday. This international non-profit NGO has spent years monitoring the abuses and development of human rights with researchers on the ground in pretty much every country in the world.

The 690-page report which can be downloaded for free, examines everything from poor access to AIDs medication to instances of domestic violence from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

Whilst there is a large focus on the events of the Arab Spring, which is likened to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the report includes a damning resume of the state of human rights in Europe.

Three main trends are identified as creating the ‘human rights crisis’ in Europe.

Firstly, counterterrorist measures in the wake of the attacks in Madrid and London have justified stripping all terrorist suspects of basic rights. An unknown number of suspects have faced torture in secret rendition centres abroad at the behest of national governments. This contravenes both international law against torture and the advice of terrorism experts who recognize the rule of law as the best way to counter terrorists.

Secondly, in the name of security, the idea that the rights of the majority can only be protected by sacrificing the rights of the minority has won widespread support in mainstream political discourse. As a result, Europe's migrants and minorities have faced increasing discrimination and xenophobic violence. This is evidenced by headscarf bans for Muslim women in several EU countries (France, Belgium, Germany and Italy) as well as the continued segregation of and discrimination against Roma, especially in eastern Europe.
 

Finally, the rise of populist extremist parties has furthered undermined the founding EU principle of universal human rights. Rather than combating the rise of the far right, mainstream parties have co-opted many of their policies. The ideal of democracy has been used to justify discriminatory and abusive policies - for example some argue that evictions of Roma from France protect the rights of the national majority and are therefore legitimate. The rights of the minority are considered irrelevant.

Ignorance and fear in Europe are again resulting in dangerous arguments that see some humans as more equal than others. As we have seen over the past century, such ideas can have catastrophic consequences.

Whilst the report identifies the European Commission and the European Court of Human Rights as crucial actors that have the power to hold national governments to account, it remains to be seen how the people of Europe will respond as the economic recession deepens.

Will easy scapegoats be found and abused? Or will people rise to the challenge of building a better future, united in diversity?

Links:

World Report 2012
Chapter on the European Union
Essay by Benjamin Ward, ‘Europe’s Own Human Rights Crisis’
Video about Human Rights Watch

Crisis - What Crisis?

How long will this economic doom and gloom in Europe last? Since a bank collapsed in the US three years ago, politicians have been ranting on about a 'crisis'. Surely it is now time for governments to stop moaning on about the economy and take some positive action.

A real crisis is a short and sudden critical event with potentially devastating consequences. It is not something that drags on so long that it makes you yawn with utter boredom.

OK, so the Euro is in trouble. Greece was a little naughty and fiddled her accounts. But why did the rest of Europe make such a huge tragedy out of this? As former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt pointed out, Greece has the economic weight of a single German state. So why all the agonizing from Merkel and co. over whether to bail Greece out or not?

The answer of course lies in winning political capital. The current 'crisis' is quite a handy little tool for our governments. First, they make us worry about losing our jobs, then they say they'll save us, if we go along with funding cuts to public services. 'We're all in this together!' - 'Hang on, austerity is quite good fun actually!'

At the same time, all attention to more serious issues such as improving healthcare, schemes for affordable housing, ensuring accessible top-quality university education let alone reducing world poverty, combating climate change and building good multi-lateral relations on a global level get conveniently swept under the proverbial carpet of crisis.

Sadly, the 'occupy' protest movement merely proves that plenty of people have been fooled into believing in the 'crisis'. And how does this affect the rest of us? We can't even clear our heads with a refreshing stroll in the park anymore!

Anti-Immigrant Politics in Europe

More and more European leaders are jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon of the far right. First Merkel, then Cameron and Sarkozy have attacked multiculturalism as a failure. They stated that it had led to segregation and 'parallel communities'.

However, what action had their governments really taken to promote an inclusive multiculturalism? Promoting nationalistic monoculturalism and exclusion of 'others' seemed to be a simpler and more cost-effective vote-winner.

What happened to liberal democratic Europe? Every country now has its very own fascist party, sometimes several. There's the British National Party and English Defence League in good old Britain, not to mention UKIP. 

Moving over the Channel to France, you have Marine Le Pen of the French National Front who has a decent chance of becoming the next president in 2012.

The Islamophobic Geert Wilders leads the third biggest party in the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom.

Germany has its NPD, whilst even social democratic politicians are joining the patriotic act: see Thilo Sarrazin's bestseller, 'Germany Abolishes Itself'.

A few months ago the True Finns won 19.1 per cent of the vote in the general elections, bringing right wing politics to the scene. Then there's the Progress Party in Norway, Sweden Democrats who have 20 seats in the Swedish parliament and the Danish People's Party (see last post).

It is simply a bewildering array of populist trash that makes one think again before laughing about Sarah Palin and her nutty Tea Party in the US.

I've missed plenty of far right parties out, so watch this space for more naming and shaming to come.

Re-Imagining Denmark

The historian Benedict Anderson called the nation-state an 'imagined community'. In other words, the nation is an artificial man-made construction. Who belongs and who does not is simply all in the mind. Currently, a few small-minds in Denmark are trying to reconstruct what it means to be Danish.

Today, Denmark deployed 50 additional customs agents to its borders with Germany and Sweden. Not content with just restricting immigration from outside of the EU, the Danish government now feels that it is time to impose border checks on European travellers too.

Pia Kjærsgaard and her Danish People's Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF) must be celebrating tonight. They have scored another symbolic highly-publicized blow against a Europe without borders. At the same time, they are constricting the development of a free and open society in Denmark.

The Schengen Area of 25 nation states is based on mutual trust, cooperation and extremely tight external border control. Denmark sits geographically in the very middle of this exclusive zone and yet it is the first country to contravene the spirit and purpose of the agreement.

If Kjærsgaard and her cronies are only able to imagine a return to the parochial and backward Denmark of the past, then let us hope that their myopic view does not take hold. For breaking down borders begins in the mind.

Immigration Crisis in Europe?

On the surface the 'Arab Spring' is welcomed in Europe as the democratic awakening of a people. The authoritarian regimes in North Africa are crumbling: hurrah! But beneath the rhetoric lurk serious concerns about instability in Europe's neighbourhood.

It has brought an end to lucrative arms deals with dictators and disrupted the oil trade. But this doesn't excite the people of Europe as much as the threat from illegal immigrants. So this is what Europe's stagnant Right have seized upon.

Thousands of Tunisians have risked their lives on small boats trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. Those that made it were given a foil cape and a bottle of mineral water to suck on by the Italian authorities. Then they were left to languish in the open for nearly two weeks. Italy wanted help from her EU friends. But these friends did not help.

So Italy started shipping the Tunisians to the mainland and granting them temporary residence permits. In principle the migrants could now enjoy the benefits of freedom of movement across the Schengen area. France assumed that these migrants would now all head for their great capital Paris and promptly started checking trains crossing their border.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi engineered a little crisis and called the EU's freedom of movement into question.

Is this really about a few thousand desperate Tunisian migrants? No, this is about undermining community spirit and clawing back national privileges. In the wake of Sarko's and Silvio's antics, the Commission has little power to reign in similar action from other member states.

Ludicrously, Denmark has reinstated checks on its border with Germany and the bridge from Sweden

So rather than fully supporting the Arab Spring as a united body, EU member states have used it as an excuse to pander to the xenophobic far right. When the going gets tough, there is a marked lack of community spirit.

Links:

Guardian video witness follows a Tunisian migrant

Aircraft carrier left us to die, say migrants

Eurozone Über Alles

In the midst of economic crisis for the Euro, Germany and France are pushing through plans for 'economic government' across the 17 European states that use the currency.

So far, the bailouts of Greece and Ireland have been heavily subsidised by the German economic powerhouse and Chancellor Angela Merkel is understandably keen to make sure the burden is spread more evenly in the future.

Are France and Germany using the crisis as a convenient justification for pushing through their 'Pact for Competitiveness'?  What happens when the financial crisis is over and things return to normal?  Perhaps the EU's big mummy and daddy are trying to look after themselves too much, with little concern for their southern and eastern family members.

The proposed harmonisation of tax, labour and pension policies seems to be a move to roll out the welfare state/high tax model of Germany and France across the eurozone. Whilst this may strengthen their position, it can only weaken that of poorer members.

Meanwhile, Britain sits by on the periphery with shockingly little to say about matters EU.  As Anatole Kalestsky writes in The Times today: eurozone countries are moving ever closer to political union leaving non-euro countries excluded from key decision-making.

Is a 'multi-speed' Europe really desirable?

See also:

MEPs vent fury at Van Rompuy over Franco-German plan
BBC Gavin Hewitt's Europe blog: France-Germany pact resisted