It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, May 30, 2022
The windfalls of this war
by Serge Halimi
On 10 February, two weeks before the Russian invasion, President Joe Biden told Americans in Ukraine to get out within 48 hours. Since then, the US has returned to this country, albeit in different ways. Without risking a single soldier’s life, they are using the succession of disasters caused by Vladimir Putin to achieve strategic gains: a Russia weakened for the long term; a China discomfited by its neighbour’s setbacks; a NATO strengthened by Sweden and Finland’s fast-track accession; a raft of contracts for American exporters of grain, arms and gas; and a Western media that reliably spouts Pentagon propaganda. Why would US strategists want such a fortuitous war to end?
The answer is, they don’t. For weeks, it’s seemed as if the only conclusion to the conflict which the US would truly welcome would be a victory parade of Western armies through the streets of Moscow, with Biden on the podium and Putin in an iron cage. When it comes to achieving its now express objective of ‘weakening Russia’ — in fact bleeding it — the US is not skimping. It’s delivering more offensive, more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine and (probably) helping it locate and take out Russian generals and even sink the flagship of Russia’s fleet. Not to mention that for the past three months the US Congress has already approved $54bn of assistance for Ukraine equivalent to more than 80% of Russia’s military budget.
Biden initially feared that helping Ukraine too directly would trigger ‘a third world war’. He seems to have concluded that Moscow’s nuclear threat was a bluff and that Russia, whose military might he had overestimated, can safely be backed into a corner. He is thus at one with the neocon Republicans for whom any concession to Putin’s expansionism ‘would be like paying the cannibal to eat us last’ (1). American overreach has gone so far that Biden, speaking to Lockheed Martin workers in Alabama who make the Javelin antitank missiles whose formidable effectiveness many Russian tank crews know first-hand, expressed delight at Ukrainian parents ‘naming their newborn child Javelin or Javelina’.
On 21 May, Volodymyr Zelensky restated that the war could only end at the negotiating table. But, with diplomacy in the doldrums, the Russian army is keeping up its destructive conquest of cities in the Donbass and US political leaders are benefiting from the expansion of the conflict. Europe, meanwhile, looks passive, torn between a rather isolated French president Macron, who rightly observed that ‘peace cannot be built by humiliating Russia’, and Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas, who retorted, ‘We should not offer Vladimir Putin a way out ... The solution can only be military. Ukraine must win this war’ (2). For the moment, it’s Washington’s puppeteers who are pulling the strings in Europe.
Serge Halimi
Serge Halimi is president and editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique.
Translated by George Miller
The Balkan Roots of the Far Right’s “Great Replacement” Theory
The “Great Replacement” theory is behind the far right’s worst acts of terrorism, from Christchurch to El Paso. It has its roots in the Balkans, where it inspired Serb Nationalists to genocide
A sticker placed on a traffic bollard proclaiming ‘Multiculturalism is Genocide’ in the Barnsbury area of Islington, north London/Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images
When Ratko Mladic’s Serb nationalist forces entered the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 11, 1995, the general of the self-styled “Army of the Republika Srpska” took a moment to speak to an accompanying camera crew.
“Here we are,” he says solemnly, “on July 11, 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica.” What followed was Mladic’s rationale for the extermination campaign that was unfolding in the city, the culmination of the nearly four-year-long Bosnian Genocide orchestrated by Mladic and his political masters, Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic: “We gift this town to the Serb people. Finally, the moment has come, after the uprising against the Dahijas, for us to take revenge against the Turks in this region.”
Even those who had followed the news of the Bosnian War but were unfamiliar with Serb nationalist lexicon would have struggled to make sense of Mladic’s pronouncements. But this was the clearly articulated thesis of the Belgrade-orchestrated war and genocide in Bosnia, and it is a sentiment that has continued to percolate through to the present – not just in the Balkans but, increasingly, throughout the West.
The essence of Mladic’s project is known to the contemporary, Western far right as the “Great Replacement” theory: the idea that Muslims are waging demographic warfare against white, Christian Europeans, seeking to outbreed and replace them and their civilization. And defending “Western civilization,” as such, requires a confrontation with the “invaders.” Or as the Canadian reactionary Mark Steyn put it in a 2006 New York Times bestseller:
“In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out, as other Continentals will in the years ahead: If you cannot outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.”
Though Mladic and his associates did not use the term Great Replacement (it was only coined by the French neo-fascist writer Renaud Camus in 2010), their paranoid, genocidal campaign against the Bosniak community in Bosnia (and later ethnic Albanians in Kosovo) and the accompanying narratives justifying these pogroms electrified far-right extremists in the West. In a sense, Mladic and his cohort were the true authors of the Great Replacement doctrine – and all its accompanying bloodletting.
Today, the Bosnian Genocide is a rhetorical and conceptual pillar of the Western far right, an example of the kinds of regimes and policies they embrace and aspire to replicate. In untangling the origins of this coupling, a still more disturbing reality emerges: Bosnia’s recent past – the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the ensuing war, and the accompanying genocide – is what many contemporaries on the Western radical right imagine, and aspire to reenact, in their own societies.
Mladic’s oratory in Srebrenica referenced the events of the First Serbian Uprising (1804-1813), during which the leaders of the incipient Serbian state sought to overthrow the Dahijas – the largely autonomous, Ottoman-backed military regime that governed the then Sanjak of Smederevo. In the canon of Serbian nationalist thought, the struggle against the Dahijas (a South Slavic transfiguration of the Ottoman Turkish word dayı) signified the rebirth of the Serbian nation, whose statehood and autonomy, they argued, had been extinguished by the 15th century conquest of Southeastern Europe by the Ottomans.
This is a Christian parable of the (re)birth of a nation. And as in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” the central conceit is the eternal struggle between a noble warrior race and a savage, racialized Other. In the standard telling of the former, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo – a bloody but indecisive clash between the invading Ottomans and a coalition of Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Albanian lords – marked the metaphorical death of the medieval Serbian state. Prince Lazar, who led the Serbian forces, and the knight Milos Obilic, who in the oral tradition is said to have killed Murad I on the battlefield but may in reality be a mythic figure invented after the fact, subsequently assumed Christ-like characters. They became folk heroes who sacrificed themselves to preserve the Serbian people and their state in the Kingdom of Heaven, even as it was conquered on Earth.
The prophecy of the second coming of the Serbian polity was then fulfilled in the 19th century as the Ottoman hold on the Balkans slipped, and a modern Serbian state emerged and quickly began vying for political and military supremacy in the region. But left unaddressed for both 19th and 20th century Serbian nationalists was the lingering problem of “the Turks,” that is, the indigenous Muslim populations of the Balkans – primarily the Bosniaks of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosovo (often referred in the discourses of the era as Arnauti, another Ottoman era term for region’s ethnic Albanians).
In the century between the First Serbian Uprising and the start of World War I, a de facto (if not always systemic) method took root to address this problem: Local Muslim populations, whether Slavic, Albanian, or Turkish, were to be expelled and/or exterminated wherever the new Serbian authorities managed to establish even a momentary political claim. The process was emulated by the new Greek, Bulgarian, and Romanian authorities as well. The exact figures are disputed or otherwise difficult to establish, but, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of Muslims left the area during this period – primarily resettling in modern-day Turkey – and at least that many were killed. But both figures are likely in the millions. Taken in conjunction with the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, the period marking the end of the Ottoman Empire is likely one of the bloodiest in modern European history, a horrific and sustained unmixing of peoples.
But the new state system that emerged in Southeastern and Eastern Europe in the wake of the Ottoman era was weak. The new nationalist regimes were perennially unsatisfied with the boundaries of their territories and devoted the brunt of their meager resources to war making rather than the development of local economies or civil societies. By the time the First World War began in 1914, most of the region had already seen two devastating years of fighting and atrocities during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1914. After 1918, the long-promised unification of the South Slavs produced the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, a union so ensnared by crisis and factionalism that its brief experiment with parliamentary democracy lasted barely a decade before it was aborted by the autocratic Serbian crown. By the time of the Axis invasion of what was then called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the country was effectively on the brink of civil war.
The second Yugoslav state, the one formed by Josip Broz Tito’s communists after the Second World War, lasted twice as long as its predecessor, but it too collapsed under the weight of authoritarian and sectarian animus. Once more, it was the regime in Belgrade, this time led by the soon-to-be genocidaire Slobodan Milosevic, that whipped up Serbian nationalism to carve out a “Greater Serbia” from the carcass of the Yugoslav federation. Fusing medieval myths with sectarian grievances from the 20th century and disseminating it through modern propaganda techniques, Milosevic, an erstwhile and middling communist apparatchik, presented himself as the new Lazar.
The four subsequent wars he launched – in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – spanned the entire decade of the 1990s, resulting in the deaths of nearly 150,000 people, with two-thirds of these occurring during the Bosnian War. The concurrent Bosnian Genocide was not merely a byproduct of Milosevic’s project but, in fact, its primary objective. The creation of the so-called Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and the Republika Srpska Karjina in Croatia) – the breakaway territories self-declared by local proxies of the Belgrade regime, similar to the Russian-occupied “People’s Republics” in eastern Ukraine today – was explicitly premised on the wholesale removal and extermination of the non-Serb populations of these areas; in many cases, these populations constituted the majority in the targeted region.
There was no motive for Milosevic’s policies in Bosnia, or the policies of his proxies, other than the imposition of ethnic homogeneity through violence and terror. These were both the aim and the method for achieving these objectives. But the outward face of the project – embodied by the telegenic figures of Karadzic and Milosevic, who both spoke fluent English – was pure equivocation. Though both Karadzic and Milosevic routinely denied the systematic nature of their genocide, they never denied its necessity. Here they remained categorical: The Bosniaks, like the Kosovar Albanians, were an abscess that had to be removed from the body of Christian Europe. It was ugly going, to be sure, but they were the knights on the ramparts “guarding” the whole of the continent. In the fevered swamps of the Serbian tabloids, the language was even more explicit: Serbia was Byzantium restored, the cradle of Christian civilization, taking its glorious vengeance on the Turks, the Moors, and the whole of the Muslim world.
From the onset, this narrative made inroads into segments of the West. Robert Kaplan’s 1993 “Balkan Ghosts” did not embrace the Bosnian Genocide but, like Steyn, he framed it as a historical inevitability; the triumph of what he infamously called “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Kaplan’s framing was formative, profoundly shaping the views of then-U.S. President Bill Clinton in (initially) rejecting the possibility of American or international intervention in the war. After all, what business did Washington have in meddling in this primordial bloodletting? British and French officials of the time were even more blunt in their remarks to Clinton: The events in Bosnia were “painful” but also the “necessary restoration of Christian Europe.”
Such attitudes were widespread, especially in Europe. The Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke, for instance, explicitly defended Milosevic and his war effort. As soon as the Bosnian War had ended, Handke toured the killing fields and partied with the killers. He was a guest of honor at Milosevic’s funeral and delivered his eulogy. Such abasement notwithstanding, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. Living Marxism, the magazine of the U.K.-based Revolutionary Communist Party, falsely claimed that photographs from the Trnopolje and Omarska concentration camps were staged. One of the magazine’s editors, Claire Fox, eventually went on to join the Brexit Party (now Reform UK) and today sits as a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the U.K. Parliament.
While the Clinton administration finally – and begrudgingly – intervened in the war, European governments remained largely unmoved even as they watched the killings in Srebrenica unfold in real time.
After 9/11, preexisting revisionist and negationist discourses about Bosnia began to aggressively percolate through a newly invigorated Western far right. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon recast the nature of Milosevic and Karadzic’s project; to Western reactionaries it became a prophetic war, led by men who recognized the true threat of “militant Islam” and thus the need for a true clash of civilizations. That the cause of Bosnian independence was overwhelmingly secular, led by a multiethnic coalition of Bosnians of all ethnicities and religions, including non-nationalist Serbs, of course, never entered this discourse.
By the 2010s, Bosnian Genocide denial and the valorization of Serb nationalist war criminals became a staple of Western far-right discourses – a pillar of their ideological and political lexicon like the Confederacy, the Third Reich, or the African apartheid regimes. It soon started featuring in the manifestos of far-right terrorists.
Anders Breivik, the terrorist who executed the attacks in Norway in 2011, made nearly 1,000 mentions of the Yugoslav Wars in his meandering manifesto. Eric Frein, who orchestrated the 2014 attack on the Pennsylvania State Police barracks, frequently cosplayed in Serb nationalist uniforms. And Brenton Tarrant, sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2019 Christchurch mosque killings, covered his rifles and munitions in the names of Serb and Montenegrin historical figures and livestreamed himself playing a Serb nationalist ballad glorifying Karadzic’s genocide from the Bosnian War. And while the 2019 El Paso terrorist did not cite Serb nationalist motifs, his manifesto credits Tarrant and the Great Replacement as his primary inspirations, directing his ire at Latinos and Hispanics rather than Muslims.
Among the far right, “kebab” is used as a derogatory term for Muslims, and Tarrant referred to himself as a “kebab removalist” in his manifesto.
In the sewers of the online far right, Serb nationalist themes are even more prominent. The song Tarrant played on his way to massacre the congregants in Christchurch is a well-known meme among extremists and gamers. The original is titled “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadzic, lead your Serbs”) but it is known online primarily as the “Remove Kebab Song” or “Serbia Strong.” Among the far right, “kebab” is used as a derogatory term for Muslims, and Tarrant referred to himself as a “kebab removalist” in his manifesto. A cursory search for the song on platforms like YouTube reveals millions of views and hundreds of thousands of comments, most of them in English. Those willing to dive deeper into the underground forums and message boards of the far right will easily discover their intimate familiarity with the Bosnian Genocide and the deeds of Serb nationalist genocidaires.
As the Western far right gains political currency in Europe and the U.S., it is likely that their interest in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo will become more pronounced. The turn toward paranoid identity politics and demographic fetishism among ostensibly center-right parties on both sides of the Atlantic readily comports to the ideological discourses developed by Serb nationalists during the 1980s and 1990s. Their current encounters with similar “traditionalist” and “patriotic” discourses emanating from Russia – and the Kremlin’s court intellectuals like Aleksandr Dugin or the late faux-dissident Eduard Limonov (a close associate of Karadzic) – will also serve to further disseminate Serb nationalist ideas, as Moscow is the primary international patron of the revisionist regimes in Belgrade and Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.
Following the sacking of the U.S. Capitol by an extremist mob on Jan. 6, 2021, the ascendancy of far-right movements in the established democracies has finally landed as, arguably, the central national security issue facing the West. Confronting the QAnon cult has required that researchers and law enforcement decode an obscurantist ideological and political lexicon; the same will be required in recognizing the extent to which Serb nationalist ideas have penetrated many of these same extremist circles.
Beyond the immediate security concerns, however, the Bosnian Genocide should serve as a critical lesson for democratic societies everywhere. Genocides are not sudden eruptions of freewheeling violence. They are meticulously organized, administratively complex undertakings. They require project managers, bureaucrats, and executioners. Above all, they require ideological justifications. The ideas and discourses of the architects of the Bosnian Genocide have already taken root in the West, contributing to many deaths. Failure to recognize this runs the risk of letting Bosnia’s recent past shape our collective future.
Muzaffar Al Nuwab’s legacy and pain lives on among Iraqis and Syrians
Rasha Al AqeediRasha Al Aqeedi is the Middle East deputy editor
Mourners carry the coffin of Muzaffar Al Nuwab on May 21, 2022 / Qassem al-Kaabi / AFP via Getty Images
On a late-night train between Baghdad and Iraq’s south, poet Muzaffar Al Nuwab listened to a beautiful woman in her mid-forties reminiscing about a lost love from decades before. As the train neared her home village, her sorrow grew more visible. The chance encounter on the train some time in the 1960s inspired one of the most popular poems and songs in Iraq’s modern history: “The Rail” (it has the same title in Arabic: “Al Rayl”). Folklore singer Yas Khudur, known for his urban vocals, sang the words of “Al-Rayl,” which reflected a woman’s perspective:
We passed your home, oh Hamad
While on the night train
We heard coffee grinds
We smelled the cardamom
O, Train
Don’t make sounds of heartbreak and pain
Don’t make a sound of passion and fondness
I yearn for Hamad,
and I do not yearn to be for anyone else
Both poem and song captivated audiences in Iraq, the Gulf states and Syria — the same three geographical entities that chronicled the life, times and death of one of Iraq’s most celebrated poets.
Muzaffar Al Nuwab died on May 20, 2022 at the age of 88 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
He had a way with words in formal Arabic and colloquial Iraqi that was relatable and expressive. In one poem, he asks an absent lover to “come to me in my dreams, I would consider it a visit.” There were, however, other forms of heartbreak he wrote about extensively. The heartbreaks shared by his generation in the Middle East: disappointment in the ruling class, riveting criticisms of authoritarianism and sorrow over Palestine. These heartbreaks established the various stations of Al Nuwab’s life.
Muzaffar Al Nuwab was born in Baghdad in 1934 to a wealthy upper-class family with Hashemite roots — descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. From an early age teachers saw his talents in arranging words and expressions and encouraged him to write on the schools’ open walls; a chalkboard for students to pin their artwork.
He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Baghdad and was appointed as a teacher soon after. By the age of 22, despite his privileged background, Al Nuwab was ideologically left-leaning which caused his expulsion from his job in 1955, the first of many turbulent encounters with authority. Al Nuwab was reassigned to his post following the end of Iraq’s monarchy in 1958 but soon clashed with Arab nationalists after the 1963 revolution that placed Baathists in power.
He attempted to flee to the Soviet Union through Iran but was captured by Iranian intelligence and returned to Baghdad. He was sentenced to death for one of his fiery poems against authoritarianism, but later received a reduced prison sentence. Al Nuwab managed to escape prison and become a fugitive in southern Iraq where he supported himself by working for a Dutch company in Basra.
In 1969, the government, now completely under Baathist control, issued a pardon for political prisoners and fugitives. Al Nuwab emerged from hiding and was re-employed once again as a teacher. During these eventful two decades, he penned his most famous political poem following the defeat of Arab countries in 1967. In his poem, he describes Arab leaders as “sons of whores.” The poem and its use of profanity gained Al Nuwab a cult following among disappointed youth in the region, particularly Iraq and Syria. He fled Iraq once again soon after, making Syria his second home. Although also Baathist, the regime in Damascus was more tolerable to Al Nuwab, though that didn’t stop his criticism. He continued scorning Arab leaders in poems, including Hafez Al Assad who miraculously overlooked it.
In 2003, Al Nuwab supported the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Although he was an anti-imperialist leftist, he accepted that an occupying American force was the means to remove a dictator. He did not necessarily endorse the occupation. In fact, in the years that followed, Al Nuwab’s poems about Iraq grew more painful, reflecting a deeper sorrow: disillusionment and complete desperation. Al Nuwab no longer believed that he would see his homeland prosper in his lifetime. He visited Iraq again, but by then he was too frail and too sick to live in Baghdad.
He settled in the United Arab Emirates, an ironic destination: He wrote some of his harshest poems against the monarchs and sheikhdoms, yet found a home during his hospice years in one of them until his death. Muzaffar Al Nuwab was 88 years old. He had been in and out of prison and on the run throughout his youth. He illustrated his agony through his words from the diaspora for decades while becoming one of the most admired figures in the art of spoken, written and sung words for generations of Iraqis. He was simply exhausted.
Muzaffar Al Nuwab was taken to his last destination, back home to Baghdad, for his final rest. His funeral procession was akin to a majestic homecoming ceremony where his life was celebrated by legions of admirers despite never having met their idol during their lifetime. Many politicians attended the funeral such as the infamous former PM Nouri Al Maliki. In true Al Nuwab fashion, Al Maliki was ejected from the procession by young Iraqis, his name cursed and his presence unwelcome. If anything could patch Muzaffar Al Nuwab’s broken heart, it is knowing that his legacy, passion and pain carry on, and were on full display as he was laid to rest.
Yazidi refugees again flee fighting in Iraq
2:37 Our Observer told us how these Yazidi refugees fled the violence in Sinuni, Iraq.
Intense fighting broke out between the Iraqi Army and Yazidi fighters affiliated to the Kurdish rebel group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on May 1 and 2 in the region of Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq. The clashes displaced thousands of Yazidi people for a second time – as many as were only recently resettled in the area after fleeing the Islamic State group in 2014. Our Observer told us about fleeing the fighting.
Yazidis are a Kurmanji-speaking minority who are indigenous to the Sinjar region in Iraq. They follow a monotheistic religion with similarities to the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism.
The Iraqi Army wants to enforce an agreement signed between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan providing for the withdrawal of Yazidi fighters and PKK fighters from the Sinjar region. But the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBŞ), a Yazidi militia created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group, don’t want to withdraw and accuse Baghdad of wanting to take control of their region.
On the night of May 1, the Iraqi Army finally launched an offensive to push back Yazidi fighters, some of whom had taken up positions in civilian areas in villages near Mount Sinjar. 'Local residents were terrified'
When the fighting broke out on May 2nd, our Observer, Ferhad (not his real name), was at his uncle's house in the village of Sinuni. He fled with his family to neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan.
I called one of my friends and he told me the Iraqi army was attacking the Sinjar Resistance Units, with tanks and helicopters. Local residents were terrified. We fled in a car. I saw lots of other families heading for the Sinjar mountains and villages that were not affected by the fighting.
There were 22 of us in the vehicle. We made our way to a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.
After the attack, about 10,000 displaced persons flooded into the camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Many of the newly displaced were already forced to live in these camps once after fleeing the Islamic State group back in 2014. Many have moved into already overcrowded tents with family or friends already living there.
Little Amal to come to London this June for World Refugee Week
Since her now celebrated 8,000km journey from the border of Syria and Turkey, Little Amal, a 3.5 metre puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian girl refugee, has become an international symbol of human rights. She has come to represent the millions of refugee children including those who have been separated from their families.
One year on from leaving Syria and 5 weeks after her visit to the city of Lviv in Ukraine, she will take part in World Refugee Week by visiting 10 towns and cities across England meeting old friends and making new ones. As always, Amal will be sharing her message of resilience and hope with anyone who has been forced to leave their homes.
Starting in Manchester as part of the city’s now iconic Manchester Day parade, Little Amal’s journey includes spending morning at the ancient stones of Stonehenge, walking through the famous docks of Liverpool, exploring the joys that books can bring in Bradford and Leeds, exploring the Old City and Harbour of Bristol, celebrating with the many festivals of Cheltenham, and dancing in Canterbury and in London. Her journey will end in Folkestone, Kent where she arrived in the UK, standing on the shore remembering the life she left behind in Syria and her very first day in her new home.
Little Amal’s itinerary is:
Sunday 19 June – Amal will start her journey in Manchester, the city she has called her home since arriving in the UK last year. She will join thousands of children and families as they celebrate Manchester Day, as part of the iconic Manchester Day parade which is this year dedicated to young people.
Monday 20 June – On World Refugee Day, Amal will visit Bradford, one of the most culturally diverse and youngest populations in the United Kingdom. She will take gifts from the children of Bradford to children in Leeds, where she will explore the city centre with her new friends. Tuesday 21 June – Amal will learn about England’s complex history of migration at the docks of Liverpool, a place of arrival and departure for hundreds of years.
Thursday 23 June – Amal will walk through the festival town, Cheltenham where she will be dancing and celebrating with children and families.
Friday 24 June – Amal will explore Bristol’s historic Old City and harbour with local artists and community.
Saturday 25 June – Amal will visit Stonehenge to meet the ancient stones. She will then head to London to see old friends at the Southbank Centre who welcome her to a DJ Dance Party for children and families.
Monday 27 June – Amal will dance a Dabke at the University of Kent ‘Youth Summit’, bringing young people together again after many years of learning online. Later that evening, Amal will stand on the beach in Folkestone, moments away from where she first arrived to the UK last year.
It takes three puppeteers to operate Little Amal, a stilt walker whose legs become Amal’s and who also animates her face one puppeteer on each of her arms. There is a team of ten puppeteers, some from refugee backgrounds. The puppet is crafted from moulded cane and carbon fibre.
Little Amal represents the millions of refugee children separated from their families. Her urgent message to the world is “Don’t forget about us”.
The Walk is produced by David Lan, Tracey Seaward and Stephen Daldry for The Walk Productions in association with the Handspring Puppet Company and led by artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi.
New Steps, New Friends is supported by Choose Love.
Amir Nizar Zuabi, Artistic Director of The Walk, said: “As the invasion of Ukraine began the whole world, governments and citizens, proved that when we’re willing to respond to the urgent needs of refugees we can accomplish astonishing feats of compassion and generosity.
‘New Steps, New Friends’, Amal’s Walk through England in June will remind us that, if we choose, we can welcome and care for all refugees, regardless of their skin colour, their religion or their background.”
In-depth: In an exclusive interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, Mona Seif, the sister of high-profile Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah who started a hunger strike on 2 April, says UK authorities need to act now.
His family haven't stopped demanding justice for him since his initial six-year stint in jail from 2013 to 2019. This was followed by a second arrest in 2019, just months after his release. International human rights organisations have also tirelessly tried to highlight his case.
Alaa, a high-profile blogger and activist who mobilised protests against Hosni Mubarak's regime in the January Revolution of 2011, was arrested in 2013 for organising a protest without a permit.
However, the six years he spent behind bars, denied even the most basic rights supposedly afforded by international law, wasn't the end of the story. Shortly after his release, Alaa shared a Facebook post that resulted in his re-arrest and he was thrown back into Tora prison.
"His family haven't stopped demanding justice for him since his initial six-year stint in jail from 2013 to 2019. This was followed by a second arrest in 2019, just months after his release"
UK citizenship: A gamechanger?
Alaa's hunger strike has lasted seven weeks so far, and there are genuine fears over his fragile physical condition after the torture and deprivation he has suffered during the last nine years.
However, Alaa is no longer simply an Egyptian prisoner: after obtaining British citizenship in December 2021, there is a new question - can British nationality save him from this hell?
Moreover, will the British government clearly demand his release as it would for any other British citizen, especially one jailed for having the 'audacity' to express an opinion?
To answer these questions and share more information about Alaa's condition, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, The New Arab's Arabic-language sister publication, interviewed Mona Seif, his sister and fellow activist, who is in London to raise awareness and press for action on his case.
The New Arab: What are the latest developments in Alaa's case?
Mona Seif: Alaa has completed more than 50 days of his hunger strike. Two days ago my mother and his aunt and uncle visited him in the new prison he was transferred to recently (the Wadi El-Natrun prison) which was a response to pressure on Egypt's government by the British embassy in Egypt and interventions by the UK government and MPs.
This very late step comes after two and a half years of him suffering [Tora] prison's horrendous conditions which are completely illegal: the guards were abusive, he was denied sunlight, exercise and books and was kept in isolation. His transferral to Wadi El-Natrun may be a slight improvement. We don't know whether they will allow him books now, for example.
However, the biggest achievement is that he has slept on a mattress for the first time in years. However, Alaa is continuing his hunger strike having made two clear demands: the assignment of an independent investigative judge to examine all the complaints we have submitted since his imprisonment in September 2019, and the torture and assaults he has suffered, in addition to his demand, as a British citizen, for a British consular visit to discuss legal proceedings.
TNA: Has anything changed since he obtained British nationality?
MS: Despite the number of governmental communications undertaken by the British side, nothing has changed. The consulate has been trying to get permission to visit since December with no results. This has pushed me to come to London to meet British officials, while my sister Sanaa has headed to Washington where Alaa's book was recently published.
We are trying to generate more interest [in his case]. All these efforts have contributed to improving the situation even if by a little, and have resulted in Alaa being moved from a maximum-security prison to El-Natrun Prison. However, we still don't know whether he will get some of his rights.
"Alaa's hunger strike has lasted seven weeks so far, and there are genuine fears over his fragile physical condition after the torture and deprivation he has suffered during the last nine years"
TNA: You announced in a family statement that his hunger strike is different this time. Why?
MS: That's right, it's completely different. In the past, Alaa has gone on hunger strikes to improve conditions. Alaa has been living in a maximum-security prison in conditions which don't adhere to any law, like the other prisoners. Furthermore, the level of violence he has suffered and we have also suffered as a family, for which there’s been no intervention from the government, has aggravated the sense of injustice and exhaustion.
When Alaa was sentenced in December (five years for 'spreading false information'), he already had British nationality: he was being sentenced as a British citizen. We have previous experience in this. When my sister Sanaa was in prison and she was issued a British passport, the government immediately allowed a consular visit. Alaa has been waiting for this visit since December, to no avail.
Besides this, Alaa has suffered multiple abuses in the prison. There is a national security officer known as 'Ahmad Fekry' whose real name is Walid Al-Dahshan, who enjoys torturing him and the other prisoners. This reaches the extent of his attending the rare visits of Alaa's only son, Khaled, which forced Alaa to cancel these visits, because it was painful to see his 10-year old son whilst the person responsible for his torture was in the room.
These factors pushed Alaa to a hunger strike to try to end the situation he's in. He wants to end all this absurdity, either through total collapse, or through forcing the authorities to end the injustice inflicted on him for years and hand him over to the British. Alaa wants to sever his relationship with prison by whatever means necessary.
TNA: Have you got detailed information on his condition today seven weeks into the hunger strike?
MS: Physically, Alaa has become gaunt and weak, however his mind is still razor-sharp. He should've had a medical check after moving to the new prison and we should have more details soon. What worries us is that his physical deterioration could be sudden and drastic after fifty days of his hunger strike.
We also lack details on his general health after he's spent two years without sunlight or any form of exercise, which will definitely have affected his health. However, positively, Alaa's mental state has improved since he began hunger striking.
As a family, our relationship with prison is long and bitter. But last September, Alaa talked about death and suicide for the first time ever. Even when my dad was in prison, then on his death bed, Alaa never took such an extreme position, and this frightens us. By hunger striking, Alaa feels like he is resisting, guiding us and dictating the terms of his own battle without surrendering to mental and physical torture.
"The situation in Egypt is horrific - there is no effort or political will in Sisi's regime to find solutions to the prisoner issue, so individual efforts are the only way"
TNA: Was the strike a collective decision?
MS: Usually, these decisions are taken collectively in our family. This time was different. We knew Alaa was considering striking. But we imagined we would discuss it, despite the complications with visiting – since Covid-19, the monthly visits have been restricted to one person and for no more than 20 minutes.
Additionally, there is now a glass barrier between us and him so we have to talk over a telephone. But despite that, we were previously discussing these issues. This time, Alaa took the decision alone, and just informed us after he had started the strike.
I remember visiting him on the 5th of April and he told me he had started his strike on the first day of Ramadan, which was the 2nd of April. I didn’t ask him to go back on his decision because our role is to support each other's battles, even if we disagree about timing or tactics. However, I did ask him to be patient because I believed the British ambassador's efforts might yield something.
Alaa was more farsighted. He was certain of his decision, having been patient for months while the entirety of the [Egyptian] state was waging war on his body and his mind. And he was right - the soft diplomacy between England and Egypt hasn't succeeded even in getting one book to him.
The British government has the right, according to Egyptian and international law and international agreements which Egypt has signed, to visit a British citizen in prison. The Egyptian side hasn't refused their request, but it is delaying.
Alaa's determination to hunger strike and that we publicise that he has obtained nationality, and all the official procedures we are now undertaking, all this has pushed the case to a new level, and pushed people to help and show their solidarity. All I want is to get Alaa out before his health deteriorates beyond recovery.
TNA: Can you speak about the British government's efforts? What about Foreign Minister Liz Truss, have you managed to get through to her?
MS: The British side is not doing nearly enough. This said, I want to be fair to the consular team in Cairo who have tried their hardest. However, they have limited powers and can't do more without the political will of the British foreign secretary to increase pressure and demand Alaa's immediate release.
The problem is, we are talking about close allies: Britain is Egypt's biggest investor; they have very strong relations. Only two days ago the Egyptian Minister for International Cooperation, Rania Al Mashat, was in Britain to discuss the global climate summit this November. These are two states with shared interests in trade and politics. But I have hope, and my visit to London is part of that.
I hope to see enough of an outcry on this that relevant parties will engage with the urgency of the situation. My last attempt to contact Foreign Minister Liz Truss was via sending a letter signed by 10 British MPs and 17 members of the House of Lords, demanding that she act urgently.
"The British side is not doing nearly enough. This said, I want to be fair to the consular team in Cairo who have tried their hardest. However, they have limited powers and can't do more without the political will of the British foreign secretary"
TNA: Could Alaa's case be used to rescue other prisoners in Egyptian prisons?
MS: The situation in Egypt is horrific - there is no effort or political will in Sisi's regime to find solutions to the prisoner issue, so individual efforts are the only way.
However, Alaa is my brother, so defending human rights is no longer a choice for me - I find myself compelled to work constantly to defend prisoners' rights and to contact their families. My identity is now as a member of the families of prisoners. Alaa and the rest of the prisoners are a mirror, reflecting the appalling state of the law, and of humanity, in Egypt.
Alaa has an active family, a network of supportive human rights groups, a second nationality and a second government to assist him, but none of this has protected him from violations, and didn't even protect his family from being beaten outside Tora prison.
Me and my mum were beaten outside the prison and my sister Sanaa was jailed for over a year simply because we were trying to check on Alaa. So none of this secured him with even minimal rights. So what do prisoners without that support go through?
As a family, we have dealt with many prisons, but this was the first time Alaa was tortured. This is an indicator of how they will be treating others who don't have a voice. The independent journalist Mohamed 'Oxygen' was convicted in the same case as Alaa, and since his arrest (2018) he hasn't been allowed one family visit, and has tried to kill himself. And this is not the first suicide attempt in prison. There's also an increasing death rate due to deliberate negligence including medical neglect.
Since Alaa has been in prison, he's seen two prisoners die. The first was Ahmed Sabir, who was in his forties. We filed a report on Alaa's behalf after he told us how Ahmed had suddenly collapsed with exhaustion one day, so the prisoners knocked on the cell door but no one responded. After five hours of continuous knocking, Ahmed died. This is the terrifying state of the general conditions.
"Alaa and the rest of the prisoners are a mirror, reflecting the appalling state of the law, and of humanity, in Egypt"
TNA: Are you being harassed by the public out of fear around your case?
MS: The opposite – people's responses have surprised me. Sisi's regime has decided that my family are its enemy because we express ourselves. Our friends were harassed just for knowing us. However, I have been surprised that despite the fear which prevails in Egypt, we have received huge solidarity.
In the streets, shops, and on public transport, people introduce themselves and express their sympathy - even if they won’t do this publicly. If it wasn't for this support, we wouldn't be able to bear this level of violence.
This is an edited and abridged translation from our Arabic edition. To read the original article click here.
Translated by Rose Chacko.
Going backwards: Israel and the US leading the world to lawlessness
Several years ago I went to a small conference in Washington, D.C., and sat in on a lecture on “a new era of statecraft”. The presenter, who worked for the US government – though was not putting forth any official views – was supported by several friendly companions in the audience. His argument was that states were now shaking off international rules and organisational – he named the UN – regulations so as to “reassert their lawful sovereignty”. This “shaking off” was presented as progressive because it would let a state more freely pursue the interests of its citizens. Again, the presenter claimed this was all worth supporting.
I was shocked and angered by this presentation. During the Q & A I told them they either knew no history or were consciously trying to mislead us, for what they were describing was a move backwards in terms of regulating state behaviour, to a time prior to World War II. They were trying to resurrect an ugly and very dangerous period in history. I think they would have ejected me from the room if they could have gotten away with it.
As misleading as this presentation was, it framed a seminal issue: we are in fact regressing in terms of post-World War II values and obedience to international laws. One can rightly ask, going backwards from where, to what, and why?
Going backwards from where?
The “from where” was the progressive period inaugurated just after World War II. This period was a reaction to the horrors of Nazism, fascism and war. As a consequence of these horrors, imperialism and colonialism lost their lustre and some of the Western political leadership started to move in the direction of decolonisation.
Roughly at the same time (1945-50), treaties and “universal declarations” were drawn up, outlawing the behaviours of the Nazis. By treaty, genocide was outlawed and eventually made a crime against humanity. The Fourth Geneva Convention was created to “deal with humanitarian protections for civilians in a war zone.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which according to Eleanor Roosevelt represented “a great event in the life of mankind”, guaranteed, rather optimistically, the right of every individual to “live their lives freely, equally and in dignity”. Finally, the International Court of Justice, a body of the UN, was established at the Hague in the Netherlands followed by the founding of the International Criminal Court, a complementary organisation set up by international treaty.
If these new standards had prevailed in practice,the result would have been restraints on sovereignty – rules covering what things a nation’s rulers could or could not do within or without their borders. They would also act as a guide to a better world – a set of new standards of civilised behaviour. For instance, an impulse towards racial equality began at this point and lasted at least into the early 1970s: the US Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and apartheid was declared a crime against humanity in 1973 by the UN General Assembly. However, maintaining this progress was not to be as easy as Eleanor Roosevelt and so many others thought.
Why are we going backwards?
There are two sources of erosion that work on these new progressive standards. The first one was the pull of sovereignty. The horrors of Nazism and fascism demonstrated the inherent dangers of sovereign national behaviour, yet the claim of supreme authority for state government turned out to be a habit very difficult to break. Thus, you have a constant tendency to overlook or forget the rules set down by international law or treaty because they restrict sovereign action. And, if you are a “great power”, or a smaller state that has a great power patron, you are all but immune from the dictates of international law. So, it has been only the small-time dictator of an unprotected state, usually African or Balkan, that gets held accountable for breaking rules.
“The Israel lobby… is powerful enough to impose its will on the US State Department in those areas reflecting the lobby’s interest. And what is that interest? It was the protection and promotion of the colonialist power of Israel, a state that breaks international law and violates international treaties on a regular basis.”
The second source that continues to erode the progressive measures of the postwar period is an invasive and parasitic force. This is the postwar growth of lobbies, or interest groups powerful enough to force their own will on democratic governments when it comes to formulating the national policy they wish to influence.
It turned out that my conference state-power stalwarts had something to do with this interest group phenomenon. The presenter and his audience cadre were Zioists, which made them associated with one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States. The Israel lobby (hereafter the lobby) is powerful enough to impose its will on the US State Department in those areas reflecting the lobby’s interest. And what is that interest? It was the protection and promotion of the colonialist power of Israel, a state that breaks international law and violates international treaties on a regular basis.
Going backwards to where?
The behaviour of states like Israel, which has a patron in the United States government, essentially mimics state behaviour before World War II. Among these behaviours are colonial expansion, cross-border aggression, persecution of captive peoples, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure – the list goes on and on. These are behaviours that ultimately lead to state-based racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Thus, we have a pretty good picture of “where to” takes us: it takes us back to a lawless international scene.
Since the conference presenter and his entourage were such supporters of Israel, we will first take a look at a recent Israeli action that reflects its colonial, racist behaviour, then at the aftermath of the action.
The action of note was the recent murder of Shireen Abu Aqleh, the AJazeera reporter shot in the head by an Israeli military assassin while she was reporting on an Israeli raid into the occupied Palestinian city of Jenin. Later her funeral procession was literally attacked by Israeli police. This behaviour on the part of the Israeli state was not only a colonialist one, but was also fascist in nature. Again, mimicking pre-World War II behaviour.
In the aftermath of the murder, was there any move to hold Israeli personnel accountable? There was certainly no significant reaction in Washington. The power of the lobby is such that it can cause the US government to ensure that Israel escapes accountability for its crimes. Over the past one hundred years, this lobby has cultivated friendships of and financially supported US politicians to the point where they are able to secure their long-term support. They also heavily spent to defeat those who will not support Israel. Over time this has resulted in the seeding of the US government with elected and appointed pro-Israeli personnel.
Thus, what was Washington’s reaction to Israel’s display of fascism?
With many civil society organisations agreeing that Shireen Abu Aqleh’s’s murder deserves an independent, objective investigation, and with both logic and past history demonstrating that Israel cannot investigate itself, the spokesman for the State Department, Ned Price, declared, “The Israelis have the wherewithal and the capabilities to conduct a thorough, comprehensive investigation.” Whether they literally do or do not have such “capabilities”, history has demonstrated they never use them when it comes to their accountability for criminal behaviour towards Palestinians – who are their colonial subjects.
There is another incident worth mentioning, and this one originated in Washington, D.C. In February 2022 the human rights group Amnesty International released a report that described Israel as an apartheid state. The report proved to be so factual and complete in its coverage as to be definitive.
Nonetheless, the State Departments rejected the report.The government spokesman, again Ned Price, objected to the use of the term “apartheid” when describing Israel. Then, still within the context of discussing the apartheid label, Price reminded us all that Israel was “the world’s only Jewish state”, and it is important that “the Jewish people not be denied their right of self-determination”. I don’t know if Price understood that he was interjecting “Jewish self-determination” into a discussion of a report that definitively demonstrated that Israel was maintaining and growing the “Zionist Jewish state” through apartheid practices. In other words when it comes to Israel, self-determination = apartheid. This all occurs at the 67-minute mark of the press conference cited above and recorded in its entirety by PBS.
There is something frustrating, and also offensive, about the State Department’s dancing around the obvious. The implication is that it is acceptable for a state, be it of Jews or any other group, to be racist in practice if that is where their “right” of self-determination takes them. This was the position taken by Adolf Hitler and is now in stark contradiction to international law. But who obeys the law?
Conclusion
Israel is just the most obvious example of the erosion of international law and such agreements as the Fourth Geneva Convention. In the proxy and civil wars that go on more or less constantly, international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are simply ignored. It is not just minor powers that are guilty: the rules aren’t observed by the Russians in Ukraine, as they weren’t observed by the United States in Vietnam.
That being said, Israel has certainly led the way backwards, and ironically so. For much of post-World War II’s rules were put in place in response to crimes committed against the Jews. For example, genocide was made a crime against humanity, and here the motivation comes from the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jews, among others. When Hitler began this project, there were no rules regulating sovereign behaviour, be it in domestic or foreign affairs. Sovereignty reigned supreme. The League of Nations had floundered, and its Mandate System established after World War I really masked colonial expansion. From the point of “legal” state action, the Nazis had a clear field for slaughter as long as they restricted their efforts to Germany.
It is back into that environment that Israel, numbly and dumbly protected by its patron in Washington, is taking us all. The irony gets greater. In the early 1970s apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. The Zionists ignored the declaration and proceeded to create an apartheid society for themselves and their colonial subjects, the Palestinians.
This returns to a time of unfettered violence and the suppression of others’ human rights is folly. The only ones crying out in the darkness are civil society organisations, and they are being pointedly ignored by governments. Yet there is nothing for it but to keep up the protests, the boycotts, the investigations and the writing of essays that relatively few will read.
