Meet Wijdan Al-Majid, the Iraqi muralist at the forefront of Baghdad's cultural renaissance

Zainab Mehdi

13 May, 2022
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Baghdad's creative milieu is on its way to being restored. This is in part due to a dedicated team of artists and architects who have helped beautify the city's architecture, of which Wijdan al-Majid is a member.

From Iraqi Architect Zaha Hadid to Iraqi Poet Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri, Wijdan Al-Majid is the Iraqi artist behind the recent explosion of mural paintings across Baghdad.

Wijdan, who also teaches at Baghdad’s Fine Arts College, specialises in watercolours.

Having already completed 16 murals across Baghdad city, Wijdan’s recent and completed projects are dedicated to prominent Iraqi artists including, Jawad Saleem (1919-1961), one of the greatest 20th-century sculptors and painters whose most notable work includes the Nasb al-Hurriyah (Monument of Freedom), and Hafidh Al-Droubi (1914-1991), known for his Cubist paintings and his approach to professionalising Iraqi art education in the early to the mid-20th century.

"The Baghdad Renaissance project continues to provide vital infrastructure projects, develop streets and neighbourhoods of the capital, as well as the beauty of the industry, through creative artworks jointly implemented by professors, academics and great creators from the artistic community"

On the two buildings in Al Sadria Market, Baghdad’s main neighbourhood, the representation of watermelons in each of the paintings resonates with the market’s long history of selling vegetables and fruits, including mouth-watering watermelons.

At present, Wijdan is finalising a mural painting of Mudhafar Al Nawab, an Iraqi artist and poet. Joining the Iraqi Communist Party at an early age, Al Nawab was imprisoned and tortured under the Baath regime during Saddam Hussein’s reign.

Al Nawab eventually left Iraq in 1970 and lived in exile until 2011, when he came back to Baghdad for a brief visit.

Wijdan al-Majid painting during Iraq's recent sandstorm [credit: Wijdan al-Majid]

Supporting Wijdan’s mural projects is Alaa Maan, the Mayor of Baghdad who took office approximately 18 months ago.

Determined to work with the Iraqi people and reassure the population that Iraq’s reconstruction efforts are underway, Alaa established the Baghdad Renaissance Project.

In a January 2022 press statement, Alaa said: “The Baghdad Renaissance project continues to provide vital infrastructure projects, develop streets and neighbourhoods of the capital, as well as the beauty of the industry, through creative artworks jointly implemented by professors, academics and great creators from the artistic community.”

Jawad Saleem and Hafidh al-Droubi's Watermelon paintings [credit Wijdan al-Majid]

Paying homage to prominent figures who played a key role in Iraqi society and gave back to the public, the mural projects have also been put in place to educate the population about Iraq’s rich art and history.

That said, a few of the mural projects also include paintings of international figures such as Mother Teresa, one of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century who dedicated much of her life to serving the poor, and Max Weber, the founding fathers of sociology.

Worth noting is the sustainable aspects of the mural paintings. In an exclusive interview, the artist explained that some of the mural installations on the streets of Baghdad were original ruins from Iraq’s wars.

Because some of the ruins were neglected by the Iraqi government, Alaa proposed re-using the ruins and transforming them into street murals. According to Wijdan, the ruins were found in some of Iraq’s railway stations.



In the mural of Nadia Murad, the background of the painting illustrates the migration of the Iraqi community, as well as the suffering those displaced as a result of IS’s occupation in 2014 witnessed and continue to endure.Alongside the afore-mentioned artistic figures are murals also dedicated to peacekeepers. One notable example is the mural dedicated to Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi human rights activist once kidnapped by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq.

Mural painting of German sociologist Max Weber [credit: Wijdan al-Majid]

“There is a certain level of ignorance when it comes to art in Iraq," Wijdan told The New Arab. "After people started to take notice of my work, and especially the mural paintings I have been working on, feelings of shock combined with appreciation emerged.

"The paintings have created a loud noise in Baghdad, and also increased communication among individuals," she added commenting on the Iraqi public’s reaction to her work. "For example, after people started to recognise my work, I received messages and requests to work on more mural paintings. In addition to receiving such messages, I have also inspired others to paint.”

Mural of Iraqi painter and sculptor Jawad Saleem [credit: Wijdan al-Majid]

“One day, I know I will have to stop with my mural paintings. However, this won’t be the end of mural paintings in Iraq. Other artists will take on my job and continue to transform Baghdad like other Western countries where there is greater awareness and appreciation for mural paintings.”

In a nutshell, the mural projects part of the Baghdad Renaissance Project can be interpreted as a good sign of governance and commitment to rebuilding trust with the Iraqi people, who have repeatedly been let down by a number of failed projects during the post-2003 reconstruction years.

RELATED
Coexistent Ruins: Exploring Iraq’s Mesopotamian past via art
Culture.  Karen Dabrowska

As stated in a number of reports, corruption and Iraq’s volatile security situation have been the primary obstacles preventing Iraq’s redevelopment after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the consequential implementation of the new governance system referred to as the Muhasasa Ta’ifia sectarian apportionment system.

Since the introduction of the Baghdad Renaissance Project, hope has been restored among the Iraqi community.

Thanks to the project, it has been possible to give the Iraqi community the space to use their creativity to help guide Iraq towards the path of recovery, and by default, allow the city to experience a cultural renaissance representative of a city which was once a beacon for artists.

Zainab Mehdi is a Researcher and Freelance Journalist specialising in governance, development, and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Follow her on Twitter: @zaiamehdi

Arab female identity in Lalla Essaydi’s 'Image and Text'

Culture
Hind Berji
20 May, 2022

Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi's Image and Text, exhibited at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, is a meticulous inversion of the fetishised Arab woman. Her photographs allow for a natural, personable re-imagination of the female space.

Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi appropriates traditionally male Islamic art practices and motifs with European Orientalist paintings to illuminate an otherwise stagnant image of the exotified Arab-Islamic female figure.

In a new exhibition at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, Florida, titled Lalla Essaydi: Image and Text, architecture, calligraphy, and painting collide on her carefully composed photographs recently donated to the museum, featuring works from the artist’s Converging Territories, Les Femmes du Maroc, Harem, and Bullets series.

"Basing her work on the deconstruction of homogenous, eroticised images of Middle Eastern and African women and places plucked from the imaginations of European nineteenth-century painters, she [Lalla] illustrates private, gendered spaces in a nuanced fashion"

Essaydi grew up in Morocco, lived in Saudi Arabia, and studied in the United States and France, lending the artist a lifetime of experiences with seemingly clashing Occidental and Oriental perceptions of gender and culture.

Essaydi recognises the aesthetic pull towards the Orientalist gaze and how it positions itself as a critical point in these discussions, staging her photographs with her own beautifying ornamentation and textual narratives assigned to her models.

Essaydi understands the paradox of the Orientalist gaze: it is tantalised by that which is veiled, concealed, unseen, and yet it continues to participate in the unseeing, the othering, of its subjects.

Lalla Essaydi - Harem Revisited #45, Chromogenic print, edition 3 of 15, 2013 24 x 30 inches. Gift from the Collection of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross, FIU 2021.13.4 © Lalla Essaydi

 [Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York]

Basing her work on the deconstruction of homogenous, eroticised images of Middle Eastern and African women and places plucked from the imaginations of European nineteenth-century painters, she illustrates private, gendered spaces in a nuanced fashion.

The archetypal odalisque and feminine ideal carry over into contemporary perceptions of Moroccan women, within Morocco and in the greater Arab world, as fetishised subjects – a stereotype Essaydi turns on its head.

Using her own memories and female models she knows personally, Essaydi creates subtle oppositional elements to the westernised harem scene, the stagnant female figure, and the decontextualised scenes of “foreign” lands to a western viewer.

Lalla Essaydi - Les Femmes du Maroc #30, Chromogenic print, edition 2 of 15, 2006, 24 x 30 inches. Gift from the Collection of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross, FIU 2021.13.6 ©Lalla Essaydi [Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York]

Instead, she situates the harem setting as an intergenerational female space, gives life and personhood to her models; uses henna, which is often associated with female bonding and celebrations, as calligraphic ink.

The henna changes form as it dries, altering the clarity of text taken from Essaydi’s journal entries; it is deliberately legible in some parts and obscured in others.

She prints the black border of the photograph negative to show the image’s authenticity and the subjective nature of photography, a sentiment one can tie to critical responses to her work as both a reinforcement of Orientalist imagery and an intrusive exposition of a private, sacred realm.

These responses prove the artist’s point in emphasising the duality and performance within her work: it reveals the cultural framework of the viewer – an inherent interference on their part is integral to the reactive familiarity of these images.

Arab and Islamic women are seldom seen in popular culture and media, outside of the stereotype-lidden victims of action movies, the women shown in tragic news coverage, or the occasional advertisement showing off a visibly (veiled) Muslim woman for the purpose of selling tennis shoes.

Yet, the Western world remains fascinated by the fictionalised unapproachability of these women. In Essaydi’s Bullets works, bullet shells are woven into the fabric to create the illusion of geometric, tiled patterns.

Her subjects must grapple with the real and imagined violent associations projected onto Arab and Muslim women; undeniably, their gaze prompts us to look inward at this lexicon of images, even when we ourselves are represented as that othered body.

Lalla Essaydi - Bullets #5, Chromogenic print, edition 7 of 10, 2009, 48 x 60 inches. Gift from the Collection of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross, FIU 2021.13.8 ©Lalla Essaydi [Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York]

Whether we are inserting or asserting ourselves into these works, Essaydi forces us to untangle the representational visual language leading up to that viewing moment. It makes the act of looking a self-conscious – even uncomfortable – endeavour.

As the Frost Museum’s Director Jordana Pomeroy notes, “Her art pulls us into a place where we might feel discomfort when we stop to consider Essaydi’s narrative about what is visible and concealed.”



Essaydi’s subjects blend into the furniture, becoming extensions of the idiosyncratic Moroccan zellige walls that surround them and the fabric that adorns them, a theme that is characteristic of Essaydi’s work in showing the objectification of Orientalism and her interruption of it.

Her models are both anchored, some might say hidden, too, in these spaces, but also protected by them.

Essaydi uses her craft as a means of not only critiquing Western-fuelled cultural misconceptions but also confronting the real-world, ethnocentric associations with these tropes.

Here lies the two-pronged dilemma of the Arab and Muslim woman: how can one critique a faith-based community one belongs to without perpetuating the stereotypes in its periphery?

It's as if she’s telling viewers to acknowledge, as she acknowledges, the complex hierarchal, patriarchal, and colonial structures within the frame while asking to move beyond them and celebrate the women who defined and defied these spheres.

The keyword here is agency, as Essaydi balances the responsibilities we owe to personal freedom and cultural identities –where does a woman’s body end and a riad, a city, a country, a diaspora, begin?

“Lalla Essaydi: Image and Text” is on view now through August 7 at the Frost Art Museum.

Hind Berji is a freelance writer with experience in art reviews and sociopolitical criticism.

Follow her on Twitter: @HindBerji

Five killed in suspected Turkish drone attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan

At least five people were killed on Saturday in two separate drone attacks in the Iraqi Kurdistan

SAME DRONES AS SHIPPED TO UKRAINE

The strikes hit a civilian pick-up car near Chamchamal town in Sulaymaniyah governorate. [Getty]

Dana Taib Menmy
21 May, 2022

Five people were killed early on Saturday in a suspected Turkish drone attack in Iraq's Kurdistan region, Kurdish officials and relatives of the victims told The New Arab.

The strikes hit a civilian pick-up car near Chamchamal town in Sulaymaniyah governorate.

“Early today two suspected Turkish drones targeted a civilian pick up car in Tutaqal village in our area, killing five people, including two civilians and three suspected fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). We could not confirm that there were PKK fighters inside the car, because all the five persons were burnt up,” Hemin Bahjat, mayor of Aghjalar sub-district of Chamchamal town, told The New Arab in a phone call. “Locals previously had told our security forces of the existence of PKK fighters in the area, and we had addressed higher Kurdish authorities in this regard.”

Turkish drone attacks have led to hundreds of civilian casualties in the Iraqi Kurdistan region in recent years. Ankara says it is targeting PKK guerrillas who are using the region’s territories to attack the Turkish armed forces.

“It is not yet clear where the drones had flown as no formal side has made any official clarifications about the attack, and here we do not have such equipment to know or identify the drones. According to initial reports there are casualties from today’s drone attack in Aghjalar sub-district,” Ramak Ramazan, mayor of Chamchamal town told The New Arab.

But a relative of the two civilian victims said they were Turkish drones.

“Early today the Turkish drones were initially targeting some PKK fighters who were based in a rural jungle from Tutaqal village, then the drones were observing all cars in the area,” Adil Majeed, relative of the victims, told The New Arab. “It seems some of the PKK fighters were wounded and they sought help from civilian cars in a nearby road, consequently the drones attacked the pick-up car, and killed two of my cousins who were from working as farmers.”

The two civilians were survivors of the 1988 Anfal genocide, Majeed, also an Anfal survivor, added.

Meanwhile, on Saturday afternoon suspected Turkish drones also targeted a vehicle in Makhmour refugee camp. The camp hosts more than 12,000 Kurdish refugees who fled the atrocities of the Turkish state; mainly in the 1990s. The camp is being sponsored by the United Nations.

The Iraqi federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have yet to announce their comment on the latest Turkish strikes.

The PKK has been waging an insurgency for greater autonomous rights against the Turkish state since 1984, with tens of thousands estimated to have been killed so far. The PKK is designated as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.

One killed in renewed anti-coup protests in Sudan

Sudanese security forces killed one protester during renewed demonstrations against last year's military takeover on Saturday

The latest death brings to 96 the toll from a crackdown on anti-coup protests [Getty]


The New Arab Staff & Agencies
21 May, 2022

Sudanese security forces killed one protester on Saturday during renewed demonstrations against a military takeover that derailed a transition to civilian rule last year, medics said.

The victim, who was not identified, died as a result of "a bullet to the chest" in the capital's twin city of Omdurman, the pro-democracy Central Committee of Sudan Doctors said in a statement.

The latest death brings to 96 the toll from a crackdown on anti-coup protests which have taken place regularly since the October 25 military putsch led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the committee said.

Saturday's protests came after thousands took to the streets Thursday to oppose the power grab, mainly in Khartoum but also elsewhere, renewing demands for civilian rule.

About 100 people were injured during Thursday's demonstrations, according to the doctors' committee.

At the same time two leading anti-coup figures from Sudan's Communist Party were arrested. They were released on Friday.

The United Nations, along with the African Union and regional bloc IGAD, have been pushing to facilitate Sudanese-led talks to resolve the crisis after the latest coup in the northeast African country, one of the world's poorest.

But civilian forces have refused to enter negotiations involving the military, while Burhan has repeatedly threatened to expel UN envoy Volker Perthes, accusing him of "interference" in the country's affairs.

In late March Perthes said Sudan was heading towards "an economic and security collapse" unless its civilian-led transition was restored.

Women TV presenters defy Taliban order to cover faces on air

Women presenters on Afghanistan's leading TV channels went on air Saturday without covering their faces, defying a Taliban order that they conceal their appearance

Since surging back to power last year the Taliban have imposed a slew of restrictions on women [Getty]

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
21 May, 2022

Women presenters on Afghanistan's leading TV channels went on air Saturday without covering their faces, defying a Taliban order that they conceal their appearance to comply with the group's austere brand of Islam.

Since surging back to power last year the Taliban have imposed a slew of restrictions on civil society, many focused on reining in the rights of women and girls.

Earlier this month Afghanistan's supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada issued a diktat for women to cover up fully in public, including their faces, ideally with the traditional burqa.

The feared Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice ordered women TV presenters to follow suit by Saturday.

Previously they had only been required to wear a headscarf.

But broadcasters TOLOnews, Shamshad TV and 1TV all aired live programmes Saturday with women presenters' faces visible.

"Our female colleagues are concerned that if they cover their faces, the next thing they will be told is to stop working," said Shamshad TV head of news Abid Ehsas.

"This is the reason they have not observed the order so far," he told AFP, adding the channel had requested further discussions with the Taliban on the issue.

Taliban orders such as this have caused many female journalists to leave Afghanistan since the hardline Islamists stormed back to power, a woman presenter said.

"Their latest order has broken the hearts of women presenters and many now think they have no future in this country," she said, requesting not to be named.

"I'm thinking of leaving the country. Decrees like this will force many professionals to leave."

Mohammad Sadeq Akif Mohajir, spokesman for the vice ministry, said the women presenters were violating the Taliban directive.

"If they don't comply we will talk to the managers and guardians of the presenters," he told AFP.

"Anyone who lives under a particular system and government has to obey the laws and orders of that system, so they must implement the order," he said.

The Taliban have demanded that women government employees be fired if they fail to follow the new dress code.

Men working in government also risk suspension if their wives or daughters fail to comply.

Mohajir said media managers and the male guardians of defiant women presenters would also be liable for penalties if the order was not observed.

During two decades of US-led military intervention in Afghanistan, women and girls made marginal gains in the deeply patriarchal nation.

Soon after they took over, the Taliban promised a softer version of the harsh Islamist rule that characterised their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001.

Since the takeover, however, women have been banned from travelling alone and teenage girls barred from secondary schools.

In the 20 years after the Taliban were ousted from office in 2001, many women in the conservative countryside continued to wear a burqa.

But most Afghan women, including TV presenters, opted for the Islamic headscarf.

Television channels have already stopped showing dramas and soap operas featuring women, following orders from Taliban authorities.

New Jersey street renamed Palestine Way in honour of local Arab community

The city of Paterson, New Jersey has renamed part of a main street Palestinian Way, honouring a place that is close to the hearts of many residents, around 15,000 of whom have Palestinian heritage.


A city in New Jersey has renamed a section of its main street Palestine Way. [Getty]

Brooke Anderson
Washington, D.C.
21 May, 2022

A street in the city of Paterson, New Jersey, with a vibrant communities of Arabs and Muslims, has renamed part of a street Palestine Way, paying tribute to a place that holds a special place in the hearts of residents, around 2,000 of whom came out to celebrate the new street name on Sunday.

“Palestine Way is long overdue,” councilman Alaa “Al” Abdelaziz was quoted in the Patterson Times as saying. He added, “We are the hub and the capital in America for Palestinians.”

Abdelaziz, who is of Palestinian heritage, sponsored the street naming initiative, which passed unanimously in April. The city’s Palestinian community, which currently numbers about 15,000, dates back nearly 100 years, with the first arriving in the early 1930s and the first Middle Eastern restaurant opening on Main Street in the 1980s, which now hosts a variety of restaurants, and will now be called Palestine Way.

A street festival was held for the renaming ceremony, with vendors setting up booths with food, t-shirts and flags for the occasion.

The renaming of the street came on Nakba Day, 15 May, the annual commemoration of the establishment of the state of Israel, when around 700,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes following the outbreak of the 1948 war.

“We make history today. Today, everyone, everywhere is Palestinian,” said mayor Paterson Andre Sayegh, according to the Patterson Times.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

[Newsmaker] Prosecutors looking into whether to bring Ponzi fraud charges against Terraform CEO Kwon

By Yonhap
Published : May 20, 2022 - 


Lawyers from LKB & Partners representing South Korean investors in two main tokens of Terraform Labs head to the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office on Thursday, to file complaints against Do Kwon, the embattled cryptocurrency firm's co-founder and CEO, and co-founder Daniel Shin. (Yonhap)

Prosecutors are looking into whether to bring Ponzi fraud charges against CEO Do Kwon of Terraform Labs, sources said Friday, a day after investors sued him over the shocking crash of the firm's two cryptocurrencies.

In a crash starting last week, Terraform's two main tokens, TerraUSD and sister coin Luna, had registered more than 99.99 percent falls from their highs, wiping out more than $38 billion of investors' money in a week, according to data by CoinMarketCap.

Financial authorities said about 280,000 investors were believed to be holding about 70 billion Luna coins as of late, although the exact size of the damage remains unknown.

On Thursday, five South Korean investors filed criminal complaints against Kwon and co-founder Daniel Shin on charges of fraud and other financial irregularities, saying their combined damages amount to 1.4 billion won ($1.1 million)

According to the sources, prosecutors in charge of the case are looking into whether they can make a Ponzi scheme case against "Anchor Protocol," under which depositors of TerraUSD are guaranteed a 20 percent annual return.

Anchor Protocol, an application facilitating contacts between TerraUSD depositors seeking financial returns and money borrowers, has been seen as instrumental in the recent growth of the stablecoin.

"Kwon's remarks promising returns could provide a key clue," a prosecution official said.

The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office in charge of the case plans to assign an investigation team after reviewing the lodged complaints and other factual backgrounds. (Yonhap)

SOUTH KOREA
1 killed, 9 injured in S-Oil refinery explosion

By Yonhap
Published : May 20, 2022 - 


One person has been killed and nine others injured in an explosion at a refinery run by South Korean oil refiner S-Oil Corp. in the country's southwest, firefighters said Friday.

The deceased was a subcontractor who was among the 10 others doing repair work at the alkylation processing line in the refinery in Ulsan, about 415 kilometers southwest of Seoul, when the blast occurred at 8:52 p.m. Thursday.

The nine others sustained injuries, mostly severe or minor burns. They were all sent to a hospital for treatment.

A total of 26 people were working at the site, including 14 S-Oil employees, at the time.

Firefighters are still working to put out the fire.

Hussain A. Al-Qahtani, CEO of S-Oil, will hold a press conference in Ulsan later in the day and issue a public apology over the explosion, according to the company. (Yonhap)

The Brief Life and Watery Death of a ’70s Libertarian Micronation

A wealthy American wanted to build an island republic. The king of Tonga had other ideas.

BY RAYMOND CRAIB

MAY 21, 2022
SLATE

LONG READ

Stamps issued by the kingdom of Tonga commemorating taking possession of the Minerva Reefs. Photo illustration courtesy PM Press. Stamps from the collection of Raymond Craib.

Once upon a time, a wealthy man set out to establish his own country. He found a shallow reef over which the waters of a vast ocean had lapped since time immemorial. He hired a company to dredge the ocean floor and deposit the sand on the reef. An island would be born, upon which the man had a concrete platform built, a flag planted, and the birth of the Republic of Minerva declared. The monarch of a nearby island kingdom was not impressed. He opened the doors of his kingdom’s one jail and assembled a small army of prisoners. The monarch, his convicts, and a four-piece brass band boarded the royal yacht and descended upon the reef, where they promptly removed the flag, destroyed the platform, and deposed, in absentia, the man who would be king. And Minerva returned to the ocean

The story of Michael Oliver, his short-lived 1972 Republic of Minerva, and the response of the king of Tonga is not the stuff of fairy tales. Nor is it an uncommon story, an isolated event ripe for consumption as a chronicle of crazy rich Caucasians. In the U.S. after World War II, with the dramatic geopolitical changes wrought by decolonization and the Cold War, battles were waged over the meaning of ideals such as democracy and freedom, often pitting those who believed individual liberty to be more important than social equality against those who prioritized the latter over the former. In the midst of such struggles, individuals concerned with protecting their wealth, their safety, and their freedom from what they perceived to be an overbearing government and a threatening rabble sought to exit the U.S. and to establish their own independent, sovereign, and private countries on the ocean and in island spaces. It usually did not end well.

The location of the Minerva Reefs. John Wyatt Greenlee, copyright 2022

Experiments in libertarian exit—abandoning one’s country of residence for a private territory where social relationships are structured largely through contract and exchange—like the one Michael Oliver undertook were not unusual in the America of the 1960s and 1970s. They proved common enough that writers for the Los Angeles–based libertarian Innovator Magazine priced out the costs of various forms of exit, from “clandestine urban” and “underground shelter” to “sea-mobile nomad.” It was only a small step to imagine a commune on the high seas rather than in Northern California, or a private island in the Caribbean rather than a gated community in Orange County. Libertarian-inspired exit projects proliferated to the degree that one might recast the 1960s not as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but as the Age of Atlantis, the favored island reference point for libertarians.

The name itself was ubiquitous. The “Republic of New Atlantis” arose, albeit briefly, in 1964 when Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother Leicester parked an 8-by-30-foot bamboo raft, anchored to an old Ford engine block buried in the sand, 8 miles off the coast of Bluefields, Jamaica. He declared the birth of his new republic with a bottle of Seagram’s 7 in hand. Having encouraged birds to defecate on one end of the raft, he ceded that portion of it to the U.S. under the criteria established in the 1856 Guano Islands Act, which allowed citizens to claim possession of unoccupied islands, rocks, or keys that contained guano on behalf of the U.S. The raft’s other half became his own private country, albeit only briefly; a hurricane soon sank the vessel. Pharmaceutical engineer Werner Stiefel, whose family had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, founded “Operation Atlantis” in 1968 in a motel next to I-87 in upstate New York. He recruited libertarian “immigrants” to collectively build a vessel that they would sail down the Hudson River to the Caribbean where they would establish a libertarian micronation. Like its namesake, it met a watery fate. Upon launch on the Hudson, the vessel capsized and caught fire. The Atlanteans, undeterred, repaired the ship and sailed it to the Bahamas, where it promptly sank during heavy weather.

A kind of iconoclastic curiosity could underpin some of these schemes, but it was more frequently unease and fear that drove exit projects. Apocalyptic scenarios of demographic, ecological, and monetary collapse proliferated in the 1960s, along with fears of nuclear annihilation. Works such as Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” were only the most prominent of a corpus of works that warned of an approaching disaster due to unchecked population growth and ostensibly unmanaged resources. Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! was reworked into the 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston as New York City detective Robert Thorn who, in the year 2022, discovers that the Soylent Corporation’s protein pills, allegedly created from ocean plankton, are made of human corpses. Ayn Rand and libertarian fellow travelers forecast monetary collapse due to government meddling, and encouraged listeners to instead invest in gold, a libertarian prediction and prescription that is now so often reused as to seem like parody. But just as prominent in the minds of exiters such as Michael Oliver as these apocalyptic concerns was a fear of social unrest and totalitarianism.

Born Moses Olitzky in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1928, Oliver had survived German massacres of Jews in his hometown, and then the Stutthof and Lager 10 concentration camps. Rescued by U.S. troops in 1945 while on a forced march from Dachau, he spent two years in a displaced persons camp before emigrating to the United States in 1947. His parents and four siblings all had been murdered. Once in the U.S., Olitzky changed his name to Michael Oliver and set roots down in Carson City, Nevada. He owned and operated a land development company as well as the Nevada Coin Exchange, specializing in the sale of gold and silver coins, which he advertised as security investments in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and Innovator.

Over the course of the 1960s, Oliver became quite wealthy and began to translate that wealth into a hedge against a perceived rise of totalitarianism in the U.S., which he discerned in riots and protests around the country. Although he railed against “social meddlers” who opposed the free enterprise system and criticized how the government robbed society’s producers by creating welfare programs or pursuing inflationary policies and deficit spending, it was the masses and their supposed susceptibility to demagoguery that most concerned him. While he could have identified the populist, often apocalyptic and violent, politics of the right—the John Birchers and the Minutemen, the Ku Klux Klan and the Christian anti-Communist crusaders—as the existential threat, it was populations acting in the name of “liberalism” and “freedom now” whom he accused of employing “Storm Trooper tactics.” His libertarianism dovetailed with the socially conservative property-rights movement that took shape around Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy, and has grown ever more potent in recent decades.

Roger Griffith/Wikimedia Commons

Roger Griffith/Wikimedia Commons

Oliver ignored calls to stay put and fight for liberty at home. Instead, he sought to escape what he saw as the approaching storm of social unrest and revolution by creating a new country. Its structure he outlined in a self-published 1968 book, A New Constitution for a New Country. Oliver crafted his constitution for an imagined libertarian territory freed from bureaucratic constraints and the regulatory apparatus of the welfare state. The book contained a declaration of purpose, a plan of action, and a constitution with 11 articles. Oliver designed the constitution as an improved version of the United States Constitution—improved in that it would “spell out the details whereby government can, at the same time, properly protect persons from force and fraud and also be prevented from exceeding this only legitimate function.” The argument that the sole function of government is to protect individuals from force and fraud echoed mainstream libertarian thinking of the time, found in the work of novelist Ayn Rand, economists Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, and philosopher Robert Nozick. Although its proponents describe the ideal government as a “nightwatchman” or “ultra-minimalist” state, it would be a mistake to understand this as a call for a smaller state. Its minimalism had little to do with the size of its apparatus or budget, but rather with the limitations placed on the range of its functions: national defense, policing, and a legal infrastructure dedicated to the protection of property rights and enforcement of contract.

Published in February of 1968, Oliver’s book sold out quickly, and a second edition appeared in May of that same year. Admiring readers found the book via word of mouth and advertisements in libertarian magazines and soon convinced others of Oliver’s vision. Among these acolytes were Wichita wheat magnate and World Homes chief executive Willard Garvey, millionaire horologist Seth Atwood, famed banker and fund manager John Templeton, and former placekicker for the undefeated 1954 Ohio State football team (and inventor of the eponymous WEED tennis racquet) Tad Weed. They helped bankroll efforts to put Oliver’s new country idea into action through his Ocean Life Research Foundation.

The foundation’s name is revealing. In order to build a self-governing, private territory in which the very promises of libertarian theory could be fulfilled, Oliver required a locale not already under the sovereign control of another state, or that a state would be willing to sell for such purposes. In the high era of decolonization—between 1945 and 1960 alone, the number of nation-states represented in the United Nations doubled, and over the course of the 1960s grew further due to decolonization in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific—Oliver seemed assured that he could find a government with which to negotiate. “A surprising number of nearly uninhabited, yet quite suitable places for establishing a new country still exist,” he informed readers of his Capitalist Country Newsletter in 1968. “Many such places are scarcely developed colonies whose governmental or other activities are of little or no concern at all to their ‘mother’ countries. There will be little problem in purchasing the land, or in having the opportunity to conduct affairs on a free enterprise basis from the very beginning.”

This was an optimistic evaluation, as Oliver would repeatedly learn in the coming decade. Between 1968 and 1971 alone, he or his associates made exploratory visits to the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Curaçao, Suriname, New Caledonia, French Guiana, Honduras, and New Hebrides to gather information on climate, taxation, and land quality and to explore the possibilities of building a libertarian country. Such visits revealed the difficulties confronting any would-be world builder looking to land on distant shores. Purchasing land was no problem. But purchasing sovereignty was. And so his first real effort unfolded on a space long seen as open: the ocean.

“There will be little problem in purchasing the land, or in having the opportunity to conduct affairs on a free enterprise basis from the very beginning.”— Michael Oliver, founder of the Republic of Minerva

That oceans and islands have figured prominently in exit efforts should come as no surprise. Both have long constituted spaces upon which to situate arguments and plot fantasies about the market, exchange, politics, and society. It was under the ocean (not upon it) that Captain Nemo, antihero of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, sought to escape the tyranny of nation-states. On the ocean proved as appealing as under it. In one of his less well-known works, The Self-Propelled Island, Verne described the geography of the island Pacific by using as his primary narrative device a large, artificial floating island inhabited solely by bickering billionaires—a prescient vision of 21st century seasteading. The high seas were and are still frequently invoked, even if mistakenly, as spaces of nonsovereignty and lawlessness, the last great frontier for those seeking freedom from the state, whether it be to profit through illegal fishing and exploitation of labor or to experiment with new forms of political and social life.

Similarly, “remote” and small islands have provided a place for imaginative experiments in political, legal, and social engineering, from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Thomas More’s Utopia to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. As clearly defined, circumscribed territorial entities, small islands can seem like natural laboratories in which political and social experiments can unfold without the noise of contingency, the burden of history, or the taint of politics. Given that one of classical liberalism’s founding myths, Robinson Crusoe, grew out of the fertile soil of a distant archipelago, it is not surprising how much islands figure in libertarian exit fantasies. Alexander Selkirk’s four-and-a-half-year struggle as a castaway isolated on the Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile served as the historical basis for Daniel Defoe’s novel, a story that made remote islands an ideal libertarian political ecology: an overdetermined geographic form upon which the drama of individualism, of man alone, could be staged.

Islands and ocean spaces have been attractive not only because they are conceived of as laboratory spaces but also because they are very often sites that seem ripe for speculation and planning for new countries. In the post–World War II world, many island territories were the last to decolonize. Much of the Pacific remained under colonial control into the 1970s, and a significant portion still exists somewhere between dependence and independence. Such political opacity and geopolitical vulnerability made them attractive locations for those looking to get some territorial purchase on their libertarian dreams.

By 1971, Garvey, Atwood, Oliver, and their associates had set their sights on the Minerva Reefs. They did so after having rejected the option of another southwest Pacific atoll, the Conway Reef, when they learned that an Australian consortium intended to develop it for the construction of a casino. The Minerva Reefs were more attractive. They seemed to sit within neither the territorial waters of Aotearoa New Zealand to the south, nor Fiji or Tonga to the north. In August 1971, the Ocean Life Research Foundation arrived at the Minerva Reefs and began the arduous process of building an island in the southwest Pacific. A dredging vessel piled sand on the reef, while a small crew erected two mounds made from coral wrapped in chicken wire and encased in concrete, upon which they then constructed 26-foot vertical markers topped by a flag representing the Republic of Minerva.

These steps laid the groundwork for the new country, which would operate as an offshore financial center and house 30,000 settlers. Funds for the country came from settlers who would pay a base rate for a 3-acre plot of land, and from investors who, rather than settle in Minerva, would back the project and share in the profits. A corporation and board of directors would steer the process and review every settler application. “Capability of self-support,” Oliver wrote, “or sufficient assets shall be one of the requirements for acceptance.” Other conditions also applied: “collectivists […] criminals, nihilists, or anarchists” would not be welcome, regardless of their purchasing power.

Anarchists and nihilists turned out to be the least of their worries. 

By early 1972, the king of Tonga, Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV, had caught wind of the project, and began to voice concerns. The Minerva Reefs may have sat at a substantial distance from the core of the Tongan archipelago and beyond its territorial waters, but that hardly meant they were not a part of Tonga’s political and cultural horizon. The reefs had long served as seasonal lobstering and fishing grounds for Tongans and Fijians. Historical and human connections to the reefs ran deep.

Anarchists and nihilists turned out to be the least of their worries.

One incident in particular tied Tonga and the reefs together. In 1962, the Tuaikaepau, a 50-foot, 20-ton cutter bound for Aotearoa New Zealand from Tonga, struck the northwestern edge of South Minerva Reef. Capt. Tevita Fifita, the crew, and the passengers—all Tongan and all of whom survived the initial impact and a night struggling with the thunderous high tide—knew they were in serious trouble. Far from shipping lanes and subject to the cold winds that blew north from Antarctica across the Tasman Sea, the Minerva Reefs saw visitors infrequently. For three months the group struggled, holed up in the shell of a rusting Japanese fishing vessel that had foundered on the reefs two years earlier. They survived on fish, crayfish, and the small amounts of water they could either produce with a homemade still or catch from infrequent rains. Most of them suffered from various ailments, and in early October, in the span of only two days, three men died. The men buried the body of the first person to die in the reef. They wrapped his body in layers of canvas to protect it from crabs and fish. They marked the grave with a cross. Soon after, Fifita made the decision to build an outrigger canoe from the remains of available wreckage, and, along with his son and the ship’s carpenter, they paddled to Kadavu, Fiji, where their vessel capsized while attempting to navigate the reefs. Fifita’s son drowned. The remainder of the rescue party succeeded in reaching help.

Tongans mourned the tragedy and celebrated the rescue. Queen Sālote declared a national holiday and wrote a poem in the crew’s honor. The Minerva Reefs became indelibly attached to the memory of Tuaikaepau and the history of its crew and passengers. In 1966, Fifita returned to the reefs and attached a Tongan flag to a buoy there, an act that took on the important appearance of a ceremony of annexation. Then, in 1972, conflict with the Ocean Life Research Foundation erupted. As word of the exiters’ activities spread, King Tupou began investigating. In February 1972, he sent a fact-finding mission to the reefs. The participants established a refuge station on the South Minerva Reef, but the king’s government made no immediate claim of possession or sovereignty. In May, he himself sailed to the reefs with the brass band and freed convicts accompanying him. He ordered the building of a structure on each reef that would remain permanently above the high-water mark. The king then used these built structures as the basis for a claim of possession on June 15, 1972.

The king’s assertion of sovereignty had the potential to stoke conflicts, particularly with neighboring Fiji, but at the intergovernmental 1972 South Pacific Forum meeting, convened for Southwest Pacific trade discussions and cooperation, heads of state from Fiji, Nauru, Western Samoa, and the Cook Islands agreed that Tonga had a long-standing historical association with the reefs, and that any other claim to sovereignty, and in particular “that of the Ocean Life Research Foundation,” was unacceptable. The king could count on regional support from other heads of state because they, too, feared that any successful libertarian colonization would open up dozens of Southwestern Pacific seamounts and atolls to claims of ownership. The question reached well beyond the bounds of one nation. As Oceanian decolonization proceeded, questions of archipelagic territorial rights to the ocean—never adequately addressed in early U.N. conferences on the sea—arose and led to the writing over the course of the 1970s of a series of Archipelagic Provisions that would be adopted at the 1982 Conference on the Law of the Sea. Such provisions accentuated what islanders themselves had long understood: that the ocean was a human space.

Oliver and his backers withdrew. For the founders of the Republic of Minerva, the reefs were a space of legal liminality, one of the few areas where establishing a new country seemed possible. With terra firma firmly divided among nation-states, the oceans seemed to be the only empty spaces left. Yet, as has so often been the case, spaces perceived by distant colonizers as open for the taking are in fact places that sit within the social and cultural horizon of nearby peoples. For Tongans, the reefs were part of a history of navigation and settlement, of rescue and loss, of meaning and mourning, and part of a geography of identity and livelihood where sea and land entwined. Rather than distant atolls, they were places of provision and poetry and history. No doubt one day, maybe a thousand years hence, a natural island will come to be in Minerva, a result of processes of the kind that had built up the reefs themselves. But not until then. The only invisible hand at work among the atolls and seamounts of the Native Pacific will be that of the ocean.




Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, From the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age

By Raymond B. Craib. PM Press.

BIG PHARMA USA

Nonprofit drugmaker Civica Rx is taking aim at high insulin prices

JING LUO
University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences
THE CONVERSATION
MAY 21, 2022


Doctors have been treating diabetes with insulin since 1922. A century later, about 1 in 5 of the 37 million Americans living with diabetes take this medication – a hormone that helps cells absorb sugar from the blood.

This medication helps avert a host of medical problems including heart disease, kidney disease and stroke. Some 1.6 million Americans living with Type 1 diabetes, a condition in which people don’t produce any insulin, depend on it for their survival. So do millions more people with Type 2 diabetes – a condition in which the body doesn’t make enough insulin.

But an estimated 1 in 4 of the Americans who need it have so much trouble affording this lifesaving medication that they skimp on doses because insulin prices have been skyrocketing for years. For example, the full cost – not counting insurance coverage – of about one month’s worth of a commonly used kind of insulin called glargine has nearly tripled from $99 in 2010 to $284 in 2022.

The exact amount Americans pay for insulin varies quite widely, depending on their insurance coverage and which version of the medication they’re prescribed.

Kris B. Mamula
Highmark to make low-cost generic insulin available to members

Civica Rx, a nonprofit that manufactures generic drugs, is trying to help solve this problem. It’s planning to produce generic insulin for no more than $30 for a month’s worth of the drug at a factory being built in Petersburg, Virginia. Eventually the drugmaker intends to sell all three of the most popular kinds of insulin, starting in 2024 with glargine.

Based on my research regarding the pharmaceutical industry and my work as a doctor who treats patients with diabetes, I believe this effort, announced in March 2022, may greatly increase access to insulin for hundreds of thousands of people who need but can’t currently afford it.

Generic competition is limited

Americans rely on robust competition from low-cost generic drugs to make pharmaceutical products more affordable. This system has historically been more successful with blockbuster drugs like atorvastatin – a cholesterol-controlling drug better known by the brand name Lipitor – and azithromycin – an antibiotic sold under the brand name Zithromax.

Unfortunately, this system has failed to restrain increases in insulin prices, which are far higher in the United States than other countries.

One reason this has been the case has to do with the fact that insulin is a biologic drug, meaning that it’s produced using DNA technology by living organisms. Biologic drugs are harder to manufacture and are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration in a different manner than more conventional drugs.

Reasons for optimism

I’m excited about this initiative because it promises to increase access to all people who require insulin in the U.S., regardless of insurance status or where they buy medications.

One reason is that Civica Rx is a nonprofit that will be more able than private-sector drugmakers to put the interests of those who pay for insulin – patients and health insurers – ahead of investors’.

Another is its pricing strategy. Civica Rx plans to charge only about 20% of the list prices for brand-name insulin products. Walmart and some other big-box retailers already sell insulin at a discount, but their prices are still higher than what the nonprofit plans to charge.

And findings from my own research suggest that intellectual property protections will not likely be a substantial barrier to Civica’s efforts.

I’m also optimistic because of support from large insurers like Anthem and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association for this effort. It’s reassuring that Civica Rx’s leadership includes many people with decades of experience in the pharmaceutical industry and in health policy.

But I see some reasons to be less optimistic.

First, there have been prior attempts to manufacture generic insulin in the U.S. None have succeeded.

Another possibility is that brand-name insulin manufacturers may try to push doctors to prescribe newer patent-protected versions of insulin, which would be harder for Civica Rx to market as a generic – at least initially.

Success is far from guaranteed, given that the established players all have a strong financial interest in seeing Civica’s efforts fail.
Lawmakers are taking action

Several state legislatures have also tried to deal with this problem. Some have enacted laws mandating drug price transparency and provided funds to guarantee emergency access to insulin.

But to date these assorted responses have failed to lower prices for brand-name insulin products, although I think it’s possible that prices would have risen faster without them.

Congress is also responding.

Four weeks after Civica Rx announced its plans to produce insulin at well below current prices, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would limit insulin copays to $35 for insured patients. This measure was also in President Joe Biden’s stalled Build Back Better spending plan.

The House bill would leave out many patients – most notably the uninsured. But this measure would also mark a positive step should the Senate follow suit.

People living with insulin-dependent diabetes have been waiting a long time for someone to do something to make it more affordable. It looks like that time may finally be arriving.

Jing Luo, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

First Published May 21, 2022,