...Or Does It Explode?

Halabja Anniversary - A Few Days Late

Two decades since the gassing en masse of civilians as part of the Anfal campaign, a date commemorated this weekend, prompted the following thought from an anonymous reader of Kurdish Media:

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Saddam's gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, which killed over 5,000 innocent people and left thousands injured, some of whom are today still suffering from a the deadly strike. The attack on Halabja is only the most famous of many carefully planned attacks on Kurdish people which were part of the Anfal campaign, an attempt by Saddam Hussein to eliminate the already oppressed Kurdish people of Iraq. An unknown number, many tens of thousands, were murdered, some of whom simply disappeared without a trace.

The world was silent. Most remained unaware while some knew but chose to keep quiet. It was only 20 years ago, yet today too many people wonder why the Kurdish nation is suspicious of its neighbors in these uncertain times. Meanwhile, the city of Halabja remains underdeveloped, forgotten by the outside world and too often used as a symbol by opportunists who have no interest in aiding its people.

Please take a moment to remember and pray for the victims Halabja and the Anfal campaign. It was not so long ago.

Kurdish Activist Arrested in Syria

Yet another advocate of reform gets rounded up:

Syrian police have detained a human rights activist in the mainly Kurdish northeastern city of Hasakah, rights watchdogs said on Thursday.

"The state security service in Hasakah arrested activist Osama Edward Qario on Wednesday evening because of his activities and his writings about public life in Syria," the Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights said.

The 31-year-old English teacher had recently been called in by the security services over a critical article he had written about the economy entitled: "No gas, no oil, no electricity," the watchdog added.

No freedom.

Al-Akhdam - The Servants Remain on the Margins

"But where Yemen's other hereditary social classes, the sayyids and the judges and the sheiks, and even the lower orders like butchers and ironworkers, slowly dissolved, the Akhdam retained their separate position. There are more than a million of them among Yemen's fast-growing population of 22 million, concentrated in segregated slums in the major cities..." Read the whole story.

Together Again: Bashir and Hilal

The butcher of Darfur has been appointed to a prominent government post, and Omar Al-Bashir is spinning like a record player:

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan on Monday defended a government appointment for an Arab sheik accused of leading a militia that helped the government suppress a rebel movement in the Darfur region, leading to 200,000 deaths.

On an official visit to Turkey, Bashir described the sheik, Musa Hilal, as a Sudanese citizen who is influential in Darfur and has "contributed greatly to stability and security in the region," Reuters reported from Ankara, Turkey's capital.

"We in Sudan believe that those accusations against Mr. Hilal are untrue," Turkey's state-run Anatolian News Agency quoted Bashir as saying. "Right now in Darfur, the real murderers are those who are aided by Europe and others."

Musa is believed to be a leader of the janjaweed, Arab militia forces that have committed mass killings of civilians in Darfur. The conflict has also displaced 2.5 million people in less than five years.

Glad to hear President Bashir is concerned about the "real murderers."

Kuwaiti Royal Pwned over Windy NYT Blog Post

For some reason, the New York Times has invited Kuwaiti royal and Villa Mode fashion retailer Majed El-Sabah to blog this week in the "prestigious" For the Moment fashion blog. Thanks to some sharp folks leaving comments and Maj's airy blogposts, hilarity has ensued.

First, dig the opening bio gusher the New York Times offers on Maj: "Sheikh Majed Al-Sabah, this week’s guest blogger on The Moment, is fashion royalty. Not only is Majed, as he is better known, a member of Kuwaiti royal family (his father is the first cousin of the emir of Kuwait; his mother is the emir’s sister)..."

Commenter  "How Applachian" asks: "So, is that a fancy way of saying his parents are first cousins?"

Anyway, a few days ago, Fashion Royalist Maj decided to step out of the air-conditioned luxury mall and get in touch with his Bedouin roots, with a delightfully orientalist post on "The Sands of Time". While it's mostly a hackneyed paean to the lure of the desert and the lingering influence of Bedu culture, one line gets Maj in trouble:

"The majority of us who live in the Gulf region are descendants of these tribes — in fact, there’s hardly a family whose roots are not Bedouin."

Commenter Patricia Odean picks up on that line and won't let it pass:

...According to Britannica.com, “Nearly two-thirds of the population [of Kuwait] are expatriate workers, formerly from other Arab states but now largely from South and Southeast Asia. These nonnationals do not enjoy citizenship rights, economic or political, which are reserved for Kuwaiti citizens—defined as those able to prove Kuwaiti ancestry prior to 1920.” While the experiences he describes are no doubt genuine, the experience of the Indian maids would probably give a truer picture of what the majority of people living in the region experience.

It would seem to be a good thing if more Gulf royalty were forced to confront the masses by blogging with open comments. In the meantime, we wait for the New York Times to invite an Indian maid working in Kuwait to blog next month at For the Moment.

Qatar is "Celebrating Change" in Bid for Olympics

This post is categorized under "minority rights," but in the case of Qatar it's a misnomer. The 20% minority of the people living in Qatar who are actually citizens enjoy some rights. It's the 80% disenfranchised majority  of "foreign" workers that lack any guaranteed rights. This bizarre inversion (similar to the UAE's and Kuwait's) comes to the fore as Qatar bids to host the Olympics:

You could learn as much about Qatar and its Olympic pretensions from the [Doha Games] gold-medal match between India (35) and Pakistan (23) as you could about kabaddi itself. Although some 750,000 people live in Qatar--a peninsula-state about the size of New Jersey jutting into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia--only 170,000 are its citizens. The balance are Indians (the majority)--numbering more than 200,000--Pakistanis, Filipinos, Iranians, Bangladeshis and a host of other groups who come to Qatar in search of work and sometimes end up staying the rest of their lives. As at most events, very few Qataris were seen at the kabaddi hall, whose seats were filled mainly by the immigrants who do the work that keeps Qatar running...

The Doha Games were executed almost flawlessly...  But a catering company from England fed the Athletes' and Media Villages, a Dutch company ran the lnfo2006 system and Asian Games News Service, foreigners handled the accreditation, did the announcing at the competitions, and managed and operated the transportation system. Foreigners ran the Athletes' and Media Villages, as well as the scoreboards, the media centers, and the TV camerawork. Foreign janitors did the cleanup. And the 16,000 volunteers who complemented the paid staff were drawn overwhelmingly from Qatar's immigrant communities. Seven hundred Australians put together the Opening Ceremony program; even the horse at the Opening Ceremony was trained in Australia. Only in the security detail was there any identifiable Qatari presence. A simple "Keif halaq" ("How are you?") addressed in Arabic to a Doha Asian Games worker almost always brought a blank response. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies aside, there was little of the flavor of Arabia at the Doha Games. Qatar simply gave the go-ahead and wrote the checks.

On balance, hosting the 2016 Olympics would be a tremendous boon for Qatar, well satisfying Doha 2016's bid slogan: "Celebrating change." At the extreme, it might force Qatar to deliberate whether a country whose citizens are a 20% minority can be viable.

SandBlast - Art to Empower the Saharawi

For those who missed the festival, check out the website of the Sandblast arts project.

Bashir Bombs Town, Meets with Pope

It is amazing what these dictators manage to get away with. Sudan's Bashir is now suddenly open to a cease-fire and negotiations. Meanwhile the attacks continue and the Pope hosts him in Italy:

Al-Bashir's offer came just four days after a major attack launched by his forces against units of the Justice and Equality rebel group in Haskanita, a small town in northern Darfur. Sudanese army helicopter gunships and Antonov aircraft bombed the town in violation of a U.N. military flight embargo, killing over a dozen people.

Al-Bashir, who came to power in 1989 in a military and Islamic coup, was making a rare, high-profile visit to Western Europe that raised concern from human rights advocates and some politicians.

The Vatican said that Pope Benedict XVI and al-Bashir spoke for 25 minutes at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi described the atmosphere during the talks as "very respectful."

"One could see there was a great commitment by Sudan for this meeting, as demonstrated by such a high-level delegation with evident care to showing great attention and respect for the Vatican," Lombardi told reporters.

"Zero Degree Turn" as Iranian TV Confronts Holocaust

The great irony of AhMADinejad's Holocaust "questioning" is, as this blog noted some time ago, Iran actually rescued hundreds of Polish Jews (mostly children) from the Holocaust and then helped them immigrate to Palestine. The rescue of the 1,000 or so "Children of Tehran," who were housed in camps outside Tehran, is unfortunately little remembered today.

Except now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the hottest show on Iranian TV is a melodrama about an Iranian rescuing Jews during the Holocaust:

Every Monday night at 10 o'clock, Iranians by the millions tune into Channel One to watch the most expensive show ever aired on the Islamic republic's state-owned television. Its elaborate 1940s costumes and European locations are a far cry from the typical Iranian TV fare of scarf-clad women and gray-suited men.

But the most surprising thing about the wildly popular show is that it is a heart-wrenching tale of European Jews during World War II.

The hour-long drama, "Zero Degree Turn," centers on a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman. Over the course of the 22 episodes, the hero saves his love from Nazi detention camps, and Iranian diplomats in France forge passports for the woman and her family to sneak on to airplanes carrying Iranian Jews to their homeland...

[The show's producer] says he came up with the idea for "Zero Degree Turn" four years ago as he was reading books about World War II and stumbled across literature about charge d'affaires at the Iranian embassy in Paris. Abdol Hussein Sardari saved over a thousand European Jews by forging Iranian passports and claiming they belonged to an Iranian tribe...

"In this show, you notice that a new method of political dialogue is being promoted that is more in line with the modern world," says Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist cleric and former Iranian vice president.

The message appears to be grabbing the public. Sara Khatibi, a 35-year-old mother and chemist in Tehran, says she and her husband never miss an episode. "All we ever hear about Jews is rants from the government about Israel," she says. "This is the first time we are seeing another side of the story and learning about their plight."

Read the whole story, as the show's message and political positioning is more complicated than the excerpt above. Also, check out a photo gallery from the show, which seems to include a large number of female characters inexplicably covering their hair in 1940s Europe.

Friday Photo: Essaouira Mellah

The rubble hints at what used to be...