Parallel revolutions in Yemen

First published at WeSpeakNews

It seems that revolutions always come in pairs, or that is at least the case in Yemen, probably the most underreported country from the movement collectively known as Arab Spring. Near the end of last year, after 10 months of tireless protests erupting on an almost daily basis all over the country, demanding the resignation of decades-long president Ali Abdullah Saleh and significant improvement in the living conditions of the poorest Arab country, an attempt at mediation was brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council in order to end the long political crisis that left hundreds and thousands of casualties at the hand of government forces.

Even through the deal was signed under the auspice of the United States, this has done very little to end the year-long crisis and stability has been very slow to return.  The deal would not only be translated into a political transition but was also meant to grant immunity to Saleh and all of those associated with him. The main argument of the immunity in the eyes of both the brokers and opposition politicians in Yemen is to prevent a slide into a civil war in a country already impoverished, faced with tribalism, regionalism, high illiteracy rates and widespread corruption.

Yemenis on the other hand, were not very happy about the deal and although many opposition politicians supported it and committed themselves to abide by it, the revolutionary youths and activists were clearly opposed to it and demanded Saleh and his family and officers to be put to trial for crimes against the Yemeni people, including not only murder and countless human rights abuses in the course of the uprising but also those committed in the decades-long authoritarian rule.

Already in December protests erupted again against the immunity clause and on December 20, thousands of Yemenis joined the “Life March” from the city of Taiz to the capital Sana’a to stage a demonstration in front of parliament on Saturday, December 24, to protest immunity being granted to Saleh. The march was one of the longest marches by foot recorded and in the course of which, demonstrators were also attacked and armed thugs prevented food and blanket from reaching the protesters even though they had been walking for days all the way to Sana’a.

On that same month, a new wave of protests started all over again to fight corruption that in the words of a Yemeni newspaper, “has invaded every institution in Yemen and fighting it should come at the top of the agenda of the new government if they really want to terminate the suffering of the people in Yemen”. The revolution moved from squares to institutions after the political opposition failed to address the grievances of the Yemeni street and no steps were taken to oust corrupt officials. Protests were staged then in front of government offices, colleges, universities and many other public institutions. It seems as if the people are determined not to stop protesting until their demands are met, in what has been termed the new revolution against corruption.

Last week another revolution inside a revolution was begun when a Yemeni activist began a campaign via social media called “I want Yemen to change – I will not store qat”, whose target was to raise awareness about the dangers associated with qat consumption. The controversial plant and social drug, now banned in most in many Western countries, is consumed by a majority of the population and takes a very sizeable portion of the country’s water, land and income from already impoverished families, many of which subsist on a diet of nothing but bread and tea. The culture of qat in Yemen is already a distinguishable feature of Yemeni society and today is considered by many the building block of the Yemeni identity, in spite of the fact that looking back in time, qat consumption has increased rather than decreased with the urbanization and modernization of the country, promoted by state policies out of which only very few profited.

The event ran yesterday and relied on the support of Nobel laureate Tawakkol Karman and of leading Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bashara. It received selective media attention after activists campaigned for it and several Yemeni designers and graphic artists submitted art work and posters for the campaign. Support was not unanimous and many in Yemen complained about how a campaign of this kind would leave many Yemeni families without their daily income and groups appeared on social media promoting support for qat and one of them, even offering substantial discounts to qat buyers in the course of the day. The event ran in Sana’a and Taiz and even though the attendance was not massive, the reaction to the event was very positive and it succeeded in raising awareness about this problem, with deep economic and social repercussions.

Because of the reliance on qat by so many farmers in the country, it is impossible to ban qat but this campaign might be seen as a first step in yet another revolution that is not only political but also social, cultural and critical of policy-making overall. Only a day after the controversial event against, qat, in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, a rally is being held to promote reconciliation and forgiveness among Yemenis.

Unity in Yemen has proven very difficult between the restive north, the capital Sana’a, the once cosmopolitan south and other parts of the country, such as the Tihama – bordering with Africa – that has been neglected by the government for decades. The threat of secession between different parts of the country is always present and it is difficult to address all the issues at the same time. It is also necessary to mention here that the southern governorate of Abyan was declared in March an Islamic Emirate by Islamist groups, after government forces lost control of the region to Islamist militants and the region might be the most serious humanitarian crisis in Yemen, of which there is next to no information or reports available.

What remains clear is that the revolution in Yemen is not one but many revolutions and that the people will continue exercising their new-found power – protesting, for which they have demonstrated creative abilities and an infinite supply of patience: In Yemen, protests are not only political acts of defiance but also public spaces in which art, music, poetry and political discussions are present. It is unlikely that under present circumstances and without expurgating the unprecedented levels of corruption at all institutional levels, the grievances that led to the Yemeni revolution might be solved anytime soon or simply with elections, the results of which are compromised in advance.

Yemenis in general are certainly not ready to accept immunity for the ousted president as the foundation of a political system, since justice and reconciliation are key elements in the configuration of democratic politics. The fact that Yemen is a country with more firearms than citizens and that the demonstrations remained peaceful in the course of an entire year, gives an indication that the revolution is peaceful and that the threat of a civil war is now perhaps exaggerated. In the meantime many revolutions continue running in parallel, social, cultural, political and religious; the number of issues to be dealt with and that require campaigns and revolutions are next to endless but there is little doubt that the revolution is far from over and in fact, it might be only beginning now.

Dutch look to ban qat in country

First published at BIKYAMASR

A week after the initiative “I want Yemen to change, I will not store qat” was launched by Yemeni activists, in order to raise awareness about the social and economic consequences associated with qat use, the government of the Netherlands also announced on Tuesday that qat would be banned in the country.

On January 7 NOS – the largest news organization in the Netherlands – reported that the government was working on a qat prohibition and aired a brief special, interviewing members of the Somali community in the country, including Shamsa Saïd, activist in an organization for Somali children.

Men in the Somali community reported that people came from all over Europe to buy qat in the Netherlands and claimed that the practice was harmless and no reason to ban it. Women on the other hand complained about the social and economic strain on the households caused by qat, which is a well-known story to many families in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The qat ban was proposed by Dutch politicians Mirjam Sterk (Christian Democratic Appeal) and Cornelia van Nieuwenhuizen-Wijbenga (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), members of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands and was based on extensive research published in 2010 by the Trimbos Institute in Utrecht; a study dealing with the influence of qat on the social and economic situation of Somalis in the Netherlands.

On January 10 NOS announced that the ban on qat would be effective immediately and that health minister Edith Schippers would include the plant in the List II of the opium list, what would render possession and trade illegal in the country. Imports and distribution of qat was not banned until now in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, from where it was distributed to Germany, Norway, Canada and the United States, even though it is already considered illegal in these countries.

An independent report commissioned by the Dutch government has cited many negative effects derived from qat consumption and added that with high unemployment and low education levels, the Dutch Somali community is perceived as late in terms of integration, compared to other immigrant communities.

The proposal of Mrs. Sterk also came under fire in the Netherlands and it was criticized by media, treated as a minor problem that does not compare to the use of alcohol and other drugs in the country. The ban was also criticized because instead of encouraging integration, it might alienate Somalis even more.

Speaking to BikyaMasr.com yesterday, Mirjam Sterk (CDA) answered the following questions:

BikyaMasr: How did you become concerned with the qat problem?

Mirjam Sterk: Since I visited Tilburg-Noord (a quarter in the city of Tilburg, in the south of the Netherlands) and spoke with people working with the Somali community there.

BM: Did you face opposition from either the Dutch authorities or the ethnic communities in the Netherlands?

MS: The Somali community has different opinions on the issue. Some organizations want to stop qat while others believe in raising awareness.

BM: In the case of those consuming qat in the Netherlands, what would be your suggestions to replace qat addiction?

MS: Well there are different things. But better is to stop and start exercise, sport or drink coffee.

BM: In the Middle East, particularly in Yemen, millions of people bring food home because of money earned from qat. Do you believe there might be viable solutions to gradually replace qat for a more sustainable agriculture?

MS: There are always different options, although they are not easy. But the negative implications (costs of water supply needed to grow qat for example) are huge.

BM: What message would you like to send to the Yemeni people in their efforts to combat qat consumption?

MS: Think of alternatives and explain the negative consequences.

In the meantime “I want Yemen to change, I will not store qat” continued to gather support at home and internationally. Several people in Yemen and abroad have created posters and digital artwork to promote the campaign that has already gathered a few thousand supporters via social media, and it was announced in Yemen in newspapers, TV and also publicly at Change Square in Sana’a.

It is reported that in specific areas in Change Square and Freedom Square, it will not be allowed to chew qat there and people will distribute coffee instead. Other organizations working against qat have joined the campaign efforts and have begun to distribute posters to raise awareness among people about the dangers of qat. Elsewhere in Yemen, activists in the city of Taiz will make people put their finger prints on ink to say that they will not chew qat.

The campaign is supported by Nobel Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman and by Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bishara, and popular Yemeni singer Fahd Alqorany will also sing on Change Square today during “I want Yemen to change, I will not store qat”.

A number of Yemeni activists, including the organizer Hind Aleryani, and others in Yemen such as Sadek Maktary, Ammar Moujali, Salim Bin Mubara and Mohammad Al Ammari have mobilized at home with grass-roots organizations and youth groups, and abroad calling for international media to cover the event, to encourage more and more Yemenis to participate.

The example set by the Netherlands with the prohibition on qat is perhaps unrealistic for Yemen, where a vast number of people subsist on qat and where the agriculture is based on the controversial plant; however it still serves as a precedent that the negative effects of the plant have been studied and discussed world-wide and that substantial steps are being taken by many Western countries to put a halt to cultivation, distribution and consumption. This alone should raise alarms in Yemen that a qat-based agriculture might no longer have a place in the global economy in years to come.

The Arab Spring of Saudi Cinema

First published at BIKYAMASR

“Bring your passport, we are going to the cinema” was the logline of “Cinema 500 km” (2006), a Saudi documentary film directed by Abdullah Al-Eyaf. To bring your passport go to the cinema seems like an unlike adventure everywhere in the world, that is, everywhere in the world except Saudi Arabia, the theaterless kingdom.

Al-Eyaf’s film, shot with permission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information, follows the curious story of 21-years-old Tariq Al-Husaini, a Saudi movie-fan as he embarks on the adventure of watching a film in the cinema for the first time.

The movie is a chronic of this journey that begins with Al-Husaini applying to obtain a passport in his home city of Riyadh, then traveling from Riyadh to Khobar, crossing the King Fahd Causeway into Bahrain, until he finally enters the popular Seif Mall in Manama, buys a movie ticket and enters the theater.

According to Al-Eyaf: “I wanted to bring out the voices of all those people who have to travel to another country and take a journey of four to six hours just to watch a movie and come back”.

The cost and distance of the trip to Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, only to watch a film in a theater, makes movie tickets for Saudis, the most expensive in the world. Two days ago it was reported that the ultra-conservative Gulf kingdom would be looking at opening cinemas across the country if the government gives the final go ahead, with the cooperation of Ministry of Culture and Information.

It was however reiterated that even if films are shown in theaters throughout the country, they would be heavily censored to prevent anything deemed “un-Islamic” from entering the country. Even though films are considered quintessential to the modern experience everywhere in the world, their presence in the Gulf region has been more of an absence.

According the Viola Shafik, the scholarly authority on Arab cinema, the Arabian peninsula has been central in shaping the Arab and Islamic identities in regard to language, religion and culture but cinema has remained a margin phenomenon in the Middle East, mostly confined to the once thriving film industry of Egypt and Lebanon that still remains the benchmark of Middle Eastern cinema all over the world.

Films made their appearance in the Gulf region only recently, although a film was produced by the former republic of North Yemen and presented to the public in a square in Sana’a in 1962 and then, in 1972, the world was surprised when a Kuwaiti film, “The Cruel Sea”, a tragic love story directed by Khalid al-Siddiq, appeared on the scene and demonstrated great cinematic artistry. The film was featured with a prize at Cathage Film Festival in 1972.

The re-birth of film in the Gulf started only recently as prestigious annual film festivals are now held in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha, but local production is still lagging far behind Lebanon and Egypt in quantity and range of topics. The United Arab Emirates have a very limited production and released their first full-length feature film, “The Dream”, in 2005 and since then have produced about 8 films, including Ali F. Mostafa’s “City of Life” (2009) that revolves around Dubai’s multicultural nature; this was the first Emirati film to achieve release in local UAE cinemas.

Since 2005, a good number of short films and documentaries made by Emiratis have appeared on the scene and most recently, in 2011, Emirati full-length feature “Sea Shadows”, directed by Nawaf Al Jahani, received critical acclaim following its release in the UAE and will be screened in prestigious festivals in the US this year. The film deals with the traditional themes of culture, religion and tradition – a commonplace in Gulf cinema – but it is considered to be the coming of age of Emirati and regional film.

The pioneer in the regional film industry, nonetheless, has been pearl-sized Bahrain, that produced its first full-length feature film in 1990, when Bassam Al-Thawadi’s “The Barrier” was released, followed by a few feature films in the past decade and a good number of short films. Active filmmakers in Bahrain include Hussain Al-Hulaibi, Hussain Al-Riffaei and especially Mohammed BuAli, the most active filmmaker in Bahrain whose last short film was released in 2010.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, paradoxically enough, has not been entirely absent from the history of Gulf cinema even if the screening of these films is by all means forbidden in the country. Contrary to common opinion films are being made and watched in the theaterless kingdom; over ten full-length features and short films have been produced in the country by local filmmakers and semi-clandestine groups of filmmakers and cine clubs are not unheard of. Besides Al Eyaf’s documentary, in 2006 the first big-budget film, “Keif al-hal?” was directed by Palestinian-Canadian Izidore Musallam and produced by Rotana Group, the largest entertainment company in the Middle East, property of Prince Al-Walid bin Talal. Once again, resorting to the most commonplace topic in regional cinema, the film is a story of a family torn between modernity and tradition. Though the cast of the film is made of mostly Saudi actors, it was shot in the UAE masquerading as Saudi Arabia.

There is also a high-profile woman in Saudi cinema, the director Haifa Al-Mansour, who directed, among other films, the popular and controversial documentary “Without without Shadows” (2006) addressing the explosive gender politics of her country. International film festivals in the Gulf and all over the world have taken an interest in Saudi cinema and interesting pieces seem to appear every year, all of them made by indie-like, very low-budget independent filmmakers.

In the end of 2010, before the events of Tunisia escalated into the Arab Spring uprisings that also reached Saudi Arabia, the magazine of the European Network of Young Cinema, published an interesting article titled “Springtime for Saudi Cinema?” (by Nadia Muhanna) recalling a meeting with Abdulmuhsin Al-Mutairi, the founder of Talashi, a group of Saudi filmmakers: It is a small independent production company, self-funded and not making any profits at all.

According to the article, the group started when the members realized that they couldn’t fund themselves to acquire equipment on their own, so they formed a group that bought equipment utilized by all, in which there are no salaries, fees or profits. Talashi has produced about 12 films to date, and they claim to produce films with under 2000 dollars that are usually paid to the actresses, and as it is expected, there are very few who agree to appear on films.

In words of Al-Mutairi: “The important thing about our films is that they reflect reality. Some people criticize us saying that we should paint a good image of Saudi Arabia abroad and I agree with that, but that doesn’t mean not to tell the truth”.

As of today Saudi newspapers have film review sections, a Saudi TV station hosted a program on the subject and cartoon movies have been shown in summer festivals. If movies are allowed in Saudi Arabia, it is not going to be the first time: In the 1960’s and until the 1980’s there were movie theaters all over the kingdom, even though the religious police tried to shut them down. In the words of a former projectionist: “We kept young men on bikes stationed near the offices of the religious police, when they saw them coming our way, they would fly on their bikes to alert us… The staff at the theater would quickly turn off the lights in the entrance area, shut the doors and keep quiet to give the impression the cinema was closed”.

Though cinemas were closed in the 1980’s, no official policy or law banned public screening of films until 2009, but since then private cine clubs have appeared on the scene, that until now are allowed only for men. The change in official policy might change little in Saudi cinema culture, and films will continue being produced and watched in the country, against the will of the establishment and the conservative clerics. The possibilities offered by the information age bring Saudis and the rest of people in the Middle East, in contact with the latest technologies and entertainment products faster than any government is able to ban them.

According to Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, “nowadays you can have a server in another country and you cannot censor Internet production if the server is in another country. Some people organize television station on the Internet and asked me to participate. So the technology is above it. In the classical style of the Soviet Union, technology allowed that everything could be supervised. Now not everything can be supervised”.

In the meantime, Saudis remain repeating themselves the story of Al-Husaini, traveling for several hours only in order to watch a movie in a theater, living through Al-Eyaf’s movie time and again; what to a Western audience would seem a product of the most vivid imagination. More than anything, the emerging film culture in the Gulf has served as a platform of social realism and criticism for many, raising voices that reach further than books and newspapers and that now reach audiences all over the world, and most likely will continue to do so in the future, with or without public screenings in theaters.

In 1995, Susan Sontag wrote in “A Century of Cinema” about the “ignominious, irreversible decline” of the cinema culture, a century after its spectacular beginning, and confessed that to some degree, the culture of cinema had come to an end:

“Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia – the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. That love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born out of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral – all the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.”

She concludes by saying: “Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyper-industrial films. For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range of eclecticism of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the films as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films, too. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated. If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too… no matter how many movies, even good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.”

While this might be true for the West, cinephilia and the cinephilic desire triggered by non-public cinema is very much alive in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region in spite of the increasing censorship. It might be that the love inspired by cinema in the Gulf, is only beginning now, and it is very far from dead. In that sense, the Arab Spring of Saudi cinema might have begun already, preceding the Arab Spring by at least half a decade.

Remembering Tim Hetherington’s “Diary”

First published at BIKYAMASR

Artaud wrote that films are essentially narrative experiences that offer emotion through captions that verbalize a story but that should never attempt to translate written language into visual language, in which the action operates as “immediate intuition,” rejecting the notion of a purely visual cinema. To him, the “pure” or abstract cinema leads to a commonplace, depicting more or less adequately, psychological situations that would be in the place on the theater stage or in the pages of a book, but not on the screen where he says, “They exist only as a pale image of a world whose real existence and significance lie elsewhere.”

Nevertheless, films are always impure, editing and cuts – that is what it is, it makes it impossible to purify the art of cinema into a mere contemplation. Perhaps Badiou was right when he said that “A film operates through what it withdraws from the visible… It is of absolute importance that the flowers cinema displays be Mallarmean flowers, that they be absent from every bouquet”. Many films that we call experimental fall into this description perfectly and like many works of contemporary art, they do not want to offer us consolation or comfort, not even alienation; they want to shake us up, even if only momentarily.

But when the filmmaker dies in a situation similar to that depicted in his film, we are likely to change our minds and might turn to his films in order to find narrative answers about the world in which he lived, the kind of person he was or the work that he might have done had he continued to live.

Such was the case with Tim Hetherington’s film “Diary” (2010) that he himself described in the following terms: “Diary” is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

His film, unlike the documentaries we are used to, which act as vaults of worlds and experiences, is nothing but a telescope by which we are allowed to peer through only for a fraction of a second and then we are not permitted to keep anything. Tim Hetherington, the photo-journalist, was killed while covering the frontlines of Misrata on April 20 2011, in the course of the Libyan civil war, caught by mortar shells, a day after he tweeted: “In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”

Hetherington was no stranger to the realities of war, having covered previously Africa and Afghanistan for several years, but yet the label “photo-journalist” and “covering” seems entirely inadequate to describe his work. The kind of masterful detachment and lack of commentary implicit in the practice of journalism today does not match the honest ambitions of Hetherington who is caught in his own film saying about zones of war and conflict that “I want to go there and understand”. The answer for what was this precisely what he wanted to understand is the reason why we turn to his personal film, and yet there is none to be found.

In an interview – that is more of a conversation – with Tyler Malone from Patrick McMullan’s PMc magazine, a month before his untimely death, he says: “I did a film recently called “Diary” which is like a 20 minute film. I took ten years of reporting and my personal life and mixed it into a stream-of-consciousness. It’s completely non-narrative. It’s really about simultaneous experience. In the same way that Joyce was into journeying – you know, Ulysses is a journey in one day – there are themes of journeying and dreaming and sleeping. “Diary” is like a dream. There’s no logic to it. Someone asked me: “How did you work out the governing principles?” Well, there aren’t any governing principles in a dream”.

How can dreams be translated into films? It this even possible without breaking the conventions of the filmical? Experimental films of course are always conceived as transgressions and dreams are always present in the topography of art because they constitute the most terminal and vivid experience of the imagination. Translation of dreams into experimental films are already commonplaces and one can immediately conjure up images of master pieces such as Maya Deren’s “The Very Eye Night of the Night” (1958) that is nothing but distant dreams.

However, in translating dreams, the filmmaker usually takes a vantage point from which he can give these dreams a universal imprint that will endow them with the dignity necessary to come out of the circle of mere self-portrait. From the detachment of the photo-journalist he pilgrimages into an artistic domain that is not necessarily that of film. In the interview with Malone, he puts it this way: “Ultimately all my work is a journey, but ultimately the journey leads back to myself – it’s starting to lead back to myself. Which is great, that’s life. I mean I hope that’s what it’s about. It’s both an uncovering the world and uncovering of yourself. But I’m being discursive as a way of expressing that…”

He goes on to say: “Immersion. Abandonment into subject matter. Exile, maybe. I mean Joyce wrote Ulysses when he was mostly in Trieste. He was completely immersed in the world. He was emotionally abandoned. There was no reason in it. In much the same way that, for me, doing the emotional projects I do now – it’s complete abandonment into the work. And an interest in other perceptions, in other ways of thinking and being”.

All of the above places Hetherington in contemporary art more than in the history of journalism and documentary film, even though he did shoot a documentary film, “Restrepo” (2010), about the Afghanistan war, co-directed with Sebastian Junger. Even there, Hetherington surprises by not attempting to offer a point of view with or against the war, and achieves the impossible: To humanize every single person involved, or in his words, from the interview with Malone: “And you know, I’m an image-maker, and I know when we talk about the war-machine, often we present it with images of Apache helicopters or missiles, but it’s not. The war-machine is: take a group of young men, train them together and put them on the side of a mountain, and they’re going to kill and be killed for each other. It’s something very human.”

The only documentary film that I know of, that succeeds in the same way, is Susan Sontag’s “Promised Lands” that she directed in 1973 in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in Israel. The film manages not to take a position on the war and part of the movie is actually a confrontation between two different spokesmen, neither of which argues for a case either. Walking in between the burnt roads, tanks and bodies, coming closer to the war lines in Israel than anyone did before her, Sontag deploys the same traits that we are to find later in Hetherington’s work: This commitment to understanding, the vision of larger or alternative realities, and the inner desire to want to shake up, rather than merely offer support or consolation. The artist, the writer, the journalist, the filmmaker, they all convene in the same topography.

His work were not only silent photographs and footage from conflict but ranged across a variety of media such as multi-screen installations, fly-poster exhibitions and other devices. In this sense, it can be argued that “Diary” more than a documentary of his own work or a personal experimental film, functions as an installation, doing what Badiou said to be in a way, the essence of film: “After all, cinema is nothing but takes and editing. There’s nothing else”. That is precisely what we see in “Diary”, a dystopian world, images of war mixed with reception of images in Western media and life, the experience of comfort and above all, an incredibly restlessness – in the form of a masterful video-installation, all of it running in parallel.

In her book “Aesthetics and Modernity”, Agnes Heller writes: “To be sure, video art is difficult and, perhaps installation the most difficult among contemporary art forms. Along with the new media goes the temptation to realize all ideas and experiments with all conceptions. As far as I see, those installations I judge as significant (and I have not seen that many significant installations), use the interpretandum as a kind of quotation. Yet, strictly speaking, this is not a quotation because the interpretandum for the installation is not a work done in the medium of the installation. It has been pointed out several times that quotations play a significant role in contemporary art.”

What is Hetherington doing in this installation? What is he quoting? Is he perhaps anticipating something? There is no way we can answer this question, but we do know that the interpretandum to which Heller points is not an abstract concept in Hetherington, but rather, an exposure to risk, to war, to life, and to the very real and not abstract at all realities of human conflict. Was he heroic? Perhaps. Sandra Lehmann wrote yesterday in reference to Havel: “If heroism is to overcome, it can also dispense pathos and vanity. It needs no reward, not even that of great importance and meaning. Probably only heroism without reward is true heroism. It is a matter of the moment and of a far off future”. There is no story to be told in his film, just that – lack of pathos and vanity.

After Hetherington’s death, Tyler Malone published on PMc a postscript to the interview, with his reflections, and he concluded by saying: “He needed to tell stories. He didn’t merely snap photos in dangerous places –anyone fearless enough to face conflict could do that –but rather he told stories with his images. He was a writer, he just used a camera instead of a pen. And, though I admittedly didn’t know him well, I could never imagine him stopping of his own accord. Unfortunately, he was stopped, not of his own accord on Wednesday, April 20, 2011, when he was killed in Libya. He died doing what he loved, documenting truths, telling stories, navigating alternative realities. I don’t personally believe in an afterlife, but I do hope that Tim Hetherington is somewhere, elsewhere, still navigating alternate realities.”

When Hetherington shot his “Diary” in 2010, recording a decade of his photo-journalism work covering the most restless corners of the world, he was only offering us a pornographic tour through the naked limbs of contemporary history; little did he know then that after his death in April – murdered by mortal shell fires in Libya – we would see now through his diary how desperate he was to live. About him and his wonderful, mysterious and fascinating film could be said what Hannah Arendt wrote in 1965, after the death of her friend, the writer Randall Jarrell: “Randall, at any rate, had nothing to protect him against the world but his splendid laughter, and the immense naked courage behind it”.

The Art of Protest in Yemen

First published at YEMEN TIMES

In the end of last year, while the eyes of Yemenis were on the still unfinished power transfer following from the deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council, a curious event took place in Spain about which little was heard in the Middle East: “Casa Árabe” (Arabian House), an international institute on Arabic and Islamic studies in Madrid and Cordoba, held a series of conferences called “The Arab Springs in Evolution”, in which different experts analyzed the evolution of political changes in the Middle East.

It was particularly interesting that the title itself pointed to the fact that Arab Spring is not only one but many different springs and that the world “evolution” was used, echoing the words of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy from 1963: “Revolution and Evolution are but two parts of the same process. You cannot have one without the other.” As it is always the case with expert analysis on the Middle East, we are already used to the absence or rather passing reference of Yemen and surprisingly this wasn’t the case.

On December 14 and 15 an interesting panel on Yemen titled “Yemen: Contestation and Creation. The Revolution Inside” was hosted by Spanish researcher Anahi Alviso-Marino, researcher at the Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sana’a (CEFAS), who lived in Yemen since 2009 until she was evacuated to Oman in March 2011 in the course of the violent uprising. She has been working on the connection between artistic creativity with social and political activism.

In this context, she published an interesting article on art magazine Nafas in April 2011, dealing with social change in Yemen as seen through the work of Yemeni artist Amna Al Nassiri and her installation “Hisarat”, presented in Sana’a in February 2010. At the time, Ms. Alviso-Marino argued that the installation, even though it received harsh criticism from the local art scene, would have been seen differently today because it anticipated the way in which people began occupying public space in Sana’a demanding reforms and revolutionary change.

In the words of Al Nassiri from 2010 commenting on the crude reception of her work: “They feel the danger of this change, they don’t want changes in art in the same manner that they don’t want changes in their lives, in their societies.” Today obviously it has become clear that the change is wanted and that people are striving for it in spite of great adversity, even though it is clearly dangerous because a revolution implies not only a transition of political systems but a change in the way we live.

The reflections of Ms. Alviso-Marino in Spain were poignant on highlighting this with a critical eye: The desire for reform embodied by the Yemeni uprising seems to be somewhat stranded on practical demands of the political kind while the social structure hasn’t been necessarily questioned. This happens to be the case with nearly all of the Middle Eastern uprisings and the consequences are visible already in the difficult transitional politics of Libya, Egypt and Tunisia.

However, the case of Yemen stands out – paradoxically – as a case in which the uprising did not create a public space for politics and art for the first time, but rather, seized upon an existing public space and vastly expanded it. Mobilizations took place in the country in 2006 and 2009, a certain freedom of expression existed in a variety of critical media and works of poetry, fiction, painting and photography among others, predated the revolution introducing themes that were not necessarily traditional. Cases in point are of course the work of Al Nassiri, and also that of cartoonist Kamal Sharaf. These pre-existing themes gained nevertheless newer and deeper surfaces in the course of 2011 when they were integrated into innovative elements of contestation and protest.

Even though revolutionary art – if such terminology is adequate – sprouted in nearly every country in the region, in Yemen it was a central element of protest with the now famous tent cities, in the form of posters, paintings, drawings, stencils, graffiti and the like, that were used not only by the revolutionary youth but also by the government. Artistic production included not only fine arts but also photography, music – with genres as surprising as hip hop and reggae – and integrated particularly Yemeni icons and themes, as much as iconography from the larger Arab Spring inspired by Tunisia and Egypt.

The unique role of art in the uprising was photo-documented in June by Atiaf Alwazir and traveled all over the globe through blogs and other online venues, highlighting the role of online media and the Internet in the revolution. The variety of art works were meant not only as documentation of the historical momentum but offered above all an inflected narrative with a particular message in which taboos – at least political ones – were lifted and opened the way for a wholly new style not only of art but of political and social conversation. Later this narrative was also translated into short documentary films.

Overall Ms. Alviso-Marino’s presentation was the most complete documentation to date of the role played by art in the Yemeni uprising under extraordinarily unique circumstances, and even though it is still little known, it is available in Spanish from the Internet.  It cannot be underestimated that a great effort was put into action by an unprecedented number of Yemenis that took to the streets not only to demand reforms and rights, but to engage in styles of political conversation that while were not new to them, only now gained dimension in the public space.

The recovery of the public space through art is without doubt one of the great achievements of the Yemeni revolution and is grounded in pioneer work done by independent Yemeni artists – at the risk of disapproval and censorship – in the past decades. Small as the artistic production has been, it has set the foundation for a larger and richer zone of freedom that is not exclusively political.

Yemen’s battle against Qat

Published first at BIKYAMASR

“Qat, the cursed plant in Yemen,” was the headline in a five-part series published by the Yemen Times in 2010, documenting extensively the social problems associated with qat chewing in the country.

The practice goes back thousands of years, was widespread in the region long before the arrival of coffee, and it was first documented by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a Persian scientist, who offered a description of it in his medical treatise “Kitab al-Saidala fi al-Tibb” in the 11th century.

It is thought that the plant was brought from Ethiopia because the works of Yemeni writer Hamdani, who documented extensively many aspects of his country in the 10th century, makes no mention of it.

Western images of Yemen never miss a reference to it, often charged with Romanticism, even though there is very little romantic about it and in modern times, it has become a major obstacle for social development in the impoverished nation.

Every travel guide informs travelers about the practice and one of them even offers an encouraging generalization:

“While not a food per se, something else to put in one’s mouth is the qat leaf. This is the Yemeni social drug and is chewed by almost all of the population from after lunch until roughly dinner time. The plant is cultivated all over the country, and most Yemenis are more than happy to offer visitors a branch or two. Actually chewing qat is something of an art, but the general idea is to chew the small, soft leaves, the soft branches and to build up a large ball of the stuff in a cheek”.

There exists a whole culture around qat-chewing and is embodied in the Yemeni institution of the “mafresh” or qat houses, that exist all over Yemen, some open to the public while some others operate as private clubs with membership fees. While the “mafresh” is a male, urban middle class institution, it is not exclusive, and is also used by many at home.

Qat is also part of the local business culture and Yemeni women do it as well during the “tafrika” or afternoon visit that begins following afternoon prayers. During the “tafrika”, held in private homes, they take off their veils, share snacks and many of them also chew qat.

But the reality is that qat-chewing has been for so long associated with health hazards, drains on the household budget, disincentive to the local production of food crops and an obstacle in economic development. Chronic consumption of qat leads to great social and economic damage to individual and community, great loss of working time, overspending and malnutrition.

Qat induces mild euphoria and a state of excitement, makes people become talkative and more relaxed. However, the cathine contained in qat leaves, has been classified by researchers as an amphetamine-like substance that can induce manic behaviors, hyperactivity, dilated pupils and constipation, together with increased heart rate and blood pressure.

There might be also withdrawal symptoms, including mild depression, irritability and nightmares, among others. Long-term use is associated with liver failure, tooth darkening, ulcers and sexual impotence. Following from all of the above, it was classified in 1980 by the World Health Organization as a drug of abuse that can produce mild to moderate psychological dependence.

The strain caused by qat is not only social but also agricultural: In a country with reduced food production and little water available, the cultivation of qat – the most cultivated plant in Yemen – consumes much of the country’s agricultural resources. It is estimated that close to half of the country’s water supply is used irrigating qat and that one “daily bag”- that can be consumed by one person in one day – requires over 500 liters of waters to produce.

Even though scholars everywhere – including the West – have declared the use of qat against Islamic law, it would be worthwhile remembering that in Yemen as early as the 16th century, Zaydi and Shafi scholars ruled that consumption of qat was permissible to Muslims. Yemeni Jews are also known to consume it.

The attitude of the government was generally negative and as early as the 1930’s there were a variety of initiatives sponsored by the authorities to clamp down qat consumption, however the state received very substantial income from taxing crops and sales of qat, at the same time that it produced higher income to farmers than vegetables or fruits. Inside Yemen’s tribal order, many tribal farmers turned to qat cultivation that they considered of higher status than vegetables and fruits, often cultivated by people of lesser status.

The degree to which qat is part of the tissue of Yemeni society can be seen in the United Kingdom and Israel, with Yemeni exiles: Substantial quantities of qat are imported into the UK and in Israel, it is not only that the old generation of Yemeni Jews still chew locally-grown qat but also that the young generation consume it in the form of a drug nicknamed “Hagiga” in Hebrew (party) that is a cocaine-resembling stimulant, considered illegal and that is well known in Tel Aviv night life, together with other recreational drugs, now used also by non-Yemenis too.

According to members of the Yemenite and Ethiopian communities in Israel, the habit is harmless and ordinary, but yet in an interview with an environmental magazine in 2010, a Yemeni woman in Israel is reported to have said: “Qat is the bane of Yemen. The husbands go to the souk and spend all their money on it, while their wives and kids go hungry at home”.

As early as 1972, a Yemeni writer, Hussain Abdallah al-Dhamari, wrote that “qat is anti-revolutionary and a major factor in the long isolation of the country”.

In 2007, long before any indication of a revolution, an organization named “Generations without Qat” was set up in Yemen, authorized by the Ministry of Social Affairs, with the purpose to educate people about the tragic fate of qat consumption. In line with the great protest art to be found in Yemen since the 1960’s, many cartoons and posters have been produced to raise awareness about this problem.

It has been reported recently for example that in 2009, Yemeni soldiers used qat while battling Houthi rebels in the north of the country, and in 2011, in spite of the country having increase qat taxes by 200% and placed a ban on public consumption, the practice is still as widespread as always and as normalcy begins to return, farmers turn to qat cultivation once again.

On an interesting note, Shelagh Weir, a noted British anthropologist and expert in Yemen, who wrote the first academic study on qat in the early 1980’s, has pointed out in a recent book from 2007, “A tribal order: politics and law in the mountains of Yemen” – perhaps the best modern study on Yemen – that there is a tendency in Yemeni society that as prosperity and wealth increases, so does consumption of qat, rather than the other way around.

That being said, qat poses a terrible threat to the future of a post-revolutionary Yemen, and even though there are many bent on its continued use, a very large number of Yemenis have protested the tradition of qat for a long time now.

The argument that because it is a cultural tradition it should be maintained, can no longer hold in a world in which under the rubric of tradition, entire nations have justified xenophobia, violence against women, homophobia, theft, corruption and the like. The widespread cultivation is extraordinarily non-sustainable for a country that needs to be fed, grow its own food sources and all of that with very limited water resources, even though it is a very fertile land in which the possibilities for agricultural development and autonomy depend on stopping the dependence on qat.

Western analysts in previous decades have pointed out for example that qat is the building block of the Yemeni identity or that qat chewing acts as the replacement of the public sphere in Yemen. These studies, however interesting, must be dismissed now that it has been proven how art and deliberation are practiced in Yemen in the public space and that identity has become a concept by all means contested. Priorities should be placed on the social and economic sustainability of a practice now very well known to affect negatively the life of many.

On January 12, through social media, Yemenis are organizing an event called “I want Yemen to change – I will not store Qat”. This event, organized by Hind Aleryani, a Yemeni activist based in Beirut and who made headlines with the “Shame Reuters” campaign, is a call for all Yemenis, wherever they are, to say no to qat, to not store any qat and to protest the cultivation and consumption of qat. International organizations should watch for this event and support the people of Yemen in making a transition that is much more difficult than any political process: That of building a new country in which the widespread cultivation and consumption of qat can be eventually replaced.

To be sure, it would be naïve to assume that this will happen overnight and that a large amount of financial resources will not be needed to make it possible, but it is important to raise awareness in all segments of civil society in Yemen and abroad, for the continued use of qat in Yemen will only slow the process of the revolution infinitely. Yemenis have proven to be capable of many things, and even though qat might be one of the greatest stumbling blocks in the social structure, the stakes for long-term change are very high.

Winds of Goodness: Emirati lenses into Afghanistan

First published at BIKYAMASR

At the end of August 2011, a short documentary was screened at the Ramadan Majlis of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the United Arab Emirates.

That this is how the film began its career with the public is hardly surprising, for what we are dealing with here is a self-produced documentary film about the work of the armed forces of United Arab Emirates in Afghanistan since 2003.

No doubt a measure of caution about the practice of institutional film is very much in place. Short documentaries of this sort are produced on a daily basis by government agencies, corporations and political organizations with the aim to persuade, promote an agenda or ultimately sell something.

In the Middle East, even though the practice of institutional film as a vehicle of propaganda is not too sophisticated, as it was under totalitarian regimes in Europe, it is not entirely unheard of:

In Syria in 2003, a private film company created a 29-part TV series Ash-Shatat (“The Diaspora”) originally aired in Lebanon in 2003 and broadcasted by Al-Manar (a network owned by Hezbollah). The series is based on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and shows the Jewish people as engaging in a conspiracy to rule the world, presenting them as people who murder Christian children, drain their blood and use it to make unleavened bread.

Other less egregious examples come to mind, for example when in 2008 Yemen’s Interior Ministry sponsored the production of “The Losing Bet”, a film produced by Fadl al-Olfi, to educate the public about the dangers of Islamist extremism. The film follows the fictional story of two Yemeni jihadists who return from abroad, sent by Al Qaeda to recruit new members and carry out terror attacks in Yemen.

The truth is that the use of films as vehicles of propaganda is nothing exclusive of totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, and it has been widely used in democratic countries: The earliest pioneer in this field was the “Committee on Public Information”, an independent agency of US government that existed from 1917 to 1919, and made use of every medium available – including movies – to promote war efforts and enlist public support for American participation in World War I.

“Mission: Winds of Goodness” on the other hand, is very surprising a documentary not only in the technical aspect but because of the human voice – rarely found in documentaries – with which the story of the Emirati armed forces in Afghanistan is told and because of its visual sobriety, all of which fall short of the usual format of the institutional documentary and aim at the kind of atmosphere that is found more in commercial television than in documentaries.

Directed by David Eberts and Khaled bin Lahej Al Falasi, and filmed both in Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates, “Mission: Winds of Goodness” is not the kind of epic warmongering tale, circumscribed to the usual narrative that war is the continuation of politics by other means and it resorts to no heroic or agonistic narrative to justify military intervention as a political principle, but rather, highlights the work behind the scenes of the UAE armed forces in delivering humanitarian aid and fostering development in remote regions, particularly in the town of Maruf, in the province of Kandahar.

The kind of war and conflict journalism that was so harshly criticized by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the pain of others”, seems to be entirely absent from this film: “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called “news,”, features conflict and violence – “If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.”

There is little journalistic about the film, and though there is a narrator – in this case, the voice of Michael Ironside – one could easily think that it is more a narrative film than a traditional documentary, enhanced by an excellent cinematography blended in with personal stories of Afghans and soldiers.

And this is of particular interest when we bring up the images, documentaries and reports that have appeared in recent years in Western media related to Afghanistan. It is not only the vast majority of documentaries that have lived up to each and every word implied by Sontag’s criticism of war journalism, but also the written reportages, including those that appeared in the all-time famous Rolling Stone:

In June 2010, the famous and long interview of Michael Hastings with General Stanley McCrystal about the failure of American policy in Afghanistan, and then the extremely graphic report of Mark Boal in March 2011, that brought in full view the war crimes perpetrated by American soldiers on the Afghan people that offered very little commentary to match the brutality of the images displayed.

It is not that images of war as such can or should be censored – and the developments in the course of Arab Spring have shown that this is no longer possible – but it remains still true that in order to differentiate story-telling in journalism and films of any kind from reality, it is also necessary the safeguard the dignity of the participants involved.

The subtleties of respecting human dignity while reporting is what differentiates an opinion and meditation – which journalism and documentary always expounds – from an unmediated exposure to pornography of violence, by means of which, instead of increasing sensibility and awareness, the possibility of developing any sensibility whatsoever is stolen from the public.

The greatest example of this was not necessarily the Rolling Stone reports from Afghanistan but what took place in Iraq in 2003 with the photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the infamous Abu Ghraib. No matter the extent and gravity of the tortures demonstrably inflicted, it was possible for policy-makers to focus not on the moral disaster represented in them but in the complex process of dissemination of images, or in the words of Sontag: “The distinction between photograph and reality – as between spin and policy – can easily evaporate. And this is what the administration wishes to happen.”

Mere images and loyal reproductions of violence suffice to shock the public but do not lead anyone into having second thoughts. It is precisely here that “Mission: Winds of Goodness” is a very successful experiment in telling the story of something as politically controversial as intervention in Afghanistan without one single mutilated body, ransacked village, pond of blood or severed limb, as it is often the case with images of war in Western media and film – fictive and otherwise.

It is also the case that prior to this film, it was little known that another Muslim country – the UAE, and also in 2010 it was reported that 125 troops from Bahrain had been deployed to the Helmand province of Afghanistan – also participated in the military intervention and this brings up a whole new set of questions that challenge the binary opposition between West and East with which the whole discourse of military intervention and the war on terror is plagued since the very beginning.

This calls into question an incident from May 2011, when several media outlets reported that in November 2010, dozens of Colombian mercenaries were brought into the UAE by Erik Prince, founder of an infamous private security company, Blackwater Worldwide. At the time it was rumored that the UAE was gathering a private army to defend its own interests, keeping an eye on Iran and preventing a local uprising such as the one that took place in Bahrain.

According to some reports, former employees of Mr. Prince, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from all over the world, Mr. Prince had instructed his subordinates to follow an strict rule not to hire Muslims because according to them, Mr. Prince had warned them that Muslim soldiers could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

The story, interesting as it is, could be if not disproven, at least challenged by the public knowledge of Emirati participation in Afghanistan, in which of course, casualties have been reported and the soldiers have been targets of explosive devices planted in the area by the Taliban.

It is then no surprise that as much as the mercenary tale received immediate attention by a great deal of Western media, the documentary film did not receive any, and the book, released on January 1 2012, called “The Mission: Winds of Goodness”, a 224-page book, both in Arabic and English, chronicling UAE’s participation in the international operations in Afghanistan, and other parts of the world, is likely to receive as little attention.

The film captures some essential moments of the Emirati mission, for example the ability of draw trust in the local communities because of the shared Islamic heritage at the same time that it highlights the difficulties in extracting information from local informants in regard to threats and explosive devices, no less than Westerners would do.

The image that it paints is perhaps a little too rosy and difficult to match with the reality of the headlines coming out of Afghanistan on a daily basis, however, it is very viable as a film because it is not a vulgar exploitation of war and in it, nothing surfaces more prominently than the Afghan human stories that deserve to be heard without being strip of dignity and thrown into an abject superfluous state, the way in which contemporary journalism loves to expose them.

It represents an innovation in the unpopular genre of institutional documentaries of war and conflict and while it does not capture the controversial nature of Emirati presence in Afghanistan, it does shatter some myths about the relationship of the oil-rich emirate to the world around it and in doing that, it poses an extreme challenge to the traditional narratives of East and West or democratic and un-democratic.

Clearly the United Arab Emirates is not necessarily a text-book case for Western democracy, but documentaries such as “Mission: Winds of Goodness” give an indication of how the contemporary globalized world is a complex map of more or less authoritarian and more or less liberalized tendencies.

These tendencies can go in one direction or the other at a given time or another, and values such as “democratic” or “authoritarian” can be no longer held as absolute or sacrosanct. Every country, Western or not, is a mixture of those tendencies, influenced by the politics of the day, and filming its own history, each time differently.