Sand story - Ukrainian artist conjures up war story in sand

I have just watched the amazing sand animation by Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova for Ukraine’s Got Talent. She uses a giant light box, haunting music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII.

She seems totally absorbed in her story. She uses sometimes large movements, her whole body almost dancing, sometimes short and precise fingers strokes. She throws sand, erases, starts again, adds just a few lines here and there and the whole atmosphere has changed. It is mesmerizing. It is amazing how she can conjure up a whole story and create feelings of love, hope, dread, fear and unbearable paint with sand. It is beautiful and very powerful, and although she is telling a precise story, it is also a universal one.

Iran - petition against the execution of five protesters

The media’s attention has moved away from the aftermath of the post-election unrest in Iran, but hundreds of protesters remain in prison, some have been sentenced to death, and for at least five, execution is imminent.

Those sentenced to death have been forced to confess their involvement in the unrest, yet some of them were already in prison during the election and the subsequent riots, according to a group of ex-political prisoners.

The group is circulating a petition urging Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations to intervene and put pressure on the Iranian authorities to prevent the execution of the condemned five.

They fear that these executions might herald mass massacres of political prisoners as it was in the case in the summer of 1988.

The petition is being circulated in Farsi, English, German, French and Spanish. To sign it, click here

N0 waiting for Copenhagen – African children say, Act Now

In the run-up to the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December, I wanted to look at the point of view of children in Africa. They have contributed the least to climate change, but are the worst affected by it. They are also leaders of change: studies have shown that well educated and informed children are often more willing than their parents to adapt and change in order to fight climate change.

“You people in the first world, can you please fix the hole in the ozone layer?” asks 10-year-old Joseph Davies, from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to school children in the UK through a video link. Across Africa, children like Joseph have contributed the least to climate change, yet they already have to deal with the consequences.

Over the last few years, their communities have faced seasonal drought, flooding, landslides, thunderstorms, heat waves and other natural disasters. This has led to failing crops, water shortage and diseases - and children, being more vulnerable, are hit the hardest. The resulting increased poverty has a shattering impact on their education and future.

In Malawi’s Ezondweni farming community, people used to start planting crops in November, but now they have to plant in December or January because of the longer dry season. “This means we harvest later and less,” says Christophe Koroma, 18. “The longer and hotter dry spells also cause crops and trees to die and this causes famine in our community. For me, the changes mean that there can be no food to eat at times. My education suffers as I cannot concentrate at school.”

Yet, Christophe and thousands of other children across Africa aren’t feeling sorry for themselves. They are full of optimism and ideas on how to tackle these threats to their communities.

“I am not too young to worry about climate change”

“We are the future leaders and we need to protect the environment we live in,” Nyakeh Vandy Konteh, 13, says in a telephone interview from the Eastern part of Freetown. “I am not too young to be worried about climate change, simply because if this trend continues unchecked, nobody will be able to live in this environment.”

Nyakeh and 30 other pupils from the Albert Academy School in Freetown have formed the Albert Academy Young Activists on Climate Change, a club involved in research, education and action on climate change.

On field trips, they have learned that the major cause of flooding in their area was deforestation, so they have launched a campaign to convince community members to stop cutting trees and plant new ones. “I have participated in debates, radio discussions and drawing posters,” says Nyakeh, who is the chair of the club.

They have established a solid waste management system, digging waste disposal pits and starting a recycling programme. And they have planted trees on their school compound and the local community. “We have planted Acacia trees because they are fast growing and can serve as wind breakers, prevent erosion and provide timber, and fruit trees like mango, orange and apple, so we’ll have fruits to eat during lunch.” In addition, they are also working with the Ministry of Education to include climate change on the geography curriculum, using local examples, and pushing for more stringent regulations on deforestation.



“They pick up things we don’t see”

Across Africa, thousands of children are involved in similar work. In many African countries, children traditionally are seen, but not heard, but this is slowly changing. “We welcome what the children do. They pick up on things that we don't see,” says an elder in Falaba, Moyamba District in Sierra Leone, where children worked on renovating a well. “The children are aware and take action. They identified the well as a problem, but the adults had just accepted it. Now we work together with them.”

Nyakeh and his friends’ decided to take action after learning about climate change through “Make the Link, Be the Change”, an international climate change education programme, run by Plan, a leading children’s humanitarian organization. The project links 100 schools in 12 countries in the UK, Asia and Africa, so children can share ideas and strategies about preventing the worst effects of climate change.

Ten years ago in Kyoto, children’s issues were not on the agenda and their voices were not heard. “It is critical that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 puts children at the heart of the discussions and includes their voices in the debates,” says David Bull, UNICEF UK executive director.

Involving children in the fight against climate change is invaluable, adds Nick Hall, head of Disaster Risk Reduction at Plan UK. “Young people are more willing to change and make their lives safer than adults who are more entrenched in their ways and more fatalistic."

My Neighbour Goes to the Zoo - violence and its legacy

In my last post, I wrote about “The Tree That Remembers,” a moving documentary by Masoud Raouf about political prisoners who have been tortured in prison in Iran and the impact it has on their lives.

How can you go on living when you have been subjected to unbearable pain or injustice at the hands of fellow human beings? It is a question that haunts me. I have asked it to many people all over the world. Here two survivors of the Iran 88 massacre share their answers:

Amir Atiabi says: “You have to live with this legacy, you carry an unbearable burden, you cannot know peace until you can share this pain with the rest of humanity. You cannot concentrate on your own life: carrying this burden takes all your energy, it slows you down, it crushes you.”

Mahin, another survivor, explains: “I am involved in two contradictory lives. My external life at work, in socialising, entertaining, etc. is filled with joy, activity and optimism. My inner life, however, is filled with stories that cannot be shared with others. Speaking about the prison, executions and the wounds of that period makes me sad and crumpled.

Most people do not have the patience to listen to such stories! The prison and the massacre have strengthened my tendency towards solitude, loneliness and ridiculing death from within. The memories of the prison are at the same time distant and near.”

The legacy of the violence is always there, just below the surface, and crops up even in the most unlikely circumstances, as the Iranian poet Majid Naficy wrote in his latest poem, first published in Iranian.com.

My Neighbor Goes to the Zoo

by Majid Naficy

My neighbor is going to the zoo

With her three grandchildren:

Mussa, who was born in Haifa

Of a Palestinian father and an Israeli mother,

Sees himself as the never-grown-up Peter Pan-

Sailing from the island of Neverland

With one eye green, one eye blue:

Gemini, a twin, who was born in America

And named after his father's lost friend,

Has a moonlight face and a red robe

And sees himself as Casper, the friendly ghost

Returning from the land of martyrs;

And Zahra, who is one minute younger than her brother,

Has soft, golden hair

And sees herself as Alice from Wonderland

Looking for her lost rabbit everywhere.

They are going to the zoo

To visit the crocodiles of the Nile river

Who, everyday after lunch

Lay back on the pebbly shores

And leave their mouths open for hours

So their companion birds can clean

Their sharp teeth and gums,

And when they want to return to the water

The crocodiles gently close their mouths

Lest surprise

Their tooth-brushing plovers.

Having no faith in earthly paradise

And being accustomed to war and bloodshed

I panic from so much co-existence in nature

And unwillingly shout:

My neighbor! My fanciful neighbor!

Keep your grandchildren around your skirt

Lest the warring crocodiles

Roll their armored tanks

And the Iron-winged birds

Drop clusters of bombs

Over their heads.

August 18, 2009

The Tree That Remembers

This weekend I went to “Iran – 21^st Anniversary Seminar” in London, a seminar commemorating the thousands of political prisoners executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran in the summer of 1988 and the 72 or more young people killed during the uprising following the June 12 election.

During the seminar, Masoud Raouf, an Iran-born painter and film director/producer who has lived in Canada since 1988, presented “The Tree That Remembers.” In this poignant documentary, he tries to understand what led to the suicide of an Iranian student who was living in Canada as a refugee. The film won the Silver Award for Best Canadian Documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival in Toronto, the Golden Sheaf Ward for Best Social Documentary at Yorkton and the Bronze Plaque at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

In 1992, a young Iranian student hanged himself from a tree on the outskirts of a small Ontario town. He had escaped the Ayatollahs' regime, but he could not escape his past. News of the young stranger's death hit home with filmmaker Masoud Raouf. He too is part of the generation of Iranians who rose up against the Shah's despotic rule during the 1979 revolution, but their hope quickly turned into despair as the equally murderous new regime persecuted them too. Thousands of political prisoners were executed by the Islamic regime in the 1980s in order to eliminate any opposition to the regime. This culminated in the mass massacre of more than 3,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988.

In the Tree that Remembers, Raouf assembles a group of Iranians - all former political prisoners like himself who were active in the democratic movement. The ex-political prisoners who have been tortured in prison, explain they have to build walls around themselves in order to survive. Their eyes have been opened to the capability of all mankind to inflict the most terrible evil. And this remains imprinted in them for ever. The only way to go on living with this unbearable burden is by sharing their stories, and that’s what they are doing. And that's what a growing number of filmmakers, artists, writers and ordinary people are doing.

The 21st Anniversary Seminar was organized by the Association of Iranian Political Prisoners (in exile) and and Prisoners of Conscience Appeal Fund

Never Forget Us - In Memory of Iran's Election victims

Just as Amnesty International is sending out warnings that victims of rape and torture by Iranian security forces are facing renewed risk, I’ve received a link for “never forget us,” a moving website documenting 72 confirmed victims killed by the regime for protesting the 12 June presidential election.

“In the summer of 2009, millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest a rigged election,” reads the webpage. “Many were shot, beaten or tortured to death. Despite government pressure, names and pictures of some of the fallen have emerged.

This is in their memory…”

The site opens on a view of masses of people protesting in front of the Azadi tower in Tehran. Some hold placards. On each placard is a photo of one of the 72 victims, and if a photo was not available, a flying bird. If you click on the picture, you can read a short bio of the victim and the circumstances of his/her death. Many were students with their whole lives in front of them, shot dead for participating in the protests or just chanting or only observing.

The list has been compiled from sources including The Guardian, Tehran.stanford.edu, ICHRI and Green Martyrs.

While you scroll from one victim to the other, you can listen to the beautiful and sad “Overture to NeyNava concerto” by Persian composer Hossein Alizadeh. You can also leave a tribute on the site.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International is concerned for the safety of the detained protestors after documents detailing abuses against them were confiscated.

Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said:

“The Iranian authorities appear more intent on finding the identities of those who claim to have been tortured by security officials than in carrying out an impartial investigation so that the perpetrators can be brought to justice.

“The Supreme Leader must intervene and ensure that there is no cover up of the grave abuses committed against those who challenge the official election result. In particular, he must ensure that victims of rape, torture and other abuses are fully protected against reprisals or further abuse at the hands of those who tortured them.”

"I want the world to know" - 21st anniversary of the 1988 massacre in Iran

In the coming days, families will gather on a derelict plot next to the cemetery of religious minorities in the district of Khavaran, in south-east Tehran. They call it ‘the rose garden of Khavaran’ – for a rose, in a culture where it is often safer to use poetry, represents a fallen freedom fighter. The Iranian leadership calls it the ‘place of the damned’ or the ‘cemetery of the infidels’. There, in unmarked mass graves, lie thousands of political prisoners killed by the Islamic regime.

Their families have been coming there early September – and at other times - for the past 20 years to commemorate what they call “the national catastrophe” - the biggest and most under-reported state crime in Iran’s modern history. Braving military harassment and sometimes arrest, they return to Khavaran again and again.

In July and August 1988, the Islamic regime had executed in secret thousands of political prisoners throughout the country – men, women and teenagers. They were intellectuals, students, leftists, members of opposition parties and ethnic and religious minorities. Many were jailed for no more than distributing leaflets, having a banned book or being accused by ‘a trusted friend of the regime’.

The slaughter was efficient and relentless. All day long, prisoners were loaded on forklift trucks and hanged from cranes and beams in groups of six at half-hourly intervals. Others were killed by firing squad. Those not executed were subjected to horrific torture. The killing was ‘an act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history, unprecedented in form, content and intensity,’ wrote the US historian Ervand Abrahamian in his book on Iranian prisons Tortured Confessions.

‘When they took me to the death committee in (Tehran’s) Gohardasht prison, the lobby was piled high with sandals, glasses and blindfolds. That’s all that was left of our friends. They are all gone and I am alive. Iam alive to tell their story. That is my only goal,’ says Mehdi Aslani, 52, who survived the massacre and now lives in exile in Germany.

The regime has never acknowledged the massacre, revealed how many were executed, nor why. Amnesty International has recorded the names of 2,800 victims, but survivors believe it was probably between 5,000 and 10,000. The execution of such a large number of people within such a short time, without any due process, violates many international human rights treaties to which Iran is signatory; yet the world has remained largely silent. Most of the perpetrators are still in power today. ‘Nobody has been brought to justice’ says Drewery Dyke, Amnesty’s Iran researcher. ‘Impunity for such appalling crimes only leads to further human rights abuses.’

The husband and two brothers of Rakhshndeh Hosseinpoor, now 56, were killed by the Islamic regime. She now lives in Germany with her son. ‘They have ruined so many lives. I’ve lost three members of my family, but some families have lost six or seven. So many children are without fathers and mothers, so many young widows, so much pain that never goes away... We need justice.’

‘We need people to know about the massacre of 1988 because it isn’t just the problem of the survivors and their families,’ says Reza Moini, another survivor, who works as a human rights activist in Paris. ‘It was a political act, a social act, not a private one. We need the truth for tomorrow’s youth.’

This post is based on an article I have written on the massacre for the New Internationalist. I have researched this topic for many years, gathered lots of evidence and documents, and interviewed a dozen survivors in Germany, the UK, Belgium, France and the US. I have yet to find a mainstream publication willing to run an in-depth article on the 88 massacre.