from Photographers Blog:
In the darkest corner of my soul
By Dado Ruvic
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Bosnian war.
I was only three years old when the war broke out. Although I was only a child, I keep the dark images of horror, blood and the suffering inside me, buried deep in the darkest corner of my soul. I was only a child, but the memories of war will never fade away. It is something all of us carry as a burden on our souls, each every one of us in our own way.
Regardless of my memories, I try to do my job impartially and without any influences. I want to see things rationally. I want to cover the stories that matter; the stories that carry the message. I want to say and express what some people dare not say. The photos are not merely photos, they are tears. They are screams of the desolate despair. They are pain.
Libya war pushes Christian presence to the brink
The Christian church in eastern Libya, which traces its roots back two millennia to the era of Christ, is fighting for survival because war has forced nearly all its worshippers to flee. But Muslims in Libya’s rebel-held east are keen to show that Christians are still welcome, drawing a contrast with the Christian community’s turbulent history under Muammar Gaddafi, whose rule in the east was ended by mass protests in February.
At the Coptic church in Libya’s second city of Benghazi, the main rebel stronghold, bearded and robed Father Polla Eshak swings an incense burner among mostly empty pews for the worshippers who have not fled the fighting. Many Christians in Libya are Copts, an Egyptian sect, and the number going to Eshak’s church has shrunk to about 40 from over 1,000 before the revolt began.
Eshak says it is fear of war, not persecution, that caused the exodus of Christians, nearly all of whom are foreign farmers, builders, nurses and other workers vital to Libya’s economy.
“The revolutionaries are good to us. They are afraid for us more than their own people. There’s a lot of affection between us and Libyans,” said Redha Thabit, a Copt in Benghazi.
Evidence of Libyan Christian communities has been traced back to the century following Jesus’s birth. According to three of the gospels, it was Simon of Cyrene — an ancient coastal city lying in the east of today’s Libya — who helped to carry the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.
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Algeria War wounds still bleed in French politics
Nearly 50 years after Algeria won independence from France, the unhealed wounds of the war of decolonisation keep wrenching at French society and could play a key role in the 2012 presidential election.
The unending Algerian trauma explains why France finds it so hard to integrate its large Muslim minority, why second and third generation Muslims of Maghreb origin born in France often feel alienated from their country of birth, and why politicians continue to find fertile ground in their quest for votes.
“There is an endless battle of memory, both within France and between the French and the Algerians,” said Benjamin Stora, the leading French historian of the Maghreb.
In the last few weeks, a law has come into force banning the wearing of the face-covering Islamic niqab veil in public, and parliament is debating a bill to strip recent immigrants of their French citizenship if they commit certain serious crimes.
Both measures were part of an offensive by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to woo voters hostile to immigration, many of whom believe France has too many Arabs and Muslims.
Germans atone for Holocaust with “stumble stones”
The metal plaques, called Stolpersteine, or “stumble stones,” are set into the ground at my father’s ancestral home in this picturesque village south of Frankfurt.
The squares, 10 cm by 10 cm (4 inches by 4 inches), are barely conspicuous, but the words etched in brass seem to cry out for memory of the home’s last five Jewish inhabitants.
As autumn sunlight bounces off the plaques, I recall a time nearly 75 years ago when the five, all relatives including my father, were driven from here by Nazi anti-Semitism. Four fled Germany; the fifth died in a concentration camp.
The creation of Cologne artist Gunter Demnig, the Stolpersteine are set at homes of victims of Nazi prejudice. They aim to trip the memories of passers-by of long-gone targets of discrimination, mainly Jews but also homosexuals, the disabled, dissidents and Gypsies.
By tying a victim’s fate to a capsule biography, told in a kind of Haiku, the “stumble stones” seek to reduce the epic scale of the Holocaust to a more comprehensible human story.
Christians in Lebanon fret despite privileged role
After a panicky mass flight from his Christian village, Sami Abi Daher watched from across the valley as Syrian-backed Druze fighters burned and looted it. That was back in 1983 when battles forced tens of thousands of Christians from their homes in the Aley and Shouf hills near Beirut in a bloody postscript to Israel’s 1982 invasion.
Abi Daher, a former Christian militiaman, has never returned to live in his village, Rishmaya, instead working and bringing up his three children in a Christian district of Beirut.
Twenty years after the 1975-90 civil war, Christians formally enjoy a reduced but still disproportionate weight in Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system. While under no specific threat, as a community they are weak and divided.
“There isn’t anywhere else in the Middle East that has a Christian president,” says Abi Daher. “Just as well. If the Muslims had ruled, imagine what would have become of us.”
Yet he denies that Muslims pose any peril for Christians, who number perhaps a third of Lebanon’s five million people, but are guaranteed half the seats in parliament, as well as the posts of president and army commander. “There’s no problem between us and the Sunnis and Shi’ites… The problem is with the politicians of course.”
Read the full story here. See also our factbox on Christians in the Middle East and analysis Vatican synod to mull Middle East Christian exodus.
Iraqi Christians flee homeland even as war fades
Bassam Hermiz has slashed prices to clear his stock of electrical appliances, close his shop and join many thousands of other Iraqi Christians abroad. Once numbering some 750,000 in this mainly Muslim country of 30 million, Christians have been trapped in the crossfire of sectarian strife ignited after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship in 2003.
Alarmed that their flock could face extinction, Iraqi Christian leaders appealed to the Vatican for help. Pope Benedict, also worried about the shrinking Christian presence in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, has called a synod of bishops for October 10-24 to discuss how churches can work together to preserve Christianity’s oldest communities.
Post-invasion bloodshed and chronic insecurity have spooked Iraqi Christians, many of whom feel they have no future here. “We decided to leave after we lost hope of living in peace in Iraq. It was not our choice,” said Hermiz, the shopkeeper who is taking his family from the volatile northern city of Mosul to Holland, where his brother already lives.
Pope, ending his British trip, recalls Nazi terror in WW2
Pope Benedict on Sunday expressed “shame and horror” over the wartime suffering caused by his German homeland and said he was moved to mark the 70th anniversary of a key air victory with Britons.
On the last day of a four-day visit to Britain that drew the biggest protest march of any of his foreign trips, the pope also beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of the most prominent English converts from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.
The pope was seen off from the airport by Prime Minister David Cameron who said Benedict had challenged the “whole of the country to sit up and think” about issues such as social responsibility during his four-day state visit.
On Sunday, Britain commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the air conflict that doomed Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain. “For me as one who lived and suffered through the dark days of the Nazi regime in Germany, it is deeply moving to be here with you on this occasion, and to recall how many of your fellow citizens sacrificed their lives, courageously resisting the forces of that evil ideology,” the pope said in his sermon to more than 50,000 people attending the open-air mass.
“Seventy years later, we recall with shame and horror the dreadful toll of death and destruction that war brings in its wake, and we renew our resolve to work for peace and reconciliation wherever the threat of conflict looms.”
In the early 1940s, the former Joseph Ratzinger was briefly a member of the Hitler Youth when membership was compulsory. During the war, he was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery in Bavaria and then sent to Austria. After returning to Bavaria, he deserted and, at the end of World War Two, he was a U.S. prisoner of war. The pope has said that as devout Catholics, his parents rejected Nazi ideology.
The Pope says, “For me as one who lived and suffered through the dark days of the Nazi regime in Germany, it is deeply moving to be here with you on this occasion, and to recall how many of your fellow citizens sacrificed their lives, courageously resisting the forces of that evil ideology,”
But did not the Papacy justify the evil ideology of the Nazi regime to such an extent that they facilitated the escape of the perpetuators of war crimes to South America via the Rat Line. For in July, 1997, a documentary film crew discovered a US government document stating that the pro-Nazi Croatian Ustachis sent gold coins worth 250 million Swiss francs to the Vatican which was later used to finance the “rat line” of fleeing Nazi leaders to sanctuary in Spain and Argentina.
After all the Scriptures say, Pro:17:15: “He that justifies the wicked, and he that condemns the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD.” How can the Papacy justify the righteous in words, the British and Allies, but the wicked, the Nazi SS, in deeds.
Factbox: Roots of Yemen’s conflict with northern Shi’ite rebels
Yemen announced a truce with northern Shi’ite rebels on Thursday, aimed at ending a war that has raged on-and-off since 2004 and that drew in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, a Yemeni official said.
The conflict with the northern rebels, who complain of social, religious and economic discrimination in the southern Arabian state, intensified last year. A truce was to start at midnight on Thursday, the official said.
The Yemeni rebels are known as the Houthis after the family name of their leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. Here is some background about the Houthi rebels:
WHO ARE THE HOUTHIS?
* The Houthis, like most tribesmen in Yemen’s northern highlands, belong to the Zaidi sect of Shi’ite Islam, whose Hashemite line ruled for 1,000 years before a 1962 revolution. * Zaidis, who make up about a third of Yemen’s 23 million people, have coexisted easily with majority Sunnis in the past, but Badr al-Din al-Houthi, a cleric from the northern province of Saada, promoted Zaidi revivalism in the 1970s, playing on fears that Saudi-influenced Salafis threatened Zaidi identity. * After north and south Yemen united in 1990, the movement spawned the al-Haq party and the Houthi-led Believing Youth group. Houthi’s son, Hussein, was elected to parliament in 1993. Saada remained neglected economically by the Sanaa government.
* President Ali Abdullah Saleh, himself a Zaidi, at first used the Houthis to counter-balance the Salafi groups. The government later portrayed Believing Youth as a fundamentalist group, out to subvert the state and restore the Zaidi imamate. * After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, Saleh declared support for Washington’s “war on terror”, in part to enlist U.S. support against the Houthis, whom Yemeni officials accused of having links to al Qaeda, Iran or Lebanon’s Hezbollah. * The Houthis say the government, with U.S. and Saudi backing, is targeting Zaidis in general, forcing them to take up arms to defend their villages against oppression.
HOW HAS THE CONFLICT UNFOLDED?
Thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Theology Prize speech
If there were a Nobel Prize for Theology, large parts of President Barack Obama’s Oslo speech could be cut and pasted into an acceptance speech for it. The Peace Prize speech dealt with war and he made a clear case from the start for the use of force when necessary. While he began with political arguments for this position, his rationale took on an increasingly religious tone as the speech echoed faith leaders and theologians going back to the origins of Christianity.
It started with a hat-tip to Rev. Martin Luther King when he said “our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice” – echoes of King’s 25 March 1965 Montgomery speech saying “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Obama then went into the “just war” theory that says war is justified only if it is a last resort or self-defense, if force is proportional to the threat and civilians are spared if possible. This is a classic Christian doctrine elaborated by Saint Augustine in the fifth century and then by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th. In 2003, Pope John Paul II used this doctrine to justify his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Obama noted that this doctrine was “rarely observed” but called for new ways of thinking “about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace … Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.”
The president used the “just war” theory to put a theological interpretation on Islamist militancy, saying that “no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint — no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or even a person of one’s own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but the purpose of faith.”
Then came the echoes of the man Obama has called one of his favourite thinkers, the 20th century American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The whole speech had a tone that American political commentators like to call Niebuhrian, either in its phrasing or its tough mix of political realism and moral thinking. For example:
– “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes”– Obama (” Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime” — Niebuhr).
– “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people” – Obama (We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power — Niebuhr).
This Peace Nobel Price is a bad joke and when it comes to peace in the Middle East Obama is just a laugh.
If he thinks “ that war is justified only if it is a last resort or self-defense, if force is proportional to the threat and civilians are spared if possible. “ how could he not criticise Israel’s latest military offensive which left more than 1200 Palestinians dead 400 of which children under 16?
This Israeli offensive was clearly disproportionate since Palestinian rocket attacks throughout the years (2004-2008) only killed 16 Israelis (see Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site – http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obs tacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+since+ 2000/Victims+of+Palestinian+Violence+and +Terrorism+sinc.htm) . Nonetheless, when asked what he thought about the Israeli attack Obama answered Israel had a right to defend itself against rocket attacks and forgot the major issue of proportional force or respect for civilians.
I suppose Obama is just “facing the world as it is” and therefore he realises he is unable to oppose the American Jewish lobby and criticise Israel. Laughable?
from Afghan Journal:
Afghanistan: the Gods of war
[CROSSPOST blog: 27 post: 4308] Original Post Text: In openDemocracy, Paul Rogers writes that one of the great mistakes of the media is that it tends to assume the only actors in the campaign against Islamist militants are governments, with al Qaeda and the Taliban merely passive players.
"Beyond the details of what the Taliban and its allies decide, it is important to note that most analysis of Barack Obama’s strategy published in the western media is severely constrained by its selective perspective. There is a pervasive assumption - even now, after eight years of war - that the insurgents are mere “recipients” of external policy changes: reactive but not themselves proactive," he writes.
"This is nonsense - and dangerous nonsense. It would be far wiser to assume that these militias have people who are every bit as intelligent and professional in their thinking and planning as their western counterparts. They have had three months to think through the Obama leadership’s policy-development process; and much of this thinking will be about how the US changes affect their own plans - not how they will respond to the United States. Thus they may have very clear intentions for the next three to five years that are embedded in detailed military planning; and what is now happening on their side will involve adjustment of these plans in the light of the great rethink across the Atlantic."
So how will al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamist groups respond?
As discussed before in openDemocracy, and highlighted on this blog more than a year ago, the Taliban has been pretty good at studying the lessons of history, including taking inspiration from the Vietnamese war commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
It is reasonable to assume they have also studied the spillover of the U.S. war in Vietnam into Cambodia where the United States, reluctant to send in its ground troops, resorted to special ops and bombing campaigns to choke off the Vietcong's supply routes - rather as Pakistan now fears the Afghan campaign will spill into its territory as Washington tries to eradicate Afghan Taliban leaders and bases there. The ensuing chaos paved the way for the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.
It would be a step too far to suggest that the Afghan Taliban and their allies are set on taking over Pakistan. As it is, there is still a fierce debate on how far they are primarily Afghan nationalists who would settle for a return to power in Afghanistan and how far they have bought into al Qaeda's global Islamist agenda.
Anon which is more dangerous, a religious zealot or an empire seeking material gain?
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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