The Dream City is Tunis – part 1: The Maps of Dignity

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by Juliette Remond-Tiedrez

The Dream City festival is a Tunisian art festival that takes place every two years since 2007. All the events are somehow politically engaged as the festival “addresses and deals with the social and political realities of Tunis in a fragile global context”, including among others migration, democracy, human rights, environmental crimes and memory. More than 50 events, ranging from concerts to conferences to exhibitions and movies, can be attended in the heart of the capital’s medina. This series of 2 posts will present some of this year’s events. This first post addresses The Maps of Dignity exhibition which examines how the notion of dignity is common to uprisings and revolutions in the Southern Mediterranean, from Morocco to Palestine, since the 1950s.

The first three maps of the exhibition explored the lives of women married to men imprisoned during the Habib Bourguiba regime. Although the former dictator who was toppled by the 2011 Tunisian Spring, Zine Ben Ali, has been erased from the capital, his predecessor Habib Bourguiba is still very much present. There’s the Bourguiba avenue, the Bourguiba language school, his statue on a horse, and taxi drivers never fail to mention his reforms when they tell me how Tunisians are more educated and open-minded than their neighbors. It was the first time – but I haven’t been in Tunis that long – that I saw public criticism of his regime. The maps represented where the women live (in green), where they feel free (red lines), where they are loving and loved (dark blue lines), helped and supported (light blue lines) and controlled (black lines). The prison is on the bottom left. A voice explained over speakers that one of them, Houria (freedom in Arabic), actually married her husband while he was in prison, and would smuggle messages outside as he would write on cigarette paper that he would then hide in his clothing which she would pick up for washing.

The Maps of Dignity also expose a very different type of map. At first, I thought it was a game to keep children occupied while their parents toured the beautiful Dar Ben Achour. Rather, the game is for adults who seek to get social housing. In this even more depressing version of the Monopoly, players start on square 1: handing in their form requesting social housing. As they throw the dice to advance towards finding decent accommodation, they are confronted with endless difficulties. For example, your kids grew up and got married? That sounds like great news, except because housing is too expensive, they come back home and you end up sleeping on the kitchen floor. Ironically, but probably sadly true, the rules state that the game never ends.

The maps exposed are at the same time geographical, artistic, mathematical and to some extent legal as some remind one of the compilations of maps and pictures of individuals in police investigations movies. I like the idea of using maps, but I might be biased: we love maps so much that me and my partner have four in our shared office. Even if I am biased however, I felt that the visual of these maps made the uprisings and human rights violations clearer. A map of Tunis during the 2011 Arab Spring showed how widespread the protests were. In Houria’s case, we can see how her husband’s imprisonment affected her whole life, from her house in Tunis all the way to her family in Kelibia. A map by an asylum seeker whose claim kept being denied for 10 years showed how a very accessible part of the city for me – where I hang out with friends, have a run and take a swim – was for him forbidden territory as he could only mostly stay in the dorms allocated to migrants (in yellow “where we were” and in purple “where others were”, while the orange part is “inaccessible”). A lady hosting the exhibition told me that these maps were a way to illustrate the research they did on the uprisings, and I think they succeeded.

‘Art and Human Rights’: Book Launch

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INVITATION TO VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH

FRIDAY 9 JUNE FROM 4PM CET

‘Art and Human Rights – A Multicultural Approach to Contemporary Issues‘

Edward Elgar Publishing

Eds. Fiana Gantheret, Nolwenn Guibert and Sofia Stolk

Painting by artist Roula El Derbas https://www.roulaelderbas.com

  

Creating Rights is delighted to invite you to the launch of the book :

‘Art and Human Rights – A Multidisciplinary Approach to Contemporary Issues’

edited by Fiana Gantheret, Nolwenn Guibert and Sofia Stolk.

The book is available for pre-order at https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/art-and-human-rights-9781802208146.html

Where

Online. Please use the following link to attend the event, you will be automatically logged in: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89780697679?pwd=MDdkOVF1WkZqcEtER2o4SUdiVjlZUT09

Friday 9 June 2023 from 4pm CET to 6pm CET.

The book

The Book brings together experts in the fields of art, cultural heritage, social justice, human rights, international law, and transitional justice, and builds bridges between the notions of art and aesthetics, human rights, universality, and dignity. It explores a world in which art and justice enter a discussion to answer questions such as: can art translate the human experience? How does humanity link individuality and community building? How do human beings define and look for their identity? How artistic and cultural productions and rights contribute to answering these questions?

The readers will see vignettes of current debates in the fields of art and human rights, tackling issues at the confluence of these fields by providing a general framework and presenting  concrete case analyses.

Contributors to the book have tackled these debates in the following areas of interest:

PART I PEACE: THE RIGHT TO ART :  The Human Rights of Artists in the Pandemic; Right to Artistic Expression; Art and Social Justice.

PART II CONFLICT(S): Representation of Conflict Through Art; Art as a Catalyst in Times of War and Conflict; Art: A Target of Conflict.

PART III POST-CONFLICT APPROACHES: Art in non-judiciary Transitional Justice Mechanisms; International Criminal Justice and Art; Restitution of Cultural Property.

Programme

The event will start with opening remarks from the editors, and will be followed by a presentation by Dr Marina Aksenova, Assistant Professor, International and Comparative Criminal Law, IE Law School, Spain, who contributed the conclusion to the Book and will moderate the event. Contributors will then present their chapters as well as reflect on some of the issues addressed in the Book. The audience will then be invited to contribute to the discussion and to ask questions.

  • Editors

Fiana Gantheret is Consultant in International Justice and Human Rights, and the Founder and Director of Creating Rights, a non-for-profit organisation promoting Human Rights through Art.

Nolwenn Guibert is a Senior Legal Officer at an international organization, Geneva, Switzerland.

Dr Sofia Stolk, Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam,, The Netherlands.

  • Contributors

Marina Aksenova, Karima Bennoune, Bernadette Buckley, Alessandro Chechi, Laurence Cuny, Michael Danti, Predrag Dojčinović, Roula El Derbas, Fiana Gantheret, Sofia N. Gonzalez Ayala, Nolwenn Guibert, Germaine Ingram, Rachel Kerr, Cristina Lleras, Marina Lostal, Rose Martin, Hannah Partis-Jennings, Agnieszka Plata, Henry Redwood, Toni Shapiro-Phim, Elsa Stamatopoulou, Sofia Stolk, Kamil Zeidler, Shyrine Ziadeh.

Memory of a silenced community: Fighting Anti-Roma Attitudes through Art

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by Alicia Cotillas

December 9 is World Genocide Prevention Day, marking the anniversary of the UN Genocide Convention, which was adopted on this day in 1948 after the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, we remember the victims of genocide and the commitment to prevent future atrocities.

Today we also to bring attention to what the Forgotten Holocaust refers to.

European collective memory remembers The Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters of History. However, one episode was excluded from the history of World War II for decades: the Roma Genocide (Porajmos). Nazi Germany classified Roma people under the same category as Jews: “enemies of the race-based state” who were “racially inferiors”. The Nazis murdered an estimated 400,000 Roma. Only a minority survived. In post-war years, Romani continued facing persecution throughout Europe. For example, the Czech Republic and Slovakia sterilized around 90,000 Romani women against their will between the seventies and nineties. In addition, Germany did not pay war reparations to Romani survivors as it did to the Jewish victims. West Germany only recognized the crime as a racist act in 1982. As Open Society Foundations remarks, the lack of official acknowledgement of the genocide is directly linked to the long-standing discrimination against gipsy people in Europe.[1] But racism against Roma is nothing new. They are seen as low-achieving students, criminals, and low-skilled workers living in wagons. Since Romani have no country of their own, the perpetuation of these prejudices only makes harder their struggle to achieve a dignified life in the countries they live in. Most live in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and Russia.

At Creating Rights, we believe that educating ourselves about Roma history is crucial to raise awareness about silenced past atrocities, dismantle institutional racism, and create a safer future for Roma people in and outside of Europe. It is not acceptable that the biggest ethnic minority within the European Union keeps living on the margins of society.

Artistic expression is one of the ways through which Roma combats the anti-Romani sentiment and commemorates the Romani victims of the Holocaust. Since the field of Roma’s artistic memory is still evolving[2], I would like to bring to the forefront concrete cases of Romani who have drawn on the visual arts, film, and music to disclose emotions about both the traumatic past and the prevailing culture of Anti-Gypsyism.

Image: Frauenlager Ravensbrück (Ceija Stojka, 1993)/Flickr

This painting was made by Ceija Stojka, an Austrian-born Romani artist who survived three concentration camps. As a victim of mass atrocity, she depicted the reality she lived in more than 1,000 paintings. Stojka gave a voice to those of her kind who died or were persecuted both during the Nazi and post-war periods. In short, her art became a visual testimony of the Forgotten Holocaust and broke through the silence imposed by the strategic politics of forgetting.

Marika Schmiedt is another Austrian-Roma contemporary filmmaker concerned about unmuting the voices and testimonies of the victims of the Romani Holocaust. Her artistic-political work is relevant because it exemplifies how art can act as a transitional justice tool and “call the witness” of the genocide.[1] In her practice, Schmiedt unveils the long-term effects of the genocide in the lives of younger Roma generations; visible in the film-document Undesirable Society.

Polish-Roma artist Malgorzata Mirga-Tas also aims to break the silence on the Porajmos through art. She designed a wooden sculpture to commemorate the 29 Romani murdered by the Nazis in 1942. It was placed on the same site in the forest where the killing happened. The work was vandalized in 2016 and remade again.

However, most of politically committed Romani artists focus on denouncing the present-day social struggles and negative stereotypes that Roma face. A good example of an artist who uses art as a form of resistance is Albanian Sead Kazanxhiu. Concerned about the unjust treatment of his people, he uses public space to restore the dignity of Roma. 8 per 8 Prillin 2013  installation was placed in front of Albanian Parliament.

Roma aesthetics and visual culture is full of symbols that embody the spiritual and everyday life of their people. This is what fascinates English-born Romani artists Daniel Baker and Delaine Le Ban. Baker attempts to challenge pre-existing assumptions about Roma by re-contextualising the objects made by Roma artisans who do not label themselves as ‘artists’. Le Bas embraces her condition as ‘the other’ to explore the political potential of clothing and textiles.

Image: Witch Hunt (Delaine Le Bas)/Flickr

On the other hand, some artists with Roma origins do not define themselves as Roma artists. This is the case of Robert Gabris, an experimental Slovak artist who creates safe spaces for marginalised and queer people like himself. Similarly, Bosnian multimedia artist Selma Selman is inspired by her family background. She explores the role of women in Roma communities. In A Pink Room of Her Own, Selman reconstructs the memories of her mother, who got married at age 13, and designs for her the girly room of her childhood’s dreams.

Finally, I would like to name two female Spanish-Roma artists who have shown that those with a difficult past marked by their ethnicity can still become internationally renowned artists: Lita Cabellut and María José Llergo. Cabellut grew up on the streets of Barcelona as a Sinti orphan. Now, she is based in The Hague and her large-scale figurative paintings have been exhibited globally. In fact, she is the third most valued Spanish artist. María José Llergo is a 27-years old flamenco singer. She discovered her passion for music when her grandparents sang while they were working on the field. The song Me miras pero no me ves (“You look at me but you don’t see me”) is a cry of the trauma and invisibility suffered by Spanish “gypsies”.

In conclusion, Roma’s history of mass violence proves that when transitional justice fails, art has the power to disclose the anger and trauma of marginalised groups and raise awareness about genocide prevention. It is as necessary to learn from past atrocities as it is to get rid of prejudices about vulnerable communities in order to thrive as democracies. Roma people have been living in Europe for 600 years, yet they are still ‘the minority of the minorities’, living in the outskirts of cities and subject to exclusion and oppression. Their undeniable artistic and cultural record is a valuable tool to fight for change through self-expression and political storytelling about their truth. The artists mentioned here only represent a small number out of all Romani artists who openly embrace their ethnic identity to tell us their truth and reality through sharing their stories in their practice. On a day in which the lives of the victims of genocide are to be honoured and dignified, Creating Rights recognises the political relevance of stories conveyed by ethnic minority artists when the status-quo turns its back to serious societal and political issues.

[1] Open Society Foundations. “What is the Roma Genocide.” Accessed December 5, 2021.  https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/what-roma-genocide

[2] Maria Alina Asavei, Call the witness”: Romani Holocaust related art in Austria and Marika Schmiedt’s will to memory,” Memory Studies 13.1 (2020): 107-123.

Sources:

Asavei, Maria Alina, 2020. “Call the witness”: Romani Holocaust related art in Austria and Marika Schmiedt’s will to memory. Memory Studies, 13(1), 107-123.

Connolly, Kate. 2017. “’A place to call our own’: Europe’s first Roma cultural centre opens in Berlin”.The Guardian. Accessed December 6, 2021.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/08/roma-artists-launch-art-cultural-centre-institute-berlin

Open Society Foundations. 2019. “What is the Roma Genocide.” Accessed December 5, 2021. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/what-roma-genocide

REMEMBRANCE AND HOPE FOR SYRIA

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by Juliette Remond-Tiedrez

I mainly wanted to go the Institut du monde arabe (IMA – Arab world institute) last Monday to see Amal. Amal, which means hope in Arabic and is a female name, is the 3.5 meter puppet representing the millions of Syrian children having had to flee Syria and migrate to Europe. She started her journey in Gaziantep, a Turkish city bordering Syria, – like so many other Syrian refugees.

© The Guardian: Little Amal’s journey: the puppet that crossed Europe – in pictures

I wanted to combine seeing her with the IMA’s Special evening for Syria. Unfortunately when I came to the institute, Amal was already gone – turns out I misread the date of her departure from the IMA. Luckily I still had the Special evening for Syria which turned out to be a lot more emotional that I had expected.

The evening, which was dedicated to “not forgetting Syria”, combined speeches and musical performances in remembrance of all women (and men) detained in Syrian prisons.

The evening kicked off with a quick presentation by the two organisers, musician Naïssam Jalal and movie maker Hala Alabdalla. Ms Alabdalla, who didn’t want to be blinded by the spotlight while giving her presentation but instead wanted to be able to see the crowd, did her speech away from the light, in the dark. Her will not to put the focus on hersef, but rather on the cause, was also an obvious motivation behind her choice.

Garance Le Caisne gave a strong testimony. She is an independent journalist, and the only person to have met Caesar. Caesar is the code name of a Syrian military photographer who defected and leaked 53,000 photos of people killed by the regime and whom he was asked to photograph. Ms Le Caisne explained that families who discovered their loved ones in the so-called “Caesar files” found a sort of relief in it, because it meant they were finally at peace, that they were not being tortured anymore. At that moment her voice broke as she couldn’t continue. The families also felt relief from the fact that if they could recognize their loved ones, it means they were still recognizable despite being tortured…

Because all three testimonies were emotional, in their own different ways (Agnès Levallois discussed the geopolitical situation of Syria while Hana Jaber talked about the exclusion of Syrian children from Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian school systems), the musical breaks seemed necessary for the public to process them. La Chica’s choice of songs about feminism, woman power and American capitalism felt empowering as Sandra Nkaké’s focus on love was comforting.

The evening ended with a very powerful concert by Franco-Syrian flute musician Naïssam Jalal (she also hosted the event) who performed, among other songs, Almot Wala Almazala: death rather than humiliation. This slogan used to be chanted by protestors at the begging of the Revolution. However, as we know, ten years on, most Syrians who sang this slogan have known humiliation, death, or both.

Movies That Matter 2021 – Online

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By Fiana Gantheret, Director

On Friday 16 April will start the 2021 edition of the Movies That Matter festival. This Hague-based international movies festival offers the audience around 70 films in six competitions programmes. The mission of the festival is to “open eyes for human rights”, through “screening of human rights related films and the stimulation of screenings of human-rights films”. “De Kracht van Cinema” (“The Power of Cinema”) is the festival’s moto. This is because Movies That Matter is more than a festival. It is a non-or profit organisation with far-reaching initiatives designed to create awareness, educate, and sitimulate conversations on human rights issues accross the world. By buying a ticket or making a donation, you can support their work. The movie festival taking place in March every year is the peak activity of the foundation.

This year however, the festival had to be postponed to mid-April. This is because, like a lot of the festivals around the globe, adjustments had to be made in light of the pandemic of Covid-19. In March 2020, the Movies that Matter festival was one of the first human rights movies festival to be entirely cancelled. There was simply not enough time to make adjustments to allow the screenings to take place online. Since last year, some of the events were moved online, allowing the organizers to learn valuable lessons for the organization of the festival online this year. With the hope to retain some of the planned events offline, two parallel festivals were first conceptualised. However, in light of the Dutch government’s announcements, the festival was moved entirely online.

At Creating Rights, we feel a special connection to the Movies That Matter festival taking place every year in the international city of peace and justice, The Hague, which is also our home. We individually and collectively attended screenings at the festival, discovered topics and heroes, contributed as chair to a panel, engaged in conversations with other members of the audience, wrote about all this experience, for example here and here. We joined in events such as the masterclasses, danced in concerts taking place before the screenings in one of the locations of the festival, the vibrant Theater aan het Spui, and we cried attending awarding ceremonies. It is therefore important for us to try to hear the struggles and efforts of this organisation in staying alive and active during the pandemic.

Discussions around the difficulties, but also the advantages, of holding human rights movie festivals online, have been ongoing as early as April 2020 when the editions that year were cancelled. On the Human Rights Films Network‘s website, you can learn about how those who struggled before the pandemie can continue forward despite the cancellation, or how the cancellation and moving online affect the people whose very lives are depicted in the movies.

There are reasons to feel sad about the digitalization of entire festivals. We will be not be able to sit with an audience when watching powerful movies on issues that are both terrible and so close to our humanity. We will not be able to see these people’s faces when leaving the cinema hall, and to talk about our expreriences together, including with strangers. This experience is irreplaceable. Communities that had only had access to these movies because of the efforts of organizations like Movies that Matter will not be able to see them without access to internet. Also, the screening of most of the movies are geographically blocked and can only viewed from the geographic area in The Netherlands. However, this is understandable, given the needs of struggling film directors to be able to be part of multiple festivals.

There are some advantages also. For example, the Camera Justitia competition, shedding “a light on people who take matters into their own hands”, showing movies with “underdogs who stand up against corruption, inequality and discrimination in their fight for justice”, offers a Masterclass which will be accessible worldwide. This year’s Masterclass, taking place on 22 April at 16:00 is free of charge but you need to register. It will honour the carreer of Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji, the former President of the International Criminal Court who ended his term in March 2021. As part of the Camera Justitia program, you can also register for the Global Justice Cinema Workshop, an online workshop taking place on April 22-23 on documentary film and global justice, co-organised by T.M.C. Asser Instituut, VU Amsterdam & the Movies that Matter Festival, especially designed for an audience with a special interets in law.

Finally, as we did in the past, here is a selection of movies that Creating Rights takes a special interest in because of their depiction of issues closely linked to the power of art in human rights struggles, such as the infringement upon freedom of expression:

  • Scars, tells the story of Vetrichelvi, a female writer and poet – and a former Tamil Tiger, whose mission is to tell the stories of the many women and girls who fought for this militant group in the Sri Lankan civil war;
  • Josep is an animated feature by French cartoonist Aurel, about Spanish illustrator Josep Bartolí, who fled the Franco regime into France in 1939;
  • the Movies that Matter and Amnesty Masterclass will give on insight into the life of Nasrin Sotoudeh and the suppression by the authorities in Iran of the rights to freedom of expression.

There are a lot of interesting features, programmes, talks and competitions during the festival. The full program is here, and here is the list of workshops and masterclasses that will be accessible worldwide.

With special thanks to Dr Sofia Stolk of the Asser Instituut, Coordinator of the Camera Justitia program.

Music as a Healing Tool for the Yazidi Genocide Victims

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By Juliette Remond-Tiedrez

In their Acting Together on the World Stage documentary, Theatre Without Borders and Brandeis University argued that art could be used as a way to resist oppression, to reconcile, to raise awareness about human rights violations but also as a way to heal and to reconstruct oneself. Since I’ve watched the documentary, more than a year ago, I have never come across art used as a healing process – most of my Creating Rights articles are therefore focused on awareness-raising through painting, photography, or poetry. However, the Amar Foundation uses art, and in particular, music, to help the Yazidi community heal from the genocide they have suffered at the hands of the Islamic State.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish speaking minority from the Sinjar area, in Iraq and Syria. They do not, however, identify as Kurdish as they have a different religion – Kurds are mostly Muslims while Yazidis follow Yezidism. The most famous Yazidi activist is Nadia Murad, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. She won the prize “for [her] efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”.


Nadia Murad and her lawyer, Amal Clooney, at the UNSC Meeting on Sexual Violence in Conflict in 2019
picture from Nadia Murad’s website Nadia’s Initiative

In her autobiography, The Last Girl, Nadia Murad tells her story, and with it the story of her people, the Yazidis. In 2014, the Islamic State attacked her village, killed most of the older men and women, and kept the younger women, girls, and boys as hostages. The boys were indoctrinated into becoming ISIS fighters at the cost of rejecting their community, religion, and their own family. The women and girls were used as sex slaves or sabaya as is referred to in Arabic. They were sold, tortured, humiliated and often passed around to the group’s militants as gifts, an attempt to strip away their dignity. All Yazidis were forced to convert to Islam. Nadia Murad was one of ISIS’ sex slaves. She was not the only victim, most Yazidi women suffered her fate. But she is the one who spoke the loudest and managed to get the international community’s attention.

The United Nations have since then recognized that ISIS actions constituted genocide. Indeed, those atrocities did not happen out of coincidence, they had been carefully planned. Before invading the Yazidi region, the Islamic State’s Research and Fatwa department studied Yezidism and concluded that, unlike other religions like Christianism or Shia Islam, Yezidism was not a religion since it did not have a holy book. According to the Islamist scholars, this meant Sharia law authorized its fighters to kill and rape and walk away with impunity. Often, while in captivity, Yazidi women were called devil worshipers and their captors would pray before raping them, the rape was a holy act of war.

Today, the Yazidi women who escaped are either in camps in Iraqi Kurdistan or in other parts of the world living as refugees. In the Kurdish camps, but also in London, the Amar foundation has been teaching and recording traditional Yazidi music. Although the programme is led by British violinist Michael Bochmann, teachers and musicians are Yazidi, and the project has been approved by the Yazidi spiritual counsel.

Yazidi music is not traditionally written down but passed from one generation of qawals, (religious musicians) to another. And, as of today, only eight qawals are still alive. In order for this tradition not to be lost and in an effort to keep the Yazidi culture alive, the foundation is recording and sending the music to Iraqi and British museums’ archives. It is especially important to do so now, as their community has been so close to being totally destroyed by the Islamic State. Ali, a music teacher, explains that “Yazidi music is ancient and very important to our culture. As a minority, it keeps us together”.

Aside from recording, the foundation is also giving music classes: students can learn how to play the drum, the tambour (a sacred instrument to the Yazidis) and can be part of the women choir. For them, it’s not only music but also a way to practice their religion and a way to heal. A qawal explained that the music dates back to the Sumerian civilization, and already then it was used as therapy. A young rape victim confirmed its healing effect. She testified that, after being enslaved and having suffered such a “bad experience”, joining other musicians made her “feel happy and relieved”. Another former sex slave stated that “[they] are always thinking about how bad life is here [in the refugee camps] and [they] often feel very sad, but coming to the music classes help [them] forget [their] sadness”.

This is my interpretation of the situation, but I think that it also helps and reassures those women to be part of the community again. In her autobiography, Nadia Murad explains that Yezidism strictly prohibits conversion to another religion and sexual intercourse before marriage. Since Nadia Murad and so many others had suffered rape, torture and forced conversions, they risked being rejected by their community upon their return. This was a deliberate tactic by their captors. ISIS soldiers would tell their sabaya not to escape because even if they managed to flee, they would be rejected by their community. They argued it was better for them to stay in the Islamic State where they were welcomed. Eventually, the Yazidi high clerks announced that all Yazidi women, even if they had converted or had been raped, would be welcomed back. Their sins would be forgiven because they had been forced upon them. After fearing exclusion from their community, the women must be reassured to be back in the group, to be back singing Yazidi songs.

A choir composed only of former ISIS victims, singing traditional Yazidi songs, is a particularly beautiful image: the Islamic State forbad music, and now the same music they were prohibiting is helping their victims heal.

Story of a poet telling his fight against the Al Assad regime

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By Juliette Rémond-Tiédrez

Being confined for nearly two months gave me loads of time to listen to podcasts and read more. Somewhat by coincidence my reading and listening started focusing on the ongoing Syrian civil war. This focus on Syria started with Omar Youssef Suleiman’s latest book Le Dernier Syrien, the Last Syrian. Omar Youssef Suleiman is a Syrian poet and journalist who has been living in France as a political refugee since 2012. More information on his biography and news can be found on his website, as well as here concerning his latest book Le Dernier Syrien, out in January 2020.

Today I would like to focus on his story, the story of a Syrian who switched from being an extremist Islamist Salafist to a pro-democracy activist fighting the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.

 

Picture available on Omar Youssef Suleiman’s website.

Omar Youssef Suleiman was born in 1987 near Damas in a deeply religious family. In interviews given at the end of 2015 on French radios France inter and France culture, he explained that religion governed every aspect of his life in Syria: his family would only talk about religion, and, at the beginning, he would only be reading religious texts or old Arabic literature. However, religion was important at a whole other level in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he moved when he was 13. He explained that he was in Saudi Arabia when the 9/11 terror attacks happened, and there, he saw people cheering. He admitted that he cheered as well. At the time he considered Osama Ben Laden as a hero, saving the Arab world from the United States and Israel. For him, being an extremist Islamist Salafist seemed like a normal thing to be in Saudi Arabia.

Soon after going back to Syria however, he started questioning his faith and Salafist ideas. This process began when he moved to Homs to study literature. After having always lived with his grand-parents, uncles, and aunts and then his parents, Homs was the first place where Omar Youssef Suleiman was alone and free to do whatever he pleased. He therefore started going to the mosque, but also to church to ask questions and do research about religions. He began questioning Islam but also Christianism and any other religion. After his research he concluded that he did not need religion anymore and decided to become an atheist. Being an atheist was tough in Syria as it was associated to being a liar and a thief. But Omar Youssef Suleiman stuck to atheism.

Another “religion” Omar Youssef Suleiman grew up with was the cult of Hafez, and later Bashar, Al-Assad. In the same radio interview, the poet explained how the Al-Assad propaganda would start at an early age. Indeed, already when he was 7-8 years old, he was taught to scream, every morning, at school “Long life to the Bath party, long life to Hafez Al-Assad” or “Death to Israel, death to the Muslim Brotherhood”. He abandoned this religion as well. Indeed, in 2011, Omar Youssef Suleiman organised one of the first peaceful protest against the regime, in his university city of Homs. He said to have dropped classes, and exams, everything, to dive in fully into the protests. The poet remembers thinking that the fall of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali, in Tunisia, was like a dream for the Arab world, a dream that he wanted coming true in Syria. When the regime ruthlessly responded to the peaceful protests, Omar Youssef Suleiman started contacting important newspapers, like the BBC, to inform them of the situation on the ground. He began filming protesters being brutalised and even killed and shared it on YouTube. Through those videos, the young poet was screaming for help, but the international community didn’t react.

In 2012, protesting became too dangerous for Omar Youssef Suleiman and he fled to neighboring Jordan. There he met with the French ambassador who arranged for his transfer to France where he was granted political asylum. His first year in Paris was hard as he did not speak any French, was a foreigner and was poor. Later, he said that, even if he was living in poverty, his moving to France had given him his life and dignity back and that was enough. Today, he is fluent in French and even wrote his last book, the Last Syrian, in French. When asked why he chose France, Omar Youssef Suleiman answered that he had always been interested by French culture since reading Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon. Furthermore, France was known as the human rights and freedom country, the opposite of Syria. Although he was far from the war, fear didn’t really leave, “we left the war, but the war never left us”.

During this whole time, Omar Youssef Suleiman had been writing. He first started when he was in Riyadh, where he had no friends and felt very lonely. During the summer, when school was over, he wouldn’t go out but would read and write at home. The poet then enrolled in a literature university programme in Homs. Today, although he also writes novels, Omar Youssef Suleiman mainly writes poem collections such as Far from Damas. His writings are politically active. His favorite poet, Paul Éluard, said “the poet is not only a poet – he is a man of freedom, a man of humanity”. It was therefore only logical for Omar Youssef Suleiman to write about freedom and humanity, but also about war, Syria, exile, and memory.

His poems are in Arabic, sometimes in French, but luckily for us Ghada Mourad translated some of his pieces in English, including his Do Not Tell Anyone poem.

 

Do Not Tell Anyone

I

Do you remember our childhood fighting game?

What’s happened is that we’ve entered the screen

And God has taken our place

II

Between the wide front lines

The sniper lens stops

A victim falls apart in my heart

III

The father who spreads his hand

Is covering the sun

So it won’t get burned by the face of a dead child

IV

As we cross the borders

Fleeing from live bullets

Do not tell anyone that we are alive

I thought that this poem was a good one to share as, according to me, it is a good summary of Omar Youssef Suleiman’s life: the questioning of God, the Syrian war and fleeing. Furthermore, raising awareness, through poetry, about the crimes committed by the Syrian regime always seems necessary, especially as two former members of the Syrian military are currently being trialed in Germany for war crimes and crimes against humanity

Artistic and legal objects: Abu Zubaydah’s drawings depicting detention at Guantanamo

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By Juliette Remond-Tiedrez 

Warning: this post contains sensitive drawings which some people may find disturbing.

What is art? Is Abu Zubaydah’s drawings of the torture methods used against him “art”?

As explained in an article published in the newspaper The New York Times on December 4, 2019, Abu Zubaydah is a Saudi national who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 by the USA suspected of being an Al Qaeda member. He spent 4 years in the CIA secret prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo bay in 2006, where he is still being held today. Allegedly, he is the first person to have been subjected to the CIA’s torture interrogation programme. This programme was created by two CIA psychologists and approved by no one else then the USA President at the time, George W. Bush.

Last December, his lawyer Mark Denbeaux released a report entitled “How America Tortures”. In this report, Denbeaux points out that “Americans may find it difficult to acknowledge that top officials […] orchestrated and poorly oversaw a terrific torture programme”. He therefore suggests telling the American people, and anyone reading this report about the crimes committed by the CIA in Guantanamo, and hopefully to raise awareness. A series of Zubaydah’s drawings portraying the torture techniques he was subjected to are included in the report. They were first published in 2018, on Propublica.

 

Referring to my earlier question: are these torture drawings art?

For the Cambridge dictionary, yes. Art is defined as “painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.” As for the literal meaning, Abu Zubaydah’s are therefore art. The Guantanamo penitentiary administration and the USA military seem to disagree. Indeed, even if the Guantanamo prisons offer “art” classes to captives, students are not allowed to artistically represent their life at the Guantanamo bay. Detainees can only draw and paint still life or do Arabic calligraphy. In addition, detainees used to be able to send their art works, such as drawings, paintings or even small boat constructions, to their relatives. The penitentiary administration would inspect it to make sure there would be no secret messages, but if that wasn’t the case, the artworks would be shipped to the inmates’ family members. However, since 2017 the USA military has decided that art pieces made by the detainees were no longer considered to be their property. Due to this decision, Zubaydah’s lawyer released his client’s drawings as “’legal material” rather than art, making the publication of those sketches possible.

As to whether Abu Zubaydah’s drawings are called “legal materials” or “art”, there is, in my opinion, no doubt his sketches are actual art. Granted, they are dark, depressing and terrifying pieces, but art nevertheless and consider Zubaydah to be quite gifted. Take for example the image below in which he represents one of the torture techniques: walling. As one can see in the drawing thanks to the red lines, walling is to bang the detainee’s head on the wall several times a day. No details are speared as the artist shows his scars on his left thigh, on his skull and on his chest, shows the suffering (his eyes are closed and his mouth seems to be screaming in pain), the nudity and the shackles which seem very uncomfortable as they oblige him to always have his hands stretched in front of his body.

Another example is the waterboarding drawing in which we can feel the pain of the inmate and learn a lot about the actual waterboarding technique. Indeed, the way Zubaydah portrays his right foot, right hand and head as shaking because of the pain and the blood coming out of his left leg makes the viewer feel actual chills when closely looking at the drawing. In addition, the terrible sketch shows us how the board would be lowered at the head’s level so that it would be closer to the ground than the rest of the body. This is done to make sure the water doesn’t actually go in the victim’s airways but still imitates the sensation of drowning.

Beyond theoretical considerations concerning the nature of Zubaydah’s drawings, they show an underlying story about torture techniques being used by the CIA in Guantanamo bay.

Recently, an American military commission investigating the role of five persons accused of having participated in the 9/11 terror attack heard the testimonies of the two psychologistswho had been in charged of designed the torture programme. The pre-trial however, revolves around 9/11 rather than Guantanamo or CIA black sites. The torture suffered by Abu Zubaydah and other inmates has therefore not been punished yet, and it seems important to continue raising awareness about those inhumane methods.

 

 

Unsung Heroes

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By Juliette Remond-Tiedrez 

Since the beginning of October, the small Galerie Jospeh in the centre of Paris has been holding the exhibition Unsung heroes created by photographer Denis Rouvre and the NGO Médecins du monde, Doctors of the World. The exhibition gathers more than 60 portraits of women from all around the world.

As an international law student, the first thing that interested me was the stories of each woman, what had happened to them and what human rights abuses they had suffered. Some texts were very interesting as they reminded me of testimonies I had to read while doing my internship at the International Criminal Court. Indeed, most rape victims don’t dare to explain what happened to them, they don’t want to use terms like “penis” or “vagina”, they would rather say that the rapist “fell on them”. It was the same here.

After a while, however, I started focusing on the pictures themselves, after all I had also come for the portraits. I realised that the stories were actually as powerful as the pictures. Indeed, the women often pose proudly but one can still sense their pain. The fact that photographer Denis Rouvre manages to grasp their strength and sadness at the same time is quite impressive. Furthermore, nearly all of them look directly into the camera which gives the impression that they are making real eye contact with the viewer. This makes the pictures even more touching.

What I enjoyed about this exhibition is that it approached gender-based violence through different issues: some women talked about rapes committed by soldiers, family members, or employers, others testify about their experience as a maid in another countries. Other subjects such as homophobia, transsexualism, reproductive rights, migration or homelessness were also discussed. I thought that was well-made as it made the viewer realise that gender-based violence can mean a lot of different things.


Picture taken by Alexander Royall

This exhibition seems to come at an interesting time as France is currently debating whether the crime of feminicide, to kill a female because she is a female, should be included in its Criminal code. While on my way to the exhibition I actually walked by one of the numerous feminist tags on the Parisians building which stated “ni una menos” (not one woman less), the slogan used by Argentinian feminist protestors. As the exhibition guides you through different countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nepal and Colombia, a few portraits are from French women who criticise France’s legal system which does not seem able to respond to domestic violence. It was therefore a very up to date exhibition.

Finally, it seems interesting to note that a number of Congolese women referred to Doctor Denis Mukwege, the 2018 Nobel Prize winner. This is not surprising as Doctors of the World focus on rights to health such as contraception, abortion and AIDS and Doctor Mukwege, as a gynaecologist and activist, has played an important role in this domain in the DRC but also at the world level. To give an example, Denis Mukwege praised the exhibition saying he hoped it would “raise awareness, especially among men, that the elimination of gender based violence is not only a government and justice’s issue, it has to start at the individual’s level and begins with the awareness-raising and education from a young age”.


Picture taken by Alexander Royall

Sadly, the exhibition moved from Paris to Bordeaux last Friday, so Parisians won’t be able to go see Unsung heroes anymore. However, the good news is that a selection of nine portraits is available on Médecins du monde’s website, so all English, French and Spanish speakers can have an online glimpse of how the exhibition was.

 

The Ship of Tolerance

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By Juliette Remond-Tiedrez,

In the middle of London, in between the Tate Modern museum and Saint Paul’s cathedral stands, or rather floats, the Ship of Tolerance, 14th edition.


Picture taken by Alexander Royall

The Ship of Tolerance is a patchwork of paintings made by schoolchildren with different ethnic and social backgrounds. In the case of the Londoner ship, the drawings were made by 8 to 12 year old children from the capital’s primary schools, hospitals and refugee camps in Birmingham, Leeds, Peterborough, and Calais.

As I quickly mentioned, this is the 14th edition. Ilya and Emilia Kabokov have been building Ships of Tolerance since 2005. They started in Siwa, Egypt, and then recreated the ship all around the world including in Cuba, Italy, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America. Another ship has also just been presented on the 16th of September in Chicago, USA.  

The construction of such a ship is divided into three steps. Firstly, the children participate in a workshop organised by local artists and draw or paint images of tolerance. Secondly, carpenters build the boat. This is a public process that is open for the children who participated in the drawings to join and watch but also the general public. Lastly, the completed ship is put on water and exposed. Events are organised around the ship such as concerts, discussions or even shows by the participating children.

According to artist Emilia Kabokov, the human race needs to communicate to survive. Therefore, the children should be taught to communicate with others even if they aren’t from the same culture or social background. She explains that in participating in this project, the children learn about respect of other cultures and tolerance.

It was kind of a coincidence that I saw this artwork. On my way to London for holidays I saw a picture of the ship on the ‘Week in pictures’ section of the BBC application. The caption said “The art piece […] is dedicated to educating and connecting children from different continents, cultures, and identities through the language of art” and therefore decided to write a piece about how art can be used to bring people together and create a space for tolerance.

This ship grabbed my attention for many reasons. First, the vibrant colours create a beautiful floating piece, which put alongside Thames and London was very picturesque, especially for a tourist like me. However, what I particularly liked is that “tolerance” is broad enough to include different issues in the drawings like the obvious themes of:


Racism (Picture taken by Alexander Royall)


Refugees (Picture taken by Alexander Royall)


Different Religions(Picture taken by Alexander Royall)

But also other themes such as:


World Peace (Picture taken by Alexander Royall)


Equality between all (Picture taken by Alexander Royall)


Climate change (Picture taken by Alexander Royall)


LGBTI+ rights (Picture taken by Alexander Royall)

When I did more research for this blogpost and realised that this ship was one of 15, I liked the project even more because it became a truly international artwork which aims at educating children and adults from all over the world. So, if you are not in London or Chicago, don’t worry, the Ship of Tolerance might come your way in the future!