Earlier on this blog, I had it about books you pick up solely for their titles. Here is a book I almost picked up solely for the authors' name. To tell you about it in a roundabout way: In his novels the writer Vladimir Nabokov lets loose a riot of different kinds of "-lets": "wavelets", "roundlets", "faunlets", and, even, "goblets" (in the sense of a little "gob" [that is, "mouth"]!), ... *
Anyway, something tells me that "sluglet" is just another word Nabokov was waiting to discover and put into use. For the sole fact that they chose my beloved Iraq as a subject, I may forgive Marion and Peter the extra "t" they have attached at their surname. The book I picked up was their seminal history of that country. And because I know you have all just been dying to learn about the topic, here a rough account of what I reckon are the most interesting parts of it. The book is nominally about independent, republican Iraq from 1958 on, but it consecrates an introductory section to the era preceding this, coinciding with the end of the Ottoman period in the country, and the few decades under British mandate.
Separate sections are put aside for the two largest political movements of the country -the Iraqi Communist Party and the Kurdish movement-, as well as the economy (in short, the Iraqi variants of all this blogger's nerdy inclinations...).
In fact, at the beginning, when the borders had been drawn by the West, and actually even long before this, the main reason why the three parts of Iraq did not form a natural administrative unit, as for example Syria or Egypt did in a relatively comfortable way, was that economically they had never really been integrated with each other at all, but with the geopolitical neighbours -Basra traded with the Gulf and India, Baghdad connected Syria and Iran by the land route, and as for Mosul, it was turned toward Aleppo and Anatolia.
It was actually with the onset of industrialisation that, somewhat paradoxically before it's final fall, the Ottoman central power came round to make itself felt at all, in far away regions where local administrations had heretofore subsisted with an almost perfect degree of autonomy, being only nominally Ottoman.
The onset of globalisation of trade also meant that Iraq could become a major exporter of grain (and dates), mostly to the Gulf and India. The rise in exports was accompanied by an almost exponential expansion of the cultivated areas. The situation so created was one of many landless and destitute fallahin working for a few handfuls of large landowners. This great inequality was to be a major problem for Iraq until well into the 20th century.
With the Ottoman land code the Ottomans made a last ditch, but disastrous effort to develop the order of private land property in Iraq, which before had been dominated by tribal custom.
As for the Brits, they were to continue, and improve on, the practice of appointing "useful" shaykhs in administrative positions, as had done the Ottomans. *(2) From the beginning of British occupation, it even had been a cardinal principle of British policy to bolster the powers of tribal shaykhs and landlords by creating a separate legal system specifically for the tribes which was to remain in force until the Revolution of 1958.
Until that time the immense and ever increasing polarisation of rich and poor characterised this same, entire period. The first person to try to do something about it was general Abd al-Karim Qasim. Especially his land reform -just one of the measures he inaugurated that had widely been demanded throughout the monarchy period- to a large degree succeeeded in destroying the political and economic power of the great shaykhs and landlords.
Equally unexceptionable was his construction of housing for the sarifa (slum) dwellers around Baghdad in the Al-Thawra district (which today is known Sadr City, after Muqtada, the head of the Mehdi army...).
Although he genuinely cared for the poor and laboured to improve their condition and enjoyed substantial support among the masses, the political oppositions in society polarised more and more throughout his regime. His greatest mistake may have been that he did not recognise where his real power base lay, which was with the radical Left, and that, subjecting the Communists to repression, he tried to woo the other side, that is the Arab-nationalists, at a point when it was already too late to gain their favour.
Although not free from reproach, his regime was figurative miles away from the wanton savagery of the regimes that had preceded and were to succeed him. He even showed himself indulgent toward his enemies, and it was probably to his own disadvantage that, when Abd al-Salam 'Arif fell into his hands in 1962, he commuted his death sentence. It was 'Arif himself who was to replace him, when, in 1963, Qasim's regime was brought down by a military coup. It was a combination of over-confidence and excentricity that spelt his end. Quixotic quests such as an attempt to conquer Kuweit made him fall into disrespect not only with neighbour states, but also internally in Iraq. At the very moment of the '63 coup, he still felt so self-assured that he did not acquiesce to the masses gathering on the square in front of Parliament clamouring to be armed to defend him. He was executed by the new regime the next day.
The months succeeding this coup was the period in time that the Ba'ath came out to play at light for the first time. They made themselves known to the public in what most Iraqis old enough to recall remember as the period that made the Ba'ath to be associated with reckless cruelty and terror. They turned onto the Leftists for revenge. Some statistics say that each extended family in Baghdad had at least one of its members die at the hands of the Ba'ath and sport stadiums were transformed into ad hoc prisons, as in Pinochet's Chile a decade later.
This is because the Communist party at this time had been at the height of its power -since the late 1950's a time began where a Communist cult was flourishing in Iraq, with the party not only controlling the streets through its mass organisations, but even making good business of selling merchandise such as key rings and breakfast mugs, as I read elsewhere.
In general, the main failing of the Iraqi Communist Party seems to have been that they always had built their party as a body ready to rule in a functioning democratic system and not in a place like the Middle East where the rules were set differently. In 1958 for example they could have easily assumed power, had they wished to take it the "usual" way it was done in their country, and resorted to a coup.
The Ba'ath at the time, which was so lavishly drenching its hands in the Leftists' blood, was less a proper political party than a loose network of social and kin relations. Ideologically they were steeped into the sort of exuberant, but balmy "neo-romantic" discourse, Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Ba'ath, had been engaging in since the 1940's in Syria, but they lacked any real substance. Once they came into power, their main interest was to stay in power at the expense of other political forces, and any talk of ideology can be seen as pure instrumentalisation to this end.
As for the Kurds, their story seems to be one of shifting alliances, not seldom paradoxical ones, within and without Iraq, to oppose, not at last, each other. The main fault line already was the division between the tribal Barzanis and the more liberal urbanites of Ibrahim Ahmed and his son-in-law Djelal Talabani.
To come to the economy, given the weakness of private capital in Iraq, and the fact that oil was its main source of income, at the time it was generally accepted knowledge that the way forward on the road of industrialisation was a strong state powering development. Large scale nationalisations were carried out in 1964. This stayed this way and was only reversed partly in the early 1980's when the war forced Iraq to open its economy.
For some reason, for me reading through most of the 60's turned out a muddle, and the roaring 70's -rushing past a couple of oil booms, Ba'athist socialism, and Saddam's rise from head of the intelligence service to Prime Minister- a drag, and I skipped right to the end of the novel: The Iraq-Iran war of the 80's and Saddam's compromising invasion of Kuweit. However, I cannot regurgitate all that here though, I can scarcely find my own words, after having absorbed so recently only the relevant chapters.
So for the nonce, there you have it; now, who is going to actually read through this blog-post past the whacko introduction is a mystery to me, but I'll leave that to you guys.
See youse all later.
*(1) not to speak of "laundalets" and, the most excentric of all, "radugalets"
*(2) This was not always succesful. In Iraqi Kurdistan traditional clan rivalries prohibited not only an over-archign movement toward Kurdish unity, which spoilt their claims for autonomy, but also made the game of the British harder: for example they instated Sheikh Mahmud, but had to remove him in 1919 because he was unable to command and control over areas reaching out more than 20 miles around Sulaymaniyah.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Earlier this month, for the 30th anniversary of the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran, the German newspaper taz started off an article writing: "When Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States almost one year ago in November 2008, the Islamic Republic prided itself of having freed after a few days already, all those hostages who were black or of the female sex in a sign of solidarity with America's oppressed minority, and because of the "special role of women in Islam". As if not keeping them hostage for the entire 444 days had been a humanitarian act."
The hostage taking at the American embassy was so momentous an occurrence that my teacher of Iranian history even called it "a second revolution". It catapulted Iran into the international isolation that it still finds itself in today. Even though in an interview with a French daily (Le Figaro?) I picked up straying lonely about the Parisian metro about this time last year, Khomeini's daughter, Zahra Mostafavi, claimed that her father had at first been taken aback at the news of the hostage taking, but was then wheedled into acclamation by some of those surrounding him, the general view is, I believe, that Khomeini represented a fanatical anti-Americanism from the beginning, and knew how to manipulate groups of people for his ends.
For one, the hostage taking coincided with an internal leadership crisis -a conflict between prime minister Bazargan and spiritual leader Khomeiny. Bazargan, who was educated in France and very pro-American, even wanted to tighten Iran's ties with the superpower. During the course of the hostage taking he resigned from office. It is not unlikely that Khomeiny instrumentalised events to achieve this.
One of the hostage takers was a young, 19-year old woman named Masoumeh Ebtekar, who made herself their spokesperson. This youthful venture into the world of terrorism of hers visibly gave her a good headstart on the career ladder, since less than 20 years later, under reformist president Khatami, she was made Iran's first female vice president. Paradoxically, she had grown up in the United States, where she was given the nickname Mary.
In similar fashion, it can only be called ironic that conservative president Reagan, who was electioneering at the time, also had a hand in this all. In a complicated affair of drugsale and arms trade, the hostage situation was protracted until elections were over and the hostages were poignantly liberated on the very day of his inauguration (January 20, 1981). All this was debunked in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair seven years later, in 1986.
These facts can be seen as crystallisations of the long love-hate relationship the United States and Iran have had, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, well before the USA became a superpower. At the time it was simply seen as a far away ally, willing to genuinely help with the process of democratisation. American individuals even fought and fell on the sides of the constitutional movement of 1906 against the Shah of the time.
The hostage taking at the American embassy was so momentous an occurrence that my teacher of Iranian history even called it "a second revolution". It catapulted Iran into the international isolation that it still finds itself in today. Even though in an interview with a French daily (Le Figaro?) I picked up straying lonely about the Parisian metro about this time last year, Khomeini's daughter, Zahra Mostafavi, claimed that her father had at first been taken aback at the news of the hostage taking, but was then wheedled into acclamation by some of those surrounding him, the general view is, I believe, that Khomeini represented a fanatical anti-Americanism from the beginning, and knew how to manipulate groups of people for his ends.
For one, the hostage taking coincided with an internal leadership crisis -a conflict between prime minister Bazargan and spiritual leader Khomeiny. Bazargan, who was educated in France and very pro-American, even wanted to tighten Iran's ties with the superpower. During the course of the hostage taking he resigned from office. It is not unlikely that Khomeiny instrumentalised events to achieve this.
One of the hostage takers was a young, 19-year old woman named Masoumeh Ebtekar, who made herself their spokesperson. This youthful venture into the world of terrorism of hers visibly gave her a good headstart on the career ladder, since less than 20 years later, under reformist president Khatami, she was made Iran's first female vice president. Paradoxically, she had grown up in the United States, where she was given the nickname Mary.
In similar fashion, it can only be called ironic that conservative president Reagan, who was electioneering at the time, also had a hand in this all. In a complicated affair of drugsale and arms trade, the hostage situation was protracted until elections were over and the hostages were poignantly liberated on the very day of his inauguration (January 20, 1981). All this was debunked in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair seven years later, in 1986.
These facts can be seen as crystallisations of the long love-hate relationship the United States and Iran have had, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, well before the USA became a superpower. At the time it was simply seen as a far away ally, willing to genuinely help with the process of democratisation. American individuals even fought and fell on the sides of the constitutional movement of 1906 against the Shah of the time.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Recently, the (distinguished) newspaper Taraf published a pretty interesting interview with sociologist Ismail Beşikçi. Born in Çorum, some 200 kilometres east of Ankara, he was for many years -that is to say, decades-, the only Turkish voice in the struggle for Kurdish rights. Sentenced to something like 100 years behind closed bars by the Turkish state, he sat 17 years for his activism. The large majority of his books are forbidden in Turkey to this day.
The great topic of the day in Turkey is the current "demokratik açılım" ("democratic opening") undertaken by the party in power; in the beginning it was even programmatically called "kürt açılım", but Turkish society being fairly prudish and not quite ready yet to have this dirty word bandied about quite so liberally in public, the name soon was changed. When interior minister Beşir Atalay made a speech going into the details of the "democratic opening", he did not pronounce the word "Kurd" once. So far, results seem to be not much more than mouthsfull of hot air and concrete changes, such as the sanctioning of using old, Kurdish placenames instead of the Republican era Turkish ones, and the teaching of Kurdish as a foreign language in universities, cosmetic. The nationalist CHP and MHP, as well as the military, staunchly oppose a real solution of the Kurdish question. Beşikçi in this interview actually goes farther with his demands than the DTP, the pro-Kurdish party, themselves.
Broadly answering to the question "will the weapons be silent when the "democratic opening" begins to show its results? Will then come peace?" Beşikçi explains that he thinks that the Kurds should obtain "self-governance in a federal system. That is school teaching in their mother tongue, their own local administrations, their own security forces... They say there are 2,000 members of the PKK in Turkey, and 3,000 in Iraq. It is important to pose oneself the question what these PKK members are going to do when they leave the mountains. [...] The same problem existed between Israel and the Palestinians. It was solved in 1993 in the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians were given self-governance and the PLO laid down their weapons from this point on. This military power became the Palestinian National Security Forces.
We had the same situation in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. The peshmergas laid down their weapons, but were integrated into society by the Regional Government of Kurdistan as security troops. At the time when Turkey will be turned into a federation, the PKK must also be transformed into a body of security forces.
But the Turkish state ideology is very strong and as of now, such steps are incompatible with it. Colossal transformations of mentalities are needed."
Several times in the interview he calls on the Kurds to go back and study their own history. Finally, he jumps on the occasion to explain himself in detail: It is especially the duration of 1919 -21, the preparation periods of the Sèvres and the fateful Lausanne treaty, that are still largely in the dark today. Especially the Turkish state mystifies the machinations behind the going ons of the epoch, the cutting up and dividing of Kurdistan. How could they go through with such a division of Kurdistan at a time when the autonomy rights of the peoples of the Soviet Union were so constantly talked about? [...] Thing is, they probably did talk about these rights, behind closed doors, and all this is today being hushed up. Great Britain wanted to include Mosul under its mandate in Iraq because of the large oil reserves that had been found there in 1908. Mustafa Kemal at the time also laid claim on the province with the argument "We had have ruled over this region for 400 years. Our ancestors rode horses here. This is our region." The confrontation was the basis for a diplomatic crisis. [...] In my opinion this diplomatic discord between Great Britain and Turkey over Mosul led to Mustafa Kemal coming up with a deal along the lines of "We'll let Mosul go, if you leave us in peace with the claims for autonomy of the Kurds". When you look at the ex-colonies of Great Britain, you find the same scenario everywhere, be it in India, South-Africa, Kenya, Central Africa or Somalia: everywhere Great Britain granted their former colonial regions autonomy. Just not in Kurdistan! " (author's note: I do wonder what India's Manipur would feel they'd like to add to that affirmation, to note but one little-known example) -"So, according to you the Kurds did not get the right for self-determination because of negotiations with Atatürk? -"Yes, for sure, that is what I deduce from what I have read. [...] If the Kurds in the South would have been given the right to self-determination, that might have given the Kurds in the North ideas and endangered [Mustafa Kemal's] republic project."
The great topic of the day in Turkey is the current "demokratik açılım" ("democratic opening") undertaken by the party in power; in the beginning it was even programmatically called "kürt açılım", but Turkish society being fairly prudish and not quite ready yet to have this dirty word bandied about quite so liberally in public, the name soon was changed. When interior minister Beşir Atalay made a speech going into the details of the "democratic opening", he did not pronounce the word "Kurd" once. So far, results seem to be not much more than mouthsfull of hot air and concrete changes, such as the sanctioning of using old, Kurdish placenames instead of the Republican era Turkish ones, and the teaching of Kurdish as a foreign language in universities, cosmetic. The nationalist CHP and MHP, as well as the military, staunchly oppose a real solution of the Kurdish question. Beşikçi in this interview actually goes farther with his demands than the DTP, the pro-Kurdish party, themselves.
Broadly answering to the question "will the weapons be silent when the "democratic opening" begins to show its results? Will then come peace?" Beşikçi explains that he thinks that the Kurds should obtain "self-governance in a federal system. That is school teaching in their mother tongue, their own local administrations, their own security forces... They say there are 2,000 members of the PKK in Turkey, and 3,000 in Iraq. It is important to pose oneself the question what these PKK members are going to do when they leave the mountains. [...] The same problem existed between Israel and the Palestinians. It was solved in 1993 in the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians were given self-governance and the PLO laid down their weapons from this point on. This military power became the Palestinian National Security Forces.
We had the same situation in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. The peshmergas laid down their weapons, but were integrated into society by the Regional Government of Kurdistan as security troops. At the time when Turkey will be turned into a federation, the PKK must also be transformed into a body of security forces.
But the Turkish state ideology is very strong and as of now, such steps are incompatible with it. Colossal transformations of mentalities are needed."
Several times in the interview he calls on the Kurds to go back and study their own history. Finally, he jumps on the occasion to explain himself in detail: It is especially the duration of 1919 -21, the preparation periods of the Sèvres and the fateful Lausanne treaty, that are still largely in the dark today. Especially the Turkish state mystifies the machinations behind the going ons of the epoch, the cutting up and dividing of Kurdistan. How could they go through with such a division of Kurdistan at a time when the autonomy rights of the peoples of the Soviet Union were so constantly talked about? [...] Thing is, they probably did talk about these rights, behind closed doors, and all this is today being hushed up. Great Britain wanted to include Mosul under its mandate in Iraq because of the large oil reserves that had been found there in 1908. Mustafa Kemal at the time also laid claim on the province with the argument "We had have ruled over this region for 400 years. Our ancestors rode horses here. This is our region." The confrontation was the basis for a diplomatic crisis. [...] In my opinion this diplomatic discord between Great Britain and Turkey over Mosul led to Mustafa Kemal coming up with a deal along the lines of "We'll let Mosul go, if you leave us in peace with the claims for autonomy of the Kurds". When you look at the ex-colonies of Great Britain, you find the same scenario everywhere, be it in India, South-Africa, Kenya, Central Africa or Somalia: everywhere Great Britain granted their former colonial regions autonomy. Just not in Kurdistan! " (author's note: I do wonder what India's Manipur would feel they'd like to add to that affirmation, to note but one little-known example) -"So, according to you the Kurds did not get the right for self-determination because of negotiations with Atatürk? -"Yes, for sure, that is what I deduce from what I have read. [...] If the Kurds in the South would have been given the right to self-determination, that might have given the Kurds in the North ideas and endangered [Mustafa Kemal's] republic project."
Thursday, October 1, 2009
GAP Projesi
We drive along Atatük Barajı. The moon throws a puddle of light into the dull, perfect flatness that is this artificial lake, the moon throws a road that shines our way. The silver glitter of a thousand tears. In the country of contradictions, another contradiction is elevated to great heights, and it will plunge this region's richness to great depths. Livelihoods and heritage, submerged and swallowed up.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Destroyers
I have a tall beautiful friend whose name is Kyrill. He has perfect skin and slightly slanted black eyes and maybe it is because of his partial Tatar heritage that he doesn't look his 26 years of age. But the fact that he dyes his long hair, which he shaves at the temples into a broad mohawk, into a metallic black, does not hide the fact that his beard grows a light titian red. I see him in a certain light. When he sits by the campfire with his face spasmodically illumined by eerie orange brightness, and talks to me about war, blood and revolution, he can't fool me, I understand who my friend really is: a Scythian.
It is what I call his "hippy-punk" confusion that makes him very much his own character and dictates his attire -an almost feminine black top and persimmon-coloured Indian shalwars. Shalwars are comfortable Indo-European leg-wear that today is worn from Kurdistan to Maharashtra, and that goes back to olden times. All in all his pair, on which simple ornamental embroideries snake their way from shin to thigh, looks very similar to the trousers I saw on the reconstructed fiberglass Scythian in the ethnographic museum in Yevpatoria.
We are on Crimea, that roughly rhomboid-shaped bit of land that juts out into the sea like the hand of a Scythian gripped around his bow -the Black Sea being said in Antiquity to have the shape of one of the Scythian's bows. The Scythians lived from hunting and banditry and they had acquired the reputation of being invincible warriors. "Their raids strike with the force of lighting... in number they are stronger than springtime bees, ...they empty the countries of others", a Byzantine writer of the 11th century wrote about the Pechenegs, one of the successor nomad peoples of the step, but the concept was the same already a thousand years earlier: The first thing you'd notice if you were to near a horde of Scythians was a cloud of dust at the horizon, which would come flying into your eye before you even could make out the details of their wagons or individual animals of their herds of cows and sheep. At first the thunder of a hundreds of hoofs pounding the earth would overwhelm your senses, then a penetrating stench that would make it difficult to breathe. They were light-skinned, tall men on horseback, with spears in their hands and double-edged swords at their waists. At the bits of their horses they fastened the scalps of their enenmies, which they used as towels to wipe their hands, and at their belts they carried drinking cups made out of the skulls of whom they'd killed. Some even used human skin to make saddles. Their own skin certain of the Scythian tribes adorned with intricate, highly stylized tattoos, sometimes ones that covered their whole body.
Despite the fact that they were nomads, their society had a high degree of specialisation, and they had many different kinds of professions, manufactureres of different sorts and even blacksmiths. You have to imagine their galloping hordes as nothing less than mobile cities.
In the collective consciousness of the Russian people a special place is set apart for the memory of this great nomad nation who at the threshold of history lived on their southern steppes. It is by their bias that they like to explain all that is not European, but somehow, mysteriously wilder and more Asiatic in that Russian soul they so love to fuss about. And while some say searching for a connection is ridiculous because 100s of years lay between the demise of the Scythian state, and the appearance of Slavs on the pages of history, other scholars bend over backwards to attest at least a high probability that in the multi-ethnic confederation that was Scythia Slavic tribes did live and mingle.
At the time of the revolution the great Russian poet Aleksander Blok wrote a famous, strangely ambiguous poem entitled "The Scythians", that expresses all the contradictons of a Russia at the same time rejecting and embracing this barbarous heritage. It speaks of ravenous eyes, raging steel machines, and passion that destroys:
"Russia is a Sphinx. In joy and in sorrow, bathed in black blood, She gazes at you with hatred, with love."
It is what I call his "hippy-punk" confusion that makes him very much his own character and dictates his attire -an almost feminine black top and persimmon-coloured Indian shalwars. Shalwars are comfortable Indo-European leg-wear that today is worn from Kurdistan to Maharashtra, and that goes back to olden times. All in all his pair, on which simple ornamental embroideries snake their way from shin to thigh, looks very similar to the trousers I saw on the reconstructed fiberglass Scythian in the ethnographic museum in Yevpatoria.
We are on Crimea, that roughly rhomboid-shaped bit of land that juts out into the sea like the hand of a Scythian gripped around his bow -the Black Sea being said in Antiquity to have the shape of one of the Scythian's bows. The Scythians lived from hunting and banditry and they had acquired the reputation of being invincible warriors. "Their raids strike with the force of lighting... in number they are stronger than springtime bees, ...they empty the countries of others", a Byzantine writer of the 11th century wrote about the Pechenegs, one of the successor nomad peoples of the step, but the concept was the same already a thousand years earlier: The first thing you'd notice if you were to near a horde of Scythians was a cloud of dust at the horizon, which would come flying into your eye before you even could make out the details of their wagons or individual animals of their herds of cows and sheep. At first the thunder of a hundreds of hoofs pounding the earth would overwhelm your senses, then a penetrating stench that would make it difficult to breathe. They were light-skinned, tall men on horseback, with spears in their hands and double-edged swords at their waists. At the bits of their horses they fastened the scalps of their enenmies, which they used as towels to wipe their hands, and at their belts they carried drinking cups made out of the skulls of whom they'd killed. Some even used human skin to make saddles. Their own skin certain of the Scythian tribes adorned with intricate, highly stylized tattoos, sometimes ones that covered their whole body.
Despite the fact that they were nomads, their society had a high degree of specialisation, and they had many different kinds of professions, manufactureres of different sorts and even blacksmiths. You have to imagine their galloping hordes as nothing less than mobile cities.
In the collective consciousness of the Russian people a special place is set apart for the memory of this great nomad nation who at the threshold of history lived on their southern steppes. It is by their bias that they like to explain all that is not European, but somehow, mysteriously wilder and more Asiatic in that Russian soul they so love to fuss about. And while some say searching for a connection is ridiculous because 100s of years lay between the demise of the Scythian state, and the appearance of Slavs on the pages of history, other scholars bend over backwards to attest at least a high probability that in the multi-ethnic confederation that was Scythia Slavic tribes did live and mingle.
At the time of the revolution the great Russian poet Aleksander Blok wrote a famous, strangely ambiguous poem entitled "The Scythians", that expresses all the contradictons of a Russia at the same time rejecting and embracing this barbarous heritage. It speaks of ravenous eyes, raging steel machines, and passion that destroys:
"Russia is a Sphinx. In joy and in sorrow, bathed in black blood, She gazes at you with hatred, with love."
Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Teheran
Let's own up to it, there's books you pick up solely for their title. For me, the heavy-handed, moralizing "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?", a 1999 book about the Kurds, was one. I read it sometime in the mid-2000's and it triggered memories from back in the day, when the Manic Street Preachers hit the top of the charts with a song improbably called "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next". The book was almost as good as the song, although a bit more longwinded.
Another one that took my fancy this way was the thin booklet "Reading "Legitimation crisis" in Teheran". I had read one of the books this title alluded too, as, it goes understood, any Nabokophile with an interest in Iran would have had to pick up Azar Nafisi's bestseller sooner or later. I read it in sleepless nights at friends' houses, through the prisms of foreign languages I don't perfectly master, partly in Dutch, partly in Spanish, and wasn't displeased with it as a way to kill time. On the other hand, "Legitimation Crisis", which is the English translation of Jürgen Habermas' 1975 title "Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus", is a work I haven't read, although of course I would have liked to. I sometimes joke that if I could have my way in life and wouldn't have to get involved with such irksome things as, *sigh*, work or study, all I would ever do would be read neo-Marxist literature and drink Earl Grey tea.
Anyway, what point in time more apt than three months after the fateful June 2009 elections, to pick up again the Legitimation crisis in Teheran?
I'm off to do that right now, and will give you a summary later.
Much later.
Another one that took my fancy this way was the thin booklet "Reading "Legitimation crisis" in Teheran". I had read one of the books this title alluded too, as, it goes understood, any Nabokophile with an interest in Iran would have had to pick up Azar Nafisi's bestseller sooner or later. I read it in sleepless nights at friends' houses, through the prisms of foreign languages I don't perfectly master, partly in Dutch, partly in Spanish, and wasn't displeased with it as a way to kill time. On the other hand, "Legitimation Crisis", which is the English translation of Jürgen Habermas' 1975 title "Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus", is a work I haven't read, although of course I would have liked to. I sometimes joke that if I could have my way in life and wouldn't have to get involved with such irksome things as, *sigh*, work or study, all I would ever do would be read neo-Marxist literature and drink Earl Grey tea.
Anyway, what point in time more apt than three months after the fateful June 2009 elections, to pick up again the Legitimation crisis in Teheran?
I'm off to do that right now, and will give you a summary later.
Much later.
Monday, August 24, 2009
An Eastern Tale
On 7 August, a month long ecological protest camp has opened in the Crimean town of Sevastopol. Focus of the protest is the local company Avlita, who want to build four coal terminals not far from the very centre of town. Together with the town administration, who give profit and investment in the city precedence over its citizens’ health, Avlita are in cahoots against the local population who are almost unanimously opposed to the project, despite the employment opportunities it brings.
The building of the coal terminals infract on various laws. The degree of pollution the construction of the terminal alone will cause should be proscriptive in Sevastopol, which is a UNESCO site of world heritage. For the construction 350 cube metres of earth need to be excavated, which will cause the pollution of the water of the bay to a point where it leads to the death of all fauna in it, and this is without mentioning the subsequent degradation of air quality that four coal terminals in one city imply for its inhabitants.
The construction of such a terminal may seem a mere parochial concern at first sight, but in reality it offers an excellent snapshot view of the political processes of Ukraine as a whole, a country wearing the cloak of a democratic regime, but de facto reigned by concerns for profit.
Since a 2008 census Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of the company Avlita, is officially the richest man of Europe. He has long been the most important of Ukraine's “oligarchs”. “Oligarchs” are those individuals who during the de-nationalisation process of the Soviet state economy of the 1990's were close to power centres and as a result got criminally rich. In today's Ukraine, the three largest political parties are all being supported by their own network of oligarchs. As the richest and most influential oligarch of the country, Mr. Akhmetov is by some considered the most powerful man of the country as such. The political party Mr. Akhmetov is close to is the “Party of the Regions”, headed by his personal friend, Ex-president Yanukovich. This party traditionally dominates in Crimea, and the incumbent mayor in Sevastopol's townhouse is indeed a representative of it.
The decision to build the four coal terminals was made public in 2007, and construction has begun since. The local population’s indignation about the terminal has already been instrumentalised by political parties, who try to improve their rating with the Crimeans especially in view of the on-coming presidential elections. However, locals are painfully aware that these parties are part of the same political system under the sway of businessmen. People are now coming to realise that the development of civil society, and not the least the ecological movement, is crucial to assure the exertion of public rights (and this not only after it has become clear that the Orange Revolution's promises of a more democratic society were hollow ones). Since 2007 a citizens’ committee formed, whose conflict with the company has lasted for almost the entire two years. The struggle has also drawn in regional ecological organisations, but their activities are continuously undermined by the authorities. The participants of the ecological camp that is organised this August already get to feel what this means. Undercover police are present at each of its informational pickets and demonstrations, and the tent camp where the activists lodge already had to move location twice because of police harassment.
None the less the atmosphere is relaxed and the prevalent outlook over the following weeks among the participants is positive : “We do this for the people of Sevastopol, and we know that the large majority of residents support our cause”, as one participant said.
The building of the coal terminals infract on various laws. The degree of pollution the construction of the terminal alone will cause should be proscriptive in Sevastopol, which is a UNESCO site of world heritage. For the construction 350 cube metres of earth need to be excavated, which will cause the pollution of the water of the bay to a point where it leads to the death of all fauna in it, and this is without mentioning the subsequent degradation of air quality that four coal terminals in one city imply for its inhabitants.
The construction of such a terminal may seem a mere parochial concern at first sight, but in reality it offers an excellent snapshot view of the political processes of Ukraine as a whole, a country wearing the cloak of a democratic regime, but de facto reigned by concerns for profit.
Since a 2008 census Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of the company Avlita, is officially the richest man of Europe. He has long been the most important of Ukraine's “oligarchs”. “Oligarchs” are those individuals who during the de-nationalisation process of the Soviet state economy of the 1990's were close to power centres and as a result got criminally rich. In today's Ukraine, the three largest political parties are all being supported by their own network of oligarchs. As the richest and most influential oligarch of the country, Mr. Akhmetov is by some considered the most powerful man of the country as such. The political party Mr. Akhmetov is close to is the “Party of the Regions”, headed by his personal friend, Ex-president Yanukovich. This party traditionally dominates in Crimea, and the incumbent mayor in Sevastopol's townhouse is indeed a representative of it.
The decision to build the four coal terminals was made public in 2007, and construction has begun since. The local population’s indignation about the terminal has already been instrumentalised by political parties, who try to improve their rating with the Crimeans especially in view of the on-coming presidential elections. However, locals are painfully aware that these parties are part of the same political system under the sway of businessmen. People are now coming to realise that the development of civil society, and not the least the ecological movement, is crucial to assure the exertion of public rights (and this not only after it has become clear that the Orange Revolution's promises of a more democratic society were hollow ones). Since 2007 a citizens’ committee formed, whose conflict with the company has lasted for almost the entire two years. The struggle has also drawn in regional ecological organisations, but their activities are continuously undermined by the authorities. The participants of the ecological camp that is organised this August already get to feel what this means. Undercover police are present at each of its informational pickets and demonstrations, and the tent camp where the activists lodge already had to move location twice because of police harassment.
None the less the atmosphere is relaxed and the prevalent outlook over the following weeks among the participants is positive : “We do this for the people of Sevastopol, and we know that the large majority of residents support our cause”, as one participant said.
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