September 2007

Yaaay! No more Chinese support for Mugabe. I’m still waiting for the day we can say “bye bye” to him.

By the way, have I told you guys that I accidently bumped into the cute dictator himself recently in a 5-star hotel surrounded by many body guards? I was walking out of a seminar and I stopped for a while, curious to know why a big group of rich-looking Africans were gathered on the floor above the lobby. It’s as if there was a celebrity or something. They saw me looking at them and when they realized I was African, I was invited to say “hi”, together with a number of African students who had apparently come all the way just to see him. I approached to finally discover who the imporant, “wonderful” person getting all the attention was. I then looked at the guy who invited me as he was still kindly insisting I say “hi”, and loudly replied “no thanks“.

I walked away feeling satisfied.

Mugabe? Yuck!

Provided that their numbers aren’t too big, I whole heartedly welcome them. I sincerely do but seriously…

this just one major pathetic PR move by the government. Nothing else!

For ****’s sake, what about our own damn refugees? What about them? Don’t they deserve some help too?

Arghhhhh… Brilliant!

Keep preaching Jinkess.

I think the man is a little too soft and diplomatic but I certainly appreciate his efforts!

Oh yeah baby!

The Vietnam War-era slogan “Make love, not war” has been taken to its logical extreme by an Israeli pornographic website, which is engaged in a sort of cultural exchange of bodily fluids with the Arab world.

According to a recent report in Daily Variety, when executives at Ratuv installed software that could track where their users were logging in, they found that the site was getting thousands of hits a week from such countries as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though some of these governments block the “.il” domain address on Israeli websites. So Ratuv responded by translating the entire site into Arabic, and traffic quickly skyrocketed.

What makes this more than a tale of clever entrepreneurs making a buck off Middle Eastern sexual repression is that Ratuv isn’t an ordinary porn site. It’s a clearinghouse of political parody porn, making fun of Israeli affairs such as sex scandals and often featuring Mossad agents or army soldiers getting out of uniform, thus providing a view of the Israeli military seldom seen in the Arab world. The next step, says Ratuv’s manager, is to make movies with Israelis and Arabs performing together, in order to foster more intimate relations between the two peoples.

They should call it “The Arab-Jewish BOOM BOOM Room”.

Yaaay to making love, not war!

UPDATE: Here’s a related post about porn and the difficulty of getting married in Muslim countries thanks to crappy economic conditions.

First it was the South, then the East and then Darfur in the West. Now it’s Nubia in the upper North that’s picking up arms against the Khartoum government.

Their name is the Kush Liberation Front and they’re rightly pissed off thanks to 1) years of economic marginalization, and 2) the planned construction of dams which sparked the recent tragic Kajbar massacre.

My latest round-up post at Global Voices contains some information on one of the dams:

Little.Miss.Dalu puts the spotlight on the construction of a large dam in Sudan known as the Meroe Dam and the loss it will cause to archaeological treasures from the days of the ancient Nubian Civilization:

The Meroe Dam already poses a humanitarian crisis. It will displace more than 50,000 people who live along this isolated region of the Nile, growing dates and herding sheep and goats. But the project is also creating a cultural heritage disaster largely ignored by the international media, UNESCO, and private preservation groups. Thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–of ancient sites are likely to vanish underwater as early as next year without even cursory examination.

If you’re not aware of the Kajbar massacre, this post leads to some very graphic videos of the incident. The article also states the following about it:

Tensions have been high here since soldiers opened fire on an anti-government protest of 5,000 Nubians in June, killing four young men and wounding nearly two dozen. The government has arrested nearly three dozen Nubian leaders and four journalists who were trying to cover the violence.

And out pops the Kush Liberation Front.

Now a recently formed rebel group, calling itself the Kush Liberation Front, is advocating armed resistance to overthrow the central government, which it accuses of oppressing Nubians and other indigenous peoples in Sudan.

“Our efforts will not succeed unless they are backed by military action,” said Abdelwahab Adem, a Nubian former businessman and co-founder of the Kush Liberation Front. “We need to get rid of the Arabs. Our goal is to realize a new Sudan, by force if necessary.”

Adem said the new movement would rely on “guerrilla fighting,” targeting the capital, Khartoum, and other major Sudanese cities. He declined to specify what sort of tactics might be used or how many fighters the group has.

Darfur has been continuously portrayed as an “Arabs Vs Africans” conflict. Now, this looks like it’s going to be portrayed as “Arabs Vs Nubians”. If that happens, it would be a little simplistic since Arab farmers are also going to be affected by the dams. For the government in Khartoum, it’s always primarily about wealth and power. Only after that do tribal factors come into play (which they surely do).

The spark for recent unrest was a government proposal to construct two or three electricity-producing dams along the Nile in the Nubian heartland, between the villages of Kajbar, about 350 miles north of Khartoum, and Dal, about 100 miles from the Egyptian border.

This fertile Nile River strip is home to an estimated 300,000 Nubians, many of whom would be forced to relocate if rising river waters swallowed scores of villages.

… The proposals come on top of another controversial project, the 1,250-megawatt Merowe Dam, which is already under construction about 150 miles to the east. Flooding from that project will displace 70,000 Arab farmers and engulf several hundred miles of unexplored Nubian archeological sites.

Wonderful! If you’re confused about this whole Arab/African, Arab/Nubian categorization, read this. Nubians are Africans. Ethnically speaking, the government in Khartoum is dominated by Afro-Arabs, but culturally speaking it’s accurate to say, it’s dominated by Arabs. Oh and in case you didn’t know, I come from a tribe which is mixed Arab-Nubian, so watching this unfold is kind of like a biracial kid watching his divorced parents fighting. Tribalism is a disease. As for the drowning of the ancient and valuable heritage of my people, don’t even get me started. It’s too painful. Find out more about the Ancient Nubian Civilization here.

Lord have mercy! The implementation of the North-South peace agreement isn’t going smoothly. Darfur is still a mess. And now, we have this. Sigh!

Praise be to the beloved Sudanese government.

Nubia is up in arms.