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Ed Webb

Invisibility and Negrophobia in Algeria - Arab Reform Initiative - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In post-independence Algeria, autocratic elites have chosen to characterize the Algerian people as a homogenous block with a single culture (Arab-Islamic), religion (Islam), and language (Arabic) because they consider diversity to be a source of division and a threat to the country’s stability and their hold on power. Identity issues, which the regime insists on controlling, are also used to divide and rule. Aware of this, from the beginning, the Hirak downplayed identity and difference within the movement while focusing on getting rid of le pouvoir (Algeria’s military elite and their civilian allies that rule and exploit the country) as a whole, root and branch.
  • placing pressure on existing tensions between Arabs and Amazighs (Berbers) and between Islamists and secularists
  • in Saharan areas, the slave trade continued throughout the period of French settler colonialism (1830-1962)
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  • Anti-Black racism has only increased in Algeria with the arrival of tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Black, largely clandestine, migrants over the last two decades, who enter Algeria for educational or economic opportunities, or more often, to travel through the country en route to Europe.
  • 20-25% of Algerians are native Amazigh speakers (Tamazight), and many more are Arabized Amazighs. The indigenous Amazighs have been struggling for equality since independence against a state determined to impose an Arab Muslim identity on the country’s entire population
  • Amazigh activists have challenged the state’s assertion of Arab-Muslim homogeneity. Amazigh activism, in the form of mass protests and the undertakings of Amazigh-dominated political parties and civil society organizations, has pressured the state to constitutionally accept Amazigh identity as one of the components of Algerian identity, integrate the Amazigh language in secondary education, and recognize the Amazigh language as a national and later an official language of the state, in addition to Arabic
  • Black people, who were present in southern Algeria even before the 13- century-long  trans-Saharan slave trade, can be considered to be as indigenous to Algeria as the Amazigh population.
  • following a regional trend to repress diversity issues, the Algerian government has never taken a census to ascertain the total number of Algerian black citizens in the country, most of whom remain concentrated in the Saharan south. Ninety-one percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast on 12% of the country's total land mass.
  • Because most black Algerians are scattered in the vast southern Sahara, an area of the country about which many Algerians are not familiar, white Algerians may be only dimly aware, if aware at all, that they have black compatriots.25Ouzani, op.cit. Certainly, many black Algerians have reported that they face incredulity when claiming their national identity in northern Algeria at police roadblocks, airports, and even in doing everyday ordinary things like responding to a request for the time, “When I walk in the street and someone wants to ask me the time, he does it in French, convinced that he is dealing with a Nigerien or a Chadian, a way of indicating that an Algerian cannot be black.”
  • When Algerians think of “racial” discrimination, it is likely that they first think of the treatment Algerian Arabs and Amazighs received at the hands of the French during the colonial period (1830-1962), and afterwards in France.27Kamel Daoud, “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better be Muslim” The New York Times, May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/kamel-daoud-black-in-algeria-then-youd-better-be-muslim.html . See also Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Si tu desires te Moquer du Noir: Habille-le en rouge”, Middle East Eye, 24 November 2018. https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/si-tu-desires-te-moquer-du-noir-habille-le-en-rouge-0 The debate over Algeria as a post-colonial society has been fully engaged. However, in another sign of the invisibility of Algeria’s black citizens, consideration of Algeria as a post-slave society – and what that means for black Algerians today – has not
  • elites were also leaders of Third Worldism, and officially believed in pan-Africanism. Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first post-independence president, declared in Accra, Ghana, in 1963: “It was the imperialists who tried to distinguish between the so-called white and black Africans.”
  • Black Algerians find themselves in a perplexing situation during the current slow-moving peaceful Hirak for democracy. Concentrated in the Saharan south of the country, to an extent, Black Algerians are literally not visible to other Algerian citizens – self-identified white Arabs and Amazighs – who are overwhelmingly found on the northern Mediterranean coast. Nevertheless, Black Algerians are indigenous to Algeria’s Sahara,7Marie Claude Chamla, “Les populations anciennes du Sahara et des regions limitrophes,” Laboratoires d’Anthropologie du Musee de l’Homme et de l’Institut de Paleontologie Humaine, Paris 1968, p. 81. and hundreds of thousands of others, across 13 centuries, were enslaved and forced across the desert to Algeria from sub-Saharan Africa. The history of servitude has stigmatized Black Algerians, generated Negrophobia, and fostered a need – so far unrealized – for the mobilization of civil society organizations and the Algerian state to combat anti-Black racism in the country
  • Partly due to pressure on Algeria to control its borders from the European Union, Black sub-Saharan African migrants have been vilified by the Algerian government and some of the press;59https://insidearabia.com/algeria-desert-deportations-eu-migration/ accused – usually falsely – of violence, selling drugs, promiscuity, spreading venereal diseases, perpetuating anarchy, and raping Algerian women.
  • The French accommodated slavery in the Algerian Sahara more than anywhere else. Slave masters and merchants were given permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned well into the twentieth century.35Ibid. In exchange, slavers and merchants provided intelligence on far-off regions to colonial authorities
  • there is reason to believe that enslaved black people continue to be exploited for agricultural work in the southern oases of Ouargla and Ghardaia provinces to this day (among wealthy families, owners of large palm trees, fields, and farms) and in some instances among semi-nomadic Tuareg
  • The Algerian state has never adopted any policies, including any affirmative action policies, to help their black community emerge from the impact of generations of servitude and brutalization.40Brower, op.cit. Instead, it has sought to legitimize the country’s white Arab-Muslim identity only
  • descendants of freed Black slaves (Haratins) in Saharan regions of Algeria often remain dependent upon former “masters.” Most work as sharecroppers in conditions similar to slavery
  • Black Algerians also face discrimination in urban areas of the country. They encounter the same racist attitudes and racial insults as any other person with dark skin within Algerian borders.
  • Either by their colour, k’hal, which is twisted into kahlouche (blackie), mer ouba (charcoal), guerba kahla (a black gourd to hold water made out of goatskin), nigro batata (big nose that resembles a potato), haba zeitouna (black olive), babay (nigger), akli (Black slave in some Berber areas), rougi  (redhead or Swedish to imply that the black person is culturally and socially white, as everyone must want to be), saligani (from Senegal) 46Khiat, op.cit., Calling black Algerians Saligani (from Senegal) has a different history. It refers back to the early decades of the 20th century when the French utilized black West-African soldiers in their colonial army to do the dirty work of colonialization, including brutalizing members of the population that resisted French rule, taking food from farmers, and rape. or by direct references to past servile status: hartani (dark black slave or ex-slave forced to work outside the master’s house), khadim (servant), ouacif (domestic slave), ‘abd (slave), ‘abd m’cana (stinky black slave).47Ibid. Using these terms against a black Algerian passerby establishes difference, contempt, strangeness, rejection, distance, and exclusion
  • In addition to racial insults, a black Algerian academic has noted, “Our community continues to symbolize bad luck. Worse: in the stories of grandmothers, we play the bad roles, kidnappers of children, looters, or vagrants. [While Arabs and Berbers can both point to a proclaimed noble history in Algeria] there is no place for a black hero in the collective memory of my people.”
  • In addition to rejection of interracial marriages, an Algerian intellectual has reported cases of “white” Algerians refusing to room with Blacks or study with them at university
  • A step forward in reducing Negrophobia, the selection of Khadija Benhamou, a black woman from the Algerian Sahara, as Miss Algeria in 2019 has been marred by the subsequent deluge of posts on social media virulently claiming that she did not represent the beauty of the country, with many direct attacks against the colour of her skin.
  • Arab-Berber whites constructed an economy that relied on black slave labour from their Haratins (enslaved or recently freed Islamicized and Arabized Blacks, who are still susceptible to forced labour practices).31These ambiguously freed black slaves in Saharan areas of Algeria are also called Bella or Ikelan if they were enslaved by Amazighs, including Tuaregs. Today Haratins, mostly sharecroppers, work under harsh labour conditions that some have described as a modern form of slavery, they “dig and tend wells, excavate and maintain the underground channels of foggara, irrigate gardens, tend to flocks, and cultivate dates”.32Benjamine Claude Brower, “Rethinking Abolition in Algeria,” Cahier D’etudes Africaines 49, 2009 Some argue that without the labour of enslaved Black people, the Sahara would never have been habitable at all.33Ibid. The arduous and relentless work to irrigate in a desert includes digging channels tens of feet into the sand with the risk of being drowned under it.
  • Without irony, some graffiti and social media posts called on the migrants to “Go back to Africa.”
  • Three generations after independence, the Algerian state is still resisting the open public debate and civil society engagement needed to reflect the country’s pluralism and to begin to reckon with slave legacies and racial discrimination
Ed Webb

Hip Hop Finds Its Groove in North Africa | Newlines Magazine - 0 views

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music hiphop Maghreb MENA Morocco Tunisia Algeria Egypt France Italy Belgium language colonialism identity identities

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  • Pop music in the region today truly represents the Westernization of classical Arabic music defined by traditional elements of improvisation (where songs often last as long as an hour), instruments native to the region like the oud, and maqam, which is a system of melodies and pitches native to Arabic music. Classical Arabic artists like Oum Kulthum and Asmahan thrived on this style and are considered icons of Arabic music because of their ability to evoke emotion through their artistry.But in conjunction with colonization, Arabic music began to shift from its classical roots with the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932, organized by King Fuad of Egypt. This symposium brought together renowned composers and ethnomusicologists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe who created a set of proposals for the modernization and standardization of Arabic music, one of which was the incorporation of European instruments into Arabic ensembles because “such instruments possessed tremendously varied, expressive means and depictive powers.”The other notable event that pushed this modernization further was the introduction of the phonograph to the region. Phonographs could only play songs for a limited duration, making the traditional improvisation and hour-long running times of classical Arabic music nearly impossible.The final nail in the coffin was the burgeoning film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in Egypt, the cultural epicenter for creative output in the Middle East and North Africa. Movies were heavily Westernized at the time, forcing directors and producers to modify accompanying music to incorporate Western-style elements in their instruments and duration.
  • a new movement is rising in North Africa.Rappers and emcees from the region are boldly approaching hip-hop and the larger Arab music landscape by exploring taboo themes and proactively deconstructing societal markers of North African identity. They are experimenting with beat production and dialect as they go about creating a space for their music and for these conversations to be held in a public domain. This is not a knock on the Levantine or Khaleeji rap scenes; there are many artists who are doing this currently. But North African emcees are using their lyrical flows and melodic rhythms to grapple with the essential question of identity. The music sounds fresh and breathes new life into the pop-dominant Arabic music scene.
  • A vast majority of North African rappers primarily use their regional Arabic dialects and French in their music. But many artists, specifically North African artists based in Europe, also use Spanish, Dutch, and English on their albums. A few artists will even use all four languages in one song.
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  • French colonial policy in Algeria, she explained, aimed to violently prevent and suppress the teaching of Indigenous languages like Tamazight. France intentionally stoked tensions between Indigenous Imazighen and ethnic Arabs by implementing unjust laws seeking to tear at the societal fabric of the country and destroy Algerian identity.France implemented similar policies in other North African countries as well, actively working to create sectarian tensions that led to ethnic and linguistic divides that, in turn, led to brutal, violent conflicts and suppression of Indigenous culture.
  • Dialect and slang are important in rap, Boubaker stressed, because “it is a question of using a popular spoken language in constant evolution and which incorporates foreign influences.”
  • Many emcees, more so than their Levantine or Khaleeji counterparts, utilize Afropop and Afro-fusion rhythms in their music as a nod to their home continent.
  • Afrobeats is a fusion of hip-hop, dancehall, soca, and other Black genres that can be identified by its use of African drums and a 3/2 time signature — different from a Western 4/4 time signature — that gives the genre its trademark dance tempo
  • For North African artists, use of these rhythms can be traced back to Black North Africans and Indigenous communities who are descendants of the slave trade. Boubaker shared that the different genres, namely gnawa in Morocco, diwan in Algeria, and stambali in Tunisia, are the result of a distinct weaving between the musicalities of North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Black Sufi tradition that can lead to a state of trance.
  • The stambali genre, Boubaker elaborated, is sung in a language derived from a mixture of Tunisian Arabic and the Houassa language spoken by the Hausas, a people of the Sahel, mainly in northern Nigeria and southern Niger who were part of the slave trade to Tunisia.
  • “Moroccan artists, early on, primarily referenced Malcolm X as a way to make the connection between race, Blackness, and Islam in the U.S. and embraced their own African identity through their music,” Almeida said. “The African theme has been going on for a while now.”
  • While Moroccan and Egyptian emcees found early opportunities, Tunisian and in particular Algerian artists did not have that initial access.
  • In Algeria, however, while the rap scene was up and coming, Almeida said the government actively worked to shut it down, which, she said, “really crushed everything.”That now looks different, with Algerian rappers even drawing influences from raï music and sampling prominent Algerian artists in their music.
  • Algerian artists of the 1990s and up to the present day are now primarily recording their music in France, Spain, and other European countries to then broadcast back to Algeria and the rest of North Africa. This is a subtle but noticeable diversion away from seeking opportunities in the traditional Middle East/North Africa hubs of music and culture such as Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad.
  • “We just have to go back to our history, and we need to start loving ourselves and we need to recognize who we truly are because we’re not Arabs. 100% being Egyptian and being Moroccan is straight up being African and straight up being proud. And this is why I never have any issue representing mahraganat in my music because this is Egyptian music. I’m proud of my double cultures. I’m proud of my continent, and I really want to showcase it everywhere.”
  • North African rappers today are using hip-hop to express what it means to be who they are in the context of their country, their continent, and their lived experiences. And while there is a deep and painful colonial history associated with this music, the artistic yield has been profound not just for the region but the world.
Ed Webb

The White Christian West Isn't What It Thinks It Is - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • The West does, of course, face challenges in an age when movements of people happen far more quickly across vast distances than ever before; an age in which the notions of meaning and virtue are more contested; an age where technological advancements and their corresponding impacts on society develop more rapidly. All of that has understandable impacts on how communities and societies think of themselves and conceptualize their common bonds. The question is, how do societies address these challenges and find answers that are likely to heal the rifts that exist rather than exacerbate them on the altar of “saving ourselves,” when the notion of “ourselves” is a wholly mythical construct?
  • When it comes to conceptualizing themselves as a Western “us,” European Christendom has historically done so by positioning itself against the Muslims of the Mediterranean, be they Ottomans or Arabs
  • a form of Christianity that focuses on solidarity with the oppressed, rather than promoting tribalistic hate against the “other,” is precisely what Europe needs more of
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  • is “liberty, equality, solidarity” really what the West stood for in terms of its engagements with minorities at home, and colonized peoples abroad?
  • Islam isn’t a newcomer. A decade ago, I wrote a book titled Muslims of Europe: The ‘Other’ Europeans that included an examination of Islam’s long European history. But one could write an encyclopedia that focused only on the history of Muslim European communities and figures, be they in premodern Spain and Portugal or the Emirate of Sicily or indeed the many Northern and Western Europeans who became Muslims. Framing Islam as a newcomer immediately restricts the scope of discussion that is needed. And such framing leads to a focus on salvaging broken models rather than seeking a new model for the West
  • The fear of Islam is where all of these insecurities come together—a world religion being caricatured to represent all the trials of the world coming upon “us.”
  • the subject of religion always arises when pundits and intellectuals discuss the ostensible faltering of the West
  • As Ryan notes, the sociologist Rogers Brubaker has characterized this stance as “a secularized Christianity as culture. … It’s a matter of belonging rather than believing.” He further describes the attitude as being one in which, “We are Christians precisely because they are Muslims. Otherwise, we are not Christian in any substantive sense.”
Ed Webb

Can Culture Make You an Italian Citizen? - 0 views

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  • This past October, the Italian Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee brought back to the table the discussion about a reform of the citizenship law currently in force, which dates back to 1992 and mainly awards Italian citizenship through blood ties. The so-called jus culturae (Latin for “cultural right”) would offer a third alternative to the more common jus soli and jus sanguinis, which recognize birthright citizenship and citizenship by bloodlines, respectively. The reform instead proposes citizenship by cultural assimilation, mainly through the Italian education system, and aims to support demographic growth in a country with low birth rates.
  • during the 2017-2018 academic year, 842,000 “foreign” students enrolled at Italian public schools didn’t have Italian citizenship. (The report labels as foreign those students who hold residence permits but not Italian nationality.) If approved, the law will deliver automatic citizenship to all those children who were born in or entered Italy before turning 12 and finished at least five years of Italian schooling.
  • Next Generation Italy, a grassroots group of first- and second-generation Italians. Their work aims to give a voice to young Italians with immigrant backgrounds who do not feel sufficiently represented in Italian politics and are now asserting the importance of their citizenship rights and demanding fair representation in politics. It’s a rare opportunity for Italians to hear and learn directly from those affected by Italy’s immigration policies—rather than from politicians with no skin in the game.
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  • As many migrants lost their jobs or could only find illegal job options during the economic crisis, they often have trouble providing evidence of continuous legal residence in the country for 10 years. Because of the high costs of the application process—250 euros ($275) just to submit the application form, plus other bureaucratic expenses—entire families simply give up.
  • the main challenge is the inability of politicians to make a clear distinction between migrants temporarily landing in Italy as a result of the refugee crisis and generations of immigrants who have been living in the country for decades, since the end of World War II.
  • The 2018 populist coalition, consisting of the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, built its entire campaign, both for national and EU elections, around the issue of migration
  • populist parties continue to advocate ethnic nationalism and are now avoiding the citizenship question, in accordance with their promises made to voters. On the other hand, Italy’s Democratic Party had tried to promote immigrants’ rights in order to attract the pro-migrant side of the population, but they have done so without concrete results. Second-generation Italians remain the main losers on this political battlefield.
  • Saidi said he’s always found it odd that the current law recognizes citizenship rights for descendants of the Italian diaspora worldwide who no longer speak the language or never visited the country, but not to youngsters who, like him, have grown up in Italy, attended Italian schools, and fully embraced Italian culture and lifestyle
  • In the past five years, more millennials are trying to prove their capacity to influence political sentiments through panels and meetings, rather than continuing to live as ghosts in the place they consider their home country.
  • young people with immigrant backgrounds are everywhere in Italy, except in crucial sectors of Italian society such as media and politics.
  • In May, Antonella Bundu, a candidate for mayor in Florence, attracted attention for her darker skin and curly hair rather than for her work. Media coverage about her focused more on clickbait headlines about her mixed-race background (her father comes from Sierra Leone) and less on her policy proposals. Although Bundu is Italian, she has been labeled a foreigner due to her looks, and she lost the election to the incumbent mayor
  • “Older generations don’t fully grasp the idea of modern identity. For them, Italians cannot yet be associated with darker skin, a hijab, or oriental features. But millennials seem more open-minded on this matter,”
  • Kaabour said the first time he truly felt Italian was in 2004, during a university exchange in France through the Erasmus program. There, he realized that the French seemed to accept his dual identity as both Arab and Italian far more than anyone at home—a damning indictment of Italian society, given France’s long-standing history of racism toward people of North African descent.
  • Although recent statistics show that seven out of 10 Italians are in favor of the reform, Gulia believes more years of education aimed at normalizing a multicultural Italy are needed before an actual change will come. Starting in elementary schools, he said, is the way forward because “the difference at the moment is only perceived by adults,” as older generations were raised on myths and stereotypes about immigrants, compared to today’s youth
  • Recently, a group of graduates from the University of Bologna launched the Boundless Identities Project, which aims to send DNA tests to Italian politicians in 2020 and challenge them to unravel their not-so-Italian origins.
  • “Our tests are just a means to awaken Italians on the unsustainable idea that being Italian is something exclusively connected to blood.”
Ed Webb

Archaeology Turns Political to Benefit a Trio of Middle East Strongmen - New Lines Maga... - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Going back 10 years to the Arab Spring and eight years before that to the invasion of Iraq, much of the region has experienced terrible loss not only on a human scale, but also of its archaeological heritage. The culmination of both came in 2015 with the brutal murder of the 82-year-old archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad — who had been in charge of the Syrian UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra for 40 years — and the destruction of part of the 2,000-year-old site by the Islamic State group
  • Three countries — Iraq, Syria and Libya — have an extraordinary heritage of ancient archaeological sites, many of them now endangered, and had in common long-standing dictators, (although in the case of Syria, of course, the Assad regime continues), all of whom used their cultural heritage in various ways to define how they saw their nation
  • That dictators draw inspiration from ancient history to shape their nations is nothing new — Mussolini looked back to the Roman empire, while Hitler and the Nazi party developed their mythical, ancient “Aryan” race. The last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, threw one of the most lavish parties in history at Persepolis in 1971 during national celebrations to illustrate the grandeur of the 2,500-year-old Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century B.C.
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  • In the years after the Baath party came to power, writes Abdi, the budget for the Department of Antiquities increased by 80% and the number of excavations mushroomed, as did the renovation and reconstruction of historical sites
  • In Syria, too, Assad’s promotion of archaeology was, as the late journalist Patrick Seale described it, part of his exercise in nation building. Stéphane Valter, a French political scientist who specializes in Arab culture and civilization, studied Assad’s relationship to Syria’s archaeology in his 2002 book, “La construction nationale syrienne” (“The Syrian national construction”). He writes that because of the fragility of a social cohesion in Syria due to its varied ethnic and religious communities, it was important for Assad to establish a territorial and historical identity in which all minorities could find a legitimate place. The archaeological richness of Syria doubtless helped build a national identity based on a culture that was promoted as authentically Syrian.
  • Gadhafi’s view of Libya’s heritage was selective, but like the other dictators, it aligned with the message he wanted to transmit.“Libya links east to west, and north to south, and there are examples of all the cultures that were around us,” said Fakroun.But Gadhafi largely favored Islamic archaeology, in keeping with his Pan-Arab ideological preference at the time (vis-a-vis Pan-Africanism, which he embraced in later years), and after that, prehistory because it was far enough into the past to be relatively uncontested. In contrast, British archaeologist Graeme Barker, who spent many years in Libya, explained that “the country’s fabulous Greek and Roman archaeology represented to him simply the precursor of the hated Italian colonization of the 20th century.”
  • when Gadhafi saw that the museum staff had named some of the rooms “Greek” or “Roman,” his face fell, said Fakroun, “and he made us change the names to ‘Greek colonization’ or ‘Byzantine colonization.’ ”
  • “We couldn’t talk about our Amazigh heritage. Or objects that were Tuareg, we had to say they were Arab. We wanted to be scientific, but we couldn’t, because the only ethnicity that existed for him was Arab,”
  • Unlike in Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, in Gadhafi’s Libya, the Department of Antiquities suffered from constant underfunding. “Our budget was next to nothing,” recalled Fakroun. “Once they forgot about the Department of Antiquities when they were drawing up the country’s budget. We had no salary for six months. We’re talking about a country with tons of money from petrol, and they gave us pennies. And we have five World Heritage sites.
  • Iraq was flooded with propaganda posters, murals and sculpted reliefs in the style of ancient artworks, all depicting Saddam superposed with Mesopotamian rulers or symbols
  • Saddam rebuilt the site shoddily, most professionals agree, and built a palace for himself on top of it. He used new materials and inscribed his name on the bricks, as Nebuchadnezzar had done over 2,000 years before him. Moreover, said Almamori, “he dug three or four lakes, which damaged and removed part of the Persian cemetery near the northern lake. Many layers of different civilizations were removed. He constructed artificial mounds and built his palace on one of them. Archaeologists with high positions were afraid to say anything.”
  • “When Nebuchadnezzar II took over from his father, Nabopolassar, he ruled from the same palace which he rebuilt. The Baath party related to this — we have a long history, a strong civilization, that needs a strong army. Nationalists in other countries think the same way.”
  • the Umayyad period of history was useful to the party because of its multiethnic nature. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus was one of the best symbols for the party, writes Valter, because of its specifically Syrian cultural traits — first an Aramean and then a Roman temple, then a church and finally a mosque. The mosque figured on Syria’s most valuable banknote at the time, behind an image of Assad. Banknotes included images of Aleppo’s Citadel, the Roman amphitheater of Bosra and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and clearly showed the regime’s wish to conflate ethnocultural Arab references with nationalist pride and a pinch of Islam
  • one of the most important ancient sites for Assad was Ugarit, near the Mediterranean city of Latakia. With five layers of cultures going back to the Neolithic period, not only is it famous for its clay tablets with an alphabet in cuneiform script, but Ugarit is also just north of Qardaha, where Assad was born and is buried.
  • the Baath regime in Iraq sought to “connect modern-day Iraq with its glorious Mesopotamian past, leaving aside any possible Sunni-Shia division or ethnic divide. Instead, it stressed that Iraq was one nation unified in a shared Mesopotamian-inspired culture.”
  • outstanding archaeological sites in all three countries suffered looting, vandalism, neglect, or at the hands of the Islamic State or, in the case of Ancient Babylon, from U.S. and Polish troops building their military base on top of the ruins in 2003
Ed Webb

The Many Myths of the Term 'Crusader' | History | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 21 - Cached
  • the international news cycle whirred to life, attaching a charged adjective—Crusader—to a potentially unrelated object. In doing so, media coverage revealed the pervasive reach of this (surprisingly) anachronistic term, which gained traction in recent centuries as a way for historians and polemicists to lump disparate medieval conflicts into an overarching battle between good and evil, Christianity and Islam, civilization and barbarism.
  • the term should never stand alone as an explanation in and of itself. Crusades were waged by Christians against Muslims, Jews and fellow Christians. They were launched in the Middle East, in the Baltic, in Italy, in France and beyond
  • The Crusades weren’t the only events happening during these two centuries in either the Middle East or Europe. Relatively few people were, in fact, Crusaders, and not everything that fell into the eastern Mediterranean Sea during this period was a Crusader artifact. The habit of referring to the “era of the Crusades,” or calling the petty kingdoms that formed, squabbled and fell in these years the “Crusader states,” as if they had some kind of unified identity, is questionable at best. Inhabitants of this part of the Middle East and North Africa were incredibly diverse, with not only Christians, Muslims and Jews but also multiple forms of each religion represented. People spoke a range of languages and claimed wildly diverse ethnic or extended family identities. These groups were not simply enclaves of fanatically religious warriors, but rather part of a long, ever-changing story of horrific violence, cultural connection and hybridity.
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  • “In calling this period ‘Crusader,’ Israeli archaeology had, in some ways, aligned itself with a European colonial narrative about the Middle East” that privileged the experience of Europeans over those of locals.
  • The term “Crusade” has always been an anachronism—a way of looking back at complex, often disconnected movements with a wide array of motivations, membership, tactics and results and organizing them into a single coherent theology or identity. As Benjamin Weber of Stockholm University explains, the phrase “opened the way to complete assimilation of wars fought against different enemies, in varied places and often for similar reasons. ... [It] took on a legitimizing function. Any contested action could be justified by dubbing it a ‘crusade.’ It, therefore, became a word used to wield power and silence denouncers.”
  • The word “Crusade” came into use late, long after medieval Christian holy wars began. The Latin word crucesignatus, or “one marked by the cross,” first appeared in the early 1200s, more than a century after Urban II’s call to action in 1095. In English, “Crusade” and “Crusader” don’t appear until around 1700; by the 1800s, the term—defined broadly as a military campaign in defense of one’s faith—had become a convenient way for Victorian historians to mark the past as a battle between what they saw as good and evil, represented respectively by Christianity and Islam
  • claims worked especially well as supposed historical justification for contemporary European colonialism, which used rhetoric like “The White Man’s Burden” to paint land grabs as civilizing crusades against “uncivilized” non-Westerners.
  • Today, the terms “Crusader” and “Crusade” latch onto a nostalgic vision of the past, one that suggests there was a millennia-long clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity (or “the West”)
  • historians must develop terminology that accurately reflects the people who inhabited the Middle East around the 12th century. A potential alternative is “Frankish,” which appears routinely in medieval Arabic sources and can be a useful “generalized term for [medieval] Europeans,” according to Mulder. It initially had pejorative connotations, being “kind of synonymous with a bunch of unwashed barbarians,” she says. “But as there come to be these more sophisticated relationships, it just becomes a term to refer to Europeans.”
  • Between the 11th and 13th centuries, “hybridity [in the region] is the norm. The fact that another kind of group [establishes itself in the same area] is just part of the story of everything. It's always someone. ... If it's not the Seljuks, it’s the Mongols, it’s the Mamluks. It’s you name it.” Mulder isn’t denying that medieval kingdoms were different, but she argues first and foremost that difference was the norm.
  • In the Middle Ages as a whole, but perhaps especially in this corner of the Mediterranean, objects, people and ideas moved across borders all the time
Ed Webb

Italy Caused Chaos in Libya by Mismanaging Migration Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...entiloni-mogherini-chaos-libya

Africa Europe Italy Libya migration sahel policy EU

shared by Ed Webb on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • Over three days in May 2017, the Italian secret service—masquerading as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization—summoned to Rome two dozen delegates from the southern edge of the Sahara desert. The pretext was to promote a peace deal for their war-torn region; the real goal was to bring them on board with an Italian plan to curb migration.
  • the pitfalls of a foreign policy that conflates peace and development with migration control
  • The Tuareg, the Tebu, and the Awlad Suleiman—the groups represented at the summit—are the gatekeepers of the desert crossed by those hoping to reach the Libyan coast to embark on a sea journey to Europe.
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  • Migration, however, was never much of a concern for the inhabitants of the Sahara. For the most part, they move freely across borders, and their economies depend heavily on the transit of people and goods.
  • What was meant to be “A dialogue on peace, development, security and human rights in the trans-border regions of Libya, Chad, and Niger,” according to the government’s agenda, became a failed attempt to co-opt some of the poorest people on the planet in a fight against migration from which they had little to gain.
  • The interior ministers of the three countries attended the gathering, as well as one vice president of the GNA—hardly a typical NGO summit. The summit was ostensibly organized by the Ara Pacis Initiative, a group that claims to be an “international not for profit organization based in Rome, dedicated to the human dimension of peace.” Its peculiar inspiration, according to its website, is the altar of peace built in Rome by emperor Augustus. The founder and sole active member of Ara Pacis is Maria Nicoletta Gaida, an Italian American former actress with little background in the humanitarian sector
  • The mysterious man with the ponytail started off with an offer meant to capture the goodwill of his audience: “We will ask for Italy’s commitment to immediately establish cultural identity centers for the trans-border tribes,” he said. Italy would staff these centers with teachers “that will keep alive the history and the culture of these great people.” He also promised health clinics connected via webcam to Italian hospitals. “These are small things,” he said, “for the seed from which the plant grows is always small.”
  • “After peace,” he said, “comes security and development.” The delegates should “deal with the issue of immigration and terrorism through border control mechanisms based on the optimization of reception centers that already exist in your countries.”
  • “My minister is ready to support any of your requests,” he said at one point. In return, he asked for the tribes’ backing in curbing migration: That would “give him the strength to go to Europe and defeat our enemies,” he said, without clarifying who those enemies might be.
  • At roughly the same time as the meeting near Rome, the Italian intelligence services reportedly brokered a multimillion-euro payment to Libyan militias involved in trafficking to enlist them as a coast guard force, a claim that Italy denies.
  • The International Organization for Migration manages one key pillar of the EU’s migration policy in Libya, namely the so-called voluntary repatriation of stranded migrants.
  • these agencies have repeatedly proved useless when it comes to defending the human rights of migrants in Libya. Indeed, the Associated Press revealed last month that the EU’s humanitarian spending has often been diverted to militias and traffickers—sometimes with the knowledge of U.N. officials.
  • Sergio De Caprio, known by the public as Capitano Ultimo, became a legend in Italy after arresting the godfather of the Sicilian mafia Totò Riina in 1993. His exploits inspired novels and a TV series. In 2016 and 2017, he was transferred to the secret service. While his anti-mafia record is legendary, his foreign-policy credentials are unknown. His appointment affirmed the Italian government’s belief that migration is essentially a criminal problem, and that smuggling rings can be fought in the same way as mafia organizations.
  • “Rather than cultural centers,” he said, “let’s open factories, so that the youth can have a hope, an alternative to joining criminal gangs.”
  • “The social components of southern Libya are many more than just Awlad Suleiman, Tebu, and Tuaregs,” he argued. Moreover, he said, “their representatives know their identity and history well and are perfectly able to preserve their traditions.”
  • Although the south of the Sahara is rich in oil, gold, and uranium, local populations suffer abject poverty. The Saharan delegates laid out their priorities: Negotiating peace was their main aim—and supposedly the reason they had flown all the way to Rome. They saw Italy as having a European mandate to mediate peace in Libya by virtue of its old colonial ties. But still the war raged on
  • if a border force was what Europe really wanted, the tribes could welcome military equipment. The United Arab Emirates, the Tuareg leader reminded De Caprio, had lent their helicopters and pilots for border patrol after just one meeting, and this was already their fifth visit to Italy.
  • There is no accountability for Europe’s multibillion-euro spending spree on projects to curb migration. In vast regions such as southern Libya that are inaccessible to diplomatic missions, let alone humanitarian agencies, officials are able to pocket the money for themselves. Migration spending thus ends up fostering corruption, rather than development.
  • when the Libyans sought ambitious development projects they were offered handicraft workshops instead
  • Humanitarian catastrophe looms over the wider Sahara region as Islamist insurgencies in the bordering Sahel region displace 4.2 million people. The Libyan war has escalated into an international conflict
  • The parties in the Libyan conflict store weapons “in close proximity” to migrant detention centers, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, so these become a target of the bombing
  • Italy and Europe’s credibility has been severely undermined by their single-minded pursuit of migration control when dealing with Libya and other African countries
  • At least 36,000 people have been returned to Libya as they attempted to leave the country since 2017 by a Libyan coast guard that Europe funded and equipped. Unsurprisingly, given the way they were recruited, coast guard officers have been found to be involved in such crimes as detaining and extorting ransoms from migrants, whipping shipwreck survivors, shooting migrants, sinking their dinghies, and ignoring distress calls
  • For several years the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic organization of which Giro is a prominent member, had been mediating peace among the Saharan peoples. The association is involved in several conflict resolution initiatives around the world and has been credited with ending a bloody civil war in Mozambique in 1992.
  • Europe’s “migration obsession … a sickness that has infected all 28 EU countries
  • Mogherini’s tenure as EU foreign-policy chief will be remembered for its unprecedented callousness toward the plight of migrants and refugees; she now co-chairs a newly formed U.N. High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement
  • “Do you realize what it would mean if Libya fell into Turkish and Russian hands, at the expense of Europe? We would lose everything.” What would we lose? I asked him. “Everything! Control over migration, political control, economic control, the oil. … Eventually, we would lose it all.”
Ed Webb

Between British integration and Arab identity: The history of the Moroccan merchants of... - 0 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...-moroccan-merchants-manchester

UK Britain integration identity history Morocco trade business

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The Syrian/Lebanese mercantile community of Manchester existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were not the only Arab group in the UK during this period. Moroccan traders formed a very distinct Arab community in Manchester.
  • Moroccan merchants began visiting Britain as early as the sixteenth century, arriving at the port of St. Ives in Cornwall in 1589
  • In the nineteenth century, Moroccan Muslim and Jewish traders began to settle in Manchester on a more permanent basis. In the 1830s Britain and Morocco signed treaties permitting their subjects to travel and trade in each other’s territories.
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  • the words manisheester and rite – after products bearing the insignia of Manchester manufacturer Richard Wright – entered the local vocabulary in Fes, to refer to good quality tea trays and pots.
  • In his book, Reminisces of Manchester, Hayes noted how close-knit the merchants were and how different their style of business was from English merchants. The latter group were initially shocked by the openness and trust between Moroccan merchants and how, if you wanted to discuss business with one of them, you would have to do so in front of all the others.
  • He recalls that he was often bullied by other children because of his Moroccan origin and as a result developed a timid character. 
  • “Taken as a whole, these Moors were a thoughtful, peaceable, kindly and sociable set of men. Mohammedans by faith one could not but admire and respect them for their strict observance of all that their religion enjoined”. 
  • Moroccans were fascinated with England’s public parks, green spaces, and seaside resorts and would often go on hikes and picnics as well as to the cinema and theatre
  • While his parents insisted that their son be exempted from Christian prayers at school, he and other children would celebrate Christmas, exchanging gifts with British children. 
  • The Manchester City News praises the Moroccan merchants for their honesty and hospitality. It also notes, however, that most of the Moroccan merchants had married black women, purchased as slaves in Morocco, and brought them back to England. 
  • Most of this early Moroccan community had returned to Morocco by 1936 when the Lancashire textile trade declined.
  • While the early Moroccan community in Manchester was relatively small and eventually returned to Morocco, they provide an excellent example of how an Arab community integrated into British life at a time before modern conceptions of citizenship and racial equality – with their associated protections – had been established. 
  • By the 1930s when most of the original Manchester Moroccan community had returned to their country of origin, other Arabs – notably Yemenis – were establishing a more permanent presence in Britain’s cities.
Ed Webb

How despair and misery fuel North Africa migration | The North Africa Journal - 0 views

north-africa.com/...ry-fuel-north-africa-migration

Tunisia youth unemployment economy migration Algeria Italy Europe UNHCR

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • With the coronavirus pandemic further squeezing already scant economic opportunities, Algerians and Tunisians are more determined than ever to reach Europe
  • 60 people, mostly women and children, drowned off the Tunisian coast. But this has not put Hamid off. An engineer by profession, he has work, but is forced to live with his parents because his salary is not enough to rent a separate apartment
  • The migrants are known locally as “harraga”, “those who burn” — a reference to successful travellers setting their identity papers alight upon reaching their chosen destination, to avoid repatriation
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  • as the unprecedented peaceful movement has been ever more harshly repressed and the oil-dependent economy has tanked on low crude prices, illegal departures have ticked up again
  • authorities arrested 1,433 people trying to depart illegally from Algeria’s shores in the first five months of this year — more than three times the figure for the same period of 2019
  • Sociologist Mohamed Mohamedi said the Hirak protest movement had offered citizens brief “hope of shaping a life” in Algeria. But, he said, “the return of the ‘harraga’ is due to the return of hopelessness”. Mahrez Bouich, a professor of philosophy and politics in Bejaia in northeastern Algeria, agreed that the lack of hoped-for changes, along with economic stagnation, were to blame. The pandemic has “exacerbated social inequalities and injustices”, Bouich said.
  • Aboard the boats are doctors, nurses, policemen, the unemployed and entire families, lawyer Zerguine said, arguing that the phenomenon cannot be explained by unemployment alone. Those who decide to leave “want to live with the times, they want more freedom and dignity”. Mohamed, the prospective migrant, said Algeria’s social conservatism had overlooked young people. “My grandparents are more open in spirit than my parents — it’s mad,” he said. “Society has regressed and I refuse to regress with it.”
  • In neighbouring Tunisia, clandestine departures towards Europe quadrupled in the first five months of the year compared to 2019, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR. And while a growing number of migrants attempting the crossings are from West Africa, Tunisians also appear to have ever more reason to leave. Many are disillusioned with the aftermath of the country’s 2011 revolution, while the coronavirus pandemic has further crushed their economic prospects, said Khaled Tababi, a sociologist specialising in migration. Many jobs have simply disappeared, especially in the tourism sector, he said.
  • “Living in a foreign country hit by the pandemic is easier than living here without money, without prospects and with the unemployment that strangles us,”
Ed Webb

The Secret Language of Cairo's Goldsmiths - Atlas Obscura - 0 views

www.atlasobscura.com/...-language-of-cairos-goldsmiths

Egypt language minorities Jews history

shared by Ed Webb on 25 May 20 - Cached
  • the goldsmiths of Cairo, who use trade-specific terminology for their business dealings. Many of the phrases they use, as he soon discovered, are reworked Hebrew terms, remnants of a time—from at least the 16th century through the early 20th century—when Egyptian Jews were central to the jewelry trade. The find was startling not only because of the intrigue of such “secret” trade languages, but because Jews have not worked in the Egyptian goldsmith market since the 1960s. Their language has outlived their community.
  • combine Hebrew roots with Arabic grammar. For example, some merchants would warn one another about a possible thief by using the word “ganneb.” The term comes from the Hebrew verb ganab, to steal, but is in Arabic’s declarative second verb form. As Rosenbaum would write, “Another term for warning against thieves is enaymak, which is a combination of the Hebrew word עינים=/enayim (eyes) and the Arabic suffixed possessive pronoun -ak for the second person.” Translation: Watch out!
  • In the early 1900s, the goldsmith quarter was also home to Cairo’s large Jewish population, which had resided in Egypt for millennia. The departure of the Jewish community in the 1950s and 1960s was swift and sudden, leaving many Jewish goldsmiths to abandon their businesses or hastily gift them to their non-Jewish assistants and colleagues. Few shop owners operating today will openly discuss this period. It’s not known what percentage of shops in the 1950s would have been Jewish-owned.
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  • the pragmatic focus of writing in trade contexts—which was often unconcerned with literary flourishes and instead existed somewhere between written and spoken language—meant traders were often the first to introduce spoken variables of language into the written word. This linguistic trendsetting was particularly true of trades that cultivated a group identity—goldsmiths being a prime example.
  • the Karaite Jews had a unique relationship to Arabic, which some posit might be one reason their trade phrases integrated so widely within the broader, non-Jewish goldsmith population. “There were not many Jews in Egypt who used Arabic exclusively for every aspect of their lives,” explains Katharine Halls, a scholar of Egyptian Jewry and Arabic-to-English translator who has lived on and off in Egypt for several years during her career. “Egyptian Jews often spoke French, like many wealthier Egyptian families, or Alexandria it was Italian for a while, but the Karaites were generally mono-lingual in Arabic, which made them virtually unique among Jews in Egypt.”
  • The Karaite Jewish goldsmiths likely would have freely trained their non-Jewish staff in the use of such terminology.
Ed Webb

Un-Mooring Race in Sicilian Folklore: The Tradition of "Testa di Moro" | by ACMRS Arizo... - 0 views

medium.com/...-of-testa-di-moro-878a9e8cbe20

Sicily history culture race identities art analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Sicily has a centuries-long history of complex negotiations with its African heritage (it was ruled, among others, by the Phoenicians, Aghlabids, and Fatimids), and it continuously reexamines its role as a locus of cross-cultural encounters and imperialistic fantasies. Moreover, the island is now at the center of anti-immigration rhetorics, with episodes of xenophobia and racism directed against migrants from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean
  • there is a direct line of continuity between teste di moro and the head-shaped vases produced in ancient Greece and Italy, which often depicted Black African youths. In the late Middle Ages, large and elaborate flower vases in polychrome majolica (called albahaquero from the Spanish word for “basil,” albahaca) became very popular in Spain and Morocco. Further into the early modern period, Europeans’ interest in the Ottoman Empire generated a robust demand for commodities that would allow for the consumption of a culture that inspired fear and fascination. Portraits of Ottoman men and women (whether authentic or based on European subjects dressed in Ottoman garb) were sought after in Venice, Florence, and elsewhere in Italy, including Sicily: majolica vases such as this one from early modern Palermo are a close antecedent to teste di moro.
  • the early modern popularity of the testa di moro capitalized on the European fascination with the male Black body as a symbol of dominance over the Mediterranean
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  • The tale of Lisabetta da Messina inaugurated the motif of the dismembered head placed into a vase and enjoyed several adaptations across regions and languages, such as the early modern murder ballad “The Bramble Briar,” which transferred the story to a village in Somerset. The folktale of teste di moro falls into this reception history, as attested by a more simple variant, in which the two lovers are decapitated as punishment for initiating an impossible interracial romance.
  • By appropriating Boccaccio’s exploration of Sicily as a locus of the macabre and projecting it onto the island’s premodern past under Muslim rule, the iconography and lore surrounding teste di moro inscribe fantasies of Mediterranean exchange within a commodified body that can be admired and reproduced for everyone to possess. Much like the port of Messina in Boccaccio’s tale (and others in the Decameron) or the resort in The White Lotus, the medieval Palermo of this folktale is a node within a broader maritime network. All three are places where peoples meet to trade in cultures, sex, and desire; if the exchange is unsatisfactory for one of the involved parties, they are also places in which one can also meet a violent end.
  • the displaced Muslim body becomes desirable only as a disembodied and sublimated commodity, to be pleasurably displayed in one’s garden or salotto — a stark contrast to the lived experience of other displaced non-European bodies living or passing through contemporary Sicily
Ed Webb

The Post-WWI Migrations That Built Yugoslavia and Turkey Have Left a Painful Legacy - N... - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...key-have-left-a-painful-legacy

Turkey Balkans Greece Yugoslavia Bulgaria Albania history migration nationalism Kosovo Serbia Romania minorities

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • the religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity that characterized their territories in the Middle East and Eastern Europe no longer chimed with the new world order being organized around nation-states
  • Designing measures such as the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, the League of Nations legitimized demographic engineering policies and made migration an intrinsic part of nation-building. With international encouragement, the states with Muslim minorities in the Balkans devised multipronged policies to push out the citizens they saw as undesirable. Turkey became the only destination for Balkan Muslims, even when they were not Turkish.
  • in 1938 Belgrade and Ankara concluded a little-known agreement to transfer 200,000 Yugoslav citizens to Turkey. The transfer did not materialize because of the start of World War II, but the migrations did eventually take place and continued into the 1950s. For both Yugoslavia and Turkey, new states created in the aftermath of World War I, migration was an important part of nation-building.
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  • took as its model another such deal between Turkey and Romania in 1936 as well as the better-known Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923
  • During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria invaded the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. Within several months, an estimated 1 million Muslims vanished, murdered and expelled from the regions taken over by these states. The shocking magnitude of the violence, which continued into World War I, made many Muslims wary of their future in the new nation-states and incited migration to the Ottoman Empire, itself in the midst of conflict.
  • Focus on religious identity allowed for a formal incorporation of these rather diverse populations into the Turkish national body. The asylum policy and the settlement laws defined migrants as Turks and those “affiliated with Turkish culture” to encompass all the Slav, Albanian and Greek Muslims, making Turkey­­ a safe haven for Muslim minorities fleeing oppressive regimes.
  • Dispossession, expulsions and massacres of diverse Muslim populations were already a grim reality of nation-building in southeastern Europe in the 19th century, when Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were carved out of Ottoman provinces. In fact, the conquests of Ottoman Europe after 1699 normalized expulsion and compulsory conversion of local Muslims in the lost territories
  • Forced processes of homogenization are still part of the repertoire of nation-state building, and continue to shape our understanding of world order. Muslim presence in the southeastern periphery of Europe likewise continues to be viewed as problematic and even dangerous: As Piro Rexhepi observed in the book “White Enclosures,” their integration continues to be desirable for security but impossible racially.
  • In the 1920s, Catholic missionaries working in neighboring Kosovo, a former Ottoman province inhabited by Albanian Muslim and Christian populations and similarly incorporated into Southern Serbia, sent reports of massacres, assassinations, imprisonment and forced labor in a memorandum to the League of Nations, receiving no response.
  • 19th-century definitions of South Slavic brotherhood envisioned Slav Muslims as potentially assimilable, distinguishing between “the Turks” as the non-Slavic Ottomans and “our Turks,” that is, Slav Muslims
  • so-called reform also included the vast properties of the Islamic pious endowments. Schools, mosques and Sufi lodges lost the land and incomes that were used to operate educational, religious and community services. Some land appropriations were symbolic: The 15th-century Burmali Mosque that visually defined Skopje’s main thoroughfare was simply torn down
  • Ivo Andric, an admired novelist and Yugoslav Nobel laureate, was also one of the highest-ranking Yugoslav diplomats in the interwar period. Eager to finalize the population transfer agreement with Turkey, he advised the government in Belgrade that Turkey was not only interested in the small group of ethnic Turks in Yugoslavia but also populations akin to Turks in their “mentality.” Repeating a constant theme in almost all of Andric’s novels, Muslims were described in his diplomatic correspondence as alien to the Balkans. For Andric, they were “Turks leftover in the territories of our Kingdom.”
  • over 2,000 Bosnians were settled along with Greek Muslims in the town of Izmir.
  • Turkish officials, faced with the constant influx of migrants, pursued agreements with the Balkan states that would offset the costs of migrant settlement. The 1934 Balkan Pact included minority clauses that allowed Turkish citizens to sell their properties in their former homelands. Turkish administrators also considered requesting an estimated payment from the Balkan nation-states to match the value of the properties that Balkan Muslims were forced to leave behind.
  • The Turkish Republic saw population growth as beneficial for economic development and national defense in the long term, as it worked to populate its eastern and western borderlands. Moreover, many of Turkey’s early administrators, as migrants and children of migrants themselves, understood these new waves of migration from a personal perspective.
  • Laws barred those speaking languages other than Turkish from settling in groups and limited the “foreign” presence to no more than 10% of a municipality, though the realities of the period frequently made these laws impossible to execute. The locals took on much of the burden of helping newcomers, begrudgingly sharing public resources. At the same time, the immigrants provided necessary manpower and introduced new methods in agriculture and certain industries. While Balkan languages largely disappeared with the following generation, enduring legacies, such as Balkan cuisine and music evoking the most personal memories of exile, acquired a place in the Turkish national heritage.
  • Today, no official recognition of the violent policies of “unmixing” exists, and barely anyone has heard of Yugoslavia’s attempted population transfer of 1939.
  • the international community’s preferred solutions to “ethnic conflicts” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo remain equally tied to principles of nationalist homogenization and demarcation. A century after the foundation of modern Turkey and the first Yugoslavia, the legacies of that era’s mass migration and state violence persist.
Ed Webb

Corsican language ban stirs protest on French island | France | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...stirs-protest-on-french-island

France Corsica language identity culture separatism

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • A court in Corsica has prompted outrage by banning the use of the Corsican language in the island’s local parliament.The court in the city of Bastia cited France’s constitution it its ruling on Thursday that French was the only language allowed in the exercise of public office.Corsican, which is close to standard Italian and has about 150,000 native speakers, is considered by the UN’s cultural organisation Unesco to be in danger of becoming extinct.
  • the court said local rules effectively establishing “the existence of a Corsican people” were also a violation of the constitution.
  • Macron said last month that he had “no taboos” about reforming the status of Corsica, which is a sunny Mediterranean island beloved by holidaymakers. But he insisted that Corsica had to remain part of France.
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