by Sonja Kakar

Having just returned to my fire-ravaged home state Victoria after a 7-week absence, I doubt that any Australian would be giving much thought to the terror and devastation that wracked the lives of some 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza only last month. But we cannot dismiss one disaster with a new one, even if it is our own. More than ever, Australians ought to feel some degree of empathy with the Palestinians who saw over 6,000 of their fellow citizens killed or injured in the attacks – a third of them children – and leaving almost 50,000 people homeless. One disaster was caused by a merciless fire storm that has had police and firefighters describing the charred wastelands and destroyed lives as akin to “a holocaust”; the other was caused by three weeks of merciless bombardments ordered by the state of Israel that few would dare to describe as “a holocaust” for fear of being charged with somehow trivialising a word long reserved for the genocide of European Jews more than half a century ago. But how else does one describe the sheer terror that people feel when they see the bodies of their loved ones shrivel before their eyes in blistering fire regardless if caused by nature or man? Whether it is 200, 1400 or 6 million people killed, the terror and overwhelming sense of loss the rest of a threatened population feels in the wake of such onslaughts, is the same. No one thinks of numbers when one is totally helpless to stop the tyranny of powerful forces. As we rush to help our suffering own and feel that sense of shared tragedy in the crisis of the moment, we should spare a thought for all those who are suffering similarly through no fault of their own. The aftermath inevitably comes and politicians, the media and those of us unaffected will eventually turn our attention to other matters, but the people who have borne the brunt of nature’s or human-contrived catastrophes will carry with them forever the scars of loves and labours lost. And when the world is silent and people turn the other way, the pain is that much harder to bear.

We should not forget the victims of the fires or the victims of war because life for them will never be the same again. They are part of the human family and none of us are any less vulnerable than the other to malevolent forces that threaten to strip us of everything near and dear to our hearts; we can only be grateful for the helping hand, the kind word, and those who are willing to reach out beyond the call of duty long after the fury unleashed is finally spent.
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

Gone
A family rests on the rubble of their home in Jebaliya.

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Submitted by reader.

Where does one even begin to talk about what the KaraFilm Festival has been through over the last two years? In December 2006, during the 6th KaraFilm Festival, we were musing about the direction the Festival should take after finally getting the State of Pakistan to accept its legitimacy and having celebrated six consecutive years of its existence. We were discussing how to consolidate the gains the Festival had made – and there were many – and how to take the next step towards translating those achievements into a more viable film industry in the country. “How do we ensure that this first step does not remain the only bright light on Pakistan’s film scene,” we wrote in our catalogue, “but feeds into better trained and more thoughtful filmmakers, a more conducive environment for good cinema and, indeed, better films being made?”
So it was ironic that, even as some of the fruits of our endeavours began to bear fruit – cinema attendances began to see an upsurge and at least some of the films made in Pakistan set people talking about a nascent “revival” – the subsequent months threatened the very existence of the Festival itself. Two years of political and social turmoil and ever increasing security challenges forced us, despite our best efforts and to our dismay, to twice postpone the 7th KaraFilm Festival. Like the thousands of people who looked forward to the annual ‘Kara experience’, we were extremely disappointed; more so, because we had put in months and months of hard work preparing for it. For some people, who perhaps did not understand the dynamics of an international film festival and all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that go into putting together an event of this magnitude, the postponements were inexcusable. But if anyone understood how much potential damage this still tender sapling could suffer if it was deprived of the sunlight of an annual airing, it was us, those who had planted it and nurtured it against all the odds.
But as if we did not have enough issues to contend with, in the last few months we have also been hit by the double-whammy of rampant inflation in Pakistan and the global economic downturn, imperiling the Festival’s financial resources. The rising tensions with our neighbour India after the brutal terrorist attacks in Mumbai have also negatively impacted the relationships we had so carefully cultivated over the last six years. Of course, we are not the only ones to suffer in the cultural sphere. Music concerts, theatre performances, filmmaking and fashion shows, all have suffered in the same environment. But perhaps because of the scope and ambitions of the Festival, and perhaps because we had nurtured this space precisely to fight against the decades-long marginalization of cinema in Pakistan, the implications are more far-reaching. In a country where creativity and film is once again under attack from forces of extremism, and precious few institutions of art and culture exist, it is particularly galling to stand by and see all of one’s efforts to establish just such a credible institution endangered.
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(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)

MONROVIA (AFP) – Four West African nations have joined forces to do battle against a species of caterpillars laying waste to crops in the region, a statement said Saturday.
The agriculture ministers from Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast have created a team to look into the threats posed by what are believed to be Achaea Catocaloides caterpillars.
Crops in central Liberia and southern Guinea have already been ravaged by the caterpillars, and other countries in the region fear the damage will spread further.
“The five-man technical committee will begin work immediately,” the ministers from the four countries forming the Mano River Union said in a statement after meeting in Monrovia on Friday.
“They will design plans of action that will be implemented by all member countries.”
An expert from Brazil already working with Liberia will assist the new committee.
Liberia’s agriculture minister said earlier this week that the caterpillars were not army worms as previously believed but the Achaea Catocaloides species, which could turn out to be even more destructive.
Experts warned that the insects could attack more crops than army worms, including coffee and cocoa.
Ivory Coast is the world’s top cocoa producer and many of its plantations are in the west of the country in a region that borders Liberia.
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Submitted by a reader

by Anand Patwardhan

Terror: The Aftermath

In Mumbai, after the numbing sorrow came the blame game and the solutions. Loud voices amplified by saturation TV: Why don’t we amend our Constitution to create new anti-terror laws? Why don’t we arm our police with AK 47s? Why don’t we do what Israel did after Munich or the USA did after 9/11 and hot pursue the enemy? Solutions that would lead us further into the abyss. For terror is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It thrives on reaction, polarisation, militarisation and the thirst for revenge.

The External Terror

Those who invoke America need only to analyse if its actions after 9/11 increased or decreased global terror. It invaded oil-rich Iraq fully knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, killing over 200,000 Iraqis citizens but allowing a cornered Bin Laden to escape from Afghanistan. It recruited global support for Islamic militancy, which began to be seen as a just resistance against American mass murder. Which begs the question of who created Bin Laden in the first place, armed the madarsas of Pakistan and rejuvenated the concept of Islamic jehad? Israel played its own role in stoking the fires of jehad. The very creation of Israel in 1948 robbed Palestinians of their land, an act that Mahatma Gandhi to his credit deplored at the time as an unjust way to redress the wrongs done to Jews during the Holocaust. What followed has been a slow and continuing attack on the Palestinian nation. At first Palestinian resistance was led by secular forces represented by Yasser Arafat but as these were successfully undermined, Islamic forces took over the mantle. The first, largely non-violent Intifada was crushed, a second more violent one replaced it and when all else failed, human bombs appeared.
Thirty years ago when I first went abroad there were two countries my Indian passport forbade me to visit. One was racist South Africa. The other was Israel. We were non-aligned and stood for disarmament and world peace. Today Israel and America are our biggest military allies. Is it surprising that we are on the jehadi hit list? Israel, America and other prosperous countries can to an extent protect themselves against the determined jehadi, but can India put an impenetrable shield over itself? Remember that when attackers are on a suicide mission, the strongest shields have crumbled. New York was laid low not with nuclear weapons but with a pair of box cutters. India is for many reasons a quintessentially soft target. Our huge population, vast landmass and coastline are impossible to protect. The rich may build new barricades. The Taj and the Oberoi can be made safer. So can our airports and planes. Can our railway stations and trains, bus stops, busses, markets and lanes do the same?

The Terror Within

The threat of terror in India does not come exclusively from the outside. Apart from being hugely populated by the poor India is also a country divided, not just between rich and poor, but by religion, caste and language. This internal divide is as potent a breeding ground for terror as jehadi camps abroad. Nor is jehad the copyright of one religion alone. It can be argued that international causes apart, India has jehadis that are fully home grown. Perhaps the earliest famous one was Nathuram Godse who acting at the behest of his mentor Vinayak Savarkar (still referred to as “Veer” or “brave” although he refused to own up to his role in the conspiracy), murdered Mahatma Gandhi for the crime of championing Muslims.
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By Margarita Windisch

Spain colonised Western Sahara and its mostly nomadic people in 1884 claiming it as a protectorate of the Spanish Crown. Spanish rule over Western Sahara was codified in Berlin in 1885, where Africa was carved up among the European powers. The period of Spanish rule was marked by ongoing resistance, revolts and armed clashes with the indigenous population, with its liberation movements being brutally repressed by the Spanish authorities.
A 1966 UN resolution called for Saharawi people’s right to self-determination to be exercised via a referendum which never eventuated. The lack of political developments led to the formation of Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro (the Polisario Front) in 1973. Polisario was conceived as a nationalist front with the aim of achieving independence, and encompassed all Saharawi political trends.
Polisario launched a guerrilla war against Spanish rule, fought Mauritania’s occupation of part of Western Sahara (from 1975 to 1979) and Morocco’s occupation from its invasion in 1975 until 1991.
In 1975 Spain relinquished its control of Western Sahara and, contrary to 1966 UN resolution for self-determination, handed Western Sahara over to Mauritania and Morocco (the Madrid Accords). The same year, the Morocco regime organised the “Green March’’, in which 350,000 Moroccans, brandishing flags and pictures of King Hassan II, invaded Western Sahara in order to settle and “reclaim the territory’’. This strategic march was supported by 20,000 Moroccan troops, who were met with some armed resistance from Polisario. November 6, the day of the “Green March”, has become a national holiday in Morocco.
Morocco and Mauritania’s war against Polisario was financially supported by the US, France and Spain to the tune of billions of dollars.
Apart from engaging in aerial bombardment, which included napalm and cluster bombs, Morocco started to build a 2500-kilometre-long, heavily mined wall through Western Sahara, dividing almost every Saharawi family.
For a detailed map of Western Sahara and the Moroccan wall, click here
Read their Struggle here

The film is based on the Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel. Fernando Luján plays the colonel.

By Colin Murphy

Morocco won control of half of the former Spanish Sahara 33 years ago, and later annexed the rest. Several generations of Saharawis have continued a struggle to be independent, and free of the Moroccan colonial powers. It has cost them everything, but they are not prepared to give up or give in.

Hassan was walking through town one afternoon, killing time, when he bumped into a friend near the football stadium, who said “I’ve got some spray paint.” They agreed to meet later that night, by the bakery.
They met at 12, and walked a short way into a residential quarter. At one end of a long, narrow street, they started spraying in black and red paint. “Down with colonial occupation” and “Viva Polisario”, they wrote, in letters 70cm high. They worked quickly but carefully; they wanted their work to be legible, not artistic. They covered 100 metres of the street with slogans, and by ten past twelve they had finished. On a high, they celebrated with a coffee in the nearby Café Alaska.
That was in May 2007. In October Hassan found himself in a cell in the police station, naked, watching another man being raped with a bottle, by police. He was told that if he didn’t confess, the same would be done to him. He confessed to a crime he says he knew nothing about, the torching of a police car. Later, when he was presented to the chief of police, he refused to repeat his confession, and was taken back to the cells. This time, he was given the faroj or “roast chicken” (a form of torture well-known in the region, he says). He was put in a foetal position with his feet bound and his arms bound around his legs. Then a pole was pushed through behind his knees, and lifted so that he swung from it, upside down, like a chicken on a spit. For three days he was tortured, beaten and insulted, though his interrogators took care not to scar him. He was shown photos of the graffiti and made to write out the same slogans on paper, so that his writing could be compared.
Brought to trial, he entered the courtroom making the victory sign and shouting “No place for colonial justice!” He threatened to go on hunger strike. The judge replied: “You can suffocate yourself if you want; it won’t do you any good.” He was found guilty on the charge of torching the police car and sentenced to 10 months, which he completed in August.
“I’m sure, after your departure, I’ll be arrested again,” he says, and smiles. There is a twinkle in his eye.
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