flying fish

becoming a leader

2012-01-17T22:30:00.000Z

On 3 January I became acting Director of a Group of still unknown size. My UK team is currently about 27 (22 permanent, 5 casuals). In March it will be 31 permanent, if we can recruit them quick enough, plus doubtless other casuals. But the Group is international, and I don't yet know how big it is currently. By July, when I finish, it'll be something like 60 outside the UK. A total of 90 plus.

And this from a team that, in the UK at least, was 14 people in November. So there's some work to do, some late nights work to do (I'm finding), to restructure and refocus and reprocess into a sustainable organisation for which a team of 5 people working on a research programme was then seen as massive. Not so now.

And in that process I am working everything I know about leadership as hard as I can. Which isn't very much. I've only really had a couple of years' experience of proper people management. I've learnt a lot, from good leaders and bad, and perhaps most importantly I am fascinated by the subject. What makes a great leader? What makes a leader different from a manager? How do you inspire people to deliver rather than drive them to do so (as I apparently did last year!).

So I'm on the look out for things I can learn from. My daily dose of TED lectures (great 'TV dinner' material) has inevitably thrown up Steve Jobs, who surprisingly reads his script. He's inspiring, though he says nothing in this about how to lead (except by example, I guess). I've just finished Rudi Guiliani's Leadership, which is bookended by his experiences on and after 9/11, but delves into the details of his philosophy. While I don't agree with him always, he made me think.

Do you have any suggestions?

My biggest learning, from last year and recently from this, is people's desire for clarity. It doesn't matter how uncertain the situation, if you can give someone some level of certainty (at least, more than they had before you stepped into the picture) over what their role in that situation is, they usually feel more comfortable. Is it because they feel that someone else is looking out for them, in recognising the creative chaos they are in? Is it simply because they know what to do when they come in in the morning? I don't know.

I also don't really know what comes next. I'm quite good at giving clarity - as I have asserted below! - sometimes too harshly. But once clarity sets in, what sets out?

Human error - terrifying

2012-01-08T20:05:00.002Z

This article provides the transcripts from the flight data recorders of the doomed Air France 447 flight, which disappeared in June 2009 over the Atlantic, killing all on board. It is not good reading for anyone who doesn't like flying, so if you don't, look away now.

It shows that the disaster was a result of human error. Technical and weather-related error caused problems, but the human response to them made entirely resolvable problems fatal. One fairly inexperienced man made the technical mistakes, but his senior colleagues failed to communicate with him, to work out what was going on, and to take charge; that is, they failed to use their seniority on three counts.

I read the article with the fear that comes with watching an horror film, because you know it is about to go horribly, horribly wrong. The fear of the pilots is audible, but only once it is too late.

make it (short and) public

2011-12-13T23:21:00.000Z

Two things struck me today, about making messages resonate. The first was the benefits of shocking (and short) clarity.

I just had a meeting with a bunch of senior people, most of whom until today I had never met before in my life, and I had opinions. This won't come as a surprise to most of you. It didn't come as a surprise to me either. What was slightly surprising was the feeling that I am about to be employed to think like this - to cut through a lot of detail, and find clarity, and express it.

I think it's called being strategic. I hope so. I love it.

One of my new close colleagues asked one of the others what they thought of me. She reportedly said, 'She's great' - for exactly these reasons: for saying new things (actually old things, in a new way), and for not being afraid to say them. A current, and senior, colleague, wrote me an email recently, commenting that I am always 'direct and honest', and that that would be missed. It was a mixed complement - very true, I think, very insightful, and perhaps not always how I would like to be, or to be seen. But it has got me to where I am, in good and bad ways.

I learned to do research as an educational researcher (thank you, NFER, since doing a PhD in social anthropology didn't teach me about reliability, validity, or the need to number questionnaires). I was part of a project that supported researchers to do research, while researching the process they went through. When we got to the stage that they had to do analysis, some of them asked me how to do it. I ummed and ahhed a bit (anthropology not having given me any tools with which to describe the magic that happened in my head). Then I asked my colleagues (bearing in mind I worked in the UK's leading research institute). No-one could point me to clear guidance on how to do analysis. I knew my teachers needed simple, short, guidance. So like a good researcher I did a little research and wrote two pages on how to do analysis. It did the job.

In the process I learnt Stenhouse's definition of research: 'systematic enquiry made public'. Most of us researchers are pretty good at the former. But we are pretty bad at the latter. In commissioned research, dissemination in any form other than a long research report tends to be an added extra, something our managers exhort us to do while also assigning us to our next project (and I have done the same). But if we don't make it public, and make as much effort to make it public as we make in making it systematic, what is the point of doing the research in the first place?

So today I was advocating 2 to 3 page analyses, as the only likely way to get across theories of change to very very busy country directors. Someone said they had already sent round 6 key articles on theory of change. My suggestion was that most people don't have time to read 6 pages, let alone 6 articles, and that one of the roles of researchers is to distill insights into consumable chunks. Short, shocking, clarity. My military colleagues may tell you I have learnt that from them, which I might have done, but I was doing it with teachers long before I learned to see the military as real human beings.

The second point that struck me was the need to tell stories. But that's another story.

not enough of us

2011-12-10T17:11:00.001Z

Ursula Brennan, 1st PUS (permanent under secretary) at the Ministry of Defence, last week urged the military to promote more women into top armed forces posts. She reminded her (almost exclusively male) colleagues that 'the world will not end... they're not going to hit the nuclear trigger by mistake'.

And this week the new Secretary of State for Defence finally announced that women would be allowed to serve on submarines. I hadn't realised that the (official) reason why they don't yet is the fear that higher levels of carbon dioxide could adversely affect women's health... which seems far more bizarre than the reasons that other military have told me that it's not a good idea to have women on subs. (She might be pregnant. She might have to share a bunk with a man on another shift. And the unspoken - or actually widely spoken - fear that women might cause men to have sex on subs. As if men don't do that anyway. Allegedly).

As I prepare to move to a job where far more than half the staff are women, I still come up short sitting in a room full of men. Almost all the briefs I give are to a room full of men. Thursday was no exception (the only other two women were two civilian colleagues, the most junior people in the room). I'm used to it, it occasionally amuses me, and occasionally depresses me. The one female Group Captain I know is an exciting oddity.

play!

2011-12-06T20:00:00.000Z

Now that I don't have a television, I sometimes watch TED broadcasts over a plate, the 'teenies equivalent to the TV dinner. Charlie Todd's TED lecture is about the fun he has had creating seemingly spontaneous events all over New York, with his Improv Everywhere team. Musical outbursts in a mall about sitting on Santa's lap, an interrupted wedding ceremony and a Star Wars take over of the subway in New York. It reminded me of T-mobile's Welcome Back powerful sing-fest in Heathrow, which I think of as 'The Passenger' click, as the opera singer Passenger is stunning. (This clip, seemingly filmed by someone who wasn't involved, shows that it was overwelmingly impressive, even without T-mobile's recording equipment). And then there is Where the hell is Matt?, the man who danced a silly dance all over the world and had people film him dancing with other people, which you've probably heard of before.

I've loved public art, spontaneous creativity, and people doing things that shock and delight others, for a long time. While we were at Atlantic College, my good friend Claire and I decided that our friends and fellow students could do with something to make them smile a bit more. So every now and then we would sneak - highly illegally - into the castle that was our school, dining room and home, and blow up balloons. We left enigmatic notes in the school's weekly newsletter: 'Follow the balloons'. The next morning, there would be occasional musings that the balloons were in aid of so-and-so's birthday, or that country's national day. In an amazing place where strange and exciting things happened all the time, I suspect that our balloons got a little lost in the flow, but we had fun doing it.

In 2003, when I spent 6 months living with a great bunch of housemates in Shepherd's Bush, I got up early one Sunday and left the house without telling them where I was going. Several hours later I returned saying, 'I've just been naked in Selfridges!' I took part in one of Spencer Tunick's photograph installations. Although taking all our clothes off together was a bit weird, it was also strangely liberating (I've never previously or since felt so comfortable trying out perfumes in Selfridges!). Coming out at the end, it felt that I had just left the real, albeit dream, world behind and stepped into something unreal. (I'm actually in this picture; if you know where to look you can see my left ear, but not a lot more)

With my clothes on, in March 2004 I joined the crowd at the end of the Tate Modern's Weather Project, or 'the sun', in which Olafur Eliasson reflected a semi-circle of yellow light into a mirror all across the ceiling of the turbine hall. Few of the pictures show the reflections of the visitors, but we spent hours there, lying on the floor, forming words, playing netball with an imaginary ball and an imaginary net. The Tate is good at interactive art; think the slides in 2007, the 2008 crack which no-one could figure out, or last year's box of darkness.

So it was no surprise, to me at least, that when the Science Museum began running tours dressed as cockroaches, I would want to go. I went with friend Colin and 8-year old Lotty, colleague Abi and her friend Vanessa, and was ridiculously excited, more so when seeing the costumes, and more so than Lotty. The tour was done impressively, with an in-house actor (Professor John; all cockroaches are apparently John or Janet, and you can tell the different ones by the inflection in the voice) giving a commentary of the weird inventions that human beings have created (time machines, causing strange repeated arm movements to look at them, and then scuttling off). Watching five small human cockroaches scuttling up stairs was hilarious.

But it was watching Charlie Todd's TED lecture that made me realise why I most enjoyed it: the image it creates, the dissonance of super-size cockroaches, the slightly embarrassed amusement of those around us; the temporary break from reality for us, but most of all for the spectators (because inside the suit, you don't really realise how weird you look, till you see another one). Life needs to remind us every now and then to be happy, and these spontaneous acts of delight do just that.

the photocopier model of change

2011-12-05T20:00:00.000Z

In early December I participated in a three day training at DFID on political economy analysis. It was impressive how far analysis is integrated into the work and expectations of their advisers, and intriguing to watch debates in another department about how to integrate ideal practices into the reality of processes that drive ahead without us having much say. In many ways, to my (and perhaps their) surprise, they have much in common with my current department, in the role that analysis can play in helping focus on talking to people rather than throwing things at them. (My parting comment compared my role of supporting colleagues to 'talk to people rather than kill them' with DFID's need to 'talk to people rather than throw money at them'. It caused amusement, which might not have helped as I was completely serious.)

We were set an exercise in which we were to apply a certain political economy analysis tool to the problem of police reform in a state that will remain nameless. Two things were striking.

The first: that if we followed the tool properly, it showed that the political conditions and scenarios for change were non-existent, and therefore we would be wise to do nothing, and save tax-payers' money rather than throwing money at the wrong problem.

The second: the potential and unpredictable role of photocopiers. In a videoed interview, a local academic described the transformative role a photocopier had played when it was given to a small police station, enabling claimants to receive copies of their documents and hence improving service-users' experience of engaging with the police. At the time it a was bizarre throw-away comment in an otherwise depressing description of the state of policing in said country. In our planning, it was a slightly joking addition to a programme of developing model police stations. On reflection, though, it prompts all sorts of thoughts about what effects the arrival of a photocopier could have:

- service does indeed improve: not only do they give copies to users, but also for their own records, and start to build up a picture in cases that otherwise were evidence-less
- the local police are proud of their new bit of kit, and hence increase in confidence, and start to do other bits of their job with more enthusiasm
- someone takes ownership in the machine and won't let anyone else near it
- it breaks down and sits in the corner gathering tea cups
- the police start charging local people to photocopy other documents, using the funds to help run the station...
-... or to pay their otherwise measly pay
- the police start campaigning for other new equipment, like a computer that works, so records start to be kept, and linked across the country, and crimes start being solved, and and...

And so on. The possibilities are almost endless and it is very difficult to predict which ones would be taken up. With optimism though, it might just work. So next time you face an intractable change problem, why not throw a photocopier* at it?

[or insert other basic but missing and useful tool]

me and my UN tree

2011-12-04T12:38:00.001Z

For the first time in my 35 years I have bought, erected and decorated a christmas tree on my own. (Peggie's attempts to knock low-hanging decorations off before I've got them all on don't count as a positive contribution). For the past 8 years, barring my year in Indonesia, this has been a labour of love shared with my flatmate Danny, who was the first man I knew who relished the excitement, the light, the colours... and the arguments that go into creating the living decoration that filled our house for a month. Doing this without him has been poignant. I discovered that hanging the lights is not nearly as difficult as Danny made it out to be, but then that was part of our ritual too.

But most of all it provides bitter sweet reflections on past adventures. For years now I have collected new christmas tree decorations in places I visit, giving rise to the 'UN tree' description. Close to the top hang this year's contributions: the yellow shoe from Morocco, the blue and white delft bird from Amsterdam, the camel from Bastion in Afghanistan. There seem to be more Hindu deities in evidence than Christian ones, thanks to a collection of wooden flying gods acquired in Varanasi, India, last year, on one of my best holidays, and certainly most expensive, travelling down the Ganges. A reindeer from Helsinki hangs near a little man from Copenhagen. A festive kangaroo evidences last year's conference in Canberra. The metal painted brown angel is from a work trip to Mozambique in 2004.

The little Russian dolls intricately painted with folk stories, which I bought in Moscow during my phd field work over ten years ago, are unpacked from their little box each year with a smile - they are prettier and more colourful than my christmas day in 1999, when I was fasting for Ramadan and cleaning every piece of crockery my host family owned in a two room house in southern Russia.

Others have helped fill the colour. Sahra's chilli from Brazil, and little horse from Cuba, mingle with the Indian horses and bells that Claire Versteeg gave me 18 or so years ago. Hidden in the branches is a string of bells that my parents picked up on their 'pre-kids' trip to India, so pre-dates any concept I had of christmas trees. And there are still dried oranges, Danny's legacy (along with the ban on tinsel), a little over-baked but still looking fine.

I have been exceptionally lucky to have travelled all over the place, on work, to visit friends and just because its there. Thank god, even those of us who don't, that there is a month in the year when light and colour is socially expected to break through the dark and cold.

morning lights

2011-11-28T22:46:00.001Z

Waking at 6.30am to get into work in time to have a VTC before the Australians went to bed has its benefits.

our world in beautiful numbers

2011-11-28T22:30:00.001Z

Two incredibly detailed depictions of our world in numbers. The first is the Guardian's illustration of UK government spending 2009/10. I'm surprised that defence spending is not bigger than it is.

The second is xkcd's depiction of the cost of life in dollars, each unit represented by a tiny square. Someone has lots of time on his hands, or is being paid lots of money to make lots and lots of tiny squares. But with some research behind it.

(Anyone know how to 'print screen' on a Mac?)

stunning photographs

2011-11-22T16:07:00.001Z

Is it the season of good photographs? There seems to be a gathering of exhibitions on-line and in person.

This one is from the National Geographic photo contest. The Wildlife Photographer of the year is on at the National History Museum, for a small fortune, or the free and still impressive World Press Photo exhibit at the South Bank Centre.

A few years ago it struck me that with digital photographers there must be thousands, millions, of the same image now in existence. Now as I cycle or run over Westminster bridge in the evenings, it is obvious that there are millions. Dodging (or not) the 'me and Big Ben' shot is a nightly event.

how to test engines using chickens

2009-03-13T22:58:00.003Z

Given that birds were probably responsible for the descent of the US Airways flight onto the Hudson river, you might be interested to know the complexities of testing aircraft engines for bird-proofness. Frozen chickens need not apply.

red and white

2008-10-20T16:15:00.007Z

Let the battle/debate commence. I've ordered my year's white poppies, and am steeling myself to put up the poster at work. Perhaps it will even provoke debate. I'm finding considered debate in places I don't expect it at the moment, so maybe I should be more optimistic.

This is a fine image of red petals, though, don't you think? But... interesting... a lot of images of women-as-carer. I'm trying to write something about symbolism and these poor little flowers, and new ones keep popping up all the time. Fascinating.

Now I think about it I've never actually seen a white poppy. Red ones, yes, lots, close to home in the Walworth allotments where even the foxes don't kill them off. And I've seen yellow ones... now what is the symbolism of them, I wonder?

Perhaps that's the answer; wear a yellow poppy and avoid the whole debate. Or just look silly.

failing, and home

2008-10-19T20:01:00.006Z

I have just failed pretty appallingly to stick to any principles of conflict resolution that I might claim to espouse. Okay, not completely failed - I was relatively calm and I did get to the bottom of issues on both sides - but essentially the conflict was resolved not by me (or the other party) but by the artful faciliation of my flatmate, Danny, who wouldn't go near an 'Alternatives to Violence' workshop, even if it was held in our own flat. It was humbling.

The ridiculous thing is that the conflict is the latest installment in a neighbourly saga that has been running for about 18 months, and it's pretty much the only conflict I face in my life. I finally flipped a couple of weeks ago and stopped trying to be reasonable and just let myself be angry. It didn't help; what I didn't want to happen happened anyway, and I was still left a little scared to walk up to my own house. Finally, today, with the help (limited) of a red line on a leasehold agreement and the aid (exceptionally useful) of the practical, realistic outlook of my flatmate, things were talked through and more or less resolved. After Danny had left I dragged things deeper, which looked like it was making it worse (and I semi-consciously knew it), but both parties said we had felt that we were only giving and not recieving, and angry that we had (we thought) been presented with outcomes without discussion. By the end we were, at least, discussing the merits of varnish and winter jasmine, but it was a long road and not one I'm proud of.

And all this over some gravel, a wheelie bin and some plant pots. Pathetic.

(Though it was actually over ownership, feeling bullied, lied to and vulnerable... most of which also came out. Plant pots were just the pawns in the rather messy game.)

Later I wondered whether I should give up my attempts at non-violence workshop facilitation and recognise what a hypocrite I am. Realistically that's not much of an option, since I haven't been doing many workshops recently. Writing this post is largely an admission of guilt and an attempt to deal with the failure... which is also a recognition that I am not very good at dealing with conflict, I'd far rather avoid it, and when I get into it, I'm as stubborn as I am the rest of the time.

The last month's tour of European churches... this one in Copenhagen

The irony of my pavement-side dispute is that I arrived back in the UK yesterday from Copenhagen, having spent four days there, and a week in Italy two weeks previously, and was incredibly glad to be here. In Denmark a friend was discussing the possibility of moving to London for a while, and I found myself thinking the idea an exhausting one - which said far more about my own desire to be home than her plans (and I'd be very happy to have her around in London). Enough with the moving around. Both Italy and Denmark were wonderful in their own ways. But there's a Russian phrase that works better in Russian but just about withstands the translation: v gosti khorosho, doma luchshe - it's good to go visiting, it's better at home.

...and this one in Eggi, Italy

It's not only my home itself, though it is looking and feeling pretty fine to be here, thanks in no small part to Danny's four weekend ordeal of painting the front door, and a picture hanging session this afternoon, pre-conflict. And my cat, slightly nuts, exceptionally stubborn, explorative yet likes being home even if she doesn't admit it (remind you of anyone?).

It's being in Britain, which surprises me. I don't tend to think of myself and 'my country' as all that connected, evidenced the quotation marks. A friend recently commented that, 'We do things well in this country; I'm proud of it', or words to that effect. The immediate prompt was a spectacular engineering feat (Terminal 5, if you must know - the largest freestanding building in the country, took 20,000 people to build, £4.3 billion, and some damn fine metal joints), but the comment was, is, applicable to much else (if not conflict resolution). I remember thinking that I don't associate myself in my mind to the myth that is the nation of Britain, even if I work for it. But arriving back, cold, I was soothed by the music on Heathrow Express (if not by the price!), the clouds and pale sky, the crowds in Paddington, the overwarm tube ride. If this isn't Britain, I'm not sure what is, and I like it.

replenished and replete

2008-09-16T17:20:00.005Z

As I walked through Oslo airport I decided that American town planners would do well to make the trip. Everything, well almost everything, around Oslo seems beautiful, neat and fresh.

I also thought that observation becomes easier, or at least more focussed, when there is a desire to write it all down afterwards. Ragnfrid, a writer-now-publisher, agreed. (Someone else told me recently of a retreat where she said nothing for a week. By the end she could smell more clearly, heard more intricate sounds, and was intimately atuned to her surroundings.).

Long weekends are the way forward. In a sea of reports, workshops, presentations and generally feeling tired (I posted about that in March - being tired is dull, but ever present when you are), it was wonderful to get out, get away, and catch up with a friend I had not seen for two years. Remarkable then that we started talking almost as soon as we waved hello and didn't really stop till we waved goodbye. It was fantastic.

It's always humbling being around Scandinavians, as most of them speak English (and inumerable other languages) embarrassingly fluently. Ragnfrid is no exception, and nor were her friends and relations - every one of the visitors and acquaintances we engaged with that weekend spoke near perfect English, and I'm sure I learnt more English words in three days in Norway than I have in months. Replenished, for example - "May I replenish your tea?". She didn't say that, a Welsh lady did; but it sent me into ponderings about how we use that word, and replete, and many others.

Ragnfrid pushed my comfort zones by taking me mountain biking, funnily enough along the same and neighbouring tracks to the ones that Sahra and skiied along four years previously. I'm not very good at being out of control, or rather feeling out of control, and skidding downhill on gravel tracks was just that - and hence good for me!

In ideal long-weekend fashion, we ate lots, and ate well, and ate Norwegian. Salmon, apple cake, waffles with tea. Talked of Meskhetian Turks and friends teaching science in schools in South Africa; of being younger and being older and knowing what we do and don't want in our lives; of families of four and care systems and... I can't remember it all. Just the sense of it.

On Sunday we headed for a flea market in a local school, clearly the place for 30-something liberal Norwegians to meet, as we must have said hello to five friends in the space of half an hour. In the afternoon a concert given by young music award winners: a violinist who expressed the pain of the music with an expressionless face and a pianist whose facial contortions suggested knowledge a 16 year old should not, could not have.

And then suddenly it was over. I was waving through a tram window and a fantastic couple of people I hope I don't wait 2 years to see again. Replenished, though not really replete.

the chemistry glass of structure and content

2008-08-20T19:16:00.002Z

Years ago I came across the Soviet (socialist? communist? Marxist? don't know) way of dividing things into content and structure. I found it first in work by Eidlitz on 'nationalities' in the former Soviet Union, in what was, for me, an unusually pro-Soviet (or at least not fervently anti-Soviet) English language publication. The model is of a glass, with the structure being the glass, and the liquid being the content. (For some reason I always see this glass as one of those straight-sided measuring vessels we used in chemistry; perhaps it's because there's a science or an implied accuracy about them). Eidlitz discusses the concept in the context of Soviet Nationalities policy, in which each people, narod, was organised in such a way that encouraged them to be Soviet in structure, national in content. That is, their political and economic structure was Soviet, but their cultural bits (in the limited definition of culture - songs, food, language, dance) were encouraged to be 'national'. Thus leading (in theory) to national diversity in a Soviet Union. (The Soviets were, sometimes, better at encouraging cultural diversity than the lambasts they get from some might suggest.)

National in this context does not mean the same as nationalist, which was a dirty word among the Russians and Meskhetian Turks I knew in 2000. Instead it's a concept with a well-developed theorising in Russia/the Soviet Union, and a concept core to the organisation of peoples into republics, special regions and the rest. Much as our colonial policy has its legacy in today's violent complications in Africa, so too the current complications in the Caucasus have some of their roots in nationality policy. I'm not sure it's helpful to be critical of that policy in hindsight - criticising things that happened over 80 years ago is a little problematic as hindsight is 20:20 - after all, they had to organise these millions of people somehow, and a theory-based organisational plan is probably better than nothing. (That view doesn't stop me lambasting British colonial practices though. I'm a hypocrite).

Anyway, back to structure and content and my chemistry glass. I've been going back to old debates about structure and agency, the classic social theory chicken/egg problem of which has more influence over human action, shared concepts about the world and how to order it (social structure) or an individual's free will and choice (agency)? Of course they each influence the other, though some (particularly many anthropologists) see, or saw, social structure as having the edge. It's not quite the same as the structure/content glass, but the dichotomy is good to think with. And it's (kind of) helping think about other human dichotomies in currently (the violence/non-violence thing being one), where one thing ends and another begins. The problem is that they become continuums rather than dichotomies when they represent reality, at which point they become less good to think with. My dilemma is, is it more productive to use a dichotomy to think with (and act according to) and accept that it doesn't entirely fit reality, or to accept everything flows into one... but then have little guidance on how to see the world and how to act in it?

I'm not entirely sure where this is going. Product of writing a report - it's always exciting and confusing at the same time. And sleep-depriving: in semi-sleep last night I vaguely remember thinking of one arm as agency and the other as structure, with the rest of me the human action in the middle. Odd. Like the Vikings swarming my head in November last year when I tried to write about the drivers of planning for educational provision in emergencies. I have no idea now why I was dreaming of Vikings, except that at the time it felt very relevant to advocacy and fundraising. And the Vikings have stayed with me as much as the report still hasn't gone away.

celebrate

2008-08-18T21:08:00.003Z

We have inadvertently been celebrating National Allotment Week. I knew there was a reason I took marrows, rhubarb and beans into work. I'm with Alex James on courgettes though. 'The bounty of nature is such that when courgettes are ready, there are suddenly rather a lot of courgettes. There is nothing to put one off courgettes as much as the sight of lots and lots of them and more where they come from'. Sunday's harvest: 7, and no marrows.

And we are now celebrating Southwest Trains' National Customer Service week. Never have I heard as an enthusiastic an announcement as the man declaring this fact, asking "have you recieved special service from Southwest trains? Pick up a form from our travel office and let us know..." I first heard this at 9.41pm on Friday (don't), when each of the London-bound passengers occupied their own bench along the platform, and we all tried to avoid watching
a 15 year old couple (boy: skinny, beany hat, smoking; girl: much larger, shorts she kept pulling up) roll all over each other on the bench opposite. Bless. But thank god for inhibitions. (Is that right? I mean the opposite of 'no inhibitions'.. so it must be right). Anyway, I wondered why on earth we are trying to celebrate the people who collect our tickets. I mean, no offence meant, they're nice enough blokes but... fill in a form? I pondered India, wondered whether peons would ever be celebrated in this way.. are we trying to put a not only a face but an identity on bureacracy? The thought didn't last long - the train came - but I'd rather celebrate the binmen.

It's still International Year of the Potato, which Danny and I just celebrated with our own harvest. They're just potatoes really.

consider the poppies...

2008-08-17T13:31:00.006Z

Saturday's Guardian includes an article on the complete failure of the US, UK and everyone else's attempt to control the poppy trade in Afghanistan. Apparently £1.7bn have been spent over six years in counter-narcotics activities, and yet the £2bn trade continues, and continues to grow. The UN's conservative estimate is that the Taleban's 10% tax on poppy farmers earns them £50m a year. Quite enough to fund an insurgency, it seems.

Now, I'm no economist, despite the best efforts of some of my friends to convert me, but there's something here about supply and demand. Destroying the supply bit doesn't seem to be working, so what about the demand side? What could we have spent that £1.7bn on in the US and the UK in relation to drug programmes? What concerns me more than where our governments spend their money is the attempt to shift moral responsibility for what is really 'our' problem. Thrashing down or aerial spraying of poppy plants is of course going to enrage Afghan farmers. It's like a foreign power destroying grape vines in France because they don't approve of alcohol. We'd be outraged, even if we didn't drink wine ourselves. Why should an Afghan farmer, who (according to the Guardian) earns £1,658 from a poppy harvest when a wheat harvest would give him a third less, care that heroine is illegal in the UK?

Someone told me last weekend that if I didn't like something I should offer an alternative; a good consensus process position. The context was my rant about knives and orchestras, but it could apply to this too. This time I hold up my hands and say I don't know about the alternative, although we could put the WI ladies onto it - they have been working at decriminalising prostitution, and I'm sure they'd have some creative ideas on drugs too.

Actually that's not as flippant as it sounds; ...bear with me while I get to the point.

In a rather stretching conversation last weekend an acquaintance demanded to know whether I would kill him if he was about to kill my mother. (This was another attempt to get me to defend my 'extreme' position that killing people is always wrong. It's like meat-eaters trying to catch out vegetarians for eating cheese. Maybe they do it because they subconsciously feel guilty. We humour them, because so do we.) It pushed me into a corner I know I have been avoiding, because it's the same question as, 'What would you have done about Adolf Hitler?' My initial response was that I would hope not to have got to the point where you are about to kill my mother; I'd have missed some other options along the way if we were already there. (That, however, being the same kind of answer as 'Oo, if you're trying to get to Holborn I wouldn't start from here'. I still need to get to Holborn, wherever I'm starting from.)

So I broke down his question into three:
a) would it be right to kill him? No, killing people is always wrong.
b) would I be able to kill him? Unfortunately yes; as a fallible human being I know I have a capacity for violence (not least as I managed to break my brother's arm. I was 7 at the time, but that's no excuse).
c) would I kill him? That's the one I can't answer right now, it's context specific, and... I would hope I would have been creative enough not to get to c).

Despite being uncomfortably pushed into this corner, it was rather a relief to have got there, not least because I can retain a) without ever doubting it, and have spent enough time thinking about b) in my PBI career to know that I'm human, and that's okay. The WI come back in at c), because it is creative thinking that will get us to the point of being able to say 'No'.

In what was almost a repeat of the same 'push Kathryn into a corner' conversation this week at work, a colleague asked me what I would do if I was a Sierra Leonean villager, and a band of rebels raided the village, clearly looking to kill everyone. Would I use violence then? Well, if I was able to think straight, no, not least because I would know there are more of them than me and my violence is going to fail - they would beat me and kill me. I would hope that I would be able to imagine other ways of engaging with them, of convincing them to talk first, of escaping the petrifying relationship of power where they are in the supremacy...

None of this I said very clearly at the time, and my colleague concluded that I, like everyone else, see violence as a last resort. No! I don't believe that most people see violence as a last resort. I do believe that most people believe that they see violence as a last resort. But in practice... violence is an easy option. It's a lot easier to trample poppy fields in Afghanistan than it is to catch and reform drug dealers and users in King's Cross. I think in terms of a list of 'resorts', violence usually comes somewhere in the middle. It is far, far harder (particularly when someone has a gun to my mother's head, or when the Taleban is making a fortune out of poppy cultivation) to think, 'Right, what is going to give me, my mother and you the best outcome from all this? Why do you have a gun to my mother's head? What do you want, and more importantly, what do you need? Why have we got to this point?'

(Somewhere in all these posts is Helen's story about asking directions to Bethnal Green tube to diffuse a far less tense situation, but the principle is the same. Think. Creatively. Give the other person a way out and deal with my own emotions separately.)

Anyway, back to the poppies. I have learnt this year that poppies are going to do their own thing, whatever we do to them. They're beautiful, delicate creatures, so that when a couple appear in my nascent courgette patch earlier this year, I left them space to thrive. Thrive they did, and they had babies. Now I am regularly digging up poppies among the courgettes, tomatoes, strawberries and asparagus. Now they have arrived, they're here to stay, and unless I am ever vigilant, they are going to become one of the many attractive weeds that now make their home in my £10 plot of land. When I first took it over, it was a mess, but the biggest beast was horseradish. That is now under control, but the odd plant reappears in the wrong place. But so do nasturtiums, buttercups, tomatoes, potatoes, lemon balm, raspberries, mint and fox gloves. They're all beautiful, and I let the odd one stay because they're beautiful. They also remind me that, much as I like to think I am, I am not in control, and the allotment looks a lot more attractive for it.

So I still have no real solution for what to do about the Afghanistan-to-King's Cross poppy trade, though I would suggest we spend more time looking in our own backyard, and remember that poppies have their own agency, never mind the Afghan farmers. The fields of Flanders told us that, which is why they are the symbol of the Royal British Legion, and we wear them in the millions in November. Ironic thought.. could we convince the British population not to wear red poppies this year, because in the contemporary context they are far more symbolic of the Taleban's financial success than they are of the deaths of our forefathers in France?

Talking of which, a large red plastic poppy money collection box has appeared by the till in the coffee shop at work. In August! It's three months till Remembrance Day.... It did prompt me to wonder whether I will be wearing my white poppy with pride this year. (Given that it symbolises 'the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts that killing strangers', I should, but I'm not sure how brave I am. Or rather, if it would only make me the odd weirdo again, would it do any good?) Suggestions welcome in a comment box near you.

Meanwhile, I continue to have my weekly debate with the woodlice over who owns the strawberry patch (they do, of course; possession is nine tenths of the law. I'm never going to admit that to them though. And they leave me enough to allow the debate to continue). And, along with the rest of the tomato-growing UK population, I wait for the sun to come out long enough to turn my bounty of green fruits into red delights.

proms without the knives this time

2008-08-14T21:50:00.005Z

It was excellent. I'd never really understood what difference a conductor makes - after all, these orchestras are professional, know what they are doing: why do they need a man with a little stick standing in front of them? And perhaps he didn't make all that much difference to the music itself. But Gustavo Dudamel did make the whole experience a little more energising...

Aged 27, with a mop of long curly hair, he literally bounced up and down on the podium. All his body was doing the conducting, not just that little stick. But perhaps most endearing was that he took bows with the orchestra, standing among the violinists not alone on the poduium, and when pointing out individuals for applause, he walked to them, rather than pointing from afar. And he got the brass section doing a little dance at the end of the second, Latinesque, encore, which sent a frisson of excitement down our middle class spines.

And the music... I'm not very good at (classical) music. I can very rarely remember a piece, neither its name nor, often, the melody itself. Mother reassures me that she knew nothing of classical music at my age either, but I don't hold out much hope. I've been enjoying £6 tickets at the RFH and the odd Prom for years now, and next to nothing sticks. I like Rachmaninov because his music reminds me of sweeping Russian steppes and amazing huge paintings of sweeping Russian steppes in the National Gallery a few years ago. Beyond that, and Shostakovich (not only, but partly, as my parents and I found his grave in the Moscow convent cemetry in 2000), I don't really know what I'm talking about. But it is calming, allows drifting off, and fascinating to watch a bunch of people in black and white with bits of metal and wood all creating a coherent, moving, organism.

Anyway, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, it turns out, is really rather good. One of the movements has a haunting solo oboe, sad, solitary, and accompanied by timpani rumbles of thunder. It took me to, hmm, Russian steppes. (I always have a soft spot for timpanists, and not only because they tune their instruments seemingly silently, in the middle of pieces of music, laying their heads affectionately close to the skins. No, once upon a time I attempted to play the timpani in Wilmslow High School's orchestra, but I couldn't tune them, which I now realise is a core part of the job. So I wasn't much good, and moved on to learning 20 ways (really) to play the triangle and became a dab hand at a tamborine. Honest, it's harder than it looks.) Sorry, lost it... Berlioz's haunting is more important than my timpani.

Mum and I had a running discussion about the middle class nature of the audience. (Sorry Julian, but she scoffed at your suggestion that classical music does not mostly cater for the middle band). There was, perhaps, a 2% ethnic minority in the audience... but they were mostly Japanese. Or Latin. Or both, as with our neighbours, who were Brazilian Japanese. And hence far more interested in talking to us than any Brit usually is.

Actually, I have a serious point and not just a prod at Mr Lloyd Webber. Gustavo was brilliant because he changed the energy in what is a huge and difficult to fill space. Very rarely do I applaud like a really mean it (the problem with having studied ritual is that you know one when you see one; not that most people don't know that also), but here I did. He ran on and off the stage at every round, and gave us three encores, one of which no-one knew what it was but it was so smooth and gentle, it sucked you in.

Point I'm trying to get to: that music is never just the sounds. It is the people who make the sounds, but more importantly (for my debate with JLW), the people who listen to them. Surely we chose music we like in part because we like what it is associated with, and who it is associated with. There are aspirations involved, whether they are expressed in the Royal Albert Hall or in Reading, Cambridge or the Isle of Wight. I gather much of my own music taste by osmosis from the people I live with, or am around, and sometimes that's a two way process. If our friends like something we're more likely to like it too. I used to apologise for my failings in this sphere, but now I guess its not that unusual. I'm just worst at it than most.

And as some one sitting not very far from me just said of Dudamel, "I bet he has lots of middle class groupies offering themselves up." Indeed.

Kind of returning briefly to the knives, this summarises the story of El Sistema, the inspirational system that has put hundreds of poor/'vulnerable' children through Venezualan orchestras, of which the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuala is one. Gustavo is but a part, and not the instigator, though he serves as a good ambassador. Almost just because it was amusing to do so, this April I purchased 4 tickets for a concert they are giving next April. It looks like it's going to be fun. Classical music could do with more shell suits, if only because they shock the middle classes.

coup

2008-08-11T20:54:00.002Z

I've just achieved a minor coup, without even trying. I've been invited to a meeting at 8.30am with a Colonel, a meeting that I would never have dared to ask for but which fits marvellously into my personal campaign for a culturally competent institution... and it means hardly a thing to anyone else.

That's the thing with personal coups, no-one else really gets them. In some ways it makes them more impressive to oneself, but they lose so much in the telling and the blank faces that it's just a little frustrating.

Proms and knives

2008-08-10T11:28:00.000Z

Time Out this week has an article about the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, on the players' origins in ganglands and violent slums, and the UK Government's new scheme, 'In Harmony', to replicate the model here. Time Out is helping out by calling for donations of unwanted instruments, as part of its campaign to End Knife Crime. And In Harmony is being headed up by Julian Lloyd Webber.

Hmm.

I think they have slightly missed the point. I'm not sure that 'children from England's poorest estates' being given instruments by the Government is quite going to work. I've been looking recently at ways in which socities change, and how initiatives that evolve from the ground, the 'grassroots', have more efficacy than those opposed from above. Not rocket science - NGOs tell us that all the time. What is most interesting is that in some cases the people who have the answers or capacity to bring about change are the people that the Powers That Be are least likely to want to want to engage with. Or, that if the Powers That Be do try to engage they may taint the very initiatives that they want to support, because the latter are successful partly because they are an opposing voice to those Powers. I don't really understand the phrase 'speak truth to power' but that might be something of it. Point being, that the Government giving instruments to the UK's ganglands' children might be counter-productive, as it is the Powers trying to control the people who are using violence to show that they don't want to be controlled by the Powers.

Perhaps I'm too much of a cynic. I certainly don't have the answer, and I'm not all that convinced that the answers I sometimes espouse, like last year's Tools for a London without violence?, are scalable or necessarily effective. I still refuse to believe (accept?!) that violence is inevitable and part of 'human nature'.

Perhaps also I am misunderstanding the roots of this violence, the gun and knife crime epidemic which we are being told we have. The In Harmony message, as I read it, is that knife crime comes from poverty and a lack of things to do and groups to be with. Or, as Time Out puts it, a lack of options to enable them to 'communicate with discipline, passion and a sense of ambition'. I fear we are just trying to make everyone middle class.

I'm due to see the SBYOoV's Gustavo Dudamel conduct at the Proms on Wednesday with mum. I guarantee that the audience will be at least 99% white and probably at least 98% middle class. And someone else will get stabbed or shot in south London within a month.

ducks and warmongers

2008-08-09T11:02:00.008Z

Towards the end of a meeting a couple of weeks ago, my colleague said that he had another question for me, then reached into his back and pulled out a rubber duck. My immediate thought was, 'How does he know I have a row of rubber ducks on my bathroom window?'. My second, correct, thought - and it's intriguing how quickly this came to me - was that he had seen this, the tools I have used in the past to run workshops on non-violence, one of which is a rubber duck. (Funny how my memory plays with me. I thought the post in question was this one, my first AVP workshop in Aceh and the first time I really thought that peace education could work).

So a colleague has found my blog. That shouldn't really surprise me. What did surprise me was him going on to say that he had always felt a thread of discomfort about his work, because he wasn't sure that violence was the answer. (I'm paraphrasing, partly because the surprise means that I don't actually remember the words). It was a fascinating and enlightening conversation, not least because it reminded me of the humans inside uniforms - something, despite all my talk, it took me several months to get to grips with.

It also reminded me of a number of conversations with people whose CVs are not blackened like mine, but who don't think that violence is necessarily problematic. Once, in a queue for the Proms, discussing just this question of whether violence was ever necessary, an activist friend said to me that she didn't believe in extremes. I thought it was an excellent answer, and have come back to it several times. But waking this morning it struck me: why is thinking that killing people is never a good idea an extreme position to hold? Even friends who went through the Turning the Tide facilitation course with me last year laughed when I hung 'people kill other people' on our issue washing line as 'my issue'.

The chair of my panel at an anthropology conference recently started the questions after my paper with a complicated one about problematising and politicising the term 'culture', but added that 'pacifists usually get other people to do their violence for them'. Of all the critiques I faced at that conference, most of them predictable, that was the one that hurt, because it questioned my morality, my honesty and my self-awareness. Which, given that being and knowing I am a pacifist/peacenik is the only way I can justify my job to myself, was harsh. In some senses it was a cheap dig from someone who had ethical issues with my choice of career, but on another level it was a fundamental and possible deliberate misunderstanding of my 'extreme' position against violence.

I was out last night for drinks with colleagues as two are leaving us. They're a fun bunch of people, most of them younger than me which occupies me for reasons I don't understand (possibly because, apart from with my siblings, this is one of the few contexts I've been in where I'm one of the oldest). They're smart, too, which is brilliant. One told me that I was a 'prickly anthropologist', rather tempering that by saying that all the anthropologist she has met are prickly and that she loves them all. It was an interesting unguarded insight into how I am seen; I expect to be seen as odd, and I know I have strong opinions... I did rather disturb a team meeting by protesting at being offered what I called 'another warmonger' for the project I am managing! Though I was also called a 'wus' for feeling ready to cry at the planes close overhead a few weeks ago - I think again another misunderstanding of my 'extreme' position: I was not scared for me but for their recipients.

I fear this is a bit long and rambling; I'm out of practice. I had a complaint recently that there was nothing interesting on my blog, with a suggestion that even an allotment update would be better than nothing. (Actually, now I think about it, Karen's complaint is a bit ripe given she has stopped posting all together ;o) So here you go. This is last weekend's harvest, which had me stewing, blanching and wondering what to do with the rest. Five courgettes made it into the office, not quite the usual sweets on the occasion of birthdays or holidays. (How have we in this country managed to create a culture where it is normal for people to bring in gifts to the office to celebrate their own events?! It's a bit odd, but probably fits with Kate Fox's rules for being English, if I think about it hard enough. Which I'm not really in a state to do right now). Someone did ask me whether I live in the Garden of Eden; recent events in Costcutter on Walworth Road prove that I do not.

So, anyway, here's the allotment update in pictures, which notably just look like a bunch of green things unless you're standing at the gate to my patch, when they look marvellously verdant. And here's a promise to myself, and Karen, and the two separate colleagues who kindly encouraged me, to try to post here more often. I'm finding figuring out how to write about my thoughts when I can't write about the stimuli far more difficult than I thought it would be (which makes me wonder whether I wasn't too lax when writing about Aceh), but since I claim to like challenges, I ought to try harder to rise to this one.

Negotiating with the enemy

2008-07-15T14:32:00.003Z

Recent press release from the HD centre (which I know as the organisation that tried and failed to negotiate over the Aceh conflict several years ago, though they have had other successes). Makes the point I keep banging on about: it's better to talk to people.

“The idea of talking to your enemies is something that has been lost in the rush to proscribe armed groups as terrorists.”

Many, probably most, perhaps all of the 100 peacemakers, including senior United Nations and government officials, who heard Martin Griffiths, Director of the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD Centre), pronounce these words recently at the Oslo Forum, agreed with them. Indeed, another participant described the failure to speak with Hamas in Palestine “a missed opportunity” and added “this might require updating our mental maps."

The controversial question of whether the United States should sit down around the same table and talk to Iran was foremost in the minds of the 100 conflict resolvers. It was clear from the tone of the Forum that opinion ran directly against the current in Washington today, but perhaps not tomorrow.

As Martin Griffiths put it earlier, “the notion of a terrorist is notoriously subjective. Overwhelmingly, the negotiators felt that isolating, ignoring the terrorists has never been an effective way to end a conflict or violence. We don’t feel that we are giving credibility to terrorists by talking to them. We are in favour of talking with anyone if it means it can end the conflict.”

It could be said that today’s “terrorist” will be tomorrow’s international hero. The example of Nelson Mandela, once labelled a terrorist, today an icon, illustrates the point.

If “military action remains an option on the negotiating table,” as is said so often in Washington, a more peaceful tone was struck in a keynote address by Mohammad Khatami, former President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

”The West must look at the East not as a subject matter that needs to be known so that the goal of economic and political hegemony can be achieved, but also as a partner to the West in an interconnected world where the security of each depends upon the security of everyone else. The East must also rest assured that in order to achieve progress and development and independence, it will find the support of the world,” Khatami said.

“The historical mindsets that exist in the different parts of the world, including the education system, need to change. What existed as a basis for the relationships between countries and nations over decades was violence and hegemony and the result of that was two ruinous world wars and the cold war and occupation and suppression of nations and the imposition of double standards and finally the dangerous phenomenon of terrorism which has manifested itself more harshly and destructively than ever.”

The former leader of Iran said in conclusion, “the East can benefit from the culture and civilization of the West for its own development and its progress and its freedom.”

cheese for peace

2008-06-06T16:34:00.002Z

Okay, I thought it was nuts when I read the strapline. But this seems an innovative economic way of getting around long-term conflict-driven border controls. And the political hostility between Armenians and Turks is something I heard even in a tiny village in southern Russia. So eat that cheese.

International Alert’s Turkish and Armenian partners jointly launch a new cheese brand aimed at encouraging economic ties across the South Caucasus region.

The unveiling of the “Caucasian Cheese” took place on 14th May during The First Caucasian Cheese Exhibition in the city of Gyumri, Armenia. The cheese will be produced and sold in both countries.

Turkey and Armenia are countries with no diplomatic ties and a closed border. Consequently trade between the two has flown either north through Georgia, or south through Iran. The joint cheese production is meant to promote cooperation between the two countries, and also across the whole South Caucasus region.

The cooperation is one of multiple initiatives facilitated by the Caucasus Business and Development Network (CBDN), an organisation established and supported by Alert. CBDN offers local entrepreneurs ways to connect and cooperate. It provides advice and information on regional business opportunities, organises business forums and conferences, facilitates business deals and holds training sessions for local entrepreneurs.

Alert’s role is to support people involved in the network. We work with local businesses and professional associations that come from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, as well as the unrecognised entities of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorny Karabakh.

Previous CBDN and Alert initiatives have included a Regional Tourism Operators’ Forum and the first ever South Caucasian Women’s Economic Forum. Recently Alert initiated joint honey production and agricultural machinery lending schemes in the South Ossetian conflict zone, and organised a fruit juice production scheme in the Georgian-populated eastern Abkhazia for the western Abkhaz tourism market.

don't forget meg. or peg.

2008-05-26T21:25:00.002Z

For some reason you keep coming back (and you can't all be my mother). And this despite my dismal failure at posting much in the last 6 months. I'd like to say it's because I got a life, but it isn't. I got a job.

Today I came back because I remembered that blog I discovered months ago, and couldn't remember her name or site. If you like me and want a random wander through the internet, look at Meg Pickard's site. She has excellent photos on flickr too.

And she has a cat. As do I. Peg's brood started to explore today, just in time for my painters to arrive for two weeks tomorrow. Great. They are fascinating though. It's strange to realise when you see kittens sit up for the first time that they haven't been sitting up for the last 3 weeks. And how could you live somewhere as exciting as my kitchen and not want to explore?

I promise that in about 7 weeks the kittens will be gone and I'll find something else to ramble on about. Or I'll just stop posting again.

long-flying fish

2008-05-23T08:20:00.001Z

45 seconds in the air... beat that without feathers.

anthropology to an engineer

2008-05-22T15:42:00.001Z

I had a meeting with the head of my Group the other week, set up because I was trying to get approval to attend some conferences. He rightly turned the meeting on its head, and put me on the spot – as he put it – by asking me to explain, what is anthropology and why is it important?

I’m still working on that question. Month by month I get closer to an English-language response, but the final version is still a long way off (and is a topic worthy of a PhD dissertation, I’ve no doubt).

One problem, I realise, is that while I might find elegant descriptions or definitions, they are almost always self-referential, in that one has to understand the language of anthropology in order to understand the meaning of the sentences. Take this, from Rosen’s book on organizational ethnography, for example:

“The aim of social constructionist research is then to understand how members of a social group, through their participation in social process, enact their particular realities and endow them with meaning” (2000, p. 47).

Neat, and it encapsulates things that my descriptions have been missing. But quite apart from needing to ‘get’ what ‘social constructionist’ means (which I don’t, yet, fully understand), ‘participation in social process’, ‘enact their particular realities’ and ‘endow them with meaning’ are all ‘slippery’ phrases, as we put it in CEF (needing an alternative, non-culturally specific term for ‘weasel words’). You need to know the meaning before they make sense.

Which doesn’t really help explain to an engineer why he should care about anthropology.

:o)

2008-05-22T13:47:00.002Z

Reasons for optimism... I haven't read such interesting research findings for months. Violence is appparently on the decline.

"Challenging the expert consensus that the threat of global terrorism is increasing, the Human Security Brief 2007 reveals a sharp net decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world.

Fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent, while the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world.

The Brief also describes and analyses the extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change in sub-Saharan Africa's security landscape. The number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006; the combat toll dropped by 98 percent.

Finally, the Brief updates the findings of the 2005 Human Security Report, and demonstrates that the decline in the total number of armed conflicts and combat deaths around the world has continued. The number of military coups has also continued decline, as have the number of campaigns of deadly violence waged against civilians."

penguins

2008-05-19T18:06:00.000Z

You might have seen this on 1 April, and here's how they did it.

Peggie did us proud

2008-05-05T22:01:00.002Z

Having failed to get my cat 'done' on time, about five weeks ago I paid £25 for the priviledge of being told that yes, she is pregnant. The fluffly black tom from across the road had had his merry way with our Peggie on our kitchen floor, and this was the result.

So yesterday, perfectly timed, Peggie provided us with an additional five residents of Aylesbury Road. She did a fine job; a bit of a wail before each popped out but she did an excellent clean-up job, and for a cat of only 10 months herself (I know, teenage pregnancies on the rise...) she is an incredibly patient, maternal feline.

I'm particularly impressed that from a litter of five she produced three tortoiseshell (always a good seller!), one ginger and only one black and white (like its pa). It's not all cuteness though; it was clearly bloody hard work. Here she is with three out, clearly one more to go (and in fact another one after that - explaining why she looked like she had swallowed a football for the last couple of weeks.)

Anyone looking for a kitten then?! They should be ready for new homes in early July...

PBI on the BBC World Service

2008-04-21T21:43:00.003Z

PBI UK has launched a new fund to raise money for supporting human rights defenders - ie to do the work PBI does. For the launch, a Colombia lawyer has come to the UK, and she and a PBI volunteer were featured on the BBC World Service's Outlook programme last Thursday, 17 April. Catch it quick, as it will be updated to the new programme on Thursday.

And then give PBI some money. Ta.

the researched hit back

2008-04-20T21:14:00.002Z

Somewhat surprising this hasn't happened before, really:

A cultural conundrum is playing out in the 9th circuit that is sure to be heard before the Supreme Court by Fall. A coalition of organizations aimed at protecting the rights of indigenous people’s has filed a motion to halt all forms of graduate student field work throughout the world. “Frankly, we’re just tired of it.” stated Jason Natuktu, an Inuit Elder of Afognak, Alaska. “Look, haven’t these people heard of the internet? Just go look it up already.” His son, Atol agreed, “How many inept questions do we really have to answer over and over again?” He continued “Yes, we were oppressed, no we don’t envy people living in Florida, yes we really eat blubber. Really, this is the best and brightest?”

The brief states that graduate students subject participants to “ceaseless mental duress, and disruption of local life with little or no regard to those being tortured.” Quaticatl Xertaysl of the Yanomami tribe of Brazil vigorously agreed. “You know they call us ‘The Fierce People’ and I was checking out Wikipedia the other day and do you know what someone wrote about us? He called us ‘a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs.’ Hey, someone says that about you and you’d be pretty pissed-off too.” In addition to the repetitive questions they have been subjected to over the years, he also takes issue with the lack of appropriate co-authorship later. “Look, we understand these kids have to do this to satisfy a bunch of grumpy old SOBs that believe you can’t be an anthropologist unless you’ve experienced nine months of dysentery.” Said Quaticatl, “but ya know, we have access to Amazon and eBay here too. They sell a book on the topic, and in return give us a pig. Who needs this goddamn pig crapping in front of my door all day? We want points, plain and simple.”

The 9th circuit is expected to hand down a decision later in the month.

I, the anthropologist

2008-04-05T16:34:00.002Z

Flicking through the Weekend magazine of the Guardian today, I wonder how I would present myself, or be presented, in the style of the Q&A page, where the famous and/or prestigious are asked inane questions about the time they were happiest and the words they overuse. It struck me because the 50+ year old woman was described as a Yale graduate... and I wondered why and for how long the universities in which we fill three years count as defining characteristics of who we are.

One label I have been given in the last 4 months, and re-claimed with amusement, is that of Anthropologist [sic; no small caps here]. Having fled the academy at the first possible moment after achieving what I hoped was a ticket to airline upgrades (it isn't; nobody bothers seating doctors more comfortably. Perhaps the real ones are already in Business class), I haven't used the label, not only because nobody around me knew what it meant, but also because what I was doing (social research in education) hardly counted as anthropology. Now though, I am trying to help a large institution think in different ways, and being 'an ologist' is a useful way to self-define.

My latest bedtime reading is MacClancy and McDonaugh's Popularising Anthropology, largely impressively readable and mostly devoid of footnotes (although one chapter has three in one sentence, which I consider unforgiveable, agreeing with MacClancy's description of them as 'tired emblems of supposed scholarship'). In it, Benthall, one-time editor of Anthropology Today, perhaps anthropology's only readable journal, comments that, 'Although some aspects of anthropology appeal to various sectors of the public, the fact is that a large part of what anthropologists have to say requires intellectual effort, and moreover is often rather disturbing to people's peace of mind'. That last phrase made me laugh, though I don't know that it is true.

I recently gave a seminar to colleagues on 'what is anthropology and why should you care?' It was an exercise not so much in educating them - and I remain unsure of how far I succeeded there - as forcing myself to come up with definitions for things that anthropologists find exceptional hard to define. Namely, what is anthropology. An eminent anthropologist who shall remain nameless (largely as I have forgotten his name; he is clearly not innocent) begins an introductory text to anthropology suggesting that we leave, for now, the issue of defining the field. He eventually concludes, some 250 pages later, that 'anthropology is best defined as whatever it is that anthroplogists do'.

Thanks. That helps. Not.

I heard a rumour that (Dame) Marilyn Strathern, described as the greatest living anthropologist and certainly the writer of the most unreadable book, Gender of the Gift, once said that she makes things difficult to read because they were difficult for her to think, so the reader ought to do some work too. I am not averse to books requiring brainwork - try Transcend and Transform (once you get past the fluffy title) for a remarkable piece of think-work on ways to approach and resolving conflict to the satisfaction of all. But anthropologists' (my own included) inability to define their field is no better than NGOs that plan by activity, rather than by the changes that they want to achieve (and hence activities that might achieve these). It's not good enough.

So I'm plugging away, working out who I am, what I do, and why we should care about culture anyway. It's fascinating.

'do the job'

2008-03-23T22:59:00.004Z

After an hour spent trying to download sky something-or-other onto my laptop, I discover that I can watch Ross Kemp's recent documentary on YouTube. Kemp went to Afghanistan with 'the Vikings', B Company of 1 Royal Anglian. (Men less like Vikings I can scarcely imagine. Watching an 18 year old struggle to put a ladder against a wall would be depressing in B&Q; knowing the guy is going to be out there in the sandstorms makes it look like a suicide attempt.)

"At the end of the day", "It's what we're trained to do", "It's like a dream come true"... "hopefully I'll get a chance to actually do my job and fight an enemy". I'm intrigued about the language the men use (to the media) in the first episode to describe their thoughts before deployment. They're stilted, stumbling over clichés, clearly not altogether comfortable with the camera in the room... while also processing being not altogether comfortable with the impending trip to meet the Taliban. But also very excited.

Such language doesn't help make the argument that Generals have made, that if they don't have to fire a shot that is far better than if they do; if it comes to a battle, we have failed. I'm not sure the Vikings would agree. But then, having recently spent time with men for whom 'ears' 'near' and 'flah' (as one of the explained) are basic components of the English language, I can see that there are several other differences between the ranks. And command of the language only goes to emphasis the difference in the chain of command.

I nearly blew my cover recently, came out as a peacenik or whatever I am, in a fierce debate with a former MP who asked in disgust whether I "knew anything about history" when I suggested that the reason WWII happened was not entirely down to British Appeasement. (I'm sure he wouldn't agree either that the 20 million dead Soviets were the reason the war turned, but I wisely didn't try that line, to avoid being a outed as commie as well as an idiot.) We had got to this point as he vehemently declared that my concern over the impact of the forthcoming Dutch film about/against the Qu'ran (that it would lead to deaths elsewhere in the world, not in the Netherlands) was tantamount to appeasement. My suggestion that we therefore need to do something to mitigate its impact was assumed to mean I was against free speech, and no matter how many times I denied this, it remained the view he took of me.

My argument (later refined as I rehearsed the debate with myself in the smallest single bed known to student campuses anywhere) that the world doesn't work like that, and sense of sadness that we really don't know what we have got ourselves into over the last 7 years, was enhanced in a recent From Our Own Correspondant, reporting on a sense of gloom at a conference on insurgency held recently in Sweden. The now-clichéed language, of hearts and minds, and a 'battle for ideas', is sugar-coated but more realistic than talking about (non) appeasement. And our boys with their 'job to do' might take out a few of the people with guns right now, but figuring out what to do in response to the media-hungry Dutch MP's film might be more productive in reducing the global death toll in the long run.

And then with Ross Kemp we meet our boys again in Kandahar, talking of the first 'contact', shots from the enemy: "It was the most exciting moment of any of our lives... It's the one thing that everyone in the army does, as their basic job. Everyone sat there... In my section, we sat there, and we looked at each other, and we giggled."

Hmm.

tired

2008-03-21T17:47:00.003Z

I got tired of saying I was tired. It's dull; nobody really wants to know, and anyway, most people seemed to be tired around now. In fact by yesterday I felt exhausted, which was how my line manager described me. A friend told me recently of facilitating a workshop while sick with flu, and finding he simply didn't care: an exhilarating feeling. I felt the same in a workshop I was co-facilitating yesterday: I didn't care about the content of people's words; I just had to stay focussed enough to facilitate them being said. Not great.

You're no more interested in my feeling exhausted than anyone else, are you? I feel like I have spent the last month either away, or washing and ironing in preparation to go away. Thankfully I only have a cat dependent on me, and a flatmate (and a mechanical cat feeder) who look after her when I am away. (Though she's showing the stress: seems utterly confused that there are two of us at home, and, in rebellion, she has been bringing strange men into the kitchen for a bit of action). What is strange is that, although it has mostly been work, I don't resent it - it has all been fascinating and most of it enjoyable. Last time I had an institutional job like this one, the honeymoon period lasted 8 months, till I got kicked off a project I had done all the work on. Will the same happen here? Perhaps. So I should try to enjoy the exhaustion and the overtime payment while I can.

All this means that I don't feel I know what is happening in the world. People are protesting in China, and the UK public response reminds me of that to the monks in Burma: outrage now, and forgetting fairly soon. We are caring but fickle, busy, and tired.

'There are no potatoes in havana.'

2008-02-27T23:03:00.004Z

When Sahra's friend first reported on the lack of potatoes, I thought she was simply repeating what the waitress had said, to explain the absence of vegetarian options in this wonderful little paladare in central Havana. But she repeated it, and later neither Sahra nor I could make out whether she was making a statement of fact. The absence of vegetables in Cuba and Cuban diet is a known and lamented fact (or at least in Sahra's search for salads), but the potato announcement was, like much of what does or does not happen in Cuba, ambiguous.

Paladares are private restaurants run in people's homes, and supposed to have no more than 12 chairs (a way of limiting the enterprise), but someone is turning a blind eye to La Guarida - famous in part for being the location of the film Fresa y Chocolate. But also for producing damn fine food for more than 12 people. Even without potatoes. I spent 6 days in Havana, having a holiday. Not something I do often enough, and I have the sunburn to show for it. But holidays with friends, particularly friends who have spent the last 4 years coming back and fore to Cuba and hence know the place really rather well (and speak the language really rather well too), are particularly special. This was brilliant. I felt warm, happy, stimulated, engaged, cared for, and we walked for miles and miles and miles.

Timing was good too... or at least, you would think from the international attention that Cuba recieved as Fidel resigned. Seems I didn't miss much by not being there till 3 days later; indeed we spent the day of the elections for the first new President for nearly 50 years in much the same way as when Habanaros... on the beach. Though from the (prepared) speech shown on the television later, it didn't look like the outcome was much of a surprise to Raul either. Indeed the calm, and the almost complete conversational absence of alusion of the passing on of Fidel was fascinating. Sahra and I talked about change, whether it would come, what it would look like. It will be interesting to watch the next five years or so. But given that the country (and socialism) survived the loss of 85% of its trade with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, I wonder whether the change that the international community expects/wants is really on the agenda. Yes, dollars and tourists have changed things, but Cuba is really far more complex than an entity to be sucked into 'capitalism' (whatever that means) at the drop of a President.

There are, in fact, potatoes in Havana. They lay, boiled, beneath my final Cuban grilled fish (vegetarianism being stretched when in a place with limited vegetables) at the Hotel Ingleterra. Afterwards, Sahra and I were snapped by the inimitable Jose, who took a camera obscura image of us in front of the Capitolio (yes, it is an imitation of the Washington DC, built pre-revolution). Fascinating invisible process, a delight at a $1, and I got my first marriage offer of the week. All very amusing, with the nearby peanut-selling woman cackling away, although Sahra declined to continuing translating after he says that we should each make a commitment and I can go underneath...

There's more to come on Cuba; it keeps making me think.

Dili in crisis... again

2008-02-11T12:46:00.000Z

So Alfredo Reinado was involved in attacking President Jose Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, with the first now (probably) dead, the second (probably) unconcious and the third.. well, where he has been for years, at the centre of East Timor's political chaos.

Or, if don't know what I'm talking about because a tiny little conflict-ridden half-island on the other side of your world does not figure highly in your daily conversation (and why should it?): an 'experiment' of post-colonial UN-supported independence is rocking, very considerably, once again.

Alfredo was a leader of the disaffected armed forces whose actions in 2006 led in part to the crisis in which most of the capital, Dili, fled to refugee camps (and a lot of them are still there). Xanana and Ramos-Horta were on the other side. But in the big picture, all three have been key figures in what was Timor Leste's independence movement against Indonesia, until it became independent in 1999.

An ICG report suggested that until these key figures (about 20 of them, it reckoned) sorted out their differences, or perhaps even grew too old and retired/died, Timor Leste would not stablise. It recommended (in that wonderful, and perhaps naive or perhaps just optimistic, way that think-tanks can and do recommend things to people who don't read their reports) that these 20 famous, strong-willed people should, erm, consider stepping aside...

The latest events will, have rocked Dili. I'd guess they will lead to an increase a) in international white vehicles on the road and men in flak jackets pointing this way and that and b) an increase in stone throwing by refugee camp residents. What else will happen I don't know, though I am relying on my UN journalist friend in Dili to keep me updated (and when she does, I will you).

At a course on evaluating peacebuilding initiatives in Derry/Londonderry a few years ago, I heard Mary Robinson speak. She suggested that any post-conflict society will take three steps back as it takes two steps forward. (Or was it the other way round? That would make more optimistic sense, which is why I don't think it is what she said). And somewhere else I heard (or perhaps I made it up) that it takes a country as long to escape a conflict as it has lived through it. So TL can't expect much good to happen to it for the next 30 years, and it can expect an awful lot of bad.

So today's shootings are inevitable.

I increasingly learn that I am naive. I assume, unconsciously, that the world is generally heading in a positive direction. Events like this show me, ironically, that I am an optimistic - I think things will get better (and hence am surprised and sad when they do not). This is good news, because a couple of years ago it seemed I was losing my optimism. I'd rather expect sunshine than rain. (I think I am probably a (naive) optimist in the rest of my life too, not just world politics. Still figuring out what that implies for how I handle unforeseen changes in Walworth as opposed to Dili. Surprise, though, comes into it.)

Encouraged by colleagues recently I have been reading about Realism, a trend in International Relations. I know little about it still - so wait to be stand corrected but know from my readership that most of you won't comment. It's a funny approach, to my mind; not least in its (self-assigned) name: it implies that the rest of us are - by not being R/realist - deluded and naive. Essentially it states that states are the key actors in the world, and beyond states there is anarchy - in the sense of there being no one, or no institution, in control. States have to protect themselves, and hence they have the moral right (obligation even) to do things that individuals within that state do not have the moral right to do. Like deceive one another. Still getting my head round that one...

Not quite sure where this is going, except that I am clearly not a Realist, and in Timor Leste's case I am possibly not a realist either. Or am I? I left Dili in October feeling depressed about the state of the country, disillusioned about the role of internationals and the UN, and not really seeing how things could improve any time soon. Thinking back to that, today's events come as no surprise.

So perhaps I am a naive realist. I just hope my friends don't get stoned as they drive into refugee camps, and that there are some among those 20 powerful men who are willing to be naively optimistic too. Reality is (I hope) to some extent what we make it.

signs of hope

2008-02-01T23:15:00.000Z

On a bench in a community garden, I think in New Zealand, I saw the words painted:

Gardening is an act of faith in the future

I'm not so sure it's about faith as much as hope that what tomorrow brings will be better than today. Strangely I spend more time in my allotment in grim, cold, wet January and February, than I often do later in the year. And it's not planting, usually, it's fixing things: the greenhouse where the foxes and the tree pruners have mauled it; the raised bed edges that I knock down every time I dig something up; the pile of 'acquired' wood by my shed door that seems to grow quicker than I can build things with it.

But I finally planted my long overdue bulbs a couple of weeks ago, and they are rewardning me with tiny little signs of hope.

Garlic was late in too, but it's going all for it, now it's where it wants to be: in the cold soil.

In a fit of over-enthusiasm last weekend I also planted onions, which might be a mistake. I had popped in to East Dulwich's Potato and Seed Exchange, which was exactly as stereotypical as you might expect, so I escape quickly with 6 Saxon potatoes, 6 Smile potatoes and a cup full of Red Baron onion sets. Which are now, too early, in the soil, next to the grateful garlic.

And the allotment provides the rare chance for conversations in my 'community': the rhubarb got praise for its forceful appearance in early January. At the time it just made me feel guilty about what else I hadn't done, but now... rhubarb crumble to come.

on torture (?)

2008-01-13T12:44:00.000Z

The US Director of National Intellegence has said that water-boarding (the interrogation practice of stimulated drowning, by raising someone's feet, covering their face with plastic and pouring water over their head) 'would be torture' if he had to undergo it. Interesting to see the debate in the public sphere in this way.

Interesting also what happens when you name something as something. A bit like declaring mass killings 'genocide', it seems that if water-boarding is officially classed as torture then not only is the CIA not allowed to do it, but it has other legal implications. I'm interested in how naming things in certain ways 'makes' them into something into something they were not before, even though the actions themselves have not changed. There's an excellent, and painful, read in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, in which she talks about how torture 'unmakes' the world by destroying language, removing the efficacy of language to do what we expect it to do.

On a related note, Karen pointed out that Louis Theroux's stint in jail was clearly not quite as enjoyable as mine. He had minders; I was left alone with my lifers. Though they seem to have been at a different stage of in-prison-development.

Kenya in crisis

2008-01-07T21:50:00.000Z

One of the dubious advantages of having attended an amazing international school is that when something goes wrong in the world, I often know someone for whom it is intensely personal. Apart from my sister's Zoe's 'orgins' by blood, Kenya calls through Andrew Owiti, my co-year from Atlantic College. Below is part of an email he sent calling for help, sent yesterday. You can read more of his views on his blog.

As many of you know, Kenya, the country of my birth and the country where I spent the first 18 years of my life, is in a state of crisis. Because of a disputed presidential election, there has been widespread violence, civil unrest, ethic killings and the resultant reprisals. All in a country that is ordinarily SUPER calm and a number one destination for millions of fun-loving tourists from all nations. Kenya is surrounded by Somalia (a failed State), Sudan (a State in an undeclared but interminable civil war), and Uganda (a State fighting a decades-old vicious insurgency in the north). By contrast, Kenya has ALWAYS been a beacon of calm and stability and prosperity in this volatile and troubled region of Africa -- this past year economic growth in Kenya was upwards of 7%. Kenya's hard earned reputation of stability and peace, order and security is all now threatened because of this election. ...

Cause of the violence
The violence is a result of a STOLEN election. The EU observers have said as much. The EU's position is that the tallying of the votes for President in the 2007 General Elections were not credible and did not meet international or, even, shockingly, regional standards. As a result, the EU observers have called for an international audit. In addition, the US government has retracted the initial congratulations it gave to the incumbent President of Kenya. Moreover, the UK has refused to congratulate the incumbent supposed winner and has decried the subsequent violence. Also, Canda's ambassador has allowed himself to be seen cavorting with Opposition leaders. Most significantly, France has gone so far as to officially declare the Kenya Presidential Election count of 2007 as rigged by the incumbent government.

Summary of Evidence of Rigging
There was widespread DIRECT evidence of blatant rigging, like photocopied voting papers being included in the official presidential election count. This, as well as circumstantial evidence of rigging like a 2 day delay between the initial of announcing of total vote counts in, for example, one voting precinct as 50,000 for the President, and the announcement of results from that very same precinct being as tallied in the Official Presidential vote count 2 days later as 78,000. This has been documented by the EU and happened, almost exclusively, in the incumbent government's strongholds. In addition, there was a SUPER rapid and secret swearing in of the incumbent President after the announcement of the incumbent's victory. On top of this, the Chairman of the Election Commission of Kenya has now admitted that he was pressured by the incumbent government to announce the results they presented prematurely, AND that, in truth, he - THE Chariman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, did NOT know who had really won the election.

That this election was rigged is, in my view, beyond reproach. The violence in Kenya is therefore a direct result of the Kenyan people rejecting the fraudulent results that were announced. However, violence begets more violence and only creates more problems, like the rape of innocent women and children, and the murder of innocent men which has, unfortunately, occurred with an unacceptably high frequency (Street thugs are taking advantage of the lawlessness). So peace and calm is, without question, more desirable.

Latest political positions
In the last 24 hours the Opposition and the Government have both expressed a willingness to negotiate a power sharing deal and, as a result, violence has diminished dramatically. This is FANTASTIC news! But the situation still remains tense and can explode any minute because the fraudulency of the election is still deeply felt by a vast majority of Kenyans and will neither be easily forgotten nor forgiven.

Kenya is at a crossroads Kenya is at a crossroads of political evolution. She can evolve into a higher species of democracy. She can do this because she is especially well suited to democracy. This is because there are 5 larger ethnic groups among 30 smaller ones. Because no single ethnic group can dominate any of the others, this creates ideal conditions for the coalition building between disparate groups that is the touchstone of democracy. On the other hand, Kenya can also regress to a Soviet-style dictatorship if the government cracks down hard and the paramilitary police (the GSU) have shown they are more than capable of cracking down hard. To its credit, the government has so far shown remarkable restraint but it can all change in a New York… well, perhaps, more appropriately, a Nairobi minute. You can help Kenya evolve into a more mature and sophisticated democracy.

How can you help?
First, your prayers, thoughts and hopes for a peaceful settlement are needed. If this is all you are able to do then this is, without a doubt, MORE than enough and is greatly appreciated because I know many of you, like me, have very demanding professional lives and are extremely busy.

However, if you are one of those who feel more motivated, or you can somehow find some extra minutes, and I hope many of you will, you can help by calling your legislative representative AND the government department that deals with foreign affairs and express: First, express your concern with the violence; Second express your anger with the irregularities associated with the results of the presidential election in Kenya; and third you can propose (strongly, of course) your support for a run-off election. I leave it to your good offices to decide how to help Kenya survive and advance.

Andrew included relevant contact details:
If you are British here you can find your local MP by postcode. You can give him or her an earful. You can also contact the British Foreign Office at (020) 7008 15000 and give them an earful. You can also contact the UK High Commission in Kenya at (254) (20) 284-4000 and give them an earful.

give war a chance; or, being wrong

2008-01-06T22:43:00.000Z

I am in the process of being wrong. I am discovering that being wrong, when you figure it out yourself, is an intriguing process (when someone tells you you are wrong, and they, goddamn it, happen to be right, that seems far less enjoyable). Anyway, I think I am wrong in saying that war is a behaviour used to resolve a conflict. It should be, but actually war is probably used for lots of reasons, conflict-resolution not necessarily being the first or only one. I think I assumed good intent more than is realistic. In hindsight this seems obvious; if people are willing to send people to kill/be killed, they are probably willing to do that for reasons that aren't simply about resolving a conflict to the satisfaction of both sides.

I knew this process of figuring out where I stand (or, perhaps, how to stand) in an ocean of people who think differently was going to be a difficult one. At least I can say that many of those around me are supportive of the process. In response to my request for articles or evidence as to when killing people works (ie is effective) - as opposed to being ethically right or wrong - I was given three, one by Edward Luttwak with the fantastic title Give War a Chance. The abstract gives a taste of the approach:

Since the establishment of the United Nations, great powers have rarely let small wars burn themselves out. Bosnia and Kosovo are the latest examples of this meddling. Conflicts are interrupted by a steady stream of cease-fires and armistices that only postpone war-induced exhaustion and let belligerents rearm and regroup. Even worse are U.N. refugee-relief operations and NGOs, which keep resentful populations festering in camps and sometimes supply both sides in armed conflicts. This well-intentioned interference only intensifies and prolongs struggles in the long run. The unpleasant truth is that war does have one useful function: it brings peace. Let it.

Intriguingly, despite a line arguing that the UN should support strong groups to win wars against weak ones, I found myself agreeing with much of the sentiment. My East Timor visit didn't do much to convince me of the benefits of international (armed, or even otherwise) interventions. I'm not sure that the alternative the author proposes is one I agree with, not least as it oversimplifies what happens in violent conflict. (And a definition of peace, anyone?) The East Timor conflict is a case in point, in the sense that it has metamorphosed into a series of different conflicts since it started in 2006, but what would have happened if internationals had not been called in? I don't know.

Anyway, if you want an interesting idea, look up Luttwak's article in Foreign Affairs (Jul/Aug 1999), 78 (4), pp36-44.

world peace in 2008? I hope not

2008-01-01T21:35:00.000Z

I heard on the radio this morning that Pope Benedict XVI was calling for 'world peace' in 2008. God help us. No wonder peaceniks get a bad press, if the Pope can ask for something as simplistic as that.

Apparently he declared that, 'The family is the first and indispensible teacher of peace'. Families are many things, some of them wonderful and some of them down-right exasperating, but surely 'peace' is one of the last things they teach? I am sure I am (or have been) at my worst with my family - because I can be. There are no holds barred, we are at our rawest, they know us more intimately than anyone else in our lives, and remarkably we change little in this from year to year. They give us space - perhaps too much space - to try out conflicting with each other in every possible way, with remarkably few restrictions on how we work that out. (A cavaet: I have just had a lovely, relaxed and conflict-free, Christmas with my family, and am tempted to agree with my mother that we are perhaps not quite as dysfunctional as I rudely declare us to be. But also agree with a friend from another large family that 'families don't always bring out the best in us!'). Indeed so many (all?) violent conflicts are 'family' writ-large: 'us' against 'them', neatly publically ignoring that the homogeneity (and peacefulness?) of 'us' is questionable at best. Can we not see a a tribe, a town, a battalion, a nation as a large sort of family?

On my second day in my new job another 'new starter' said to me, 'So, have you found an alternative to war yet?' I was so surprised. My work place is full of some of the smartest people I have met for a long time, and while this was an attempt at a joke I was surprised at the lack of creativity of thought this implied. (That I should meet people who think this way is perhaps less of a surprise - but I have been so impressed by others that I was naively surprised by that too.) I had a far more interesting dinner conversation in a very posh house on Clapham Common about war being a behaviour used to respond to conflict, that doesn't necessarily resolve the conflict. That was my argument anyway, but their response (and my job, and other new things) reminded me of the large spaces in my understandings of other worlds. We never know what we don't know, but conversations with psychologists, economics and international relations graduates have had that slightly daunting eye-widening effect of forcing me to question certainties. Which I knew they would, and which is what has always scared and excited me about what I am doing now.

It's been a day of questioning peace, finalising the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) evaluation report, and reading through my backlog of 210 PBI documents. It depresses me when 'peace' is about training modules and wearing peace-declaring t-shirts. What I love about PBI at its best is the counter-intuitive way that it really 'makes space for peace', by engaging in conversations (and tennis matches, crab-noodle dinners and long-drawn out exchanges of documentation) with everyone, from intel, the military, the police, immigration, through becak drivers to our NGO colleagues and clients. No-one is above or below the dialogue, and it works - it protects - because of that. It's not, thankfully (or I wouldn't do it), fluffy. It's bloody hard work.

It is tempting to complain that 'peace' is misrepresented, but then we who talk about peace often do so so badly, so inaccurately, so pie-in-the-sky ridiculously, that we often have little to complain about. I don't know what 'peace' means, despite spending years with PBI - and this blog - trying to figure that out, and I realise I have given up that definitional exercise (possibly a mistake, if I continue to label myself with it). For the record: 'my' peace is not an absence of conflict. On the contrary, it is probably more conflict, because only through conflict will things change. But I don't want to die, I don't want to be hurt, and I assume the same of others. Hence believing that killing, hurting people is never a good idea. Is that peace? I don't know. Is it naive? I don't know that either, but it feels slightly more creative than to assume the opposite. And having seen some remarkable, and counter-intuitive, results from expecting the postive, for now I'm sticking to it.

Anyway. Happy 2008. May it be a year full of enjoyable, creative, conflict.

And people with a little more critical thinking skills than to call for 'world peace'.

"our new anthropologist"

2007-12-12T22:30:00.000Z

... and thereafter she disappeared into the black hole that is the home of no-longer-updated blogs. Well, I hope not. But as my new job is has more security nobs and bells on it than I could possibly have imagined, I probably can't write much about violence and conflict for the immediate future without being very sure it has nothing to do with my work. My place of work does actually exist, contrary to what you might believe looking at streetmap.co.uk. (Google earth manages to spot it).

I have been enjoying being introduced as 'the new anthropologist', a job title I never imagined myself having, and which I'm sure most real anthropologists would debate at great lengths. Nevertheless, my colleagues seem pleased that they think I am one.

I can tell you about my social life, which has got suddenly more active now I have less time to have one, thanks to commuting to Farnborough rather than downstairs. Last Saturday Helen and Huw got hitched, and it was lovely: small, simple, held in a pub and with good good friends from Atlantic College to catch up and dance with.

Kathryn and Katherine held court in the bar, putting aside spelling differences in the interests of quaffing champagne.

And Owen, best man (despite not being allowed to hold the rings ;o). I failed miserably to picture the bride and groom.

Saturday also saw the purchase of number 27's christmas tree, with no height restrictions being put on by the boss (Danny), and only minimal disruptions made by the cat. She at least finds tinsel attractive.

The lights always make me smile. One of the many (?) benefits of living surrounded by multi-storey council estates is that there are plenty of tacky lights, which I can enjoy without ever incurring my flatmates wrath for bringing them home. December has to be unreal somehow.

ant terrorism

2007-11-28T14:57:00.000Z

I just found that I had mis-typed some field notes, writing 'ant-terrorism' rather than 'anti-terrorism' in respect of a certain legislation. Initially only slightly amusing, it then points to the problems of (mis) using a concept like 'terrorism'. Being terrorised by ants is a distinct possibility; I've had it in forests, and spent long hours chasing ants out of sugar under Russian sun - to reduce their destructive powers over our tea. If terrorism can be applied to ants, marginally flippantly, what else can it be applied to? and how then does it have any analytic power? This is not, I think, simply an issue of pedantry (though feel free to disagree); the concept of terrorism holds destructive power over millions of people, if it is used by people who don't like them. Or indeed by ants.

days of risk, hope, children and cats

2007-11-26T18:24:00.001Z

Fifty-one kids at a wedding sounded like a recipe for panic, but in fact it went remarkably smoothly (thanks in no small part to the presence of ten nannies and two entertainers). I was sat next to Per at Colin and Stefanie's wedding, and he spent some of the meal explaining why having a child was just so fantastic. 'It's falling in love all over again. Something bigger than you, and sharing that with someone you love already'. The next morning the little one bit Per's nose, which reminded me of Peggie's playful (and irritating) attacks on my neck. And, while the comparison diminishes Per's bundle of love in a way I certainly don't intend, it pointed to the combination of respect and joy and responsibility and frustration that I feel towards my little furry colleague. As did a sight that (sorry Per) convinced me more than any words - the bright, bright light in the smiling eyes of a baby in the bus. Like a cat, and like someone else said to me yesterday: a chance to see the world through excited, exploring eyes, when maybe ours have been jaded.

Just a cat. But my cat. Taking me...?

I know Colin, the groom, as a mine of stories; indeed a comment he made years ago stays with me, that we (should?) do things 'to have stories to tell'. Certainly his wedding speech was a story that he tells himself (and us) about himself - and his wife - but particularly his own fear of taking the risk to hope, and how meeting his now-wife had made him take that risk. The value of risk and seeking the impossible. It made for a good toast.

Knowing only the groom and one other at a wedding was strange but not unlike a research visit: you arrive, you make links, you make conversations, you tell stories, you form a bond. And then you leave... and wonder what you have left behind. What thread of my life will cross again with that group of Cambridge graduates, people who for the most part came there after me (one as another CUSU Green Officer, which made me laugh. Small world)? Does it matter? Certainly the weekend was a tying up of threads, from a place (Cambridge) I have for the most part avoided going back to, and from a time that I have few remaining connections.

But the threads also lead into the future, as we were discussing Iraq and the (lack of) options for chto delaet - what is to be done? Most of my new friends were members of CASI, the Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq, which, with the invasion, has blown to the winds, meeting around dinner (and wedding) tables only. I had questions for them, but they did for me; perhaps there is a legacy in what can be taken forward? These connections, put to good, informative use, in the next place I go? Amusingly the US Embassy in Iraq has contacted CASI's successor, IraqAnalysis, several times, asking that they update their useful statistics. This caused some amusement, and bemusement; how is it that a random bunch of students in Cambridge have better data than those in authority in the country in question? In practice it's perhaps not all that suprising, but it made for a good story.

This is all rather random, I fear. I'm mid a worryingly complicated task of pulling together a report on education programming in conflict contexts, have a deadline of Monday and would like a weekend, and my brain hurts. Still, there's an ode to Peggie in here, since without her purring, demands for attention and distractions as she attacks the window blind, I would be losing the plot even more than I am now. I'd like to think she was tax-deductable, but I suspect even my amazing Wadhurst accountant can't wangle that one.

'Life remains as full and as interesting as ever'

2007-11-15T19:02:00.001Z

That's the last line of an interview by Tim Newell of Terry Waite, in the Prison Service Journal. It meanders all of the place, but links prisons, hostage taking and the way of the world. Worth a look.

Finding it came out of searching the web for information on Tim Newell. He's the former Governor of HMP Grendon, a therapeutic community prison, mentioned by many of the men I interviewed in HMP Shepton Mallet, for the years of one-on-one and group therapy they went through there. And Tim helped get AVP into Shepton Mallet. So there's that link.

And Terry Waite grew up in Styal, which also has a prison, for women, and is very close to where I grew up - it has the most beautiful autumn woods, and an excellent museum of cotton milling. And he was incarcerated in Lebabon, which is where I should have been a month ago, but wasn't. Too dangerous, apparently.

All this because I am currently writing the AVP-in-prison evaluation. But I'm also noticing how often my time in HMP SM comes back to me; comments or theories that the men expounded, and how they relate to my, or friends' personal lifes, or attempts to change the world. I wonder whether it is because I was researching something I was really fascinated by (which doesn't happen that often)? Or whether it's because it's a strange, unreal space, a time-out-of-time for all but those who live and work there. The rest of us happily ignore the existence of prisons and their inmates, and I think I was shocked into awareness of how much what the men had to say resonated with thoughts of my own.

It's nice to meet strangers

2007-11-08T19:28:00.000Z

I'm still trying to process my week in HMP Shepton Mallet, both professionally (spending all week in the dull task of writing up the interviews) and personally. It was strange, or actually strangely not strange at all, to be talking to 'murderers' and 'sex offenders' about non-violence. I put the labels in quotes because one of the things that the week brought home to me was the importance of separating the act from the actor. Yes, several of the men had killed people. Some of them had, as far as I can tell, messed up big time, because they didn't know how to deal with their emotions, and the behaviour that resulted from them, so they went too far, and by mistake someone died. [Sex offenders are a different kettle of fish for me, but as they are not part of my trajectory of interest, I'm not going there. Violence is enough to get my head round.]

What adds to the strangeness is that life prisoners go through endless courses, in theory voluntary but in practice they can't 'progress' without doing them. So these men have delved to the bottom of their offences, their behaviour, their emotions, their beliefs, if not their souls, multiple times. That leaves them - now - particularly good at talking about the relationships between emotions and behaviour, and with a deep understanding (whether or not they would phrase it in this way) of their own capacity for violence. A far better, more considered and open, understanding than many people I know who would never go near a prison.

They also are good at telling people what they want to hear, because their progress on the prison courses depends on it. Both prisoners and prison officers told me that. Which leaves me in a dilemma - were they telling me what they thought I wanted to know? For the most part I think not (but I would, wouldn't I?), partly because my professional pride demands that I think I would know if/when they are, but also because of the number of times they talked about the value of the Alternatives to Violence Programme (AVP - what I was there to evaluate) because it was voluntary and not scrutinised. But... it does leave a dilemma.

This is not my photo - mobile phones are not allowed inside and I didn't think attempting to take photos was a good idea. I did walk through this, the exercise yard, on my way to meet the Governor. I also passed the hanging shed; American servicemen were executed at Shepton during the war. (I've just noticed that the site is given the grand title of 'the resource for the history of capital punishment in the UK, and stop press! New for November 2007: sodomy in 18th Holland. Joy.)

Anyway, I had a lovely time. One of the men said to me, of the AVP facilitators, that it was good to have people in from outside, because 'it's nice to meet strangers'. I felt the same about them. I have rarely had such an enjoyable research trip, which is largely down to their openness and the friendly and supportive prison staff. The relationship between the two is an entirely different subject, and I was in the privileged position of being somewhere between the two, but not actually either. (Which reminds me of my strange position as a female, but a foreigner, in both Aceh and southern Russia - a female, but with the freedom of movement often allocated mainly to males.)

All this came back into the frame last night as Jenette and I watched The Investigation, the Rwandan play about the Holocaust at the Young Vic. It's a 'docu-play', written from transcripts of a trial of Nazi prison guards. The twist is that it is performed by a Rwandan theatre company. (And largely in French, with surtitles on screens, which is interestingly not as disruptive as I thought it might be. And it meant I learnt that temoin means witness, and that in French the defendant is the accusé. Is that an important distinction, accused rather than defending?).

Was it good? I think it probably was. I liked they way they adjusted their clothes after each scene, to show they switched characters. I liked the way that was essentially no plot, but still held me. I liked the gentle beginning, and the mirrored ending, which was harsh for the lack of response to the final message: that these men, the accused, were products of our society, and that essentially they were no different from the men, women and children they helped to kill. And that all along the railway line, through the typing pools and telegraphers, they were all 'guilty' as much as the accused. They, we - and I don't just mean Rwandans - were all part of the human machine that made it possible for these things to happen. Because we're all human, we all have that same capacity for violence.

But afterwards we asked ourselves, why do we go and see these things? I've been reading about the Holocaust for more than half my life, and spent a good chunk of my PhD reading about how survivors survive. I am choosing to work increasingly in work related to violence/conflict, and in hindsight feel my last 15 years have been taking me closer and closer to this core, this fascination with why and how people kill (and how to stop it happening). Am I addicted to this horrible capacity we have (despite the fact that I can't watch horror films)? I wondered whether I went because I was looking for another angle, another way to tell the story, though I didn't really get one.

It sort of reminded me of a documentary about PBI in Guatemala that I watched with potential PBI volunteers over the weekend. I was getting a bit bored; it was essentially like my PBI team, the hard bits without the fun bits, with the similarly inspiring and threatened human rights defenders they worked with. But hearing how people around me had been both moved and shocked by the film, I realised I was getting a bit blasé, that this is far from normal.

Perhaps, at least in my time off, I need a different look at the world, to remember that things like The Investigation are not normal. Danny told me to go and watch Hairspray. Instead tomorrow I'm going to see The Lady of Burma, a play about Aung San Suu Kyi!

bye bye bike

2007-11-08T09:30:00.000Z

Finally, after months of being vaguely surprised to find my bike still where I left it in Hackney, Peckham and Walworth, it has been stolen from outside the Young Vic, on the sociable Cut, last night sometime between the hours of 7pm and 10.30. Bike lock neatly cut. It wasn't even an attractive or particularly good bike, and the garish blue grips I had just put on the handles made it even more unattractive.

Now I wonder how it is doing out there on its own in this wide world.

And then I spent half an hour registering it with Walworth police, only to find this morning that my insurance doesn't cover it. And I had handled the lock too much for it to be any good for catching my bike's new owner. ('They don't wear gloves, they're not that intellegent. It's amazing how un-forensically aware people are'. That'll include me then).

This isn't my bike, but it's sad enough.

Anyway I post this only to point out my discovery of immobilise, a site that allows you to register your property free in a database searched by the police. It's useful if for nothing else than logging those weird numbers you would never keep.

Oh, and get a D lock next time Kathryn.

another week, another world

2007-11-01T14:07:00.000Z

A white clock on the wall says ‘Niceday. By Gilbert’. On the opposite wall a poster declares, ‘CHANGE. A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make that turn’. The seats are comfortable, the walls are well painted, the carpet and door nice, only slightly clashing shades of institutional green. And through the window sun streams between cotton wool clouds, over green fields on the horizon. Once you see past the bars on the window and the barbed wire around thick, thick grey stone walls.

I am locked in to the Offending Behaviour Unit of Shepton Mallett prison. I have my own little room, which is nice: interview room one, thankfully without video cameras or microphones. And I am here interviewing prisoners and officers about the Alternatives to Violence Programme (AVP) workshops that have been run here over the past year. It’s been fun.

Coming down to Shepton Mallett on the train on Monday I felt like I was travelling to another country. (And I even went via Heathrow, to do another interview, but that’s another story). As the train got smaller and the stops more frequent, I felt more and more out of my comfort zone. The 15.21 from Bath to Castle Cary was a two carriage chugger, full to bursting with archetypes of Britishness. Opposite a morose teenager with a pink hairband lay her head on the table, next to a late twenties First Great Western employee, sleeping off his early shift. Across from me two older men in white nylon shirts with camera bags (digital, mind) talked about raking up leaves from the garden, and zipped away their train spotting guide in their little rucksacks with their thermos flasks. In the next set of seats a boy of maybe fifteen, who would have the power to scare until he opened his mouth, chirped gleefully to Grandad about passing stations. Only it came out ‘Lanlad’, and the relative in question sat across the aisle and studiously ignored his disabled grandson, as did everyone else in the carriage. My neighbour was a couiffured fifty-something lady, who asked to get out of her seat a stop early to stretch her legs. Down the way an enthusiastic posh mother gave her daughter Evie endless attention, compared hairstyles, and didn’t notice her used tissue dangling from her fleece pocket. (Where would Britain be without fleeces?). And when the doors occasionally opened the piercing screams of a baby in a pink pushchair shattered the air, like cats being butchered. I felt out of place, the foreign Londoner.

Oddly, I felt more comfortable in the prison later that evening. I met my host, Virginia, in the visitor Portacabin, having shown my passport to the guards (see, I said it was another country), and confirmed that I didn’t have a mobile phone on me (a rigmarole I have since repeated often). A string of Quaker ladies burst into the cabin, carrying biscuits in Coop bags and small flower arrangements and large smiles. Together we trooped across the grounds between the high stone walls and up several flights of stairs to the chaplaincy. Oh, I missed the two locked gates we passed through to get there. We were joined by perhaps 12 men, let out of their cells at 6pm, and now on freeflow. After more smiles and introductions we held a short meeting for worship, as the Quakers do them: sitting together in calm reflective silence.

After worship and discussion (which rather unexpectedly revolved around me and PBI in Indonesia, with me naively trying to avoid saying the word murder, a word common to this place as most of my interviewees are in for it), we had tea and biscuits, and chatted about how far £80 could go on an accompanied release to Bristol.

My two trips to new worlds are the result of six months' work developing two research projects; it’s just ironic that they came to fruition at the same time.

thoughts from Darwin

2007-10-30T14:11:00.000Z

I wrote this a week ago, and have been avoiding posting it not least from fear of incurring the wrath of expats in Dili. I was also concerned about how critical I might be being, feeling unable to be objective from so close. Now ‘safe’ in London I think I still believe what I wrote, so here goes. And apologies to friends and colleagues in Dili if I offend.

Airports are not wildly exciting places to spend large chunks of my time. In Darwin I am writing up interview notes, which compound the boredom, this being one of the dullest tasks of research.

But in the skies over Timor Leste I found an embryonic answer to a question that has been niggling me. You see, I have been making these sweeping and critical comments about the mass UN white car presence, but also feeling uncomfortable that I don’t have ideas about what might be the alternative. (An important rule of consensus decision making: you can’t block unless you have an alternative proposal). That is not to say that I am an expert in peacekeeping missions, far from it, but it’s only right to make an attempt at alternatives if you’re moaning about the status quo.

So looking down on those spectacular, and bone dry, mountains, I thought about the inappropriateness of sending heavily armed soldiers into troublesome IDP camps. What message is that going to send? That conflict is ‘resolved’ by weapons, fear, threat, and that the foreigners are here to tell us to not do what we are doing. I thought back to Aceh, where the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) – for all its overpaid and underdressed flaws – seems to have been welcomed by the Acehnese, GAM (the rebels) and the Indonesian Government all together. The AMM was unarmed. It consisted largely of retired military (so both fighting sides respected them) but it also included human rights monitors. It had offices in 11 parts of Aceh, and met regularly with GAM and the government together. It had some big white cars, but mostly they were driven by Acehnese, and they used Acehnese translators.

Most importantly, they communicated with everyone. They went to where there were problems, talked to everyone involved, took the messages back, negotiated solutions, moved things forward. I remember being in a very backwater East Aceh village in December 2005, where the men had only recently stopped sleeping at sea for fear of the military, and finding that we were the second set of white people there: an AMM man had been before.

So what if, instead of driving around in all these stone-able big cars, many more of us UN people got out of our cars and talked to the people in the camps, regularly? What if we went through one family at a time, worked through what there needs were? What if we employed them and the local community to rebuild their houses, put the roofs back on? What if we actually lived in those communities, provided a protective presence while people were moving back? And what if we weren’t paid per diems, and took local taxis whenever possible? Is this pie in the sky naivety? (Yes, I know working through one family at a time would take a long time, but hey, it’s been a long time since they arrived).

The wants – needs – fears iceberg is a standard conflict resolution tool, to look beneath what people are demanding to what their needs are, and in some cases looking at the commonalities. I wonder whether responses to people in the camps (particularly controversial places like Metinaro) are responding to the expressed wants (schools, food) with what are standard needs (schools, food), while also recognising (but not being able to do anything about) other expressed wants (government compensation). Sticking to mandate is not going to get to the bottom of needs.

What is a peacekeeping mission? Is UNMIT a peacekeeping mission? Perhaps it is ‘keeping’ the ‘peace’ – as in, keeping the rock-throwing disenfranchised status quo. Is it ‘peacechanging’?

I feel nervous seeing soldiers in carrying guns through the street, and I haven’t thrown a single rock.

in Dili in pictures

2007-10-24T14:51:00.000Z

So this is what I went there to research, 'Child Friendly Spaces'. These kids really were sat around like this drawing a traditional Timorese house when I arrived in Lahane to attempt to talk to them.

And when I wasn't talking about Child Friendly Spaces, I spent happy times with Sophie, my friend from Aceh. Here we are beneath the Christ Statue that looks over Dili, and out towards Jakarta.

And now I'm home, and cold (from 35 to 8 degrees is a bit of a jump!), and a bit tired, but glad of the trip.

Aguswandi in London

2007-10-24T13:46:00.000Z

Aguswandi, Acehnese human rights activist, friend of PBI and now chair of the Aceh People's Party (one of the first local political parties in Indonesia) will be speaking at Chatham House on Wednesday 31 October 2007 3pm - 5pm. He's going to talk about 'Post-Conflict Dynamic and Challenges ' at their Indonesia Forum. (And for those not in London, Chatham House is a rather august institution, so you've done pretty well to be asked to speak there).

Aguswandi founded SMUR (Solidaritas Mahasiswa Untuk Rakyat) a students' organisation that campaigned for a referendum on Acehnese independence in the early 2000s - a political rather than armed approach. And Aguswandi has been pretty outspoken against conservative Islam, which is something in Aceh. As well as being a nice guy.

Register here.

stoned in Dili

2007-10-22T02:02:00.000Z

On the left the men sitting on the wall outside the IDP camp shout ‘hello missus’. Impressed – that we’re not ‘mister’ this time – we smile and wave back, while Sophie turns the corner slowly to avoid hitting the slightly swaying man standing in the middle of the road. It’s dark, we’ve had a good day at the beach in Maubere, the only people there. Suddenly a clunk, and someone in the back says that we’ve been hit. Thankfully swaying man aimed at the rear-most window, as otherwise he would have hit either the driver or the passenger.

Someone said to me the other day that the level of violence here is not high. True, there are few guns, and the violence is mostly against buildings or cars. Apparently when rocks are thrown they are not directly at people. But there is something wrong when men will throw stones at cars at a whim, and there is essentially impunity: we stopped and took a look at the destroyed window, but of course didn’t go back to remonstrate, no matter how good my companions’ Tetum. The UN security centre was called, and said they would send some people round.

Another man I met pointed out that most independent countries need to wait until their generation of freedom fighters has retired, grown old or died before they reach stability. Indonesia, he suggested, is maybe just reaching that stage now, and she’s been independent for two generations. Timor Leste? Well the violence might be implemented by young disillusioned men living in IDP camps (though not necessarily IDPs themselves) but the political crisis that led to last May’s crisis was political, formed by those who have fought for Timor Leste’s independence for thirty years, and now continue to fight each other.

Sophie, her friends and I had spent the afternoon outside Dili, passing through Liquica with its impressive Portuguese buildings, many of them burnt out, and Maubere’s fort, two canons pointing aimlessly out to sea. In Maubere we stopped to shop at the stalls by the fort, where enterprising women sell impressive woven crafts: bags, baskets, hanging decorations, purses. A little purse takes two days’ labour, and costs $1. A whale accompanied us along the coast, blowing up air and finally offering her tail once we were standing bare-foot on the beach. A sea eagle watched us leave, and another whale saw us on our way. I felt so damn lucky.

Some figures I have gathered over the last few days:
- Timor Leste has received $3.6 billion in aid since 1999.
- Recent research on peacekeeping missions shows that only 4% to 9% of the budget is spent in-country, and this includes all in-country staff, procurement, rental fees, spending by expatriates. The rest goes on out-of-country wages, per diems, and procurement.
- Let’s say Timor Leste has a population of one million (it’s probably less). If that aid had all gone equally to the population, they would have got $3,600 each.
- The average Timorese earns 55 cents a day.
- So it would take 6545 days to earn $3,600. Or nearly 18 years.
- 95% of the country’s budget comes from oil revenues, and 90% of the GDP. As far as I can tell, Timor Leste doesn’t actually dig for the oil itself; this is what it earns from other people doing so on its underwater territory.
- There’s a $1 billion oil fund sitting there waiting for Timor Leste to use it, along with the accumulating interest, and they haven’t touched it. Nor has the government managed to spend the whole budget in recent years.

Money, it seems, is not the problem.
That said, buying little purses in Maubere, I was shocked that two days' labour brings only $1 (and terrified by the look of the woman I bought them from; her eyes and pursed lips seemed to say that she had seen more than I could imagine, and had no respect for those of us who gallavant around on a Sunday. She would humour us for our $1s). Money might not be the national problem but there is precious little of it floating around outside Dili.

Ironically, before we were stoned, my friends had been discussing the recent reduction in stonings. One reason might be that the pavements, neglected since the Indonesian era, had been dug up ready for replacement, with the result that there were masses of stones around, ripe for throwing at passing UN cars. The pavement rehabilitation has now commenced, in attractive red, black and yellow (colours of the Timor Leste flag), hence there are fewer stones (and better pavements).

These kinds of signs of peace and development seem to me to be the most significant. Parents are apparently now bringing their children with them to sell phone cards in the street; previously they felt it was too dangerous to do so. (Don't say anything about the children being in school). The streetlights, also not working since the Indonesians left, have started to be fixed. Never mind 'child friendly spaces' providing normality; this is the real thing.

I've heard there are t-shirts available, with the slogan 'I got stoned in Dili'. You won't be seeing me in one. I'm heading home tomorrow, and will be sad to say goodbye to this beautiful, traumatised country. Leaving behind my feeling of compromise, discomfort with my own existence here, will be less difficult. I hope I retain the memory of them though, so that although my international hit-and-run research trips might reduce drastically in the coming months, what I learn from them stays with me for far longer.

Long enough to get to work on why IDPs thrown stones, militias devastate countries when colonising governments leave, other governments use the language (or fear) of terrorism to explain wandering around carrying guns when looking for those who throw stones, and whether the presence of internationals provides protection or anything else.

Have I 'do[ne] no harm'? I don't know.

potatoes!

2007-10-22T01:49:00.001Z

It's official, the UN International Year of the Potato has begun. To celebrate, I was invited to a meal of potato soup and cheesy potatoes, which is even more bizarre in Dili than it might be in London. Very tasty, good company, and I discovered that there are 7500 types of potato in the world.

The potato year follows the 2004 UN International Year of Rice, celebrating another food staple and its contribution to 'food security'. And my friends here are gearing up for UN Day, on Wednesday. Good to have things to celebrate, ey?

lines under pasts, or not?

2007-10-19T02:27:00.000Z

A meeting this morning started with a question about 'a dog pissing on a tree', which I didn't quite understand until we worked out my colleague had read my last blog post. As, I see from the comments, have a lot of other people in Dili, and however careful I might be, I am going to attract reactions. Ho hum. I wonder if that is a reflection of the nature of the ex-pat community in Timor Leste? I was never aware of that so much in Aceh.

I have been surprised, appreciated, how easy it has been to make the contacts I have needed here, and to meet foreigners. Because, unfortunately, it is mostly foreigners I need to talk to - I'm trying to work out how international organisations decide to do Child Friendly Spaces and the like. I have been lucky enough to speak with two local organisations, but they too were set up by Malae. My view is of course limited (and I feel myself being defensive as I write this). I joked yesterday over dinner (again, with people I have met in the hotel, in a way I have never connected with other hotel guests in any other country), that this ease of connection is because of the closeness to Australia. I think actually it's nothing of the sort, but I don't really understand why it is.

There is a very large statue of Christ on the headland at the east end of Dili, placed there by the Indonesian government and blessed by the pope. It stands 27m tall, to represent Timor Timur as the 27th province of Indonesia (which mirrors the symbolism of Papua's old name, Irian Jaya. I forget the exact translation but it stands for something like 'Great Indonesia's defeat of the Netherlands). It's a beautiful spot, and in the evenings it is flooded with ex pats running along the road; I saw hardly any Timorese. They (we) come in huge white cars at dusk, exercise, drive back. The 'occupation' of this part of the land and evening by so many foreigners was weird, disturbing, and perhaps aptly symbolic.

I have struggled, struggle today also, with this mass of internationals here, myself included. I oscilate between wondering whether another crisis isn't needed to make us all go away and let Timor Leste get back on its feet alone (although please, please don't take this wrong - I would never wish more violence on this desperately attacked country). In her book about education in Timor Leste, Susan Nicolai shows how in the immmediate aftermath of the 1999 consultation, fleeing and descimation by militias, attempts were made in West Timor to education the IDPs in the camps. While integration into schools was the preferred option, this was thought not to be possible; they would be flooded. But when the UN was evacuated, the pupils integrated, because there was no (internationally facilitated) choice.

Yet I have also heard Timorese staff talk of their fears of entering IDP camps, and the protective presence provided by internationals. This is exactly the way that PBI operates - using internationals as 'human bodyguards' to allow human rights activists to do their work. (The major difference being that PBI volunteers are non-interventionist, in the sense that we accompany rather than do). It's an ethical use of privilege, and works because all in the situation know that they don't want adverse international attention. But how long is this protection role needed, and does it ever become counter-productive? Certainly during my last visit to Aceh in March I felt that the Acehnese had begun to get sick of all the bule.

The last night I had dinner with an Australian and a Malaysian who had long been part of the Timorese solidarity movement. One in particular had been the only international observer of the Dili Massacre trials in the early 1990s, and he amused us (now) with his description of the convolluted journey to get into the country. Notably both men are now here as advisors to Ministers. Wishing no disrespect to the men concerned, both of whom seemed very proficient and professional, it did make me wonder about reconstructing a country using the advice those who were friends during the independence struggle.

But I think also to post-Soviet Russia, whose 'transition' disasters I know about only through hearsay (some of it, most of it? politically slanted). There, as far as I know, international financial institutions advised on what to do, and it was a disaster. The rural Russia I knew 1999-2000 was not a booming place, and the positive memories of the Soviet Union were far from just nostalgia.

It all begs the question of how do people (re)build a new country?

The ICG's reports on Timor Leste are, as ever, incredibly detailed and appear useful. (I remember our team in Aceh being pleased with ourselves when we knew a little bit more than ICG! And we lived there, they didn't). They show that internationals are one of many players in this mess, and indeed ICG calls for the withdrawal of very very senior figures from the political process. Which is a tad optimistic.

My discussion over dinner drifted into issues around 'drawing a line under the past', in order to get on with the future. From my time here I will have no idea what the 'ordinary' Timorese think about this. But it did remind me of something Murray Last wrote about Nigeria (which I am sure I have quoted here before) about the 'watchers' - international researchers, journalists, aid workers - insisting on re-examination of the past, 'justice', when many local people just wanted to draw that line, knew a balanced justice was impossible, and wanted to get on with the future. The watchers kept bothering them with the past.

Here, I have no idea, other than that layer upon layer upon layer of violent conflict, with those cats pissing on territory, and with each other, mean that nothing is remotely simple (the anthropologists' dream: it's more complicated than that) and I have no envy whatsoever of the country's leaders trying to work out how to take the country forward. I wish them luck.

cats, language and territory in East Timor

2007-10-17T02:28:00.000Z

A cat pisses on a model of a traditional Timorese house, outside the offices of IOM. Behind me a British woman is asking a local staff member to pick up croissants for tomorrow morning’s meeting from the Tropical Bakery, where I had lunch with the UNESCO representative, and spotted the UNICEF woman I met with yesterday.

I’m in Dili, capital of East Timor, fast learning that ‘complex emergencies’ are almost unbelievable. Most people will know the basic history: East Timor, half an island, was a Portuguese colony until 1975. As they left and independence was declared, Indonesian troops rushed in, and stayed, bloodily, until 1999. At that point the new Indonesia President (elected after the Asia economic crash of 1997 led to the replacement of Suharto with a democracy) surprisingly allowed a ‘consultation’ on independence or autonomy within Indonesia. When 78% of voters chose independence, the Indonesian army, and their militia supporters left, extremely bloodily. Since then the occupying force has been (in theory) requested: the UN. They’re on their fourth mission, each with different names; this one is UNMIT.

What many won’t know is that last year conflict erupted again in East Timor, this time initially over the sacking of 500 soldiers for ‘desertion’, although it erupted into something messier than that: conflicts between people from the east and people from the west. Since then it has gone in all sorts of directions, most recently political (with recent elections changing the party in power), but also encompassing gang warfare. At the height of the crisis in May last year there were about 70,000 people in IDP camps in Dili, and 80,000 ran from Dili to the districts. This of a total population of Dili of about 180,000… kind of serious then, and not just about some soldiers’ jobs.

Understanding all this is new and exciting and complicated when some of my interviewees say that they don’t know who’s killing who or why. It is part of why I love research: I need to know this context in order to understand the significance or otherwise of my research topic: ‘child friendly spaces’ for children. So I get to call people up, ask to talk to them and pick their brains to get to the bottom of all this.

What is not exciting at all, but guilt-enducing and discomforting, is being a British consultant, flown in for ten days to spend my DSA (daily subsistence allowance, although subsistence is hardly the word when my DSA is twice a policeman’s monthly salary) at ex-pat hang outs, and stay in a hotel where one night would have paid a university student’s fees for a year (albeit in 2000). And my hotel is $25 dollars a night. This is a country in which maybe 70% of housing was razed in 1999, and certainly 95% of schools were destroyed. It’s also amazing – the schools were rehabilitated by 2002.

And that, my friends, is where the UN came in. They ran the country from 1999 to 2002, 10,000 of them. They still have a big role in running the country, and perhaps an even bigger role in using the country’s fuel: every second car is a huge white UN vehicle. Allegedly there is one to every 2.5 UN staff, but others have said to me that there are more than that. I have been walking between offices and am yet to see another foreigner walking the streets. Their – our, sorry, I forget I am here as UNESCO – presence allows for a large number of fancy eateries, fancy at least in comparison to Aceh. I walked into a Padang restaurant for lunch yesterday; Padang is a town in Indonesia rightly famous for its food. I was the only white person in there, greeted with strange looks and, I fancied, some relief when I ordered in bahasa Indonesia.

Ah, Aceh. Flying in the comparison was quick: I almost gasped seeing how easy it would be for a tsunami to wipe out Dili, flat and as close to the mountains as it is. The mountains too are similar, as is the heat, the frangipani flowers, the goats on the street, the gecko in my room, the beauty of the place. But it is not Aceh: no hijab as this is Christian territory, so my elbows are visible. I watched a puppy chase a piglet chase a little pig yesterday; no pigs in Aceh. (Oh, we’ve just had mati lampu – electricity cut; not that far from Aceh after all). The pavements are far, far better (Indonesia pavements are slabs and holes over drains; more hole than slab), perhaps a Portuguese legacy?

And languages here are also a legacy. East Timor has multiple ethnic groups, but many of them speak Tetum (I’d like to say 60% but I might be making that up). Tetum is not – or was not – a written language. Thereafter it is split by age. The Portuguese taught some people, an elite, their language, and that elite included the people who then fought for independence, from in or out of the country. From 1975 the Indonesians did a far better job of mass literacy, with the majority of adults now speaking bahasa. But come independence, despite only 5% speaking Portuguese, it was again, with Tetum, made an official language. Indonesian was out for understandable emotive reasons, English not great because it would have meant increasing the reliance on Australia. So while in fact masses of people (80%? again, I’m making it up more or less) speak bahasa, it is not a language of teaching, and instead the Portuguese government sent loads of teachers to teach teachers to speak Portuguese. Perhaps not the highest priority in a country with very very few university graduates, far from enough ‘teachers’ yet alone teachers who were qualified. And did I mention that 95% of the schools were destroyed? But the children are learning Portuguese, unlike their parents. It’s another sign of ownership being stamped on the poor little country by very large human cats pissing on ‘their’ territory.

Anyway, the bahasa makes my life easier, since my Portuguese stretches to obrigada and my Tetum is non-existent. It gets me taxis and lunch, and allowed me to visit four child-friendly spaces yesterday with a local staff member who didn’t speak much English (his Tetum and Portuguese – and bahasa – of course being excellent). There are few countries I have been to where moving around in the town is so relatively simple: a combination of language and there being 8000 taxis in the capital of a country with a population of less than a million. A journey is a dollar; can they make enough to reach the policeman's salary, I wonder?

sun in the east-east

2007-10-11T21:19:00.001Z

It's autumn in Wadhurst. I think we are far enough from (non) summer for me to start to appreciate it.

However, the UN thinks East Timor is safer than Lebanon, so I am leaving my cat for 10 days and off to have the summer we didn't have. And to interview lots of people about Safe Spaces for Children. East Timor is about as sensible a name as Windermere Lake: Timor it means 'east'. In Indonesian its name is Timor Timur, East East. Does that make more sense than West Timor (Timor Barat), West East, that is still part of Indonesia? Either way, they are far enough south to see the sun.

language and terror /defense

2007-10-11T17:04:00.000Z

Clearly the theme of my month. Colin sent me an article entitled Sex and Death in the World of Defense Intellectuals, written by Carol Cohn and published in 1987. I have no idea how valid her data are twenty years on, but she has makes fascinating points.

She spent a year essentially as a participant obersver of nuclear strategic analysts in the US, learning their language: surgically clean strikes, clean bombs and one bomb called the Peacekeeper. She talks of this language as having 'enormous destructive power, but without emotional fallout'. But she takes it further, examining the domesticated language of nuclear bombs (patting the missile, shopping lists, cooker cutter attacks), and the male sexual connatations: vertical erectile launchers and deep penetration. Notably human casualities are part of 'surgically clean strikes'; it is only weapons themselves that can be 'killed'.

But most interesting is what the language does. She says, candidly, that 'talking about nuclear weapons is fun' - the language is snappy, sexy. And it only allows you to ask certain kinds of questions; and once fluent in this technostrategic language, it becomes very difficult to ask other kinds of questions in other languages, and indeed to get out. Cohen did get out, wrote this article, and does not suggest that we should not learn this language; indeed she recognises that she couldn't have understood what she does without doing so. But she highlights that 'learning the language is a transformative, rather than additive, process.' I definitely became a different version of me speaking Indonesia, or Meskhetian Turkish, and see the same process in speaking academicese, or educationalese. Not that surprising, but a little scary, when the language is defensese. Or terrorese.

One of the most disturbing things for me is her recognition that there is no question of 'recognising competing but legitimate needs' because essentially the game is about showing who has the bigger stick. And this is part of why it is impossible to introduce the reality of millions of people potentially dying: because that is not what they are talking about. They are talking about hypothetical situations involving a show-down between weapons. They're assessing the USSR's nuclear weapons stock, not their nuclear intentions. People, literally, don't come into the equation.

And the closest Cohen could get to the word 'peace' in this language was 'strategic stablity' (though, what the hell does 'peace' mean anyway?).

Then on Saturday I needed newspaper to wrap some cups, so Nessie gave me pages from the Guardian from 18 December 2006, which were mostly excerpts from Schotts Almanac 2007. It includes a section on 'The Language of Detention & Interrogation', with the terms of interrogation and and their translation into our language. For your delectation, they include:

- Sleep Adjustment: manipulating and repeatedly interrupting the sleep of prisoners, while theoretically allowing them adequate overall hours of sleep. In 'Gitmo', moving detainees from cell to cell every few hours to disrupt their sleep was known as the frequent flyer programme.

- Water-boarding: strapping prisoners to an inclined board and made to feel they will drown, either by submerging them in water or by wrapping their faces in plastic and pouring water over them.

- Cold cell: keeping prisoners naked in 50 degree F cells and dousing them in water.

Delightful. But notable for exactly the same technique that Cohen noted among nuclear strategic analysts 20 years ago: the use of innocuous, perhaps 'humane', language for inhumane treatment. But a major difference is that this latter language is not talking about a hypothetical scenario, or about large pieces of (destructive) metal. It's what they do, to other human beings.

Meg Pickard, weirdly, and yet more anthropology

2007-10-02T21:29:00.002Z

I had another conversation with Owen recently in which he criticised blogs as being not very glorified and rather dull diaries. He was kind enough to tell me I was very good putting up with all this, at which I said that it was probably nothing like what Sahra, Paul and Christian have put up from me over the past five years and more, lambasting academic anthropology.

I probably need to be more careful, as the dialogue with Hugh Guterson below illustrates that I have no idea who is reading and who I might offend. But my response to people like Owen (and myself in my doubting moments) is that sometimes I write about things that other people don't know about. (If you want to read it, you have to come to this page. It's not Facebook, shoving 'X is nursing a hangover' at me if ever I log on. If you don't want to read, don't come.)

So this week I am telling you lots of things, largely because the place I would have liked to be telling you about - Lebanon - has been closed to me by the UNESCO office there, who decided that it was too dangerous for me, a UNESCO IIEP consultant, to go and do a field trip for a week. (There is logic there; they don't want me killed.). Hence I am home with few plans and too many hours on the phone to Beirut (well, I have to do the interviews somehow...)

But the conversation with Owen reminded me I have run out of good blogs to follow. Ragnfrid stopped adding to hers several months ago, and I miss it. Simon stopped when he gave up the struggle with his independent anthropology consultancy and went to Ireland to work for Intel and have babies. Karen is now in Australia rather than Indonesia, so has gone a bit quiet.

So it was nice to find Meg today, rather randomly. She's a Londoner, and she has encapsulated all those niggles about Facebook rather well. I found her because she had made magnets out of Moo cards.. and Moo cards seemed to me a bargin for 100 cards with any photo on the back, 6 lines of writing on the front for £10. Anyway, Meg seems to have intellegent opinions, can draw good diagrams, but is also light... oh oh oh. She works for Guardian Unlimited and trained as a social anthropologist!

I think I should shut up now.

oh my %^*&%$()"&. Meg's birthday is 12 March.
This is too weird.

Any other good blogs, please? (anthropology optional, honest).

happy birthday Gandhi

2007-10-02T13:27:00.000Z

For some reason the United Nations, on India's recommendation, thought it necessary to instigate an International Day of Nonviolence, today, on Mahatma's birth day. Strange only because there is already a (United Nations) International Day of Peace, less than two weeks ago, on 21 September. Oh well, good to get the peace in while we can, since come November we'll have those red poppies all over the place and the traditional little white poppy protest to match.

I guess it's topical to be celebrating nonviolence. I had a mass-email today asking, 'Have you heard about the crisis in Burma?' Um, yes. Even without reading the news I would have been hard pressed to miss it. I have to admit to a little scepticism, in that the world has suddenly noticed a brutal dictatorship that has kept Burma in a world of its poverty-stricken own for years (and an elected leader under house arrest), but only when a mass of people do something outrageously nonviolent do most of us sit up and notice. It's a reaction I find both frustrating and bloody brilliant. A nice reminder that nonviolence can stand up to violence and achieve results (since everyone knowing about Burma is a very significant result indeed).

I'm sure Gandhi would have been very impressed.

pledge non-participation in 'counter-insurgency'

2007-10-01T18:07:00.001Z

A recent email from an anthropologists' list encourages us to sign up to this petition from the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, pledging not to 'not to undertake research or other activities in support of counter-insurgency work in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror,” and we appeal to colleagues everywhere to make the same commitment'.

It's an American petition, but the email I recieved made the connection with the recent who-ha (how do you spell that?) over the FCO and ESRC's call for research proposals on 'Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalisation'. That £2.5 million proposal call, 'was forced back to the drawing board in the light of scholars’ protesting “that it was tantamount to asking researchers to act as spies for British intelligence, in countries identified by MI5's anti terror unit.” (THES, 20 July 2007)' (It apparently later re-emerged, not looking very different).

This wouldn't be the first time a government department has been involved in requesting not very good research. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. What disturbs me slightly about this call for support for the Concerned Anthropologists (apart from their name, which suggests a) that the rest of us are not concerned and b) that they have blue rinses and write letters to the Times) is the language they use: which is the same as that of the 'enemy' - in their case, the Fed.

A famous rallying cry of the anthropologists is that, 'It's more complicated than that!'. So starting this call for support for the Concerned brigade with a statement that the Iraq war is all about oil is not only using emotive language (in just the same way as proponents of the 'war on terror') but it is also simplifying the matter a little beyond professional norms. (Let's put aside for the moment my belief that the decision to go to war in Iraq was to a large extent about oil. Belief, note.) Surely the best way to understand why the US and UK governments went to war is to research them. And to do that you need access. And, as all anthropologists know, to get access to data you have to participate as well as observe... go native, sort of.

Apparently we should look out for the next issue of Anthropology Today, which 'continues with debates on the ethical implications of covert military involvement in the social sciences and anthropological research in particular, and their potentially devastating consequences for both people and our research activities more generally.' Covert military involvement? Can we not spot the Intel lurking in our midst?

There's some other interesting stuff out there, including Marcus Griffin's site. He's doing research somewhere out there, 'embedded' with the US military, and writing about it for their benefit. Unsurprisingly, pretty soon other anthropologists start complaining. This one is a security website, which sort of puts the other side from the Concerned Anthropologists.

Where am I going with all this?

potential pbi-ers debate the meanings of 'violence'

To be honest I'm not entirely sure, other than a slightly self-defensive rant. Though I am trying to get to someplace else, where I will be in a better position to deal with the issue of 'people killing people' more objectively.

One place I am trying to take myself is non-partisanship. I spent some of the weekend in Seer Green, about an hour out of London, helping out with the latest PBI orientation weekend. It's a scarily packed 42 hours, in which we try to tell participants 'everything you ever wanted to know about PBI', in the hope that they will go on to apply, go to the training, and eventually join a project. These sort of events bring me back to the things I find important about PBI and often about life. I was reminded about being non-partisan in Aceh, and how glad I was to not be partisan, because the conflict was complicated, messy, and essentially led to people killed needlessly on and by both sides. Being non-partisan enabled us to talk with everyone (well, apart from the rebels, but that's because they were illegal actors). It enabled us to think about other things without our heads (or at least our words) being fuddled by the rightness or wrongness of one side or the other.

Jump to my recent work for Christian Aid on 'war on terror' policies, and my growing feeling that NGOs and anyone else wanting to counter human rights abuses should avoid the language of 'war on terror' or counter-terrorism altogether. It doesn't describe anything usefully, and messes with our words. Pledging 'non-participation in counter-insurgency' involves recognising the validity of inaccurate language, which is not helpful in countering the attitudes behind it (Someone, argue with me, please!).

Getting involved in these fights over language enables us to avoid what I feel is the real and most frightening issue. People are happy to blow up tube trains. Other people are happy to invade other countries and kill millions of people. What is it about the human soul/upbringing/training that enables any of us to do these things? The members of Jemaah Islamiya training in Mindanao - they have given up normal lives to train to kill people. Why?
What is missing in those lives? What don't we understand here?

We had a discussion in Christian Aid over not feeling sorry for the terrorists. NGOs have moved on from thinking insurgencies are caused by poverty (which is in some ways ironic, given the mass poverty in the Philippines and the Communist movement that in some senses grew out of it. Perhaps it is because (poverty-grown) Communism is no longer the enemy). I'm not yet convinced that many have understood what causes insurgencies of the type the State Department calls terrorist, or, perhaps more what to do to stop tubes being blown up with us in them.

Which is where anthropologists might step in.

I'm working on this non-partisan thing, I really am. (Perhaps I am having a hard time pinning down what the issue is I'm being partisan on?) I'm working on trying to be neither defensive nor offensive. Not an easy task for someone who usually has opinions and is about to sign the Official Secrets Act.

The IMF owes me money (?)

2007-10-01T16:44:00.000Z

This must be one of the weirdest spams I've received. Essentially the IMF wants to give me nearly $3 million. How many governments would like to receive this? The best thing about it is that it gives a link at the end to the bio of managing director of the IMF, because of course that makes it all believable...

We write to enlighten you regarding your long overdue Payment. Your name was found in the Central Computer/Data base among the list of unpaid beneficiaries of next of kin, International lottery. beneficiaries and swift card payment beneficiaries that originated from Africa, Asia and Europe, Your name has been programmed among the list of individuals and companies that has an unpaid fund with the following financial institutions and lottery organizations, HSBC, Barclays Bank, Coca-Cola, Bank of America etc.

Your mail has been configured for the payment of (USD $ 2,700.000.00) TWO MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS. That has been approved already for about a month ago.

In addition we bring to your notice that there are a lot of junks mail flying over the internet and some hoodlum are using this advantage to amass account information of people on internet the for fraudulent purposes, Putting in considering all of the above we have clandestinely encrypt your payment in an ATM visa card with your pin code number. With this your fund is protected and in safe hands .You mandated to send us your full name that will be configured in your credit card along with your encryption / secret pin number. You are also advice to furnish us with your nominated address where the card will be delivered to, including your phone number.

The entire management of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sincerely apologizes for every inconvenience your previous experience must have caused you.

Yours Sincerely,
Mr. Rodrigo de Rato Figaredo
Managing Director, IMF

And in case you want to claim your $2.7 million, you can email the IMF on internationafund003@hotmail.com. I'm sure they will help you out, as long as you send your credit card details.

Harry Potter meets Osama bin Laden

2007-09-23T11:12:00.000Z

I just finished the last of the Harry Potter series, having started them on train rides through Russia. (32 hours of nothing but tea and sausage need filling with something.) It won't spoil any story for you to know that Harry becomes 'Undesirable Number One'.

But as I am doing research into the impact of the 'war on terror', I find myself on the US's Most Wanted Terrorist page, having got there through a link about the Terrorist Enemy. (Can there be a Terrorist Friend?). And there, unsurprisingly, in first place is Usama bin Laden (sic).

I've been enjoying the end of the Potter series because they are easy to read, and take me into a world of mystery, a world where seemingly anything can happen, but where there are still rules and restrictions on what should happen, and even on what is possible. They are escapism, which has been welcome when I am hardly leaving my house. (They are also actually remarkably complicated, and given that it is 7 years since I last took Russian train rides, I have forgotten who a lot of the characters are. Are children better able to retain these details? Are the children who first read the first Potter books still interested in reading the last?)

Reading the US State Department pages though, I see where maybe Rowling got her inspiration. The language of fact is no stranger than the language of fiction; in fact it is easier to believe that Potter is for real than it is to believe in the bin Laden that the US government writes about - how can they take themselves seriously writing like that?!

As you should know by now if you have read this at all frequently, I'm not in favour of people who kill other people; indeed my report on the Philippines will be far more understanding of why the Philippines government is so worried about 'terrorists' than I expected it would be (though I can't necessarily say the same about their methods). But I am also a stickler for objective analysis, and that requires the analyser to use terms that are clear, specific and not loaded with ideology. The US State Department, therefore, gets the same kind of thumbs down as You-Know-How does by Potter and his friends: 'You don't understand'.

selamat hari perdamian dunia!

2007-09-21T08:02:00.000Z

Why do I write it in bahasa? probably only about 2% of you can read Indonesian anyway, and you all get English. Possibly it is because for me Peace Day begins in Indonesia,
and not only because they get there 6 hours before me.

So today is International Day of Peace, and the PBI team in Wamena in the highlands of Papua reported:

"Peace day started with us killing a big lady pig at 630am. Shot it wrong with the arrow and took 30 minutes to die"

Peace is clearly culturally bound - sharing a pig is the most community-building thing that could happen in Papua. What do we do? I'll spend the day in front of my laptop, on the phone a bit, and then go to the theatre. Peaceful, huh?

Happy day of peace. May you find inspiration in something other than porcines.

the summer that wasn't, the decade that was

2007-09-17T18:12:00.000Z

As I walked through Regents Park on Thursday, carrying a frisbee and a conference presentation, I was nearly knocked on the head by a conker. That and the gorgeous sun setting at 7.30pm finished it off. Official. End of summer. The summer that wasn't.

Somehow my allotment has managed to produce a bowl of red things in September, which I attribute more to September than summer. September is such a month devoid of expectation - it's school time, so if it is warm outside it doesn't count. Strangely it is, and strangely I can't fully enjoy it without a niggling feeling of 'Where were you two months ago?'

September has also brought home my age. I have little sympathy with complaints of growing old at 30, and indeed 30 was a great year as I had an excuse for two birthday parties (my first being held on a beach in Aceh where my most significant present was a loaf of bread. Acehnese bread is something I had to force myself to eat at breakfast, so how it was a mark of celebration Yoko has still not fully explained. But that did allow me to celebrate being 30 and a half, last September).

No, it's more that, at 31 and in September, I have realised that a decade ago I graduated from my first degree, and half a decade ago I graduated with my second. Though being Dr Kathryn has not given me the expected airline upgrades, it has, perhaps, brought me to where I think I wanted to get to when I left the golden spires with a BA: working in a little field in development, trying to 'improve the world', as my bag from the Hayward declares. Here I am pottering away writing literature reviews on the impact on the poor of the 'war on terror' for Christian Aid, researching education in emergencies for UNESCO IIEP, meeting the Foreign office for PBI... and occassionally scrumping for applies, and shifting 3 cubic metres of manure.

When my mother was my age she had me, and my brother on the way. I have a cat and possibly a mouse (though I am hoping the former has put paid to that), and an unwelcome flock of moths. When Peggie the first, my father's mother, was my age she was a long way from parenthood (her husband-to-be was only 16 at the time), which is perhaps reassuring. She nearly died in childbirth, which may be a lesson for me, if I reach 40 and find a strange urge to procreate. Don't. Maybe Peggie the second can remind me of that: at least I can shut her in the kitchen without too much guilt. (It could be suggested that my mother did the same:

but clearly I was supervised in making washing liquid pie by my grandfather behind the camera).

These thoughts of families are in part brought about by my procreation by proxy: naming a kitten after my grandmother felt first blasphemous and then warming. Peggie two lies by me as I work, just as Peggie one oversaw my French homework. Peggie is a continuation of my family name in a way that does not leave me with any vestigial feminist concerns over why UK children inherit their fathers' names, except that Peggie is my father's mother. Both Peggies gave/give me unquestioning love, but were/are also a dragon in control in the kitchen.

I joined Jennie and other inspiring women at a full moon dinner recently, where we threw our baggage in the fire and invited in the things we hoped for. I felt a little bit of a fraud, particularly when Jennie invited us to imagine our grandmothers and their grandmothers behind us, supporting us. Peggie one and Gwyn seemed more likely to have looked asconce at us. I did feel a connection though with these other women, grandmothers absent or not, in their throwing out of similar things, asking of similar things. I asked for the strength to let Peggie (two) go places I can't reach (not quite understanding why I was asking it)... which is perhaps what Peggie one, scattered as her ashes are around an Oxford rosebush, would say of my upcoming adventures inLebanon and Timor Leste. Or her son.

Excuse the introspection. I am busy working on five contracts at once, so I have a lot of time with my head and my computer. And, thankfully, Peggie.

on killing

2007-09-04T08:33:00.000Z

At a Turning the Tide workshop a few months ago, we were asked to write ‘our issue’ on a piece of paper, and hang it on a washing line of issues, the things we would like to change. Interesting to have to summarise in a few words what is the thing that drives us. Mine was ‘people kill other people.’ We were then supposed to go on to think about how we are campaigning to change our issue. A little complicated in this case; Alternatives to Violence programme (AVP) workshops are unlikely to take that particular issue off the line any time soon. But I guess I’m attempting to understand what makes my washing line issue possible – why do people kill other people? – because without that understanding nothing can really change it.

‘During the American Civil War, the soldier’s first experience in combat was called, ‘seeing the elephant’. Today the existence of our species and all of life on this planted may depend on us not just seeing but knowing and controlling the beast call war – and the beast exists within each of us. No more important or vital subject for research exists, yet there is that within us that would turn away in disgust. And so the study of war has largely been left to the soldiers. But Clausewitz warned almost two hundred years ago that, ‘it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.’

Thus wrote a soldier, an American, Lt Col Dave Grossman, in his book On Killing, now twenty years old but which I discovered only a month or so ago. Grossman studies not war but killing – how do we do it, what impact does it have on us, the killers? He starts by showing that in WWII the shoot rate was only 15%-20%; that is, over 80% of soldiers didn’t shoot, even when faced with the enemy, surrounded by their comrades, and in mortal danger. By the Vietnam War the shoot rate was up to 80%, but the people who did that shooting were more traumatised than any soldiers who had come before them. Grossman is interested in why. He charts what we do to people to make them shoot, and what shooting (or stabbing, or.. ) does to people as a result.

Taking us through all the factors that cause psychiatric casualities in war, he shows that fear of death is not by any means the greatest. ‘The mud of guilt and horror’ and ‘the weight of exhaustion’ are just two of the things that are probably more significant in destroying the minds of those who are trained, paid and sent to kill for their (our) country. Grossman takes us through the anatomy of a killing: all the things that need to be there to make someone kill (physical distance, emotional distance, group absolution, respected authority); the stages of response in what it feels like to kill (short thrill, long guilt, rationalisation and acceptance) and how society has to engage in this process too (ah! so that’s the purpose of medals and return processions!) otherwise we get left with a dysfunctional, messed up group of former killers (hence the Vietnam Vets).

But for me the most surprising but also consequent ideas are where he tries to explain why we have such a high rate of violence in our societies. Having shown that people have to be trained, well, to kill (the shoot rate went up when soldiers we trained to shoot at silhouettes of human beings, rather than a red and blue target, as they could then go into automatic pilot when they met a real live silhouette of a human being), he shows that what solider training also does is trains them not to shoot. As in, discipline. A trainee even raising a gun at the wrong time is severely disciplined. So soldiers are desensitised to the enemy, but only when it suits the Government.

What is going wrong, he claims, is that popular films, video games and the like are desensitising us to killing, so we are not surprised, horrified, shocked by it – we laugh, pay a fortune to see it, celebrate the artistry. We sit children in front of it for hours. ‘We are reaching that stage of desensitisation at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious please rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.’ And the distinction between the killing-enabling process that occurs in video arcades and that of the military is that in the military, there is a safety catch - the soldier acts only under authority. We haven’t yet found the safety catch in society.

A former professional boxer I met in Hackney a few weeks ago had the same sort of argument – that boxing, instead of causing violence, actually controlled it, because in violence you learn how to do a lot of damage, but also the discipline not to do it.

As of 1994 there were apparently over 200 studies demonstrating the correlation between television and violence (he notes that correlation doesn’t equal cause, but the same was true of cigarettes and cancer). Indeed in 1993 the American Psychological Association’s commission on violence and youth concluded, ‘There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behaviour’.

I don’t know what research has found in the last decade. I’m sure it’s rarely as simple as film/music/game causes killings/violence. I think it’s probably (slightly) more subtle: it causes an acceptance that violence is normal, it desensitises us to the other (the bad guy), and it is a major form of entertainment. This, I’m guessing wildly, is a large part of what makes it possible for ‘New Cross’, ‘Peckham’ and ‘Brixton’ to hate each other, because they are from different post codes, and what makes it normal, entertaining to cause the Other a lot of pain.

Strange to find myself agreeing with an American Lieutenant Colonel.

rosé days

2007-08-27T09:24:00.000Z

Nigel Slater wrote in the Observer this weekend about rosé days, the end of summer time when the tomatoes are ripe and, strangely, rosé wine seems the only thing appropriate. His comments brought home that my tomatoes have been struggling to ripen for months, and sadly, despite the glory of sun for the last few days, we really are coming to the end of summer.

This rustic looking harvest is the last of my apples and the only onions worthy of the name (I have a large collection of 'shallots', which was not what was planned). The runner beans took a battering from the wind last week, as did the squash, which might never forgive us.

Seb, Susanne and I set out yesterday to celebrate the sun with 2 million other people at Notting Hill Carnival. I've been before, but found it a bit overwelming: exhausting to get out of and scarily crowded when you're in. This time though - possibly helped by knowing west London better than before - it was impossible not to grin and move with the colour and the music so bass it affects your heartbeat.

So many people! Utterly organised chaos; constant streams of people going in completely opposite directions. Performers kept up the pretense of summer, bearing nearly all and shining all over the streets. We got caught in a squeeze trying to get out (what is it that passes through a crowd that can't get out? fear? awareness of its own distructive power?) but having bikes to take us home made it smooth.

There's a small bundle of fur at my feet as I type. She's Peggie, the new addition to the Tomlinson-Hunter household, arrived in a small cardboard box on the back of a bike from Hackney on Sunday afernoon (and was remarkably forgiving about the ride). She's amazing. I mean, she does all the things I never dared to hope she would do: on arrival she headed straight for the litter tray and peeed in the right place. She then ate and drank and napped, purred when I tickled her neck, and by the evening she was sleeping on the back of the sofa with her head on my shoulder.

I look on with amusement. She is so small! Sometimes she is amazingly cute, and at others she looks and acts like a fox. She plays with a small soft toy like a kitten. She's mad as a hatter in the evenings, and in the mornings has more energy than Danny and I put together. Come 9am though, she has curled up at my feet. Perfect!

Peggie is named, sort of, after my grandmother, Margaret (Peggie) Tomlinson, who died over six years ago. She was small and lovely too. The kitten's arrival was somewhat impetuous, inspired by Bethan's cat suddenly giving birth when no-one knew she was pregnant. Having been gazumped on a cat earlier in the week ('oh, a man came 20 minutes ago and took the one you wanted...' 'But we agreed I would pick her up at 5.3opm' 'I thought you'd call...') She's one of those spur of the moment decisions I seem to make in times of people coming in and out of my life; other such decisions have included taking Danny as a flatmate and buying this house, so they seem to have worked out alright so far.

So here's to more rosé days, hoping the few days of summer can be stretched and happy and, if needs be, pink.

lords of the logistic

2007-08-20T13:18:00.000Z

for any one who has ever been to Asia...

There's a load more here. I'm sure I saw the fish man in Aceh.
Check out the car chassis; how does that work?!

Survivor

2007-08-18T15:29:00.000Z

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

-Roger McGough

tools for a London without violence?

2007-08-18T12:42:00.000Z

Things come together. This week my co-facilitators told me these are god-incidences - not co-incidences, because they happen for a reason, they are directed by a higher power. I'm not convinced. But I am aware that there are themes flooding my head which need an interlocutor, a guide, an insider. And because I don't have one right now, they are coming here.

I spent most of last week in Hackney, facilitating Alternatives to Violence (AVP) Workshops with young people in youth clubs on the estates: Pedro, Gascoyne, Morningside. For anyone who doesn't know London - and perhaps for those of us who do - Hackney is one of the most deprived areas of the city. Think big social housing estates, high ethnic minority population, high unemployment. A bit like Walworth, where I live, really. It also has a reputation for a high level of violent crime, often 'black-on-black' violence. The myths in my head, and possibly yours, are that this is gang-land area, dangerous. Murder Mile.

'They call it Murder Mile. I call it home.'

AVP is about providing alternatives to violence, ways of looking at and dealing with conflict that allow us to avoid reaching violence - be that physical or verbal violence, anger, or the destruction to ourselves of seething for days. It's about seeing the good in all of us and the potential for change. And in theory it's voluntary: the facilitators are volunteers and the participants are there of their own free will. In theory a group dynamic, trust, openness builds up and people learn from their own and others' experiences.

I can't quite process what happened yet, but it was certainly the hardest, most chaotic workshop I have ever been involved in. Different people each day; half the group told to sit there by the Youth Club manager so that when the Youth Service (the funders) came round they would be impressed (they did and they were); facilitors walking out of each others' sessions, then using that conflict as an example for discussion and resolution and tears (well, guess who that was?!). Anger and more anger.

I was there with two other facilitators: A, middle class black mother from outside London, and B, young black man from south London. We had different styles and didn't always agree, but what I took at the end was that we were free to be ourselves, our different selves, in front of this group of mainly black young men, with the notable exception of one young 'working class' white woman.

White. Black.

Having grown up with two black sisters, having gone out with black and Asian boyfriends, I wonder now why I am reluctant to use these labels. Part of it - I think - is because they are that, labels. But this week showed me how very lived are these labels. And other labels. I knew going into Hackney that the people (white and black) I was working with would literally speak a language that I don't. They did: the language of chisle, hood, blad, bro, respect, the square... I was as foreign as in Aceh.

More significant though was the culture of friendship. On the one hand, you 'back your friends no matter what'. Going through the last month, dealing with a decision that friends have prodded, examined, held me with thinking questions, I know (and am grateful that) my friends do and will question me - they will not back me no matter what. They will not tell me I am right just because we are friends.

And then there is what A described as a 'culture of anger', the ease with which conflicts become heated and physical fights. Yet when I asked whether they had fallings out as B and I had just done (and publically and emotionally dissected), and whether they then talked them through: yes, three or four times a day. 'If we didn't we'd have nothing to talk about'. Angry confrontation is normal, fine.

(re-reading this I realise I sound critical. of course I do! I don't get it. I prefer what I know, because I know it, just as they do. rightly so?)

Usually participants in AVP workshops come along because they want to change something. At this point, on day two, I suddenly realised that the people I was with didn't necessarily want to change - at least not themselves. They did want a change in the world around them; one incredibly angry outbursts came about how 'the government' is against 'us' (black people), the government is not dealing with the root issues, which is that companies make guns which youth have to carry. That the government went into Iraq. That the government puts crap food in supermarkets so people eat it.

This day sticks with me because it was my lowest point emotionally. I felt helpless, I felt offended, I felt utterly confused as to how I - white, middle class - could share my view that 'the government' as well as 'Hackney' is made up of different individuals, and lumping them all together as 'against us' is never, ever going to empower us (all) as individuals to change the status quo. Most of all, perhaps - and I didn't admit this to the group and they never spoke of it - I felt white, and I felt excluded because of it.

A good lesson, maybe, in what it feels to be excluded. A lesson, perhaps, in what it feels to be black in most of Britain? Unlikely. I spent over a year in Indonesia being different, stereoytped, treated as alien. It was bit funny, and a lot tiring. I'm not saying I don't need to be reminded what it feels like (and particularly what it feels like in my own city), but this scared me.

It scared me because what I felt was going on was the affirmation of group boundaries, the setting up of an exclusion zone of the good and the bad, the laying of blame and the assertion of powerlessness to do anything to change it. (I am nervous of writing all this, as I don't know who reads it, and I don't know that you will trust that I am looking for roads across boundaries, not looking to 'blame' those who create boundaries. We all do, all the time). At the same time - and here is the contradiction - these people are not in government, probably never will be. They speak a different language. And part of what I (and A and B, both black) was doing there was was suggesting they change how they interact so that they can, potentially, hold political power. Is that right?

Evren Anil, dead over rubbish

During the week the story came out about the Turkish man killed when he confronted two young men who threw a half-eaten mars bar through the window of his car. We used the story, a little: some participants threw the idea of 'ask for a non-violent path' back at us, saying it would never work when people are willing to kill over a mars bar. Others suggested that this illustrated the principle of 'think before you act', given that all of them are very well aware of the dangers of entering, let alone reacting, in a different area code. (Apparently in south London, 'Peckham', 'Brixton' and 'New Cross' all hate each other, although they are willing to come together to stop a BNP march. And there's me thinking of these as places, not groups. I shouldn't be so naive; the Meskhetian Turks I lived with in Russia have the same concept of kin-groupings based on the villages they lived in).

I am left with a question: is there a link between a culture of anger, and pulling a knife on someone who complains when you've thrown rubbish in his car? I am not trying to attribute blame or responsibility, though it may seem that way. I'm just trying to see where deathly violence comes from. Our participants refuted the view of Hackney as more violent than anywhere else; they said it was a stereotype. So I need help to understand how a man dies for a mars bar.

This turmoil found another link in Jonathan's narration of nearly being attacked by young people in the area that he grew up in as a young man. He wonders whether mainstream opinion isn't worried about such violence as long as it remains the in black community. My instinctive reaction is that I do care, I just don't know what to do to show I care, and to do anything about it. (The same can be said of my relationship with my sister, who also happens to be black, and as much as I think that our skin colour is irrelevant, perhaps I am refusing to face a huge significance). But actually, do we care?

(My dad is to do some work on social cohesion soon; he sent me through a research report on 'social capital' which someone had said was valuable. It was all about 'bridging' and 'bonding ' networks. It seemed a bit self-referential and irrelevant when I first read it; now I think it is just crap: an alienating language about differences and connections that are fundamental and frighteningly simple. None of the people I was with in Hackney need a researcher to tell them about social (non) cohesion.)

How do we break through these boundaries, the ones that allow us to place the problem in someone else's hands? (Interesting that the mother of a stab victim talks of the 'walls' protecting her son's killer) My own in my head: I feel safe in Walworth partly because I am not part of the community that lives in the Estate, and lives in a world of area codes. I feel safe facilitating workshops in Hackney, but would I in the Aylesbury Estate?

the room in the Pedro club where we ran the workshops

I like to I think I would, I just don't know a way in. And that, for me, is the biggest issue. We build our boundaries because they keep us safe, safe in our identities, safe in our friends (however we build our culture of friendship) and safe in our anger. We build them so well that we rarely know they exist. AVP, I guess, tries to break down some of those boundaries by giving us tools to see what is going on on the other side of the road, and encourages us to take steps to the other side.

But it is very, very hard. I feel exhausted and emotionally drained, and guilty at the pleasure of cycling to Regents' Park to play frisbee with a group (of many ethnicities) who speak my language, and wouldn't know what to do if someone threw a mars bar in their car.

At the end of the week, though, I am left with an attempt at optimism, a tiny bit of it. While the issue of colour is at the forefront of my mind, and was spoken of often, the group we worked with was multi-racial. Two young women spoke of exactly the same problem in their lives; one was white, one black. I guess where I'm trying to go is that while boundaries are labelled, talked around, in fact even within the room in which they are being spoken of, they are fluid. Labels are stuck on things to try to understand them... that seeking for understanding must be optimistic. No?

pbi in cyberspace

2007-08-17T09:46:00.000Z

Finally, PBI Indonesia has a website we can be proud of. I'm in there somewhere; a packet of Indonesia coffee if you find me and comment...

There's also an article about PBI in Indonesia in Guardian Abroad, based on interviews with me, Stuart and Ruth, other PBI alumni.

happy peace day

2007-08-15T21:58:00.000Z

It is two years to the day that Aceh has had peace. On 15 August 2005 the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of Indonesia and GAM, the rebels. I flew in from holiday with Gin in Bali and went straight to the central mosque in Banda Aceh, to watch the Acehnese watch the peace signed on the tele.

It was amazing, not least in how unconvinced they seemed in their cheers. So far, touch wood, the political peace at least seems to have held. How different their last two years - and mine - would have been had it not.

And in two days' time it is the anniversary of Indonesia's independence. A coincidence of timing? I think not.

Selamat hari perdamaian Aceh.

If in Edinburgh...

2007-08-12T17:41:00.000Z

.. go and see Owen's shows.

One is Johnson and Boswell Late but Live, in which Samuel Johnson repeats his 1773 tour of Scotland with his companion Boswell, and is thoroughly rude (and funny). (Clearly you can be tired of life if you are tired of London, but Scotland is an entirely different matter.)

The other is Touch by Bill Dare, 'a low key hymn to the need to reach out and make contact', one of the Guardian's picks of the day yesteday.

Freelance theatre directing in no way compares to freelance researching, although we are both judged by our product - he probably more widely and more enjoyably.

But get this, even Walworth gets a look in. There's a play called The Walworth Farce, based in a flat off the Walworth Road, about an Irishman and his two grown up sons endlessly reenacting the day the father finally left London for to Cork. Does anyone in Edinburgh know Walworth is a real place?

life is steep

2007-08-08T16:48:00.000Z

At 4pm half of the sheep take a nap. They look like dogs, lolled on their side, muching mindlessly away. They stir like dogs too; a sudden twist of the head, half rising.

Past the dog-sheep, over the river bridge with peat brown waters, a nibble at the blackberries, and into Grindleford post office, where I overhear far more of a conversation about the Playing Fields Committee and whether they should charge a deposit for use of the cricket pavillion than I would like to, were I to try to convince myself I would like to live this life all year round.

I don't, but for week, cat-sitting in the Peak District, in the sun, is about as close to a holiday as I'll allow myself for now. There's something about the sun - it makes things more dimensional, somehow. Shadows move, bring stream valleys alive. I'm happier when the sun's out.

Walking back up the hill I pass three llamas. In London, Nessie and I found it easier to find llamas than lettuces in community spaces. I didn't think the same would be true in the Peak District.

As I didn't really plan this as a holiday, it hasn't been one. I have spent hours on the phone (outside, amidst trains and fighter jets, as the coverage is better), on the phone to the US, and in conference calls with different PBI teams in Indonesia. PBI crises don't come individually, they come all at once, when two members of staff have left and we are down to ten volunteers running four teams. Strangely though, talking for two hours about what to do about intimidation of people we know, I realise that this is why I joined PBI. Only I didn't expect to be doing it from a hill in England.

from Edale

And another reason for being in PBI is some lovely people. Stuart came out from Manchester to Edale yesterday, and we walked, talked, plotted and were very careful not to miss the one train every two hours. After he caught his and I awaited mine, I was alone on the station, in a natural ampitheatre of the hills beneath a cold, beautiful, empty sky, with only sheep moaning for company. It was hard to believe that this is the same country as London.

observations on life

2007-08-01T19:32:00.000Z

As I cycled home over Waterloo bridge this evening I wondered whether I am more observant when I am someplace new, and why I rarely write - or think - about what I see in London. Like the dry cleaning being sent down a rope from a second floor window to a Russian van that Nessie and I spied on Dalston's Kingsland Road yesterday.

I also wondered whether all my moaning about the rain and lack of summer has meant the summer has crept up on me, and I find myself cycling in a t-shirt without thinking about how great that is.

However, one place that never ceases to amaze me is my allotment. I wish more people could see the sunflowers; they seem worth more than the few days they will be this delicious.

Now this is why I planted sunflowers and painted my shed blue!

Poppies among the leeks

Not so exciting on first glance this one, but I will come back to it in a couple of days. I planted leeks for the first time, and these two poppy plants rose up. I left them there, at the expense of two leek plants, and they are doing their best to flower. Behind the leeks are my struggling chard plants.

Cardoon seen through runner beans

These glorious purple flowers are a very close relative of the artichoke; in fact I thought they were artichokes for three years until I saw them against my neighbour's plant a couple of months ago. Oops. Now they are framed by my hyper-productive runner beans. I don't really know why I do it; I don't even like runner beans that much. But if you do... come and get some!

scooters and onions in Chiswick

2007-07-30T17:45:00.000Z

Another day, another community garden. Nessie and I were out on the scout for gardening stories yesterday, and as ever we found them, as ever, not what we might have expected.

Chiswick House Kitchen Garden was established when a local writer was walking her dog past the site a couple of years ago, and found some men measuring up for a 'retail outlet'. Determined to return the garden - a classic 17th century walled garden - to public use, Karen is a paragon of energy, enthusiasing tens of volunteers by giving them tasks, and telling them to get on with it.

We chatted with Gill, a local historian, and Maggie, both of whom ride disability scooters... so Nessie got them racing up and down the central drive for the camera. On the other side, a gaggle of families were digging up onions and potatoes. The parents all explained that it was great for children to get dirty, to understand where their food comes from, etc, etc... but it was clear from questions about what potatoe plants look like and whether fennel grows under the ground that it wasn't only the children who had things to learn.

We got to go home with a bunch of gorgeous dahlias.

bee in an artichoke flower

Meanwhile, back in Walworth... actually this was the harvest that greeted me on my return from Washington, but I have had several more since.

And I have reaffirmed my belief that compost is just worm poo, and they are very good at digesting. My father refuses to believe that I can compost cardboard boxes without ripping them up, but all that is left of the several boxes I put in four months ago is the masking tape, and several buckets of fine compost.

Colombia Peace Community leader murdered - please act

2007-07-26T09:56:00.000Z

On 13 July, Dairo Torres, a leader of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Colombia was taken from a bus by two armed members of an army-backed paramilitary group. The next bus along that rounte discoved his body by the road; he had been shot.

Dario Torres's murder is but the most recent of 160 murders of members of this Peace Community since its establishment ten years ago: people who have chosen not to align with any army actors in Colombia's messy wars. You may remember the film about this community, Until the Last Stone, that showed the fear and the basic poverty in which these people live. Agreeing to be a leader looks like a suicide bid.

The San José de Apartadó Peace Community is accompanied by PBI in Colombia. As a result of this murder PBI has issued an urgent activation of its support network; a step PBI only takes when things are really serious.

More information about Dario Torres, his community and the background to this case can be found on Amnesty's website.

Please write to your MP and request that the British Government asks the Colombian Government to
- give guarantees that these acts of persecution against the Peace Community will cease
- quickly investigate the facts of this case, including the role of the police in the assassination of Dairo Torres
- take immediate measures to ensure and effectively stop impunity for the crimes committed against the Peace Community, impunity that opens the way for repetition of such crimes.

and meanwhile... school girls get shot

2007-07-23T11:39:00.000Z

And on the Afghanistan theme, here's the beginning of a piece on education...

With their teacher absent, 10 students were allowed to leave school early. These were the girls the gunmen saw first, 10 easy targets walking hand-in-hand through the blue metal gate and on to the winding dirt road.

A 13-year-old named Shukria was shot in the arm and the back and teetered into the soft brown of an adjacent wheat field. Zarmina, her 12-year-old sister, ran to her side, listening to the wounded girl's precious breath and trying to help her stand. But Shukria was too heavy to lift and the two gunmen, sitting astride a single motorbike, suddenly sped closer.

As Zarmina scurried away, the men took a more studied aim at those they already had shot, finishing off Shukria with bullets to her stomach and heart. Then the attackers seemed to succumb to the frenzy they had begun, forsaking the motorbike and fleeing on foot in a panic, two bobbing heads - one tucked into a helmet, the other swaddled by a handkerchief - vanishing amid the earthen color of the concealing wheat.

Six girls were shot here on the afternoon of June 12; two of them died.

The rest of the article can be found here. It seems that they may have been shot because their headteacher went on a visit to America with 24 other people without a male relative. Good reason to shoot children, eh?

just give us peace

2007-07-23T11:31:00.000Z

This comes from Clare, my good friend in Canada who is married to Owen, who works in the Canadian military (and has been part of my journey to a more intrigued engagement with things military and humanitarian). I asked their advice about a job interview on Afghanistan recently, and they doubled my knowledge in the space of an hour. Clare sent through this article from Canada's National Post, about the Canadian troops in Afghanistan, featuring their friend Alex. The photos I have cadged from elsewhere, for another interview presentation...

Don Martin writes from Afghanistan, where he has been chronicling the work of Canadian soldiers serving as part of the NATO force there. Today, he continues on a mission with Hotel Company in Kandahar province.

GHORAK, Afghanistan -Until the Taliban came calling last month, this mud-walled mountain village in northwestern Kandahar province was home to 100 families. There was a medical centre, a school and a robust farming community churning out crops of opium-bound poppies supplemented by the more legally desirable, but less lucrative, honeydew melons and cucumbers. But the doctor disappeared three weeks ago after a Taliban fighter gave him an offer he couldn't refuse. Then the teacher fled after being warned her next day in the classroom would be her last alive. The political leaders that used to preside over the region from the compound abdicated their responsibilities a few years ago. The heart of their community scared off, the village emptied of villagers. Now there are just seven families waiting - and hoping - Canadians can turn their lives around.

The second half of a massive convoy of tanks, light armoured vehicles and supply trucks rumbled into Ghorak under the cover of darkness on Sunday night and set to work fortifying and rebuilding the defences of the regional political centre at sunrise yesterday. A day earlier, six village elders had met Major Alex Ruff of Hotel Company to learn about a Canadian mission they hope will restore stability and bring back the residents.

It would be easy to denounce this particular mission as a waste of military manpower, after more than 100 bored soldiers lounged around with little to do for 10 days while headquarters slowly dispatched another convoy loaded with barbed wire, sandbags and barriers to fortify the outpost. As this three-day mission rolls into its 11th day, it seems to me the brass at the Kandahar Airfield deserve a slap on the head for organizational ineptitude and, frankly, dispatching an overkill of firepower, given that locals report only a dozen or so insurgents in the area.

But those village elders are haunting. There's a resigned fear in their eyes as if they've seen every horror and just want it all to end. They confirm a 10-year-old boy in the village was beheaded by the nastiest of the Taliban brutes last week after being observed giving bread to police. When the father tried to intervene, he was hanged from the nearest tree. Yet, they relay the story through an interpreter with all the nonchalance of having witnessed someone put down a donkey with a broken leg. Life here is short and cheap. Living is a constant struggle.

And yet, ask them what they need from Canada, and their answer is surprising. Maj. Ruff had his notebook open, ready to take down their wish list. Clean water? Food? Agricultural equipment? Name it. "Peace," says one elder, barefoot, yet - inexplicably in a land that runs on AMT (Afghan Maybe Time) - wearing a knock-off Omega wristwatch. "We don't need anything else. Just give us peace."

No problem, says Maj. Ruff. "That's why we're here." So far, so good. We hadn't been hit by mortar fire or rock-et-propelled grenades at this writing, as the pullout began from this inhospitable amenity-free camp-out. Trouble is, when our military shield is gone, the village will be protected by a police force that ran away after the last Taliban attack and an army that, while universally praised for its budding professionalism, still looks like its foot soldiers were recruited from a Grade 11 class. I guess you have to ask yourself to consider the alternative. To leave without doing anything? To let those Taliban bastards terrorize a town into vacating so that their drug-smuggling corridor, which runs directly through this valley, can reopen? Given that option, there really is no choice. That 's why the soldiers stayed, waited for overdue supplies to arrive and did what they could to repair the site under a broiling sun. Maj. Ruff insists there's merit in merely parking such a powerful military display in full view of Taliban insurgents, daring them to attack while knowing they'd never attempt such a suicidal mission. It would send a message to the insurgency that the villagers have friends in high and heavily armed places, he says.

Perhaps, then, this is Canada's future in Afghanistan. It's not about unleashing the quick-draw guns to run through grape fields and kill a couple of Taliban fighters for military cameraman. Read Prime Minister Stephen Harper's words on Afghanistan carefully and, while he talks of letting Parliament decide on ending the military mission in February, 2009, that's not the same thing as ending the humanitarian or reconstruction responsibilities of the deployment. Canada may well keep soldiers here indefinitely to escort and protect ventures like these - albeit hopefully more efficiently staged in the future - that are designed to support Afghans trying to rebuild a society safe from the Taliban's terror. Canadian forces will leave this isolated outpost - hopefully today, because there are a lot of filthy bodies screaming for a shower, and none more than a smelly yours truly - but they'll leave behind a defensive barrier designed to fend off the barbarians, and let a more civilized culture take root.

Interesting, I thought, in the light of various states' plans to withdraw all troops, and NGOs' feelings about the dangers of the military getting involved in humanitarian action. But what is the answer to the problems of Afghanistan?

privileges

2007-07-18T16:01:00.000Z

Girton College, where I did my undergraduate degree, kindly sends me glossy brochures asking for more money. (They have an endowment of £43 million, but say that to match colleges in the USA they need £100 million. I hate to remind them that we are not in the USA, and there is no way I’m giving them any of my money). The latest brochure includes an article by a woman researching early female students at Oxbridge. She found this, about women, from a male Professor:

‘If given the BA, they must next have the MA, and that would carry with it voting and perhaps a place on the Electoral Roll [a Cambridge MA is a ‘fake’ MA that you get automatically 3 years after your BA, and all it means is you can vote University business if you live in Cambridge]. Even the BA degrees would enable them to take 5 books out of the library… I am entirely opposed to the admission of women to ‘privileges’ of this character. And I honestly believe they are better off as they are.’

I forget I have it so good. To think that if I lived in Cambridge now I could take 10 books out of the library.

Nat is free

2007-07-17T16:47:00.001Z

as of 4.30pm ish Malaysian time today.

He was apparently investigated for alleged breach of Section 8 of the Official Secrets Act 1972, in relation to a comment left on his blog site linking Deputy Internal Security Minister Mohd Johari Baharum to a corruption allegation.

How can someone be arrested for a comment left by someone else on a blog? I guess I should be grateful hardly any of you comment on this!

funding buses

2007-07-17T16:24:00.000Z

Blatant self-publicity I know, but hey, maybe you wondered what I spent June - Dec last year doing? Well now you can read all about it, because CEF have just published my two reports.

The first is Funding Change: Sustaining Civil Society Advocacy in Education. It does what is says on the tin really: it looks at the best ways to continue to support civil society advocacy (= local organisations campaigning or lobbying) in education across Africa and Asia once CEF comes to an end. Ian and I came up with a model fund, and a new acronym to go with it: CSEFs, civil society education funds. Just when you thought the world had enough acronyms, ey?

It's a 'data-rich' report, which means it's pretty long and very interesting if you are interested in funding civil society advocacy, but if you're not... I'd suggest you read the next one instead ;)

Because Driving the Bus: The Journey of National Education Coalitions is lighter, shorter and written round the metaphor of a bus. Yes, compare a coalition to a bus. The members are the passengers, the aims are the destination, the running costs are the tickets, the other vehicles on the road are the other organisations working in education...

Well, it worked for me. And seemingly it worked for the Malawi education coalition, who, when asked, 'You wouldn't get on a bus if you didn't know where it was going, so why are you part of a coalition with unclear aims?' demanded an AGM. Nice to see research prompting change now and then.

Both reports are available to download from CEF's website, as is a briefing paper, CEF's reponse to the research. It says almost the same things as the research.

my friend Nat arrested in Malaysia

2007-07-16T17:46:00.000Z

This is a weird, messed-up world. Sometimes the people you least expect cause the most waves.

Nathaniel Tan, a Malaysian I met in Aceh, has been arrested by the Malaysian police for blogging, it seems. He was arrested on Friday evening, and is being held for as yet undetermined time frame. His blog is www.jelas.info - jelas means 'clear', which might have something to do with him seemingly having been held for commenting on a corrupt official. Nat also ran a networking site for Malaysian activists. He worked for Parti Keadilan Rakyat (Peoples Justice Party).You Tube has a number of videos about Nat's arrest.

I knew Nat briefly in Aceh. He was one of two Malaysian activists (the other I got to know a bit better!) who turned up to every Protection Working Group meeting - extremely committed to supporting, protecting Acehnese human rights activists, but volunteering in a job with JRS that didn't really give him much influence. Very friendly, always grinning, even when he wouldn't let you get a word in edgeways ;) He left not that long after I arrived, allegedly to work for a private housing company in Thailand - which seemed about as far from activism as could be imagined, so I forgot about him.

And now... how wrong I was. He's a skinny little fellow, I think he's veggie, which makes life a bit hard in a prison. Though he seems to be busy converting his co-prisoners, getting them to sing reformasi ('reform'), and being chatty and friendly as ever in his orange prison t-shirt and bare feet.

His girlfriend is updating the world, including an explanation of what is going on:

They are saying that Nat is responsible for this comment left by some stranger in a post. They are also saying that the comment posted which was cut and pasted from another site - and by all means could be one of those fucker Cyber Crime assholes who planted it there 6 months ago - is an official secret itself.

Let me spell something out to you. An official secret has to be true to begin with. If its false means its just a rumour or totally useless information. Does this mean the content in that very cut and paste comment is TRUE? That Johari is the most powerful but corrupted deputy minister? Does this mean Johari did take RM5 million to let 3 kingpins out of ISA? If it’s not true, then why remand Nat under the OSA? Thanks for spelling it out to us Royal Malaysian Police. Now we know better. (just Google the phrase in italics and you’ll see the ‘RMP verified true official secret’) Johari said he ordered police to investigate on the two Freewebs website that bears that ‘official secret’. Remember, defamation is one thing, calling it an ‘official secret’ is another. If Nat can get in trouble for a comment left in his blog. Then words to those who have posted it up on their blog, you could be next.

And a quote from Nat:

Saya berasa semnagat and menguatkan azam untuk menegakkan keadilan untuk semua. I’ve been teaching the inmates how to sing reformasi songs. If they think they can get to PKR or activists by bullying a skinny young fella, mereka sudah salah anggap. Saya amat berterima kasih kepada keluarga yang dikasihi, Li Tsin yang disayangi, rakan-rakan aktivis dan rakan-rakan di Malaysia dan di luar negara.

His sister is also blogging, repeatedly and from court rooms. There is a petition you can sign, so far at 765 signatures or so, and his sister has asked you to write to CNN. I'm not entirely sure what to do, other than blog, as this seems to be a bloggers non-violent war. (I watched a video on Malaysiakini interviewing Black, who I think is Tad's election monitoring friend. He's never met Nat, and I've never met him. But in this small small world that's a circle of connections).

Strange how writing this is a small act of solidarity. Keep smiling Nat.

turning the other cheek - what he really meant

2007-07-09T20:16:00.000Z

One of the insights I have gained in the course of following Turning the Tide's year-long training for facilitators comes from a very strange - for me - place. Maybe not strange, so much as unexpected and enlightening. It is the passage in the Bible about 'turning the other cheeck' - which I never got. But several months ago Sophie introduced this interpretation, showing it is a radical statement of non-violent resistance. Walter Wink has further analysed the rest of the verse, about giving up your cloak and going the extra mile. Seemingly debasing oneself, or passivity, were the last things on Jesus's mind. See Walter's site for explanation of the rest of it, as Helen explained at a workshop we co-facilitated at St Ethelburgha's recently.

Here's the cheek bit.

Jesus gives three examples of what He means by not returning evil for evil. The first of these is, "If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also." Imagine if I were your assailant and I were to strike a blow with my right fist at your face, which cheek would it land on? It would be the left. It is the wrong cheek in terms of the text we are looking at. Jesus says, "If anyone strikes you on the right cheek..." I could hit you on the right cheek if I used a left hook, but that would be impossible in Semitic society because the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. You couldn't even gesture with your left hand in public. The only way I could hit you on the right cheek would be with the back of the hand.

Now the back of the hand is not a blow intended to injure. It is a symbolic blow. It is intended to put you back where you belong. It is always from a position of power or superiority. The back of the hand was given by a master to a slave or by a husband to a wife or by a parent to a child or a Roman to a Jew in that period. What Jesus is saying is in effect, "When someone tries to humiliate you and put you down, back into your social location which is inferior to that person, and turn your other cheek."

Now in the process of turning in that direction, if you turned your head to the right, I could no longer backhand you. Your nose is now in the way. Furthermore, you can't backhand someone twice. It's like telling a joke a second time. If it doesn't work the first time, it has failed. By turning the other cheek, you are defiantly saying to the master, "I refuse to be humiliated by you any longer. I am a human being just like you. I am a child of God. You can't put me down even if you have me killed." This is clearly no way to avoid trouble. The master might have you flogged within an inch of your life, but he will never be able to assert that you have no dignity.

See the rest here.

Those of us attempting to 'turn the tide' (ie keep attending these workshops once a month, come sun or frustrations) are keeping another blog, which actually has people commenting ;)

is your mobile fuelling war in the Congo?

2007-07-06T08:19:00.001Z

My colleague Jonathan recently surprised me by explaining that he doesn't have a mobile phone as a matter of principle, because the trade in coltan - an essential mineral for manufacturing mobile phones - is propping up the rebels in the DRC.

While most of the world's coltan comes from legitimate mining in Australia, Brazil and Canada, a worrying amount passes through warring hands,and there is little way of knowing which is which. This report from 2001 explains how money and wars are made through our calls:

Given the substantial increase in the price of coltan between late 1999 and late 2000, a period during which the world supply was decreasing while the demand was increasing, a kilo of coltan of average grade was estimated at $200. According to the estimates of professionals, the Rwandan army through Rwanda Metals was exporting at least 100 tons per month. The Panel estimates that the Rwandan army could have made $20 million per month, simply by selling the coltan that, on average, intermediaries buy from the small dealers at about $10 per kg. According to experts and dealers, at the highest estimates of all related costs (purchase and transport of the minerals), RPA must have made at least $250 million over a period of 18 months. This is substantial enough to finance the war. Here lies the vicious circle of the war. Coltan has permitted the Rwandan army to sustain its presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The army has provided protection and security to the individuals and companies extracting the mineral. These have made money which is shared with the army, which in turn continues to provide the enabling environment to continue the exploitation.

And more information on guns, money and cells phones is avaliable if this has got you worried.

never mind the ducks, the moths!

2007-07-06T08:05:00.000Z

Has any one else had an infestation of carpet moths? They are driving us (well, Danny actually), nuts.

Apparently the best pesticide is the vaccum cleaner, which isn't really helping.

the ducks, the ducks... they're coming!

2007-06-28T21:48:00.000Z

This one is too good not to include in its entirety, sorry. Blame or thank Tom, and The Times.

Plastic duck armada is heading for Britain after 15-year global voyage

A flotilla of plastic ducks is heading for Britain’s beaches, according to an American oceanographer. For the past 15 years Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys that were released into the Pacific Ocean when a container was washed off a cargo ship. Some of the ducks, known as Friendly Floatees, are expected to reach Britain after a journey of nearly 17,000 miles, having crossed the Arctic Ocean frozen into pack ice, bobbed the length of Greenland and been carried down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Mr Ebbesmeyer, who is based in Seattle, said yesterday that those that had not been trapped in circulating currents in the North Pacific, crushed by icebergs or blown ashore in Japan are bobbing across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream. Any beachcomber who finds one of the ducks will be able to claim a $100 (£50) reward from the toys’ American distributor, First Years Inc.

The ducks began life in a Chinese factory and were being shipped to the US from Hong Kong when three 40ft containers fell into the Pacific during a storm on January 29, 1992. Two thirds of them floated south through the tropics, landing months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia and South America. But 10,000 headed north and by the end of the year were off Alaska and heading back westwards.

They were in Indonesia more than a year ago.

It took three years for the ducks to circle east to Japan, past the original drop site and then back to Alaska on a current known as the North Pacific Gyre before continuing north towards the Arctic. Many were stranded as the currents took them through the Bering Strait, which divides Alaska from Russia. Mr Ebbesmeyer predicted that they would spend years trapped in the Arctic ice, moving at the rate of one mile a day towards the Atlantic.

In 2000, eight years after their journey began, the ducks were reported in the North Atlantic and in 2003, when they were expected to wash up on the east coast of America, First Years Inc announced the reward. By now the ducks had been bleached white by the sun and sea water. Sightings in the past two years have been scant, but oceanographers believe that their next port of call is southwest England, southern Ireland and western Scotland.

taking a break on Lombok, near Bali

Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said that the ducks offered a great opportunity for climate change research. “They are a nice tracer for what the currents are doing as they travel around the world, and currents are what determines our climate, and cycles of carbon. “I would ask holidaymakers to keep an eye out, as they might be very few and far between by now. It’s a real adventure story and the plastic should last 100 years, so we hope it will continue.”

The landfalls have all been logged on a computer model called the Ocean Surface Currents Simulation, which is used to help fisheries and find people lost at sea. Two children’s books have been written about the saga and the ducks have become collector’s items, changing hands for £500.

prison buckles

2007-06-26T10:49:00.000Z

Doing literature reviews leads me down weird and wonderful alleys, like one about the Prison Buckle company, explaining how people got very excited about customised buckles for Californian prison staff.

The top one is yours for $45, but the bottom one - special edition gold and silver - will set you back $85. And it has a history too:

San Quentin was established in July 1852 at Point Quentin in Marin county as an answer to the rampant lawlessness in California at the time. During its construction, inmates slept on the prison ship, the Waban, at night and labored to build the new prison during the day. San Quentin housed both male and female inmates until 1933 when the women's prison at Tehachapi was built.

watch out for dead terrorists

2007-06-22T15:05:00.000Z

In trying to understand exactly what recidivism means for a literature review for AVP, I came across this article about the list of 44,000 people that the US government won't allow to fly. (there's another 75,000 who will be taken aside for additonal questioning). Notably the list includes 14 of the 19 suicide bombers who died on 9/11. Erm...?

rewrite the future

2007-06-21T09:32:00.000Z

Save the Children are running a huge campaign to ensure that children in conflict-affected states get education. Their latest offering is a creative interactive report. Check out the different sizes of children; that got me.

home

2007-06-19T20:40:00.000Z

An elephant just applied to build a castle IN Elephant and Castle, but Ken said no because the building contractors can't afford the congestion charge.

Isabelle meets God

2007-06-18T08:24:00.000Z

I had the fascinating opportunity yesterday of attending a christening, of Jonathan's neice, Isabelle. The priest started by saying 'I'm sure you've all been to lots of christenings before', knowing full well than several of us hadn't! He then explained all the symbols, for which we could have got him in to an under-grad anthropology class - it was helpful.

Jonathan was stand-in godfather (which seems a bit of a contradiction in terms, but he did a grand job!), with his sister Helen (the real godmother) to the right, and brother Derek holding his daughter.

The actual ritual was done as gently as possible, but still had poor Isabelle kicking her legs. She was as good as gold (what kind of symbolism is that?!). I was not, in the priest's eyes, I think. I didn't say all the things the congregation was supposed to say, including 'I renounce Satan and all his evil ways', because I don't believe Satan exists. It was at that point that the priest caught my eye. I wonder what he thought. I thought it was all a bit scary, with the 'I claim you for God', and all that. No pressure, then.

He was good enough to encourage us to take photos, bless him, so here's Jonathan's mother Mavis, Susanne and Derek the proud parents, priest with little stain on his shirt, and (along the front) friend Ruby, sister Charlotte, and the centre of attention, Isabelle.

She seemed far more relaxed with mother afterwards, though still a little dazed, methinks.

in my face(book)

2007-06-15T17:55:00.001Z

At least three people in as many weeks have mentioned facebook to me. The latest was in order to arrange ultimate frisbee matches, which seemed a good enough reason to look, and now... this thing is dangerous! It has so many little bits to keep you looking, it's a self-fulfiling gossip session all of its own.

In moments in the past few months I have thought that there is now so much information out there, it is nigh on impossible to create new images/stories. So why bother? Maybe because in the circles we move, at least, they might be new (I don't know anyone who has been to Malawi in the last few years, since my sister went in fact)... until we discover they are not. But facebook seems the epitomy of the genre; constantly creating not critical but mildly amusing new info. Don't get me wrong, it's kind of fun, but dangerously time consuming too. And no, Owen, I still don't get why you think it is better than my blog ;)

Will it last longer than friends reunited? It's essentially the same thing, right?

children, conflict and Nairobi airport lounge

2007-06-14T21:42:00.000Z

England is playing Brazil. The score is 0-0. Opposite me an Arab woman has just finished praying, with her son hanging around waiting to ask her something. I have just been descended on by two other Muslim men, seemingly unrelated, who have chosen to use my corner of sofas to eat their crisps. They inform the woman that she has been praying in the wrong direction, so she thanks them and starts again.

I’m in the lounge, the ‘first class lounge’ of Nairobi airport, having paid the grand price of £19 for seven hours on a large sofa. Last time I spent seven hours in Nairobi airport (August or September last year, missing Kate’s wedding), I spent it sat on the floor, ironically outside the prayer room then also. I feel a little like I am squatting an Arab sitting room, albeit a very large sitting room, with a selection of spirits on a glass shelf on one wall. And it has a UK socket for my laptop, so here I am.

[The son takes over from his mother, laying down the prayer blanket right direction first time. ]

Coming through here four days ago I saw military discipline in action. At least that’s what I thought it was. A gaggle of men, well-dressed by some definition (suits, overlarge and accompanied by trainers) filled three rows of the blue plastic seats. They kept turning around, a few at a time, stretching over shoulders to see someone behind me. Eventually, intrigued, I looked too. Another man, with a new new American-teenager style jacket and a brash black and white shirt, was occasionally conversing with an older man across the aisle. Then a few of the gaggle sauntered purposefully (can you do that?) and squat around his feet, admirers, underlings, subordinates?

[He’s done already. Was that the shortened version for travel? Son two takes his place, unfolding the recently folded blue sheet.]

They talk in hushed voices, so I wouldn’t catch it even if I could understand whatever language it is they are speaking. The admirers return to the gaggle, necks turn their way and they report back. A short while later the same happens again, with a different few.

[Airport man comes in and calls out KQ123 to Dubai. Prayer, chat and tea drinking is interrupted and my companions leave. Son one, using the internet, is the last to go]

Eventually the object of all this attention joins his men. Again, all necks are turned his way, bodies leaning to catch the whispered words. Some on the periphery give up and make their own conversation. After about five minutes the boss man returns to his seat.

I find myself interpreting the situation my own way. I am sure they are rebel fighters, and he is their leader. They are returning from what… training? There are two flights going to four places leaving from this lounge, mine to Lilongwe (Malawi) via Lusaka (Zambia), and the other to Maputo (Mozambique) via Harare (Zimbabwe). (Observe, my knowledge of Africa capital cities has greatly increased over the past year, and the only one of these countries that I have not passed through these five days - albeit mostly in a waiting plane - is Mozambique.) I am nervous, and hope they are taking the other flight. But I am also intrigued. Who are they? What are they doing? Where have they been and what have they done there? And what impossibilities of cultural shift would make it possible for me to communicate any of this to them?

Last night, bored in my hotel room, I wondered whether I am conning myself with my interest in conflict and children, that I am actually scared of both and just denying it. This morning, waiting in the sun in cool Lilongwe airport I wonder if rather – or also – I am fascinated by both. Conflict, clearly. Children, at least when they reach teens and become the scariest things alive. It’s like the shark I saw while snorkelling in Flores with Karen and Zoe in March – I was immediately scared, small as it was, but I also immediately followed it. Am I a fool? or is the boundary between fear and fascination very fluid indeed?

Anyway, children and conflict are a theme of the week. I attended a seminar on Friday presenting results of research into a rehabilitation programme for child soldiers in Colombia. I don’t think I made myself too popular by asking whether the programme really worked. It took rural combatants to urban centres, wouldn’t allow them out alone in case they get killed in revenge, exposed them to female roles that are alien to them (short skirts, make up, sex object v. men’s equal, mechanic, leader), and then – despite an intense education programme – couldn’t give them employment at the end because employers refused to take them. On top of all this, masses of money is flowing into a programme that only an estimated 15% of child soldiers enter, 20% of whom drop out – so that’s 12% of the demobilised child soldiers in the country ‘benefiting’. Is this a good use of funds? Or even a good way to support the young people who do go through it?

This questioning of INGO orthodoxies about DDR (demobilisation, de?? and reintegration) of child soldiers has continued with reading Margaret Trawick’s Enemy Lines, about her field work with young Tamil Tigers in northern Sri Lanka in 1996-8. It is fascinating on so many levels, how she got in there being just one of them. She is clearly scathing of the move to ‘ban’ child soldiers, pointing out that global conditions of hunger, lack of options [take from her bit] and the fact that children/ adolescents make the best soldiers, make it inevitable that children will fight. She also comments on the claims that being a soldier damages children through their interaction with violence and discipline, insisting that what hurts them most is loss of freedom and loss of access to family. But this is unconvincing, I don’t see the evidence to deny the former.

Her allegiance is interesting; pro-LTTE in many ways, she claims to see war as immoral, and her very work provides plentiful evidence to refute the Tigers’ claim that they don’t use soldiers – hence a political tool for both sides. But what worries me perhaps most is the danger she puts her informants in while she is there. From the child who lends her a bike to cross a bridge and only later finds out she wanted to go to the LTTE office – he’s clearly scared – to the comment she makes on the bombing of the area just as she leaves (commenting herself that the army probably waited till she left as they wouldn’t want westerners caught in the firing), she seems more than a little naïve, that the army will not know what she is researching, and who she is talking with.

Her book is interesting for me on another level – it is almost a ‘popular anthropology’ book (barring the dull inevitable history chapter). Does it work? Some of it does; the ‘showing not telling’ of the young peoples’ stories is initially engaging. But she gets repetitive, events are referred to again, and at some points I’m not sure why she is telling the stories, other than that they were in her field notes, or that she is trying to drive home the mundane repetitiveness of gunfire and deaths.

Apparently the England-Brazil score is suddenly 1-2; I’m not quite sure how that happened.

Dining with Ministers

2007-06-11T21:42:00.000Z

I have just been driven back to my hotel by the Director of Aid and Debt in the Malawian Ministry of Finance. As I got into the large red vehicle, she remarked that she has carried all sorts in this car: the last thing was bags of manure! A lady after my own heart, I told her. Though I did wonder if I was being equated.

There is something horribly, frighteningly powerful about being a British researcher visiting a ‘developing’ country; I guess being white has a lot to do with it too, but I don’t have anyone to check that with. I am here to help CEF develop a monitoring and evaluation framework for their gender project. Already I have met with Naomi, who is regularly chastised by her boss the Minister of Finance for – as a woman – not being humble enough, and with Esnath, CEF’s gender mentor, sometime member of the Government and head of part of the UN here in Malawi. And the Budget department of the Ministry of Education, who we questioned about gender budgeting and they didn’t really get it. Oh – the woman we talked to there was a Brit too. Though she was an Asian Brit; I don’t know if that discounts my white issue.

The doors that being… white? British? a researcher working for an INGO or the UN?.. open are astounding. I remember thinking this three years ago as the Head of Special Education of Mozambique’s Ministry of Education taught me to cook prawn curry (the secret is in removing the nerve along its back). And watching as the Special Needs department of Cambodia’s Ministry of Education was basically told what to do by a British VSO ‘volunteer’ (with, I thought, rather dubious views about education for children with special needs – or inclusive education, as it is known in the trade). I am not just name-dropping for the sake of it, though it might seem so. That is what makes these short trips to far-away places so weird and so wonderful, though I had forgotten this last week. I get to meet people whose equivalents I would never dream of meeting in the UK. And who certainly couldn’t make such delicious prawn curry, and probably don’t carry manure in their car for their roses.

red flowers in the grounds of the hotel

As Naomi drove me home we talked a little of Mugabe. I was thinking yesterday as I arrived that I don’t really understand Africa, in a way that I ‘get’ Asia a little more. The latter probably because I have lived there, but there are a lot of other resistances in me partly explaining why I never came to Africa till I was sent here on work. The history of colonialism doesn’t fight me in Asia. (Scrap that, I’ve just realised it’s ridiculous. Apart from Indonesia – for which the Dutch hold most responsibility, though the English had a go – the last three Asian countries I visited were Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. Ahem. Maybe then it is that I don’t look so very different, but I still stand out like a sore thumb in Aceh, albeit a pleasingly tall one. Maybe I’m not so scared of what isn’t here. Indonesia is lush and poor, but not this poor. Malawi right now is brittle, dried out (we saw a grass fire on the way to the restaurant), and very poor. Visiting the Ministry of Education, Grace told me that the building was allegedly built with support from South Africa’s apartheid government (why an apartheid government would pay for a black Africa government’s buildings is another of those bits of politics that I just don’t get). It shows its delightful retro age; patterned plaster, flattened thick red carpets, and a couple of battered armchairs that we were perched in as the budget woman sat miles from us on her leather armchair, surrounded by battered files.

I’m off message; I was talking about Mugabe. A few weeks ago when Zimbabwe was elected to the head of the UN Committee on Sustainable Development (something Zimbabwe seems excruciatingly unqualified to chair right now), I realised there was something major that I, and I suspect the British press, don’t get about Mugabe. Because they got the UN chair through a coup of African states supporting the nomination. What, what message is that sending to the rest of us, loud and clear, that we are busy drowning out with inordinate amounts of Take That? Take that indeed.

So today I have tried to gently ask my colleagues about Malawi’s relationship with Zimbabwe. They have gently replied. The Malawian President has a farm in Zimbabwe, and the road (in Malawi) that leads to it has recently been named Mugabe Road. Some of the local people started taking the road signs down, until guards were sent to protect it. And one of the ladies told me that there are some things about Mugabe that every African likes. I didn’t dare ask what. But when a man tells the American election monitors to go home, because he won’t have his election monitored by those who rig their own, I have a touch of admiration. Nobody else is saying that to Bush. Apparently when a UK university recently rescinded an honorary doctorate they had awarded him, Mugabe’s official response was that he hadn’t asked for it in the first place. Exactly.

But one of my colleagues told me that what people don’t understand is that Zimbabwe’s economy is remarkably resilient. ‘If Mugabe had been ten years younger it would still take him ten years to destroy the economy. But the poor people are suffering.’ That latter point is the one that Jenny and Ruth have both described, as we pondered over why the population doesn’t rise up. But when you compare Zimbabwe’s economy to its neighbour Malawi’s, maybe things don’t look quite so bad.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention, the Minister of Transport was also dining in Blue Ginger tonight. I hope he enjoyed his curry as much as I did. He probably didn’t have the same desert as I: a depressing conversation about gendered cultural practices in much of Malawi, in which men never change nappies, girls of 13 expect to drop out of school to get married, and men in the north take two or more wives, in part so that if one gets sick the other can keep working. And here am I coming up with critical questions about how to monitor gender budgeting? I wondered, though didn’t ask, how these three amazingly charismatic women around me had got to where they have. It should give hope but I know they are a small small minority.

democracy in Aceh action

2007-06-09T10:42:00.000Z

Acehnese disable a tsunami alarm when it frightens the life out of them with a false alarm. Beats writing to the newspaper.

and another (green) thing...

2007-06-07T14:12:00.001Z

Have you seen those British Gas ads recently, where the woman who has turned her central heating down by one degree rewards herself with a vindaloo? (It's telling that in June we still relate to turning the heating down). Thye could just say 'put another jumper on', but we wouldn't like that would we?

Being green is clearly all the rage right now, but it seems a bit superficial. Take the 'turn the tap off when you brush your teeth' admonition. Or putting a hippo in your cistern. Sure, saves a bit of water. But if we only flush the toilet when we had to ('if it's yellow, let it mellow', etc...) we'd save masses more. (It got me to thinking about whether there was a toilet system that doesn't need flushing. Oh yeah, most of the world uses it. It's a hole in the ground that leads to a pit, with a bucket of water and a scoop to clean up, thus saving on paper too. Duh. Why didn't we think of that? Cos we're developed, silly).

Anyway, a far better approach would be if we all (and particularly you versitile men) peeed on a compost heap once a day. It's a great compost starter, apparently. Cue allotment photos. See, I have two compost heaps: the black round one which goes like the hot clappers (without pee) and the open wooden one full of weeds and cardboard which is slower but gets a shower now and then. Of rain that is. mostly ;)

I also have a pet pink rabbit, which has no affect on compost but does guard my runner beans. It went grey over the winter, but then I discovered I could peel its skin off (no animals were harmed in the writing of this blog) and it went pink again. I'm sure Jane, on the plot round the corner, is far more concerned about my rabbit than I am. I fully expect the fox to walk off with it one of these days.

Rabbit watches the lavender, which is just starting to come out; it bushes up like an newly-combed afro and gets in everyone's way but no-one has complained to my face yet (unlike about the elder by the door, which several allotmenteers wanted me to chop down. I tried, but it keeps coming back, so now I let it, and it (plus two lemons and lots of sugar) provided me with elderflower cordial in thanks yesterday).

Jenette's cracked sink provides an excellent home to a random collection of herbs, a stray buttercup and some lovely blue alliums (I think). Behind it is the greenhouse, another contribution to greenness (by raiding my neighbours' skip). It is partly 'glassed' using plastic sheeting I bought in Russia in 2000, with just this sort of purpose in mind. Two house-moves and seven years on, it is happily in place. I also 'recycled' a couple of cork tiles to make my attempt at community building: a noticeboard. Sweet potatoes and celeriac plants are swapped with delight. Just we don't have to talk to each other.

And continuing the toilet theme - apologies - here is the best use yet for a cistern: for growing mint. I don't actually know who I swiped this off, since it was dumped on the skip by someone else, part of a community exchange programme that carried on happily one weekend (offered: four plastic chairs and a table. Taken: four plastic chairs. Offered: an ironing board. Etc.)

All I need is an electricity source to boil tea and I could retire to my green room. Though if the compost heap would get going maybe I could heat water on that...

So now I'm thinking about things that we could do that would really help preserve energy. Like not fly to Malawi on work on Saturday. Ho hum.

Maddie fever

2007-06-06T19:53:00.000Z

Why is the post office spending our money on this?

Katherine suggested on Friday that the 'find Madeline McCann' fever is an excellent example of a well-orchestrated campaign, undertaken by a well-placed middle class, white British couple. Not that I blame them; in their position I hope I would be able to do the same. But I am not sure what everyone else (including the post office) is doing with it.

Note the girls strange pupil - it slides down into her iris.

Now what if the campaign is misdirected? I mean, what is the aim of the campaign? To get Madeline back, yes, but is this the best way to do that? She will be recognised all over Europe, if not the world. But if you had abducted a small child whose picture was all over the world, what would you do? Take her outside? Not likely. So if she is alive, she is coped up somewhere - so won't be seen anyway. And she undoubtedly doesn't have blond hair anymore. I'm not convinced this is a good strategic campaign, to achieve the intended aim - get the kid back.

And I don't like my postage being spent on this leaflet.

all is not so well in Aceh?

2007-06-05T10:14:00.000Z

Two recent briefings on Aceh make me worried in ways I am trying not to be, but avoiding reality is never a good think in a post-conflict zone. I remember someone once writing/saying that in peacebuilding things go two steps back before they go anywhere forward; maybe my Aceh optimism is not so misplaced, and looking at the big picture since August 2005 is better than looking at the details. But maybe not, so I publish the details here.

The first is the World Bank's excellent Aceh Conflict Monitoring Update, of which a summary is below:

April saw a worrying increase in serious violent incidents. A series of mysterious grenade incidents heralded a new level of political violence in Aceh, with the homes and offices of government officials targeted. Although no injuries were reported, such incidents bring serious risks of casualties and could spark cycles of violent reprisal. There are several possible explanations for these attacks but competition over resources, including the right to extort,
and access to reconstruction projects and reintegration funds, are an important part of the picture. A number of other violent incidents this month continue to demonstrate the post-conflict cleavages to which we have drawn attention in previous updates. Violence again recorded a post-MoU high this month, with 23 incidents. Aside from the grenade attacks, there were a number of mob beatings of thieves, revenge attacks, and riots. The increase in violence does not at present threaten the peace process or the reconstruction effort. However, it does show that progress made since the Helsinki MoU should not be taken for granted, and that continued efforts need to be made to build sustainable peace in Aceh. Aid efforts have a big role to play here. However, there is also a risk that reconstruction and reintegration aid can contribute to problems. This update includes an overview of recent conflicts related to the work of the reconstruction agency (BRR).

And the other article was in the Jakarta Post so has of course now disappeared. (The head of the documentation unity in UNESCO's IIEP told me that documents on the web have an average life of 60 days. The Jakarta Post seems to dump them after 12 hours).

'One of the problems in Aceh is GAM vs. GAM'
Former Aceh Monitoring Mission chief Pieter Feith recently made his first visit to Jakarta and Banda Aceh since the mission's mandate expired in December 2006.

Did it come as a surprise to you that the Free Aceh Movement (GAM)'s Irwandi Yusuf was elected governor?
I was surprised. We didn't think he was a serious candidate, a likely winner. He didn't have the money, the resources. The question now is does he have the capabilities to manage the enormous amount of money coming to Aceh, over Rp 3 trillion in the coming years on top of the normal allocation by the central government. What is needed is that this money is well-spent and the right priorities are being followed. That the money will be spent on infrastructure and productive projects, and it remains graft free, environmentally sensitive.

How do you see the Free Aceh Movement now after Irwandi's win?
My concern is about the internal relations, the situation within the GAM. At this point, one of the problems that may complicate the process a little bit is GAM versus GAM. There's a lack of communication between the old leadership and the new young troops, such as Irwandi. It needs somebody to invite them to sit together in a room to talk, because as a result of this lack of communication things in Aceh are not moving as smooth as they could.

Lack of communication?
They don't talk to each other, they don't consult each other. If you want to look at how we're going to continue implementing the MoU (peace agreement) and the law on Aceh governance, we need to talk to (GAM commander) Malik (Mahmood) because he signed the MoU in Helsinki, but now he doesn't consult with Irwandi. If we look at who's going to represent the GAM in the Forum of Communication (between GAM and the government) to continue discussing the implementation, then the GAM representatives are chosen by Irwandi and, here, Malik doesn't know about it.

Do you see these frictions having an impact to the peace process?
It's just frictions, nothing dramatic. We're talking to them tonight (Saturday). It is perhaps just a classic game of power ... who's going to come out on top, who's going to be the leader for the future.

Is it the new generation or the old generation?
The new generation isn't accommodating the older enough, or you can say the other way around. It's true that Irwandi is the governor now, but he's very busy and he's got other responsibilities now. So I don't want to blame anyone. Aside from this internal conflict, there is also the issue of re-integration funds reaching their targets slowly, or not getting to them at all.

Have you heard any explanations from the government?
The funds are indeed being transferred to Banda Aceh a little bit late. There's a lot of expectation in Aceh and people are still waiting for what they've been promised. And if it doesn't come forward, it creates resentment. Maybe you know, it is a transitional period and for this year it has been, out of the Rp 700 million (US$79,500), Rp 250 million was supposedly disbursed this year and Rp 450 million next year, and you will see this later. The question is how to get the money out this year so that people don't get disappointed.

Can they wait? Do people understand this is a budgetary technical problem?
I had wished there would be perhaps a little bit more political sensitiveness (from the government) about this to make sure people don't turn cold on this.

Because basically when they agreed to peace, it was because of a lack of money in the jungle? Yes. But people want to see an improvement in their livelihood, and they expected to see that the day after the agreement was signed. And it may not be realistic but that's how, what people think. And they haven't seen this improvement in their livelihood. Some have, but not everybody. People still don't have enough money to live and this is what needs to be addressed.

How do you see the transparency of the disbursement of the re-integration funds?
I will leave it to the central government and the local administration. I don't know how they're going to work that, but I hope it will be transparent and there will be a sensible expenditure framework. There's clarity on what the money will be spent on. There's a lot to be done in Aceh in many aspects, including with the destruction because of the tsunami. I can't give you a precise answer on this question because it's up to the government, which is responsible for that, to deal with the challenges in that. The government has committed itself to auditing ... we'd love to see how the government organizes that.

the Chechen-Aceh twins

2007-06-05T09:44:00.000Z

The authorities push a hard-line religion in a conflict zone: Chechnya looks like Aceh.
The role of religion in the Chechen conflict Ruslan Isayev, special to Prague Watchdog

One of the main reasons for the split in Chechen society which led the Kadyrov family to power is the religious question. It began to receive emphasis at the onset of the second Chechen campaign, and it was precisely through their reluctance to become followers of the radical Islam espoused by some members of the armed resistance that former guerrillas justified their move to the side of the federal forces.

After the first Chechen war the authorities imposed so-called "Sharia law". Sharia courts, headed mostly by callow youths, were set up in every district of the republic. There were canings for the slightest offence, and the lower a person's status, the more terrible was his punishment. Wahhabism, when it arrived in Chechnya, made no compromises, and now the Chechen society is split into two or three different sections.

By nature, Chechens are probably more inclined to secular civil society than to the strict conditions imposed by Islam. The religious movement with the most followers in Chechnya is the wird of Kunta-Khadzhi Kishiyev, the most famous and revered nineteenth century Chechen cleric who lived in the days of the Caucasus War and who preached humility because in his view it laid down the path to true Islam. In modern terms we would describe him as a pacifist. Perceiving him as a threat and apprehensive about the enormous influence he wielded in Chechen society, the tsarist authorities sent him into exile.

Another historical figure who proved to be a considerable thorn in Russia's side was Imam Shamil. After the many long years of the Caucasus War he was finally captured and lived out his years in peace and prosperity. Russia's policies, with their absence of any long-term consistency, have undergone no major changes.

During the period between the two recent Chechen wars there were many clashes between the followers of traditional religion and the radicals – the so-called Wahhabites. The first attempt on the life of Chechen mufti Akhmad Kadyrov was on the outskirts of Grozny in 1998. A powerful landmine detonated on the road where his convoy was passing. There was also a battle in Gudermes between the Yamadayev group, who supported Maskhadov, and the Urus-Martan-based Wahhabites.

The radicals, who justified their actions by holy scriptures that allow the practice of abduction and the taking of concubines for the furtherance of Jihad, began openly to engage in kidnapping. An anti-kidnapping directorate was created in Chechnya, with broad powers to conduct special operations against the abductors. Shadid Bargishev, the commander of this unit, was killed when a bomb exploded directly opposite the squad's headquarters.

The Chechens who adopted an openly pro-Moscow position and from whom the next government was cobbled together, declared an official ban on Wahhabism and other radical tendencies in Islam. Since then its sympathizers have gone into deep hiding or have joined the hard-line armed opposition.

In Chechnya today few hindrances are placed in the way of the true Muslim. The main thing is to avoid making speeches critical of the authorities, and to make sure that one is seen in the company of the murids – the followers of traditional religion, who enjoy the present government's support.

While in the rest of Russia religion is separated from the state, in Chechnya these two concepts are closely aligned. It is not unusual to catch a glimpse of the Moscow-backed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov surrounded in public by a large number of murids. He himself is a member of the zikrist movement which performs an ectastic religious dance, the zikr. Also, almost all the members of the government appear at religious occasions wearing the traditional embroidered skull-caps (tyubeteyka), and many take part in the zikr, too.

The present-day muftiate plays an active role in the republic's social life. Young people are the special focus of the murids' attention. Recently, the Spiritual Directorate of Chechen Muslims – such is the muftiate's name in its Russian form – began issuing licences to all religious institutions.

The sermons read in Chechnya's mosques are also subject to strict control. At Friday prayers the republic's mosques are packed with believers, and after the sermons there are discussions of public life, or the reading aloud of announcements on local affairs. And it is no secret that what is said at these gatherings will reach the ears of the appropriate authorities. If someone commits sedition, he will have to account for it in another place.

Like every government, the Chechen leadership keeps the religious tendencies in society under close scrutiny. By resorting to tough measures now and then, the current Chechen authorities have managed to turn the situation with respect to religion in their favour. But this does not mean that given the right opportunity radicalism, which many observers link to the religious revolution, will not revive in a different form.

People have already learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Though of course, no other chance of acquiring religion is open to them. Anyone who seeks to penetrate deeply into Islam seeks teachers who enjoy respect and whose reputation remains unsullied. Fortunately, Chechnya still has enough of such men.

small girls helping trees (and sand) grow

2007-06-01T15:37:00.000Z

I was sat outside the cafe in Russell Square yesterday, reading about gender-sensitive indicators, and the female parts of two families appeared at the table beside me. Three girls shared between two mothers ran back and fore, bags and stickers at arm's length but definitely in their arms, wanting to play and sit on the grass rather than at the table. Made sense to me.

small girl: I want to do a wee. Can I wee by a tree?
small girl again: Mummy! I want to make a tree grow.
and again: I want to make a tree grow cos I need a wee.

Mummy takes small girl round a corner to find a grateful tree.

small girl's older sister: I need the toilet. I really need it, I need a poo.
girls' non-parent: Just wait till mummy comes back. You can't go by the tree.
sister again: Dogs do that.

It was all rather amusing, particularly as small girl number one was wandering round in a brown patterned dress with a cat top, complete with cat head and ears on the hood.

What was far less amusing was what Oley, the gender project manager for CEF who I am working with at the moment, had told me earlier in the day about girls in a certain country that will go unnamed to protect cultural relativism. She had visited a village and found girls not in school (the focus on the gender project is to make sure girls get to school). When she asked, the parents explained that she had her period so could not go to school. And why? Because girls don't wear underwear, so that when they are married they are always ready when their husbands want them. They don't wear underwear as children to prepare them for this, so therefore cannot wear sanitary towels, or cloths, to deal with their period. Instead they get to sit on the sand.

I am, as Oley knows, a bit of sceptic about the language of 'gender-mainstreaming/ sensitisation/ awareness' etc. But I am certainly not a sceptic about the ethos of ensuring that needs of all children are met so that they can attend school, and particularly ensuring that half the population does not miss a week a month, because they don't have underwear, or because the school toilets (if there are any for girls) don't have doors. There are horrendous statistics about the number of girls not in school, and some of the reasons are as basic as these. Watering trees is the least of their worries.