A 20-year-old Muslim woman is set to become the first beauty queen to participate in the Miss England finals while wearing a hijab. If she wins, Sarah Iftekhar could represent the country at the Miss World competition in China.
Iftekhar, a University of Huddersfield law student from West Yorkshire, will take part in the Miss England beauty contest final at Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire next Tuesday.
While she is not the first Miss England contestant to wear a hijab, she is the first to make it to the final stage of the competition.
Iftekhar, who started her own clothing business at the age of 16, is also using her platform to fundraise for the Miss World charity ‘Beauty with a Purpose.’ The Miss England organization encourages all contestants to raise money and awareness for the charity that aims to help underprivileged children around the world.
Posting on an Instagram account which appears to have since been removed, Iftekhar reportedly wrote about her delight at qualifying for the grand finale of the competition. On her charity GoFundMe page, Iftekhar explained her motivation for entering the beauty contest, writing: “I participated in Miss 2018 in order to show that beauty doesn’t have a definition, everyone is beautiful in their own ways, regardless of their weight, race, color or shape.”
If Iftekhar beats the 49 other beauty queens to claim the crown, she will go on to represent England at Miss World showdown in China.
The Ruler of Kuwait is set to travel to Washington on Monday to meet with US President Donald Trump, on what has been described by the White House as a “working visit,” state news agency KUNA reported.
The White House statement added that the Amir is “leading a Kuwaiti delegation to the United States to discuss trade, investment, and security cooperation,” the report added, without giving further details.
In July Reuters reported that the US was pushing ahead with a bid to create a new security and political alliance with the Gulf Arab states, Egypt and Jordan.
The Trump administration’s hope is that the effort, tentatively known as the Middle East Strategic Alliance, might be discussed at a summit provisionally scheduled for Washington on Oct. 12-13, the sources said.
Muqtada Al-Sadr has formed the biggest bloc in Iraq’s parliament after months of stalled negotiations, Shiite MPs involved in the talks told Arab News on Sunday.
The breakthrough gives Al-Sadr, one of the country’s most influential clerics, and his allies, the exclusive right to form a government.
The agreement came just ahead of the first session of the Iraqi parliament on Monday, when the largest bloc must be registered.
If the alliance holds, it means that Iran and its allies have failed to take the lead in shaping Iraq’s political landscape and would have to join the Al-Sadr alliance if they want to be part of the next government.
Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, who is hoping to extend his position to a second term, is part of the new coalition, but it is unclear whether he will keep his job as he is no longer the only candidate from the alliance.
Al-Sadr sponsored the Sairoon coalition, which won first place in the May election with 54 seats. The cleric has led intensive negotiations over the past three months with almost all the winning political forces.
Al-Sadr, whose followers battled US forces after the 2003 invasion before he turned on Iran, has said he wants to form two parliamentary blocs, in a maverick move to break the cycle of corruption and conflict that plagues Iraq and its politics.
The first is a ruling bloc responsible for the formation and administration of the government. The second plays the role of the opposition and oversees the government’s performance. Both blocs have to include Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties.
Al-Sadr’s coalition will consist of 148 members, including the 54 from Sairoon, 43 from Al-Abadi’s Nassir, 20 from Hikma, 21 from Wattiniya and other small blocs. Negotiations are still ongoing to convince some Kurdish and Sunni blocs to join, negotiators told Arab News.
Al-Sadr and his allies had aimed to form a coalition of at least 200 seats to achieve a comfortable majority in the 329 seat parliament.
“The ruling coalition will form the government in all its areas, including the positions of the president and the speaker, so we seek to achieve a complete separation between the (political) forces that will be with us and the forces that will be in the opposition,” a senior Al-Sadr negotiator told Arab News.
“We will not repeat the previous scenario and we will not allow any forces to participate in the government and in the opposition at the same time.”
Iraq is a battleground for international powers, particularly Iran and the United States since 2003. A stable government would not be formed without the approval of the two nations.
Al-Sadr and his allies, especially Al-Abadi and Ammar Al-Hakim, the head of Hikma, were in a race with the Iranian supported coalitions, including Al-Fattah, which came second, and the State of Law coalition led by Nuri Al-Maliki, the divisive former prime minister.
Al-Sadr has negotiated with all the winning political forces except Al-Maliki and Qais Al-Khazali, the commander of the Iran-backed armed faction Assaib Ahl Al-Haq, who controls 15 seats within Fattah.
“After the registration of the largest bloc, we will expand the coalition to form the ruling bloc, which we seek to include 200-220 seats,” a negotiator with Al-Hikma told Arab News.
“We are keen to have Al-Fattah (alliance) or a large part of it, but it is certain that the State of Law will be in the opposition.”
The four negotiators of the biggest bloc, who spoke to Arab News, said the talks indicate that Badr (which has 23 seat within Al-Fattah) is likely to join the ruling coalition, but only two of them indicated that Assaib Ahl Al-Haq might go to the opposition.
“The problem of the Fattah leaders was Al-Sadr’s insistence on naming Abadi as the coalition’s only candidate for prime minister, but now this problem is no longer in place and we expect that Fattah will join us after the first session,” the Hikma negotiator said.
Both Brett McGurk, the US envoy to Iraq and General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Al-Quds Force, have been personally involved in negotiating with Iraqi political forces in recent weeks.
Al-Abadi, who is supported by the United States, has faced political hurdles since the election, especially in relation towards Iran and its allies in Iraq. Abadi announced his commitment to the financial sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran last month, and has been seeking to limit the influence of Iran over the security institutions by dismissing and freezing several senior officials allied to Iran. Falih Al-Fayadh, the head of the Popular Mobilization Commission and the Iraqi national security adviser was the last one who was dismissed on Friday.
“We will not risk the interests of our people to satisfy Iran or any other country,” Abadi told reporters in Baghdad late on Sunday.
A negotiator for Al-Fattah told Arab News suggested it was too early to say whether they had failed to form the largest coalition instead of Al-Sadr.
“Negotiations are still ongoing and the direction of the results (of the negotiations) could change any minute,” he said.
For those familiar with Iraqi militant Qais Al-Khazali’s long, bombastic speeches and TV appearances, the deluge of information he unloaded upon American interrogators will be of little surprise. Transcripts of these 2007 testimonies were published in copious detail last week, with Al-Khazali revealing all about his relationship with the Quds Force’s Qassem Soleimani, weapons smuggling from Iran, and attacks against American troops. These documents show how Al-Khazali spent hours plotting with his US captors about how to undermine his former patron, Muqtada Al-Sadr. Al-Khazali’s paramilitary colleagues must, meanwhile, be furious at his detailed exposure of their complicity in Tehran-sponsored terrorism.
Admissions about hostage-taking, murder and terrorist attacks should have been sufficient to lock Al-Khazali up permanently. Instead, he was transferred to Iraqi custody in 2010 and released at the behest of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. Al-Khazali and hundreds of other militant leaders freed by Al-Maliki and the Americans immediately returned to paramilitary activities, with many traveling to fight for Bashar Assad.
Al-Khazali’s thugs — known as Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq — were useful to Al-Maliki for breaking up protest camps and attacking political foes. Al-Khazali even capitalized on his relationship with Al-Maliki to enter politics. Al-Maliki’s patronage of sectarian militias, while undermining the military by distributing commanding posts to his corrupt cronies, precipitated the army’s disintegration.
Although Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi supposedly came into existence after Daesh’s 2014 invasion of Mosul, the principal Al-Hashd forces were already active, having played a substantive role in creating the toxic sectarian climate that gave birth to Daesh. These events simply allowed Al-Maliki to formally add these militias to the state payroll.
Barack Obama’s squeamishness about putting boots back on the ground in Iraq inspired him to unofficially franchise the fight against Daesh out to Shiite militants responsible for the deaths of 500 coalition troops and thousands of Iraqis. These paramilitaries proved largely ineffective in urban combat and dedicated their energies to sectarian cleansing campaigns against Sunnis.
America and the West have a blind spot concerning Iranian-sponsored terrorism. Despite Hezbollah being responsible for the 1980s killing and kidnapping of hundreds of Westerners, and its current role in the global narcotics trade, many regard it as a legitimate political actor. Complacent Western mandarins keep assuring me that figures like Hadi Al-Amiri are committed Iraqi nationalists, despite spending four decades serving Tehran’s agenda. Don’t buy into their televized platitudes — look at their actual record of war crimes and terrorism.
US generals David Petraeus, George W. Casey and Stanley A. McChrystal all warned from personal experience what these militants were capable of. So why did nobody take the risk of empowering an army of known terrorists seriously? These militia leaders even boast that “confrontation with the American forces may begin at any moment.” The killing of a US soldier by an Iranian-produced explosive device late last year is an unambiguous message that a return to such attacks is a genuine prospect.
Reports that Iran is supplying offensive ballistic missiles to these militias set a further lethal precedent. These militants also claim to be manufacturing their own rockets. Exactly as happened with Hezbollah, Tehran’s ayatollahs hope to discreetly build up these arsenals, providing the capacity to strike Arab, Israeli or Western cities — just as hundreds of Iranian missiles have been fired into Saudi Arabia by Houthi proxies.
These militias have recently been keeping a relatively low profile to avoid exclusion from the political process. Once a governing coalition is formed, they will feel little such constraint from returning to sectarian killings and striking Western targets. If Al-Hashd factions win Cabinet seats, they will have a pre-eminent position for consolidating their stranglehold on Iraq. If they fail to obtain positions, they will enjoy greater freedom to undermine the status quo through a return to terrorism and insurgency.
After months of America’s Baghdad envoy cozying up to Al-Hashd warlords like Al-Amiri, senior US official Brett McGurk belatedly joined efforts to broker a center ground coalition. Even if Al-Hashd only obtains a foothold in government, such as retaining the interior ministry, this would maintain its dominance over the security forces, while blocking the pressure for paramilitary demobilization.
Soleimani has been energetically sabotaging Al-Sadr’s efforts to form a government, including through undermining Prime Minister Haider Abadi’s electoral alliance. Abadi just sacked National Security Adviser Falih Al-Fayyadh after he went behind Abadi’s back and realigned his faction with Al-Hashd. To win over Kurdish and Sunni parties, Al-Hashd began a unilateral withdrawal from all disputed territories, only for Abadi to prohibit these redeployments. A succession of mysterious explosions recently destroyed weapons depots belonging to Al-Sadr’s “Peace Brigades.”
It is little surprise that the Shiite south recently erupted in protests, with anger directed against the offices of Iranian proxy forces. Impoverished citizens living on top of immense oil reserves are dying of infectious diseases due to a lack of clean water, while politicians compete over ministerial posts offering the most potential for corrupt gain.
Militant encroachment into the economic and reconstruction sector, and social, theological and propagandistic activities are further steps toward the “Hezbollahization” of Iraq. These proxies have also declared their readiness for deployment as a regional force. For decades, Lebanese citizens and foreign diplomats bought into the fiction that Hezbollah served a national agenda as a bulwark against Israel. With Hezbollah now acting as a mercenary force in Syria and dominating the state infrastructure, it is perhaps too late for Lebanon. However, there is still time to prise Baghdad away from Tehran’s embrace.
As the reimposed US sanctions bite, Iran is consolidating its regional gains and mobilizing its proxies in an offensive posture. These sanctions threaten to make Tehran’s leadership even more ruthless in exploiting its transnational paramilitary assets. Is the world ready for when veteran terrorists like Al-Khazali, Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah stage a return to what they do best?
*Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.
The Universal Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Bartholemew I, has decided to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, according to a Greek church site, giving a major victory to Kyiv and inflicting an even larger geopolitical defeat on the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kremlin.
Yevstraty added that the headline in the Greek source could be translated as “The Die is Cast! Ukraine is Receiving Autocephaly.” He said that Patriarch Kirill left his meeting with Bartholemew “in not the best spirit.” But Ukrainians are celebrating what will be a major victory for them.
A spokesman for the Universal Patriarch told Orthodoxia.info that “no one wants yet another split,” something Moscow has threatened if Constantinople proceeded. “Everyone wants unity in the Church.” But he added the Universal Patriarchate won’t be guided in its action by “threats from anyone,” a clear rebuff to Moscow.
According to the spokesman, the Universal Patriarch took the decision about offering autocephaly to the Ukrainian Church in April and is now in the process of implementing it. And in the months since, Constantinople has signaled that it intends to meet Ukraine’s request although it has not provided a specific date.
It is important to recognize what the grant of autocephaly in Ukraine will and won’t do. It will elevate the status of the Ukrainian church and underscore its separation from Moscow, but it won’t end the existence of the Moscow Patriarchate’s network of churches in Ukraine, although it will undoubtedly cause many of them to shift their subordination to Kyiv.
Most important, it will undermine the Moscow Patriarchate’s claim to speak for all Orthodox on the former Soviet space and cost the church itself a great deal of its income given that half of its existing congregations are in Ukraine rather than in Moscow. And it will call into question Moscow’s claim to be the largest Orthodox church in the world.
Obviously, Moscow both religious and secular isn’t going to accept this without a fight. But the decision of the Universal Patriarch means that Ukraine has won a major victory, one that it is likely to build on in the future and one that may serve as a model for other post-Soviet states as far as Orthodoxy is concerned.
How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts – essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function – may have existed when life began.
Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser postulated that life began on iron- and sulfur-containing rocks in the ocean. Wächtershäuser and others predicted that short peptides would have bound metals and served as catalysts of life-producing chemistry, according to study co-author Vikas Nanda, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Human DNA consists of genes that code for proteins that are a few hundred to a few thousand amino acids long. These complex proteins – needed to make all living-things function properly – are the result of billions of years of evolution. When life began, proteins were likely much simpler, perhaps just 10 to 20 amino acids long. With computer modeling, Rutgers scientists have been exploring what early peptides may have looked like and their possible chemical functions, according to Nanda.
The scientists used computers to model a short, 12-amino acid protein and tested it in the laboratory. This peptide has several impressive and important features. It contains only two types of amino acids (rather than the estimated 20 amino acids that synthesize millions of different proteins needed for specific body functions), it is very short and it could have emerged spontaneously on the early Earth in the right conditions. The metal cluster at the core of this peptide resembles the structure and chemistry of iron-sulfur minerals that were abundant in early Earth oceans. The peptide can also charge and discharge electrons repeatedly without falling apart, according to Nanda, a resident faculty member at the Center for Advanced Technology and Medicine.
“Modern proteins called ferredoxins do this, shuttling electrons around the cell to promote metabolism,” said senior author Professor Paul G. Falkowski, who leads Rutgers’ Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology Laboratory. “A primordial peptide like the one we studied may have served a similar function in the origins of life.”
Falkowski is the principal investigator for a NASA-funded ENIGMA project led by Rutgers scientists that aims to understand how protein catalysts evolved at the start of life. Nanda leads one team that will characterize the full potential of the primordial peptide and continue to develop other molecules that may have played key roles in the origins of life.
With computers, Rutgers scientists have smashed and dissected nearly 10,000 proteins and pinpointed four “Legos of life” – core chemical structures that can be stacked to form the innumerable proteins inside all organisms. The small primordial peptide may be a precursor to the longer Legos of life, and scientists can now run experiments on how such peptides may have functioned in early-life chemistry.
(RFE/RL) — Serbia’s president and Macedonia’s prime minister have expressed satisfaction with the implementation of a joint border project aimed at facilitating the transit of people and goods between the two countries.
Aleksadar Vucic of Serbia and Macedonia’s Zoran Zaev hailed the project, dubbed One-Stop Shop, when they met at the Tabanovce-Presevo border crossing on September 2.
Speaking at a joint press conference, Zaev said transit through the border crossing will be significantly facilitated thanks to the establishment of one single customs office for the two neighbors.
Hailing the friendship between Macedonia and Serbia, he voiced hope that the same approach of joint border management will in the future be implemented in other crossings between Macedonia and Serbia.
“The project means that we will have a joint custom post that will facilitate cross-border travel for tourists and significantly reduce waiting time at the crossings,” Macedonia’s prime minister said.
“The project is important so that people do not waste time and do not stay too long,” Vucic said. “This is very important for the economy of both countries and will encourage tourists to go through our countries.”
Zaev said the project will officially be inaugurated after the two countries’ customs administrations, Interior Ministries, phytosanitary offices, and veterinary services sign bilateral agreements.
Vucic said he expected the inauguration to take place before then end of the year.
Human rights groups in the Philippines on Friday condemned President Rodrigo Duterte for joking that the alarming rate of sexual assaults in his hometown was linked to the area’s high number of attractive women.
Duterte stirred controversy after a speech Thursday night in the central city of Mandaue, where he appeared to make fun of a recent national police report that placed Davao, his southern hometown, as the city with the highest number of reported rape cases in the country.
“They said there are many rape cases in Davao. As long as there are many beautiful women, there will be more rape cases,” Duterte said.
He also appeared to have trivialized the crime, emphasizing that an offender “never does it on the first try” or when a woman fights him off.
Duterte cracked the joke after a report by the Philippine National Police found that Davao – which he had often boasted as a crime-free city – had 42 reported rape cases for the second quarter of this year, the highest number among major cities in the predominantly Catholic nation.
By contrast, the nation’s capital Manila, which had seen the most number of deaths in Duterte’s anti-drug war, recorded only 32 cases during the same period.
Duterte has a penchant for controversial comments, and this is not the first time that his racy comments had caused controversy.
When he was campaigning for the presidency, he joked about the gang rape of an Australian missionary worker during a prison riot in Davao, where Duterte grew up and later served as mayor and congressman. He said that the woman was attractive, and that as a mayor, he should have been first on queue to rape the victim.
“I was angry because she was raped … but she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first,” he said. “What a waste.”
Last year, he told troops to rape women and that he would pardon them if they were caught and convicted. He followed this up by telling them to shoot women fighters of the communist New People’s Army in the vagina, rendering them useless as a woman and a mother.
During a trip to India earlier this year, he joked about using virgins as a lure to tourists, and during a visit to South Korea, he kissed a Filipina on the lips in front of hundreds of well-wishers.
On Friday, presidential spokesman Harry Roque insisted that Duterte was only joking when he made the rape comment, emphasizing that the Philippine leader regarded members of the opposite sex highly, having appointed several women to cabinet posts.
“I don’t think we should give too much weight on what the president says by way of a joke,” he said.
He noted that the standard of what is offensive is more liberal in the south compared to Manila.
But a coalition of women’s groups, called #BabaeAko (I Am Woman), said Duterte’s comments were inexcusable, arguing that “the misogynist Duterte has added insult to the scares of rape survivors.”
“Rape is all about the exercise of power against women. Rape is a heinous crime based on entitlement, on the false assumption that women are chattels, to be owned, to be punished according to the whims of men,” it said.
Women’s group Gabriela accused Duterte of shifting the blame on women. “Women are raped because of misogynists like Duterte,” it said.
“We reiterate that rape is a crime punishable under our laws, and it occurs only because of the rapist mentality being perpetrated by no less than the president,” Gabriela said. “We strongly condemn this latest flamboyant display of misogyny, which places more Filipino women at risk of rape.”
A new discovery by Washington State University scientists could help grape growers roll back a devastating virus that withers vines and shrivels harvests.
Named for how it curls the leaves of infected plants, grapevine leafroll disease costs growers millions of dollars in lost vines and productivity. Until now, no one has been able to replicate one of the main culprits behind the disease, a virus called grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 — leafroll 3, for short.
For the first time, researchers in WSU’s Department of Plant Pathology have found a way to clone leafroll 3, opening the door for experiments and treatments to protect valuable Washington vineyards.
WSU research associate Sridhar Jarugula and professor Naidu Rayapati detailed the innovation in the latest issue of Virology. In a three-year project partly funded by the Washington State Wine Commission, they worked with colleagues at the University of Florida’s Citrus Research and Education Center to successfully replicate the virus, and are now revealing its secrets.
Costly contagion
“Leafroll disease is the most complex and destructive viral disease of wine grapes, both here in Washington and throughout the world,” said Jarugula, lead author of the Virology paper.
Grapevine leaf roll disease is spread by mealybugs and scale insects, which transmit the virus as they feed on vines. Once in a vineyard, it’s nearly impossible to control, except by roguing, or uprooting and destroying infected vines.
“Once you have a sick plant, it stays sick for the rest of its life,” explains Rayapati.
Infected plants don’t grow well, yielding small, uneven, poor-quality fruit. Eventually, they won’t yield any grapes at all.
“It’s a major concern,” added Rayapati. “And we don’t have any way to control it.”
WSU researchers want to know why it’s so destructively effective.
“We need a way to manipulate this virus, tease out its genes and understand how it works,” Rayapati said. “The challenge is that leafroll 3 is one of the most difficult viruses to work with,” due in part to its large genome, one of the biggest among plant viruses.
“We can’t manually inoculate this virus from a sick plant to a healthy one,” he added. “Because we don’t have that luxury, we had to find another option.”
His team set out to replicate leafroll 3’s entire genome in the lab. They partnered with a team of Florida researchers led by plant pathologists William O. Dawson and Siddarame Gowda, who had already successfully replicated the citrus tristeza virus, a cousin of leafroll virus that happens to have the largest genome ever discovered in a plant virus.
Clone could lead to treatments
Jarugula spent more than a year in Florida perfecting the technique for leafroll. The team successfully made a DNA copy of the virus’ RNA genome, then infiltrated it into a tobacco plant with the help of an Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium that can transfer foreign DNA into plants. They found that the viral DNA copy replicated inside the plant cell was forming new virus particles.
“It’s a test tube copy of the virus,” said Rayapati. “Now, we can use reverse genetics — working backwards by seeing how it expresses its genes physically — to find out how it works.”
The Prosser team is now working to see if they can infect a grapevine with the virus. Once the team understands how the virus and its genes create symptoms of disease, they can create defenses against them, such as an inoculant, or make a designer virus to deliver genes that help plants resist disease.
“Our research will lead to new strategies that control grapevine leafroll disease in ways that really benefit our grape industry,” said Jarugula.
“This whole process itself is a breakthrough,” added Rayapati. “This resource will help us build a better understanding of leafroll 3, and better defenses against it. We can make an enemy into an ally.”
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei reiterated his last month remarks that the chances of a war breaking out against Iran are zero, yet he urged the country’s armed forces to enhance their deterrence power.
“Political calculations show that there is no chance for a military war, yet the armed forces are needed to boost their equipment and human capabilities vigilantly and through an efficient and agile management,” Ayatollah Khamenei said at a meeting with senior commanders and officials of the Air Defense Base of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s army here in Tehran on Sunday.
The Iranian leader termed the Army’s Air Defense Base a very sensitive section of the Iranian Armed Forces that stands at the forefront of confrontation against enemy, and laid emphasis on the need for the enhancement of the capabilities and preparedness of the Air Defense Base.
In similar comments last month, Ayatollah Khamenei dismissed speculation about war with the US, reiterating that neither Iran is willing to initiate war against Washington nor does the US enjoy the self-confidence to open fire at Tehran late in August.
“Recently, the US officials have been talking blatantly about us. Beside sanctions, they talk about war and negotiations. They talk about a spirit of war to frighten the cowards,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, addressing a large number of Iranian people from all walks of life in Tehran.
“In the matter of negotiations, they play a poor game. One of them says, negotiations with preconditions, another one says, negotiations without preconditions. Let me address the people on the matter in a few words: There will be no war, nor will we negotiate with the US. This is the gist of the word that all the Iranian people should know. The US has now suggested negotiations; this is not new. This has existed since the beginning of the revolution,” he underlined.
Ayatollah Khamenei explained to the audience why Iran has decided not to negotiate with the United States, and asserted, “Why won’t we negotiate? The US negotiations formula is this; because the Americans rely on money and power, they consider negotiations as a commercial exchange; when the US wants to negotiate with a party, they determine their main goals, and then they won’t retreat even a step away from these goals; they demand the other party to pay a privilege immediately; and if the other party refuses to comply with them, they start to make a fuss, so the other party would surrender; the US itself does not pay anything in exchange for what it takes from the other party; the US only makes strong promises in order to enchant the other party with mere promises; in the final stage, after receiving all the immediate advantages, the US breach their own promises.”
“This is the method of the American negotiations. Now should we negotiate with such a fraudulent government? The JCPOA was a clear example of this,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, and added, “Even if we ever – impossible as it is – negotiated with the US, it would never ever be with the current US administration.”
Ayatollah Khamenei banned any negotiations with the US, saying, “The Islamic Republic can negotiate with the US only when it reaches the power and sovereignty that would nullify US’s pressures and domineering efforts; when those efforts have no effect on Iran. Today this is not the case. Thus, I will ban negotiations with the US just as Imam (Khomeini) did.”
The Leader of the Islamic Revolution slammed US rhetoric towards Iran, and stated, “The US has become more blatant and ruder in their rhetoric over the past few months. Previously they were not so observant of diplomatic etiquette in their speech either; however, they have become ruder towards all nations.”
Ayatollah Khamenei drew an example of US’s blatancy in actions and rhetoric, and said, “The example of it is that during the last week, the Saudis committed two crimes: attacking a hospital and attacking a school bus with 40 or 50 innocent children on board. Do you have 8 or 9 year-olds at home? This is a dramatic tragedy. It truly breaks one’s heart. The news shook the global conscience. But how did the US react? Instead of condemning the crime, the US said, “We have strategic relations with Saudi Arabia.” Is this not shamelessness? What the US president did to two or three thousand children by separating them from their parents, putting them in cages because they were immigrants is an unprecedented crime in history.”
Ayatollah Khamenei also addressed the recent economic problems of the country, calling “internal factors” as the source of the crisis.
“Scholars and many officials believe that the problem is internal. The problem of gold coin and foreign currency unfolded due to negligence and mismanagement,” he said.
Ayatollah Khamenei stressed that sanctions may play a role in creating the current economic situation, but that domestic factors are stronger role players on the matter.
“Not that sanctions are not playing a role, but the main reasons lie in the measures taken within the country. If actions are taken more efficiently, more prudently, more swiftly and more firmly, sanctions cannot have much effect and they can be resisted.”
“A stupid man tells the Iranian nation that our government spends our money on Syria. This is while his boss – the US president – has admitted that he has spent 7 trillion dollars in the Middle East without gaining anything in return,” he said.
The Iranian leader further dismissed any chance for war between Tehran and Washington, saying, “No war will occur as, like before, we will never initiate a war; the US won’t launch a war either because they know that it would certainly end to their detriment; this is because the Islamic Republic and Iranian nation have proved that any transgressor will be stricken a bigger blow. Even Reagan, the then President of the US – who was more powerful than the recent presidents – secretly sent McFarlane to Tehran for negotiations but he had to return after 24 hours without any outcome.”
US Army Gen. John M. Nicholson passed command of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission and U.S. Forces Afghanistan to Army Gen. Austin S. Miller during a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday.
Nicholson has been commander in Afghanistan since March 2016 and is the longest-serving NATO commander in the country.
Miller comes to Afghanistan after serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Both men served in the country previously.
The Long War
Nicholson said Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. From the breakup of the monarchy and occupation by the Soviets to civil war and the Taliban sheltering of al-Qaida and allowing the terror group to launch its attacks on the U.S., the country has been at arms. “It’s time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” Nicholson said.
“[Afghan] President [Ashraf] Ghani’s courageous decision to announce a ceasefire over Eid al Fitr unleashed the strong call of the Afghan people for peace,” he said. “The entire world has witnessed this, and we support it. I believe some ofthe4 Taliban want peace also, but they are being encouraged to keep fighting. To the Taliban I say, you don’t need to keep killing your fellow Afghans. You don’t need to keep killing your fellow Muslims. The time for peace is now.”
Nicholson called on the Taliban to listen to the voice of their own people and enter serious negotiations with the Afghan government. He said as long as the Taliban continues to fight, Afghan government forces will continue to stand up to them. “But make no mistake, until you are willing to begin talking, we will keep fighting,” he said. “The brave young men and women of the Afghan security forces will always have our full support.”
He noted that the coalition in Afghanistan continues to grow. Nations around the world have pledged funds and personnel to help Afghanistan. “These nations are here on a conditions basis, not a calendar,” Nicholson said. “They do this because peace in Afghanistan is in everyone’s best interests.”
Common Cause
After accepting the command flags, Miller said it is an honor to be standing with representatives of 41 nations that are part of the coalition. “How often do we come together for a common cause,” he said in his remarks. “The world recognizes that Afghanistan cannot be a safe haven for terrorism. The world recognizes that we cannot fail. I know this has been a long fight and it has been generational. For us, for the Afghan people.
“I know the reason we are fighting and I know why we are here. And I know terrorist seek safe haven to export murder and attack the innocent and attack everybody’s way of life,” he said.
Miller said the Afghan people must use courage and leadership to push forward. The coalition will help, but Afghans must be the catalyst for peace. “After 17 years of war for this coalition, there have been many sacrifices,” he said. “Our NATO and coalition members have sacrificed much. Our Afghan partners and their people sacrifice daily in too great numbers and I offer my deepest condolences and respect to all of Afghanistan fallen and wounded.”
The general said that to be successful in the very tough fight in Afghanistan, all must continue to learn and adapt. “We must be wary of bias and easy conclusions: They don’t exist here,” Miller said. “I challenge all of us to always increase your understanding of the complexities, be adaptive, and as you execute, be relentless.”
Judge Caroline Lebbos, of the 12th Federal Court of Curitiba, ordered former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to pay a fine totaling $7.4 million to compensate for damage and procedural costs stemming from the case involving the triplex apartment complex in coastal Guarujá, São Paulo.
Lula was taken to jail after he was found guilty of having received the apartment complex as bribe from construction company OAS in exchange for being favored in contracts with state-controlled oi giant Petrobras.
Lebbos gave Lula 15 days to propose the splitting of the payment in installments, if he so desires. Most of the amount is due to compensation for damage ($7.1 million), followed by a $310.8 thousand fine, and procedural costs ($23.75).
Gleisi Hoffmann
In the same ruling, the judge banned Senator and Workers’ Party (PT) President Gleisi Hoffmann from serving as Lula’s counsel. She was listed by Lula’s defense as his representative in court, but federal prosecutors viewed it as an attempt to break prison rules and requested that she be removed from the position.
The judge argued that, under the law, a member of the country’s legislative branch could not be brought into the case as defense, as Petrobras is a government-controlled firm.
As for Lula’s request to have his right to vote guaranteed in the upcoming elections, Lebbos said she has submitted the petition to electoral authorities.
Brazilian Ambassador to Tehran Rodrigo de Azeredo Santos said his country has allocated $1.2 billion to boost cooperation with Iran in diverse economic fields.
Speaking at a meeting attended by the head of Iran-Brazil Chamber of Commerce, Kaveh Zargaran, and some other high-ranking officials in Tehran on Sunday, Santos voiced Brasilia’s willingness to continue economic cooperation with Tehran even after the US sanctions are re-imposed on the Islamic Republic in November.
“To that end, we have found some solutions in the talks with the Iranian side, which will be implemented,” he added.
Brazil has allocated $1.2 billion of credit lines to economic activists in the Latin American country to cooperate with Iran, the diplomat said, adding that the credit line will be opened by the Brazilian Development Bank.
Iran has enhanced political contacts with foreign countries on the ways to save the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) after the US exit.
On May 8, the US president pulled his country out of the JCPOA, which was achieved in Vienna in 2015 after years of negotiations among Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).
Following the US exit, Iran and the remaining parties to the JCPOA launched talks to save the accord.
Meanwhile, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has underlined that any decision to keep the JCPOA running without the US should be conditional on “practical guarantees” from the Europeans.
The proposed partition of Kosovo would negate the day-to-day realities on the ground, particularly of those Kosovo Serbs living outside the four northern municipalities. It would also set a dangerous precedent that could legitimise further proposals for ‘population exchanges’ based on ethnic parameters.
By Francesco Trupia*
The much-discussed Kosovo-Serbia relations have entered into a yet another controversial chapter. The proposal for national “border adjustment” – which might potentially reallocate Serb-majority areas of North Kosovo to Serbia and south Serbia’s Albanian-majority areas of the Preševo Valley (e.g., Preševo, Medveđa and Bujanovac) to Kosovo – has resurfaced, despite both sides apparently disagreeing.
A dichotomy of opinions has divided institutions and organizations from Kosovo, Serbia and beyond. Some welcome the proposal for “boundary correction”, arguing that it might be reached through genuine will from below. Others, however, have warned that further “territorial swaps” based on ethnicity will impinge upon human security. The idea that a territorial swap could be beneficial for both communities in Kosovo and Serbia remains highly debate.
Splitting states along ethnic lines and thereby undermining the idea of multiculturalism would not only be deeply problematic for Kosovo-Serbia relations, but also perilous for the region’s future. A territorial modification might delegitimise Kosovo’s recognition and its sovereignty, with five EU member states refusing to recognise it due to their own fears of territorial partitions. In addition, a re-allotment of north Kosovo would reward Belgrade’s political interference, including through the maintenance of a parallel system (e.g., dual citizenship, health, education and taxation). In order words, a territorial exchange will not pacify the majority-minority relations nor the power struggle over Serb-majority municipalities. Partition would take for granted the existence of monolithic communities within which a sense of belonging cannot compromise in order to co-exist with other communities.
Furthermore, claims over a particular territory implies the narrow idea that a given community cannot be understood as plural, dynamic and in the process of change. Since 1999, there have been nuanced changes on the local level. While Belgrade has always imposed a frozen picture of Kosovo Serbs in order to claim legitimacy over Kosovo itself, Pristina has generally depicted the national identity of Kosovo Serbs in relation to (often violent) attempts to strive for, or secure, national claims over the country.
However, a look “from below” at Serb-majority areas demonstrates show how Kosovo Serbs do not only live in north Kosovo and cannot be depicted as a tout court pro-Belgrade community. In north Kosovo, Serbs have always been the vessel of Belgrade, which managed to tighten its presence and limit interaction with Kosovo’s institutions in Pristina. Second, and most importantly, Kosovo Serbs in the north are more radical than their “compatriots” living in south of the Ibar, such as in the almost-urban areas of Štrpce or within the de facto enclave of Velika Hoča.
Within Serb-majority centrally (such as Gračanica/Graçanica), in the South (e.g., Štrpce/Shtërpca) and the East (e.g., around Novo Brdo/ Novobërdë, Parteš/Partesh), however, Serbs have historically had a different environment and atmosphere. Although they remain tightly connected with their own national identity, which is reproduced and performed through everyday practices, it does not have negative impacts on everyday coexistence with Albanians, Bosniaks, and so on. In Eastern Kosovo, for instance, inter-ethnic attendance at public school is quite common, in which not just Serbian and Albanian language are taught, but even Bosnian and Turkish. Among these, other small Serbian communities such as Velika Hoča, near Orahovac/Rahoveci, shows a high level of political dissatisfaction toward Belgrade’s policy. The continuous attention paid to north Kosovo Serbs has shaped a both sense of alienation and disillusion based on the understanding that they will be left adrift if partition were to occur.
Therefore, the a priori idea that a potential “territorial swap” will come to “adjust” Kosovo-Serbia kin-state relations and internal inter-ethnic relations is distant from people’s real needs. Kosovo’s partitioning would only cover the legal-political failure and diplomatic ineptitude of those élites that have done very little in terms of reconciliation and normalisation. Hence, the concrete and growing perception of political disaffection among Kosovo Serbs – at least those living outside north Kosovo – who have recently begun to even criticise the parallel system (e.g., passport, taxation, school), cannot not so easily convince scholars and experts that Kosovo Serbs share views and behavioural patterns of a discourse that has been ascribed them.
At the very end, the potential result of a territorial swap could only legitimise further proposals for “population exchanges” based on ethnic parameters. This will give credence to the (mistaken) idea that inter-ethnic coexistence has been until day-present, and will thus remain so, a concern for the Balkan Peninsula, whose kin-states policies have failed because of people’s incapacity to well-live together instead of élites’ unwillingness to establish peace within and across the region itself.
*Francesco Trupia is a PhD Candidate at St Kliment Ohridski Sofia University, is currently contributing to the project “Building Knowledge on Kosovo v.2.0” for Kosovo Foundation for Open Society – KFOS.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of TransConflict.
An aggressive sign of an affluent society can usually be gauged by its invidious misuse of its privilege. Poverty is deemed necessary, and the rich must try to understand it. To be privileged is to be guilty, a tickling of the conscience as the pennies pile up and the assets grow; and from that premise, efforts must be made to give shape to the forgotten, and, in most cases, the invisible.
To be guilty is a spur for works that supposedly highlight those nagging reasons for feeling guilty. You might supply donations. You can become a philanthropist. You can join a charity. Obscenely, you can become a creature of mocking persuasion, a person of pantomime: you can assume the position of a poor person, a homeless person, and pretend to be him. And let it be filmed.
“When I was given the opportunity to spend 10 days experiencing different forms of homelessness for an SBS documentary, I jumped at the chance to understand more about a crisis that now sees more than 116,000 Australians homeless on any given night.” So go the words of veteran thespian Cameron Daddo, a person who never explains how understanding Sydney’s poverty leads to results, other than spending time on the screen and proving rather awkward to boot.
The individuals involved in the tawdry Australian spectacle Filthy Rich & Homeless have various reasons for participating. They have a chance, not merely to appear before the cameras, but to explore another part of Sydney. What matters for Skye Leckie is the anger of authenticity. Socialite that she is, she does not believe that her participation in the venture is “poverty porn” despite being the very same creature who benefits from having a good quotient of poor around. “Those who say it’s stunt TV are being totally ignorant to the homeless situation out there.” This is a delicious way of self-justification, a positioned blow to excuse how her exploitation of a social condition is entirely justified by a mysterious, holy insight. Her pantomime, in other words, is heralded as genuine.
Benjamin Law, author and very much an identity beacon (those things help these days), played the cool cat. In such ensembles, it’s always good to have the confidently composed, the person who won’t fall for the pathos of the show. “I went to Filthy Rich and Homeless being adamant that it was only 10 days, and that I wasn’t going to cry – I felt it’d almost be insulting to people who were actually homeless.” So goes his justification for actually participating in the project: he would hold firm, stay calm, keep his tear ducts dry. “But when it’s demonstrated that this could easily be a family member, and someone you love, I couldn’t not be affected.”
The show is sugary fodder for social media masturbation, an ever so prodding tease for those who feel pangs of stirring guilt. Nonsense about “genuine compassion” and “empathy” whirl through the chattersphere, with a disconcerting gurgle of approval at the program. The implication is clear: like true porn, it produces a release, an orgiastic sensation. The poor are sociological wank fodder. In the aftermath is the little death, or should be. Such programs float on the froth of sentiment, and last longer than they should.
There are shades of the carnivalesque, as Michael Bakhtin called it, in this exercise. The tradition of the carnival, he explained, suggested alternate worlds, inverted ones where social orders might, just temporarily, be suspended. The performer, and the audience, would become one. Communal dialogue might emerge. But the participants will eventually go home; the nobility will revert to their high standing, and the poor will undress and return to their squalid, putrid existence.
Feudalism and tribalism may have made their official exit in the historical textbooks, but we still find stirrings of old custom in the media industry. The poor are there to be mocked; the vulnerable are there to be, in some form, exploited. Gone is the exaggerated chivalric code, as meagre as it was (keeping people in place), and the presumption of charity. In its place is the clawing, scraping urge of the media moguls and networks keen to capitalise upon a condition, a disability, a drawback. Poverty is visual and lucrative for all – except the impoverished.
An obvious flaw in this project – several wealthy members of society burying themselves in the poor underbelly – is contrived anonymity. The monarchs supposedly travel incognito amongst the slums. The participants supposedly become unknown for a time. The King and Queen scrap around the hovels. But who recognises them? Presumably everybody. Not having a home, or living in indigence, doesn’t mean not having access to the saturation coverage called the World Wide Web. The camera crews might be a giveaway, the very reality of which produces distortions in the interviews.
The grotesque scene uncovers itself, and the tears, spilling on cue, supply catharsis. “Most interesting,” noted the Sydney Morning Herald, “is just how little time on the street it takes for them to be reduced to tears.” To be fair, they only had ten days, so the performance clock was ticking. The filthy rich feel justified – they acknowledged pain and desperation. The poor, their role achieved, can simply go on living.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman invited Japan to participate in the two defence industrial production corridors1 in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh during the Annual Defence Ministerial Dialogue held in August 2018. These corridors are aimed at boosting the defence ecosystem and reinforcing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature Make in India initiative. The Make in India campaign intersects with the unfolding reorientation in Japan’s post-war security posture and its easing of the arms export policy exemplified by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s outlining of the Three Principles on Transfer of Defence Equipment and Technology2 in April 2014. Since then, India and Japan have engaged in complex deliberations on the prospects of sourcing Japanese defence technology, joint development and production of defence equipment.
Within the framework of India-Japan Vision 2025, the political leadership has designed an “action-oriented partnership”, which, among other things, urged defence technology cooperation including co-development and co-production. India’s objective is to benefit from Japan’s technological prowess in its pursuit of defence modernisation and diversifying its sources of acquisition. And Japan’s goal is to revive its waning defence industry as it comes out of the decades-old export ban by participating in international joint development and production projects. It is crucial for Japan to participate in international joint development projects, which is key to sustaining its own defence production and technology base as outlined in the June 2014 Strategy on Defence Production and Technological Bases. In this regard, the Strategy refers to fostering cooperation with India as well as with the US, European countries including UK and France, Australia and Southeast Asian nations.3
Accordingly, defence and security cooperation has been identified as the foremost out of five priority areas for conceiving “new signature projects”.4 Japan has been acknowledged as a “privileged partner”5 in the Make in India drive and the leadership of the two countries has professed defence technology cooperation as having the potential to “emerge as a key pillar of bilateral defence relations”.6 The Agreement Concerning Transfer of Defence Equipment and Technology Cooperation and the Agreement Concerning Security Measures for the Protection of Classified Military Information were signed in December 2015, redefining the latitude for defence cooperation and paving the way for joint research, development and/or production projects.
Defence and security cooperation constitutes a core component of the India-Japan Special Strategic Partnership. Since the 2008 Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation, bilateral cooperation has revolved around high level defence exchanges and the expanding scope and complexity of joint exercises including anti-submarine warfare, mine counter-measures, counter-terrorism, and so on. While robust maritime cooperation constitutes the mainstay of India-Japan security cooperation in bilateral, trilateral and multilateral frameworks, trade in defence equipment and technology by way of joint research, co-development and co-production is a relatively new area. With the aim of supporting equipment collaboration with defence and dual-use technologies between the governments and defence industries as well as between businesses, the India-Japan Defence Industry Forum was instituted in 2017,7 drawing upon the efforts of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistical Agency (ATLA) and India’s Department of Defence Production (DDP). Demonstrating bilateral commitment, India and Japan unveiled a new chapter in defence cooperation with their maiden project — Cooperative Research in the Area of Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV)/Robotics — agreed to by the two defence ministries in July 2018. Following the bilateral agreement on defence equipment and technology, technical discussion involving ATLA and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) intensified and culminated in the first cooperative research project on the Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) Based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Augmentation Technology for UGV/robotics.8
In the run up to the Defence Ministerial Dialogue held earlier this month, the fourth Joint Working Group on Defence Equipment and Technology Cooperation (JWG-DETC) was hosted in July with the goal of identifying particular items and areas for cooperation in joint development and production. The JWG-DETC was instituted in February 2015, following the landmark shift in Japan’s arms export policy referred to earlier.9 Prime Minister Modi has encouraged Japan to participate in Project 75(I) which seeks to collaboratively build six diesel-electric submarines with air-independent propulsion (AIP) capability for the Indian Navy. The Navy issued a request-for-information (RFI) in July 2017 to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, manufacturers of the ultra-quiet Soryu class submarine, as well as to other foreign manufacturers including ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, Naval Group, Navantia, Saab and Rubin Design Bureau-Amur Shipyard. However, these two Japanese companies have refrained from responding to the RFI perhaps because of Japan’s experience with the long and difficult negotiations concerning the state-of-the-art Utility Seaplane Mark 2 (US-2) amphibian aircraft, manufactured by ShinMaywa Industries.
Thus, while broad agreement at the political leadership level has been easier to achieve, negotiations relating to defence equipment and technology cooperation have proved to be rather difficult, shaped as these are by a complex interplay of critical variables like cost-competitiveness, technology transfer and domestic politics. India’s quest of defence modernisation and diversifying its acquisition sources present opportunities for Japanese defence industry, which, prior to 2014, focused solely on the domestic market given the value of tsutsushimu,10 entailing restrictions on arms transfers which barred Japan from entering the international defence market and participating in joint development and production of arms. But navigating India’s opaque defence procurement11 and offset policies is a colossal challenge for Japan, which is relatively new to the fiercely competitive international defence market. Further, in cost-sensitive markets like India, policymakers are guided by variables such as cost-competitiveness, technology transfer, setting up of a manufacturing base in the country, and job creation. But these determinants are not unique to India. Japan’s attempt to sell its 4,000-ton Soryu-class diesel-electric attack stealth submarine to Australia, despite Abe’s determined diplomatic campaign, also failed because of some of these variables in addition to Canberra’s technical and military priorities. Even after Tony Abbott’s departure and his successor’s decision to open up the deal for bidding, Japan refused to compete because of its hesitation to share technology12 and aversion to build the submarines in Adelaide.13
India is indeed interested in sourcing the US-2 amphibian aircraft, which would be useful for patrolling the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and for conducting search and rescue operations in the Indian Ocean. But concluding the first defence equipment cooperation with Japan under the Make in India initiative through government to government route has proved difficult due to the complexities of pricing, offset clause and technology transfer. Thus, despite the MoU signed between Mahindra Defence and Shinmaywa Industries in April 2018, the press statement issued after the latest meeting between Defence Minister Sitharaman and her Japanese counterpart Itsunori Onodera refrained from updating the status of the imminent deal.
Meanwhile, the business lobbies in both countries have argued in favour of fostering high-technology cooperation. SIPRI data reflects that India has emerged as the largest importer of major arms between 2012 and 2016, accounting for 13 per cent of the global total. The India-Japan Business Leaders Forum has frequently underscored the need for robust engagement in “high-technology areas in the defence and security sectors”.14 And, the Japan Business Federation or Keidanren has prioritised India, besides the US, Europe and Southeast Asia, while enunciating the importance of promoting equipment and technology cooperation with foreign countries.15 Japanese defence enterprises visited India in August 2018 following up on the maiden India-Japan Defence Industry Forum hosted in Tokyo last September to pursue cooperation in high-technology items.
Japan has projected success stories for Make in India in other sectors with the Suzuki-Toshiba-Denso joint venture for automotive lithium-ion battery packs aimed at the domestic and global markets and Made-in-India Suzuki Baleno export to the international market. But in the defence sector foreign companies will have to be incentivised to set up defence manufacturing bases in India. India is doing business with the US, Russia, Israel and others for a while but Japan is a relatively new partner. Both sides need to invest more energy in developing a robust understanding about each other’s defence sector, and grasp the cultural differences and explore prospects for future cooperation. Cultural sensitivities are important while dealing with Japan. For Japan, defence equipment and technology cooperation is more than just arms trade. It is a very important component in Prime Minister Abe’s larger security conceptualization of Japan’s Proactive Contribution to Peace.
It is also important to note that a revised arms export policy in itself is not sufficient to promote defence cooperation. Despite a robust civilian manufacturing base and being a repository of dual-use technology, cost-competitiveness and relative inexperience in global arms market are a fundamental challenge confronting the Japanese defence industry. The issue of cost-competitiveness can be traced back to the structural constrains imposed on the Japanese defence industry owing to the prohibition of arms exports, making it very different from its US and European counterparts.16 To remain competitive, US and European companies have restructured with mergers and acquisitions as well as joint ventures aimed at achieving improved efficiency. In contrast, for the Japanese defence industry, the Self-Defence Forces were the sole consumer for decades. And since the quantum of the defence ministry’s procurement level is small, the cost of producing the equipment becomes high and translates into low profits for the contractors. Limitations on arms export have curtailed the prospects of achieving more favourable economies of scale.
The 2015 Agreement on Defence Equipment and Technology Cooperation elevated the strategic partnership to newer heights as India and Japan began technical discussions on the prospects of equipment and technology cooperation. Japan has reportedly reduced the price from US$ 133 million to 113 per US-2 following intense negotiations. Moving ahead cost-competitiveness will be key for Japan as it targets markets like Southeast Asia and India. The focus in the immediate term is likely to be on international joint development and production, and export of small items instead of big ticket items like submarines. In this regard, India should consider Japanese surveillance radars, communications, and electronic warfare technologies, etc. While India traverses the challenges linked with indigenous production, refining the investment setting, enabling defence manufacturers to absorb technology transfer through offsets, Japan faces the litmus test of making its defence industry competitive and globalised.
Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.
About the author:
*Titli Basu is Associate Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
1. “Joint Press Statement on the India-Japan Annual Defence Ministerial Dialogue”, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, August 20, 2018, at http://pib.nic.in/newsite/pmreleases.aspx?mincode=33 accessed August 29, 2018.
2. The 2014 Principles replaced the 1967 ‘Three Principles on Arms Exports’ designed under Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, which later was firmed up in 1976 by Prime Minister Takeo Miki enunciating that Japan shall not promote arms exports, regardless of the destinations.
3. “Strategy on Defense Production and Technological Bases: Toward strengthening the bases to support defense forces and Proactive Contribution to Peace”, Ministry of Defense, Japan, June 2014, at http://www.mod.go.jp/atla/en/policy/pdf/strategy_defense_technology.pdfaccessed August 28, 2018.
8. “Japan & India initiate a cooperative research on Unmanned Ground Vehicles/Robotics”, Embassy of Japan in India, August 1, 2018 at http://www.in.emb-japan.go.jp/itpr_en/00_000647.html accessed August 29, 2018.
16. For more see, Kimura Soji and Matsuoka Hisao, “Prospects and Dilemma of the Defence Industry in Japan in the Post-War Era Accommodation to Globalization of Economy”, NIDS Security Reports, No. 2, March 2001, pp. 1-34; Sugio Takahashi, “Transformation of Japan’s Defence Industry? Assessing the Impact of the Revolution in Military Affairs”, Security Challenges, vol. 4, no. 4 (Summer 2008), pp. 101-15.
The death of John McCain, a decorated Vietnam war veteran and long-serving US Senator from Arizona has once again underlined the growing political divide in America under the Trump Presidency. Instead of bringing the nation together, McCain’s death and US President Donald Trump’s reaction to it have brought to the fore the challenges America faces as it navigates through these difficult times.
At the end of last year, McCain, who strongly believed in the post Second World War global order and America’s key role in maintaining it, had written about the need to defend the “liberal world order.” For him, the rise of Donald Trump was a sign that all was not well in the liberal global space. Targeting the populists in the western world, McCain had bemoaned that “they have turned inward economically and prioritised protectionism over integration,” and “seem to have given up on the very idea of liberalism itself, betraying the underlying will that is necessary to maintain any world order.”
McCain was anti-Trump all along and the sitting US President has not been invited to his funeral while McCain’s other political rivals, George W Bush and Barack Obama, will be eulogising the late war veteran. Trump has reciprocated in kind. Despite being pushed by his aides to release a statement in honour of the late Senator, he only tweeted a perfunctory condolence message on McCain. Lowering the national flag at half mast was also apparently a big deal.
McCain’s death draws a line under an American approach to the world which touted American primacy and defended the liberal international order. There is little love lost for these priorities today amongst the ordinary Americans. Despite doing his best to shred the global liberal order to bits, Trump’s popularity among his base remains high. The more besieged Trump seems, the more sympathetic he seems to his base. Talk of his impeachment in the beltway has gained salience after fresh accusations of him passing hush money to women for his alleged affairs.
Speculation that Donald Trump may be impeached has been rekindled by fresh accusations that he paid hush money to women with whom he allegedly had affairs. Last week, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer implicated the President in off-the-books hush money paid to a porn star in his guilty plea. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, has also been found guilty of bank and tax-fraud charges. And then there is the Russia inquiry which hangs like a Damocles sword over Trump. While Trump cannot be prosecuted during his presidency, the only way remaining for his political opponents to remove him from office is by impeachment.
The process of impeachment is a cumbersome one and has to be started by the House of Representatives, needing only a simple majority to pass. The trial is held in the Senate where a two-thirds vote is necessary for the President’s removal. This has not yet happened in the US history. Bill Clinton’s case is a reminder that impeachment can take a political toll on those trying to remove the President.
Given the inherently political nature of the process of impeachment, the Democrats remain coy about declaring their intentions. They are only promising a serious investigation into Trump’s affairs if they take control of the US House of Representatives in the midterm elections. They don’t want to jeopardise their chances to get a majority in the House in November elections. They need 23 more seats to win control of the House. So they continue to underline that impeaching the President is not a priority for them. They are wary of energising the Republican base before the midterm.
But Republicans have seized upon this chance and are likely to use the threat of Trump’s impeachment to bring their voters out to vote in November, exhorting them to keep the Republicans in power to save Trump and his agenda. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and close aide has made it clear: “This election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser, has warned that impeachment proceedings would be launched against Donald Trump in January if he fails to hold onto the House of Representatives.
The institution of the US Presidency, one of the most potent of political institutions anywhere in the world, today faces a crisis of credibility as it has been weakened considerably by Trump. American polity, meanwhile, is dysfunctional with the nation’s much-touted checks and balances barely managing to either check or balance.
In his final message to the Americans, the late Senator McCain suggested that the nation’s greatness is weakened, “when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down; when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.” It is not hard to decipher the target of this message – Donald Trump – who is challenging the foundations of the consensus on which American foreign policy was based. By rolling back economic globalisation and making it starkly clear that his America is not keen on sustaining Pax Americana, Trump has managed to disrupt not only the global order but also in his own way the American domestic polity. It is not readily evident if American polity will be able to regain its equilibrium even after Trump has left the centre stage.
Travel literature whether inspired by pleasure, pilgrimage, official duty, geographical exploration or profit emerges as a prominent genre in virtually all times and cultures. Travel narratives mediate between fact and fiction, autobiography and ethnography, combining a number of academic disciplines, literary categories and social codes. They also raise issues concerning power and self- perception, cultural representation as well as imagination.
Travel literature is travel writing considered to have value as literature. Travel literature typically records the people, events, sights and feelings of an author who is touring a foreign place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary.
To be called literature the work must have a coherent narrative, or insights and value, beyond a mere logging of dates and events, such as diary or ship’s log. Literature that recounts adventure, exploration and conquest is often grouped under travel literature, but it also has its own genre outdoor literature; these genres will often overlap with no definite boundaries.
Travel literature is a popular genre of published work today. However, it is rarely a dispassionate and scientific recording of conditions in other lands. As a literary genre, it has certain conventions. Readers are generally seeking the exotic, the other, the different in the places they explore in literary mode.
Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or may involve travel to different regions within the same country.
On travel and related literature, the famed American author Mark Twain writes in his book entitled “The Innocents Abroad”:1
“But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers: they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle-valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; […] But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes; for their supernatural ability to bore; for their delightful asinine vanity; for their luxuriant fertility of imagination; for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!”
The Role Of Travel Literature In Intercultural Dialogue
First edition of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
If we are to believe the major myths and tales, travel is part of the human adventure. Whether man embarks for good or toward a promised land (Abraham or Moses), experiences numerous tribulations before returning to his point of origin (Ulysses), takes to the road to seek wisdom through multiple encounters (Buddha) or goes off to discover terra incognita (Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo), he enriches his perception of the world. In an era when travel is part of our daily life.
Maybe one of the best illustrations of applied intercultural dialogue is travel literature, for over centuries people have moved from one geographical location to another for work, education, trade, diplomacy, leisure and have come in interaction with other people of different color, culture or creed. These interactions occur in different ways, they can be violent and disruptive or peaceful and amicable, and obviously when we talk about violence we do not mean occupation or conquest but merely erroneous cultural approach resulting from lack of communication due to preconceived ideas. The truth of the matter is that humans build far too many walls around them and too few bridges to meet. Is it fear? Is it superiority? Is it hatred? Or is it all these things put together? Actually there is no ready-made answer, but a multitude of scenarios…
In this regard, by undertaking research on travel literature, culture experts aim at advancing cultural exchange in the field of literature and translation through multilateral cooperation encompassing policy research and analysis, publications, translator training and skills development, joint participation in international book fairs, literature festivals and other forums, organization of larger-scale projects, as well as conferences, seminars and workshops.
The major objectives of their efforts can be summed up in the following:
dialogue through encouraging travel literature and its translation;
improve access to lesser-known travel literatures, particularly those written in the less widely-used languages and those underrepresented in the international arena;
encourage greater diversity in international literary events and in the publishing of literature for all age groups;
develop innovative approaches to literary creation, promotion, support for translation and training of literary translators working in less widely-used languages;
act as a catalyst for new multilateral contacts, collaborations and innovative projects bringing travel literature into interaction with other art-forms and exploring the social and political role of writing;
stimulate debate on relevant intercultural issues; and
create opportunities for the exchange of ideas, transfer of skills and knowledge, and sharing of experiences and resources amongst organizations and institutions in order to encourage intercultural dialogue and communication in the best ways possible.
Examples Of Renowned Travelers
From The Muslim To The Non-Muslim World And The West
14th Century
Ibn Batuta (1304 – 1368 or 1369) commonly referred to as “The Prince of Travelers”. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
Ibn Battuta (1304 – 1368 or 1369)2, Moroccan world traveler3, Rihla (1355) — literally entitled: “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling”.
Ibn Battuta4 was the only medieval traveler who is known to have visited the lands of every Muslim ruler of his time. He also traveled in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), China, Byzantium and Russia. The mere extent of his travels is estimated at over 75,000 miles, a figure which is not likely to have been surpassed before the age of steam.
The famous traveler Ibn Battuta lived by the motto – ‘never, if possible, cover any road a second time’. Fifty years earlier than Marco Polo, he traveled, on horse, camel, foot and boat, through all manner of lands, including West Africa where he visited Timbuktu, Mali and Niger. His interest was not only confined to geography. He vividly described the prevailing political, economic and social conditions, the position of women and religious matters. He was appointed Qadi (Chief Judge) of Delhi, and spent the last twenty-three years of his life as Qadi of Fez, Morocco, writing his comprehensive travel document.
Ibn Battuta started on his travels when he was 21 years old in 1325. His main reason to travel was to go on a Hajj or the Pilgrimage to Makkah (Mecca), as all Muslims are instructed to do. But his traveling went on for about 29 years and he covered about 75,000 miles visiting the equivalent of 44 modern countries.
He met many dangers and had many adventures along the way. He was attacked by bandits, almost drowned in a sinking ship and was almost beheaded by a tyrant ruler on his travels.
Near the end of Ibn Battuta’s own life, the Sultan of Morocco insisted that Ibn Battuta dictate the story of his travels to a scholar and today we can read translations of that story called “Rihla – My Travels”. It is a valuable and interesting record of places which add to our understanding of the Middle Ages.
On the person of Ibn Battuta, Evan Andrews writes in History the following5:
“The title of “history’s most famous traveler” usually goes to Marco Polo, the great Venetian wayfarer who visited China in the 13th century. For sheer distance covered, however, Polo trails far behind the Muslim scholar Ibn Battuta. Though little known outside the Islamic world, Battuta spent half his life tramping across vast swaths of the Eastern Hemisphere. Moving by sea, by camel caravan and on foot, he ventured into over 40 modern day nations, often putting himself in extreme danger just to satisfy his wanderlust. When he finally returned home after 29 years, he recorded his escapades in a hulking travelogue known as the Rihla.
Born in Tangier, Morocco, Ibn Battuta came of age in a family of Islamic judges. In 1325, at age 21, he left his homeland for the Middle East. He intended to complete his hajj—the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca—but he also wished to study Islamic law along the way. “I set out alone,” he later remembered, “having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.””
19th Century
Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873). Source: Wikipedia Commons.
Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873)6, Egyptian traveler to France. Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz (“An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826-1831)”, 1834)
Tahtawi was born in 1801 in the village of Tahta, Sohag, the same year the French troops evacuated Egypt. He was an Azharite recommended by his teacher and mentor Hassan El-Attar to be the chaplain of a group of students Mohammed Ali was sending to Paris in 1826. Many student missions from Egypt went to Europe in the early 19th century to study arts and sciences at European universities and acquire technical skills such as printing, shipbuilding and modern military techniques. According to his memoir Rihla (Journey to Paris), Tahtawi studied ethics, social and political philosophy, and mathematics and geometry. He read works by Condillac, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Bezout among others during his sojourn in France.
He was an Egyptian religious scholar trained in Islamic disciplines at al-Azhar by a shaykh sympathetic to the reform program of Muhammad Ali. He went to Paris as a religious teacher for the diplomatic mission there, gaining familiarity with European ideas. Helped develop a new educational system in Egypt and encouraged language instruction and translations. Worked to develop an intellectual framework for the integration of European and Islamic ideas, laying the foundation for Islamic modernist thought. Also laid the foundation for Egyptian nationalism.
Rifa’a al-Tahtawi was a writer, teacher, translator, Egyptologist and renaissance intellectual. Tahtawi was among the first Egyptian scholars to write about Western cultures in an attempt to bring about reconciliation and an understanding between Islamic and Christian civilizations. He founded the School of Languages in 1835 and was influential in the development of science, law, literature and Egyptology in 19th-century Egypt. His work influenced that of many later scholars including Muhammad Abduh.
On this enlightened Egyptian traveler of the 19th century, Barbara Winckler writes in Qantara an article entitled “France as a Role Model” on his travel experience in France7:
“His book, with the virtually untranslatable title Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Baris (The Refinement of the Gold in a Comprehensive Depiction of Paris), couched in the rhyming prose typical of the time, appeared in 1834. Ein Muslim entdeckt Europa (A Muslim Discovers Europe), as the title of the German translation has it, describes Tahtawi’s impressions of Paris, where he lived from 1826 to 1831 as the imam of the first study mission sent by Muhammad Ali.
At the time Egypt was going through a period of transition. Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition of 1798 and the following three years of occupation confronted Egypt with Europe’s glaring superiority, above all in the military and technological spheres; it became imperative to catch up. According to the strategy, those who had studied in Paris could replace the French experts who had been imported for the purpose.
In addition, the largely secularized France was regarded as less “risky” for Muslims. After centuries of disinterest in a supposedly backwards Europe, Tahtawi’s book was the first modern Arabic description of a European country. Written in an objective tone, it was meant to function as a practical travel guide, educating, uplifting and encouraging imitation.”
And goes on to talk about his fascination with the French culture and civilization and an idealized view of the French educational system:
“Much taken by French learning, the educational system and scientific achievements, Tahtawi often conveys an idealized picture in which “all the French” can read and write, own a library, and are passionate scholars. The republican political system is described positively, but the author also comments that Islam provides good arrangements as well.
Tahtawi, born in Upper Egyptian Tahta as the scion of a prominent family, was one of the pioneers of the nahda, the Arab Renaissance. His studies at Cairo’s Azhar University, with its traditionally religious curriculum would hardly have seemed to predestine him for this role, though he did study geography, history, astronomy and the natural sciences even at that time.
Doubtless crucial for the further course of Tahtawi’s development was his participation in the study mission, which, as for the other participants, laid the foundation for a subsequent career in the army or the administration.
It also proved fortunate that Tahtawi – unlike the other participants – was not delegated to a technical specialization and could instead devote himself to translating and reading a broad range of literature.”
From The West To The Muslim World
17th Century
Lady Montagu in Turkish dress by Jean-Étienne Liotard, ca. 1756, Palace on the Water in Warsaw
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)8 — known for the letters she wrote during several trips abroad, which were important for later female travel writers. These letters include: Turkish Embassy Letters — letters describing her life as an ambassador’s wife in Turkey, important as one of the earliest discussions of the Muslim world by a woman.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, by birth Lady Mary Pierrepoint, was the eldest daughter of Evelyn earl of Kingston (afterwards marquis of Dorchester, finally duke of Kingston), by his wife the lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William earl of Denbigh, and was born at her father’s seat of Thoresby in Nottinghamshire, about the year 1690. Displaying great attractions of person as well as sprightliness of mind from her earliest years, she was the favourite and pride of her father, who, having lost his wife in 1694, and continuing a widower, introduced his daughter to society, and made her preside at his table, almost before she had well outgrown her childhood.
In August, 1712, without the consent of her father, with whose views in regard to a settlement his son-in-law had refused to comply, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu, Esq., eldest son of the Hon. Sydney Montagu, and grandson of the first earl of Sandwich. Her letters to Mr. Montagu before their marriage, which have been published entire for the first time in the late complete edition of her works by her great grand-son, the present Lord Wharncliffe, prove that she had already attained much of that sharpness both of style and thought for which her writings are remarkable, as well as a maturity of judgment far beyond her years.
Between 1716 and 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accompanied her husband during his appointment as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, travelling overland through Vienna, Belgrade and Adrianople, staying in Constantinople, and returning via Tunis, Genoa and Paris. The Turkish Embassy Letters is a selection from the letters she wrote during that embassy; she worked on it during her lifetime but it was not published until after her death in 1762.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was described by a contemporary as “one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world.” Her letters, collected here, tell of her travels through Europe to Turkey in 1716, where her husband had been appointed Ambassador. Her liveliness makes them delightfully readable, and her singular intelligence provides us with insights that were exceptional for their time. Her ability to study another culture according to its own values, and to see herself through the eyes of others, makes Lady Mary one of the most fascinating and accomplished of early travel writers.
As the balance of power shifts from the Ottoman Empire to Europe following the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, despite the similarities in the subordinate positions of women in the East and West, the veiled woman becomes one of the most powerful symbols of the “irrationality” of Islam. The burgeoning industry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature, which satisfied the desire for tales of the “exotic” East, reveled in stories of the oppressed veiled woman. These often “imaginary” accounts (men had no access to women’s quarters) of the women of the Orient found expression in such works as Aaron Hill’s A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, Jean Dumont’s A New Voyage to the Levant, John Covel’s Early Travels in the Levant, and Robert Heywood’s A Journey to the Levant. At once voyeuristic and indignant, these travel narratives distracted attention from the gender inequities at home, presented the Orient as a place in need of rescue and secured the idea of Europe as free, fair and civilized, supporting the role of the Empire. These narratives also allowed the male reader to vicariously experience the role of hero while satisfying his fantasies of penetration and domination.
However, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the first female travelers in the Ottoman Empire, challenged these voyeuristic tales about Turkish women and their enslavement by insisting on the liberty of veiled women. In her Turkish Embassy Letters, she disrupts the pervasive orientalist discourse and the East/West divide by throwing into confusion the rhetoric of Western modernity and reason and Eastern barbarism and irrationality, at least as it is secured by the figure of the (un)veiled woman. In this description, Montagu invokes the tradition of eighteenth-century travel narratives that delight in imaginative descriptions of the abuse and enslavement of the oriental woman and “lament on the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies” (134) but then shifts the gaze to her own imprisoned body. Teasingly opening her shirt and inviting rescue, she forces attention on the English social order and complicates the role of the heroic colonialist reader. This undressing or unveiling does not naively assume an unfettered freedom but rather displays a gendered social order that underlies the very rhetoric of reason.
Montagu’s writing about Turkey counters the prevalent orientalist assumptions in the travel accounts of her day, which support empire building, and opens up a space where colonialist impulses are subject to critique.
On this distinguished lady traveler and Augustan age intellectual, Carolyn McDowall, writes in The Culture Concept Circle, in 2016 an article entitled “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – Adventuress & Woman Of Influence”9:
“The Turkish Embassy Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague, written during her travels in Europe, Asia and Africa to persons of distinction, appeared in 1763, published the year following her death.
She had charged the Rev. Benjamin Sowden in 1761 when she was heading back to London following her husband’s death, to do with them whatever he decided and today they are the basis for her literary reputation.
Lady Mary had commented when reading the letters of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné and asserted that ‘… without the least vanity, mine will be full as entertaining 40 years hence’.
They were a best seller and became a model for lively letter writing, inspiring and influencing sensibilities about what constituted an effective and entertaining personal letter.
Her description of life inside a harem would go on to influence the work of Orientalist painters, illustrators, and writers in the nineteenth century.
Would have loved to have read her diaries but her daughter burned them after she had died of cancer seven months after arriving home.
The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vol. (ed. Robert Halsband, published 1965–67) was the first full edition of Lady Mary’s letters published.”
19th Century
John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852)
John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852)10. Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræa and the Holy Land (1837).
Stephens, John Lloyd, traveler, born in Shrewsbury, Monmouth County, New Jersey, 28 November, 1805; died in New York city, 10 October, 1852. He was graduated at Columbia in 1822, and, after studying law at Litchfield, Connecticut, and New York, was called to the bar. He practiced his profession during eight years in the latter city, at the same time figuring occasionally as a public speaker at meetings of the Democratic Party, of which he was a warm supporter. His health becoming impaired, he undertook a journey to Europe for recuperation in 1834, and extended his travels to some parts of Asia and Africa along the Mediterranean. He wrote a series of letters describing his journey, which appeared in Hoffman’s “American Monthly Magazine.” When he returned to New York in 1836 he found that these letters had been the most popular feature in the periodical. This fact induced him to give a more detailed account of his travels, and he published “Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Pertain, and the Holy Land” (2 vols. New York, 1837.)
Perhaps the first modern travelogues still to capture the imaginations of armchair explorers, the mid-19th-century bestselling books of American diplomat and writer John Lloyd Stephens read like the most inspired of novels, their poetic immediacy placing the reader square in the saddle of adventure. In this classic 1837 work — which no less a critic than Edgar Allan Poe praised for its “freshness of manner evincing manliness of feeling” — Stephens takes the reader on an evocative journey through the Middle East, from a visit to the pyramids of Egypt to encounters with enthusiastic locals and much more, complete with all the beautiful original illustrations by English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854), this delightful book continues to enthrall adventurous spirits today.
Conversational and unpretentious, the book is a delightful narrative of the author’s year-long journey through the Middle East, incorporating detailed observations of such architectural marvels as the Pyramids, the temples of Karnak, the red-rock city of Petra and more, and offering charming accounts of a Turkish bath, how to catch a crocodile, the wardrobe of a Nubian damsel, a night in a tomb, the hospitality of the Arabs, desert horses, and Easter in Jerusalem.
You can follow Professor Mohamed CHTATOU on Twitter: @Ayurinu
Endnotes:
1. With an Introduction by Stuart Hutchinson. Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party? So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World – to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the Old Masters . He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta / Ibn Battuta (or Ibn Baṭūṭah) (/ˌɪbənbætˈtuːtɑː/; Arabic: محمد ابن بطوطة; fully ʾAbū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah; Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد بن عبد الله اللواتي الطنجي بن بطوطة) (February 25, 1304 – 1368 or 1369) was a Muslim Moroccan scholar and explorer who widely travelled the medieval world. Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of the Islamic world and many non-Muslim lands, including North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and China. Near the end of his life, he dictated an account of his journeys, titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling (تحفة النظار في غرائب الأمصار وعجائب الأسفار, Tuḥfat an-Nuẓẓār fī Gharāʾib al-Amṣār wa ʿAjāʾib al-Asfār), usually simply referred to as The Travels (الرحلة, Rihla). This account of his journeys provides a picture of medieval civilisation that is still widely consulted today.
6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rifaah-Rafi-al-Tahtawi / Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī, (born October 15, 1801, Ṭahṭā, Egypt—died May 27, 1873, Egypt), teacher and scholar who was one of the first Egyptians to grapple with the question of adjusting to the West and to provide answers in Islamic terms. Ṭahṭāwī’s first important contact with the West occurred in 1826, when he went to Paris as a religious teacher to a group of Egyptian students there. After five years he returned to Egypt, and in 1836 he became head of the new School of Languages in Cairo. In 1841 he was placed in charge of a translation bureau, where he translated or supervised the translation of many books on history, geography, and military science. Under the khedive ʿAbbās I, who ascended the throne in 1848, Wes tern influences were suspect, and Ṭahṭāwī was sent to Khartoum (now in Sudan), where he taught school. On the succession of Saʿīd (1854), Ṭahṭāwī returned to Cairo, where, among other activities, he continued his own scholarly work. Ṭahṭāwī saw the social order as being established by God and the ruler as God’s representative. He believed that the only limitations on the ruler’s authority were the dictates of his conscience. Although the people had no rights, the ruler should rule with justice and strive to foster their material well-being. The people in turn should conscientiously fulfill their duties as citizens, and the state should educate them to that end. Ṭahṭāwī’s modernism lay in his conception of the material progress that could be possible within the framework of a harmoniously functioning government and society, achieved with the aid of Western technology.
8. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lady-Mary-Wortley-Montagu / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, née Pierrepont, (baptized May 26, 1689, London, Eng.—died Aug. 21, 1762, London), the most colourful Englishwoman of her time and a brilliant and versatile writer. Her literary genius, like her personality, had many facets. She is principally remembered as a prolificletter writer in almost every epistolary style; she was also a distinguished minor poet, always competent, sometimes glittering and genuinely eloquent. She is further remembered as an essayist, feminist, traveler, and eccentric. Her beauty was marred by a severe attack of smallpox while she was still a young woman, and she later pioneered in England the practice of inoculation against the disease, having noticed the effectiveness of this precaution during a stay in Turkey. The daughter of the 5th Earl of Kingston and Lady Mary Fielding (a cousin of the novelist Henry Fielding), she eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament, rather than accept a marriage that had been arranged by her father. In 1714 the Whigs came to power, and Edward Wortley Montagu was in 1716 appointed ambassador to Turkey, taking up residence with his wife in Constantinople (now Istanbul). After his recall in 1718, they bought a house in Twickenham, west of London. For reasons not wholly clear, Lady Mary’s relationship with her husband was by this time merely formal and impersonal.
10. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lloyd-Stephens / John Lloyd Stephens, (born Nov. 28, 1805, Shrewsbury, N.J., U.S.—died Oct. 12, 1852, New York City), American traveler and archaeologist whose exploration of Maya ruins in Central America and Mexico(1839–40 and 1841–42) generated the archaeology of Middle America.
Bored with the practice of law and advised to travel for reasons of health, in 1834 he set out on a journey that took him through eastern Europe and the Middle East, where he was particularly drawn to many of the archaeological sites. Two popular books resulted, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, 2 vol. (1837), and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, 2 vol. (1838), with drawings by the English illustrator and archaeologist Frederick Catherwood. Reports of the existence of ancient ruins in Central America and Yucatán stirred Stephens’ curiosity to locate and explore them. He obtained an appointment as U.S. chargé d’affaires to Central America through the influence of President Martin Van Buren, and in 1839, accompanied by Catherwood, he went to Central America, then torn by political upheaval and civil war. Their progress to Copán, Honduras, was imperiled first by local strife and then by the hazards and extreme hardships of travel through dense, dark jungle. At times they nearly despaired of finding what they sought, but their perseverance was vastly rewarded. After coming upon a wall of uncertain significance, they were stunned by the appearance of a magnificently carved stone stela (slab). Other discoveries—more stelae, terraces, stairways, and walls with strange and fantastic ornamentation—came in quick succession. Stephens “purchased” the extensive site for $50, and work progressed in clearing away the jungle overgrowth. There and elsewhere, including Uxmal and Palenque in Mexico, Catherwood set about drawing the Maya remains. The report of the first expedition, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vol. (1841), and the subsequent publication of Catherwood’s superb drawings caused a storm of popular and scholarly interest and precipitated much study of earlier, mostly forgotten accounts of the lands of the Maya by Spanish conquerors and explorers. After their second expedition, Stephens and Catherwood published Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 2 vol. (1843), containing accounts of visits to the remains of 44 ancient sites. Stephens’ last years were devoted to directing the first American transatlantic steamship company and to developing a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama.
General bibliography:
A reference guide to the literature of travel, including voyages, geographical descriptions, adventures, shipwrecks and expeditions by Edward Godfrey Cox. Call Number: Z 6011 .C87. Publication Date: 1935-1949, 3 volumes
American Travellers Abroad by Harold F. Smith. Call Number: G 222 .S5 1999, ISBN: 0810835541, Publication Date: 1999-02-04. American Travellers Abroad is a bibliography of travel literature published before 1900. Upon publication of the first edition in 1969, it showcased the importance of travel upon the notion of “national identity,” and the impact of travel literature upon writing in America. The annotations summarize each title concisely and note significant features. An author index is organized by occupation and by the country visited.
Going Places by Robert Burgin, Call Number: G151 .B865 2013, ISBN: 9781598849721
Assad was supposed to be gone already. President Obama thought it would be just another “regime change” operation and perhaps Assad would end up like Saddam Hussein or Yanukovych. Or maybe even Gaddafi. But he was supposed to be gone. The US spent billions to get rid of him and even provided weapons and training to the kinds of radicals that attacked the United States on 9/11.
But with the help of his allies, Assad has nearly defeated this foreign-sponsored insurgency.
The US fought him every step of the way. Each time the Syrian military approached another occupied city or province, Washington and its obedient allies issued the usual warnings that Assad was not liberating territory but was actually seeking to kill more of his own people.
Remember Aleppo, where the US claimed Assad was planning mass slaughter once he regained control? As usual the neocons and the media were completely wrong. Even the UN has admitted that with Aleppo back in the hands of the Syrian government hundreds of thousands of Syrians have actually moved back. We are supposed to believe they willingly returned so that Assad could kill them?
The truth is Aleppo is being rebuilt. Christians celebrated Easter there this spring for the first time in years. There has been no slaughter once al-Qaeda and ISIS’ hold was broken. Believe me, if there was a slaughter we would have heard about it in the media!
So now, with the Syrian military and its allies prepare to liberate the final Syrian province of Idlib, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo again warns the Syrian government against re-taking its own territory. He Tweeted on Friday that: “The three million Syrians, who have already been forced out of their homes and are now in Idlib, will suffer from this aggression. Not good. The world is watching.”
President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has also warned the Syrian government that the US will attack if it uses gas in Idlib. Of course, that warning serves as an open invitation to rebels currently holding Idlib to set off another false flag and enjoy US air support.
Bolton and Pompeo are painting Idlib as a peaceful province resisting the violence of an Assad who they claim just enjoys killing his own people. But who controls Idlib province? President Trump’s own Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, Brett McGurk, said in Washington just last year that, “Idlib province is the largest al-Qaeda safe-haven since 9/11, tied to directly to Ayman al Zawahiri, this is a huge problem.”
Could someone please remind Pompeo and Bolton that al-Qaeda are the bad guys?
After six years of a foreign-backed regime-change operation in Syria, where hundreds of thousands have been killed and the country nearly fell into the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda, the Syrian government is on the verge of victory. Assad is hardly a saint, but does anyone really think al-Qaeda and ISIS are preferable? After all, how many Syrians fled the country when Assad was in charge versus when the US-backed “rebels” started taking over?
Americans should be outraged that Pompeo and Bolton are defending al-Qaeda in Idlib. It’s time for the neocons to admit they lost. It is time to give Syria back to the Syrians. It is time to pull the US troops from Syria. It is time to just leave Syria alone!
At a time when labor unions are weak, Catholics still have a place in the labor movement, said a priest who emphasized the Church’s historic efforts to teach the rights of labor and train workers to organize.
“On the local and state level, Catholics are a major part of the labor movement. They took to heart our Catholic social teaching, and tried to implement it in their workplace,” Father Sinclair Oubre, the spiritual moderator of the Catholic Labor Network, told CNA.
However, he said, there is sometimes a disconnect between Catholics and support for organized labor.
“Like in so many areas of our faith, the heresy of radical individualism, a lack of knowledge about why unions were formed, and a general ignorance of what options workers have, have led to many Catholics to either not realize that the Church has favored workers’ associations, or that the Church even has a teaching that has to do with the workplace.”
Union membership peaked at 28 percent of the American workforce in 1954. According to 2017 figures, about 34 percent of public sector employees are unionized, but under 7 percent of private-sector employees are, CBS Moneywatch reports.
Unions continue to enjoy strong approval in the U.S., with 62 percent of respondents telling a recent Gallup survey they support organized labor.
But union support among some Catholics has waned, in part due to labor unions’ political support for legal abortion and pro-abortion rights political candidates, among other issues.
For Fr. Oubre, this shows the need for more faithful Catholics to join a union, not withdraw.
“The fact that many of the cultural war issues have been embraced by labor unions is a concern to me,” he said. “However, the Church and Labor have been here before.”
“From the 1930s to the 1950s, there was a real effort by communists to take over the U.S. unions, and in some cases, they were successful. Instead of saying, ‘Catholics can’t join unions because they are communists,’ which was not accurate because many were not, the Church instead set up labor schools by the hundreds in parish basements.”
“The Church taught workers their rights under the law and Robert’s Rules of Order. It encouraged Catholic workers to run for union office, and bring their Catholic social teachings to bear,” the priest said. “This was very successful, and led to the purging of many communists from the union ranks.”
Catholics have historically played a major role in the U.S. labor movement, as evidenced by several prominent Catholics who have headed the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the U.S.
Oubre said unions are a place for Christian evangelization and contribution.
“We cannot write off whole groups of people because part of their agenda is not in line with Catholic teaching,” he said. “Rather, we are called to engage these groups, be active in the organizations, and like in the past, direct these organizations in ways that respect God’s truth.”
The record of Catholic social teaching also backs labor and the right of workers to organize, Oubre said.
In the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII recognized that economic changes introduced new relationships between those who had wealth and those who did not.
“As cities grew, and manufacturing and industry developed, the relationship of responsibility that has existed in the past between the landowner and the peasant no longer existed,” Oubre explained.
“Pope Leo XIII recognized the natural right of people to associate with each other, whether these were religious associations or work guilds, he endorsed the importance of collective bargaining to promote the common good, and recognized the unequal contractual relationship between the worker and the employer.”
The labor market meant that workers were negotiating not only with an employer, but competing against all the other workers seeking the same job. Leo XIII said these pressures to accept employment at ever-lowering wages could lead workers “to agree to employment terms that did not supply the basic needs for a dignified family life.”
The labor-focused traditions of Catholic social teaching have continued especially through the work of Popes Pius XI, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis.
The Second Vatican Council’s apostolic constitution Gaudium et Spes names the right to found unions for working people as “among the basic rights of the human person.” These unions “should be able truly to represent them and to contribute to the organizing of economic life in the right way.” These rights include the freedom to take part in union activity “without risk of reprisal.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All” also addresses the place of labor in Catholic thought and action.
In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME struck down a 1997 Illinois law that required non-union public employees to pay fees to public sector unions for collective bargaining.
A U.S. bishops’ conference spokesperson said the decision threatened to mandate a “Right-to-Work” environment in government employment in a way that undermines the ability of workers to organize.
Oubre said Catholic union backers object to such a legal principle “because it works against the principle of solidarity and the right of association.”
“‘Right to Work’ laws have their primary intention of weakening the organizing power of unions, and allow people to receive the benefit the union, without taking on the responsibility of being part of the union,” he said.
In Oubre’s view, a union-friendly legal environment is critical.
“One can pass laws that promote workers ability to organize together, or to discourage it,” he said.
He noted the proposals for a “card check” unionization effort, in which an employer must recognize a union if a majority of workers express a desire for a union using signed cards.
Obure said this effort now faces legal obstacles and simply “begins a long process where union avoidance experts are brought in, one-on-one meetings take place with workers, sometimes the leaders are fired, and every effort is made to dishearten the workers.”
“When the election comes around, the will of the workers has been crushed,” he said.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issues annual Labor Day statements which continue “the long tradition of support for workers’ right to organize and join unions,” Oubre said.
In 2018, the statement stressed the importance of just wages for workers, especially for those who have difficulty securing basic needs. It also discussed problems of income inequality between the wealthy and the poor, as well as between ethnic groups and between the sexes.
“This Labor Day, let us all commit ourselves to personal conversion of heart and mind and stand in solidarity with workers by advocating for just wages, and in so doing, ‘bring glad tidings to the poor’,” the bishops’ message concluded.
