Syria: Abdulrahim and Malek Jandali on violence and war

Today, Syrian professor Mohamed Abdulrahim and pianist Malek Jandali attended to the University Carlos III of Madrid to talk to the students about the conflict in their country and the role of music and arts in that environment. The lecture was hosted by UC3M professor and human rights activist Leila Nachawati. The hashtag used during the talk on Twitter was #FreeSyriaFromUc3m, where you’ll be able to find all the information shared during their visit.

Professor Abdulrahim got his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Damascus Music Conservatory in 1995. Since then, his career as a musician has been growing, travelling around the world. You can get more information about him on his website alsiadi.com.

During the talk, he said that in Syria, intellectuals go to jail or are executed if they refuse to obey the government, which imposes how much and how to work: always in its benefit. This way, their culture is under the influences of the government, a fact that destroys arts and the identity of Syrians.

The professor wanted to highlight the fact that mainstream media do not cover the Syrian war. He illustrated this with the massacre of Hama in 1982, when the president Hafez al-Asad killed between 20,000 and 40,000 civilians in less than a month, during a period of revolts against his mandate. Again, this event was not given coverage by media.

In 2011, the Arab uprising started. As Abdulrahim stated, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, knew how to fight them through money and power. People who went back to their country after having left to be around the world and brought new ideas were executed and, in many cases, nowadays they still do no know anyting about them. The professor, as a current citizen of the US, also complained about the fact that they pay taxes to know the truth but, unfortunately, they do not get to know it.

Moreover, he added that, currently, Syrians have no dignity and no rights. They cannot be called citizens. 8,000,000 of them are being fed by the population itself, not by the United Nations, as it should be. Thousands of people are being killed everyday and, however, “we are more worried about a missing airplane”.

Abdulrahim warned the students that they “must stop the killing of people in Syria” because they are the intellectual future. As a datum, he stated that the majority of the victims of the Bashar’s mafioso army are women and children. Journalists are being killed because they are looking for the truth.

Then, Malek Jandali, after presenting his music video Freedom Qashoush Symphony, asked for a minute of silence in memory of all the children killed by the Syrian regime.

“Can you imagine a world without letters and music notes?”, asked in the beginning of his talk. It tourns out that Syrians invented them. Thanks to them, we have Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music. Without those people, we could only communicate verbally and we could not write music. Ironically, now they cannot these elements freely in their country because their government is in charge of manipulating and censoring it, while they also bomb museum, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, kindergartens… And this is not even on news.

As a concrete example of these barbalities, he also told the anecdote of the war correspondent Marie Colvin, who lost her eye in Sri Lanka while she was covering the civil war in 2001. After this tragedy, she did not decide to stay at home and instead went to Syria in 2010 to speak the truth about what was going on in the country. But she almost did not have time. She was killed. Killed within the borders of the country condemned to be ruled by Bashar al-Assad. She was killed by the government because “she was looking for humanity, music, freedom,, dignity. She sacrified her life for beauty and truth“, as said by Jandali. He met the journalist’s mother at her funeral and, surprisingly, she said that she was good because her daughter “died happily, doing what she loved to do”.

Jandali said during his talk that he considered himself “a hypocrit” because he was “a product of a dictatorship”. When he went to school, he had to state several times a day, after listening to the Syrian anthem while standing up, “I sacrifice my life and my blood to Assad”. However, his parents told him not to say so because Assad was not a good man, so in the musician’s mind there was a mess of love-hate-love-hate and evil-good-evil-good. “Imagine that you get an A+ just for saying so and lying!”, he said. This causes a destruction of morality.

After the massacre of Hama, Jandali composed a song I’m my homeland to “clean his brain from all the pollution that covered his country in that moment”. When people asked him about his actual homeland, he never said “Syria” because he really feared for his life. When he performed in the White House, his parents got hurt by the regime in their own rooms because of his son: two people related to al-Assad beat them for half an hour, even breaking their teeth.

“We want peace, harmony, human rights, justice. The end of war that has been launched by the regime. It is not a political issue; it’s humanity“, the musician stated. People in the streets scream “give me liberty or give me death”, and all the government is giving them is death. But, according to them, at least “they are dying free”. “Children are dying slowly from starvation. It is the most inhumane thing in the world.” 12,000 children have been massacred in Syria for no reason: they are Christian, Muslim, atheists…  “It doesn’t matter if they are 150 or 15,000, because we are not numbers, we are people”, the pianist said. “Syrians are asking for human rights and the government divides the population to fight each other while they just watch and call for Russian airplanes to bomb them. This way, they make the world forget about the original demands and focus the attention on the war. The regime turns a revolution into a civil war“.

When asked why media do not report about this issue, Jandali answered that “the dictatroship pays billions of dollars to fake journalists, fake artists, and a fake army. This government has created fictitious messep up people because they want to create this fake war”. However, he believes strongly that “the power of people is much stronger than the people in power” and that the solution to conflicts are students, encouraging them to use their own tools to help the Syrian population, as he does with his music.

Malek Jandali is performing next Saturday the 5th in the Auditorio Nacional of Madrid to unite people’s voices for Syrian children. It is a charity concert together with the Iuventas orchestra. They want to “give hope” and “take pain up again” through music. The fundraising will be aimed to help Syrian children through Mensajeros de la Paz. You can click on this link to buy the concert tickets.

Madrid, Spain: Peoples united against Troika: how I lived the demonstration

First of all, I would like to apologize because I didn’t post anything on Saturday or Sunday. I really am sorry, but I literally didn’t have time to do it. I hope things like these don’t happen again!

Apologies apart, let’s talk about last Saturday’s demonstration in Madrid.

When I was walking down the street to get to Neptuno square, I saw many national policemen near their vans, controlling the area.

As I arrived to Neptuno at 17:30 ,a group of journalists was discussing how they were going to cover the demonstration. The fact that two of them were carring bycicles attracted my attention and I was wondering the use they were going to make of them, but I feared my doubt would stay unclear to me.

Since the time of the demonstration was coming and there wasn’t many people there, I decided to ask those journalists if I was in the right place. Indeed. Moreover, one of them asked me if was attending it and I told him that I was, not only as citizen, but also as a journalist! “Oh, are you studying Journalism? Why don’t you come with us? You can learn a lot of things!”. I was quite astonished. A group of journalists was inviting me to go with them and see them work! I was attending the behind the scenes of a report! That sounded really good to me.

So, I went with them. They introduced themselves and turned out to be workers of the on-line platform TM-EX. It is an association of Telemadrid ex-workers in exile. Since this public TV channel from the Community of Madrid decided to fire 80% of their workers, these professionals decided to create their own project. They defend a good-quality, close television in the service of citizens, more and more contrary to the spirit of Telemadrid, which manipulates the information in order to be on the side of Esperanza Aguirre. Check out their web page linked above if you want to watch their interesting reports. You may find some good information about people who is not usually listened to.

Before starting the demostrations, there were already people with clever and significant banners:

“Money from Church for the unemployed and for public schools.”

“Garzón will be judged for the Gürtel case before the corrupted people.”

“The Church the education reform.”

After that, we went towards the masses of people. As you may expect, I wasn’t exactly among the demonstrators, but ahead of them. I was surrounded by tons of journalists covering the event. There, I could see protesting people from a lot of sectors: teachers, firefighters, people from platforms against evictions, 15M movement, from the sanitary sector … In short, people fed up of cuts and the austerity carried out by our Government and imposed by the troika: International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank.

Furthermore, the leader of the movement ‘Fuck Troika’ (‘Que se lixe a Troika’, originally) from Portugal was supporting this Spanish demonstration:

There were a predominance of Republican flags (attentions: flags of the Spanish Second Republic) and then, an anarchist one, others bearing messages, etc. In the front row, the large banner was this one:

“Peoples united against Troika”.

“We don’t owe anything!! We don’t pay!!”. This was also the most repeated phrase during the demostration.

As soon as we got next to the Stock Market of Madrid, the demonstrators started to explode bags (it is a metaphor, since in Spanish both elements are called “bolsa”):

Then, next to the Bank of Spain, people shouted “There is the Ali Baba’s cave” and they called “thieves” to its bosses before asking for their resignation as well:

During this demonstration, I learnt some things about journalism and it seemed very curious to me to see journalists working behind the scenes, interviewing people, preparing what they were going to say to their cameras, recording, taking pictures…

This is the reporter of TM-EX interviewing a teacher in the demonstration

And, as in almost every demonstration, satire and sarcasm played an important role:

Finally, when we got to the end, there was the final speech, the reading of a manifesto. They denounced the “brutal and inhumane adjustment politics imposed by the hateful troika with the help of the accomplice governments, which are causing in Europe the biggest economic crsis in democracy in the last decades. Millions of people are forced to unemployment, poverty and even death because of an ilegitimate and unpayable debt.”

Two parts of the final speech:

Also, some demonstrators mooned the troika…

 

 

…right after listening to the speech, let’s say, in a more “normal” way:

 

 

I would like to thank the staff of TM-EX for having me. I love your ethic and journalistic values. People like you are needed nowadays. I recommend you to check out their special report on this demonstration.

Thank you so much!

Journalism: World Press Freedom Day

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

 Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today is the third of May. And it means it is the World Press Freedom Day. So, as it could not be otherwise, I am going to dedicate this post to Journalism and freedom.

Freedom of speech is a political right that consists of communicating one’s ideas via speech. Freedom of expression is a very similar concept, but it also includes “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice” -this is, sharing ideas through any kind of medium-, according to the 19th article of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The 19th article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that this right involves “special duties and responsibilities” and  can be “subject to certain restrictions”.

Now, if we refocus this issue on the theme of the Internet, we can find the term net neutrality, which means that “Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication”.

If the Internet were “ruled” under this principle, it would be a free space where, therefore, freedom of expression would reign and all the opinions or points of view would be respected and freely shared, in a democratic way. In other words, the Internet is a very large and common area in which people from around the world say anything they want, which is heard by the rest of the people as well. This way, from this statement, it can be concluded that the Internet is as big and diverse as humanity itself.

For this reason, the Internet not only allows us to access a place where we can express ourselves in free way, but it also promotes the concept of freedom of speech itself. When people take part of this huge community, they appreciate more and more this right since they can feel its benefits in themselves, as a personal experience.

As a matter of fact, the 2013 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index points out that Finland is the country that more respects media freedom, followed by the Netherlands and Norway. Democratic countries occupy the top of the index while dictatorial countries occupy the last three positions, as the most violent ones against journalists: Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea.

The Reporters Without Borders secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, makes an interesting statement: “In dictatorships, news providers and their families are exposed to ruthless reprisals, while in democracies news providers have to cope with the media’s economic crises and conflicts of interest”. So, while in dictatorial regimes the repression even can be physical, in democratic countries money and benefits rule. Political instability also makes it very difficult for journalists to be independent. Under these circumstances, they also receive threats and physical attacks and staff purges are common.

Tanzania is another example of authoritarian country. There, the repression against journalists is also very severe. For example, in the space of only two months, a journalist was killed while covering a demonstration and another was murdered.

In Oman, belonging to the region of the Middle East and North Africa, 50 netizens and bloggers were prosecuted on cyber-crime charges in 2012.

The Iranian regime does not limit itself to just imprison journalists and citizens. Even the relatives of journalists, including the ones of those who are abroad, are harassed.

In February, the Egyptian Court issued a verdict to impose the prohibition of a month over YouTube because of the refusal of the website to delete the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims. Other countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and  Afghanistan also asked for its removal but they did not get any result.

Another example of censorship by authoritarian governments is the case of Anas Awwad. The Palestinian tribunal sentenced him to one year in jail, finding him guilty for speaking ill of the President on Facebook. Awwad’s father said that his son left a comment that stated: ”The new forward of the Real Madrid” under the picture of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, kicking a ball during a visit to Spain in 2011.

Also, the police in China arrested a Chinese user of  the microblogging website Weibo for criticizing the “Fan Club” of the leader of the Chinese communist party, Xi Jinping. He was accused of “inciting to subversion of the power of the State”.

But not only journalists and bloggers are censored in repressive countries. Culture is also very affected. In the African country Uganda, the National Theatre censored a play that tackled the issue of homosexuality and the difficulties it carries in that country. The role was cancelled when the regulatory authorities intervened.

After reading about what the Internet means as a public access to freedom of expression, the difference of the situation of media in democracies and in dictatorships and all these cases of repression over journalists, bloggers and, in short, people who fight for and believe in freedom of expression, we can conclude that some people take risks to tell the world what is happening in every place – they put their lives in danger. But, from my point of view, these people’s objective is also to change the authoritarian regimes from its roots, this is, to eradicate the repression and start living in a democratic and free way. However, unfortunately, in many places of the world, governors are more interested in their own benefit than in the people’s, and they carry matters too far. And, as we know, the easiest way to maintain one’s power is to shut the people through terror.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”

— Voltaire (1694-1778). French philosopher and writer.

Crime & Unpunishment: Why journalists fear for their safety infographic by BenStanford.