More than ever can we say that the world is put upside down by the tunisian revolution. While F16 of the NATO is bombarding Libya at the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, few thousands of refugees from Tunisia reach the northern coast on board of makeshift boats. How the world can still not see that the later movement is a replica to the first one? It is the same blindness towards the economic injustice that governs the world order. For how long humanity will refuse to admit that emigration, the trauma of the North, is not the problem of the South but the result of the arrogance of the imperialist attitude of the North?
The world was somehow under considering the claim of human rights and democracy in Tunisia. It didn’t want to believe in it and take it seriously until it became a revolution. At that time the fear was that it is going to be spread to the region. We started to talk about a domino effect. It was not that much wrong. The infection went indeed to other countries in North Africa like Egypt and Libya and reached even those of the Golf and the Middle East. Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria will not be spared. But nobody thought really to the way these domino were settled or established. They were in fact exposed to the failure because they were mined by the same illness.
The domino effect works when the game is arranged to work in a determined way. Or, who arranged the regimes which are governing these countries? Wikileaks first and the no more controlled societies then came to denounce the unmoral international policy condemning populations to poverty and humiliation for the only benefit of the multinationals of the North and the political elite of the South. Complicity worked for too much longtime already. It had to end.
Rather than a domino effect, the images of the emigrants boarding on Lampedusa show that it is a butterfly effect. The Italian island halfway between Africa and Europe becomes then the epicenter of a human tsunami. A butterfly moves on the hills of the Atlas and the Alps shake.
The North African youth organizes a Sit In in the Kasbah place in Tunis or the Tahrir square in Cairo and the pillars of The European Union tremble. The effect of the youth uprising doesn’t work in a horizontal way going from the West to the East and vice versa, but in a vertical one going from the South to the North. And this is the proper of the butterfly theory of the chaos: it is not predictable. The Tunisian and Egyptian regimes were considered as fortifications strong enough to hold their societies under control, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t fit with the universal values of democracy and human rights. The arrogance of these regimes and their protectors kept them in a kind blindness preventing them from seeing the fatal ferment. It is then logic that a reaction to any pressure goes right at the opposite direction from where this one is coming.
What happened in these two countries (until now) was a result of a time bomb produced by the global policy based on security. The most sophisticated technology of surveillance and the biggest investment in security measures were not and will never be able to hold a population under eternal control. The reaction of the Tunisian and Egyptian populations is not only against their political leaders, but also against a global postcolonial mechanism. It was boiling since years, artists witnessed this, and social networks accelerated it.
For short, by making themselves seen Tunisian and Egyptian youngsters jumped from being nothing, when nobody looked at them really or ignored them, to stand as an All, because they challenged the whole global system and not only their rulers. It took some time for the world to understand that and to admit that the whole world is concerned, not to say targeted, by the uprising. It would be too perfect that the unrest stays an inside conflict between a third world regime and its population. But, when this regime was for decades supported to keep its population in a kind of natural reserve, when it is used to get its legitimacy only from serving the interest of the northern multinationals, it is then very natural that the uprising target also the source of the evil : the western cupidity.
It is irony of the history that the movement of the Tunisian emigrants doesn’t stop in Italy but precisely at the border of France. One could see in this an answer to the attitude of the former French foreign affairs minister who offered to help the Tunisian police overflowed by an irresistible angry youth. Isn’t it a revenge of an oppressed people against the former colonial power which is still continuing to behave with arrogance and impunity, not only in Tunisia but also in other countries like Libya and Ivory Coast?
No, the few thousands of immigrants boarding on the coast of Italy are in fact a symptom of a deep problem. Nevertheless, the origin of the crisis is not to find in Tunisia, or at least not only in this small country on the north of Africa, it is to find in the deepest point of the occidental mentality that still has a residue of colonialism. Why does Europe drive back these young people, while it accepted other people from the same origin, the former rulers and their families?
Morally speaking, isn’t there legitimacy to this movement? Isn’t it a reaction to the hopeless gesture of Mme Catherine Ashton, Vice-President of the European Commission, offering 258 millions of Euros as a European support to the transition process? Wasn’t it a kind of a confession of a guilty consciousness? Wasn’t it enough? Of course not, says the youth.
Times of “One cries, one is given a feeding bottle; one keeps quiet" are definitely over. They don’t want to be those who are eternally in need of help. They are asking for equality nevermore for charitable help. A real generous gesture would not be anything else but to recognise their rights and their goods. They want Europe to give up with its contradiction: why offering a financial help of hundreds of thousands of Euros while billions of Euros stolen from their countries by the former rulers are sleeping in the European bancs? How can they accept a donation while the Swiss banks refuse to give back the Tunisian state the money they, perhaps legally but for sure unmorally, accepted from the former dictator and his family knowing very well its origin and the price of suffering and humiliation it cost this same youth now knocking at its doors.
Furthermore, what these young people want is not more than what the western used to show as a model of modern, human and economically viable society. The problem starts when they are not given the chance, the time and the means to build it themselves. It starts also when the powerful world thinks that it is possible to impose a model of democracy to the rest of the world. It starts when these young people understand that the real purpose of the western world is to keep them eternally dependent of its aid because its wealth is depending of the weakness of the rest of the world.
This is precisely what the Tunisian youth evinces through its uprising and through its claim weather it is expressed in Tunisia or in the border between Italy and France. And this is exactly what Alain Badiou, the French Philosopher, denounces as a “...moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests” . In other words, as far as the world is divided and as far as it doesn’t see that the problem is not limited to theses societies but it is a crisis of the global world order, as far as the citizenship is not based on a kind of criticism towards the continuously growing power of multinationals without caring about the human dimension of development, there is a very small hope that these flux of young people seeking a better life will stop.
1- «Esse est percipi vel percipere », George Berkeley (1685-1753) in Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
2- In an open letter to Jean-Luc Nancy reacting to his article “What the Arab peoples signify to us” in the French daily newspaper Libération of April the 28th, 2011.
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
A new colonial conquest
The most important particularity of the Tunisian revolution is that nobody prepared it and nobody could guess it because it was not in any agenda. One could remember how the world wanted to establish democracy in Iraq or in Afghanistan and how it didn’t succeed. France and Great Britain are trying obstinately and blindly to achieve in Libya what the United States and its allies could not do in Iraq nor in Afghanistan on the name of what Alain Badiou denounces as a “...moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests” . Tunisian people showed how the uprising of a population can put a regime upside down. The youth refused to be manipulated from any force, not even the western world. The little body of Bouazizi will be the flame that put the fire of purification in the Tunisian society first, then the Egyptian and further to the whole region.
This is a very important moment in the History. It doesn’t concern only the region. The whole world system is based on the way one part of it looks at the other. There was a moment when some people were considered as beasts. The “civilized” world used them as slaves. Then came another moment when they were seen as human being but not civilized enough. They needed to be protected, colonized. After what was called “de-colonization”, they needed to be helped via a world process of development. All this was nothing else but different forms of perverse and vicious tutorship.
During all these phases of the human evolution, there was always a connection between the image we make of the other, and the way we despoil it. These where the two face of the same coin of the “Orientalism” would say Edward Saïd . The system consists of reducing the other to the situation of subaltern in order to control it: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”, dixit Karl Marx talking about Labour class in the 19th century.
What is happening now is that the snake is biting its tail. The western world provides internet and all kinds of technologies to its accomplices regimes. It provides them also with the necessary programs to control their populations and to spy at users. The same technology which was sophistically developed in order to control the subaltern is used by this one to put the system upside down. And this worked well mainly because it gave the populations the possibility to make its own image and not let it anymore made by others as was the case for a long time. The Tunisian/Egyptian revolution was made possible thanks to the democratization of the image.
This is a very important moment in the History. It doesn’t concern only the region. The whole world system is based on the way one part of it looks at the other. There was a moment when some people were considered as beasts. The “civilized” world used them as slaves. Then came another moment when they were seen as human being but not civilized enough. They needed to be protected, colonized. After what was called “de-colonization”, they needed to be helped via a world process of development. All this was nothing else but different forms of perverse and vicious tutorship.
During all these phases of the human evolution, there was always a connection between the image we make of the other, and the way we despoil it. These where the two face of the same coin of the “Orientalism” would say Edward Saïd . The system consists of reducing the other to the situation of subaltern in order to control it: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”, dixit Karl Marx talking about Labour class in the 19th century.
What is happening now is that the snake is biting its tail. The western world provides internet and all kinds of technologies to its accomplices regimes. It provides them also with the necessary programs to control their populations and to spy at users. The same technology which was sophistically developed in order to control the subaltern is used by this one to put the system upside down. And this worked well mainly because it gave the populations the possibility to make its own image and not let it anymore made by others as was the case for a long time. The Tunisian/Egyptian revolution was made possible thanks to the democratization of the image.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
The Arab spring: rather an ongoing process
The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolution is not as surprising as it seems. It is the result of a progressive process that was going on for a while. The uprisings are only the emergent part of the iceberg. During decades frustration was growing until the point of no-return. In the cultural field for example, things were already going on for years. The world re-discovers now, what the youth was trying to build in the underground and what associations and corporations where trying to make, despite deaf dictatorships. A demand of change was formulated by the people and artists did listen to the youth and tried to give it the voice it was denied.
Cinema is the most obvious example of this process. The crowds of young people that the world suddenly saw in the streets and the central squares of Tunis, Cairo and Alexandria are the same ones that you could see in recent films made by Nouri Bouzid, Fadhel Jaibi, Ahamad Abdalla and Ahamad Rashwan. These filmmakers witnessed the grumbling of the volcano before it erupted. They witnessed the deep changes of their societies although they were ‘… occulted by the clichés the Western World developed about the Middle-East and North Africa’, writes Olivier Roy about what he calls ‘post-islamist revolution’. These artists were able to see what the world did not dare to see or did not want to see.
Mostly it is about independent productions focusing on the suffocating atmosphere, the youth’s frustrating daily life due to the power of the police. Young people were prevented not only from their political and civil rights but also from any possibility of artistic creativity. Poverty, frustration and marginalization of young people pushed them into the spiral of violence. This is what we can see in films like Making of… kamikaze (2006) by Nouri Bouzid, Junun (2005) by Fadhel Jaibi, Microphone (2010) by Ahmad Abdalla, Basra (2008) by Ahamad Rashwan and Hawi (2011) by Ibrahim El-Batout.
Looking at these films now, after the eruption of the societies in Tunisia and Egypt, completes the full image of the Tunisian and Egyptian youth who made the change. Bahta in Bouzid’s film blows himself up after being involved in a kind of vicious circle made of unemployment, police oppression and fundamentalist brainwashing. In Microphone the icon of the power, the director of the cultural center who refuses to finance performances unless they fit into the ‘politically correct’, is turned into irony by groups of young artists and has to face the signs of an uprising. Now, such films can be seen as prophecies of the uprising of these societies.
They are also the concrete product of a slow movement against a draconian system of censorship. In Tunisia, filmmakers were trying to change things using the rules of the cultural policy. In Egypt, where cinema is one of the most organized industries in the world, a new generation started to look for a renewal out of the traditional circuit of production: on the one hand they strength the critical tone of their films, on the other hand they seek an independent production process.
In Tunisia, same as in Egypt, we witness a big number of short films made by a new generation of filmmakers who are structurally independent from the traditional financing system of film production thanks to video technology. In Tunisia the record of 80 shorts could be reached in one year, while the average of the usual Tunisian potential does not exceed 10 films. The same phenomenon could be proportionally found in other countries like Morocco and Algeria.
The Egyptian filmmakers mentioned above are examples of this tendency of independence. They are relatively young, they make their first features and they adopt the spirit of small budget production. At the same time they are involved in a kind of informal groups of young filmmakers, recently coming out of film schools. This is what films like Microphone, Hawi and Basra are explicitly about. They depict a young generation of artists trying to find their ways despite the jungle of the mainstream film and art industry. All these phenomenon’s can be seen as signs of the deep change that these societies were facing.
In Tunisia, the policy of culture started already to move slowly a few months before the uprising. A reform of the film sector was put on the table of a National Commission for the Reform and the Development of Cinema and the Audiovisual Industry. The fact is that this plan was a way to outguess the real demand of the youth. They reacted by standing as a kind of ‘propositional force’. The idea was that a real reform can not come as an exclusive official policy without a real connection to the ground.
On January 25th, a big meeting of film professionals took place. Symbolically it was a revival act of Tunisian cinema: the filmmakers took possession/repossession of the Association of Tunisian Filmmakers which was for decades confiscated by a group of people helped by the former regime. Since that date the new team started to make a plan to work on a new policy of cinema in the country considering that: ‘The former regime has been the enemy number one of freedom. Among others, the freedom of creation, especially in cinema, has been oppressed. This oppression operated both on a creative and socio-professional level for the film workers who have been marginalized over the years, who have been demonized, censured, deprived of their rights, etc.’
This is the case in Tunisia, but it is also a perfect example of the mechanism of change in Arab societies. When King Mohamed VI of Morocco decides to engage a huge and deep political and social reform in the country, it is not a personal decision coming from a political will; it is a reaction to the demand formulated by Moroccan society, not only after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, but for decades. The uprising of Arab populations is an ongoing process, not its beginning. The revolution is not a fact of a few days of ‘sit ins’ and demonstrations, it is a deep and long mechanism of claims of change.
It needs time to clean up the brainwashing operating for decades in these societies. Artists are continuing the work of change that started before the events. The big change already is that there is more hope and more trust in the future as far as it is under the power of the artists themselves. As a matter of fact, a new constitution is going to be voted in Tunisia in July 2011. The film and cultural policy should be on the agenda of the new government by then. And this is one of the victories.
To see also on th blog of Boekman Foundation: www.boekman.nl
Cinema is the most obvious example of this process. The crowds of young people that the world suddenly saw in the streets and the central squares of Tunis, Cairo and Alexandria are the same ones that you could see in recent films made by Nouri Bouzid, Fadhel Jaibi, Ahamad Abdalla and Ahamad Rashwan. These filmmakers witnessed the grumbling of the volcano before it erupted. They witnessed the deep changes of their societies although they were ‘… occulted by the clichés the Western World developed about the Middle-East and North Africa’, writes Olivier Roy about what he calls ‘post-islamist revolution’. These artists were able to see what the world did not dare to see or did not want to see.
Mostly it is about independent productions focusing on the suffocating atmosphere, the youth’s frustrating daily life due to the power of the police. Young people were prevented not only from their political and civil rights but also from any possibility of artistic creativity. Poverty, frustration and marginalization of young people pushed them into the spiral of violence. This is what we can see in films like Making of… kamikaze (2006) by Nouri Bouzid, Junun (2005) by Fadhel Jaibi, Microphone (2010) by Ahmad Abdalla, Basra (2008) by Ahamad Rashwan and Hawi (2011) by Ibrahim El-Batout.
Looking at these films now, after the eruption of the societies in Tunisia and Egypt, completes the full image of the Tunisian and Egyptian youth who made the change. Bahta in Bouzid’s film blows himself up after being involved in a kind of vicious circle made of unemployment, police oppression and fundamentalist brainwashing. In Microphone the icon of the power, the director of the cultural center who refuses to finance performances unless they fit into the ‘politically correct’, is turned into irony by groups of young artists and has to face the signs of an uprising. Now, such films can be seen as prophecies of the uprising of these societies.
They are also the concrete product of a slow movement against a draconian system of censorship. In Tunisia, filmmakers were trying to change things using the rules of the cultural policy. In Egypt, where cinema is one of the most organized industries in the world, a new generation started to look for a renewal out of the traditional circuit of production: on the one hand they strength the critical tone of their films, on the other hand they seek an independent production process.
In Tunisia, same as in Egypt, we witness a big number of short films made by a new generation of filmmakers who are structurally independent from the traditional financing system of film production thanks to video technology. In Tunisia the record of 80 shorts could be reached in one year, while the average of the usual Tunisian potential does not exceed 10 films. The same phenomenon could be proportionally found in other countries like Morocco and Algeria.
The Egyptian filmmakers mentioned above are examples of this tendency of independence. They are relatively young, they make their first features and they adopt the spirit of small budget production. At the same time they are involved in a kind of informal groups of young filmmakers, recently coming out of film schools. This is what films like Microphone, Hawi and Basra are explicitly about. They depict a young generation of artists trying to find their ways despite the jungle of the mainstream film and art industry. All these phenomenon’s can be seen as signs of the deep change that these societies were facing.
In Tunisia, the policy of culture started already to move slowly a few months before the uprising. A reform of the film sector was put on the table of a National Commission for the Reform and the Development of Cinema and the Audiovisual Industry. The fact is that this plan was a way to outguess the real demand of the youth. They reacted by standing as a kind of ‘propositional force’. The idea was that a real reform can not come as an exclusive official policy without a real connection to the ground.
On January 25th, a big meeting of film professionals took place. Symbolically it was a revival act of Tunisian cinema: the filmmakers took possession/repossession of the Association of Tunisian Filmmakers which was for decades confiscated by a group of people helped by the former regime. Since that date the new team started to make a plan to work on a new policy of cinema in the country considering that: ‘The former regime has been the enemy number one of freedom. Among others, the freedom of creation, especially in cinema, has been oppressed. This oppression operated both on a creative and socio-professional level for the film workers who have been marginalized over the years, who have been demonized, censured, deprived of their rights, etc.’
This is the case in Tunisia, but it is also a perfect example of the mechanism of change in Arab societies. When King Mohamed VI of Morocco decides to engage a huge and deep political and social reform in the country, it is not a personal decision coming from a political will; it is a reaction to the demand formulated by Moroccan society, not only after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, but for decades. The uprising of Arab populations is an ongoing process, not its beginning. The revolution is not a fact of a few days of ‘sit ins’ and demonstrations, it is a deep and long mechanism of claims of change.
It needs time to clean up the brainwashing operating for decades in these societies. Artists are continuing the work of change that started before the events. The big change already is that there is more hope and more trust in the future as far as it is under the power of the artists themselves. As a matter of fact, a new constitution is going to be voted in Tunisia in July 2011. The film and cultural policy should be on the agenda of the new government by then. And this is one of the victories.
To see also on th blog of Boekman Foundation: www.boekman.nl
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