Yemen uprising - overview

by Judith Brown

In order for you to understand the Yemen uprising, and the uprisings in many parts of the Arab world, I would like to tell you about Amr. He is the sort of young man most parents would be very proud of. He has graduated from university with a degree in engineering. He is polite and well mannered, he always looks clean and smart. His parents are very ordinary people, his father a policeman, his mother recently made redundant from her job teaching hairdressing to refugees. Seeing that Amr needs new skills, they took on debt in order for him to take extra courses in IT and English, and he has worked hard at these courses. A year and a half after graduating, he is without work. His mother told me that he leaves home every day with his file of certificates, to visit prospective employers. He told me that he would be willing to do anything, and then he emphasised it, repeating, ANYTHING. He cannot leave home, or consider marriage, until he has an income, and he cannot see any possibility of an income at any point in the future..

In Yemen, 70% of the population is under 30, and 50% under 15. There is extremely high unemployment, especially amongst the young. Those who get jobs tend to have family or tribal connections - if you belong to a poor, unconnected family, your chances of finding employment is very low indeed.

But one way that people can get employment of a sort is by becoming a member of the balataga. These are thugs paid for by the President. They get 2,000 riyals a day (about £6), plus food and qat, the narcotic leaves that Yemenis chew. It is alleged that they are paid for out of money that US provided for anti-terrorist activity.

There can be no country in the world where the terrorist activity is over-egged as it is in Yemen. It helps the Yemeni government get aid from US, UK and the rest of the world. Despite claims that Al Qaeda in the Arab Penisular is now based in Yemen, there has been very little evidence of that except for a scatty plot over a year ago to put a bomb in a printer on a plane, and that failed. For example, there has been no large scale terrorist acts such as occurred in regularly Saudi Arabia before Al Qaeda was driven out.

Whereas the Yemeni military can be relied on to fight in places like Aden, with its separatist aims, and north of Sanaa where there is a Shia population, it cannot be relied on to fight in Sanaa, where the army is more sympathetic to the population. So the balataga has been used by the President to challenge protesters in Sanaa from the beginning of the uprising, occupying the central square, Tahreer, causing the protesters to set up camp outside the university, renamed as Al-ghreer Square, or Change Square. It is about two miles from the centre, on the ring road, and the main inconvenience was that traffic had to be diverted around their camps. Two weeks ago, the protests were virtually ignored by all, and everyone was just getting on with life. When talking to Sanaa residents, although they wanted a change, many said that Saleh was not as bad as many leaders in the Arab world. There were very few considering joining in with the protest.

There have been some military attacks on the students at Al-ghreer in the past weeks, and allegations of the use of a nerve gas that caused convulsions on student protesters. But the main attack that came last Thursday was almost certainly the actions of the balataga, although there is no emerging evidence either way of Presidential orders. Friends who live in the area tell me they heard machine guns firing for twenty minutes. I heard that the protesters were hemmed in by the army, whilst the balataga stood on roof tops, machine-gunning those below. So far, 52 have died according to the Yemen Observer, and 200 more were injured. The massacre stopped when student protestors went to the roof-tops and caught the protagonists and handed them over to the police. Despite Yemeni people having wide access to weapons, the protesters have not been drawn into using weapons as part of their protests, to their credit.

This dreadful event has resulted in many protest resignations. The head of the army and other top military officials, some of whom are now in tanks protecting the protesters. Members of the government, including the Minister for Human Rights. Ambassadors, including those to the UN and Lebanon. The President has declared a State of Emergency, sacked the government but asked them to keep on working until he appoints a replacement. Saudi is acting as a mediator between the President and opposition groups.

So where from here?
With the military divided, could it be a civil war? Without this massacre, it was very likely that Ali Abdullah Saleh would hang on to power, particularly since the unclear outcome in the Libya uprising, but now, everything has changed.

But it stands to reason that something has to give in Yemen. Apart from horrendous youth unemployment, the country is fast running out of water, with Taiz already out of water, and the capital, Sanaa, likely to be the first capital city in the world without water by 2015. At 8000 feet above sea level, this will present a huge challenge. The country's oil reserves are dwindling, Yemen is hoping to find gas but it won't be in significant quantities, and oil is currently its only significant export. And what is more, the known oil is in South Yemen, that demands separation from the North, making the issue more complex.

Whatever happens, ordinary Yemenis are in for a tough time, especially the young. I hope that young men like Amr find a future and are able to reach their potential, or I dread to imagine what will happen to the Arab world.

Drones winning 'War on Fright'?

Just a few weeks after the MoD declared its interest in stocking up on mini-drones, as have already been used by Merseyside police for a one year trial, tribal leaders in the Pakistani region of North Waziristan vowed revenge against the US after armed drones killed more than 40 people near the Afghan border. It’s an echo of the criminal mistake America made in the Sixties when it bled the war on Vietnam into Cambodia.

The drone phenomenon is bound to increase the number of civilian dead in any empirical adventures by the technologically-advanced but tribal “west” on several fronts: shooting or bombing people from the air will never be accurate, it is not a face-to-face encounter as on the battlefield and so is in fact a casual judge, jury and execution in one; and as the perpetrator is seated at a console on the other side of the planet, he or she feels no remorse nor danger.

The attack on the 17th March caused fury - as with all previous airborne attacks, the victims were random: most of the dead were tribal elders and police attending an open-air meeting.
“We are a people who wait 100 years to exact revenge. We never forgive our enemy,” the surviving Pakistani elders stated.

General Hayden denied the attacks were state-authorised assassinations. He said the US was at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and was simply acting in self-defence.
When Peter Taylor (BBC Two's The Secret War on Terror) pointed out that legally the war was in Afghanistan not Pakistan, he said that was not how the American administration looked at it.
“No they're not assassinations. This is a war, this is action against opposing armed enemy force. This is an inherent right of America to self-defence.”
If you think you have heard this line before, of course: it’s a macrocosmic version of the Israeli justification for bombing Palestinian villages.

Another link to Palestine is the Israeli arms industry, knocking out and exporting, among other things, drones. The European Union has given Israel direct funding for research in a programme called FP7; this has been getting channelled into military projects. In the end, the EU has been subsidising the manufacture of arms including drones, some of which it or its allies will then have bought.

The RAF is already using Predator drones, described as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) carrying Hellfire missiles or Paveway bombs, in Afghanistan.

What fun, boys!

The ECCP Briefing Paper - March 2011

The Israeli military and security industry

The Israeli military and security industry plays a pivotal role in the violent oppression of the Palestinians. The domestic industry provides a large proportion/majority of the weapons and equipment used by the Israeli military against Palestinians and the materials and systems for the construction and operation of Israel's illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements. Further still, the manufacture and export of weapons and other military equipment is crucial to the Israeli economy and its ability to continue its violations of international law. Israeli defence and security companies promote their products on the basis that they are "tested" in real world situations: the Palestinians are the guinea pigs in this testing laboratory. The violence experienced by Palestinians has become a source of profit; profit which itself surely motivates further violence. As former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Arens explained, "Israel's largest comparative advantage is in military products, because these demand advanced technology on one hand and military experience on the other…no country in the world is as dependent on arms sales as Israel. The Jaffa orange is fast being edged out of the public consciousness by the Uzi submachine gun as Israel's major export. Israel is the largest per capita arms exporter in the world".
Those who trade arms with Israel or cooperate with its military and security industry support Israel's continued violence against Palestinians and give a green light to continued Israeli violations of international law.

Israel and the Seventh Framework Program for Research

With a budget of €50.5bn, the Seventh Framework Program for Research (FP7) is the European Union's main research funding and collaboration vehicle and is due to run until 2013. As part of the benefits ascribed to Israel as part of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, Israeli research entities are equally eligible for research funding as those based in EU member states. The EU is Israel's second biggest source of public research funding after the Israel Science Foundation. All full participants in FP7, including Israel, make a contribution to FP7 based on their gross domestic product.

Jill Evans, Plaid Cymru MEP for Welsh Region, told us lobbyists in Brussels that Israeli UAVs (drones) are tested from an airfield at Aberporth on the Welsh coast near Cardigan, one of which crashed on the airfield a few days ago. She said that the Israeli company making the drones receives financial support from the Welsh government. The Welsh firm at the site is very small with about six employees, so it is not a significant local employer, but size in this case hardly matters: the connection is there.

Music history: The Maryland Club

Brilliant Corners Jazzwise staggers down memory lane
The Maryland Club, Glasgow (April 2007)
"It's like Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night in here!" was the cry of many a Scottish parent as the neighbourhood kids came tumbling unscheduled through the house. Sauchiehall Street is at the hub of Glasgow's nightlife. From the banks of the River Clyde, you can walk uptown past the main railway stations and the fancy shops, increasingly uphill until Sauchiehall Street crosses your path. Head west along that famous thoroughfare towards Charing Cross - gateway to the more bohemian West End - and on your right look out for Scott Street. Scott Street hauls itself steeply up Garnethill, and to reach the Maryland, you had to do the same. Back in the 1960s music fans in Scotland looking for something outside the mainstream would find their way, sooner or later, to the Maryland.

The Maryland site today



Local band Sky Cabin in the Maryland café

Owned by Bob Gardiner and fronted by Willie Cuthbertson, both now sadly deceased, the club caught the tail end of the Trad jazz boom with visitors such as Acker Bilk and his band. Local heroes included the Clyde Valley Stompers and the George Penman Jazzband. The Cool era followed with, for instance, tenorist Jimmy Skidmore who also appeared with his son Alan, as 'Skid, and Skid's Kid'. The gradual inroads made by soul music into jazz in the mid-60s resulted in the clientele becoming seriously Mod and one local soul band appearing at this time was The Dream Police, featuring the young Hamish Stuart, later of The Average White Band.

When the Blues came to town around 1967/68, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Champion Jack Dupree were regulars. Moothie* player extraordinaire Frazer Speirs - a suitably big lad - was on the door. Occasional precious nights included blues legends such as Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, while Muddy Waters made a rare UK appearance here, coming onstage on crutches after an accident of some months before - this gig went on so late that Willie Cuthbertson let the folks who had travelled specially from the other side of Scotland kip on the floor of the club for the night! And there were two jam-packed nights with Tony Williams' Lifetime, a booking Bob Gardiner remembered with particular fondness. Jon Hiseman's Coliseum (with and without Chris Farlowe), Mogul Thrash, Kevin Ayres and The Whole World and the Edgar Broughton Band also played here; Cream were booked to play early in their career but a week or two before the date, their appearance on Top of the Pops moved the goalposts and they had to play at the nearby Locarno Ballroom. Support for that gig was Long John Baldry and his band featuring Elton Dean on sax and Reg Dwight on keyboards. Pink Floyd made their first Glasgow appearance at the Maryland having been banned by the City Corporation from playing elsewhere. Around this time local blues band Crusade, featuring probably Glasgow's first bona fidé guitar hero, Shug Barr, set up home at the Maryland along with several lesser groups including the psychedelicly inclined Mechanical Bride.
Although the club expanded beyond blues and rock to heavy metal with bands like Uriah Heap, it never lost contact with its jazz roots, always the place for rival musicians to check each other out, and good for making contacts. Pete Brown spotted Jim Mullen here and took him off south to join Piblokto (or more accurately Piblokto!).
The ambience of the club changed with the times, and only messrs Gardiner and Cuthbertson could have revealed how this miniature Amsterdam flourished in the centre of uptight, Presbyterian Glasgow - although their budget didn’t extend to arranging a drinks licence. Then one April night in 1971 a smouldering fag-end in the dressing room opened the roof and let out all the memories.



-Thanks to Craig Lockhart for lots of extra input here...............

*Glaswegian for harmonica
Morning-after photo by Jim Waugh (mural by Cliff Hanley)

Living Souls

Dmitry Bykov

translation: Elaine Feinstein

pp 439

ISBN: 978-1-84688-126-8

AlmaBooks 24/02/11

There is a tradition in Russia, as there is in America, of the brick-shaped novel. Although life is short and most of us have a limited amount of time to spare wandering through the pages of another world, writers such as Dmitry Bykov believe that we should abdicate weeks of our own reality in favour of his fantasy of the near future. An impoverished Russia, permanently at civil war between the northern Varangians, who claim descent from the Aryan founders of Russia, and the southern Kaganate, made up of Khazars and Jews driven out of Moscow. These base their right to Russia on the skills that they believe once brought prosperity to a land now derelict. In the middle, the peasantry takes comfort in superstition and folklore. As it is set in the near-future, the history of modern Russia, Soviet crimes and the massacres of the Second World War hang over it throughout. Russia’s economy is destroyed. The world has turned to a new fuel, Phlogiston, and is no longer buying oil. The country is marginalised, and has turned to war, the only productive activity apart from oil sales its rulers can organise. War brings no tangible results, partly because Russian officers exterminate more of their own men than the enemies can.
As the story opens, Gromov, a Varangian officer, battles to recapture the village of Degunino before nightfall, chiefly to prevent his leave being shortened. Meanwhile, a nervous Private Voronov has fallen into the hands of an old KGB sadist, amusing himself before arranging his execution the next morning. An army priest, Ploskorylov, struggles to align his work with the enormously detailed army rulebook:
“ What’s wrong? You think I tricked you into a test? I love you, you idiot!” Gurov said with a short staccato laugh, flapping an arm at him and noisily kissing his cheek.
“In a church...” Ploskorylov gasped, barely able to breathe.
“Forgive me Father, I’ve sinned, Gurov grinned. ‘Right, fuck off, Priest, I’m going to inspect our troops.’
It certainly does read as a satire, and one about bureaucracy and procedural red tape as much as anything. We are not expected to love the Varangians, whether they are poltroons, sadists or book-punchers, although there is an air of melancholy drifting through the story which carries us with it. And grim though it may be, it is funny, too.
The soldiers find some light relief in the arms of the peasant women, who have to be equally welcoming to all warring factions as they pass through. In fact, only the peasantry in general have a sympathetic light cast on them. Although this has been described as the Catch-22 for modern Russia there is no central character as likeable as Yossarian; it is so well-populated that there is hardly enough room for one man to be central to the whole epic. The strangest thing about this tale is its overall tone of being set in the late nineteenth century, and it sticks there despite the soldiers’ occasional use of mobile phones and casual references to 20th century phenomena like TV serials and ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
Does the original Russian title, the abbreviaton Zhd, mean Yidzhivye dushi (living souls), in acknowledgment of Gogol's epic Dead Souls (1841), which inspired Bykov's book, or yid? Apparently the English translation removed a lot of the original references to yids but ‘yd’ pops up a few times: Major Volokhov, once a historian, wishes to marry his lover, Zhenka, who lives in the Kaganate , but she refuses because she is a “Yd”. Volokhov’s friend Everstein is also a Yd. We have to judge for ourselves. Certainly, his characters have it in for the Jews (Zhydy), but plenty of them also hate the Russians; and he has pointed out that he does in fact have it in for everyone. Bykov is a big name on the Russian literary scene. His novels (five, plus a biography of Pasternak) have won the two most prestigious prizes and he is a well-known poet and TV face. Half-Jewish, he answers accusations of anti-semitism by pointing out that he attacks Russian nationalism too. His enormously inclusive book - the translation is long, but the original is even longer - caused a furore in Russia when published in 2006. Blending a ‘novel of ideas’ with a dark urban fairy-tale and lyric satire not unlike Raymond Queneau (‘The Sunday of Life’), he leads his characters to an inevitable collision maybe like the one they came from before the book opened. The survivors say, “Let’s go,” holding hands as they move on. Not necessarily going to a rosy future.

Cinema: Myths and Illusions

As we enter the annual blockbuster high-season, here is my look back at the world of smoke, mirrors and sprockets:


MYTHS and ILLUSIONS

If you watch just about any TV programme about the First World War, you are going to see the shot of British soldiers going 'over the top' and one hit by a bullet, falling back into the trench. It's ancient and scratchy as you would expect, but it was filmed in the 'twenties.
It's all illusion, of course. Our perception of cinema has come a long way since the Lumiere Brothers had music-hall audiences rushing for the door as they were faced by a speeding locomotive. We accept that light particles bouncing off a white screen are no more than that, but willingly leave this flesh, blood and brick world to suspend our disbelief and allow our emotions to be assaulted or pampered. More than that: cinema now demands that we accept several layers of reality. It began with jumps in space as the scene cut, for instance, from one lonely Romeo to his far-away Juliet. Charlie Chaplin and the delectable Edna Purviance.
Early masters like Abel Gance topped this by sticking two or more related events together in a multiscreen, as in the 1927 'Napoleon'. It was time-travel that really took off, though, with the flashback quickly growing from an insert to being the whole film, like 'The Lavender Hill Mob' (1951), where we start in the present and only return to it for Alec Guiness' punch line, which completely trashes all the assumptions we would have made about the story's outcome.

Concurrent with the growth of mainstream fictional cinema has been the documentary, which, although for most of its history has been predominantly in the service of hard fact, also enabled us to learn about alternative worlds, e.g. 'Nanook of the North', while giving directors a freedom to experiment they would not have had with bigger budgets hanging round their necks. 'The Night Mail', mixing film, poetry and music being just one example. Rap cinema. Often through budget limitation, films have included bits of what is later recognised as valuable documentary, like the original Titanic film, 'A Night to Remember', where The Queen Elizabeth played the lead role for the launching scene. But story-telling and information have usually tended to keep well apart, although now there are plenty of straightforward dramas which function as documentaries too, like 'In the Name of the Father' (the story of the Guildford Four) although it bent the facts by combining the characters of solicitor and barrister for the American market, casting some doubt on the rest of it. (Incidentally, complaints have also been made against the 2006 film, 'Provoked', based on the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who killed her violent husband, in that it lost by having the legal process 'Americanised'.) 'Fellow Travellers', too, the 'eighties film about how blacklisted Hollywood writers came to work on British TV, putting words in the mouths of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe. An ideal double bill with 'Good Night, and Good Luck'.

Inbetween we have the honestly 'based on real events' film; starting with historical fact but jumping off to create a slightly, or completely, new story. A special mention here must go to the Italian 'Private', the Golden Leopard award-winning tale of a Palestinian family playing unwilling host to some frightened Israeli boy-soldiers. Based on a true story, or perhaps a couple of true stories, it works a little like a 'reality TV' show, the camera sharing confined airspace with improvising actors. The Coen Brothers' 'Fargo' is another one of the legions of examples, and one of the best. It isn't so new, though: Two directors separately made differing films both based on a murder committed by two bored youths just to see if they could carry out the perfect crime; one being 'Rope', by Alfred Hitchcock. If you want to really stretch the point, you could include half of all films ever made, taking in gangsters, men in tights, westerns and war movies.

Meanwhile, books (and not just Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and James Joyce's Ulysses) have been taking increasing liberties with genres; but the landmark event in demolishing the wall was surely on the wireless with Orson Welles' 'War of the Worlds'. He managed to top even that, in a sense, with 'F for Fake' (1974) . 'Art itself is a forgery, of nature or the imagination' - (is an interpreter a forger?) An investigation linking two art forgers including Elmer Hory, with Howard Hughes the recluse who employed stand-ins for his rare public appearances (cf A. Warhol), a hoax biographer and Orson the amateur magician himself, 'Fake' jams together visual puns, stills, other films, reconstructions and actual documentary footage in an exhilarating but disorientating experience. It was not a great success at the box-office as it was born ahead of its category.

Two strands of new cinema can be traced back to that film: most of Charlie Kaufman's scripts especially 'Adaptation' and plenty of Michael Winterbottom's output stand out as a recognisable genre, combining a film, with a film about the film and chopping together the script with its source and the business of writing it. Jean Luc Godard has also had a considerable effect in this area, although since he came over all analytical, only the most determined film scholars would sit through his films more than once. In 'One Plus One' (comparatively a symbolist drama) , combining a fictional group of black kids planning bloody revolution on the banks of the Thames, with the Rolling Stones interminably trying to record 'Sympathy for the Devil', Jagger spoke for us all when he burst into an exasperated 'Jeeziz Christ!'. Winterbottom has made several films which combined genuine documentary with fiction, particularly 'Welcome to Sarajevo'. Documentary has now become a 'style' to take its place with other movie forms including musical, noir and comedy. In the end it's a matter of degree: 'Apocalypse Now' looked, in its time, quite like the 'real thing', but 'The Road to Guantanamo' and now 'Shooting Dogs' leave it looking relatively stylised. Films like this which look like documentaries actually contain quite a lot of acting and inter-acting. Such leading cinema has a chicken/ egg relationship with technology. As it was with oil paint and easel pictures, offset litho and Private Eye, Marshall Amplifiers and Jimi Hendrix, photocopiers and samizdat or punk fanzines, so it goes with video/ digital and (usually) small-budget postmodern cinema.

There certainly is an entirely new genre: depicting real events and using non-actors to play themselves or people like them. Or 'real' actors to impersonate them. That's the other strand. There has been a wave of no-budget films from Iran, notably 'Kandahar' ( an Afghani-born woman receives a letter from her suicidal sister, taking a dangerously unaccompanied journey through Afghanistan to try to find her), by Mosen Makhmalbaf, 'The Apple' by his daughter Samira (two daughters are released from their prison home by their jealous and paranoid father), and 'The Day I Became a Woman' (the three ages of woman) by Marzieh Meshkini AKA Mrs Makhmalbaf. All are shot in the middle of their real-life scenario with combined actors and non-actors, often apparently playing themselves. The ubiquitous Winterbottom has also done this, perhaps with a little more money, as in 'In This World', the harrowing study of people-smuggling. The perfidious logic of our film distributors shows up in the way that, although Makhmalbaf has been established as a film maker since at least 1981, it was that charmer, The Apple, by his 21 year-old daughter, that was the break-through for Iran in the UK.

Just as in Iran, Africa has been growing as a film-making country. Widely regarded as the father of African film and called by his colleagues, 'Uncle' or 'The Old Man', Ousmane Sembene has been working in films for a quarter century. His latest, 'Moolaade', seen at the 2005 bath Film festival, appeared, deceptively, to feature 'real' people playing themselves, but they were in fact actors from all over the continent. His stories are placed in convincingly real surroundings, and as well as setting out to show their intended audiences their world and themselves, are heavily polemical; none more so than Moolaade, which deals with female genital mutilation. Combining the illusion of reality with strong ideas, and ideals, these films will inevitably become as important part of history as the attitudes, cultural and political, they portray.

At the same time, there has been the rise of 'Dogme': director Lars von Trier and his confederates issued a manifesto and followed its puritanical rules - to get rid of trickery in cinema. No more overdubbing, sound effects, back-projection, artificial light. A return to the absolute basics, 'Festen', 'The Idiots' and other productions rolled out before it became apparent that these revolutionaries were only using their new 'style' for what they could squeeze out of it. They have, perhaps inevitably, got more sophisticated and now have their choice of established movie technique. Von Trier's recent 'Manderlay' was mostly post-synched (overdubbed). In any case, their pared-down approach didn't necessarily always lead to a heightened sense of realism, although by sticking to one kind of film-making throughout a production, they made it a lot easier for audiences to maintain one level of disbelief-suspension. The unobtrusive camera, the fly-on-the-wall observation felt a little like documentary but there was never any doubt that we were watching actors acting.

'Documentary' has elided with 'fiction' for the sake of style as much as for the sake of budget. '24 Hour Party People' and 'A Cock and Bull Story' played jokes with the idea of doing such a thing, and the first was a mock-documentary with Steve Coogan playing 'pop svengali' Tony Wilson, who also plays the part of 'Tony Wilson' in the latter, parts of which were indistinguishable from hard-fact documentary. But there are also plenty of films which regardless of their believability levels, look like documentaries: 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' for instance. A film made by Remy Belvaux in 1992, on the other hand, set out from the start to look like a documentary, made by a team who by their presence are implicated in the crimes being carried out by the protagonist. 'Man Bites Dog' beguiles us all into assuming the relaxed attitude of the disinterested observer, to the extent of finding our man amusing and sympatico. I am tempted to give more details, but it's too good to spoil, and I'm sure there are some amongst you who have not yet seen it. Enough to say that when we eventually become aware of how far we, the audience, have strayed, it's as amusing as a kick in the solar plexus.

Yoko Ono in one of her darker moments made a short film called 'Rape', in which the camera stalked an increasingly frightened girl through streets and round corners. That's it. It's an Art Film, which means taking one idea and hammering it to death. The fad for 'snuff movies' in the States went a little further, by hammering the protagonist to death. They seemed to have lost popularity when it became clear that they were, despite their hand-held immediacy, fiction. Perhaps. Anyway, as far as their hardcore audience goes, it probably wouldn't make that much difference.

'The Blair Witch Project' probably fooled some of the people, some of the time. As it begins with the bald statement: 'In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was discovered.' - it's obvious what we are expected to believe, or credit. The students' film begins professionally enough for beginners, but deteriorates into thoughtless pointing and shooting as they get lost and descend into danger. The really clever thing is getting us to accept that three people who are only in the end concerned with struggling to survive, would take the trouble to film themselves struggling. There are plenty of setups which are palpably not unplanned; simply not what real people without a film crew would really do - but it doesn't matter. We believe. The three students' personality clashes, frustration, anger and distress are 'true to life' and they at least must be 'real kids' even if the film requires us to make that credibility jump. It's necessary to watch the DVD complete with the extras, to see the light. They are believable because they are actors. As they plan to make their documentary one of them makes a passing reference to 'Deliverance', a drama which followed a similar plot, and also convinced as a portrayal of a bizarre and dangerous other world. John Boorman is a great director, and so we believed the scenario, but we may have had reservations about such horrible people really existing. One of them was in the Whitehouse, you might say; so life imitates art, as it always has done.

Yemen update 2nd March

With the spread of political unrest throughout the Arab states, there has been a dearth of news about Yemen, a part of the world which if anything only conjures up embarrassing memories of Britain's empirical adventurism in the nineteen-fifties. We in Bristol are privileged in having a colleague, Dr Judith Brown, right there in the middle of it all. Here is her latest report:

I'm back in Sana'a which is much quieter than Aden protest-wise, although the areas around the new university and Tahreer Square are blocked to traffic. I am living way north of those areas so I don't see any action except when driving nearby.
The mood in Sana'a I think is apprehension. I think it might be difficult for us to understand their fear, but when the whole Middle East is set for a possible big change, everyone becomes aware of the financial, security, stability risks and they are scared at the prospect. They would like change but...
Just as I left Aden, I received an email from the British Ambassador suggesting that all British citizens leave Aden immediately. There are tanks on the streets apparently and it is considered that the risk of civil war has been raised. However, the demonstrations yesterday, whilst very large in Taiz and Aden, were I gather peaceful. Taiz is an interesting situation because it was in North Yemen - which is actually to the West of Yemen, but actually located in the South. So it gravitates towards the South, it is far nearer to Aden than it is to Sana'a. It also has a reputation for having respect for women's rights and is noted as a place where education is valued - even during the Imam era, it was the only town in North Yemen with educational facilities for women, and the schools were considered to be excellent. It is in Taiz where there are the biggest uprisings in the whole of Yemen. I think the people of Aden (not the youth who are protesting) see the issues of separation and change in government as too closely related, and fear the consequences. They know the president has close links with the American military because they are fighting Al Qaeda in Arabia, which is now based in Hadramaut, which is in the political South but is actually in the East. So you can perhaps see why Taiz, with no secessionist issues and no close links with Sana'a is the lead city in the protests.
But I can see that the fear and apprehension of change, once the initial excitement has passed, is a big block to movements for change. And this of course applies all over the Middle East - nothing is settled politically in Tunisia, Egypt or Libya yet and that adds to uncertainty elsewhere.

Libya: what next?

So what next in Libya? The USA will be keen to re-establish ‘stability’ first and foremost. We all know what stability means: setting up a regime that will be in every way a puppet of the ‘benign’ godlike Superstate, and which looks pretty much like the last one. That is why Eisenhower invaded Guatemala. And that is why Kennedy also invaded Guatemala. The wrong kind of democracy. As in Vietnam, Chile, Gaza.

And we can look at Iraq for an example of perfidious US/UK politics. Saddam was our man until he went into business for himself; then suddenly he became Evil Personified - and the fact that his chemical weaponry was sold to him by the US and UK was brushed aside repeatedly. Similarly, Gaddafi morphed from terrorist supporter to Friend of the West, which then ignored his internal repressions. Libya is regarded as a favoured customer, with the UK boasting the largest pavilion at the last Libyan arms fair. Thus it was with the Thatcher Government and Indonesia.

In January 2009, Nick Clegg wrote in The Guardian that Britain should stop selling arms to Israel following its bombardment of Gaza. He made a broader point: the UK should not supply weapons to countries involved in external aggression or internal repression.
He has been conspicuously silent on this subject since he became deputy prime minister.

Interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, Tuesday 1st March, John Major exposed the Establishment position on this for once and for all. He claimed, with some bitterness, that the people who were complaining about arms sales would be the same ones who would be out on the street demonstrating against job cuts when the arms industry suffers.

Now Iraq has ‘stability’: a new, stand-in dictatorship, hotwired to Washington as before. And all those deaths? Just numbers, as Harry Lime would say. But our government and supine news media - the Mail, Sun, Telegraph etc will have it that we ‘won’ the war and liberated the Iraqis while saving ourselves from the threat of WMD.

It does look now as if the UN could be readying itself for intervention. Our very own David Owen has been calling for a degree of UN-sanctioned interference. Or America could just stick to tradition and start pouring bombs all over the parts of Libya that it suspects contains the people who least represent its interests.

In a recent blog, Susil Gupta said,
Should the crisis continue, the Guardian argues, “intervention on the ground would have to be considered. The Egyptian army has the means, other Arab countries could contribute, and western forces could help.” Yes, and it would all be over by Christmas.

It is obvious that these war-enthusiasts have not thought this through – but then they would not be doing any of the fighting. The plain fact is that there are no feasible military interventions even if the major powers could agree on an intervention plan, which is very far from being the case. Consider the options.

Imposing a no fly zone. This would require extensive air patrols by foreign air forces. They would have little effect since air power is not key to Gadhafi’s strategy. It would, however, create an atmosphere of major war and give Gadhafi a propaganda boost.

Creating a military barrier or cordon sanitaire around eastern Libya to protect rebel positions. Likewise this would crystallise the situation into a two-sided war, which could only play into Gadhafi’s hands. It is to the advantage of those that want to topple Gadhafi to avoid a war of entrenchment fixed positions, preventing them from permeating every level of society and undermine further his crumbing power base. In any case such Western intervention would be impossible to implement. No Western commander is going to deploy troops at short notice into a theatre unknown to his troops but well-known to an enemy who, in any case, cannot be easily distinguished from friendly forces. It is a recipe for disaster.

Sending in a ‘peace keeping’ African Union force to separate the parties. One way to unite every Libyan behind Gadhafi, given the reputation of such forces in the past.

Sending in a ‘peace keeping’ force made up of troops from Arab countries as The Guardian recommends. One way to unite every Libyan behind Gadhafi and infect and inflame the whole of the Middle East with the vicissitudes of a Libyan civil war.

...
I would say that any kind of outside involvement would most likely unite the Libyans against the invaders if it did not break up the country into a protracted civil war. The good news is that America is seriously in hock after a century of overspending and colonial overstretching, so that it is unlikely to be as gung-ho as it used to be over this kind of scenario. And sanctions? Remember the sanctions in Iraq: how effective they were in hastening the deaths of the very young, the very old and the seriously ill. But in any case Libya is a different kind of country entirely - its edges are very ‘porous’ and it is probably as far removed from a self-contained walled-in state as you could get.

But whatever form any interference might take, it would certainly not be aimed at consolidating the democratic revolution by the People. It will be for re-establishing the pipelines of oil and money. Stability.


The Guardian has published some excellent letters on this subject including ones from friends Tony Greenstein and Peter Downey:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/01/liberal-intervention-in-arab-world?INTCMP=SRCH