Mercurial » World

Happy Colombia Independence Day!

Camilo — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:12:29 +0000

So now we celebrate the Dia de la Independencia de Colombia, remembering the words by Acevedo y Gomez:

Si perdéis estos momentos de efervescencia y calor, si dejáis escapar esta ocasión única y feliz, antes de doce horas seréis tratados como insurgentes: ved los calabozos, los grillos y las cadenas que os esperan.

How fitting: It takes a revolution that occurred 197 years ago to think again about who we are, what we are worth and how the regimes, the people, and the institutions that insist on stripping away our humanity have to be replaced, removed and remade according to more enlightened principles.
This discussion of freedom and equality doesn’t come cheap: just translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will end you up in jail; just demanding those rights from the authorities will end you dead; just walking in front of tanks will end you up in isolation. Yet people do it, across cultures and times, religions and ideologies, across cultures and backgrounds – the basic human rights are universal, and we all understand at a very basic level the absolute right to a decent existence.

Did you know that the first man in the Moon was a Colombian?
According to Luis Dueñas Gallo, author of “La otra realidad”, book number 8 in the Enciclopedia Familiar Colcultura, which you will never find anywhere anymore, Neil Armstrong visited Colombia way back in the 60s, before he was an astronaut, before he was even in the cards, and received an honorary Colombian citizenship.

What? Honorary Colombian? What for? Well, knowing Colombian penchant for pomp and circumstance, it is fitting: the guys flies planes, shows up to say hello, and the ruling President just makes him part of the family, as it were – I have heard of those 60s presidents, and they were prone to those extremely public displays of affection; besides, the country was at war (still is) so every local celebrity, real or made up, was good enough to divert attention from the daily pain.

38 years ago, it was on the 20th of july that we heard

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

And then NASA lost the tapes. Bummer.

World Refugee Day

Camilo — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:57:13 +0000

Today is World Refugee Day, a day instituted to bring awareness to the plight of the millions of people displaced by racism, intolerance, war and persecution.
Go and check MDW, that has a poem by a 14 year old Sudanese refugee, of which the following is an extract:

The actual moment,
Of Exile,
Is like an illness.
You are ill,
With rage.

To each family,
It means closing the door,
On friends, culture, your native country.

I do have mixed feelings about this day. On one hand, yes, by all mean raise awareness about the fact that 40 million people have lost their homes and their culture, and have been forced to flee just to be alive. On the other hand, it is taken too lightly by media and politics. What are those stateless people doing here, seems to be the world motto:

Given the role of the United States in creating this mess, these numbers should cause some hard thinking in Washington. The United States admitted a whopping 202 Iraqis for resettlement during 2006, and though plans are in place to take in 7,000 this year, compare that to the 850,000 Vietnamese who were given asylum in the U.S. during and after that war. It’s pretty weak.

as the FP says. But unlike what they say, the total figure is not 10 million – it is, officially, 33 million people, according to the report on from the UN Refugee Agency: this figure includes the refugees, the asylum seekers, the internally displaced persons, the returnees and the stateless persons. In 2006, the IDP number was driven by Iraq’s war: there are people doing their work to alleviate this:
Oftentimes we have senseless figures, like the three million IDP from Colombia, or the 2.2 million Iraqis that have been displaced thanks to this recent oil war. What does it mean for us? Seriously, how is the world changed to your eyes on that ongoing tragedy? No one is a refugee by choice:

In a world, whose focus has become security, the Refugee Highway has become even more challenging. The rights of refugees to seek protection can be subtly discouraged, disregarded even, by perception and process. Yet, they persevere. Hope lingers as their search for a durable solution, for a life lived in peace and productivity continues.

How to deal with the worst year on record for refugees? Antonio Gutierres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees , said

Let’s be honest, in many cases their governments are part of the problem, and in many cases the international community does not have the capacity to help them.

How true.
Again with the Sudanese poet, I feel anger. Anger at the indifference, at the palliative phrases, at the empty “how sad” commentaries, all the pregnant silences after explaining loss and anger, all the impossible resignation to slowly losing identity, culture and family. The exile of a refugee is a slow, painful death fow which we al are responsible.
You could send a donation to the UN (tip of hat to devious diva).

Learn Chinese

Camilo — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 18:46:27 +0000

So, Pete points to a report about Brighton College now giving Mandarin Chinese to its students, as reported by BBC.
Good indeed, as it is increasingly relevant to know the language of the manufacturers of all we use.

Akin to learning the language of our masters, since we are indeed indebted to China, although I do not want to sound so alarmist. On the other hand, when the USA became the de facto force in the world, everybody started learning English, and schools all over the world would require it for anybody with international aspirations.
In conclusion, this change in languages is nothing more that another knell for traditional economic powers. What would come next?