[Montréal, Québec, Canada 1°C] The little known international campaign to promote the cultural, academic and economic divestment in the state of Israel is set to begin around the world on March 1, 2010. The growing campaign is modelled after the success of the global efforts that successfully dismantles Apartheid in South Africa. In its sixth year, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), has become an important rallying event against Palestinian oppression with events organized in more than 50 cities worldwide.
The Montréal IAW activities were announced this morning in a press conference that included the publication of an open letter signed by more than 500 Montréal artists who support the Palestinian-initiated campaign to boycott, divest and encourage sanctions against Israel. Although the international IAW is from March 1 – 7, 2010, Montréal organizers set their own schedule with the week’s events beginning on March 4 with a conference at McGill University entitled: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions: Celebrating the successes and overcoming the challenges of the BDS Movement against Israeli Apartheid.
A woman from Lurcuk Payam receives a tetanus vaccination, March 20, 2009. (by David Widgington)
[Montréal, Québec, Canada -4°C] I visited Southern Sudan March/April 2009. It seems like such a long time ago. Reviewing the video footage and photographs I took during my visit, brings me back. Below is my latest video montage of a particular day: March 20, 2009.
This is the day I joined a team of World Vision staff on one of their vaccination programs. We went to Lurcuk Payam in Tonj North County, Warrap State. The one-and-a-half-hour drive along bumpy roads that are inaccessible during the rainy season, took us past clusters of traditional tukul homes and herds of strolling big-horned cows.
We arrived at 11h00 under the shade of the biggest tree that stood outside of the local clinic and borehole well where women come to fetch water. Two vaccinators spent five hours giving innoculations for measles, tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria and tetanus. In all, 276 Lurcuk children are vaccinated and 167 women of childbearing years receive a tetanus vaccine.
[Montréal, Québec, Canada -4°C] Holding elections anywhere in the world is a logistical challenge. Considering that Sudan has not had elections since 1986, it is Africa’s largest country with vast regions among the least developed on the planet, election logistics are no simple matter.
Census and Voter Registration
A Juba resident makes her registration for the Natonal Elections in April 2010, by Bonifacio Taban.
There are prerequisites to conducting a democratic election that include a census of the population to determine who can vote and in which electoral constituency. The Sudan census has been contested by the SPLM and analysed by others.
Citizens are required to add themselves to the voter list during the voter registration process, followed by a verification of the voter list after its publication. The Carter Center provided observers to provide an impartial assessment of the process. Registration of political party lists with their representatives ended yesterday after a seven-day extension. Continue reading →
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 6°C] Before the January 12th earthquake shook the ground from beneath Haiti’s foundations, pulling the roofs down onto the people of Jacmel, Ciné Institute used the power of cinema to educate and empower Haitian youth in the coastal city south of Port-au-Prince. Just like other educational institutions, Ciné Institute was devastated with its building—where it housed its equipment, trained aspiring filmmakers and held its weekly screenings—came crashing down two weeks ago.
Ciné Institute in Jacmel, Haiti
Students from the institute, whose own houses were destroyed, dug cameras and other equipment out from under the rubble and began capturing images of destruction and testimonies of solidarity in their city of Jacmel. The students chose to use the skills learned at the Institute to highlight the situation in their home town long before humanitarian aid even reached Jacmel and before any other media extended themselves beyond the Haiti’s capital. They are probably the only ones offering a local perspective of the circumstances they themselves are living through that is available to the outside world without the filters of international news gatherers. According to an article on Naomi Klein’s blog, sometimes the media is the disaster.
What began as the Festival Film Jakmèl, Ciné Institute has become a voice of the Haitian people broadcast around the world via the web and throughout the American network GRITtv. If their current work, as portrayed in the videos below, taken from their website, they are rising to the challenge and have become a beacon to other Haitians who want their own message to reach the world. It is now more important than ever to include many Haitian perspectives with today’s opening of an international conference for the reconstruction of Haiti in Montréal. Formally called the Ministerial Preparatory Conference of the Group of Friends of Haiti, it may also be called ‘those who want reconstruction contracts in the new Haiti’ as the ‘international community’ jockeys for the positiion in the rebuilding of Haiti. An excerpt of Klein’s The Shock Doctrine offers a model for Haiti that we should all be familiar with as Haiti’s residents are relocated from their former homes to temporary displacement camps and their country is rebuild in the image of international donors and ‘expertise’. With the land still trembling beneath them, let’s hope Haiti’s citizens’s do not get the rug pulled from under their feet nor the wool pulled over their eyes.
[Montréal, Québec, Canada -2°C] Montréal is a city of filmmakers particularly known for its production of documentary films. Like all documentary filmmakers know, it can take a while to complete a film. Few films have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end while others are ongoing and are dependent on an unfolding story and an unknown finally.
GRITtv is a New York City-based, news and arts discussion show that gives weekly attention to documentary films and their filmmakers. What differs GRITtv from other shows is that it focusses on issues and provides context to the stories of the day. It is broadcast via satelite four times each day on Free Speech TV immediately following well known political analysis show hosted by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now. It is also vailable on cable TV in 35 US states and on 200 college TV stations. Of course, GRITtv is available online where viewers can subscribe via video RSS feed.
If you want to get preview your lastest film, get feedback or need help getting images, you may want to consider contacting the show’s host, Laura Flanders to be included on her weekly segment, Got Docs? I will certainly send her a video montage of work-in-progress to get on her show. There is no indication ratio between the number of submission they getas compared to the 52 weeks available in one year but I imagine that competition is tough.
Below is the thursday, January 21, 2010 episode. A Thursday show with a Got Doc? segment at 25:31. The film presented, Sifuna Okwethu, is by Bernadette Atuahene. Translated as “We Want What’s Ours” is a film that explores the tensions of present-day South Africa where families reclaim land disposessed by the racist Apartheid regime. The film follows one family’s attempt to reclaim their land. You can visit the filmmaker’s website, Documentaries to Inspire Social Change for further details about the film.
So if you have a documentary work in progress that you would like to show an excerpt, visit the Got Docs? page for details.
[Montréal, Québec, Canada -2°C] I can imagine the emotional depth and confused sense of belonging/alienation that must come from a return visit to one’s homeland ofter a very long and forced exile. At least I think I can. The documentary film by Jen Marlowe, Rebuilding Hope, offers a glimpse of estrangement as it collides with the nostalgia from a childhood torn appart by a 21-year civil war. Chris Koor Garang, Gabriel Bol Deng and Garang Mayuol, the film’s three characters, return home to Southern Sudan to find themselves, to look for their families and to help rebuild their communities now that the war is over. Their expectations clash with the realities on the ground. The following quote introduces their story of return.
We left Sudan because of war and now we are going back for the first time in twenty years.
(source: Map No. 3707 Rev. 10, UNITED NATIONS, Department of Peacekeeping Operations Cartographic Section, April 2007; demarcation line source is US Department of State)
The Sudan has been at war with itself in two successive civil wars since its independence in 1956 from British rule in the southern region and British-administered Egyptian rule in the rest (Anyanya 1: 1956-1972 & Anyanya 2: 1983-2005). Colonial powers may have decided to create Africa’s largest country by maintaining the two administrative regions together but they may just as easily have divided the country along the Jan 1, 1956 Line of Demarcation. Power in a post-colonial Sudan was handed over to the political elite in Khartoum to the detriment of Southern Sudan, Darfur, and other peripheral regions far from the capital. Power, wealth, resources and development have always been tightly controlled by a small click of autocrats based at the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile rivers. This Line of Demarcation is the divide that is now a defining line needing negotiations should Southerners vote for independence in a 2011 self-determination referendum, scheduled in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the second civil war in January 2005. Continue reading →
[Montréal, Québec, Canada -9°C] Below is a first post that was not written in-house. It was taken from another source. It is the first article I read that discusses so eloquently the water conundrum in Sudan.
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Perspective: Sudan – Land of Water and Thirst; War and Peace
As we approach the January 2011 date for the referendum on the south, and as we see Darfur seemingly in an eerily, but uncertain, peaceful period, we need to look at the water situation in Sudan. Water will be a make or break issue for the peace process in Sudan and in deciding whether the Sudan will move forward in peace and prosperity or more poverty and war. It is a country that went through one of the most brutal civil wars in history. Millions were killed and displaced. Sudan is the country of Darfur, “The lost boys,” and lost generations. One of the driving forces behind the start of the last civil war between the south and the north was the Jonglei Canal. This is an idea that has been around for a very long time. It was to be a canal to bring the water through one of the largest wetlands in the world, The Sudd, more quickly to the north and to Egypt. But those earlier plans did not include much improvement in the lives of the people of the South and along the proposed canal. Dr. John Garang, one of the leaders of the southern rebels wrote his Ph.D. on the Jonglei Canal. The horrors of Darfur can be partly traced back to climate change, rain pattern changes, and water stress. Water is a very big issue in Sudan.
About 80 percent of the people in Sudan find their livelihoods in agriculture. Agriculture is about 40 percent of the country’s GDP and accounts for about 97 percent of the water use. Meanwhile 70 percent of agriculture in Sudan is rain fed. The rest of agriculture can find its water through small traditional spate irrigation and via khors, small mostly hand dug canals, or via huge irrigation projects, such as the Gezira project — which uses about 35 percent of Sudan’s water, and the many giant sugar irrigation schemes. Sudan has the largest area of irrigation in all of Sub-Saharan Africa, but even if this is poorly managed and maintained.
A close up of the fields in the Gezira Scheme, which is one of the largest irrigation projects in the world. It is centered on the Sudanese state of Al Jazirah, just southeast of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers at the city of Khartoum.
During a visit to Southern Sudan in March and April 2009, I visited multiple projects funded by the Canadian International Development Agency. This short video shows a project managed by the UN's International Organization for Migration in Northern Bahr el Ghazal State to provide schools, women's centres, and borehole wells for communities of returnees in the region.
For more about Southern Sudan, visit: http://southsudaninfo.net
