Posts tagged Syria
Book Launch at SOAS: These 13 stories of young activists from the MENA region (Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Palestine - West bank & Gaza), reveal how young Arab women and men, who come from very diverse backgrounds, regions, continents, share the same passion for their countries, the same audacity of hope for a better tomorrow, the same dream of making their country proud of them. All of the writers who were committed to this project were deeply convinced that one should not ask what their country will do for them, but rather what could they offer their countries. In a world where barriers are constantly being erased, where virtual communication turns the world to a global village, what is this strange bond that ties this Arab youth to politics and public affairs?
Lebanese Victims of Torture
Remembering Palmyra
They were abducted and tortured. Now they have taken to the stage: In “The German Chair”, Lebanese survivors of Syrian jails recreate the horrors of the civil war in a play. By Jannis Hagmann
Aleppo, a flood of suffering, how much blood is shed in my country!
I wanted to sing the pain of my country,
With a broken heart I cry for my land and the children who have become strangers in their own country.
Artists exorcise demons of Syria crisis through art
“That’s the voice we want to hear in the Arab world, not the sound of cannons!” exclaimed Nancy Ajram, a star Arab singer and jury member, as Hamdan’s fellow Syrian competitor Farah broke into tears.
WMC’s Women Under Siege is calling on women and men from Syria and those working with Syrian refugees to provide us with reports of Sexualized violence as the crisis unfolds. We are relying on you to help us discover whether rape and sexual assault are widespread - such evidence can be used to aid the international community in grasping the urgency of what is happening in Syria, and can provide the base for potential future prosecutions. Our goal is to make these atrocities visible, and to gather evidence so that one day justice may be served.
We collaborate with epidemiologists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, as well as multiple Syrian activists and journalists.
I was not afraid for a moment because I believe what I am doing is necessary, especially in view of the media blackout about many aspects of the revolution. From the outset I figured there are people dying in their homes, and if I were to die in the street or on the front lines, so be it. I faced death when I was hit with shrapnel from a regime artillery shell fired on Sheikh Saeed district in Aleppo on February 7th, 2013. It broke my leg but I am recovered now.
I survived many moments that were fraught with danger while I took photographs on the front lines, and during air strikes, mortar attacks and tank shelling.
When the Syrian conflict broke out in March 2011, Nour Kelzi, a schoolteacher from Aleppo, had no idea how the war would change her life.
Kelzi, who was 23 when the conflict began, started taking amateur photographs on the front lines with her mobile phone. This eventually led to a job with the international news agency Reuters, and her current status as a well-known chronicler of the Syrian revolution.
Kelzi began her work for Reuters under the pseudonym Zain Karam to protect her family, later reverting to her real name.She spoke to Al-Shorfa about her experience as a war photographer.
Art exhibition for the Syrian crisis
Syrian-born artist Issam Kourbaj is exhibiting exclusive recent works in order to raise money for Syrian mothers and their families.
For the fortnight of 22 March to 7 April, Christ’s College Cambridge artist-in-residence Issam Kourbaj will be exhibiting his new art project, Excavating the Present, in a former furnishing emporium in King Street, Cambridge. Here, in a space blessed with abundant northern light, he will present his haunting installation, which amalgamates X-ray images of the human body and of familiar animals with aerial photographs of British landscapes.
In it, images of animal and human bones hang beside images of the land observed from the sky. Fixed to a clothes-line, carefully weathered with acids, the images are eerie yet domestic, a reminder that the biggest mystery of all, death, surrounds us all the time.
[Top: Bab Trablous, Hama. “A bag of bread cost around 25 cents two years ago, but the price in Hama is now $1,” reports a photographer from Lens of a Young Hamawi. “Nowadays, every family member - men, women, and children - take their turn fetching bread.”]
[Bottom Left: Yassin and Maryam Sabbagh, a brother and sister playing in the street in a regime-controlled neighborhood of Homs, January 2013. A half hour after the photo was posted on the Lens of a Young Homsi page they were killed by mortar fire.]
[Bottom Right: One of five similar graveyards in Qasayr in which roughly 1000 of those killed in the last two years, both fighters and civilians, have been buried. Local volunteers from the town decorate and maintain the graveyards.]
The Lens of a Youth Photography Collective: Documenting Life and War in Syria
As much as the war in Syria is one of weapons, it is also a war of images. Photographs and videos circulated online have altered assumptions, confirmed biases, and framed narratives at every stage of ongoing developments. In the past year, a number of Facebook pages have emerged as part of the “Lens of a Youth” network of photography collectives, covering nearly all the different cities and towns in Syria. Each individual collective’s moniker declares the place it is from, such as “Lens of a Young Aleppan” or “Lens of a Young Hamawi.”
Not surprisingly, the idea of systematically documenting all the cities through a coordinated photography collective came from “the capital of the Syrian revolution”: Homs—but it quickly spread across all of Syria. Nebras, who works on the “Lens of a Young Deiri” page, says the Syrian uprising contains many elements, but that in his “personal opinion, media is the soul of the revolution. The effort to document every event, no matter how large or how small, is what keeps it alive.”
The collectives have become a popular source of images of everyday life, violence, and destruction in neighborhoods from around the country. While most of the photographs and videos coming out of Syria seem to exclusively feature either images of war or images of peace, the “Lens of a Youth” pages have a variety of pictures from daily life in Syria. The pages exhibit photographs of destruction and protests, but also of street corners, houses, and city landscapes.
We have fine and talented artists in the Arab world but circumstances are not in their favour. We reside in a spiritual part of the world and the soil of our region breathes culture. Culture is ingrained in us. Old Damascus is an accumulation of culture and civilisation throughout the ages. How do you expect artists not to emerge from this land? Our artists are committed to their humanitarian causes and those of their countries. They are mirrors of their societies.
Razan Chatti, a set designer and scenographer, is cultivating young talent under the auspices of the Afak (Horizons) foundation, which she launched in 2011.
Through Afak, she organises traveling exhibitions for artists from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, whose works carry powerful humanitarian messages.
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How Skype Is Helping Topple A Dictator In Syria
This article from Mashable gives us another reason to love technology.
Skype is the go-to social network for communication between rebels, anti-government activists, journalists and officials inside and outside of Syria.
Why? Skype uses wiretapping-resistant Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, making it safer for transmitting messages while under the watchful eyes and ears of government censors. It’s free to download and easy to use, both positives for cash-strapped rebels and activists. Its video-based chatting makes it easier to identify the person on the other line, important when verifying information as legit amidst the fog of war. And it provides an easy way for Syrians to gather electronically in areas where assembling in person poses too great a security risk.
[Image:via Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty Images]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a7186f9143b236106b907387af2c0634/tumblr_mht8ojgAEl1qzt7h7o1_400.jpg)
How Skype Is Helping Topple A Dictator In Syria
This article from Mashable gives us another reason to love technology.
Skype is the go-to social network for communication between rebels, anti-government activists, journalists and officials inside and outside of Syria.
Why? Skype uses wiretapping-resistant Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, making it safer for transmitting messages while under the watchful eyes and ears of government censors. It’s free to download and easy to use, both positives for cash-strapped rebels and activists. Its video-based chatting makes it easier to identify the person on the other line, important when verifying information as legit amidst the fog of war. And it provides an easy way for Syrians to gather electronically in areas where assembling in person poses too great a security risk.
[Image:via Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty Images]
A new photographic work created by Ayyam Gallery artist Tammam Azzam has captured the imaginations of the world, going viral and being shared across social media as a symbol of the power of love and human spirit in times of war. The Syrian artist has superimposed Gustav Klimt’s iconic work, The Kiss (1907 – 1908), over the walls of a war-torn building in his native country in a powerful juxtaposition of beauty and devastation. The image has been ‘liked’ by over 20,000 people and shared 14,000 times in only 5 hours.
The new work follows on from Azzam’s recent series Syrian Museum, which was exhibited at Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai, 2 months ago, Dec 2012. Azzam merges instantly recognisable masterpieces into images from Syria’s war zones, working in various digital mediums to address the ongoing political and social upheaval in Syria, and the cycles of violence and destruction tearing his country apart.
(Image Credit: TAP77 Tammam Azzam “Freedom Graffiti” Ayyam Gallery)
A groundbreaking document published by the Open Society Foundation, on Tuesday shows that 54 countries, a quarter of the world’s nations, cooperated with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme.
(Image Credit: Huffington Post)
Speech by the Ameer of Hizb ut-Tahrir to the people of Al-Shaam and the Sincere Revolutionaries
The following is a translated transcript of a speech delivered by the Ameer of Hizb ut Tahrir, the Aalim, Ata Ibn Khalil Abu Arashtah - may Allah protect him - to the people in Al-Sham and the sincere revolutionaries, on the occasion of the glorious day of the birth of the Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم, in the month of his Hijrah and the establishment of the great Islamic state, a state that the Muslims were glorified by, which will be established again soon, Insha’Allah.
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
To the people of Al-sham, the Abode of Islam and the sincere revolutionaries,
السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته
Praise be to Allah, prayer and peace be upon the Messenger of Allah, his family, companions and allies and those after them.
وَقَدْ مَكَرُوا مَكْرَهُمْ وَعِنْدَ اللَّهِ مَكْرُهُمْ وَإِنْ كَانَ مَكْرُهُمْ لِتَزُولَ مِنْهُ الْجِبَالُ
“They concocted their plots, but their plots were with Allah, even if they were such as to make the mountains vanish.”
(Surah Ibrahim, 14:46)
So you’re forcing me to choose then, between the silence of prison and the noise of the regime?
- If I were you, I’d be more worried about the silence of the grave.
Extract from the novel ‘The Silence and the Roar’ by Nihad Sirees
Fathi, a writer no longer permitted to write, makes his way through a city churned by parades for an unnamed dictator. It is a day stifled by heat and the noise of the chants, a day of people trampled, and of the brutality and bullying of the party faithful. But Fathi presses treacherously against the crowd, attempting just to visit his mother and his girlfriend.
Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss
Publication date: 10th January 2013
Winner of the English PEN Award 2012
Business Networks in Syria
The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience
by Bassam Haddad
Collusion between business communities and the state can lead to a measure of security for those in power, but this kind of interaction often limits new development. In Syria, state-business involvement through informal networks has contributed to an erratic economy. With unique access to private businessmen and select state officials during a critical period of transition, this book examines Syria’s political economy from 1970 to 2005 to explain the nation’s pattern of state intervention and prolonged economic stagnation.
As state income from oil sales and aid declined, collusion was a bid for political security by an embattled regime. To achieve a modicum of economic growth, the Syrian regime would develop ties with select members of the business community, reserving the right to reverse their inclusion in the future. Haddad ultimately reveals that this practice paved the way for forms of economic agency that maintained the security of the regime but diminished the development potential of the state and the private sector.
SUPREME KA’ABA OF GOD, 2012 by Shadia Alem
Born in Mecca, the visual artist, who is also a photographer, lives and works between Paris and Jeddah. She has a degree in art and English literature from King AbdulAziz University. Shadia Alem is involved in several projects to encourage the creativity of youth and women in Saudi Arabia. Her works reflect the change of the holy city surrounded today by building towers and buildings still high and caught in a conflict between spirituality and modernity.
This is one of the pieces being sold at auction on January 21, 2013 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to raise funds for Syria.
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