Robert Sharp

I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:

On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.

Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project. Citizens of the world are invited to leave a 64 word message for Aung San, in honour of her 64th birthday on 19th June. Alternatively, you can leave a 64 character twitter instead, using the hashtag #assk64.

http://64forsuu.com/

The project is led by the Burma Campaign UK and was created in only six days, which is a remarkable feat. In addition to Salman Rushdie, the site carries messages from Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and George Clooney. Why not add your message, and then let others know that you’ve done so?

Photographed at a press conference in her home, September 1996, after a government crackdown on her party. By flickr user taptaptap

Activists marked the 12th anniversary of the house arrest of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi by protests outside Chinese embassies worldwide, this one in London. Photo by lewishamdreamer

As any news report worthy of the name will have told you this morning, the Burmese military junta have imprisoned the democracy campaigner and PEN Honorary Member Aung San Suu Kyi. The reason given in an apparent breach of her house arrest conditions, after an American man swam a lake and visited her.  As a correspondent at the Burma Campaign UK HQ just put it to me in an e-mail:

It seems Burma is the only country in the world where you can be sent to jail for someone breaking into your house.

Aung San Suu Kyi was nearing the end of her ‘term’ of house arrest.

The Burma Campaign have a handy form that allows you to quickly lobby the UN Secretary General, asking him to send an envoy.

Today I start a new job, as Campaigns Manager at English PEN, promoting literature and human rights worldwide.  A dream job for a blogger, I reckon.

As before, consider this full disclosure to the bloggers’ register of interests, and sufficient explanation should this site suddenly begin to feature more posts on imprisoned writers or UK libel law. 

One of my first acts will be to go an hear Giles Ji Ungpakorn speak about Thailand’s archaic Lese-Majesty laws at SOAS, 7pm. Its chaired by Carole Seymour-Jones, chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. PDF details here.

As the Twin Otter roared through the mountains, I could see the altimeter in the cockpit. We were at 10,000ft but the mountains on either side were higher than us! I saw a small dirt airstrip below us, “How sweet” I thought, then I suddenly realised that was our landing strip.

Browsing a hard-drive from a long decommissioned family computer, I found this report of a Himalayan trek that my Dad wrote in 1999. He did the walk in aid of the Frimley MacMillan Nurse Appeal. (more…)

News gatherers and citizen journalists in Mumbai, 28th November 2008. Photo by Vinu

The way in which 24 hour news channels have changed the way we learn about, and witness, global events has been well documented and discussed. We saw the twin towers fall, live on TV.  I think its astonishing that the image of one of these young terrorists could be pasted across my copy of the Metro, whilst he was still at large in India.

The latest terror induced crisis, in Mumbai, takes our participation in these events a stage further. These attacks, made with assault-rifles over several locations, was in many ways more confusing than Al-Qaeda’s grand gesture of 9/11. It says something about how technology has developed, that this story was relayed as much by connected individuals – the mass of citizen journalists – as by major news networks. Via Peter Bradwell at Demos, I’ve found a Twitter feed giving information on the attacks. In a mirror of the Election Twitter, which captured the global exhilaration of the Obama victory, this Mumbai twitter conveys something of the confusion caused by these attacks.  As well as learning about the events, and witnessing them, it has come to the stage where we are experiencing them too.  The epicentre of the attacks are in India, but we experience the reaction everywhere.

Meanwhile, high quality images are available via Flickr (including Vinu’s excellent shots, which I’ve used to illustrate this and the previous post).  In this case the static, but high-resolution photos beats low resolution YouTube.  Either way, social media sites have been promising to empower the citizen journalist, and to cut out the middle-man of the mainstream media.  And of course, they also make it harder for government’s to force a certain narrative onto us.  In 2008, with the Obama campaign and the Mumbai attacks, I would say that social media has come of age.

Mumbaikars kept back from the scene of devastation, Colaba. Photo by Vinu.

Whoever these terrorists in Mumbai turn out to be, its clear that they are trying to sow division and hatred in a country of many cultures.  The fear is that Hindu will now turn against Muslim, and India will now turn against Pakistan.  This is certainly what the cynics expect.

I am hopeful, however.  Back in 2006, after the Malegon bombings, I was struck by the defiant attitude of the locals who refused to divide themselves along religious lines, as the terrorists (in that case, militant Hindus attacking Muslims) intended.

There is a lot of cynicism about the over-use of the word ‘Hope’, and about the potential of digital technologies to help create a genuinely new politics.  I think this atrocity, terrible though it is, presents an opprtunity to put these optimistic sentiments to practical purpose.  What is needed is a grass-roots response to the current crisis, similar to the We Are Not Afraid phenomenon, which wrestles the narrative away from a divisive blame-game.  Its a way in which advocates of peace, those who recognise our common humanity, can win another PR victory against these vicious ideologues.

Here’s an interesting alternative medal table (h/t KiwiClaire). It ranks the countries not by how many Beijing Olympic medals they have won, but by their ratio of medals to population, and to GDP.

Britain does not do quite as well in this analysis, and the lead over Australia we have been boasting about vanishes.

What’s noticeable, however, is India’s lack of impact. With only one gold and one bronze medal to share amongst a population of 1.1bn, the planet’s second most populous nation sits at the bottom of the table for both population and GDP measures.

Now, gold medals only really matter if they contribute to a sense of national pride and happiness, as they clearly do here in the UK. If the Indians don’t really care about the Olympics, and are instead focused on their cricket (say), then maybe this underperformance will have no effect. However, if sporting actually results in some kind of increased cultural capital, then surely India is losing out?

And I would say that sporting excellence does increase your cultural influence abroad. With Ussain Bolt’s victories in the 100m and 200m sprints, we have been treated to highly positive coverage of Jamaica and Jamaicans, a welcome change from the terrible impression of the carribean islands we have experienced in recent weeks.

Perhaps India needs another decade or so before it can exploit its Olympic potential. As the New York Times interactive map shows, the now-dominant China were Olympic minnows before 1984.

So, the games have opened.  I am all for having a global party, and for the Olympics to be seen a symbol of peace and shared humanity, &ct &ct…  But surely these media claims that four billion people watched the ceremony is stinking hyperbole.  That’s pretty much two in every three people.  What with it being a working day in many parts of the world, what with legions of other people being asleep,  and millions more without access to a TV, I don’t think it would be possible – even if every person in China was watching.

Loving it:

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.

Which is odd, because it means that footage of the Free Tibet Olympic torch harassing in London, Paris or San Francisco must have squeezed past Chinese censors.

As the farcical torch relay reaches India, and Western political leaders fret over whether to boycott the Beijing Games, Adrian Hamilton has a cheeky route out of the impasse:

I have a suggestion for breaking out of the impasse over the issue of Tibet and the Olympics. It is for the West to make the Dalai Lama the arbiter of whether we should attend the opening ceremonies or not.

Did I mention I’d met the Dalai Lama. I did? Oh, well, sorry to have troubled you.