about the terrible devastation in New Orleans, you need to no further than NOLA.com’s Hurricane Katrina 2005 site. The NO Times-Picayune is publishing only electronically during the crisis.
Archives for August 2005
Boris wrote about a conference
he went to the other day and had an interesting experience: Documenting human rights abuses. I tried to write a comment on his site, but somehow his comment script kept rejecting it. So here is my comment:
Information wants to be free… when there isn’t a warlord at the other end of it who will use clear evidence of Western tampering and favouritism (clearly anyone featured in a North American website is supported by the US) as cause to raze the village and stop relief efforts by international organizations.
Information wants to be free… until that warlord repurposes the images to demonstrate how clearly those people need his help and protection and uses them to gain financial support from other organizations in his bid to be seen as the legitimate protector of villages he controls.
Boris I love the idea of the project and think it would be a great thing for you to bring to life. But the concerns they mentioned in the conference are pretty valid. People in parts of the world where basic human rights – food, shelter, right to life – are routinely abused have a lot to fear from such projects, and to do it right I think a group would have to go the extra mile to make sure those problems were addressed, and aggressively so.
I think Karl has hit on part of the solution, but if you are going to move forward with this – which I hope you understand I would thoroughly encourage you to do – I would recommend including a specialist in such development issues on the team. There’s a lot of bad history with abusive media representations of disadvantaged people, and I know you’d want to avoid that as far as possible.
The Globe and Mail today
is running a story about another Canadian immigrant who was sent to Syria, seemingly with the knowledge and participation of the Canadian government, and held (and tortured) for over a year: For the first time, Abdullah Almalki tells his story. The Maher Arar case is well-known, but the disturbing thing is that there are more Arars out there and their cases are not being considered.
It’s disturbing because it shows that there’s a huge systemic unwillingness in Canada do actually do anything at all about terrorism and related issues. Almalki may or may not have been a Really Bad Guy, but it’s beside the point. If we have people here who may be terrorists or whatever, we must have the processes in place (and the balls) to do what has to be done here. I don’t think that ever includes torture, but I don’t think they sent him to Syria just to offload the torture on them – I think there’s a deeper problem: a general lack of will to deal with this issue as if it were truly ours.
It’s a story that has been written
several times already, but nevertheless Cintra Wilson’s story about the White House press corps is worth a read: I invaded the White House press corps.
Interesting news yesterday
from something called the Aspen Summit. It seems that in his keynote address, Edgar Bronfman (CEO of Warner Music) said that “The War is Over” between the content industry and consumers. We shall see…
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