The meaning of saudade

In just a few weeks I will be leaving Portugal and start living in Norway. This, up to a certain point, explains why I have been neglecting my blog for so long. I have been busy making arrangements, taking care of different things, but mostly it’s that I have been using the small amount of time that I have left to do things that will not be possible once I start living in Norway, namely, spending as much time as possible with friends and family and also spending as much time as possible at the beach, taking as much sun as possible before I move to a place where in winter time there are only three or four hours of sun light.

As I am getting ready to leave, I find myself being sometimes touched by this nostalgic feeling that in portuguese is called saudade. This word, we are often told, has no accurate translation in foreign languages. I really don’t know if this is so, only that in the foreign languages that I know I can’t find any appropriate equivalent.

Saudade is supposed to be something very deep and distinctively Portuguese in character, but its importance is, I always thought, greatly magnified, and that, in turn, keeps people too much attached to the past – or rather to an idealized past made only of pleasant memories- and implies a certain amount of fatalism, as if what the future might bring us could never match that past. This feeling is strongly connected with the act of leaving and is cultivated by the Portuguese as a way to keep a link to their roots, since we are traditionally a people of emigrants and travellers. It is an ambivalent feeling, both positive and negative, and it is that blend that provides its deepness and subtlety. However, as far as I perceive it, it has been too much influenced by the excessive value that is attributed to suffering, something that is culturally induced by the catholic religion, which overloads this feeling. Those who leave are supposed to be making a great sacrifice, while for me to leave means rather an opportunity to improve one’s life and expand one’s knowedge and worldview.

Until now, I could only experience the saudade felt by those who stay, and only after I leave I will really grasp what does it mean. I’m not particularly worried about that, but still, just in case, I am pre-emptively engaging in what we call portuguese ‘matar saudades’, killing this feeling, by enjoying the things  that I will have to give up when I leave, like the sun, the mild weather, the tasty food, the company of people I love, while already looking forward the new experiences that this change in my life will bring me.

With this post I am resuming my regular blogging. I want to thank my readers for the nice messages that they wrote during my absense.

Time Out

My regular readers are probably by now asking whether I forgot the password to my blog, or something like that. I have spent some time travelling and was also busy taking care of things that took most of my time and mental space, and because of that the blog has been a bit (a lot) neglected during this month.

The good thing about blogging is that there are no commitments, we write what we want when we want to, however, after a while, when we having a regular audience and people commenting, we realize the blog is not exclusively ours and we feel we need to correspond to the readers’ expectations. For a long time before I had my own blog I was commenting regularly on other people’s blogs, so I like that feeling of my blog not being totally mine anymore, but rather a space where some people feel comfortable coming to.

That works as a stimulus to write better, but sometimes it can become also perceived as a pressure to write more or to keep a regular pace. Usually I tend to write long texts, and it’s very rewarding to realize that some of the visitors actually read them all, instead of just skimming through. Time is limited for everyone and nowadays with so much information available most people lost the habit of spending more than just a few seconds in a text. Being myself a slow reader (and a slow writer), I appreciate it particularly that people come and read my posts, so I think it’s better not to write anything than to publish texts that would represent for the readers a waste of time and for me a source of embarrassment.

I intend to come back and start blogging regularly again soon, hopefully with renewed inspiration.

Italy sliding into fascism.

In a seminar that I attended last year, there was a lecture on the problem of corruption in Serbia. When we got to questions and awnsers, an Italian professor made the following comment: “Well, at least you manage to get your garbage collected”. Far from dismissing my worries about the seriousness of the problem of corruption in Serbia, this comment made me reflect on how weak is the italian state and how fragile is italian democracy.

I think the political situation in Italy is not having the attention it requires. Italy is a fascinating country, and if I had to briefly define its main features, creativity would come on top. The italian society shows an extraordinary tendency for inovation, while being able to also keep its more traditional features. This caracteristic explains why Italy is such an attractive country, having a privileged image in the imaginary of western societies as a place where tradition and modernity stand side by side. This romantic image of Italy, with its fantastic monuments, cities like Florence and Venice, fashion, Ferrari, nice food, beautiful women and handsome men makes it easier to downplay the worrying signs that are coming about the erosion of democratic values.

Politically too, Italy has been on the vanguard of inovation. It was in Italy that fascism was invented. Although Mussolini never managed to have the degree of control over society that Hitler enjoyed in Germany, his defeat did not mean the erradication of the fascist ideology. The post-war political system was caracterized by a significant degree of disfuntionality, which led to the collapse of its party sistem, under the weight of corruption and the penetration of organized crime at all levels of society. The void gave the fascist forces a golden opportunity to emerge, and, since the appearence in italian politics of of Silvio Berlusconi in 1993, the pattern of italian politics is one of polarization between the radical right (with the moderate right having practically disapeared) and the left forces, which only manage to win by forming fragile negative coalitions, but seem to be powerless to respond to the challenged posed by the populist appeal of the radical right.

This became particularly clear with the victory of  the neo-fascist polititian Gianni Alemanno, member of Alleanza Nazionale in the local elections for Rome’s city council, who vowed to expell from the city 20 000 roma immigrants. The problem of immigration is being used to exploit fear within the population and to make it less resistant to the erosion of key features of democracy. As usual, gipsies appear as a point of minor resistance, due to the prevailing prejudices among the population and their marginal existence. Blamed on the increasing levels of violence, they are now the target of extremist violence. The fact that Italy faces a serious problem with immigration is not at stake here. That problem is indeed being welcomed by extreme-right politicians whose power is built largely upon their ability to expoit fear and prejudices. Thus, it is not surprising that incidents like burning alive a homeless immigrant from India, to which my friend Max Spencer Dohner raised my attention.

From last year, the signs of how Italy is increasingly sliding into fascism are becoming more and more visible:

At the level of foreign policy, in Berlusconi fascination towards Vladimir Putin and Russia;

Internally, the recent emergency laws allowing the creation of citizen street patrols, after three episodes of rape that outraged italian society. Please note that, dramatic as these crimes are, they are not representative of a rise in crime, as it happens that the number of sexual assaults fell last year. Here, the fears associated with the crime of rape converge with xenophobia, as the alledged authors of this crime were immigrants.

The technique  is to make use of a climate of sentimentalism and tension, induced, in great extent by the media, which Berlusconi as a media tycoon and Prime-Minister has largely under his grip. The right moment is seized, thanks to the disregard for the normal legislative procedures, to which I have already pointed out in the case of Eluana Englaro, where, through an emergency decree, the government tried to defy the sovereign decision of Italy’s highest court, thus also the principle of separation between legislative, executive and judicial power.

Berlusconi’s contempt towards democratic principles is also clearly patent in the aproval of laws granting the President, leaders of the upper and lower chambers, and Prime Minister (the four highest offices of the state) immunity from investigation whilst in office, just in time to avoid investigations to his own activities.

Now, it’s the right to strike that comes under attack, with the approval draft law to restrict strikes in the transport sector.

To this we could add Berlusconi racist and sexist comments, which reveal a deep comptemp towards equality and tolerance, but are very much in accordance with his style of  (frustrated) ‘macho latino’, which makes him appealing to sectors of the italian society, still too much dominated by the tradicional patriarchical model.

The resemblances between the current political situation and that of non-democratic countries are growing. This is particularly worrying because, as I have said in the begining of this post, Italy stands out as a very innovative country in the field of politics, and it’s experiments sooner or later have an impact also on other european societies. In this sense, Italy can be seen as a ‘lab’ for political scientists and commenters in search of new and old fashion tendencies…

The question that this process raises in my mind is: in which point of decay does a political system stop being democratic?

Congratulations to Kosova on the first anniversary of its Independence !

One year ago, I had the chance to be present for the big party launched to celebrate de Declaration of Independence of Kosova! It was a great party that revealed above all a sense of relief that a day for which the people had waited for so long had

finally come. I am very glad I was there and witnessed such a happy event. From all the countries that I’ve visited, Kosova is the one that brings me warmest memories, because never elsewhere have I found a friendliest people.

One year later, I’m also very glad to see that none of the grim predictions about the consequences of the Independence materialized. State building is not an easy process, even less at a moment when the World is facing an economic crisis whose proportions are yet not clear, and many challenges lie ahead, but struggling to overcome huge obstacles is something the albanians know all about. (I’ll write another post about this, hopefully).

I’m posting two photos from my collection of children from Kosova. I’m very grateful for the generosity with which albanian parents allowed me to take their children’s photos. The pride they take on their children is simply moving.

One year of blogging at Café Turco

This month my blog is completing one year since it was launched. Time for an assessment…

This is a small blog, in one year I had just a bit more than 15 thousand visits, and, although my audience has been steadily growing, it seldom goes above 100 visits a day. I really don’t mind that at all and to make that clear to anyone passing by I have left on my side bar the number of visits. It is the fact that this is a small blog that allows me to have comments without prior moderation. This gives me a particular pleasure, since I find the interaction of readers through comments very stimulating, and I am very glad that steadily my posts started receiving more comments, sometimes simple messages of people that liked what they read, sometimes more elaborated comments, most of them relevant. The cosy environment of this blog clearly made it unattractive to hate comments, because I don’t usually get those, but when I do I erase them because I don’t like trouble makers coming here and disrupting this nice environment.

The year that is now drawing to a closure was very intense and rewarding. I travelled a lot, worked a lot and met very interesting people. I tried to reflect that in the contents, by writing about different subjects, sharing my experiences and my perspective. I wish I had written more, but living things intensively has a side effect, stress, which sometimes makes it harder to focus, and the fact that I am not using my own native language, Portuguese also makes it harder to express myself, and I’d rather not post anything than to say dumb things or commonplaces. I guess this is rather common, most bloggers pass through this, and eventually this feeling goes away, inspiration returns and I really don’t think we should make our blogging an aditional source of stress, when we can avoid that (sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially when nasty people comes with their hatred and tries to defeat us through exhaustion, but in those cases, our sense of duty provides us with a resilience unknow to such people).

The best about blogging is that the absense of an editorial filter allows us to get in touch with people and ideas which wouldn’t be so easily accessible. Furthermore, the possibility to establish informal networks with other blogs very widely expands the impact of each of those blogs. The interaction thus created can be very rewarding and stimulating.

So, to conclude, I am very happy with my cosy blog and would like to thank my readers, regulars and passers-by, as well as the writers of the blogs that have linked me, in particular Marko Attila Hoare, from Greater Surbiton, who wrote a very nice post that helped boost my audiences, and Daniel from the Srebrenica Genocide Blog, whom I really admire for the way he is devoted to the cause of keeping alive the memory of the Srebrenica genocide.

Plans for the year that is about to start: lots of them, but mostly I hope to start writing more about my own country, Portugal, since it is so under represented in english language blogosphere.

Now, some posts that I think are good enough (well, at least the photos are good enough):

April 25th about the politics of memory, or rather the politics of oblivion of Portugal’s fascist past;

Srebrenica some impressions on my trip to Srebrenica last July;

Defending animals’ well being in Belgrade some impressions about a city where I feel particularly at home;

and Why Serbia? in case someone may be curious about…

Eluana Englaro

16 years after the car accident that, in 1992, left her in a persistent vegetative state, Eluana Englaro died today. Her father was fighting in justice to have the artificial feeding tubes removed since 1999. When finally the justice of him demand was recognized, the italian government led by Silvio Berlusconi tried to use this tragic case in order to undermine the principle of separation between judicial, legislative and executive powers, by having an emergency decree aproved, which the President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign. I don’t think it’s the moment to go on with extrapolations, but I want to leave two thoughts.

First of all, from Italy disquieting signs keep coming. I hope to take from here in  another post soon, as I am particularly interested with Italy.

Second, this is not a case of euthanasia, and in most developed countries such situation would have been dealth with accrdingly to the deodontological rules that regulate medicine. This is a case of cruelty, I mean, keeping artificially alive a person who will be forever in vegetative state. This is a distortion of morality.

Catholics should be ashamed of themselves for making vigils and prayers to keep Eluana’s soul inprisoned in a useless body. In what kind of God do these people believe in???

For those of us who are believers, let our prayers tonight be directed at her, with the certainty that she is now better.

Denial and the rhetorics of Serbian victimization.

One of the most effective ways for Serbian nationalist propaganda to get into the minds of normal people has been, over the last three decades, the invocation of Jasenovac and of Serbian victimhood. The rhetorics of victimization was presented in a way that actually represents an abuse of memory of the Serbian victims of past oppression. Victimization was used in order to install a climate of fear, to present the Serbs as a nation under continuous threat and thus to whitewash as self-defence the wars of aggression conducted by the Serbs in the 1990s. For Serbian nationalists, thus, Serbian victims became no more than an asset, a useful tool of propaganda.

Even nowadays, this mentality dominated by the idea of victimization is what prevents many decent Serbs with no sympathy for nationalism to fully aknowledge the degree of harm caused by the Greater Serbia nationalists.

On my post on Holocaust Memorial Day, a reader, signing as Svetlana, wrote a comment about a bitter exchange of arguments between Owen and I and a Greek reader, Nikos previously published in the same thread. Her comment to a certain extent is illustrative of how the rethorics of victimization distorts the ability or the will to assess Serbia’s responsibilities for the violent break-up of Yugoslavia.

here is an excerpt: (…) somehow I feel that there will never be any understanding for serbian victims. The comments for this article should talk about all the victims of all nationalities and to be equally treated by everyone and not just always to point to Serbs as the main war criminals. Mladic should be arrested, no doubt about it, but now I somehow suspect that it is not Serbia that does not want to arrest Mladic, in my opinion some bigger factors are involved, because for some people it would be better to leave Serbia in dark, isolated, marginalized… so they could do their business as usual there.(…)

I am not at all questioning Svetlana’s good faith, I am just quoting her, in order to introduce the comment written as a reply to her by Owen, which focuses on victimization and on the patterns of argumentation used by those who believe that should not face the extremely negative legacy of Greater Serb nationalism.

I have been reading Owen’s comments in other blogs for years and I am very happy to receive his support and have him regularly following my blog and writing comments here. I am publishing Owen’s comment in full. In case some parts seem to lack context, please consult the post where the comment was originaly published :

Svetlana, I must take my share of criticism for the way in which the discussion moved on from discussing Sarah’s initial post honouring Aristides da Souza Mendes by way of commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day.

The problem was that I saw in the way Nikos expanded his original comments yet another effort to take discussion of criminal atrocities into the area of subtle propaganda for the EU to allow Serbia to move on and in.

As Sarah has said, our experience of exchanges with Serbians – hers considerably greater than mine – has been sufficient for us to have a reasonable idea now here an apparently open-ended discussion is heading. I observed to Nikos that the regrettable outcome of so many discussions with so many Serbians is that I have become much more focussed – closed-minded, with entrenched views, whatever – because I have wasted so much time beating around the bush as a result of taking the initial remarks at face value. Sad, but some of us have to use our time and energy carefully.

That’s not to write off all Serbians, far from it. I know that Sarah like myself has Serbian friends and acquaintances whom we not only like but intensely admire. But when engaging in discussion with Serbs and Serbians on the internet – on blogs, at places like Wikipedia, etc. – I so often find myself aware of a pattern emerging that reveals a single overriding concern on the part of my interlocutor, the aim to persuade me that Serbia is being victimised and discriminated against and I and the world should treat Serbia with more consideration and tolerance.

Of course I know about Jasenovac and the atrocities there. It is true that what happened at Jasenovac is not widely enough known and acknowledged outside Former Yugoslavia as a horror that stands alongside Srebrenica and the other atrocities in the wars of 1991-1995. But there are reasons why even those who are aware of Jasenovac are distracted from showing adequate respect for the memory of the victims.

Most of us communicating on the internet were born after the Second World War. We tend to speak of what we know. I know that Srebrenica was the single worst atrocity on the continent where I live since WWII. Events in Former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s were profoundly shocking to myself and others who had grown up with the idea that even if the commitment to “Never Again” was unlikely to eradicate war and conflict the one thing we should not expect to see in our lifetimes was the spectre of ethnic extermination. Srebrenica was only the culmination of horrible events that unfolded before us in places like Eastern Slavonia, Prijedor, Central Bosnia and the Drina Valley (not ignoring atrocities perpetrated on a smaller scale but no less importantly in places like Gospic and during the exodus from the Krajina).

For a long time when trying to discuss these atrocities and the reality of what had happened the inevitable response from Serbians, with the exception of an honourable and honoured minority, was that no massacre had taken place, that the scale of atrocities was vastly exaggerated, that Muslim and Croat atrocities were on a much greater scale than those blamed on Serbs, etc.

Over time as more facts have been confirmed the arguments deployed have gradually changed. There is still denial, but absolute denial is much less in evidence and attempts to downgrade the scale of what happened are much less blatant. In the case of Srebrenica that’s perhaps thanks to the evidence of the Scorpions video, though Natasa Kandic remains a target of hatred for forcing it onto the public’s consciousness. And also perhaps an appreciation of the overwhelming public acceptance outside the Balkans of the facts relating to the wars of the Former Yugoslavia wars as established in legal proceedings which however imperfect have succeeded in bringing to light an extraordinary volume of evidence that is now seen as beyond question.

So the argument has shifted but its central focus remains the same, the unfair treatment of Serbs and Serbia. Many Serbians now acknowledge that Srebrenica was a terrible atrocity (albeit little is said about events elsewhere – Omarska doesn’t seem to register much and Ovcara seems to remain difficult to accept). But that’s about as far as it goes. After a brief acknowledgment of Srebrenica the discussion moves rapidly on to Serbia’s problems and suffering. There’s no real outrage, no condemnation of the fact that the principal perpetrators have succeeded in avoiding justice for so long. I never hear concern expressed for the families of the victims. Above all I hear about the suffering of Serbians denied the right to be part of a prosperous, contented Europe (and occasionally complaints about the situation of Serb refugees in Serbia – a legitimate concern but usually expressed in a context of assigning uncritical blame). Serbians appear to be outraged by the notion of conditionality. The country that has protected and paid pensions to the indicted war criminals considers it has moved on.

The agenda is always to make the outside world aware of its mistreatment of Serbs and Serbia. And that is the problem. So much obvious intelligence and wide-ranging knowledge is relentlessly applied to the task of persuading the persion at the receiving end that Serbia must be allowed to cast off the burden of any outstanding responsibility for the recent past.

Jasenovac has become part of the scheme of justification, as an instrumental reference. And that’s why people who are aware of what happened there may appear to pay less attention to Jasenovac than the scale of what happened there demands.

The motives behind the work of the hopefully now defunct Jasenovac Research Institute were made clear by the activities of its officers elsewhere. That was perhaps one of the most transparently cynical attempts to exploit the reality of the suffering of the victims of Jasenovac and their survivors by using an association with other Holocaust victims to cloak apologist propagandising in a false respectability.

I often sense the presence of a similar, if less intense, cynicism in the references to Jasenovac that I’m offered as a sort of balance to comments about Srebrenica and other atrocities. To be frank though possibly unfair, it is difficult to detect the pain experienced by other victims in many of these references. Where there is a sense of genuine anger it often seems to spring from a resentment at being treated unfairly. But at least that anger is genuine. What I find most disturbing is when the references are almost incidental and appear intended simply to confirm a communality of victimhood rather than remind me of the terrible suffering of the individuals killed and otherwise abused by the Nazis and their Ustashe and Chetnik associates.

Svetlana, I don’t quarrel with your reference to Serbians as hospitable people. My problem is that Serbian hospitability seems to be conditional on the conduct of your guests. We’ll get along fine as long as I don’t disagree with you. I’m not going to be mealy-mouthed and pretend that I’m not criticising because that’s precisely what I have been doing up to this point.

As far as you personally are concerned I know almost nothing about you and your personal motives so the above is not directed at you. Nevertheless I think I’m still entitled to challenge your lack of insight in accusing Sarah of unfairness towards people who don’t share her attitudes. I very much hope that the profound respect for truth and justice she observes is, as you put it, what Europe is, and what democracy is.

You’re right, Europe should be proud of all its diversity and let people be different, their difference informed by that fundamental respect for one another.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes: small tribute on Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2005, the day was declared Holocaust Memorial Day by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/60/7, 1 November 2005, adopted by consensus).

I take this day as an opportunity to pay my tribute to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Consul of Portugal in Bordeaux, who, in 1940, saved the lives of more than 10 000 Jews, who were fleeing the Nazi invasion of France.

On 16 July 1940, he decided to disobey the orders coming directly from António Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, who had forbidden the issuance of visas to “foreigners of nationality undefined, contested or under litigation; apatridas, and Jews”.

On that day, he said: “From now on, I will grant Visas to everybody, regardless of nationality, race or religion”. After the Consulate was closed, he still kept issuing Visas, until the moment he entered Spain. He justified his stubborness and defyance with these words: “If I have to disobey, I prefer to disobey an order issued by men than an order issued by God”.

He granted more than 30 ooo visas, of which more than 10 000 to Jews.

He was expelled from the diplomatic service and persecuted by the regime, and died as an indigent in 1954.

I take this example of non-conformism as very inspiring, since it happens that it’s simply so much easier to just follow orders and never take risks.

Update, a video:

Duty of Memory: European Parliament declares 11 July “Day of Comemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide”

At 11 July 2009, the commemorative ceremony of the Srebrenica Genocide will be officially celebrated for the first time not only in Bosnia but in all European Union countries.  Today, the European Parliament has declared this date to be the day of Comemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide.

As a citizen of the European Union, I want to welcome this resolution. This is an act that honours the democratic tradition of the European Parliament, the only european institution directly elected by the european citizens themselves. Through this act, the European Parliament is fulfiling its duty of memory and contributing to fight genocide denial and oblivion.

With this decision, the European Parliament is also helping to strengthen the fragile civic-minded civil sector in Serbia, by calling all the countries in the Western Balkans to join the EU countries in this european-wide celebration.

At 11 July 2009, 14 years will have passed since the genocidal massacre of Srebrenica, 17 years since the start of the war in Bosnia and 18 since the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia. During these last three years since I started studying full-time the history, culture and current political situation of the countries of the Former Yugoslavia, I have met a lot of people who shared with me their frustration for the impunity with which the apology of genocide and war crimes was done, and their sense of hopelessness regarding the prevalent state of denial of the majority of the population in Serbia. I have also met people who have expressed their fear that soon all would be forgotten and to those people I have always said the same thing:

The commemoration of traumatic events with political implications, which is one of the ways in which collective memory is established and renewed, obeys to a cycle. Immediately after the events, there is a peak in commemorative acts, but in the subsequent years the need to focus on the future and to face immediate problems provoke a decrease in commemorations. Traumatic evens involve a lot of pain, and it is only natural that people tend, in this phase, to repress those memories. This happens to individuals as well as to societies. The wish to live a normal life and to move forward drives people to neglect their duty of memory.

Anyone who has already experienced the death of a beloved person knows that this corresponds also in a way to the process of mourning. Denial is a mechanism that helps us to cope with our pain for a while. I remember that when my father died, for a while after his funeral it was as if he was travelling, but at a certain moment we had to admit to ourselves that he wasn’t going to come back.

In societies, this phase of decline in the remembrance of traumatic events is much longer than with individuals. The push for a new increase on commemorations and other forms of expression of collective memory, such as through narrative arts like literature and movies depends mainly on a specific group: the generation that lived through the traumatic events in the period of adolescence and early 20s. This is the generation that will most want and need to remember, because it is the one that was most deeply marked by the traumatic events. Older people will try to stick to the memory of how their life was like before it got disrupted and many try to ignore that period as a period when their lives were suspended, and small children were too young to remember more than what they directly experienced, and are more likely to have the most traumatic blocked or to keep only fragmented memories.

The moment when a generation starts getting its voice heard in a society starts when they reach their 30s. This means that, in the case of the genocide in Bosnia, thus moment is now only starting. This is the defining period to establish an enduring collective memory. This period will last more or less 10 years and will reach its peak at 25th anniversary of the events.

Someone who was 16 in 1991 and 20 in 1995 is now reaching his 35. It is thus the generation composed of people of 28-40 year old that most want to get involved and commit themselves in shaping collective memory. Because they are still young people with most of their lives still ahead of them, It is very likely that, if the circumstances so permit, that this generation will try to shape those memories in a way that helps them also move forward, and with them the whole society. In this sense, today’s decision by the European Parliament is a worthy contribution.

I am not citing any source because this is not an academic essay, but those intested should read this book: Collective Memory of Political Events. I am sorry to say that the book is hugely expensive but it’s the best reference in this fiels (other suggestions welcomed). However I didn’t follow the book to write this post, it is the product of  my own impressions observing comemorations of events that happened in my own country and of my experience as a researcher, reading and meeting interesting people.

Bellow you can read the text of the European Parliamente resolution (emphasis added by me to make it easier to go to the point).

P6_TA-PROV(2009)0028
Srebrenica

PE416.145
European Parliament resolution of 15 January 2009 on Srebrenica

The European Parliament,
–    having regard to its resolution of 7 July 2005 on Srebrenica1,
–    having regard to the Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the European Communities and their Member States, of the one part, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the other part, signed in Luxembourg on 16 June 2008, and the prospect of EU membership held out to all the countries of the western Balkans at the EU summit in Thessaloniki in 2003,
–    having regard to Rule 103(4) of its Rules of Procedure,
A.    whereas in July 1995 the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which was at that time an isolated enclave proclaimed a Protected Zone by a United Nations Security Council Resolution of 16 April 1993, fell into the hands of the Serbian militias led by General Ratko Mladić and under the direction of the then President of the Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić,
B.    whereas, during several days of carnage after the fall of Srebrenica, more than 8 000 Muslim men and boys, who had sought safety in this area under the protection of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Mladić and by paramilitary units, including Serbian irregular police units which had entered Bosnian territory from Serbia; whereas nearly 25 000 women, children and elderly people were forcibly deported, making this event the biggest war crime to take place in Europe since the end of the Second World War,
C.    whereas this tragedy, declared an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), took place in a UN-proclaimed safe haven, and therefore stands as a symbol of the impotence of the international community to intervene in the conflict and protect the civilian population,
D.    whereas multiple violations of the Geneva Conventions were perpetrated by Bosnian Serb troops against Srebrenica’s civilian population, including deportations of thousands of women, children and elderly people and the rape of a large number of women,
E.    whereas, in spite of the enormous efforts made to date to discover and exhume mass and individual graves and identify the bodies of the victims, the searches conducted until now do not permit a complete reconstruction of the events in and around Srebrenica,
F.    whereas there cannot be real peace without justice and whereas full and unrestricted cooperation with the ICTY remains a basic requirement for further continuation of the process of integration into the EU for the countries of the western Balkans,
G.    whereas General Radislav Krstić of the Bosnian Serb army is the first person found guilty by the ICTY of aiding and abetting the Srebrenica genocide, but whereas the most prominent indicted person, Ratko Mladić, is still at large almost fourteen years after the tragic events, and whereas it is to be welcomed that Radovan Karadžić now has been transferred to the ICTY,
H.    whereas the institutionalisation of a day of remembrance is the best means of paying tribute to the victims of the massacres and sending a clear message to future generations,
1. Commemorates and honours all the victims of the atrocities during the wars in the former Yugoslavia; expresses its condolences to and solidarity with the families of the victims, many of whom are living without final confirmation of the fate of their relatives; recognises that this continuing pain is aggravated by the failure to bring those responsible for these acts to justice;
2.    Calls on the Council and the Commission to commemorate appropriately the anniversary of the Srebrenica-Potočari act of genocide by supporting Parliament’s recognition of 11 July as the day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide all over the EU, and to call on all the countries of the western Balkans to do the same;
3.    Calls for further efforts to bring the remaining fugitives to justice, expresses its full support for the valuable and difficult work of the ICTY and stresses that bringing to justice those responsible for the massacres in and around Srebrenica is an important step towards peace and stability in the region; reiterates in that regard that increased attention needs to be paid to war crimes trials at domestic level;
4.    Stresses the importance of reconciliation as part of the European integration process; emphasises the important role of religious communities, the media and the education system in this process, so that civilians of all ethnicities may overcome the tensions of the past and begin a peaceful and sincere coexistence in the interests of enduring peace, stability and economic growth; urges all countries to make further efforts to come to terms with a difficult and troubled past;
5.    Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission, the governments of the Member States, the Government and Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its entities, and the governments and parliaments of the countries of the western Balkans.

My photos, 11 July 2008.

Happy birthday Tintin!

Tintin, the famous belgian reporter, celebrates 80 years today.

I could never miss the chance to congratulate him!!!

I am very attached to Tintin. I had my first contact with the french language through Tintin, trying to read my brothers albums. Then when I was 18 I got my first regular job at a Tintin shop. It was a nice job, where I learned how to overcome my shyness and deal with all kinds of people, which in turned help me a lot to understand human nature, not to judge people for their appearence and to always look on the eyes, smile and be pleasant to the invisible workers who attend me in the shops or at the supermarket.

My favourite character is the Captain Haddock, because, unlike Tintin who is self-rightous but sometimes too perfect, he is a person with a lot of flaws, but has his heart on the right place. Haddock is not the only alcoholic.  Milou, aka Snowy,  has a particular taste for Whisky, especially the scotch brand ‘Loch Lomond’, and, like Haddock, he also has to face some moral dilemmas, as when, in the album King Ottockar Sceptre, when he has to choose between a tasty bone and the famous Sceptre, a decison on which depends the survival of Syldavia, a small nation somewhere in the Balkans.

Syldavia is threatened by its bigger and stronger neighbour Borduria, a contry dominated by a fascist regime with expansionist ambitions. (I was in Montenegro for first time in May 2006, for the referendum for its independence. There were lots of journalists there and I found it very funny that Montenegro was compared by many among them to Syldavia… an imagined Balkan country as a model for a real one!!!)

Published in 1938, this book can be seen as a criticism of fascism and follows the tradition set earlier in The Lotus Bleu. Interestingly, Hergé was allowed to work during the period of Nazi occupation of Belgium, and this book was not censored, although Tintin in America and The Black Island were. Hergé’s political conservatism is well known and lots of pages have been written about it, in debates about the political contents of his books,  the near-total absense of women in his stories, not to mention the mystery of whether Milou was a male or a female dog, etc, etc.

Nowadays, what fascinates me most in Tintin is the possibility that its books offer us to get an insight of the prevailing prejudices of his time and their evolution. The case of Tintin in Congo is paradigmatic of this, with Tintin shooting and even blowing up wild animals and fulfilling is ‘mission civilizatrice’ by lecturing the local children about Belgium (in a later version Hergé depicts him teaching maths). The evolution is clear in The Blue Lotus, where Hergé actually engages himself to fight prevailing prejudices about the Chinese people and to denounce the japanese expansionist ambitions and the behaviour of the West. I could go on, but time is short and after all there were 24 albums!!!

(Oliveira da Figueira, the only portuguese to appear on Tintin’s albums, is the quintessencial portuguese)

Another sign of how much we have evolved since Tintin was created is the famous phrase that Tintin’s public was everyone from 7 to 77. Now that Tintin himself is 80, I imagine him as one of those old men who love to tell stories about what it was like when they were young.  I am sure he tells them in a very lively way, getting emotional now and then when he remembers his companions of adventures, Haddock, Milou, the famous opera singer Castafiore, his trip to Tibet in search for his friend Chang, not to mention is account of his trip to the Moon, and how stupid those conspiracy theories about the landing on the Moon being a fabrication of Hollywood…

In a way, Tintin could be the embodiment of the XX Century (which was, by the way, the name of his employer).