Hissa Hilal’s Weaponry of Words

Hissa Hilal

Every Wednesday night, Hissa Hilal steps on to the stage of the popular Abu Dhabi television show The Million’s Poet. As is required of Saudi women appearing in public, she is covered from head to toe in a traditional abaya. Facing an audience carefully segregated by gender, she recites poetry that brazenly calls out for women’s rights and the end of Islamic extremism.

A housewife and mother of four from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Hilal has become a sensation and a polarizing figure in the Arab world. One might think that, given her controversial subject matter, she would be thankful for the abaya’s anonymity. But she told the BBC that she (and her poetry) would be just as bold without it: “I am hoping my daughters won’t have to cover their faces and they’ll live a better life.”

Hilal’s poetry has, not surprisingly, led to death threats by Islamic extremists. She is admittedly worried for her children, but as for herself, she says simply, “I am not afraid.” And the Arab world’s response has primarily been supportive. “Most of the people loved what I said, from their hearts,” she continued, “They think I am very brave to say so, and that I said what they feel in their hearts.”

That feeling has shown up in the votes. Hilal has already gone farther in The Million’s Poet competition than any woman before her, and she received the highest overall score in last week’s semifinals, pushing her through to this Wednesday’s final (and its $1.3 Million prize for the winner). She was loudly applauded, and one of the judges praised her as “a courageous poet.”

My poetry has always been provocative,” she told The Associated Press. “It’s a way to express myself and give voice to Arab women, silenced by those who have hijacked our culture and our religion.” She has said that she “always dreamed” of a day when she could talk to the people directly.

A taste of that straight talk is below. It’s an excerpt from Hilal’s semifinal poem, translated by the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National, in which she decries the actions of conservative clerics in the Muslim world.

I have seen evil from the eyes
of the subversive fatwas
in a time when what is lawful
is confused with what is not lawful;

When I unveil the truth,
a monster appears from his hiding place;
barbaric in thinking and action,
angry and blind;
wearing death as a dress
and covering it with a belt

He speaks from an official,
powerful platform,
terrorizing people
and preying on everyone seeking peace;
the voice of courage ran away
and the truth is cornered and silent,
when self-interest prevented one
from speaking the truth.

How is Hilal able to get away with being so critical? In an interview with the New York Times, Lina Khatib, an Arab media expert at Stanford University, explained: “The show is at the heart of cultural conversations in the Arab world. Because it’s poetry, one of the most respected forms of expression in the Arab world, you can push the boundaries much further than you might with popular music.”

Hilal aims to do more than push boundaries–she aims to break them down. “My message to those who hear me is love, compassion and peace,” she has said. “We all have to share a small planet and we need to learn how to live together.”

Source: John Lundberg, Huffington Post

References: BBC, New York Times

 

Massacre in the Congo

The Lord’s Resistance Army killed about 300 people and kidnapped 250 more in a rampage in the Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2009, according to an international rights group and the UN. The previously undocumented massacre, undertaken over four-days in the remote Makombo area of DRC’s northeastern Haute Uele district, was highlighted in reports by Human Rights Watch and the UN on Sunday.

The killings of 321 civilians occurred between December 14 and 17, HRW said in a report after documenting the deaths in a visit to the region in February. The Ugandan anti-government group were said to have abducted 80 children among the 250 people kidnapped.

“The Makombo massacre is one of the worst ever committed by the LRA in its bloody 23-year history, yet it has gone unreported for months,” Anneke Van Woudenberg, HRW’s senior Africa researcher, said.

“The four-day rampage demonstrates that the LRA remains a serious threat to civilians and is not a spent force, as the Ugandan and Congolese governments claim.”

However, Obonyo Olweny, a former LRA spokesman, has told Al Jazeera that while the group is still active, it is not fighting civilians. “I want to say categorically to the world that the LRA is not responsible for the killings going on in the [Democratic Republic of] Congo or the CAR [Central Africa Republic],” he said from Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday.

“It is the UPD [the Ugandan armed forces] carrying out the killings – it is part of the government’s propaganda.”

Sources: Al Jazeera (News), Human Rights Watch (Report)

 

Rohingya: “Hell on Earth!”

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — It’s there in their faces, in the dark night of their eyes and in the sag and slump of their shoulders. It’s unmistakable, the despair of the Rohingya, the fear for departed husbands and fathers, the daily abrasions of poverty, sadness and the world’s indifference.

More than a quarter-million Rohingya – an ethnic Muslim minority from western Myanmar – have come here to southern Bangladesh to escape the hunger, humiliation and official brutalities in their homeland. Many have landed in a place called the Kutupalong Makeshift Camp.

It is an obscenity, this camp, a festering hell of lost hope and inhuman squalor. No water, power, schools or medicine. Occasional stoop-labor jobs carrying bricks or making salt. Huts made of leaves and branches. There is no music.

“The worst conditions you could imagine anywhere on earth,” says a well-traveled international aid worker. “Total despair,” says another.

These are the luxuries in the camp: a packet of cookies, a crayon, a new battery for an old radio, a small breeze on a sweltering night.

Refugee Sano Ara, 30, sits with her mother, left, and her children at an unregistered refugees camp, outside the official camp at Kutupalong, run by Bangladesh government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, near Cox's Bazar, a southern coastal district about 183 miles (296 kilometers) south of Dhaka, Bangladesh. (AP Photo/Pavel Rahman)

Difficult enough are their journeys from Myanmar to the camp. Even more dangerous are the attempts by thousands of Rohingya men and boys to emigrate each year, starting with perilous sea voyages to Thailand. After that comes an overland trek to Malaysia, a country that has become a kind of Muslim El Dorado for the Rohingya. There might be friends or family connections there, and perhaps jobs that allow for money to be sent to families back in the camps.

These trips often begin in leaky boats that are underpowered and overloaded. Hundreds of Rohingya die at sea each year, and hundreds more are rescued, adrift at sea, by navies in the region. And thousands are detained each year by the Thai authorities. Human rights groups were outraged recently when it became known that the Thai military had roughly detained several dozen Rohingya men on a remote island, then packed them into a boat with few provisions and towed them back out to sea.

“Pushbacks” is what aid workers are calling this tactic.

How to measure or comprehend the terror – or perhaps it’s the love – that propels a man to leave his family, quite possibly forever, and climb penniless into a boat to find uncertain work a thousand miles away in a place where he knows he’ll be both unwelcome and liable to arrest? For that matter, what hellish existence could send a family fleeing to a refugee camp where conditions resemble, charitably, the 12th century?

The Rohingya number about 750,000 in Myanmar. But the military junta does not recognize them as one of the 135 “national races” in the mostly Buddhist nation. And so, in the face of forced labor, arbitrary arrest, stolen land and even starvation, they flee to the makeshift camp. (An adjoining settlement of 20,000 residents has water, electricity and other basic services. Run by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, it is known as the official Kutupalong camp. Some Rohingya have lived there for more than a decade.)

Hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya ethnic group have fled to Bangladesh to escape persecution in neighboring Myanmar only find themselves trapped in a hellish international limbo. As Muslims, they were unwanted in Buddhist Myanmar. As foreigners, they are unwanted in Muslim Bangladesh.

Every day more Rohingya arrive at the Bangladeshi camps, stateless, sun-blasted refugees carrying their meager bundles. The newcomers, largely from Rakhine State in Myanmar, are often so traumatized that they’re unable to tell aid workers what they have fled.

Another one million Rohingya are scattered about the world – there has been a major diaspora from South Asia in recent decades – and they have flung themselves from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Thailand to Indonesia. The men lay asphalt and pour cement in Riyadh. They haul fishing nets in the Andaman Sea. They pull rickshaws in Jakarta. The children, with their small hands, peel shrimp and weave carpets in Karachi.

But no country claims the Rohingya. No country welcomes them. For many, Islam is the only sanctuary left. “They still have faith,” says an aid worker, “that Allah will protect them.”

This article was reported by a reporter for the International Herald Tribune in Cox’s Bazar and by Mark McDonald in Hong Kong. It was written by McDonald.

Source: New York Times

References: Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch Report, Physicians for Human Rights