Valentina Pasquali

Originally published on National Public Radio’s NPR.org

by Valentina Pasquali

On a recent afternoon, nearly 100 people gather at Istanbul’s Galatasaray Square for the weekly demonstration of a group known as the Saturday Mothers.

Kneeling on the pavement, they protest the disappearance of their relatives, mostly ethnic Kurds, caught up in a decades-long fight between the Kurdish separatist movement and the Turkish government.

The protesters hold red carnations and photos of their loved ones, most of whom disappeared in the early to mid-1990s. They hold the Turkish government responsible for the disappearances of about 1,200 Kurds.

The protests started about 15 years ago, but they were halted in 1999 and resumed only recently.

This year, a court case brought by state prosecutors against high-level military and government officials inspired the Saturday Mothers to come back. The prominent Turks are accused of plotting a military coup against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Sebla Arcan, an economist and a leading member of Turkey’s Human Rights Association, believes that some of the military people on trial in the plot to overthrow Erdogan’s government are also responsible for the disappearances in the 1990s.

“We want the people now under custody to also be tried for the disappearances,” Arcan says.

Turkish judges are yet to be convinced of the link between the disappearances and the court case. But the uproar generated across Turkey by the trial has given the families of the disappeared renewed courage to speak out.

“We thought of this case as an opportunity. And that’s why we started the protests again — to show we haven’t forgotten the people who were made to disappear and the people who were responsible for these disappearances,” Arcan adds.

The Kurdish movement has spent decades fighting for the rights of Turkey’s largest minority: Kurds account for about 18 percent of Turkey’s population of 77 million. In the 1980s, a splinter group — the Kurdistan People’s Party, or the PKK — took to the mountains in the Southeast and started an armed struggle against Turkey’s central government, with the intent of carving out a separate state for Kurds. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization in the United States and Europe.

Turkey’s security apparatus responded forcefully to the PKK, raiding villages throughout the Kurdish region.

Many Kurds, such as Kasim Alpsoy, were caught in the middle of that fight. Kasim went missing in 1994 from Adana, a city in southern Turkey, where he was a worker in a leather factory. His son, Mehmet, recalls the day.

“There was a police raid at 6 a.m. on our house, and my father was taken into custody,” Mehmet says. “He was questioned and tortured. But then he was released. Only they kept his identification card and told him to come get it the next day.”

According to Mehmet, when Kasim Alpsoy went back for his ID, he disappeared inside the secret services building. His brother-in-law, who had accompanied him, waited outside for hours, to no avail.

“My uncle came back home but not my father. We never saw him again,” Mehmet adds.

Mehmet says his father was sympathetic to, but was not a member of, the Kurdish movement. He also says he believes the government took his father because of his ethnicity.

When the protests to prod the government to investigate the disappearances first started in the mid-1990s, they quickly attracted national attention. As the state took notice, however, things soon got ugly.

“We were dragged on the streets, were attacked with pepper gas,” says Arcan, whose organization co-sponsors the Saturday Mothers’ sit-ins. “It came to the point where it started to threaten the health of the relatives of the disappeared people. That’s why we had to stop [in 1999],” she adds.

Since the demonstrations have restarted, one missing person’s case is presented each week during the rally.

This day it is the turn of Seyhan Dogan, a Kurdish boy rounded up during a police raid in his home in the city of Mardin-Dargecit in southeastern Turkey.

“Seyhan was 13 years old on Oct. 29, 1995,” says an activist reading the boy’s story into a loudspeaker. “He was arrested at 3 o’clock in the morning along with his brother Hazni, who was 9 years old at the time.”

Dogan, the activist says, was never seen again.

For Mehmet Alpsoy, who lost his father in 1994, the matter is simple.

“I am here because even after 15 years, the people who are responsible for the disappearances are still free,” Mehmet says. “I want them to be found and tried.”

Originally published in the Miami Herald’s blog dedicated to LGBT issues

Istanbul – Mirroring Turkey’s difficult yet unyielding progress towards equality for all its citizens, Istanbul’s sixth annual gay pride parade took place successfully Sunday after policemen in combat gear initially threatened to prevent the participants from marching down Istiklal Caddesi, the city’s central pedestrian street. After much quarreling and an hour’s delay, the marchers – numbering about 3000 – were finally allowed onto Istiklal. Colorful but definitely not as bold as fellow demonstrators in New York or San Francisco, they chanted political slogans and sang cheerful songs, while holding signs and the traditional rainbow flag. Tourists and curious spectators watched the parade making its way to Galatasaray Square. Heavy humidity leftover from the afternoon’s quick Mediterranean storm had everybody gasping for air, while the old-time tram that still whistles along Istiklal struggled to find a breach in the crowd.

Key to the resolution of the initial dispute with the police force was, perhaps, the intervention of two foreign g

uests attending the parade. The presence of Mechtild Rawert, Social Democrat (SPD) MP from Germany’s National Parliament, and Stuart Milk, nephew of Harvey Milk – the slain gay-rights leader from the ‘70s –and himself an internationally renowned gay rights activist, lent an international touch to the event and made sure that the police relented eventually.

Between Turkey’s bid to gain full European Union membership and its overall effort to present itself as the beacon of modernity in the greater Middle East, authorities here certainly did not want international headlines on the country’s controversial human rights record. “The fight for human rights in Turkey is a key issue towards EU membership. I have personally witnessed the progress achieved in the last few years, but there is more to be done,” said Rawert, the MP from Germany.

For Milk — who attended other events part of a weeklong series of panel discussions, award ceremonies, and film screenings culminating in Sunday’s parade — Turkey represents a great opportunity for the LGBT movement worldwide. “I think Turkey has a tremendous potential to act as a modern, civil and human rights bridge between west and east,” Mr. Milk said. “I came because I believe that success of the LGBT community here will resonate throughout the world,” he added.

While homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey — the country’s Ottoman rulers legalized it in 1858 — it remains a taboo in this conservative Muslim-majority society. Gay men and women who choose to come out of the closet risk being shunned by their families and friends, and fear discrimination. As a result, most Turkish homosexuals still choose not to disclose their true sexual preferences.

In 2005, a survey of the LGBT community in Istanbul conducted by LAMBDA – one of the two oldest gay rights organizations in Turkey — found that 83% of those interviewed preferred to hide their sexual orientation from all or some of their family members. 40% of interviewees also confessed to reluctantly forcing themselves into heterosexual relationships.

“There is discrimination everywhere, it’s hard to describe. It’s in the insults and the general unwelcoming atmosphere,” explained pride participant Zefer Çeler. A thirty-five years old professor of politics at Istanbul’s Yildiz University, Çeler has even seen friends lose their jobs due to their sexual preferences.

“When I walk down the street holding my girlfriend’s hand, or if I ever kiss her in public, people will always comment, sometime they can even try to hurt you,” said Burcu Ersoy, a twenty-nine years old activist who came from Ankara to attend the parade.

Turkey’s LGBT movement has achieved some success in the last couple of decades and they are now better able to organize. “I’d call the 1990s the decade of the movement’s foundation-building, when we created a platform for LGBT people to come together and discuss their experiences with one another,” explained Oner Ceylan. Ceylan, thirty-seven years old, is an interpreter by day and gay rights activist by night. The 2000s became, always according to him, “the years of visibility,” with gay rights organizations sprouting up in many Turkish cities and the community finally taking to the street with the g

ay pride parade, which began in 2004.

But there is little doubt that the movement is only at its inception. The LGBT community has achieved relatively little in terms of human and civil rights. There is no law on the books that protects homosexuals from discrimination in employment, education, housing, health care, public accommodations or credit. Turkey’s family law does not recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions or domestic partnership. The Turkish Council of State has ruled that homosexuals should not have custody of children. And the military bars LGBT people from serving in its ranks.

Members of the LGBT community here also continue to suffer from various forms of persecution. For example, when the country’s vague ‘public order, obscenity and morality’ laws are used by the police force to harass transsexuals on the streets. And hate crimes, particularly stabbings of gays are still not officially recognized by Turkey’s legal system as a form of especi

ally heinous crime. Rather, offenders often get reduced sentences for having harmed or killed a member of the LGBT community, with the courts open to accepting the defense’s claim of “provocation” under article 29 of the Turkish Criminal Code.

While coming out into the open was the key to Harvey Milk’s success — he relentlessly pushed all of California’s closeted gays to declare themselves to their relatives, friends and colleagues — his nephew Stuart thinks that this message might be premature here in Turkey, because of the particularly frightening consequences members of the LGBT community could face.

But there are other ideas that the Turkish gay movement can take from its American counterpart, for example active political engagement. “After the 1980 military coup, most progressive opposition groups in Turkey opted out of the system, giving up on elections and politics,” said Cihan Hüroglu, twenty-eight years old gay pride parade organizer. To this day, Hüroglu believes, the political left in Turkey does not encourage its youth to get involved. “The American tradition is different, more open to civil and political participation at the grassroots level,” Hüroglu continued, explaining that they invited Stuart Milk “to give us inspiration.”

The fact that three MPs from the National Parliament in Ankara attended a panel discussion held as a part of Gay Pride Week on Friday is testimony to the fact that Turkey’s LGBT movement is moving in the right direction. Two came from the left-leaning Kurdish-friendly Democratic Society Party (DTP) and one from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Turkey’s main opposition party. However, nobody was there to represent the AKP (Justice and Development Party), the moderate Islamist ruling party.

Washington D.C. – For the land that gave us the Kamasutra – the global manifesto on love and sexual desire – today’s India is a relatively conservative society, with restrictive norms and mores on marriage, pre-marital relations and same-sex relations. The gay community in particular suffers from discrimination, which sometimes turns into outright persecution.

This past February, police officials raided a party in Thane, a district neighboring Mumbai, after being tipped off about homosexual goings-on — reportedly by TV journalists looking for a sensational headline for the evening news. The police arrested six men. The party had been drug-free and nobody was caught having sex; nevertheless the police questioned and harassed the six men all night long, and brought them before a judge the morning after on charges of violating the Prohibition Act, which requires a permit to serve alcohol at large gatherings. The judge threw out the case because the lack of a permit is considered a minor violation, despite efforts by the police to keep the men for further investigation.

In response to the incident, Indian author Shobhaa De published an op-ed on the treatment of homosexuals titled Gay Hunting in the pages of India’s Weekly Magazine. “Society at large continues to be hostile and suspicious of people who prefer same sex love,” wrote the lifestyle writer and well-known Bollywood socialite. “Why else would the Thane police bother to raid a gay party and detain six people? What was the crime? That a bunch of guys had decided to hire a suburban bungalow, share a few drinks and, perhaps, have sex?” According to De, gays in India remain as marginalized as ever: “Their portrayal in commercial cinema, television and popular culture remains caricatural and hostile.” Even the high-profile gays that have chosen to go public in India have done so knowing that they would inevitably face prejudice and ostracism.

India’s mainstream middle-class especially, though increasingly affluent and well-traveled, is still suspicious of homosexuality, especially in the way it challenges the traditional concept of marriage and family. Marriage in India is thought of as a sacred union between a man and a woman sealed with the purpose of procreating – forming one of the pillars of Indian society. “Parents plan their lives and their children’s lives viewing marriage as the fundamental goal that must be achieved as soon as education and career are taken care of. After marriage, children must come,” says Aditya Kundalkar, a journalist and gay rights activist from Mumbai. “It’s still hard for a gay person in India to even accept himself or herself,” Mr. Kundalkar told Washington Prism.

“Yes, mainstream society is conservative,” medieval historian and gay studies scholar Saleem Kidwai echoes, “and the recent trend to stamp out cultural diversity is largely fueled, I suspect, by fears of sexual attitudes as it is about cultural diversity and respect of the individual agency.” Nevertheless, Mr. Kidwai says “the assumption that Indian society is overall a sexually conservative society assumes that Indian society is homogeneous.” Mr. Kidwai believes that the reality is quite the opposite; India is far too complex a society for this to be true.

Traditionally, representatives of the GLBT movement track the causes of such discriminatory mindset to attitudes imposed by colonialism and foreign imperialism. “Conservatism on many issues, including familial ones, was a product of our colonial history as innumerable studies have shown. The same is true for homophobia,” Saleem Kidwai told Washington Prism. Even from a legal standpoint there were no implications for homosexual relations prior to British rule since homosexuality was not a crime. As a result, Mr. Kidwai points out, “Homophobia in India is not as virulent and violent as it is in the so called sexually liberated societies. Same sex attraction might not be approved of, be derided or scorned, but is still tolerated and accommodated fairly comfortably in Indian society, as are alternate lifestyles.”

In fact, much of the legal quandary about gay rights revolves around Section 377, an article of the Penal Code that is a remnant left-over from the British Empire. Section 377 reads: Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine. Section 377 was introduced by colonial legislator Lord Thomas Babington Macualay in 1860 while the current judicial interpretation of the law dates back to 1935 and to the court case Khanu vs. Emperor. “The Court in Khanu vs Emperor laid down that, the natural object of sexual intercourse is that there should be the possibility of conception of human beings,” legal scholar and LGBT activist Arvind Narrain explained in 2007 in an articled titled An Idea whose time has come? The repeal of Sec 377 of the IPC.

Although supposedly neutral in scope, in the opinion of India’s growing movement of gay rights activists, the law has effectively stigmatized and criminalized a part of the population more directly than others, namely gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT), and other queer people. In fact, while Section 377 does not directly prohibit homosexuality or criminalize homosexuals as a class, it targets instead sexual acts which are commonly associated with only homosexuals. “This has made homosexuals the only groups vulnerable to prosecution under the law, with heterosexuals being completely immune,” Mr. Narrain believes. He is the author of Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change and is now a part of a collective of lawyers at the Alternative Law Forum based in Bangalore.

Those who advocate for the maintenance of Section 377 claim that the law has hardly been used to prosecute cases of consensual adult same-sex relationships but rather, the main usage has been to prosecute child abuse. However, and in spite of the actual number of incriminations, “Section 377 becomes the basis for routine and continuous violence against sexual minorities at the level of the street by the police,” Mr. Narrain wrote in another paper titled There are no Short Cuts to Queer Utopia: Sodomy, Law and Social Change. In his opinion, the real danger of the law lies in the fact that it permeates different social settings including the medical establishment, the media, the family and the state. Thus it becomes part of ordinary conversations and ultimately a part of the social fabric of the country, crystallizing a societal repugnance of homosexuality as a perverted, animal-like behavior.

Even culturally, some believe, British attitudes and costumes were largely responsible for the emergence of prejudices and discrimination. According to Mr. Kidwai, the social reformers and early Indian nationalists adopted Victorian notions of propriety and these naturally seeped into the mindset of the middle classes. “The intellectual effort that went into declaring Indian society licentious was staggering,” Mr. Kidwai told Prism. “Hindu gods and goddesses were an obvious target. Sufism and Persian-Urdu poetry, which often valorized same sex attachments, were the first victims when the Indian intellectuals went on the defensive and tried to ‘modernize.’” Saleem Kidwai, co-authored with University of Montana Professor of GLBT Studies Ruth Vanita, a book titled Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, a pioneering work documenting the indigenous roots of homosexuality in South Asia. The book shows that traditions of tolerance towards same-sex relationships existed and were well established in pre-colonial India.

British journalist, travel writer and broadcaster James McConnachie addressed similar issues while researching the origins and history of the Kamasutra. “It (the Kamasutra) certainly had little to do with my experience of South Asian village life, where I was supposed to ensure the door stood wide open if a woman entered my room,” Mr. McConnachie writes in his recently published The Book of Love, an historical examination of how the Kamasutra went from collectible rarity to the world’s essential text on sexuality. “It had still less to do with the India in which the Health minister of the Hindu-fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party had responded to the country’s mounting Aids crisis by proclaiming that India’s native traditions of chastity and fidelity were more effective than the use of condoms.” James McConnachie can’t help wondering, “What on earth could have happened between the apparently carefree composition of the Kamasutra in the third century and the problematized publication of my gift copy at the end of the twentieth? Had the colonizing West somehow infected an entire culture with sexual conservatism?”

Despite the fact that western colonialism certainly strengthened a moralistic and highly conservative view of sexuality in general and homosexuality specifically, India’s history shows that tensions between two opposite worldviews already existed within the native culture. “Simply discounting this (i.e. sexual conservatism) as the result of imposed Muslim religiosity and imported British ‘Victorianism’ would overlook the inherent complexity of India’s indigenous sexual culture,” James McConnachie writes. At the time when Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra, lived – during the 3^rd Century A.D. – Indian urban society was highly developed, an aestheticized culture of luxury and sensuality. Nevertheless, even then, India didn’t lack more religious-minded citizens that associated cities with moral turpitude. In fact, around the time of the composition of the Kamasutra, which so openly addresses the sexual desires of men and of women, even sketching out instances of same-sex desire, the Manavadharmashastra was also published. The Laws of Manu, as it came to be known in the West, is a text preoccupied with matters of religion and morality and aimed at rigidly regulating, among other things, sexual behavior. Manu bans sex in “non-human females, in a man, in a menstruating woman, in something other than a vagina”. “Its ideal,” Mr. McConnachie comments, “is that sex should be strictly procreative and monogamous,” not unlike India’s mainstream sexual morality of today.

Such cultural complexity and divergent understandings of morality and sexuality should be regarded as an asset and not as a hindrance, says Saleem Kidwai. In his opinion, all it would take for India to recognize that there is a legitimate place for homosexuality is “the acknowledgement that Indian society is capable of absorbing enormous diversity.” Kidwai’s personal experience, as an Indian gay man and a Muslim, is a testimony to that. “I was born after the Indian constitution had been written and grew up as a secular Indian citizen. I have never felt a contradiction in these three aspects of my person, and am surprised that they should be assumed to be contradictory,” Kidwai said in the interview.

Beyond recognition of the country’s inherent diversity, increased awareness could be the basis for a wider acceptance of a multiplicity of sexual behaviors. “Awareness of GLBT issues is increasing,” says journalist and activist Aditya Kundalkar. “It’d be safe to say that all urban citizens in the age group of 15-30 know about homosexuality, while perhaps until a decade ago, people thought of this as only a ‘western’ concept. ‘This doesn’t happen in our country,’ they might have said.” Simultaneously, acceptance seems to be also growing, especially among those people who have been personally exposed to stories of homosexuality, and by having gay relatives, friends and colleagues who might have come out to them. Such link between awareness and acceptance creates an important role for the popular media. “At least part of the credit for those positive developments goes to the increasing coverage of gay people and gay issues,” Mr. Kundalkar said.

For precisely this reason, Mr. Kundalkar recently joined an all-volunteer organization named the Queer Media Collective (QMC). Founded in the fall of 2007 by Times of India journalist and long time activist Vikram Doctor, the QMC joins a growing line-up of GLBT movements, such as the NAZ Foundation, Gay Bombay, the Humsafar Trust and LABIA (Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action). The goal unique to the QMC, comprising a group of media professionals, is to track and evaluate the coverage of LGBT issues on mainstream media and to train journalists to address such issues in accurate and fair terms. Recently, the collective organized the QMC Awards to recognize the responsible coverage of particular productions, media professionals, networks and publications.

The project immediately excited Mr. Kundalkar. “I had recently begun to notice the increasing number of newspaper column-inches, magazine articles and TV programs that were discussing gay issues and lifestyles. Ten years ago, it was almost absent,” he recalls. “And here was an opportunity for me to become a part of something that I felt will shape future coverage and reportage of these issues.”

The immediate goal for the QMC, as well as for every other LGBT advocacy organization, is the repeal of Section 377. “Since the case in ongoing, we feel that we are going in with the hope that change will happen and the judiciary will take a positive stand,” lawyer Arvind Narrain told Washington Prism. “There will be immediate implications of how homosexuality is perceived, but change will undoubtedly be a longer term process.” In fact the movement has much more complex challenges ahead and more ambitious objectives that they set for themselves. Among other things, the GLBT community is still faced with a mainstream political class that mostly refuses to take a position or to address the issue of sex-based discrimination. “The left parties offer the best chance for a breakthrough. The women’s wing of the left parties AIDWA (All India Democratic Women Association) has already taken a stand that Sec 377 should go,” Mr. Narrain said in his interview. “I’m not entirely disappointed at the progress that India’s GLBT movement has made, but I do worry about the road ahead,” adds Saleem Kidwai. “I warn my younger friends that our current struggle to challenge section 377 of the IPC will seem like a picnic if we win this round. If we win, I think the struggle for rights will get far more difficult for the morality brigade will start taking us seriously and launch an offensive which would include violence.” Nevertheless, Mr. Kidwai claims to be confident that Indian civil society is fully capable of accommodating the human rights of GLBT people.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian edition

Washington D.C. – Seventy percent of Iranians are under the age of thirty, a striking comparison, for example, to rapidly ageing Europe. Recording the activities, hobbies and moods of this burgeoning Iranian youth, Greek writer, photographer and producer Iason Athanasiadis lived and traveled in Iran from 2004 to 2007.

“I let serendipity take hold and move me according to its wishes,” Athanasiadis told Washington Prism in an interview. “I worked on television documentaries on Iranian music and cultural traditions. Through my travels, I found myself in situations that allowed me to take images indicative of the youth zeitgeist,” he said explaining how he carried out the project. His photos are now on display at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a respected think tank in Washington.

Shortly after arriving in Tehran in 2004, Athanasiadis realized that there was something missing in the Western media coverage of Iran and that the foreign policy issues that hindered the country’s relations with the West were often no more than mere speculations. “Did Iran have a nuclear weapons program, and if so, what to do about it? Did Iran support militias in Iraq, and if so, what to do about it?” Athanasiadis said criticizing mainstream reporting on Iran.

Instead, another fascinating story was taking place, one that was – still is – destined to have wide-ranging social ramifications. It was the story of the emergence of Iran’s youth. “When I arrived in Tehran, all the rage was about Orkut parties, where young people who had met online on the social networking site Orkut would meet up in real life, in cities around Iran,” Athanasiadis recalled in his interview with Washington Prism. “It was a way of getting around the Islamic prohibition on unrelated members of opposite sexes socializing, at least before Orkut was filtered by the authorities.”

This new generation of Iranians that Athanasiadis met was one born after the Shah left Iran and retained scarcely any personal memory of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. “They are children of a revolution they had not participated in, in some cases asked for,” the Greek journalist said, “They view the Islamic Republic with a realism that comes from those who are pragmatists, rather than idealists who tasted disillusionment, as many of their parents are.”

Children of the Iranian Revolution is the title given to Athanasiadis’ exhibit, which runs at the Wilson Center through July 14^th. It is a collection of shots bustling with life, portraying youngsters banging heads at a rock concert, a couple of rappers rhyming hip-hop lyrics in a recording studio, friends attending a soccer game wearing Metallica shirts. There is a touching portrait of a boy and a girl cuddling with each other on a park bench, and another of a young bride wearing a Western-style strapless wedding gown surrounded by a cheering crowd of older veiled women. Athanasiadis’ work is a rich and compelling tale about the exceptionally lively and continually expanding underground life in Iran, although, like the artists explains; “underground loses meaning when large segments of a society are at it.”

“I came to know Iason through the Wilson Center’s Southeast Europe Project (SEP),” the Center’s Special Events Coordinator, and curator of the exhibit, Maria-Stella Gatzoulis said in an e-mail interview with Prism. “Iason approached SEP’s Chairman John Sitilides, and expressed interest in showing his photography at the Woodrow Wilson Center,” Ms. Gatzoulis recalled. “He was in Greece at the time and we discussed reviewing the idea if he were ever to come to America. As things turned out, Iason was appointed as a Harvard Fellow one year later.”

The son of two academics who used to bring carpets and objets d’art back from trips to Iraq, Egypt and Syria and whom his mother would lull to sleep with stories from the 1001 Nights, Iason Athanasiadis studied Arabic and Middle East Studies as at Oxford, holds a Masters Degree in Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies from Tehran’s School of International Studies and speaks Arabic, Persian and is now learning Turkish. “The kind of journalism I practice is predicated on learning the culture and speaking the language before I start writing about a place,” Athanasiadis told Washington Prism.

“I think the greatest strengths in Iason’s show are his images of the people behind the scenes of what life appears to be in Iran today,” Wilson Center’s Maria-Stella Gatzoulis told Prism; “With his exhibit, he captured the reality of the joys and pastimes this generation is enjoying. He goes beyond Western stereotypes of what Iran appears to be today to show us what Iran is really like through the eyes of its young generation.”

“The first thing I noticed about Iran when I stepped off the plane was the incredible vitality you see in the streets,” Athanasiadis said remembering his arrival in Teheran. He was struck by the proximity he felt with the people he met. “Despite the language barrier, our interactions reminded me of being with my friends in Greece. I realized that a great generation gap was in play between themselves and their stiffer, more formal elders.”

Wanting to avoid showing elite activities but instead trying to focus on how ordinary youth is looking for a balance between adapting to the globalized world and preserving local traditions, Athanasiadis found out how dynamic Iran’s middle class is. “They have neither too much money as to be cautious, nor so little that all their efforts are spent working to make enough to put food on the table,” the Greek photographer discovered. “Hence the extraordinary artistic and cultural innovations they are pioneering in Iran, both in visual arts and music.”

The exhibition, however, is not meant as a purely aesthetic portrayal of a new Iranian generation. “The show is as much ethnographic as journalistic as artistic,” said Iason. At the same time, and because of how controversial the debate on Iran is nowadays, in order to preserve the value of the contribution offered by his photographs, Athanasiadis has tried to avoid direct political statements. “To not get drawn into the politics of the US-Iran confrontation, I put up the show exclusively with my own money and no sponsorship, in order to avoid allegations of political bias.”

Iason hopes that his exhibit displays an image different from the usual fare on the more mainstream media. Similarly, “the objective of the Wilson Center in putting up this exhibit is to enlighten people through pictures and captions of the lifestyle of the third generation of Iranians,” Ms. Gatzoulis said. “Its goal is to promote an understanding of the culture and its people and to hopefully open doors for greater friendship, understanding and dialogue.”

Athanasiadis believes that “a process of dehumanizing Iran and its people is gripping the US media that is similar to what happened prior to the war against Iraq. The voices of the people are not transmitted to us. We don’t know what they think.” What he found during five years living and traveling in Iran, and listening to regular Iranians, is that “the people in my pictures do not want to be liberated. They are engaged in their own struggle to redefine the Islamic Republic they inhabit, but from within.”

What is important for Americans to understand, according to Athanasiadis, is that Iranians, including the globalizing youth, are not happy with what the US has done to their neighbors, “and have cooled off on their support for the West.” In the opinion of the photographer, US policymakers tend to misunderstand the signals coming from this third generation and too easily interpret its love for Western fashion as a call for ‘liberation’ or ‘regime change’. “Yes, it’s true that there are Iranians who dislike their regime and wish for the US to come liberate them from the Islamic Republic, but alliances built on mutual interests are seldom solid,” Athanasiadis believes. “For a fiercely patriotic people such as the Iranians, foreign occupation would be just as unpalatable as it has proven in Iraq.”

Athanasiadis has a warning and a suggestion for the American public, gathered thanks to his experience in the country. On the one hand, “they should not feign shock when they travel abroad and find themselves less than embraced.” At the same time, Americans should remember that they come from a great country with a superb tradition of hard work and meritocracy. “These are the aspects of its culture the US could focus on exporting to the world,” said the artist.

In conclusion, Athanasiadis believes, Iran is in the process of a tough and wrenching transition as the Islamic Republic is constantly redefined from within. In his opinion, the US and the international community should let this process run its course since outside interventions seem to only offer the government a pretext to crack down on civil society.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), the Russell Sage Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, National Academy of Social Insurance, and the Society of American Historians. Professor Katz is considered one of America’s leading experts on the history of social welfare, poverty and inequality. In 2006 he co-authored, with Professor of Social Welfare and History Mark J. Stern, Co-Director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, the book One Nation Divisible, a sweeping history of twentieth-century that weaves together information from the latest census with a century’s worth of data to show how trends in American life have changed while inequality and diversity have endured. Professor Katz spoke with Valentina Pasquali about the issue of racism and how it might affect the 2008 presidential bid of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Valentina Pasquali: There has been much talking recently about Barack Obama’s problem with white working class voters. Do you think that this is true at the national level or are his difficulties with this particular constituency regionally-based?

MK: My sense is that it may be a problem in general with white working class voters but I suspect that it is more extreme and regionally concentrated in some areas, such as rural areas and Southern states. Basically we are talking about those places with a history of slavery and confederation, where I think racism lingers, especially among less educated people.

VP: How much do you think these problems could affect the general elections and the race against John McCain? Is it something the Democratic Party should seriously worry about? And could it be an issue that might convince super-delegates to endorse Clinton against the results of the primaries?

MK: My suspicion is that if Obama wins the greater number of delegates, the majority of leaders and officials of the Democratic Party will move behind him and mobilize in those areas where he has been weak. In the cities this would be easier to do because there are more established Democratic machines and voters could be rallied more easily.
As far as white working class voters that seem hostile to Obama, their influence in the general election will depend on the state where they are located, what percentage of the population they comprise and if they will turn out to vote. In the last analysis, these people will really have to ask themselves if they want to vote for a Republican, considering the state of things now, between the Iraq war, the economy, gas prices, and the housing crisis. I think it will be very hard for them to make such choice.
Then there is the other side of the issue as well, or the disgruntled Republicans. Yesterday I read an interesting piece on The Nation which pointed out that in a number of primaries, Republicans chose to vote in the Democratic contest and over 70% of them cast a ballot for Obama.

So, I think these will be very complicated elections; on one hand there will be white working class Democrats that could go Republican. On the other, there could be those frustrated Rockefeller-type Republicans that might go Democratic.

And, we should consider that there might be a slight decline in white working class voters’ turnout, but other than that there will be a huge participation among African Americans and young people. Obama has this way of mobilizing people that is incredible.

VP: What kind of an African American would you say Barack Obama is? How black is he?

MK: It is not a question of how black he is; it is a question of how street he is. And he is not street. He is a highly educated, articulate, handsome, presentable American and, let’s put it this way, I think that most Americans that would be uncomfortable with Jesse Jackson would be comfortable with Obama.

VP: Considering his peculiar profile and personal history, do you think Barack Obama should be viewed as a symbol of real change in America, of the end of an era of segregation and discrimination? How much instead is he just an exception?

MK: I honestly think that his candidature is a momentous development because, it is true, he does have a white mother and an unusual upbringing, but he is cast in the mind of the public as an African American, that is how people look at him. The fact that an African American could very well be the next President is unprecedented; something that ten years ago I would not have imagined could happen in my lifetime. But it can only be an African American who has Obama’s characteristic, well spoken and highly educated. It could not be someone like Al Sharpton.

VP: Because of his mixed racial heritage, his international background and his degrees from Ivy League universities, would you say that there could be doubts about Barack Obama within the African-American community itself?

MK: There was some discussion of it earlier, about the fact that Obama wasn’t black enough. But then people have come around. The African-American population in general has a very mixed background, and the homogenous view that is normally cast is simplistic and racist. Obama falls within this group.

VP: In conclusion, what do you think will be the biggest challenges for Barack Obama in running for President of the US?

MK: I do share the worry of many people that he might be a target for assassination. This is true for Hillary Clinton too. I think every President is, but there are hardcore racist people and hardcore misogynist people. I don’t think that this should stop him from running or people from supporting him. But I hope his security is well taken care of. Just think about those doctors who perform abortion and how heavily they are targeted by groups of extremists.

Secondly, he will have to unite the Democratic Party. He has to win over the people that have been Hillary Clinton supporters and he has to make them enthusiastic and get them to work for him and to go vote. I think Clinton will come around and she will support him wholeheartedly.

In the end, the two elements that will decide the race are, on one hand, the attraction for Obama, which is very great. On the other, there is the repulsion for Bush. So the next thing to watch in this election is how successful John McCain will be in distancing himself from Bush. But Republicans have a terrible record right now.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

In spite of the fact that water covers more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, 97.5% of it comprises of salt-water. For the most part, the fresh water supply is either stored as ice at the poles, in underground beds that are inaccessible to humans or retained as soil moisture. As a result, only a small fraction of the planet’s water resources, approximately 1% of the total, is available for human use. With the world population growing exponentially, issues of water scarcity are becoming increasingly pressing.

A UNDP report from 1999 predicted that access to water was likely to be the single biggest cause of conflict in Africa in the following 25 years. Almost a decade later, the global pressure on water supplies has increased due to population growth, continued deforestation and climate change, making water an increasingly scarce and precious commodity. According to the World Bank, 1.1 billion people today lack access to safe water, normally calculated as a minimum of 20 liters per day from an improved source within one kilometer of the home.

“Africa’s Lake Chad,” writes Lester R. Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, “once a landmark for astronauts circling the earth, is now difficult for them to locate.” The lake, surrounded by fast-growing countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, has shrunk 96% in 40 years. “The shrinkage of Lake Chad is not unique,” notes Dr. Brown, one of America’s leading environmentalists and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. “The world is incurring a vast water deficit.” The flow of the Jordan River is also steadily diminishing – along with those of the Yellow River in China, the Mekong in Southeast Asia, the Amu Darya in Central Asia and the Colorado River in the United States. And, as the Jordan River decreases, the Dead Sea is also shrinking. Over the past 40 years, its water level has dropped by some 25 meters and it is estimated it could disappear entirely by the year 2050.

Moreover, with demand growing, several countries are exploiting their groundwater to the point of exhaustion and water tables in parts of China, India, West Asia, the former Soviet Union and the western United States are dropping. According to Dr. Brown, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with a population of over 62 million, wells are going dry almost everywhere because of the depletion of underground water tables. Similarly, Iran is over pumping its aquifers by an average of five billion tons of water per year, causing “water refugees” to abandon their villages in the eastern part of the country as wells dry up.

Considering the extent of the problem, it shouldn’t be surprising that the 1999 UNDP study forecasts that should water wars occur, they would most likely break out in regions where rivers or lakes are shared by more than one country. Lester R. Brown agrees. “Nowhere is this potential conflict (over water) starker than among Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia in the Nile River valley.”

The Nile River Basin

The Nile River Basin is a reservoir of water covering 1.3 million square miles, a surface slightly larger than the territory of India. There are ten riparian countries to the Nile River, the longest running in the world: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Eritrea. However, three of them – Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia – account for 85% of the territory that constitutes the hydrologic boundaries of the basin.

Whereas 95% of Egyptians rely exclusively on the Nile for their water supply and 77% of Sudan’s fresh water comes via the river, the Nile originates in Ethiopia and controls 85% of its headwaters. “Ethiopia is an interesting case,” says an economist with the Ministry of Water Resources in Addis Ababa who asked not to be identified by name, “since its economic fate is closely tied to unreliable rainfall and since 90% of its water resources are ‘trans-boundary,’ which means that rivers flow into other countries that inevitably oppose upstream development that might reduce their own resources.”

The already high demand for water in the region is projected to increase steadily through the next forty years. The population in Egypt, today at 75 million, should reach 121 million by 2050. Sudan is expected to have 73 million people by 2050, almost double today’s 39 million. And the number of Ethiopians is projected to grow from 83 million to 183 million.

Population growth is not the only factor of stress on the region’s water resources. David Shinn, former ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia and professor of International Affairs at George Washington University, told Washington Prism in an interview, “Irrigation projects are the greatest threat to the future of amicable Nile water usage.  Big irrigation projects simply use so much water that never returns to the river system.”

Deforestation and soil erosion also represent a threat. According to Mongabay, one of the most influential climate and environment websites, Ethiopia lost 14.0% of its forest cover between 1990 and 2005. Fewer trees could result from less rainfall. They could also cause worsening soil erosion, which in turn would increase sedimentation and reduce the lifespan of water storage infrastructure.

Competition vs. Cooperation

“Since there is already little water left in the Nile when it reaches the Mediterranean,” Lester Brown writes in Plan B 3.0 , “if either Sudan or Ethiopia takes more water, then Egypt will get less.” Moreover, international agreements grant Ethiopia only a minuscule share of water. “Given its aspirations for a better life, and with the headwaters of the Nile being one of its few natural resources, Ethiopia will undoubtedly want to take more,” Dr. Brown believes.

Possibly the biggest problem with the Nile River Basin is the lack of reasonable agreements among riparian countries on the equitable share of water rights. The most recent one was signed by Egypt and Sudan in 1959 and resulted in a virtual Egyptian monopoly over Nile water. Based on an annual flow at Aswan of 84 billion cubic meters, it allocated 55.5 billion cubic meters, or three-quarters, of the water to Egypt and 18.5 billion cubic meters, one-quarter, to Sudan. “The 1959 treaty remains in effect but is only accepted by Egypt and Sudan.  This is the big problem,” Ambassador Shinn told Washington Prism. The other eight riparian countries do not accept the agreement, but unfortunately there is no formal structure in place for handling such political contentions. “There are periodic bilateral and even regional discussions on water-related issues, but they have not yet achieved a breakthrough on redistribution of Nile water.  That is why this situation could, not will but could, result in conflict some day,” said Ambassador Shinn.

The one example of an attempt at cooperative development of the Nile is the 10 year-old Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). The World Bank-led NBI provides a framework through which its member states can cooperatively make use of the resources of the Nile Basin to fight poverty and promote socio-economic development in the region. Each member has agreed to share information with other riparian states on the projects it intends to launch and, if possible, to undertake joint studies to ensure the sustainability of such projects. The initiative has been regarded as generally successful and the parties to the NBI appear very committed to it. However, Ambassador Shinn believes that the “NBI is an organization that deals primarily with technical and practical issues and not controversial political ones.  It is easier to cooperate on technical matters than political ones.” What remains to be seen is whether the riparian states of the Nile River can find a way to approach the hard-button issues of water rights and water equitable shares.

Responses

The story of the Nile River Basin illustrates the challenges confronting people and policymakers around the world. Current trends in population growth, deforestation, agriculture and the general inefficiency in the way we use available water signal that conditions of water scarcity are only destined to worsen and suggest that conflicts over water resources are becoming increasingly likely.

According to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, world population is projected to grow from six billion in 1999 to nine billion by 2042. In the meantime, while more than one-fifth of the world’s tropical forests have been cleared since 1960, tropical deforestation continues at rates averaging about 0.7% per year. As for agriculture, close to 70% of the Earth’s freshwater already go towards irrigation projects. The Food Policy Research Institute projects that irrigated cropland area for grains will grow 11% worldwide between 1995 and 2025. Finally, wasteful consumption of water, especially in developed countries, is also contributing to the gradual depletion of global supplies. For example, a report published by the European Union Commission in 2007 estimates that water usage in the EU alone could be reduced by about 40%. As a result, water becomes a more precious resource each day.

If financial markets are any indication of the value of a commodity, a new movement toward the trading of water reinforces the idea that this will be the next most sought after good. It was recently reported that a wave of water purification companies are going public in hopes of increasing their value. “Water companies have become prized acquisition targets as a result of growing concerns over shortages of clean water, the increased infrastructure needs of developing countries, more stringent regulations and an aging water distribution system in the United States,” wrote Euan Rocha for Reuters.

The British economist Roger Bate, currently a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington D.C., explained to Washington Prism: “Water is traded amongst farmers, municipalities and industries in many semiarid countries: Australia, Chile, United States, South Africa. It is either literally transferred or the rights to use the water are transferred, much like a contract for many commodities.” Dr. Bates, an expert on water policy, believes that water trading “improves efficiency by allocating water to the most efficient uses, and as such it is also better for the environment.” The premise is that there is enough water in the world for everyone, but it is being used wastefully almost everywhere. What is needed then is a system for allocating water shares more efficiently and an increasingly large number of experts believe that markets can provide such a system.

Trading in water shares is becoming popular even among small investors. Ronald Saville told Washington Prism in an interview, “Water is already a limited resource just when considering it for consumption. Add into the mix the fact that we are going to rely more on it for energy, and its importance for the future is readily apparent.” Saville is a young professional employed in the field of international education in Washington D.C. “I think water will become the next oil and these companies will stand to make huge profits on it, similarly to the way oil companies are making them now,” said Mr. Saville, who has decided to buy shares of a “water mutual fund” known as Powershares Global Water.

Although markets can help allocate a commodity more efficiently by determining the price at which offer meets demand, questions arise as to how they can help distribute equitably a resource such as water, which is equally indispensable to all human beings independent of income, and as to whether or not finance can help preserve it for the future. Oil will be traded at higher and higher prices until it runs out. Unfortunately, while mankind can survive without oil, the same cannot be said for water.

According to Roger Bate, while oil is only slowly replenished, water is a renewable resource. “Water can be commoditized successfully without it ever having to run out,” Dr. Bate says.. “Water markets are based on tradable quotas calculated on supplies. If you set the quotas at below the total amount you will not run out.”  According to Bate, it is crucial then to set the right quotas. “It often happens that a government sets more quotas then there is water to fulfill,” he concedes. However, he believes that “this is not the fault of the market; it is the fault of the quota allocation, in this case the government”.

Even those like Bate who strongly believe in the efficiency of the market as a system of resource allocation see a role for governments and politics in the process. “Making sure people have the funds to be able to afford water is the job of a government, creating a safety net. It is much better that the poor pay for water and get used to paying for it so its not wasted, but that simultaneously they are subsidized to do so. For too long too many users, and notably farmers, have not paid enough for water and wasted it,” explained Bate.

Ethiopia is a very good example of the need for both investments and a political response. Since at an aggregate level Ethiopia still has an abundance of water, the biggest question for Addis Ababa is how to store it, manage it and, if necessary, transfer it.  The economist with the government’s Water Ministry told us: “This is the major concern, since it requires massive finance which of course is not readily available.  In the medium to long term, if investment keeps coming the improved ability to manage water resources will likely more than offset the reduced total quantity of water due to climate and localized factors.  But that may be a big if.”

Since water is a public good and one of the fundamental sources of life, and since it inherently raises trans-national issues, a concerted global political effort at managing and preserving it may be the best strategy for confronting water scarcity and the conflicts that could potentially arise. “I think that there is not much that can be done at a national level, other than more of the same,” the economist with the Ethiopian government told us. “The major solutions will need to be international.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – The Dalai Lama is a small man with an exquisitely Asian sense of humor wrapped in a simple burgundy drape. He often interrupts his speech with laughter looking sincerely entertained by the situation. Three big men dressed in expensive western-style suits surround him. They casually drop typically American jokes as they talk but the truth is that they seem to take themselves very seriously.

Last week’s conversation with the Dalai Lama was organized jointly by Asia Society, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), three among the most important non-profit institutions in Washington D.C. The three men sitting at the sides of His Holiness were Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Chairman of Asia Society and former assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Carter; Strobe Talbott, President of Brookings and deputy Secretary of State under Bill Clinton; and Richard Armitage, trustee of CSIS and deputy Secretary of State under the Bush Administration. They are “three refuges from the State Department” as Armitage himself said in an attempt to find common ground with a man who’s lived in exile for almost fifty years.

The ballroom of the Park Hyatt, an upscale hotel in the business district of the national capital, is packed with approximately three hundred guests, sitting on the expensive velvet that covers the chairs lined up under the room’s massive chandeliers. Most people in the audience belong to the upper level management of oil companies, sit on the boards of prestigious charity foundations, or work as high-level officials for different branches of the federal government. Thursday morning they took a break from their important lavishly paid jobs to come listen to the small Asian man talking about compassion. They also positioned themselves well enough to maybe have a picture taken with Richard Gere, who was sitting in second row looking devotedly at the Dalai Lama.

The striking contrasts marking the event did not end with the appearance of things, but instead ran as a thread through the morning. Here there was, a man who preaches detachment from material possessions as a means to spiritual elevation speaking in the world-capital of consumption. At one point the Dalai Lama couldn’t resist the irony of the situation and shouted; “the American way of life; always consume, consume, consume. Maybe think more!”

Through the conversation, Armitage, Holbrooke, and Talbott took turns in questioning His Holiness on the most diverse array of issues. They asked him about the protests in Burma, about the 17th Congress of the People Republic of China, about the melting ice cap, and about the role of the United States in world politics. They wanted him to play the part of the expert on everything. But he is not. He is the head of Lama Buddhism, the current of Buddhism that developed in the high Himalayan peaks. He has risen to global fame because of his own personal experience. He was exiled from China in 1959 at a time when China was taking the final measures to enforce its rule over Tibet. He’s a superb speaker, who’s gained worldwide respect for the simplicity and wisdom of his words.

Yet he is not an expert on Burma. So he shared his sympathy with the monks protesting in the street of Yangoon – “of course this is very sad, very sad, and their purpose, an open society or democracy, very right” – but when Holbrooke asked him; “Do you think the outside world can affect this situation inside Burma?” the Dalai Lama replied; “My answer is I don’t know.”

His Holiness is also not a scientist who holds the secret to the cure against global warming and resorted to give simple advices as a way to exemplify his thoughts when questioned on this matter. “From early morning, I think everybody takes a bath, or a shower,” he said speaking on individual responsibility towards the environment; “At least in the last few decades, I never take a bath.  Only shower. It’s a small contribution,” he continued laughing as he described his personal effort to preserve water.

Faced with crossfire of questions on hard-politics the Dalai Lama often reacted by telling stories. For example he recalled of the time he visited the township of Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the years following the end of the Apartheid. During that trip he met with a teacher and asked him about his students and their progress; “He told me with some sign of sadness, their brain is inferior.  He believed that.  I was shocked,” His Holiness told the audience at the Park Hyatt. “So I argued with him.  This is absolutely wrong.  As far as brain is concerned, white people, black people, or yellow people, they are all the same, the same human being, same brain, same potential.” Throughout the morning His Holiness aimed at emphasizing the importance of education. “We must educate the future generations,” he repeated over and over.

One of the main political goals of the event was to give the Dalai Lama yet another chance to highlight how he does not challenge China’s sovereignty over Tibet but only asks for a larger degree of autonomy of the region. Strobe Talbott very pointedly asked: “Is it your position that Tibet is and will continue to be within the People’s Republic of China?” “Give us meaningful autonomy and we are fully committed to remain happily within People’s Republic of China,” was His Holiness response.

For as straightforward as this approach might seem, there in the words of the Dalai Lama lay the biggest and saddest contradiction of the morning. Despite reiterating his commitment not to seek independence, he effectively pledged for a degree of autonomy that would put the whole administration of Tibet in the hands of Tibetans, substantially border lining independence. “Tibetan Buddhism or Tibetan spirituality, Tibetan culture, education, and economy, these should handled by Tibetans,” the Dalai Lama stated Thursday.   A fair request in the opinion of many, but not in that of Beijing, which is in Tibet precisely for the purpose of managing the region’s precious resources to China’s advantage. It is in this perspective that the PRC’s resistance to a return of the Dalai Lama should not be seen as too much of a surprise, although His Holiness makes his best effort to deny the accusation of being a “splitist.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Valentina Pasquali – Washington Prism

Shanghai – The existence of slums is curiously absent from modern-day China. Even in the country’s bustling urban cities, wealth and poverty coexist side-by-side as gleaming new skyscrapers form the backdrop for the rows of government subsidized housing that litter the city. Such a ubiquitous cityscape is largely symbolic of China’s current schizophrenic state, embracing open-market capitalism while still subscribing to a largely communist ideology.

With the fundamental economic, societal, and political changes that the country is going through, one starts to spot somewhat atypical faces speckled into the cosmopolitan crowds. These are the faces of the poor: their clothing often ragged, their faces often grimy. Most come from the nation’s eastern countryside and many belong to ethnic minority groups that the Western media has largely ignored.

These so-called “migrant workers” are most visible in the city during late evening hours and at bus and train stations, when most people are returning home from a day’s work. Their conditions outside of the workplace are of little comfort, either. Often finding shelter in old abandoned buildings or cramming an entire family into a single dormitory room, these workers are the ones being left behind by China’s rapidly growing economy.

“When we first moved into this building, the road below was still under construction,” Steve recalls as he points outside the living room window of his 30th floor apartment. Together with his wife Michelle and two children, he set out for China from the United States just under two years ago on a Chinese language, culture, and politics fellowship that funds his stay.

“For the first few months we would see the migrants down there, and see the lights shed by the small fires they lit up to try warming up,” he adds. Steve and Michelle live in a large apartment in a newly build high-rise in the development area of Pudong on the East side of the Hangpu in Central Shanghai. Their flat sports a beautiful view of the opposite side of the river and its European-style façades.

The American couple remembers the shock in first seeing the line of lean-tos adjacent to base of their upscale apartment building. “A few times we saw trucks coming at night, forcing the workers on them, and driving them away. Hard to say who it was, but the government is very afraid of slums growing in China and it tries its best to prevent that from happening.”

“I was a little uncomfortable seeing what was going on,” Michelle admits. “I had just moved here, and I didn’t want to get in trouble. At the same time I felt like I should have done something.” Soon enough, Michelle put together small kits containing toothbrushes, toothpaste, and towels and distributed them to her migrant neighbors below. “I wasn’t sure of how they would react but I just went downstairs and handed out some of my kits to the very surprised looks of these men.”

Although the term “migrant worker” now spans a larger spectrum to any person who has left their native homes for work, it is more widely used to refer to those who have left their countryside villages for large cities in seek of work. Some even bring their families with them and settle in their newly adopted urban settings.

The majority, however, are seasonal workers who migrate between eight and ten months, return home for the Chinese New Year, and then continue their migratory cycle at year’s end by moving onto yet another city for yet another job.

According to China’s official Xinhua news agency, the number of migrant workers has already topped 200 million. 120 million of those are said to be working in large cities. With Sino metropolises booming, the workers provide much of the labor that is put into creating infrastructure and expanding city boundaries. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions estimates that migrant workers constitute up to 71% of the country’s entire construction industry.

For many of the workers, the prospects of big-city life go past a better paying job. Compared with the amenities of small rural villages, Chinese cities inevitably have infinitely more to offer. Shirley, an elementary school teacher friend of Michelle, has witnessed the juxtaposition between the two ways of Chinese life firsthand. “When she first arrived in Shanghai during the 1980’s, she [would tell] me how overwhelmed she was by all the possibilities Shanghai had to offer. Most of all, she was thrilled that she could finally eat chocolate, which she had never tasted before.”

Zhao Juin, a 27 year-old from the northeastern Hubei province, proclaims “Shanghai is big, Shanghai is beautiful!” Zhao, who works in a massage parlor in the outskirts of the city, is enthralled with the educational opportunities that are afforded to him in Shanghai—opportunities nonexistent in the rural parts of the country. As he explains in his broken but self-taught English, “I only went to school up until 8th grade.”

Originally from the semi-autonomous island of Macau (where he first started as a masseuse), Zhao came to Shanghai only four years ago when his former teacher introduced him to his current employer. Though “it is very easy to make money in Shanghai,” the posted hours of the parlor that Zhao works at (11am to 2am) is indicative of how hard migrant workers toil for their extra pay. Zhao, for instance, works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Vacations days are also for naught, as Zhao’s work is under the table, disabling him from claiming any government-mandated days off.

As is so typical with migrant workers, housing is an issue for Zhao. Like all his coworkers, he lives in an all-male dormitory provided by his employer; his girlfriend, also a migrant, lives in a similar female-only dormitory around the block. Perhaps it is this concrete aura of unfamiliarity that has Zhao occasionally longing for home.

“I like Shanghai. But I also like my hometown.” Zhao confesses. “My father, mother, sister—they are all there. I think I want to go back, and take my girlfriend with me. I want to get married. Maybe in three years from now, I will be able to open a center like this, but for now I still don’t have the money.”

Zhao’s situation—and indeed, that of all migrant workers—is made worse by the fact that Chinese society and social policy are not structured to accommodate them. In a country where individuals are largely tied to their places of birth, it is difficult to move residence from one part of the country to another. As a result, migrants’ aspirations of social mobility suffer.

The policy, known as the hukou system (or, the Household Registration System), was established after the founding of the People’s Republic of China during the 1950’s and was meant to control migration around the country. Under the system, individuals were assigned residences, and before they could relocate they needed to be granted permission from the appropriate registration office. The policy became stricter under Mao Tse-Tung’s now infamous Cultural Revolution. During this time, the distribution of food rations became contingent upon the hukou system, as citizens had to show their registration cards at their local grocery stores in order to receive a predetermined amount of food. More rigid still was the fact that only the head of the household was entitled to keep the government-sanctioned booklet that listed the names of all the family members.

Though the traditional hukou system was dismantled under 1985 reforms (and replaced with a more laissez-faire approach to household registration), China has proven itself to be still largely unprepared to meet the needs and challenges of its migrating populations. There exists, in essence, a glass ceiling.

While registration documents are no longer required for food purchases, they must still be shown in order to obtain state-subsidized housing, employment, pension or social security, medical care, and children’s school registration. Though such a requirement is reasonable given the nature of services being requested, the exorbitantly high fee citizens have to pay should they not have proper documentation places such services out of reach for the average migrant worker, especially since it they are the ones who are most likely to be lacking such documents in the first place.

With respect to education, a local hukou is still required in order to enroll children in public schools. Without it, the only options left to parents are to pay exceptionally high tuition fees or enrolling their children in private schools that are even more expensive. This effectively makes providing a solid education to one’s children unviable to impoverished parents lacking the requisite hukou papers. Given that social mobility is inherently tied to education and that for many migrant workers, the raison d’être of being such a worker is the possibility of social mobility for the next generation, this fact is tauntingly ironic.

Trying to overcome this problem, migrants have resorted to setting up their own private schools that are cheaper than their public counterparts. Michelle started volunteering teaching English at Tongsi XueXiao, one of such schools, shortly after moving to China. It is a private institution that costs approximately $80 a year. “But the facilities are inadequate,” Michelle says. “It is a former industrial building [that has been] converted—no heating, no cooling, water only from a well outside, and bare rooms that have small old wooden desks and with about sixty children crammed inside.”

Tongsi XueXiao is one of twenty-five schools for migrant children in Shanghai. Though the schools provide a necessary service, there is a subtle fear among government officials that their existence may provide an additional impetus for would-be migrant workers to leave their rural homes for work in the city.

Of these twenty-five schools, nine have reportedly been shut down by the Shanghai municipal government.

Despite the hurdles, however, the students at Michelle’s school—which number around 2,000 mostly from impoverished Anhui and nearby Hebei—realize that their future prospects lie in a strong educational background. “They are very determined to work hard and it is not complicated to teach a class with sixty of them, whereas in the U.S., for example, it would be an impossible task,” Michelle points out.”

However assiduous the students may be, however, they are by no means assured that their education will continue past high school. University admissions are largely determined by students’ scores on a standardized national entrance exam. Since performance on these types of exams is largely influenced by the amount of resources students’ parents throw at them (in the form of prep courses and private tutoring, for example), impoverished students—and by extension, the children of migrants workers—are at an inherent disadvantage.

This disadvantage is only exacerbated by the quota system (based on the hukou) that is in place. Allotting a greater number of admissions to local students is common practice by Chinese universities, and this leaves those from outside schools’ provinces with a lower chance of gaining admission.

Fudan University in Shanghai, for instance, offers only two spots per year for students applying from outside the province. For the children of migrant workers, the fact that they grew up and studied in Shanghai is irrelevant, for they are largely still registered as residents in their cities of birth.

In an attempt to deal with this problem, smaller cities began luring migrant workers in the 1990’s in hopes that by increasing their relatively small populations, they could have a larger stake in the central government revenues that the larger cities routinely enjoy. With the families of migrants workers come the next generation of college applicants, and so by luring these workers to their municipalities, these smaller cities hope that their children will be enticed into applying to local schools, lured by the much better probability of being accepted vis-à-vis the competitive and restrictive universities they would otherwise be targeting.

Shandong province’s capital of Jin’an, for example, experimented with the issuance of temporary residence to anyone with a college degree in 1997. This policy was extended in 2006 to cover any rural resident who has had steady work and housing. But not all cities experience the success that Jin’an has. In Shenzhen, for example, a similar program was scrapped after an unexpectedly large number of people began migrating to the city—too many for the local government to accommodate. Even in the one year immediately following the program’s cancellation, an additional 130,000 migrants followed suit.

Michelle has lived in China for about two years now, and has been witnessing many of these changes firsthand. “It’s one thing to blame the Chinese,” she tells says, “but I don’t feel it’s the right way to go about it. I have a feeling that they’re trying to do their utmost. They have a huge country with a huge population. We must give them credit for what they’ve achieved since the 1950’s, considering what China was like before. And we must give them more time to get the rest done.”

Though Michelle’s sentiments may be true, historical perspective is often hard to keep for migrant workers. As they struggle for social mobility, many feel that the words of Chairman Mao have been forgotten: “Production by the masses, the interests of the masses, the experiences and feelings of the masses—to these the leading cadres should pay constant attention.” Yet with China’s behemoth economy finally awakening, many migrant workers feel that they are being left behind in the midst of the country’s newfound affluence, and it is here in the underbelly that they fear no one is paying attention at all.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Lhasa, Tibet –  “Nima,” calls a male voice from the outside, “Nima…”
Nima comes and goes from the tent where I sit sipping yak milk tea; she ensures that all of the guests always have their cups full, and hurries towards the many voices that keep calling her name. She is just eighteen, and she has been working here only since March, but it seems like she has already become a pillar for this small community of workers of the local tourism industry.

My journey across Tibet has taken me all the way to this campsite on the north face of Everest. The highest peak in the world shines right above us as the snow that covers its summit reflects the sunrays. I warm up next to a fire stove while smoke and the smell of coal fill the air inside the tent. The sign that stands outside the entrance calls this Hotel de California. We are lodging in one of several similar tents, dark green on the outside, which are lined up on both sides of the road for the length of a few hundreds feet. Each one of them is a different establishment, and each one of them carries an alluring name; Everest Holiday Inn, Gourmet Hotel, Rainbow Hotel. On the inside the furnishing is not as glamorous as these names try to suggest. There are simply a few couches around the perimeter, coffee tables decorated in traditional Tibetan style, woolen rugs and blankets to help keep the guests comfortable, and the stove in the middle. The restrooms, serving the whole campsite, are just another tent that hides a hole in the ground within.

Nima rests for a moment, chats with a coworker, and swallows a spoonful of tsampa, roasted barley flour that is Tibet’s staple food. It is her first season working at Hotel de California and she will return home in October, to a small village about 30 miles away. Her round face is dark red and the skin on her cheeks appears burned, thickened to look like leather; “it’s the cold, the wind, the sun that do this,” she says gloomily. Nima confesses that she does not particularly like this job; “I like to go to school, I really like it.” Unfortunately she has completed compulsory education last year and after returning home to spend the winter months unemployed she will come back to Everest once again, to cook and pour yak milk tea into the cups of tourists.

A short yet breathtaking hike to a 17,000 feet altitude connects this campsite to the actual Everest Base Camp. From there climbing expeditions launch their ascent to the summit during the spring months. Base Camp is just a rocky field in the midst of snow-covered peaks and earthy hills, and it is sided by a river the waters of which flow down directly from the glaciers higher up on Everest. As a reminder that this is still Chinese territory, there is a military post of the PLA – the army – and a pole with the red flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). China Mobile provides cell phone coverage and the logo of the 2008 Beijing Olympics printed on every sign.

“The flag and the PLA station were not there until recently,” Rinzen explains as we relax in our tent. “They were put up after the protest by the American students.” Rinzen is the guide that has accompanied us on the road from Lhasa. He is a short, bony, opinionated Tibetan of 21 years of age, who suffers with motion sickness and has spent most of the driving time to here asleep on the front seat of the land cruiser. He is making reference to an incident of this past April. Three Americans and a Tibetan-American who belonged to the activist movement Students for Free Tibet arrived here at the campsite, hiked the three miles to Everest Base Camp, and in protest against the Chinese rule over Tibet, they held up a banner that said “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008,” mimicking the motto of the upcoming Olympic Games that will be held in Beijing next summer. Ever since, the government has been cracking down on foreign tourism to the region, it has toughened the regulations to enter the region, and it has made it more dangerous for the Tibetans themselves to move around. “I have not been up to Base Camp since,” Rinzen admits.

Because of the newly imposed restrictions and because of the general difficulties upon which foreigners will undoubtedly stumble when trying to travel to Tibet, a trip to this region begins a long time before the moment one finally steps on a train, especially for those waiguoren (in Chinese literally “people from outside countries”) who reside in China. It is a process that can be extremely nerve wrecking, but it is also illuminating on how China works nowadays.

My personal journey to this fairy-tale land to the west of the PRC started on a mid-spring morning, as I was sitting in my Chinese Diplomacy class at Fudan University. At the time I was an international student in Shanghai taking courses in English on the country’s politics.

That Tuesday morning the professor lowered her voice as she started giving an overview of the situation in Tibet. She turned her eyes down to the sheets of paper where her assistant had typed up the notes for the lecture, and began to read from what sounded like a script. “The Peaceful Liberation of Tibet in 1951 by the People’s Republic of China freed the Tibetan people from the barbarous feudal system based on servitude that had subjugated them until then,” she recited. Then she listed a few examples of the good that the Chinese government is doing for Tibet: “Beijing is successfully developing the region economically, bringing infrastructures, such as roads, schools, and hospitals, and promoting increased trade.”

As I sat there and listened to the professor praising Chinese intervention in Tibet, I started conceiving the plan to go see the region with my eyes. I wanted to try grasping where the balance lies, between the Chinese effort to develop the region and to improve the locals’ standards of living, and the cultural violence imposed on a peaceful people of mountain shepherds and devotes of Lama Buddhism.

To my misfortune, and due to the sensitivity of the Tibet issue, the Chinese government tries to discourage the journeys of foreigners to the province to the best of its abilities. I therefore had to embark upon a winding path of confused and often contradicting regulations, the only road that could have taken me to Lhasa.

First they told me I needed a specific government-sponsored travel permit in order to buy train tickets to Lhasa. Then they told me I needed to have the train tickets in hand in order to apply for the permit. At one point they said that the train tickets had apparently all been bought off, disappearing in the pockets of the many tourists and businessmen who travel to Tibet over the summer. Then they said that, maybe, some of these train tickets would have reappeared if only I was willing to purchase an all-inclusive week-long tour of Tibet that I did not have the money to afford.

Despite all the apparent complications, as with everything in China, patience and some stubbornness will usually get you where you want. My story is one of chasing permits and train tickets halfway across the country. Overall it took me close to a month and several trips to different cities in order to organize my journey. Over that rainy June I sent countless emails to tour operators and talked to everyone I knew who had traveled to Tibet in the previous months. Everyone had a different story and never a useful advice. Then I coincidentally met up with a travel agent that went by the English name of Sonia in Chengdu, home of the Pandas and capital of Sichuan Province, and with another one called Dawn in Beijing. And all of a sudden I found myself holding the permits and the tickets in hand.

I finally set off from Beijing West train station on the evening of July 1st, accompanied by a friend. It was the one-year anniversary of the inauguration of the railway line connecting the capital to Lhasa.

The Beijing-Lhasa train and the tracks upon which it rides are considered a marvel of technology. They take passengers to the Himalayas, the highest mountain chain in the world, they run on permafrost, an unstable surface that melts with rising temperature, and the last stretch of their route lies between 15,000 and 17,000 feet above sea level.

The many years and the many engineers that took to bring the project to completion gave the Chinese and the Tibetans an easier means to travel to and from Tibet. Prior to the railway line people had to choose between an eight-day journey on buses or expensive plane rides. Now one can do the trip in just two days and at a reasonable price.

Supporters of this technological wonder claim that this will mitigate the geographical remoteness of Tibet and that the train will bring wealth and development to the province, will make it easier for Tibetans to move to other parts of China, and will facilitate communication, understanding, and integration. Critics of the railway believe that the government-funded the project has a less noble goal in mind. By making transportation more easily accessible, Beijing aims to speed up the colonization of Tibet. Now that even lower class workers can afford the train tickets more people will likely take advantage of the government incentives offered to those ethnically Han who choose to go re-settle in Tibet.

Despite the ultramodern engineering behind its construction the interior of the train is not particularly fancy, although it is definitely newer and significantly more comfortable than most other trains in China. The cars are of three kinds. There are the “soft-sleepers,” the most expensive ones. Each cabin in these compartments accommodates four beds, has doors that close, a TV screen and some other amenities, and normally houses foreign tourists. The “hard-sleepers,” in which we are traveling, have six beds per room, no doors, and are populated with Chinese on vacation and others on business. Finally there are the compartments that lodge the “hard-seats,” regular seating Chinese style, meaning that they are literally hard, seats in a 90 degrees position that do not lean back, not even an inch. Here the darker faces of the Tibetans appear, mostly young students, a few families, and monks wrapped into their dark red drapes.

The train ride is forty-seven-hour long, many people crammed in a relatively small space together. By mid-day of the second day boredom takes over the train and would overtake the spirit of even the most enthusiastic traveler. The toilets have become filthy, toilet paper disappeared a while ago, every book has now been read, food eaten, and every conversation had. In the meantime, Altitude Mountain Sickness (AMS) has begun to affect many passengers while the train runs at increasingly higher altitudes. People lay down in silence on their narrow beds and show sign of distress, their skin having turned to a yellowish tone, and bags under their eyes having grown bigger and darker.

Rose, an older woman in our room, in her sixties, has been feeling sick since the morning. She and her husband come from Tianjin, the third largest city in China located in the northeast of the country. They recently retired and they have joined a group of fellow retirees for a vacation in Tibet. They have been married for thirty-three years and they have one daughter – and one only – because of the One-Child Policy. They are also the grandparents of one only granddaughter because of the same reason. They worked in international trade before retirement, managing transportation for import-export to Japan, Korea, and the US. However they do not speak a word of English.

The doctors who work on the train came to see Rose a few hours ago, they measured her temperature and her pressure, and they pulled out a thin plastic tube, attached it to the plug for oxygen and inserted it in her nose. She is just now lying on her bed half-asleep, her husband looking over her with a concerned look in his eyes.

AMS has also hit Jasmine, who is sharing our compartment and sleeps on the top bed. Jasmine is 12 year-old and travels with her mother Katherine. The two now live in Beijing, where they relocated a few years ago. Despite being born in Tibet, Nina never acclimatized to altitude and never was able to adjust to it. Hence, leaving their husband/father in Lhasa, where he works as a performance artist, the two of them moved to the capital and only come to Tibet for visits three times a year.

While her daughter rests Katherine tells us her story. “My family originally comes from Jangsu province, I was born there,” she begins. Jangsu province is located along the east coast of the country. “When I turned thirteen, my parents decided to move to Tibet.” These were the years followed 1979, when the central government was in the midst of the launch of the reforms that since then have opened China to the outside world. At that time Beijing started offering economic incentives to those people who were willing to relocate to Tibet and help “develop” this “backward” province. “My parents decided to take advantage of these opportunities and so we moved,” Katherine recalls.

In an effort to kill some time I take a stroll through the train. The passengers in the “hard-seats” compartment seem now even more crowded than they were yesterday, when I took my first walk across the cars. The impression is probably created by the positions that the people have taken on to try surviving the journey. Very few are still seating upright. Some have ended lying down on the floor to give relief to their backs. Others have reclined backward and forward on the laps of their neighbors and have dropped their heads onto the arms and legs of strangers. The smell of instant noodles, sweat, and feet has grown pungent.

The state-of-the-art PA system, which has been alternating radio shows and music for the duration of the trip, is now playing an enthusiastic explanation of the marvelous engineering that gave birth to this train and to the tracks. A deep, charming voice, gives an overview of the history of the project in proper English. “This railway line has brought luck and happiness to the Tibetan people,” the voice claims. It also tries to present a defense – although frankly unconvincingly – against the accusations that the railway has had a negative environmental impact on this land. “The ecosystem,” the P.A. recites, “has shown to have changed not too much.”

I return to my car and the last few hours of the journey I get lost looking at the scenery that runs outside the windows of the train. The smooth profile of the surrounding hills, in earthy colors and covered by barely any vegetation, is punctuated by herds of Yaks grazing peacefully. In the distance snow-capped mountains create the background of such inspiring views, as the train rides by scattered lakes of crystal-clear waters.

We step off of the train in the evening, around 9 o’clock Beijing time. But Lhasa is still traversed by sunlight. China is on one time-zone but the size of the country makes it so that in provinces such as Tibet, all the way to the West, the sun rises and sets with a few hours delay. We are immediately hit by the brisk air and the transparent light of the high mountains, our heads slightly dizzy due to the altitude.

The unique magic of this land unfolds at once before our eyes. We drive by the Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama and today a museum. The palace emerges in its thirteen stories from the top of a rocky hill at the heart of the city. Its outside walls painted in white and burgundy-red, and steep steps climbing up to its top, the Potala looks like a beautiful creature from the under world. When, at dusk, it is lit up to remain the only visible sight in the pitch-black darkness of the Himalayan night, the palace becomes the core of a poetic world that slowly comes to life.

The first twenty-four hours of my stay in Tibet I am uncritically carried away by this ethereal atmosphere. I arrived in Lhasa prepared to witness the worst kind of colonization on the part of the Chinese because of what I had heard from people who had traveled there in the months prior to my trip. I was expecting to be overwhelmed, and severely troubled, by the growing presence of modern, yet characterless, concrete buildings, tacky neon lights in blue, green and red, and PLA uniforms on the corners of every street. My pessimistic expectations made it so that the first impact works for me as somewhat of a relief. In the end, I think to myself as I walk around the city, there still exists a whole Tibetan quarter in the old part of town, there are Buddhist temples in all directions, and the Potala still stands in all its magnificence.

However the more my outsider’s eyes become accustomed to the translucent light of the Himalayas, to the vivid colors of the sky, the mountains, the temples, and the mandalas, once I begin to awaken from that state of dreamy blindness that caught me at the arrival in Lhasa, I start to notice the mounting encroachment of which this land of shepherds and pilgrims has been made the target.

To their misfortune, Tibetans sit on sizable reserves of precious resources and at the crossroads of important trade routes and international borders. It is no coincidence that the name given by the Chinese to the province is Xizang, literally meaning “western treasure house”. Because of its key location, the men of neighboring countries have for centuries dreamt of possessing this territory, militaries have studied strategies on how to invade, governments have laid out plans to promote colonization, engineers have sat in their laboratories to try to come up with ways to make more easily accessible this vast, remote territory hidden between the highest peaks in the world.

The Mongols tried in the thirteen and fourteen hundreds, the Nepalese attempted in 1855, the British gave it a shot at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, after several other efforts throughout history, the Chinese succeeded when they “peacefully” liberated Tibet in 1951. Today the occupation of this land is embodied in the unusually high concentration of government buildings, in the presence of military establishments everywhere, in the many red flags of the PRC blowing in the wind. And so the Tibetan essence of Lhasa is increasingly suffocated by the unstoppable growth of the yet another, average, mid-size, Chinese town, while the heart and arteries of the Tibetan soul of the city remain anchored to the last standing incarnations of its cultural heritage, the Potala and the Bakhor.

The Bakhor is a corridor of narrow pedestrian streets surrounding Jokhang Temple, among the most sacred destinations for Tibetan pilgrims. A maze of pebbled lanes, the Bakhor marks the area where the locals live. The houses here are built on two, maximum three stories, in grey bricks, and the frames of the windows and doors are decorated by wooden carvings and painted in bright colors. White cotton curtains embroidered with geometric shapes in blue hang from the doorways. Shops selling yak butter and yak meat are lined up along the streets, together with vendors of Buddhist artifacts and local crafts. Thousands of pilgrims wearing traditional clothes stroll by at any time of the day as they complete the Kora, the clockwise tour around the Jokhang Temple. Although most of them walk it is not unusual to see some kneeling down in the way prescribed by traditions. At every step these people bend on their knees and then, in a smooth progression, they slide down on their torso until they touch the ground with their faces. They slowly get back up just to start the whole procedure again with the following step.

Coincidentally I visit the Potala Palace on the birthday of the Dalai Lama, today exiled in Dharamshala, India. Contrary to my expectations nothing and nobody around me bear signs of excitement or anxiety for such celebration, not the pilgrims, not the guards. It almost seems like people have forgotten and the place is open for business as usual. The Potala is a museum, and an expensive one to say the least. The entrance ticket is 100 Yuan (about $13). In any case far more expensive than a Tibetan from the countryside can afford. This place also remains the destination of a religious pilgrimage among the most significant for the people of Tibet. The interior is filled with a sour mix of tourists and the endless stream of monks and devotes who say their chants, light up candles, and make offers. They prey to a hollow altar of devotion, to the remaining semblances of a world that does not exist anymore. They hope to earn their graces, and maybe even access their nirvana, by visiting the sterile rooms of a museum.

Lhasa being the capital of the province it is also the place where the Chinese presence is more visible and oppressing. Traveling away from it towards smaller towns by names such as Shigatse, Gyantse, and Shigar, we finally experience more of that sense of remoteness and isolation that one would expect being typical of this region. Nevertheless the Chinese already control the largest share of the tourism industry, owning most of the guest houses and small restaurants on the way. Instead, a fairly equal share of Chinese and Tibetans work as driver and guides taking tourists to those spots where they are not allowed to go unaccompanied.

The Everest region is among these restricted areas. The drive from Old Town Tingry, the last village before the wilderness, to Everest Base Camp is a long, difficult, off-road journey that takes us straight into the arms of the mountain. The fifty miles land-cruiser trip on rugged terrains and through river crossings brings us through breathtaking views to the Hotel de California where Nima is pouring yak milk tea into our cups.

As we sit around to rest and warm up our guide Rinzen shares some of his feelings about the Chinese. “I don’t like them,” he states, leaving little doubts as to his opinion on the matter. Rinzen explains the rivalry and the animosity that exits between Tibetan drivers and guides and their Chinese counterparts. “For a Chinese driver,” Rinzen says, “it’s far more complicated to take tourists here. If his vehicle breaks down at one of those river crossings nobody will stop to help him.” He recalls an episode to illustrate his point; “One time a Chinese driver whose vehicle got stuck offered to pay 30,000 Yuan (about  $450) to a Tibetan that was passing by, but the guy turned down the money and left the Chinese there,” Rinzen continues. “For us Tibetans,” he says, “It’s easier, we have each others.” It might not be much but it is what they have left.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Washington D.C. – In April 2005 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from Germany became the new Pope of the Catholic Church with the name of Benedict XVI. Prior to his election Ratzinger had been a well-known Catholic theologian and he had often been viewed as a defender of traditional Catholic doctrine. Reaffirming these beliefs, a few decisions made recently under his papacy have some observers wondering if the Vatican has chosen to turn the clock back in time.

On July 7th official steps were taken towards re-adjusting the Church’s liturgy so as to accommodate the requests of traditionalist Catholics. Pope Benedict XVI decided to welcome the long-standing demands of the most conservative wing of devotes and eased the restrictions on the use of an older rite in Latin as the source of the Mass – restrictions which had been in place for forty years.

The prohibition to local priests to celebrate the traditional Mass in Latin unless specifically authorized to do so by their bishop came as one of the results of the Second Vatican Council, a round of reforms that was launched in 1962 under the papacy of Pope John XXIII and that marked a decade of transformations within the Catholic Church aimed at modernizing the internal hierarchies and the liturgy, but also the relationships that the Vatican entertained with other faiths.

Among the changes implemented, the Vatican II (another name for the Second Vatican Council) decided then to start promoting the incorporation of vernaculars (local languages) in the celebration of the Mass. This move was intended to encourage more participation on the part of the local communities and was aimed at reaching out to a larger number of people that did not understand Latin and might have been put off by its use.

The use of the Tridentine Rite – as the traditional Mass is known – was increasingly restricted in the following years and came to be an available option only in the case that the locals demanded it and after the bishop had granted official permission.

The changes sealed by the Vatican at the beginning of this past July reverse some of the changes implemented forty years ago and allow priests to celebrate the Mass in Latin once again without needing authorization.

The Vatican defends this decision as simply dealing with liturgical matters internal to the Catholic Church. Dr. Joseph Komonchak, Professor of Religious Studies at Catholic University of America in Washington DC, told Washington Prism; “I honestly believe that this decision only has value within the Catholic Church.” He said in a phone interview; “It is a step that was taken to reconcile with the Church those Catholics that have wondered off nostalgic of the older rite.”

“I doubt that the celebration of the Latin Liturgy will have any effect in the United States,” Mike Goggin of the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington says. “People here are not asking for it and most priests were educated after its introduction and are not really familiar with it,” the Assistant Director of the Washington DC-based organization tells Washington Prism in a phone interview. “Overall, if this decision by the Vatican brings more people back to church in places like Europe, as a Roman Catholic I think that this is all for the better,” Goggin continues.

However, this move by Pope Benedict XVI might bear significance that goes beyond the private theological workings of the Vatican. In fact, despite the efforts by the Church to reassure that no major change is underway, many constituencies are worried that the document signed by Benedict XVI on July 7th sends worrisome signals.

In particular the Jewish community was very critical of the adjustment of the liturgy.

Eric J. Greenberg, Director of Interfaith Policy at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told Washington Prism: “ADL and the Jewish community are not concerned specifically with the Latin Mass. What concern us, instead, are the references made to the Jews that are part of the Latin liturgy.”

The most prominent problem is a verse about the conversion of the Jews that is present in the Good Friday prayer.

In a phone interview Greenberg said: “For the Jewish community this decision was eye-opening and upsetting. We had come to believe that the Vatican had finally dismissed the idea of converting the Jews, a mission that has created so much suffering and so many deaths for our people throughout the last 2000 years. To hear it again was traumatic.”

“I think the decision by the Pope was received in the worst possible light,” Dr. Komonchack replied. “The problem with the Jewish community can be easily dealt with by changing the texts of those specific prayers and I do believe that the Vatican is willing to take the right steps toward a solution.”

However many within the Jewish community do not seem convinced of the good intentions of the Vatican. Greenberg of ADL recalls in our phone conversation: “I personally was on the phone with colleagues of the Catholic Church since March and April, as the first news came out about the eventuality that this document would be released. It was no surprise to the Vatican, or to the Pope, that the prayer in question would have represented a problem. The surprise was that it was in the Pope’s power to delete the reference from the liturgy but he did not. This was a shock.”

The question that is at stake now is whether or not this decision must be interpreted as a signal that Benedict XVI is aiming at taking the Catholic Church down a new and more conservative path, disregarding the consequences that such choice could have on interfaith relations.

“I see no signs that this pope wants to go back on Vatican II. I do not believe that he is more conservative than his predecessor John Paul II,” Joseph Komonchack told us. “I simply feel that this issue has been exaggerated by all sides.”

However even among Roman Catholics there are some worries. Mike Goggin’s admits; “Personally I have some concerns. Although this is not a huge surprise since we have known the profile of this Pope for a long while before he became the Pope.”

In fact, Benedict XVI’s track record might suggest at least some caution.

In 2000, for example, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger authored a controversial document on inter-faith dialogue known as Dominus Iesus in which he made the argument that salvation can only come through the Catholic Church.

Following the July 7th decision Benedict XVI took another few controversial steps.

On July 10th he issued a statement from his vacation retreat in the Italian Alps saying that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true Church, and that the Protestant Churches are not. “Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one church,” said the document. The others “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they lack apostolic succession, meaning they cannot trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles.

Finally this past week the Pope met with Reverend Tadeusz Rydzyk, head of the Polish Radio Maryja that has become known for using its broadcasts as a way to express feelings considered anti-Semitic. Following the meeting, the Vatican immediately released a statement trying to distance itself from the actions of Reverend Rydzyk saying that the fact should not “imply any change in the well known position of the Holy See and the relations between Catholics and Jews.”

The intervention of the Vatican apparently did not come quickly enough to prevent reactions from representatives of other faiths. “These incidents together certainly create concerns within the Jewish Community and when they happen one after the other they certainly raise questions about what is going on, about how the Pope truly feels about Jewish and about where the Catholic Church his heading under his papacy,” Greenberg told Washington Prism.

Representatives of the Muslim community in Washington DC have been less vocal during this recent turmoil. “As far as the use of Latin I would bet that no Muslim would have a problem with it,” Mohamed Nimer, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – a leading advocacy organization in Washington DC-, said in a phone interview. “I think that they would feel like they really have no saying in such a matter.”

Nevertheless Benedict XVI has aroused Islamic discontent not too long ago. Specifically, a heated controversy was spurred by a lecture that the Pope gave in January 2006 at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Many were offended by the use of a quote by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus in 1391 saying; “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

“After the incident in 2006 there have been conciliatory moves on the part of the Pope and this has quieted things down,” Nimer, Director of Research at CAIR, told Washington Prism. “However some questions remain as far as where this Pope stands on Vatican II, especially as far as the recognition that was officially given then to Islam and to other faiths.”

“Has the progress, the openness of the previous Pope been lost? Quite possibly so” Mike Goggin says on the phone, “especially as far as ecumenism.”

On the topic of Catholic-Muslim relations, CAIR will host a panel next Tuesday to discuss the current status of things. Two eminent guest speakers will attend to represent the two faiths. Father Francis Tiso, Associate Director for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America and former President of the Islamic Society of North America, will offer their views at an event that is part of the ongoing effort “to keep improving Catholic-Muslim relations in the US,” as Nimer told us.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism