Link reblogged from THE GUN. with 659 notes
Almost Dawn in Libya: Chris & Tim, Heading Home. →
We’re numb here as the clock nears 4:30 a.m., and we’re not quite sure what to do. The deaths of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington on Tripoli Street still seem unreal. Bryan just walked off from the little space we’ve been huddled in, working. He’ll sleep soon, I hope. The work kept us busy enough to hold the worst of the feelings away. But now the work is almost done, and it will hit again with the same shock as the first word.
Before that happens, a few words should be typed.
These:
Everyone who admires Chris and Tim, and everyone who loves them, has a debt of gratitude to Human Rights Watch and to the International Organization for Migration, who together, on extremely short notice, bent the world to get Chris’s and Tim’s remains on the Ionian Spirit, the evacuation vessel that by chance was briefly in Misurata port tonight. The vessel delayed its departure to take them aboard and begin their journeys out. Tim was brought down first, while Chris clung to life. When Chris died, there seemed no time to get him there. But HRW worked the phones, pleading by satellite call to the pier to have the ship held up again. They simultaneously urged one of Chris’s and Tim’s colleagues at the triage center to get Chris’s remains en route through the besieged city by ambulance, assessing — correctly as it turned out — that if they could honestly say that he was on his way that no captain would leave the pier.
They were right. Chris and Tim are at sea now, heading toward Benghazi, which means, in the indirect but solemn ways that the fallen travel from battlefields, that they are heading home.
One more thing must be said. None of this would have happened without Andre Liohn, the colleague in the triage tent mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Andre worked all afternoon and night to get word out about Chris and Tim, who are lost, and Mike and Guy, who are wounded. At the end, it was Andre who tended to the details at the hospital to put them in motion toward their families. Without Andre, Chris and Tim would still be in Misurata, in conditions I do not care to describe. Their friends and families would know little, and Chris and Tim would have been off-the-grid, and hard to reach, and the delays in their travel would have been painful for all who want them back. Andre was a savior tonight. He brought hope and humanity to a chaotic, devastating day.
If you want to know a little more of Andre, let me say this: When I spoke to him a short while ago, I asked if he has been wearing his flak jacket, which I had carried into Misurata for him last week. Tripoli Street is a hell of flying bullets and shrapnel, and he’s on it almost every day. No, he said, I am not wearing it. I asked why not. “I gave it to an ambulance driver,” he said.
These are the organizations and the people — HRW, IOM, Andre — who make it possible to imagine, on days like these, that we are people still, just as Chris and Tim did in the work that defined their lives.
***
The last NYT update, for tonite, is here.
Source: cjchivers
By Mary Slosson
Amidst the glamour and glitz of the Oscars, a short film on the children of migrant workers and asylum seekers in Israel was awarded a golden statue for best documentary short.
The film, “Strangers No More,” highlights the Bialik-Rogazin School in Tel Aviv, which teaches 800 students from 48 countries. Some have fled violence in their home countries, while others migrated to Israel along with their parents, who were searching for work. All are united by a common language: Hebrew.
A screening of the film in Tel Aviv on Monday night brought a capacity crowd, including former prime minister Ehud Olmert. As the Jerusalem Post reports:
Olmert said the school presents a model of how Israel can treat those who are different and those who come here seeking refuge. The former Prime Minister added “We must not allow these children to be deported.”
You can bet your bottom dollar we’ll try to meet the students and teachers at Bialik-Rogazin School in Tel Aviv when we’re there in just under two weeks!
Expert on the politics of the Middle East and USC Professor Laurie Brand pointed me towards some interesting reading on immigration and Israel recently — namely, that the tension between Israelis and immigrant workers began in the late 1990s, when the Israeli government began allowing foreign workers in order to replace Palestinian labor.
This Guardian article from 2003 details how one contingent of Chinese workers were “forced to agree not to have sex with or marry Israelis as a condition of getting a job,” and were “also forbidden from engaging in any religious or political activity.” Their work contract “states that offenders will be sent back to China at their own expense.”
Preventing assimilation into Israeli society was clearly the intended effect of such contractual stipulations. The Guardian further writes that “advocates of foreign workers, who also come from Thailand, the Philippines and Romania, say they are subject to almost slave conditions, and their employers often take away their passports and refuse to pay them.”
Do such contracts still exist today?
It is clear that there will be many angles to the story of foreign workers in Israel: labor conditions, religious and cultural assimilation, political and civil rights, and more.
Palestine Papers: Divide over Public and Private Diplomacy Emerges
By Mary Slosson
WikiLeaks syndrome is spreading in the media world, with Al Jazeera and The Guardian releasing bombshell stories this week about peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority based on leaked documents, dubbed the Palestine Papers, over the past week.
Israel’s relatively liberal newspaper Ha’aretz has been reactions to the document leaks as they emerge, and has noted a common theme:
The Palestinian negotiators found themselves in an embarrassing position this week, because of the disparity revealed between their tough public positions - mainly in regard to Jerusalem and the refugees - and the more flexible proposals they put forward in the talks. The documents brought to the fore the ongoing debate between the left and the right in Israel over whether to listen to what Arab policy makers say in the negotiating room, or to their public declarations.
The Palestine Papers reveal that the Palestinian Authority offered to accept illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, was willing to make significant compromises on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and cooperate closely with Israeli authorities on security issues.
The question, as Ha’aretz rightly raises, is this: is the official position of the Palestinian negotiators what they say in private, to the Israelis, or what they say in public to their own people?
