Catching a glimpse of a Facebook discussion this weekend, I noticed that Sharon Smith had written a piece entitled, “Why CounterPunch Owes Women an Apology” in the online weekly SocialistWorker.org regarding Ruth Fowler’s 14 May CounterPunch piece, “Angelina Jolie Under the Knife: Of Privilege, Health Care and Tits.”  It was clear from the Facebook discussion that some members of Smith’s Facebook friends and Smith herself took offense at the word “tits.”  Then the focus of ire shifted to the assumption that the editors changed the title from Fowler’s original article which does not even mention the word “tits” (“One can almost hear them howling with laughter at their own perceived cleverness”). Once it was established that the editors did not change the article’s title and that the title was that of Fowler’s creation, the criticism was then directed at Joshua Frank for not having edited out the word ‘tits’ in the title.  The word ‘sexist’ was thrown around quite a bit and by the end of the Facebook thread, I was hooked.

I recalled reading Fowler’s piece with total agreement as this article highlights the way in which celebrity such as Jolie seems to be performing the benefit of ‘public service’ while in truth these enunciations tend to be condescending and hurtful to many.  And for those who really sit down and think about the consequences of such an ‘announcement’ by a celebrity, as Fowler clearly did, this seemingly generous and confessional act is not one that will help other women and men with cancer deal with their illness–to the contrary:  it merely dangles a carrot at millions whose reach falls short financially.  So, I read Sharon Smith’s article and in turn I reread Fowler’s piece.

To be fair, I found Fowler’s piece quite tame for I would have been far harsher.   Jolie–someone who has bought a child from Ethiopia while paradoxically representing UNICEF an organization with which I have had dealings in their cover-up of child trafficking in Haiti– behaves as if the rest of the world really cares about her life to include her medical traumas and misinformation strangely pimped out to us by the The New York Times. And certainly while I would not dispute the existence of readers of People and Hello magazines who take every minute detail of Jolie’s life with incredible weight in their lives, those who actually face imminent mortality haven’t the time for such publications.  Even in the United States where we assume healthcare to be accessible to those with policy coverage, women and men who suffer with cancer must still spend weeks or months looking for the best specialist under their healthcare plan (if they even have one), with few options left to them they then end up googling and reading up on comparative strategies for dealing with their condition, and finally they must spend hundreds of hours in waiting rooms, doctor’s surgeries and hospitals hoping to survive the ravaging of their bodies and personal existences. And let us not even dare mention those who have no healthcare coverage and are at the mercy of systemic leftovers.

Indeed, when Fowler questions what Jolie has done to deserve praise, she is spot on to point out that cancer is in the vernacular of most everyone in the United States.  Simply put, Jolie brought critique on herself by mentioning that she wanted to “bring awareness” to breast cancer without acknowledging her privilege whilst elaborating a choice she made that most people could never afford.

However there is an poignant issue of sexism which Smith elides and which certainly is not to be found within Fowler’s piece.  Sexism is rife within Jolie’s op-ed piece as she equates “femininity” to womanhood.  Since when is being a woman about “femininity”?  As if women who cannot have reconstructive surgery are somehow less women? Clearly, if anyone made this matter about “tits,” it was Jolie who in her own words equates womanhood with femininity with the ability to recuperate the “lost breasts” through a reconstruction to which so many women can never have access for purely financial and/or somatic reasons.  It seems that Smith missed this glaringly obvious point in her misplaced rage over sexism.

In the Facebook discussion as in Smith’s article there seems to be some cultural sensitivity about the word “tit.”  Could it be because Fowler hails from the UK where the word “tit” is not a “dirty word” and where this word occupies various expressions aside from this literal reference to the body?  I recall when I first moved to London hearing a friend mentioning his business going “tits-up” and in response I burst out laughing in admiration of this wonderfully poetic phrase.  Of course, the fact that my friend’s business went under was of no laughing matter to him but he still chose to use an expression that expressed what he meant.  I also still giggle whenever I hear mention of the tube station, Cockfosters.  I come from a prudish country and this is the cultural baggage I brought with me from the USA. Might Smith’s aversion to the word “tit” also originate in a very base reading of the word?   Moreover, while I am aware of sexism in the world today having seen and experienced it in my own life, I do not think that the word “tit” in the title is inappropriate given that Jolie puts gift wrapping and a bow on her experience by discussing the reconstruction of her breasts.   This begs the question, of course, that in a piece addressing breast surgery and reconstruction, how is one to avoid the word “breast,” or any number of it’s synonyms?

In wanting to ensure that Counterpunch allows for other corporeal turns of phrase in its publication I conducted a search of its past articles.  Just for the record, there are plenty of Counterpunch titles with “dick,” “penis,” and “cock” in them, just in case Smith might be interested in developing further her accusations of sexism.   Here are a few of the titles:

“What I Learned About Being a Dickhead”
“Dick the System”
“Penis Envy”
“Penis Politics”"Cock Chuggers and Cheese Curls”
“Facebook Cock Up” (ironically written by Michael Dickinson)

But let us return to the “tit” and an article written about a cultural icon who exposes her breasts in an ostensible goodwill gesture to our clueless collectivity.  Smith claims that Fowler misses the point that since Jolie’s op-ed piece was published that “the Internet has been abuzz with debate and discussion about this important subject, demonstrating that Jolie has indeed opened a much-needed conversation.”  Oh, I have read these conversations online and open up discussion it has, such as the various conjectures regarding Jolie’s medical  history (“I have not read Jolie’s entire medical history so I don’t know if she’s had not-A-OK mammograms…”) to those who reject claims of self-promotion (“Dude Angelina doesn’t have to “promote” herself”) to some attempting to figure in Jennifer Aniston (“She wanted the majority of women who are still pissed about Aniston to praise her for another reason.”)   This mediatic event has turned every person into Angelina’s BFF  and/or a medical expert with some calling for “biopies.” With such medical “expertise” chiming in on Salon.com and CNN.com message boards why not dismiss our own medical institutions and simply let us all diagnose each other while watching heavy doses of Gray’s Anatomy as we collectively melt into one mass of cyberchondria?  The hard questions about cancer need to be asked and Fowler unveiled Jolie’s performance of martyrdom for the masses because of what it fails to undertake and for the very privilege that it evidences.

What is it about Jolie’s op-ed that necessitates that we speak about cancer at all?  If it is stardom then we have had slews of celebrities in the past twenty years who have struggled with cancer from Audrey Hepburn to Farrah Fawcett.  Perhaps appendiceal and anal cancers are not as appealing to the public?  Regardless, what Jolie’s op-ed piece does signal is the need to question our ethos as a society if indeed our only motivation to speak about cancer is spurred when a Hollywood star tells us to, or when we discover that we have joined the ranks of millions of cancer patients.  For the real problem here is not Fowler’s mention of the word “tit”, but rather it is our inability as a society to embrace the reality of this and other body parts which remain categorically unprotected in a country whose class system decides who can and who cannot have proper screening, treatment and “preservation” of their femininity.

George, Gilbert and Hans-Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine Gallery

Vigo: I wanted to ask you about this connection between memory and art.  Various theorists have discussed how memory is a combination of the past and present, that memory impedes us from forgiveness, and various other theories. But now that we can record memory digitally, there is a sense of immediacy that by the time a work of art is produced by tomorrow it becomes already something else.  How does your installation ‘London Pictures’ address this notion that what is news today is forgotten by next week?

Gilbert: But we don’t believe in that.  Every picture is still there, nothing disappears, it becomes more visible.  It depends how you do it.

George: We still  have Shakespeare on stage all over the world and we have been reading books of people long dead .

Gilbert: In the new expressions of modern art, it is sometimes this art which is more dismissive of the past.

Vigo:  Yet we still have this cultural desire to see the new–from Star Academy to X Factor–whereby people desire to see the new constantly supplied to us, renovated over and over.  So it would seem that in our society especially, that we do have an obsession with the new.

George:  Some French philosopher said that we paved the way for reality television.

Gilbert:  Certain things stay in your mind forever where other things disappear.  We only believe in the permanence.

Vigo: Like the song you sang earlier that you still remember after–

George: –forty years.

Gilbert:  More than forty years.

Vigo: Certain customs are lost, for instance, I can no longer write by hand because of having spent so much of my life on a keyboard.  So memory is not only cerebral but it is muscular, it involves the entire body.

Gilbert: Amazing.

George:  The same thing happened with typewriters before that.

Gilbert: And for us the computer is fantastic–we can use the computer to do things so easily and manipulate things how you want it. And we don’t have to go through the smelly chemicals.  It is like the modern brush for us.

George: It is not new–it is a continuation.  We had been practicing for twenty-five years for that preparation for a computer.  If you were to give a young artist a computer today it is not the same.

Gilbert:  We knew exactly what we wanted to do.

George:  The language is the same–the layers and the coloring.  Exactly. The move from the darkroom to the digital space, nobody can see which pictures were produced in which way.

Gilbert:  The end result is that there is a big picture, a frozen sort, like a medieval picture.

It is a different thing to understand, but we know from people speaking with us that it is a totally different experience to stand in front of an artwork from some long dead person. It is like reading a book from a living novelist–it is different from reading a text from someone who is long dead. We don’t why but people feel it in a different way.

Vigo:  A narrative techniques have changed in literature,  perhaps similarly artistic techniques have changed.  Perhaps people perceive this and the different styles and form which inflect themselves differently upon the viewer?  For instance, when you discussed how you moved from one form of mechanical photography and composition to Photoshop, this necessitated a change in form based on the change in technology.

Gilbert:  When you see the movies from the 1930s they are extraordinary and you think, “How did they do it?”  But they didn’t have digital and still did extraordinary stuff.

Vigo:  But along with these technologies in cinema the editing techniques set the style.  To what degree did your use of technology effect your style?

Gilbert: It is an amazing machine to make art so in the end the developments of technology develop the images through time.

Vigo:  I attended the week of Abramović’s ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ at the Guggenheim in 2005 and one critique leveled at her during this time was that she was accused of re-creating and appropriated other artists’ piece. Many people felt this was fraudulent.  Is archiving one’s own work a reconstruction of the art, is it an appropriation or a recording of work?

George: I think it is very honest.  We are not appropriating them.

Gilbert:  No, we don’t do that.  But we photograph our original works for the books–for history.

George:  We are just looking for the best examples from each period.

Vigo:  But how will your be performances be regarded once photographed or videotaped?  Or left not to be.

George: They will be in the book.  And there are videos as well.

Gilbert: We even leave instructions as a blueprint.  It is written down.  It’s not random.

George:  Even someone else can do it based on our instructions–how many minutes is this and that.

Gilbert:  It is like a play and you can do it again and again and again. It is the same construction.  But it is the same construction.

Vigo: When you talk about victims of crime, this installation shows this.   I noticed your piece in New York’s Chelsea:  it remembers history in the poster, commemorating memory in plastic.

George: How privileged we all are.

Gilbert:  Nobody remembers the the poster because it disappears the next day.  Forever!

George: Unless it says John Lennon.  The rest is useless.

Vigo: So this makes the space of art a place of remembering.

George: It is a huge modern cemetery.

Gilbert: Art is always that. You remember the feelings–even the Renaissance. You remember that period. You you don’t remember  your memories or the pope. You only see the leftover picture.

George:  Why do couples find cemeteries quaint? Courting couples love cemeteries–it is extraordinary. You don’t think, ‘What a horrible place with dead bodies.’  You just don’t think that.   There is a certain beauty in the cemetery.

Vigo:  There is a certain sense of closure in the cemetery:  it is like art in the sense that it is finished.  It is a place to which you can return; it is real.

Gilbert:  That is why art is extraordinary because they are freezing time.  We only know most of what we know from medieval time from pictures and books.  There is nothing else, except for the fact that there are decomposed bodies.

George:  And then you must put the facts, thoughts or feelings down somewhere.

“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

In the United Kingdom 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 are raped each year (2010/2011).  These statistics do not include rape victims who are male, whose aggressors are both male and female.  The population of the United Kingdom is 20 times smaller of India’s population.  Yet living in the UK and reading its media, one could easily think that rape solely existed in India and that there is only injustice against women in the subcontinent and other ‘developing countries.’  During the past week I have had many conversations with friends and colleagues about the twenty-three-year-old rape victim, now nick-named ‘Damani’ (lighting in Hindi). A few of these discussions have proven to be productive terrains for analysing rape as a social problem in the world today. However the majority of these discussions have served as cathartic moments for the Westerner to express her disdain for those ‘other countries that do not respect women’s rights’ while proclaiming her own country’s superiority in this area. Facebook comments as well have replicated this neo-colonial gaze towards other countries and in recent days India has been rendered a monolith in human rights abuses; yet the country in which I am currently living has aided my own country (the USA) to amass over 1,000,000 Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani deaths. (Of course, nothing is mentioned about these women’s rights to live in these countries.)  As such, I am gravely concerned by the focus placed by Westerners upon rape outside of their own borders since rape is not a problem unique to India.  Violence against women is a global problem that needs to be discussed honestly and without pigeon-holing certain cultures as more culpable.

Certainly women’s rights is an issue to be addressed from society to society and there are often nuances of difference from country to country regarding  womans’ roles–both perceived and real–within each culture.  Yet, it is also true that these discussions can only happen candidly from within each society.  As the good people of India march in the thousands on the streets demanding reforms for women’s and girls’ rights–from the problems of female foeticide to educational access to personal safety on the streets of Delhi–it is imperative that we take Damani’s rape as a call to analyse rape and women’s rights here in the United Kingdom.  For while we can make comparisons between societies from the UK to India, this does not change the fact that Facebook is now rampant with postings from women here who use Damani’s tragic story to proselytise about the ‘evils of’ other countries far far away, citing that rape occurs every 20 minutes in India and ‘Let’s not forget Africa. And let’s not forget the women who are raped in warfare.’  The imperative here, of course, is that ‘we’ understand that it is worse ‘over there’.  Honestly, I am most uncomfortable with such arrogant brush strokes of judgement, especially made by people whose knowledge of India (or ‘Africa’ for that matter) is often limited to the media or at best, several months spent in ashram, yoga courses in Rishikesh, various beach hangouts in Goa and/or the ‘volunteer’ stints with NGOs which are riddled with all the appurtenances of Orientalism.  (And I will not delve here into my thoughts on the vulgar classification of independent African nations under the nomenclature of this monolith ‘Africa’ with zero differentiation made between societies and clearly no knowledge of the actual countries’ names and unique histories and cultures.)  What is clear to me is that  years after the lesson’s of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized is that in the West we learned very little from the colonial heritage which implores the other to resemble us, to mimic our cultures as we perceive them to be superior.  Memmi writes:  “The first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid (European) and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.”  Yet the inverse is also true: that the European expects this disappearance to occur because she sees herself and her culture as far superior to the other and the other’s culture.  Hence Western subjects seem drawn to take up the case of ‘women’s rights’ each and every time a travesty is mediatised (not that they don’t happen daily here and abroad) in order to cathect a personal issue onto the world terrain of human atrocity.  The neo-colonial era of  burqa from 2001 is now transformed to the rape victim of 2012 who elusively escapes all media critique back home.

Yet, if we are to play the statistics game, we might as well do it properly and analyse not the rapes that occurs every 34 minutes in the United Kingdom, but the per capita offences per 100,000 which reveal a quite different statistical field of information.   As recorded by the police registries of each country rape offences in India show 1.8 rapes for every 100,000 versus 28.8 rapes reported for every 100,000 in the United Kingdom.  Of course we could then analyse what percentage of rapes are actually reported and deconstruct the pool and statistical methods, etc.  My point here is to underscore the importance in understanding that these figures are simply terrible when it comes to speaking comparatively for women’s rights in the world today–be it London or Delhi.

In one of my discussions this week about rape, one of my interlocutors questioned me about my experiences living in India and other countries outside Europe and North America asking me if I encountered ‘problems’ while traveling.  I was quite honest and spoke of an attack I suffered last Spring on a bus in Karnataka, India, where a man insisted on sitting next to me on a bus that was 60% empty.  Given that I had ridden next to groper on the way to the temple, a one hour journey, I decided to inform the man that the empty seat next to me was for women or children only. He immediately started to hit my head and as I put my arms up to protect myself from this drunken human, I was rather shocked that nobody on the bus did anything to help me.  I likewise noted to the women who asked if I experienced ‘problems’ that I had experienced the greatest aggressions as a woman while living in the West.  For instance, in Montreal, Quebec when 8 months pregnant I was physically assaulted by a man for ‘standing too close to [him]’ in a queue for a public telephone and while seven months pregnant I was not only run over by a drunk driver but to this day I am still fighting for the SPVM (Montreal Police) and the province of Quebec to proceed with an investigation.  I was also told minutes after being hit by the car, when trying to press for charges against this drunk driver this: “Madame, you are not hurt enough.”  A month later while asking for a report to be drawn up I was told: “Madame, because of your pregnancy hormones you probably imagined being hit by a car.”  And quite recently in London, I was stalked and harassed by my landlord during my first two weeks of living in my flat; yet it took weeks of lobbying the Metropolitan Police Service of Tottenham to take seriously the gravity of the threat.  Apparently this man’s presence in my life as a landlord was considered a civil issue despite his persistent attempts to enter my flat daily and sending 18 pages of SMS in three days with references to his mental instability (ie. ‘I am losing my mind’).  Clearly women’s rights are not as fixed in the West as some of my interlocutors would like to believe and I simply could not claim that I had suffered greater threats to my person as a woman in India, Algeria, or Mexico any more I have suffered as a woman in Canada or the United Kingdom.
Yet in some of these discussions, I felt pressured to jump onto what I refer to as the ‘burqa bandwagon,’ a discursive space where Western women assert their societal superiority and their own country’s excellence in legal jurisprudence.  Personally, I am not drawn to such dialectical arguments and neo-colonial spaces since progress is simply not a linear development that begins at A and ends with Z, nor is it a demarcation that can be made from across many oceans to societies that have very specific differences in how women interact with men and other women.  I am also far too aware of the media blackout that has surrounded the murders of women, children and men in the past eleven years in this ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan perpetuated by ostensibly ‘enlightened’ and ‘democratic’ Western nations.  The innocent dead see none of this democracy.  Were we to examine honestly the place of rape in the global sphere, the UK and the US would have to shoulder a huge amount of blame for having rendered unstable these countries they have invaded and occupied lending a greater vulnerability to women and children specifically as the link between women’s rights and economic development and literacy is well documented.  As I have lived much of my life in various countries throughout Latin America, the Maghreb, the Middle East and in Asia, I have come to learn how societal inflections on the human experience do not reveal facile notions of oppressor/oppressed.  I have witnessed how the oppression of women is often effected–as it is here in the West as well–by other women and that hand in hand with oppression of women is the oppression of men, albeit an entirely different form of oppression.  Such discussions that polarise women against men and the ‘modern’ against the ‘backwards’ only end up reaffirming a certain Western superiority and linearity of thought which ends up reaffirming Western paradigms of power and predispositions for framing the ‘savage, misogynist culture of India’ as the backdrop for our paradisiacal projections of a fictionalised equality.

As war crimes in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have highlighted rape over the past fifteen years, so did the pervasive Bosnian ‘Rape Camps’ of the 1990s remind us of the power of rape as a weapon of control in conflict situations closer to home.  Yet, rape goes much further back than the US soldiers’ war crimes in Viet Nam of the 1960s and 1970s or the Nanking rapes by the Japanese forces in 1937. Rape is found throughout history as it is well documented and cannot simply be linked to x or y spot on the planet.  Moreover, media incursions into post 9/11 Afghanistan have highlighted the need to understand rape in a larger context wherein women are not the only victims: what was uncovered by many journalists post 9/11 is that boys and young men were also the victims of the Northern Alliance.  Likewise, revelations such as the Zimbabwe female gangs who have been raping male soldiers has recently come up again in media focus demonstrating the power of women to be sexually violent. When one Facebook poster writes about Damani, stating, “As long as there are men on this planet it will never end…,” I reminded her of the rape of men and the problems facing these men in terms of reporting the violence and of having these reports being taken seriously. The stigma for men to report rape today in any country is most humiliating as these men are basically told that it is impossible for them to physically be raped or that he should ‘consider himself fortunate.’  Recent research into the rape of men is revealing that there are far more male rape victims than previously estimated and that many of the perpetrators are women (most often mothers, aunts, nannies, etc).  In the United States of America 10% of all rape victims are men.  And in another rape case in India this week which has received far less Western media attention, a seventeen-year-old girl from northern Punjab committed suicide after being gang raped by men with the help of a female accomplice.  To demarcate rape as a unidirectional domain whereby only women are raped by men (or that only men can possibly be rapists) is a disservice to undertaking any honest discussion about rape today. Likewise, to discuss rape purely within the confines of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘third-world nations’ is to diminish the reality of rape right here in the United Kingdom and other Western nations.

What is going on with the need for Western subjects to highlight Damani’s death as somehow endemic to India and other ‘third-world’ nations alone?  I suspect that there is something much deeper going on in this growing problem of armchair Facebook ‘advocacy’ which reveals myriad humans who click and ‘like’ an article about a truism.  For it is self-evident that a tortured puppy or a raped Indian medical student is ‘a bad thing’, yet these are the items of vast interest for people to idle away their days on Facebook.  There is a huge disconnect in my fellow Londoners who post about the travesty of Damani whilst espousing the superiority of their own culture.  On the one hand there is something incredibly violent about casually posting, sharing and liking an article about a rape without the deconstruction of similar events in our own political landscape.  On the other hand, this growing trend of armchair Facebook advocacy falsely simulates a political action–as if ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ such articles is actually doing something other than objectifying a rape and a death which is for Damani’s family and community alone to experience.  All the rest is cultural fetishism.

Let us learn from India and get off our computers to engage in real political dissent speaking against all forms of rape here and now.

Q:  Could you start by taking about your background in theatre as you have mentioned earlier the social role of the artist?

HB: I would like to make the observation that a lot of people like to put me into a context that is easy for them to understand. One thing people should understand is that I am not an artist who became an activist, I am an activist who became an artist.  It was my good fortune that when I was quite young, before I was twenty, to discover the world of theatre quite by accident. I came back from the  Second World War where I had served in the United States armed forces and after that war I had absolutely no idea where I was to go and what I was to do with my life.  I worked in a very menial, unskilled job: I was a janitor’s assistant.  I did repairs in the building, I cleaned the hallways, I cleaned the windows, I repaired faucets.  And in such an adventure, I was once given two tickets as a tip, as a gratuity, to go to the theatre. I had never been to the theatre and I was very curious to see what it was.  I went into the theatre, a small place in Harlem, in New York, the place where I was born, and  a whole new world opened up to me.  I saw the artists came on stage and I saw the magic of words, the magic of lighting, the magic of drama, the power of the playwright.  I just knew it was an environment where I wanted to be. I wanted to belong to the people who were doing this work, who were trying to say something to the world.  I saw it as a platform where I could speak about my own desires and hopes. So I stayed in that place first as a member of the audience and then eventually I hung around everyday and I would come back every day. I would do anything to be part of this culture and it was in this place where I found I would be for the rest of my life. I had no idea what would become of it,  I had no idea what it would turn out to be–it was just an adventure.  There was much to learn and much to understand that would help enrich me, my knowledge, my spirit in this magical thing called theatre.

I was very lucky. Most important part of this early part of the journey was to meet a German name Erwin Piscator. He had come from Germany and had fled the Nazis and he came to the United States. All the universities wanted to get him as he came to America with great fame.  He had come from the world of Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt.  The kind of theatre which he did was incredibly powerful and realistic drama. Through his teachings I saw the deeper meaning of what it meant to be in the dramatic arts.  It was very fortunate for me that my classmates–people like Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Tony Curtis, I can go on and on–this remarkable young group of actors who had no idea what would become of our lives.  Because of the teachers we had we were embarking on a journey.  One of the most important was Marlon Brando. He was to the world of acting what Picasso was to the world of painting–he was very dramatic and very inventive and he inspired the rest of us. I grew up with this–he and I were very close friends.

The reason why I am here today is not only to give tribute to Otto Preminger but also to show this film, Sing Your Song.  I started to make this film when Marlon Brando passed away.  I was very sad when we lost him, but I was even sadder by the fact that they said very little about who he really was.  They talked about his fame, his philandering, his adventures as a human being, but they never talked about his soul, his heart, they never talked about his social vision. And it was in that context that I admired him and was inspired by him as he was very committed to the human family.  He was very committed to doing films about the lives of people that he thought we should know about. It was no accident he did the films he did–he made those selections out of great consciousness. He had a belief that there was a purpose to being an artists.  There was a great mentor to us, Paul Robeson, who once told us, “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth and when our voices are silenced civilisation will have come to an end.  We are perhaps one of the most important instruments in the experience of global humanity.” In this rather august thought, with this belief that the gift of art had a purpose, not just for fame or economic reward, but the purpose to instruct, to inspire people to know things about other people. This is a wonderful, wonderful place in which to reside.  Everything I ever did in my life was always measured in this consciousness:  what do you want to say, why do you want to say it, and why do you think it is important for people to know?  Even the most casual opponents in theatre or film it seems to be a flirtatious moment but there was always a purpose for it.  And with this anointing, this sense of purpose I set out to do what I did and the gods smiled on me:  people liked the songs that I sang, I tried to do pictures that made statements about experiences that I had as a human being in America and I also found the opportunity through that fame to become very instructive. I found that the audiences were very generous and liked when I sang. The first question I asked was what do I do with this generosity, with this much power, what do I do with this much extension, this desire to know–that my task is to fill that space with information that I thought would inspire people which would make them smile at the world in which they lived.  Frantz Fanon, a social philosopher once wrote about the people whom he called “the wretched of the earth.”   To live among the wretched of the earth, to live among the poor to among those who have had to struggle for human truth and human dignity is the place I most enjoy being.  I have spent my life in the midst of that social strata because to be inspired by them is to be inspired by a greater use for my life and the opportunities which I was given.  This is who I am and that is how I came to be.

Q: I would like to ask since the Preminger Retrospective is the centrepiece of this festival and since Carmen Jones was your first major film, did you sense in Otto Preminger this kind of purpose you have just been talking about?

HB:  Yes, I did sense that in Otto Preminger, that he had a purpose in life more than just the pursuit of fame. He had a deep social sensitivity as he came from this part of the world, Austria, and he had an experience with Hitler and the Third Reich and what happened with Naziism. He came to America in the quest for freedom and opportunity and he found in America the opportunity to become an artist.  And he used his platform to tell stories that he felt touched a deeper humanity.  When he stepped out to do Carmen Jones, he didn’t just think it was an idea for a wonderful film, it had a historical and social purpose.  In most of cinema history, people of colour–particularly people of African descent–had always been pictured as sub-human. We were never considered to be individuals with dignity, with a history, with a culture, with a story to tell. We were always looked upon as a burden to humanity, were people who always had to be helped, who had to be benevolently treated, that we should be instructed kindly by those who had power. But those who gave us that kind of definition failed to realise that long before they came to be who they were, people of African descent and people of colour had experienced thousands of years of civilisations and the development of civil society and did remarkable things long before Europeans came into their moment of glory and their moment of power. Most of how we were judged was measured by slavery. They found these people who had no humanity, these people who were just a little bit better than the beasts in the jungle: white benevolence, you came to rescue us, to help us find our souls and our dimensions as fellow beings. Of course, that attitude, that view, of Africans led us to be always be viewed as such.

But Otto Preminger came to know us and understand us and he decided to take another approach.  When he did Carmen Jones, he saw in that film an opportunity to treat us as anyone else in the world would have been treated who were telling a story of interest, of tragedy, of drama, of humour, a story of humanity.  And instead of seeing us as we were always seen–as servants, as buffoons, as mindless people running around the jungle waiting for Tarzan, the great white hope to come and save us–we were given the opportunity to show our own strength, our own dignity, our own spirit as a people.  In Hollywood at the time, it was considered a very dangerous thing. First of all, there was a large part of our society that never wanted us to be envisioned as a people of a certain purpose and history who, from their point of view even today, are trying to force us to a subhuman place.  But there were others who said to try to do this, to change the norm,  would be a reckless expenditure of resources. Anybody who would want to make an all black film was doomed to failure because there was no audience for that, nobody would believe that, nobody would understand that.  And Otto Preminger said, “I disagree” and he stepped up and used his own resources and with the alliance of Darryl Zanuck and the distribution of Twentieth Century Fox and these men reached out to some young people who were quite famous in their communities to step to the table to become part of this adventure.

This wasn’t a picture that was very political–it wasn’t a picture that tried to show us emerging from oppression.  It was a picture that tried to tell a story that was far more fundamental to our common humanity: it was a love story, a tragic love story. And what you saw on the screen for the first time in Hollywood was a beautiful black woman. Most of the time what you saw on the screen were black women who were fat, who were servants, who were stupid, black women who were always servile and bowing; you saw black men who were always butlers, always taking care of the horses and doing all the cleaning, and buggy-eyed and hence they were a source of humour for the white master.  Otto Preminger saw a very different kind of humanity.  So getting Dorothy Dandridge and putting her on the screen and she was incredibly beautiful in a cunning and smart way.  He put other artists–Pearl Bailey, Dihann Carroll, a great dancer by the name of Alvin Ailey–and he went and go Harry Belafonte who at that time was just starting to peak in his popularity.  They know who I was and Twentieth Century Fox thought I was a good way to insure their investment because I already had an audience.  And when they put us together in this film, Otto Preminger did the impossible–we filmed in ten days. Everything you see on the screen we were required to do it in ten days for the budget.  We worked very hard and it was extremely complicated–a cinemascope picture, we had to lip sync to the music.  One of the problems that Dorothy Dandridge and I had was that the voices you hear in the picture were not ours.  Someone else did the singing because the estate of Bizet from which Gershwin made an adaptation, one thing the estate insisted on were that the origins of the musical as had been written by Bizet could not be altered. And both Dorothy Dandridge and I were not classically trained–we didn’t have operatic voices so we couldn’t sing that great range, those notes.  We could have sung it by using other styles and interpretations but they did not allow us to have that artistic license.  We had to stick strictly to the score as it had originally been written. So both Dorothy and I who were singers said that for the benefit of the project that we thought it was important for us to go along with the idea.  So we had Marilyn Horne who was a great classical singer–and still is today–at the Met.  She loved the opera, she was a great Carmen and she loved singing Carmen Jones.  She did Dorothy Dandridge’s voice.  And a man by the name of LeVern Hutcherson did my voice.  So we had to learn how to lip sync and it was quite strange to be on set singing and making love to each other with someone else’s voice [laughter] and we had to look like we believed it. But we did the film.

And when it came out, to everybody’s delight and reward, the world fell in love with us, fell in love with the film.  Otto Preminger was vindicated and he went on to do other films dealing with subject matters of black life, of black humanity, as well as other films. That to me was the earliest indication that the theatre allowed you to say things, to change the way people perceived their own society and neighbours and to see the correct way to live.  I have been rewarded by that fact ever since.

Q: In your book, you discuss among many things, going to the Havana Film Festival and you talk about going to meet Castro and how impressed you were with him.  Can you talk about the role of film festivals and what makes them valuable?

I think, like others, I enjoy the anointing, the opportunity to be praised given the generosity of the audiences.  But there is an agenda for me–that is to take advantage of the moment since the audience is willing to hear my voice and to make sure that when they hear that voice I am giving them something that they can think about, something that might inspire them, something that might help them understand things they don’t understand. I was born into poverty and the fact of that experience made me understand why the people in my family–namely my mother–were treated so cruelly because of their station in life.  It was extremely difficult. And because of race, it was extremely difficult to get equal opportunity and I thought very early that if I never did anything else, I would use my life to change that reality, that I should fight against poverty and racial oppression and that I should fight against all oppression.  And therefore anointed with this mission everywhere I went and everything I did seemed to be touched by the fact that this was what I wanted to do.

The earliest time of my life was influenced by three people.  One was the great woman by the name of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the president of the United States of America, who was a woman of enormous qualifications: she had a great intellect, a great humanity, and she had inordinate power as the wife of the president to do things to change the plight of people. She felt nobody deserved to be oppressed so she fought for our equality. When she saw in my young life how I used my life as an artist, she asked me to come and work with her and be part of her mission. And with that opportunity I engaged in her mission for healthcare, for a productive way of life.  A man by the name of Paul Robeson, a man of great force within the African American community who was absolutely stunning–not only did he have a great intellect but he had a great capacity for language.  He spoke, wrote and could read twenty-two language among which were Swahili, Zulu, Fula and Susu and many tongues of Chinese dialects.  People always loved him for coming to their countries and singing their songs. When I met Dr. King, who was the third person, he was two years younger than I was–he was 24 when he led the movement in America and I was 26.  That was very young to take on such a large responsibility. But I admired him too: he had a PhD, he studied theology and he was a great religious philosopher.  But he was a liberation theologist and he saw religion in the service of humanity, not as a force to command people but to inspire people.  He use religion to teach us about the goodness in one another.  From the very earliest moment when I joined him in the cause to liberate us in America, people of colour, he said, “The thing we must remember is that we need to talk with our adversaries. Our friends do not need to hear our voice–we need to talk to those who don’t understand us, to those who would crucify us, to those who do not see us as worthy of our space.  I found that whenever we went anywhere in the United States of America where it was against the law to sit some place, to sleep some place, to eat some place.  It was the United States of America that created the rules of apartheid. South Africa didn’t invent that–as a matter of fact those who created apartheid in South Africa learned from the United States.  We invented the rules of the separation of colour and the separation of class.  So we always spoke to those we felt we needed to convince to change their belief that we should be oppressed.

I saw how effective this concept was when I first met the Kennedys, when I met John and Bob Kennedy.  They were not friends of ours to begin with. They were gracious, they tolerated us, but they didn’t see us with passion.  They saw us as something they must do as an incident to their lives, not as a cause in their life.  We saw them as a cause in our lives and we had to reach out very deeply to them to convince them that they had to service the greater humanity which was to see the world in terms of equality. Wherever I went I found there was a social distinction that separated people, that separated ideas.  In dividing and conquering us, I don’t really come to know you and you don’t really come to know me, you’ll never understand that I am really you and you are really me. Once we truly come to understand and appreciate that is when we can look towards developing a civilisation that is much more harmonious and much more rewarding.

Sometimes you can be punished for that idea. So I went to places in the world where one side would not talk to the other and I said, “That is precisely where I need to be.”   Wherever I went both sides called me a traitor:  the ones on the left saw me as a traitor, the ones of the right saw me as a traitor. And because of that fact I knew I was doing my job.

When I went to Germany for the first time, I did not want to go. I had come fresh from the experiences of the Second World War.  I understood much about the cruelty of “Deutschland über Alles,” the superior race, the blonde, blue-eyed Aryan, the alienation between cultures and theology, the hate of the Jew–all these things that made up that system and that crushed our common humanity. I felt somewhat reluctant to go to that place to sing, to bring the instruments of joy to a society that had been so cruel to the rest of the world.  But that did not sit comfortably with me. It was precisely the place of my own base belief: that you must reach out to those who don’t understand you, to that community and make a difference. And because of certain friends that I had, a man by the name of George Merrick who was an Austrian Jew who became the head of RCA, the most powerful record company in the world–he ran that company. And he saw in me and others of colour, a chance to make a statement. He gave us the opportunity to record, to bring our voices to the audience. He said, “Let them hear your art and it will change the way they think of you.” He did that for Leontyne Price, he did that for me, he did it for Duke Ellington… He signed all these black people while he signed all these great white artists on the label. He was also a social philosopher–he is the one who said, “You will go to Germany, you will go to Austria…you will understand who those people are and they will understand who you are. That is the real purpose of your mission.”  So I went to Berlin, it was 1957 and I was one of the popular artists from America to go to Germany.  When I arrived, there was a law only a small group of people, no more than five, could congregate in one place.  This was martial law so when I got to Germany there were not great crowds at the airport. So when I came, everything was segregated and separated. I came with this sense of darkness.

When I got to the hotel I heard a noise outside and the musicians came to my suite to ask if I had heard the noise outside. It sounded like this: “ah ha–ah ha–ah ha!”  One of the men in the group said, “I think they are saying “Sieg heil, sieg hiel!”  I told him, “I don’t think that’s possible.” So we went to the shutters in the hotel room and we looked out, and against the law,  there were in the street below the hotel hundreds and hundreds of Germans who were in the streets screaming, “Har-ry, Har-ry, Har-ry!”   And I got extremely emotional.  Much to my amazement were these young people I didn’t even know who knew me and they were giving me this chant and they were expressing their humanity. And in that very moment I saw what I consider to be the future of Germany–of young people reaching out for another time and space, to do something very different from the history they had come from, the history they knew. Even in Germany as in the United States, the children still do not know enough about the history they had come from, the history they knew.  They were looking for another place. And therein sat the great opportunity to the artist, to bring their songs, to bring their films, their stories and art; to transcend cruel laws and violate everything–to make everyone listen. From that moment on I knew I would go forever to Germany as long as there would be an audience.  But the most touching moment came at my concert. I sang a repertoire that was filled with songs that were quite popular by the time I came to Germany. One song in particular I always sang which I didn’t sing because I was in Germany, I sang it because I always sang it:  the “Hava Nagilah.” [Belafonte begins to sing this song]  By the time I got halfway into the song, they were singing. [Belafonte continues singing.]  In the end it was like being in a beer hall. What fascinated me is that here I was with all these young Germans in1957, singing the song of the Jews who, just a few short years earlier, had been the victims of one of the cruel mass murder attempts known to civilisation. And now instead of crucifying, we were singing, “let us have peace, let us have love.”  And all these Germans were singing this.

And here I was, coming from America as a black American, having experienced severe racism, having even then, under the law–there was a written law–that said I couldn’t sleep certain places, I couldn’t vote.  All the things we talked about human rights and I didn’t have them.  And here I was a black American singing to Germans the song of the Jew in the land of the Jew. We were all family in one moment and that was an epiphany for me.  I said I have now seen the clarity of the power of art and what my mission was to do.  And now to get to the point of your question.  [Laughter erupts]

I took a long time to explain this because as my relationship with German and Austria grew during the Cold War there was a great strain between the East and West: we had the Persian Missile Crisis, there was East Germany and West Germany and there was this division in ideology. There was the buildup of nuclear arms everywhere and the death of civilisation was very close: nobody was talking to anyone except in great belligerence.  They always said, “You can cage the singer, but not the song.” So I decided when the people of East Germany called and asked me to come to sing there, I understood the social difficulty of accepting with the press stating I was a Communist sympathiser and that I was betraying the Democratic principles of the West.  I said, “You can call me what you want but I know what I am and I know what I must do.  If I can sing for the Germans in the West then I can sing for the Germans in the East. I do not accept this division because it is an unjust law that says we must not talk to one another. But I was doing the exact the same same thing in the United States of America, I just didn’t talk with people who loved me–I talked with people who disliked me intensely. I sat at the table with members of the Ku Klux Klan and with Dr. King talking with people who religiously condemned us as an inferior people, as the instrument of the devil. And through Dr. King and others we always spoke with the enemy because it was the enemy you had to convince: you can’t convince the enemy unless you talk with the enemy.  You can kill the enemy but we had centuries of illustrations of that kind of behaviour and it never succeeded in making our civilisations whole. So when I got the opportunity to go to East Germanybecause of this cruel law in America, I said, “No, you cannot do that.  I don’t accept this…If you want to send us to jail, there are those of us willing to pay this price.  But I will not have my voice snuffed out because you think it is inappropriate that I talk with someone who needs to hear what I have to say and I need to hearwhat they have to say.”

Cuba, which is a big thorn in America’s side, gave me an opportunity to go to that film festival and to meet several kinds of people.  There are many artists–great artists–who are not permitted to come to the United States because they were members of the Community Part or members of the Communist Socialist belief and the laws of the United States would say, “You cannot come to America.”  And some of them were the most powerful artists of the day, great writers like Gabriel García Marquez, not permitted in my country–he won the Nobel Prize.  So the only place I could meet him was in a place where we could celebrate art.  So Havana said,  “Come to the film festival and you can meet each other here.” So I went.  I met Jorge Armado and there were so many other like artists.  In that environment I found movies I never saw being shown in Havana, arts from all over Latin America, things I had never seen.

Q: How did you come to know Miriam Makeba?

HB: The year I came to Germany, I had gone to England first. While there people were enjoying the after hours party and I came back from my hotel. There was a priest who came from South Africa and he had been waiting for me all night.  He came with three young Africans–three black Africans–and he said, “I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Belafonte, but I have come here in a crisis.  And I am here with three young Africans who are political refugees from South Africa who will be deported to South Africa.  And if they are sent back they will be sent to prison for life all because they dared to come to Europe to speak out about the Apartheid system in Africa.”  They did a film called Come Back Africa done by a young filmmaker by the name of Lionnel Robeson. It was a remarkable documentary which for the first time gave us a look into what the Apartheid government was doing.  In this film there was a young woman, as part of the story, who was singing a song and I loved the way she sang–he voice and what she was singing. And when they showed us the film in this private viewing room, they brought in these young Africans and she was one of them. And the South African government said these people when they go back to South Africa would be put into prison for having spoken out against the South African government. So these men asked if I could help get them visas to stay in London and perhaps help them get to America. And that is what I did as a political service. I also know if Miriam Makeba was able to come to America that I could help give her the platform so she could speak out on behalf of the African people. When she came to the United States she was concerned that Americans would not understand her: she spoke in a different language, she sang in a different language. And so I told her that music is universal they won’t understand the language that you speak, they will understand the language that you sing and there will be many of us to help you interpret what you do.  “You speak fluent English and the Americans will understand.   So we gave her the platform because she was quite popular and she was able to speak out about Africa in terms people understood.  She went on, of course, to become one of the great voices of music–she has influenced so many artists in America alone:  Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, many other Africans we brought to America, the students who became artists.  You see, I have always believed that one of thing that I must do is share the space of power:  find the artists that deserve to be heard and give them your platform, let them stand where you speak, let them stand and speak to the audience that has came to hear you.  The audience will love it and think it rewarding… And that is what happened.
Q: Actors like you, Dorothy Dandridge and Sydney Poitier were able to pave the way for black actors today. Still there is debate about the place of black actors in Hollywood.  What are your thoughts regarding the opportunity for young black entertainers today?

HB:  One thing Paul Robeson taught me never to compromise that responsibility that the artist has to expose the truth.  That was the earliest mandate we had in that day.  As has happened to the rest of culture, money has preempted life, money has preempted values, the things in our lives which are important.  Artists have yielded to the dictates of money.  The very pieces of silver we have taken to give up our right to be the purveyors of truth.  What most troubles me is that we have more black artists than ever before–not just in the world of cinema–in theatre and certainly in music, more black artists are famous and known all over the world.  And what is deeply disturbing is that most of those artists have never used that platform to inspire or instruct to take the focus of their constituency  towards understanding the deeper humanity and to understand the world in a greater context. But that is not just “black America,” that is the global.

What I think is happening is that money, the pursuit of money, has touched something very deep in the human DNA. We are creatures of greed, we have become extremely selfish as a culture.  Our humanity has been blurred by our need to become hedonistically filled with constant pleasure:  more, more materials, more goods, more space, more power. So that power becomes an end in itself and it destroys everything else in its path.  And there I think we see that instead of seeing black artists singing songs and making pictures about the  tragedies of what goes on in the world today–the stories of the Sudan, the rape of women in the Congo, and the stories of the millions of people who live in squalor in Latin America.  Now people make films to satisfy the bank who says: “Here is what we will pay for.  We own the studios, we own television, we own the press and they will do our dictates.”  And most of us capitulate and we say “fine.”  They give us our thirty pieces of silver.

Consequently we are on a journey in our time and global space where unbridled capital from the bank will lead no longer to a great overthrow.  So I think because since the Soviet Union imploded since Communism could not work, we are now in a time where we see how power corrupts absolutely–we see how it corrupts Wall Street, it corrupts Switzerland, it corrupts culture, it corrupts religion, it corrupts civilisation. It corrupts. It does not enhance.  What we need to replace when these things self-destruct is art, what the artist creates.  We are the inscribers of history.  You would know nothing about the world in which you live without these songs, these books, those stories.  Who told those stories?  Artists told them.

I once sat with the Archbishop of Edinburgh, a liberation theologist, and we got into a discussion of religion and mythology of the written word, the scriptures.  He said, “I settled that issue years ago, Harry.  I will tell you this:  when you read the Bible forget the science and enjoy the poetry.”  I really believe that we have yet to come to a deeper understanding of what we must do. I really believe that we have yet, as a species, to come to a deeper understanding of what it is that we must do.  So that in this time in which we live, I think that if we do not change our choices, we are likely to feed the weapons of our own destruction.

I met up with directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine, 2006) in Locarno, Switzerland after the screening of heir latest film.  Ruby Sparks (2012) portrays a young novelist, Clive (Paul Dano), whose writer’s block leads him to dreaming up the perfect girl, Ruby (Zoe Kazan), who becomes the inspiration for his new novel.  Clive not only begins to fall in love with his creation in his dreams, but Ruby materializes as Clive’s real-life girlfriend as he continues his novel.  To avoid spoiling this dream, Clive stops writing only to tweak at times in order to assure his happiness with Ruby.  However, Clive’s misguided efforts produce problems as he realizes that Ruby is not independent, forcing him to consider his brother Harry’s critique of Clive’s idealization of women: “Quirky, messy women whose problems make them endearing are not real… you haven’t written a person, you’ve written a girl.”  Here is my discussion with Dayton and Faris.

Q: This is a human story–a story about people, about love.  It is interesting that independent filmmaking has become about making human stories.

JD: It’s unfortunate that human stories aren’t interesting for studios because, for whatever reason, they can’t makes millions of dollars and they can’t sell action figures.

VF: What independent means to us is that we get to make the film the way we want to make it and that we have final cut.  There were other films which we were involved with in the past six years where we felt we weren’t going to have that control so we decided no to do them. Even though this was produced by Fox Searchlight, it was a studio film in a sense.  I still consider an independent film because we had the final say and there were no superheroes in it.  I think you could do an independent superhero movie I think, a human story with a superhero.

JD: We worked on this one movie with Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon that took place in the future.  It wasn’t a comic book movie, but it was a very high concept movie and we were trying to tell a story.

VF: It was a world ruled by women which was very cool…in the future [laughter]…

JD: But that was a 17 million dollar movie and it became very clear that we couldn’t do the same kind of personal storytelling that we wanted to do.

Q: Ruby Sparks is a human story, but also it is an inhuman story…

JD: That is what was interesting is that we could have our science fiction within a very human story.

Q: When you read Zoe Kazan’s script I imagine it appeared even more fantastical on the page than it does on the screen. How did you feel about this jump from the script to screen?

VF: I think what I found from the script was that she wrote it with the intention of it being more in the tradition of magical realism where the magic happens, you don’t explain it, it’s part of life and we just move on and get into the story.  It’s really about the human experience and not about the magic.  We also felt that we would want to treat it that way as well so that was important was not the fantasy aspect as much as how this is like all relationships or our experience and to try to ground it in what felt real and relatable to us.

Q: Well, the film took metaphorically this idea of the perfect relationship by indirectly showing us that what Hollywood shows us in their romantic-comedy films is in fact science fiction.  

VF:[laughing] Yes!

Q: It really pulled me in because this film shows the real of relationships with the brother telling the protagonist that the women he imagines are not…

VF: Real… That quirky, messy women are not real!

Q: Exactly.

VF: I think that is in some way a reaction to seeing cinema that is supposed to be real that doesn’t feel real to us. Here is what is supposed to happen in the realm of fantasy or his imagination but actually it feels more real to us or more true to life that so many relationships in movies.

Q: What I find interesting is how you treat these two characters when their relationship starts to go  through this fast fragmentation and re-fragmentation as the protagonist would editorialize his narrative, but as crazy as it was unreal, it was real.

JD: That was the interesting challenge for us was to have what were real responses to a fantastic situation.

VF: For us it always had to feel real.  This is what we do to each other and if we had that ability and we could make a little adjustment, it would be very hard to resist that urge. We don’t really have that power but we have all had that desire at times to do a little tweak and then for the protagonist it snowballs into something he cannot sustain. Really the fun of this story is that it starts as a little thing we have got to take it to a place where he has to confront ugly or painful.

Q: It is also about power, the power of a relationship, which is very difficult to confront–what he could do and what we might do.

JD: And would you want it? And of course we don’t think we would…ultimately.

VF: He comes to realize it’s a burden: he wants her to be happy without making her happy. So at a certain point, he is not enjoying that responsibility. What is funny is his brother thinks about the implications of what he could do with that power but Calvin doesn’t want to do that. It is just that in his trying to fix it, that is when he gets into trouble.

JD: And when he runs into his former girlfriend who pushes back and he feels that, he is reminded and realizes that is when he goes home and burns down the house.

Q: This is a moral film.  As you were saying earlier that people were asking you to explain the mystery behind the science fiction, but it wouldn’t have worked. It worked simply because we didn’t know.

JD: I appreciate that but some American critics do get upset and say, “You didn’t explain this scene.”

Q: What is your opinion about art and the struggle for control, for it seems it seems to make parallels between art and love?

JD: That was an important theme within the film–how an artists seek to control their work and how that urge can destroy your work. The challenge of the artist is to accept.  In seeking to control her Calvin destroys Ruby.  As directors you hope a film takes on a life of its own.

VF: What is most fun about creative work is when it starts to speak to you and you are no longer in control. It is not easy but that is the goal to get out of your head and work more intuitively. That is where Calvin is, thinking about his last book, the pressure and then he creates something and ends up destroying it because he still has that urge to control.

Q: But this happens as well in human relationships…[laughter] and instead of Calvin re-narrating his book, he could have gone to real human lengths such as his not calling her for fifteen days to bring her closer.

JD: What was fun for us was that in this very simple concept you could explore very real issues between people and in work and there are so many layers.  You spend two years of your life on a film..  It is like a tattoo, you better love it because it is with you forever.

At the Locarno film festival in August, I had the chance to catch up with and interview Mexican actor Gael García Bernal regarding his starring role in Pablo Larraín’s latest film, No (2012).  Based on true life events and characters,García Bernal plays an ad executive who comes up with a plan to defeat Pinochet in the 1988 referendum.   Tackling the delicate issues of political repression while demonstrating the necessary pragmatism behind any political campaign, Pablo Larraín’s feature smoothly creates a serious drama while the aesthetic layers of the film—camera, light and colour—remains faithful to that of 1980s cinema.  García Bernal takes his character (René  Saveedra) and portrays the subtle nuances of political dialogue and familial complexities. We begin our conversation discussing age, as García Bernal at 33 is one of the youngest recipients of the Locarno Film Festival’s Excellence Award.

Q:  Isn’t it scary to be given an award for your career and you are in your early thirties?

GB:  It’s scary in a way a little bit but there is something to be added to that scariness which is something quite unconscious because I never thought about doing films so it was never a possibility. I dreamed about doing them, of course, like we all dream about being rock stars or with the Olympics now I want to be a diver, but I never saw it as a real possibility. It was never a possibility.  Now that I have passed the age of thirty I have started to wonder about the real and practical reasons behind my becoming an actor and working in films. And for most of this, it is not my fault: it’s that people called me and I have put myself  “there”, you know?  I think the reason why I started to make films was because I was going to be able to travel a lot, to meet a lot of people and to have a lot of challenges, to play, to have fun [he laughs] and to learn. Basically you learn a lot.  This film gave me—gave us—a lot of thought.  So these are the real reasons why I wanted to do films. I can’t say it’s because “I love films and I want to make them,” no.  I love watching them, yes, but I like doing them for another reason, not because I like watching them. Whenever there has been this kind of recognition it’s always really surprising and quite unconscious—I don’t think I’m really aware of this process which is a good thing because it’s a celebration and a party and I am really grateful.

Photo by Raquel Tardivo

Q:  So did you ever have a key experience in adulthood where you saw you have a talent for acting? And do you think this award goes to your talent?

GB: The story goes a little bit like this:  I didn’t want to be an actor because my parents were actors which is quite common not to follow in one’s parents’ footsteps. I started to study philosophy in Mexico and there was a student strike at the UNAM, the university, and so at that point I decided to travel.   I ended up in London. I had never been in Europe before and so it was the first time I went to Europe and I ran out of money.  So I started to work in bars and restaurants and then I started to get really bored of just doing that and I wanted to study something in the meantime. I  was 18 and I had no idea what I wanted and I went to do a theatre course. Why not?  It’s England, “the land of theatre” [he enunciates in a dramatic voice] and I started to see the courses and I saw there was the whole career.  I said ok, I will audition to get into this school.  I think I decided to make more films or rather…for Amores perros I wasn’t aware what was happening. I always tell this story but at the end of the shoot I asked for a VHS from the producers so I could show my family the film eventually because those films in Mexico never were seen by anybody, so I wanted to show it to my family.  And then Amores perros became what it became and then I did Y tu mama también.  Then at that point I remember thinking consciously, “I like doing this” and I liked also the fact that I got to travel, embody a lot and I discovered that I like cinema. But when I say “I like cinema” this is not from an actor’s perspective, it’s from a producing and directing perspective. That is when I took a conscious decision to get closer to the cinema world or to be there because I want to do it.  If I was asked if I prefer to act in a movie or in a play, I would always say a play.   If I am asked, “What do you prefer to direct, a movie or a play?” I would always say a movie.  Cinema is done more behind the camera. In front of the camera you just put yourself generously there and then there is someone else who can [he gestures to a snip] which is wonderful as well. It is an act of faith.  You are playing around and hopefully there is someone there who is a good director.

Q: Does this mean you don’t recognise yourself in a movie?

GB: The best case scenario is when you have ownership of a character and later this character has an other life to you. Now, for example, I wonder what Julio form Y tu mama también is doing, you know?  What are those characters doing?  I am sure Alain Delon with Rocco e I suoi fratelli, they are wondering what has become of you. They become these parallel lives. I like playing that kind of thing where life continues—you visited, you gave life or you embodied the life of this character that already existed and all of a sudden you are the representation of this character.  Then you start to develop a family with brothers. In the best cases this happens and in the worse cases, those characters have no life.  I don’t even remember them…

Q: You come from a country with its own history such as the massacres of Tlatelolco, where massive student protest occurred in response to government violence, and then contrast this to the horrors of Argentina and Chile. Yet you play a character, René, who had to take the position of how to sell the “No” campaign to Chile, to oust Pinochet in the face of 3,000 desaparecidos (disappeared), whereas in neighbouring Argentina there was no sale necessary in large part to the 30,000 desaparecidos and the anger towards that dictatorship. You play a very subtle character who had to negotiate the passion of politics within the reason of salesmanship.  So how did you approach the character of René because he was not an angry, revolutionary type in the least?

GB: I think the character by itself in the script has an existentialist approach.  The character is based on two real people, García and Sanzero, the creative people in the campaign who organised and put the group together and moved it all around.  But there is a third person here:  me being a foreigner, I play an exiled person.  This was an element that wasn’t considered in the beginning of the film.  We found this creates a much more complex character.  Basically this gave life to a character and at the same time he sees all the contradictions and ambiguities of democracy and he speaks for us in a way.  This is what the world is going through I think.  We are at the stage where we have reached a post-adolescence of democracy and now we are seeing that real politics is about the small win is not the total win. It is the small win that opens up the bigger picture.  We were so naïve to think that elections would change everything and elections never have.  So some people from Chile might say, “But nothing changed.”  But this election was won in minor ways. There was a huge campaign that had to happen to register voters and imagine registering voters during a dictatorship, putting your name down. People were really scared. Then they went to vote—they never thought it was going to be a secret vote…at all. So this work that the politicians and activists made was incredible. And what is most incredible is that nobody thought they would win!  Imagine a dictator who says, “I am going to do a referendum.”  But that is something very interesting about Chile—they were the only country that has overthrown a dictatorship with votes, without blood, and it is just incredible. And it is just a fallacy to say that nothing changed. Of course it changed. Pinochet was out!  As a foreigner I see a strong link between the student demonstrations in Chile and No vote in 1988.  There is a huge connection. Of course a lot of things didn’t change, but that is what we are living in a democracy: we think very innocently that the elections are the end of it all.  And there is more to it. Radical democracy happens every day, it happens every moment. The optimist message in the movie is not about the elections or the Manichean decision of voting for A, B or C,  it is about the ambiguities, complexities and contradictions.

During my time working in Haiti after the January earthquake in 2010, several humanitarian workers from various United Nations agencies approached me regarding what they viewed as a parallel situation between ethical problems within the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and what they experienced in the final months of the conflict in Sri Lanka. Essentially several of these people, seeing that I was a volunteer and not politically or economically tied to any one organisation in Haiti, recruited me to write a report regarding what they experienced in Sri Lanka in the final months of the conflict.  In working on this project I met with twelve different United Nations agency staff members and recorded their stories.

Part of the difficulty in recording such information is that some of the subject are afraid to lose their jobs or to have their reputations besmirched or questioned. Inasmuch as I am hesitant to use the names of those individuals who asked to be named, I have decided to do so in the interest of the integrity of this report.  However, I am respecting those individuals who continue to work within the United Nations in the hopes of improving that organisation from the inside out by keeping their names out of this report. Similarly there are individuals working in other NGOs who have asked that their names not be mentioned given the repercussions of speaking out against an organisation such as the United Nations might have on their careers.

In the interest of transparency, I have not been paid for this report nor have I any vested personal or professional interests in any of the agencies mentioned. I attempt to relay the information of these interviews in the most objective fashion possible, allowing for the direct speech of the informants when possible.  Notably absent from this report is any response from any of the United Nations agencies. I went to New York and made calls and visits in the attempt to have personal meetings with the head of various UN agencies who declined to be interviewed and declined to comment on the allegations made by their own staff. UNICEF claimed to have no knowledge of the incidents contained within this report despite the fact that the UN has investigated some of the human rights abuses in their report entitled “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” (31 March, 2011).  Although the 2001 UN report elides most of the issues mentioned in my report below and deflects UN responsibility while indicating a greater responsibility with the Sri Lankan government, it does allude to certain ethical questions of various UN agencies. This report covers the information that is missing from the 2011 report of the Secretary-General’s Panel and that should have been included alongside any and all violations committed by the Sri Lankan government and that resulted in what is now estimated to be 40,000 deaths.

Methodology

I interviewed eleven humanitarian workers who were posted with various agencies within the United Nations and one Internews staff member.  These interviews took on an ethnographic format very quickly as I was learning from these informants about both their experiences in Sri Lanka and the workings of their specific agencies and mandates within the United Nations.  The information I received verbally was often repeated other stories I would hear from different informants.  In short, the travesties of what is contained in this report in my view are completely truthful simply based on the sheer precision of details that were reiterated from subject to subject.   Moreover, the mixture of professional integrity and the candid manner of reporting their stories impressed me as these individuals were not out to “trash” the United Nations as an organisation. Every single subject in this report seemed to uphold very honourable beliefs in their field and in the humanitarian practice for they view the problems they describe herein as more related to institutional ills, albeit many ills.  Hence, my task was to understand their individual stories as humanitarian workers in the field and to transmit this information in a clear and unbiased format in order to represent their individual experiences in the field and their collective commonalities when it comes to evaluating the mechanisms of the UN agencies that failed from one person to the next.

I attempt to adhere to the first-person singular format in reporting these subject’s words in order to keep the integrity of these people’s voices and lives. There are times when I use reported speech and this is due to the vast amounts of information that I condense. It is of great consequence that these individuals stood up to speak against an immensely powerful organisation and hence it is necessary that I defer to their wishes for complete or partial anonymity or in the case of a few, none at all.  This is, in certain respects, an incomplete project as their are many actors who are afraid to speak out, who must defer my calls to interview them to their media office, and those whose avoidance of the subject was due to unexplained motives.  The most troubling absence was that of the UN agencies whose representatives grew nervous when I called them up from midtown Manhattan ready to meet them.

The conclusions I draw from the interviews is based purely on what these individuals have experienced and witnessed.  Although I do not cite the UN’s “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” (31 March, 2011) as part of this report, it must be stated that this report ignored the experiences of its very staff who supplied the information for this 2011 report.  This indicates that the UN—given that these subjects had made written reports as part of their exit processes—willingly ignored crucial ethical violations of its own offices in a report that ostensibly looked for accountability in the final months of the conflict in Sri Lanka.  This fact cannot and should not be understated.

Scope of Investigation

While doing relief work in Port-au-Prince in 2010, I was approached by several UN humanitarian workers present in Haiti.  These individuals asked me to take their testimonies of what they experienced in the Sri Lanka because of the similarities they noticed between certain abuses within UN agencies operating in Haiti and Sri Lanka.  I undertook this task and met with a dozen extremely qualified professionals who were all stationed in Haiti in 2010 and who had also been posted in Sri Lanka at some point during the final months of the conflict.  Many of these aid workers still work for various UN agencies today while others work for other NGOs as a result of the events they narrate in Sri Lanka. I interviewed each informant individually and recorded their testimony. In discussing their experiences within their individual UN agency jobs, these informants relay what they professionally experienced and witnessed in the final months of the conflict in Sri Lanka between September 2008 and May 2009.  Their stories, although some different in details, all have one similarity:  they collectively point to the various symptomatic problems within the United Nations.  This report will detail the following events as experienced first-hand by these twelve UN workers:

-Conflictual inter-institutional political ties the United Nations maintains with the governments in whose countries it is operating;
-Unhealthy relationships between the donors and various agencies which create an institutional tendency whereby agencies exercise their mandates in the service of donor funding;
-Intra- and inter-agency conflicts of interest;
-Elision of the mechanisms of inter-agency cooperation (ie. the cluster system);
-Blocking Resolution 1612 violation reports and refusing to examine the remaining 1612 reports which focussed upon child soldiers;
-Censoring information that was put before the 1612 task force by the UNICEF Representative;
-Discouraging all work on other MRM (Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism) cases;
-A subtle humanitarian blockade in that the UN only sent one protection staff to the Vanni in the course of 11 convoys of humanitarian aid to the North;
-Neglecting to speak out regarding the fact that the Sri Lankan government constantly changed the triggers of the “no fire zone” in order to force people to constantly move camps while also augmenting the casualties during shelling;
-Obfuscation of UN reports which demonstrate that since the UNHCR presence in Sri Lanka malnutrition had increased;
-Repeated hiring of senior level officials who were either incompetent or had no previous experience in the field in their sector in a conflict zone;
-Attempts by UN senior level officials to discourage and even harass its staff members in order to discourage them from speaking out regarding the violations and misconduct they witnessed on behalf of the Sri Lankan government or UN agencies;
-UNICEF’s exclusion of NGO participation for providing food, medicine and shelter for the eleven convoys that went through to the Vanni so that UNICEF could empty its warehouses of educational materials, cricket bats, and chalkboards while conterminously maintaining a central role in the media eye as tens of thousands were malnourished and in need of shelter, medicine and food;
-Conflicts of interest in NGOs and UN agencies’ mandates and the actions of other NGOs and/or their governments;
-Deception of UN staff by having them work on projects that the UN claims would be realised and funded, only to waste the staff members’ time and talents on a project that the UN never intended to carry through;
-UNHCR remaining silent on crimes against humanity in the final months of the conflict in order to protect its presence in the country;
-Senior UN officials taking professional complaints from UN staff which underscore many of the ethics violations mentioned in this report and browbeating these individuals rather than allowing for a transparent and fair evaluation of the accusations and proofs;
-UNICEF’s ignoring child protection reports;
-UNHCR’s refusal to render public the shelling of hospitals and schools;
-Various UN agencies rewarding incompetence and reckless professional behaviour with promotions to high levels within the UN structure;
-Inter-agency spies, one which intercepted a letter containing legitimate critiques of the December 2008 UNICEF convoy and the “spy” sent the document to Colombo;
-UNHCR’s silence on Menik Farm, and IDP camp which became a virtual concentration camp;
-Forcing UNICEF staff members to go to hospital to collect “life examples” of young children who were hit by bullets and to describe them in great detail in order for the UNICEF Representative to confirm for the international media that children had not been spared in this conflict; and
-The barring of Protection Officers from exercising their mandates for fear of their witnessing UN violations worrying these officers would write reports relating the facts of the violations they witnessed.

UNICEF & UNHCR: General Knowledge of Abuses

Many of these former United Nations workers whom I interviewed state unequivocally that UNICEF maintained its silence during most of the final months of the conflict where the total mortality rate is estimated between 80,000 and 100,000. [1]  While some of my sources maintain that remaining silent while witnessing abuses and receiving reports of human rights abuses is not outright collaboration with the government forces, they categorically agree that UNICEF and UNHCR did nothing to speak out and use the power of the General Secretary or the media to denounce these acts.  Instead,  UNICEF congratulated the Sri Lankan government for its work at the end of the conflict. The inaction of the UNHCR and UNICEF spurred Profeta to resign her position.  However Profeta was not alone as she was joined by Grove and five other sources with whom I have spoken many of whom resigned their posts, stating they could not ethically continue working in a capacity which was creating civilian deaths.

According to one source who was working for OCHA in Sri Lanka, “When I went up to the North, we had a focal point system whereby the main agency had a certain amount of power in each area…In Kilinochchi it was UNICEF. Quite frankly the programming of UNICEF was negligent. Their WASH wouldn’t function because wash did not have much coming into through the humanitarian blockade and with 1612 blocked they were hardly doing any child protection work. The only functioning part might have been education, but that is the exception.”  He maintains that the Sri Lankan government policy of blocking supplies to the north, under the auspices of stopping all rebel supplies throughout the conflict was utilised as the government’s cover for starving the civilian population.  While the transport of arms is a valid concern for any government, he maintains that the ongoing attacks on civilians, hospitals, schools and the human rights abuses of children were all acts about which agencies such as UNHCR and UNICEF tacitly remained silent.   This informant saw much of the human rights abuses in Sri Lanka first-hand and he traces the origin of the problem to UNICEF’s chief stating,  “Quite frankly, [this was a] deliberate, but unofficially slow progress of supplies.  I think Philippe Duamelle  is responsible, and it is a disgrace that someone like that can hold so much power.  If that is the organisation that is supposed to look after children’s rights, then UNICEF is an absolute failure.”  This UN worker told me about how Philippe Duamelle’s presence changed for the worse the performance of UNICEF in the region:   “Things changed after Duamelle came on board and I know they had pressure. The first time I realised something was wrong was the anniversary of the ACF killings.  John Holmes had written a speech we were going to read out in three locations—he would read it in Colombo, the focal point in Trincomalee.   And someone else in Batticaloa.  UNHCR  didn’t want us to do this, so I said I would read it out and I was beat out in the area security coordination meeting.  UNICEF would not only vote against me because they had had staff that participated in a commemoration ceremony for Sri Lankan Red Cross workers that had been abducted and killed… So that was always their reaction to retreat away from their responsibility.  The head of UNICEF was instructed to say that nobody was allowed to attend—they were welcome to attend as individuals, but not as UNICEF, not to wear any symbols. So that really defined the way it was going to be with UNICEF.”

This informant went on to discuss the way in which triggers were manipulated by UNICEF within a large geographical box which designated the no fire zone in the north of Sri Lanka:  “They were basically trying to change the triggers.  They wanted to designate the large box which we created on the map, say that movement on that inside would result in our moving the box around, hence forcing people to move around.  It is my opinion that UNICEF used their powers to change the triggers so that knowing how things work in Sri Lanka, the government would shell as they wanted everyone out.”

1612 Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism

Barbara Profeta recounts her story to me with visible disgust, explaining how her job in Sri Lanka while she was stationed in the north of the island, consisted of processing 1612 reports which detail human rights abuses.  UNICEF and the UK government were monitoring the violations of children’s rights in Sri Lanka and Profeta tells me that suddenly these reports stopped being processed and that the necessary reviews of each report by committee were also ceased.  In short, the 1612 mechanism failed.  The filing of these reports was to ensure that certain abuses were not taking place, abuses such as the recruiting of child soldiers, maiming and murder, and attacks on hospitals and schools.  This measure was enacted and carried out in Sri Lanka and the only authority ultimately responsible for safeguarding this measure and its implementation is the UN Security Council.

In mentioning the 1612 reports Profeta tells me that they were ordered stopped in September 2008.  She infers that UNICEF was acting in compliance with the Sri Lankan government which resisted all external investigations into its alleged human rights abuses.  There are claims by other UN workers with whom I spoke that these reports were purposefully kept from examination from September 2008 until the end of the conflict, May 2009, with those in positions of authority sitting on the files.  The consensus is that UNHCR and UNICEF kept their mouths shut in order to maintain their organisations’ presence in the country, remaining silent instead of denouncing the human rights abuses either internally through their formal structures or through the media.

Profeta turns to the subject of the multiple conflicts of interest within and surrounding the structure of the United Nations and its agencies such as UNHCR, UNICEF and IOM (International Organisation for Migration).  She cites various examples beginning with the fact that members of the Sri Lankan government partially made up these 1612 committees; hence members of the government would investigate its very own structure.  Equally problematic, these committees which examine the 1612 violations were appointed on the basis of dialogue between the United Nations and the local government, a process for which there was absolutely no transparence.  So when in September 2008 these committees stopped being formed, many UN workers grew suspicious.  Profeta informs me that there many conflicts of interest within the United Nations and as well problems directly related to the very structure of the United Nations.  For instance, since the United Nations funds much of the UNHCR, there is an implicit conflict of interest in overseeing any abuses to the implementation of 1612 since there is no outside overseeing authority that is not a donor.  Mirroring  Profeta’s complaints, other UN workers tell me of the many conflicts of interests between the donors and the representative of these organisations, notably UNICEF and UNHCR.  Similarly there are conflicts of interest between donors and UN agencies where, for instance, the United States agency USAID funded IDP camps in Sri Lanka and strangely enough, it also shipped military equipment to the Sri Lankan government.

Another UNICEF Child Protection Officer working on 1612 forms who asked to remain unnamed, tells to me that the forms for reporting 1612 violations did not make sense upon her arrival in Sri Lanka in October 2008.  She telephoned Colombo and asked the 1612 advisor about ambiguities in the forms, essentially questioning the mechanism for data collection. There was a focus on child recruitment and she sent through the reports only to realise that there were points of ambiguity to verify when these reports would go through the committee.  For instance the Humanitarian Coordinator heads the task force and the Sri Lankan government sits on the task force to meet and review the cases.  And these two parts to the task force—a technical working group and a task force meeting—report collectively to the security council.  There is a country report that needs to be done annually and “horizontal notes” which occur every few months.  One part of the task is to write up the notes.  One group compiles the report working  the year’s prior reports, trying to get their annual report done.  But all of this is inevitably overseen by the task force which is complied of Sri Lankan government members, so the outcome was less than objective.

One UNICEF Protection Officer discusses how UNHCR was aware that the Sri Lankan army engaged in human rights atrocities in violation of the Security Resolution 1612 as villages were destroyed and schools and hospitals attacked.  Natalie Grove, a former UNICEF Child Protection Officer who worked in Sri Lanka in the last months of the conflict, documented 11 separate incidents of attacks on or near hospitals and medical facilities in the Vanni between 15 December, 2008 through 15 January, 2009.  Of all the incidents in the final months of the conflict the Puttalam district was hardest hit, especially during March 2009 where eight separate acts of shelling took place, specifically the 7 March attack where 7 children were killed and 16 injured.  According to Grove, Profeta and eight other unnamed sources, UNICEF did nothing to denounce these various acts of shelling and did not continue the analysis of the 1612 dossiers.  She also claims that UNICEF workers were directed to stop working on 1612 reports as of  September 2008.

Grove also drafted a briefing note entitled “Humanitarian Situation in Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu Districts: Newly Arrived IDPs in Mannar, Vavuniya and Jaffna” (3 April 2009) which documents 1612 Violations.  In this briefing, there are 27 incidents reported to UNICEF of these violations which range from illegal shelling most of which point to the Sri Lankan Army as the perpetrator.  There were also reports of violations allegedly committed by the LTTE (The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), but no allegations have been verified.  Likewise there are sources who do not wish to be cited who have told me that UNICEF was aware that children were being recruited from the very spaces it established to protect these children.  “And UNICEF did nothing,” says one source.  “Philippe Duamelle [the head of UNICEF in Sri Lanka] was interested in visibility and not policy”, he claims. “The question is what are the 1612 for, but why is there a 1612? What is it supposed to change?”

Natalie Grove deconstructs the problem of child advocacy concerning the 1612 resolution:  “It was very easy for UNICEF to advocate.  What they had difficulty with was responding when the perpetrator was the state: the Sri Lankan army was recruiting children, maiming children, bombing children’s families.  And when paramilitary groups who were associated with the Sri Lankan government were abducting children from the street, UNICEF was complicit.  When it was the LTTE UNICEF’s flagship move was to advocate against the recruitment of children.  So with the 1612 mechanism, the security council resolution and there are six violations…everything was going very well because it was UNICEF and the government holding hands. By the time I arrived the conflict was escalating and there were a group of civilians trapped within this area.”

Grove continues, “The LTTE was using people as human shields.  What people were saying about the LTTE were true and they were condemned for that. But the Sri Lankan government decided the rules didn’t apply to them and they clearly ignored the no fire zone.  The LTTE would allow people out—there is a pass system—and at one point the LTTE agreed that the staff could leave but the national staff could not.  So people with satellite phones were calling down as they were being shelled… In January 2009 there was a new no fire zone, and the army would continue to fire upon people.  UNICEF had a job to document the 1612 violations.  So in the same way that when the child was abducted and recruited by the LTTE, UNICEF had to document it, expose it.   This report would go to Colombo and eventually go to the Security Council. What they were supposed to do was monitor other violations: attacks on schools and hospitals, maiming and killing children, denying humanitarian access to children, and sexual and gender-based violence to children.  That work ground to a halt when those who perpetrated the violations were not primarily the LTTE but instead the Sri Lankan army.  We have detailed reports that state this child was killed here, at this place and time.  As the war escalated towards its end there were debates about how many civilian casualties there were—our mission was to report child causalities. These files never were examined, the 1612 task force never met.  Since between October 2008 until April 2009 the task force which was to look and review this on a national level, examining how Sri Lanka was conducting the war.”

Echoing many of the other officers who also worked on the 1612 Resolution documents, Natalie Grove gives her details of the task force which was to meet on 1612: “I was given a six month deployment and I was asked to extend for six months because of how things were going.  In order to collect data, I stayed for three more months.  The task force meets in country, in Colombo, headed by the humanitarian coordinator.  UNICEF, Save the Children and other agencies sit on the task force.  Surprisingly nobody thought a task force would be a good idea.  I asked when the task force meets I would like to be present to learn about how this works.  Obviously what was going to be contentious was that this child and this child was killed or maimed and we were naming perpetrators from the Sri Lankan Army. But of course, they would just say, ‘Prove it.  Prove that it was not the LTTE.’  So, what do you do to build up a case that is not going to be open to debate?  So I want to know about the discussions that happened and what will be the proof to convince these people that it was not the LTTE but the Sri Lankan Army.   Our job was like that of worker bees:  get a case, fill out a form, send it to Colombo. But we never got any responses.  And I would go back to the cases with pictures, with a blurb and I resend this to Colombo.  It is never a good idea to present one case with no analysis and I had this for each and every case, in order to provide talking points to Philippe and for the media.   We had information on these 1612 violations and nothing happened. At this point I am thinking that maybe everyone is overwhelmed? Maybe they need pictures?  What’s going to help us get this out there?  Let me make it as easy as possible to let you to pick up which part of international humanitarian law you have violated.  Let me do all of that work for you so it is all ready to go, so that you might make a statement on this, to respond , to advocate.  I believed that if we made it easier for these people to do their jobs, they would do their jobs. But nothing worked.  And it goes nowhere and these are complicated stories—what we collect is confidential, I can’t share it with anybody.  And if this ends up in the hands of Human Rights Watch then so be it.”

“There were two parts of the task force.  There is an annual report to the Security Council.  Then there were the horizontal notes, reports made every two months.  One part helps write up the annual report and the other is the technical working group and the other works on the reports that are issued every two months.  The part of the task force that was to be meeting in real time in relationship to the reports, well they never met.  That side meeting was never convened.  The part of the task force that should be meeting in real time regarding files from two weeks ago, they never met. The group working on the country report were still working on files from 2007.  Nobody was reviewing our reports from last week or from Trincomalee.  To be perfectly honest, I would have say that they sat on the files. I get into this debate about this subject:  is it incompetent or is it morally bankrupt?  And the truth is that sometimes it’s a blend of the two.”

“Once the war was over we were able to get more staff.  I asked for staff dedicated to 1612 because throughout the war I couldn’t compile reports fast enough because of the lack of direct access to victims and their families. I had this worry about verification.  So I wanted to send staff who could talk to the families.  There was a 1612 expert from Nepal and her job was to explain the camp layout as we know when people in each section of the camp arrived as the camps filled chronologically.  So at one moment in time, I told the staff that I wanted them to go into the camp with the Sri Lankan Army, and to show that the Sri Lankan Army was using a strategy of war that directly affected the civilian population.  She was able to get on a daily basis 250 to 300 documented cases.  It doesn’t get more verified than this.  This enabled us to have precise verification with details from families and this information goes into an Excel spreadsheet.  This is why I ask, what is incompetent and what is morally bankrupt?  So you would get a situation that what goes into the horizontal note is this, ‘Between x and y date, there were 300 children were killed and this many of them were boys and this many were girls.’  I said to her, ‘Did you not think in looking at this information, and instead of giving a gender breakdown, not to mention that the data shows that of all these deaths, the Sri Lankan Army was guilty of 90% of the deaths.’  I was reaching my breaking point after redoing the analysis. There should be a mechanism in New York and we kept taking that mechanism back to the field as we could not trust that the data was handled correctly in Colombo.”

The consensus from every single informant with whom I spoke to on this subject is that many of the 20,000 dead in the final months was due to the failure in the system of the Resolution 1612 reports and their followup.  There was a moral bankruptcy, according to every informant, of UNICEF’s and UNHCR’s role in keeping information of the atrocities marginalised and silenced while conterminously appeasing the Sri Lankan government.

Nutrition Study

There were several institutional problems related to malnutrition in Sri Lanka.  One UNICEF officer told me of a study made on malnutrition in Sri Lanka; however this study was stopped midway through, according to this informant, because the study demonstrated that malnutrition increased rather than decreased after the UNHCR presence.  Natalie Grove echos this informant’s position on this matter:  “There was a nutrition survey commission..the results weren’t shared.  What I ended up learning was a statistic was on severe acute malnutrition.  That, in a way, didn’t implicate anybody.  I remember the suspicion being that there were levels of chronic malnutrition detected by the survey that far exceeded what should have been.  The Sri Lankan government strictly controlled humanitarian assistance and they controlled the amount of food for obvious reasons. WFP was supplying the food but there is no way to verify this.  WFP was then giving out half-rations, that within those survey results.  Now you are just running as aid agencies and the level of chronic malnutrition would indicate that the population was being sustained at just about starvation levels—alive, but not enough to keep up their nutritional needs.  The study was completed and the results were known by the Sri Lankan government and UNICEF.  Nutrition surveys are incredibly sensitive in conflict zones and we were given this one statistic, acute malnutrition in five year olds that were not publicly released.”  While in June of 2009, James Elder told The Australian newspaper, “The nutritional situation of children [in the camps] is a huge concern for UNICEF, and restrictions on access hinder our ability to save lives,” Elder’s comments do match the realities presented by these other UN workers whose experiences narrate how these UN agencies acted in complicity —albeit it a passive complicity—with the abuses of the Sri Lankan government.

Conveys to the Vanni

In meeting with these UN workers the one subject that resonated most tragically with them all was the subject of convoys.  After the UN international staff left Kilinochchi, the United Nations Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator and the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Sri Lanka secured an agreement with the government of Sri Lanka which permitted the UN to continue its humanitarian assistance with weekly convoys into the Vanni  in the north of the country to deliver food, shelter and medicine.  The Ministry of Defence imposed extensive restrictions on convoy participants as well as on non-food items, such as tarpaulins which they thought could be used for military purposes.  The also put limitations on food and medical supplies.  The first convoy entered the Vanni on 3 October 2008 and a total of 11 convoys went into the Vanni over five months delivering a total of 7,435 metric tons of food which was not enough to sustain the civilian population in this region.

One informant from OCHA recounts her experience with the convoys:  “I also remember getting a visiting a visit from USAID Food for Peace, they came a big delegation from the United States…and they asked me this is two months before the end of the conflict.  I think it is important to acknowledge that WFP (UN World Food Program) was covering up the fact that they were only sending half the rations that was prescribed.  There was a convoluted process where the Commissioner General would approve convoys in terms of trucks, then they would get to the military and there would be concern about one or two trucks and then the seals on the doors [of each truck which could not be broken].  Once in Trincomalee the USAID convey members were told that the government would not be not sealing the trucks so they went to Varunya without any seals. Then of course they were told not to pass through because they didn’t have seals on them. It was deliberate and the government agents in Kilinochchi had a terrible job between working for their own government and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam).   Then on of the USAID convoy members in Kilinochchi showed me a memo which said “You are not to share any memos on needs”, from the Commissioner General of the section services. “We will inform you of the needs and you are not to share any of this info—if you need any assistance you come to us. You are not to collaborate in terms of information with [the LTTE].” It was very clear, very threatening.  The Commissioner General was to control the amount of assistance entering the north.  Of course they had legitimate security concerns, but it was clearly extended to humanitarian services which was not legitimate.”

This informant comments on her own agency, OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), and the tragic decisions made in sending up much needed supplies to the north:  “In OCHA, in response to the very murky policy decisions that were going on and the fact that the big UN agents were to a large degree operating outside of the cluster system and cutting their own deals, we set up something like the inter-cluster meeting where we would discuss policy, what was being set in Colombo, how to interact with the government, especially when they were setting up camps that clearly were going to be military in nature. We also would discuss the convoys that would go up. People were in dreadful conditions and some had been displaced up to twenty times. This particular time I remember the area was flooded and the people were in rags. Medical supplies and food were being restricted.  Also the half-ration since February 2008 had been implemented for the IDP and this was the last time was when people ate the recommended caloric values. UNICEF and UNHCR hated doing the umbrella group and they were very angry about it. Duamelle was very upset and said it was not needed—he was extremely angry.  It was interesting because we discussed policy issues. There was a moment when a convoy actually came through.  We had pressed really hard for shelter material and it looked like for once they would let five trucks up.  It was ridiculous considering we had between 250,000 and 300,000 people and we found out that UNICEF was going to get cluster materials up there.   And you know what was going to happen—the shelter materials of UNICEF would get bumped up so that they would get heir name in the press. This is how it works.  What was in the trucks? Not food, not shelter and other urgent supplies. Instead they sent educational materials, logo stuff, cricket bats, children toys and water tanks. Unbelievable shameless attempts for UNICEF to get its stuff out of its warehouse and it has this incredible ability to push its name around at the expense of real qualified needs. Blackboards were on those convoys!  The convoys denied shelter materials. We wrote a letter to the humanitarian coordinator and UNICEF kicked up a massive fuss about our letter.  There were two different letters presented—the other writer was more passionate and letter was dismissed and the blame game started vis a vis protocol.  We insisted that the Humanitarian Coordinator needs to be reenforced and so Duamelle ordered the other draft of the letter, the least effective letter, and made this OCHAS’ official draft.”

An unnamed UNICEF Protection Officer states: “There was a first joint assessment caravan, and they had to fill some of it with UNICEF trucks… in which were held cricket bats.  It seems that they were getting rid of what was in their warehouse.  You have an entire population trapped in a zone and have no basic needs met and you send this type of garbage.  This entire UNICEF family was corrupted from Philippe Duamelle.  There are no sanctions in UNICEF, you are just being moved to another country to screw up that country.  This is how it works, the more you screw up you are just promoted and moved to another country. The honest people are the ones getting sick of it and they leave, they resign.”

The OCHA officer comments on the aftermath of this convey fiasco: “Duamelle was always looking out for himself, he was promoting the logo, never substance. When John Holmes came up to visit the very controversial camps, it was a great moment for advocacy and Duamelle toured the camps himself to make sure that UNICEF logo was present… This is a time when 60 children a day were dying, and when people were being crammed into military camps with no services, a great amount of disease and malnutrition.  And Amin Awad, the head of UNHCR, those two socially and work-wise were the big two—they were the protection mandate.  Awad has quite a lot of power within UNHCR and these two were worrisome for all of us.   Andrew Brooks, UNICEF Section Head,  would come to me hoping I might tell him something comforting—you know when someone is asking your opinion but hoping you tell him what they want to hear. I told him the truth, that he made some huge mistakes.  I was told we would have a debrief, but we never did. I think there are serious concerns about how we operate, how we interact.”  This same informant finally met with John Holmes, the former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, during his Sri Lanka visit in 2009. This UN worker took the opportunity to air his grievances with the head of the agency about the convoy issue:  “I had time with him in the back of a car and I made use of it.  But I get the feeling that—and he was in possession of the figures, of the deaths—he also was aware, as was the secretary general, that they were probably a lot higher.  I bet my life that over 20,000 were killed in the last few months.”

Another informant who worked with Internews tells me what he knew about the convoys:  “There were 11 convoys, plus the ones who were watching the convoys.  And people chipped into the convoys. You need safer spaces and it never happened, the no fire zone was moved constantly.  The General Commissioner  for social services had to approve all conveys but problems emerged as the trucks travelled as they had to be inspected and seals were broken from the trucks.  Eventually all trucks travelled to the Vanni without seals and then this caused problems. And then UNICEF pushed their materials instead of letting in food and water.  Apparently this was in the pipelines and I don’t know how those non-humanitarian items got in instead of humanitarian aid.  It was crazy. I just watched the annihilation of an entire group of people because of this!”   With 300,000 Sri Lankans displaced and flooded and UNICEF staff convinced the government to let in UNICEF’s trucks because UNICEF wanted the front page story despite that it had no tents in its trucks. So the government let five trucks through and UNICEF would call it a triumph.  Children were dying and UNHCR admin Amin AWad was largely responsible for the fallout.”  This informant contended that UNICEF and UNHCR so disliked the umbrella group (ICRC later replaced this with the cluster meetings) despite the was support for humanitarian efforts; yet UNICEF would usurp the authority of smaller NGOs to push through its goods.

Barbara Profeta witnessed first-hand the abuses of UNICEF having overheard a conversation between a UNICEF representative and a UNICEF field coordinator which made clear that the UNICEF representative played a crucial role in deciding who would be allowed to go on these 11 convoys whereby only one protection staff was allowed to join.  This was strange given the humanitarian urgency of the Vanni.  It was clear to Profeta that she and her colleague Natalie Grove were barred from going on further conveys because their last trip resulted in their collecting 90 cases of killing and maiming without ever leaving the convoy. These two child protection specialists were directly discouraged from writing any reports which would be critical of the Sri Lankan government and so the limiting the number of protection staff was UNICEF’s way of acting in concert with the government’s desires not to be criticised.

Another UNICEF Protection Officer also recounts how NGOs complained about not being allowed to participate in the negotiations with the MOD (Ministry of Defence) on camps and of not being allowed into the convoy.  UNICEF negotiated the terms of the convoys with the MOD and managed to put a few extra trucks on the convoy.  Colombo asked if Protection Officers would send clothes or toys from their warehouse in Vavuniya despite needs assessment conducted by the relevant field specialists demonstrating a need for only food, shelter and medicine.  She learned one month later that UNICEF sent chalkboards, cricket bats, and clothes and that UNICEF had not even considered trying to get NGO materials onto the convoy. Instead UNICEF piled onto the convoy more non-essential materials.  Of the letters that were mentioned by the above unnamed OCHA informant, she also had profound knowledge of these letters since these letters came out of a meeting of a coalition of NGOs who were criticising the UN.  One group of NGOs in particular was so moved by the travesty of the convoys that they decided to write a letter to complain to UNICEF.  One draft which was written by DRC (Danish Refugee Council) and Care International after they held an interagency meeting days after the convoy had left Vavuniya but an internal spy got hold of the document and it was diverted to Colombo.  Then it took a few weeks for this group to write a letter that was acceptable to OCHA during which time this letter was intercepted by a UNICEF spy.

The consensus of every single UN informant who witnessed the travesty of the UNICEF conveys is that UNICEF was presumed to have all the power on the ground, that it co-opted the political scene on the ground and elided the presence of other NGOs, that NGO presence and input regarding the convoys and essential materials these NGOs wished to donate was completely ignored by the direction of UNICEF, that UNICEF’s chief made final decisions without consulting his officers and without paying attention to the many reports which perspicaciously evidenced the severe degree of malnutrition in the North, and that the UNICEF field coordinator and other high official within UNICEF worked in concert with the government’s desire to avoid criticism at the expense of not sending more than one single Child Protection Officer during all of eleven convoys.

Menik Farm and other IDP and Surendee Camps

Susan, an IOM Program Manager, whose job it was to work with managing suspected Tamil Tigers to report the situation of the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps in Sri Lanka relates her knowledge of the IDP and Surendee Camps:  “The government put civilians in IDP camps and separated suspected Tigers in separate camps, men of all ages and some women.  Eleven thousand people were put in these camps call Surrendee Camps as the government wanted these possible Tigers to renounce their allegiances. The government then set up programs to brainwash them and the camps were closed, completely militarised.”  Susan adds, “We should not forget the Tamil Tigers were pretty horrible to their own people…the government took a security, protective posture and considered those people to be the terrorists and in need of re-programming.  Their proposal was to keep these people in the camps for an indefinite period of time.  When I was there the debate was under what conditions are you keeping these people detained.  The definitions of liberty were debated.”

Susan continues her critique the UN agencies on the ground:  “There was a big schism between the UN agencies and IOM.  IOM was working with the government to construct rehabilitation camps, to put programs in these camps.  The donors were worried because the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)  didn’t have access to these camps.  So funding wasn’t forthcoming and IOM had broken from the position of the UN as it was more supportive of the government’s position and of the integration of IDPs. While there I was trying to get IOM to tow the line and to be part of the UN system—that as long as the legal status of these people inside these Surrendee Camps was not conclusive, that the UN was not going to get involved.   The UN didn’t say anything publicly.  The High Commissioner of Human Rights said that they were essentially being detained under conditions of internment but there was never a statement from the UN Secretary General.  I think this silence existed for a number of reasons, namely because of the resident coordinator, Neil Buhne, who was quite weak. In the United Nations the agencies form a country team and this is led by the resident coordinator and Neil Buhne was the Resident Coordinator.”

“UNOPS started compiling information on the casualties, lists with numbers.  If you take the bureaucratic position, you will say UNOPS is not mandated to do this, that is to speak out. The other way of looking at it is that there were people who had access to information and they have the duty to share this information.  The figures were leaked to the press and eventually the press used this information.  But the number that was leaked was much less than that being compiled by UNOPS.”  Susan concludes that the UN was weak on Sri Lanka because of the Resident Coordinator, Neil Buhne, who had previously never worked in a conflict situation.  “He is UNDP and he doesn’t know how to handle this.  But back in New York there was a lot of pressure not to really get involved in Sri Lanka—the Sri Lankan government is very strong on sovereignty and its own identity on the international scene as a way of putting back on the West and what they perceive as the West’s agenda.”

Another anonymous informant recounts how parts of schools were as IDP camps initially and the later became sites to transfer out those from IDP camps who were to be shipped to Menik Farm, one of at least twelve sites for surendees:  “The children were taken to a particular place, the women separated. The biggest proportion were men.  We were trying to advocate the separation of children from adults. Menik Farm  held 300,000 IDPs.”  Vanni was emptied of NGOs in September of 2008 so that nobody was able to provide support for those IDPs transferred from the Safe Zone to the camps. The LTTE surrounds this area of the Vanni which keeps the IDPs inside.   She recounts how, “It was chaotic and more and more people would arrive.  You would wake up one day and there would be a camp where there hadn’t been one the day before.  We had no access to information as there was no central management of camps as in Haiti.  Everything was managed from the Sri Lankan government.  The people were running away from the conflict, screened if they were believed to be part of the Tigers, then separated and sent to separate camps.  The main body of camps which was a huge strip of farm cleared daily to provide space for the refugees.  This was Menik Farm.”

Sophie Perreard, a colleague of Profeta and Grove, states, “We were a group of people working on the same project, in protection management in the camps.  I had teams in the camps and there were also problems in protection, namely protection monitoring and displacement in conflicts.  The camps were closed, militarised.   I was in Vavuniya, there were 300,000 people I had to move—many children, injured and soldier children.  Barbara, Natalie and I worked on this. We sent a report to Colombo to the UN and to the government.  It never ended.  In September 2008 the procedure of 1612 was stopped.  Fonseka Bhavani, a Sri Lankan UN worker, also noted the attacks on schools and hospitals.  “In Sri Lanka, the government was clearly interested in ending the war by any means necessary; however, towards the end, there was no distinction made between adults and children,” Perreard contends.

A former UNICEF Protection Officer discusses the manner in which the “In the Vavuniya field protection cluster, we constructed arguments around articles in applicable international conventions.  For example the presumption of innocence: people in camps were supposed to be innocent until the government would find them guilty, but in fact the burden of proof was the opposite. We were stretching our minds to find conventions and articles we could use. We also went to other clusters to let them understand that they were buying into practices that would violate human rights. It worked on the field level but decisions were made in Colombo.  Then suddenly, we in the field learned that IOM were building shelters in the newly identified Menik Farm 5, when we were still building Menik Farm 3 and 4 and already finding this process controversial. We sent all these arguments to Colombo and UNHCR transmitted the Protection cluster’s information to the Colombo protection cluster.  Of course, UNHCR supported the government in whatever they wanted to do.”

Protection Cluster Failings

One UNICEF Protection Officer notes that the protection cluster in Vavuniya had already existed before the conflict and it has always been lead by UNHCR. However, when this officer arrived in Sri Lanka the cluster did not resemble a meeting. “It was UNHCR calling its partners around a table to distribute figures, updates and give instructions,” she recalls.  It was extremely unilateral and UNICEF took the bigger role at these meetings since October 2008, especially after the arrival of the Child Protection Emergency Specialist. “Initially, we met once a month, then once a week. UNICEF established an additional CP weekly meeting, because UNHCR was not keen to discuss Child Protection issues at the general meeting.  Additional ad hoc meetings were added at the peak of the conflict, where protection monitoring teams were established in the camps it was necessary to share observations and recommendations.”  She notes that the protection cluster was composed of UNHCR, ICRC as an observer, Save the Children and two local organisations.  But then in December of 2008 the cluster grew to include another ten NGOs and the Child Protection sub-cluster which was headed by UNICEF met once a week.  UNHCR had devised a monitoring programme and although it was not perfect, according to her, it worked.  There were two databases: one was an Excel database for access to water, medical services and food and the other one was on specific cases, violations.  Each agency had their own version.

One of the problems that this UNICEF Protection Officer addressed in her work was the denied access to camps which she recorded in position from which the final and agreed version between the various UN agencies would take about four months. Yet the conflict was in January and February of 2009 only perceived as a regional problem in one of five programmes of UNICEF and she worked to have this recognised as a problem for the entire country and not just Vavuniya.  She analyses this problem further as a sign of the weak functioning of the protection cluster and the disagreement among agencies as to how much they should get involved in child protection:  “There was lack of consensus among agencies because they were competing among donors. For example, they were competing for US funds and the United States clearly had the position to support the government to end the war by military means.  The US political position in Sri Lanka with regards to the conflict was almost a publicly announced fact. Save the Children in Sri Lanka, for example, was not allowed to work in the Vanni on child soldiers’ issues (prevention, rehabilitation, reintegration) with US funds, because the engagement was ambiguous, given that the US was also heavily involved in supporting financially the SLA to push for a military solution.”  Her analysis was partly corroborated by some internal exchanges of information —to include the feedback of some friends working in Embassies—related to the lack of consensus among donors themselves (particularly US versus European donors). “The European Union made a public statement at some point of the conflict, where it tried to mention protection issues and almost got kicked out of the country and this was a well known ‘anecdote’ in Colombo and Vavuniya,” she relates.

The problem of donors was a common theme among many of the informants included in this report and she had detailed knowledge of how donors interfered in the mandate of Child Protection: “Among donors there were big differences of opinion.  So, agencies would follow the line of a particular donor which resulted in a lack of common position and strategy among UN agencies. Certain agencies were scared they would be kicked out of the country. Communication was purposely hijacked as protection people were shouting about communication between field and HQ so at some point we were having telephone communications each morning with Colombo.  But this was only meant to look like we communicated more.  This is my impression based on the fact that most of the telecom was spent listing WATSAN (water and sanitation) logistic issues and “calculating” how many more latrines and tanks we would be able to build in one week. We were not discussing nor finding solutions to the big questions related to institutional positioning and protection dilemmas. The questions we raised, like access to camps, they reacted like, what do you mean we don’t have access, the govt. doesn’t say we don’t have access so don’t say that.”   The unaccompanied children and orphans were eventually let out of the camp and put into a new orphanage the government built. It was run by the president’s wife. UNICEF wanted to advocate for these children to remain in a Tamil-speaking area near Vavuniya but Colombo refused and UNICEF was barred from visiting the children.  After the press took the photos of the Tamil children with the president’s wife, the government abandoned support of that orphanage and the kids were let out of the house.  Eventually UNICEF was given 48 hours to create safe houses for these children at which time the president’s wife re-emerged and decided to relocate these children to her orphanage in a separate house in Vavuniya.

This UNICEF Protection Officer details other protection cluster problems and human rights abuses:  “The protection cluster recommendations were to evacuate the elderly and unaccompanied children from Menik Farm.  Then we realised they (the SLA) were taking the elderly and dropped them randomly in abandoned houses or fields and basically let them die. A lot of older people died because they couldn’t find food or shelter once the SLA had dropped them. We tried to visit the places where people were dropped but whenever NRC (Norwegian Refugee Council) or UNHCR would visit they would be denied access. They found the places locked up and fenced in with guards monitoring incoming people.”

One of the most troubling incidents which points to institutional abuse of information (or the elision thereof) within UNICEF and its collaborating agencies, was the mishandling of information that had repeatedly been filed by both Profeta and Grove.  Specifically, the 1612 reports which both Protection Officers had repeatedly sent to Colombo had been disregarded and shortly after the ICRC released a public statement on the casualties of the conflict, Profeta received a phone call from the ICRC Representative that very same night of the public statement:   “He needed to get information for a press release the next day early in the morning. He wanted concrete cases of young children as victims of the conflict and that we needed to go to the hospital that evening to get information. We said we didn’t want to go particularly because we had already sent detailed 1612 reports which he had access to. Also, there were security rules to respect in the evening.  However, he insisted.   There was a curfew and he said he would take responsibility.   So we drove alone without driver or interpreter and we arrived at the hospital after 19h30.  People were sleeping, medical staff had left and only the guards were there. So we walked all over the people (people were laying everywhere) and we had the Representative on the phone while we were looking for injured kids.  We were describing the scene the whole way to him going through different wards.  He asked us to find a kid who is very young. We found one and said ‘Here’s a kid without a leg.’  But he said, ‘That’s not good enough because he’s not young enough.’ In the end we found a mother with a little baby in her arms and we saw the bandaged  leg of the baby. He told us to ask the mother to remove the bandage to verify the baby had a wound from a projectile and for us to describe the wound. The mother started crying and didn’t understand why we were there. We were so embarrassed. The next day our Representative was able to say children as young as 4 months old were victims of fighting and the government cannot say that there are no civilian casualties. But why didn’t he just rely on all our reports we sent every day?  We didn’t need to go to the hospital and remove the bandage of a small baby in the evening. He wanted to accept nothing less than international staff personally witnessing this. We had verified information over time in many places—hundreds of cases;  but they didn’t read them or used them in their reports.”

On Genocide and War Crimes

A UNICEF staff member does not hold back in evaluating the UN’s role in the Sri Lankan government’s acts of genocide and the UN’s failure to act:  “Were these organisations complicit in covering up the governments actions?  Well yes, I think so.  I think they were in a position to make such stronger statements about what was happening and to apply much more pressure and leverage on the government while the conflict was happening.  And the Sri Lankan government did what it wanted to end the war and that is because there was not enough pressure applied to them and they disregarded human rights because of this.  They can use the mechanisms from the Human Rights Commission to the Security Council…The Tigers see the UN’s presence as an agency to witness.  Maybe in Haiti the situation is desperate, there are huge humanitarian needs, so they decide not to confront the government on child trafficking. Particularly if your mandate is to protect the rights of displaced people or children—you don’t get to decide what is the institution’s mandate. It is your job to follow through on it.  Do I think that what went on there amounted to genocide? I am not sure that I would say that. I would say that the Sri Lankan government did not care if the Tamals lived or died and they showed disregard for a civilian population.  If the cost was the death of the Tamals, so be it. They simply didn’t care. I don’t know if their deliberate strategy was to annihilate the population. But there were war crimes and there is evidence for it.  I want to believe that good things happens in the end and I think a war crimes case will be brought against the Sri Lankan government.”

Of the twelve participants eight questioned if the UN were not complicit with the Sri Lankan government by virtue of its silence the human rights abuses mentioned here and its complicity with the starvation tactics used by the government of those in the Vanni.  This is definitely a question which needs to be addressed for there is reason to believe that the UN’s failure to act made it an accomplice in the Sri Lankan government’s human rights abuses and possibly various acts of genocide.

Harassment and Intimidation of UN Staff

Another former UNICEF worker begins our interview by relating what she has experienced and heard while in Haiti and comparing this to her situation in Sri Lanka:  “Since I came to Haiti I have stopped all protection work—not that I don’t want to, because this is my field and my background. I have witnessed abuses and I have spent a lot of time in the camps. I am hearing things here, even without working full-time on these issues.  The last mission here from Human Rights Watch was in January and they were the first ones here working on this problem of UN abuses.”  And she then goes into detail of her work with the United Nations in Sri Lanka:  “I resigned from the UN in Sri Lanka.  A lot of us, the Sri Lankan colleagues, were disgusted.   We could not resolve the fact that specific, key agencies did their “best”.  I was the head of mission for a foreign NGO involved in child protection. Because of my expertise from Nepal, I had to implement the framework for trafficking after the tsunami in Sri Lanka.  So I did six months of research for UNICEF, I came back with results. I defined a framework and a project, although there was money and there was the budget, the project never happened. We went through the legislative aspects of training people—how to interview and protect—there was the policy present but also the protection, the treatment of victims, basically an integrated framework.  My research was taken and relabelled UNICEF so my former NGOs couldn’t have it. After that, I was so bitter.  We actually had an agreement that they would fund the project but it never happened.  They lied to us all.”

A former UNICEF staff member discuss how those who worked on Menik Farm were lied to by UNOPS: “Tony [Oliver] worked three times for UNOPS and he was the shelter coordinator there.  He designed Menik Farm, but he designed it before he knew there would be barbed wire.  When he saw what his creation had become he went into a depression for months.  He thinks this entire camp that he built is his responsibility.  It is still too hard for him to talk about.  He feels as if he has blood on his hands and he feels manipulated like we all were.  He feels that his expertise was manipulated.”

Barbara Profeta details for me how she and many of her colleagues felt because of the abuses they witnessed:  “A lot of people wanted to quit because they were so disgusted from different UN agencies but in the end they didn’t because they didn’t believe it would change anything. Agencies are nervous now because they know a lot of the critical people have left. After I finished in Sri Lanka I was sure that one of the reasons that UNICEF had never made a public statement on all these problems we were having was because they didn’t have the correct information because of the access to our area by humanitarian relief organizations, media, donors, embassies’ representatives, and so forth was almost never granted in addition to the fact that UN agencies made extremely few statements in the media or even denied their own findings in front of government authorities.  So when nothing had come out from UNICEF on the real situation,  I took a plane to NY the second week of November 2009 and went to speak to that the interim head of the protection department.”  Profeta was able to voice her concerns to this interim director who at first seemed genuinely concerned and invested in helping out.  However after she said that they were not receiving the correct information from Sri Lanka, “UNICEF staff in NY said they didn’t know, but they didn’t show concern after that because they claimed they felt there was not much that could be done given the fact that most information was almost impossible to verify. I told them that just be careful because if there is ever a war crimes investigation into the war in Sri Lanka, this will bite you back and you will be accused of complicity with the Sri Lankan government.  They didn’t worry too much, took a few notes and that was it.”

A former UNICEF Child Protection Officer details her witnessing UNICEF senior management in Colombo attempt to get a humanitarian worker PNG’ed (persona non grata, a common term in the UN used to indicate someone who is not only unwelcome but who is also “banned”) as a form of harassment when this staff member had done nothing wrong and was the victim of harassment.  She herself had also been pressured and denigrated by senior staff: “UNICEF senior staff in Colombo often told me, ‘You shouldn’t have sent this or said that,’ ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ ‘This is dangerous information to talk about’ (ie. numbers of killed and maimed children). They regularly told Natalie and I that we were considered a liability for the organisation, and I was called a “moralist”. In my final evaluation I was considered not to follow often enough the SOPs (standard operating procedures) and the “general mood” of the office, which “was pulling my decisions related to the protection programme away from the main topics of interest.”  I replied in writing that what my bosses were considering “inconsistency with the main goals of the office, in my language it was called ‘integrity’. The Head of Child Protection for UNICEF in Sri Lanka told me that I was always negative and I said I can’t help what the reality is. We wrote many reports and sent them to Colombo to the head of child protection but we only received superficial feedback such as our “reports were too long.” I doubt many of them were read by anyone. The head of child protection in the time I was there only came to Vavuniya twice, in April and June.”

The Myth of Expulsion and the Ethics of Accountability of the United Nations

One theme than each and every informant to this investigation revealed was the mechanism that the United Nations would engage when experiencing internal criticism from its workers—that of claiming that it was powerless to act or to speak up without risking expulsion. This pretext is debunked by professionals throughout various agencies within the UN herein.

An unnamed source from UNICEF states plainly, “I think it is an absolute myth of expulsion.  Whole agencies have been expelled. But this is Sri Lanka, you cannot convince me that they were going to throw out NGOs…individuals, yes.  But it was never going to pick up UNICEF and expel it from Sri Lanka.  For instance, Peter MacKay is the only international worker who was stuck under his vehicle and he somehow survived, but every ten minutes he saw parts of bodies.”  In July, 2009, Peter MacKay was a senior UN diplomat was expelled from Sri Lanka for providing detailed rebuttals of government’s “wartime propaganda” during the final battles against Tamil Tiger rebels.  MacKay, an Australian citizen, was given two weeks to leave the country because he was a witness to the “bloodbath” in the final weeks of fighting and in an attack he witnessed behind Tamil Tiger lines on a mission to rescue 100 local staff and their family in January, 2009.  She continues to detail this invisible threat of expulsion:  “The Sri Lankan government was never able to do what UNICEF was doing—UNICEF gave the government credibility.”  Sophie contends that while there were threats of expulsion, “UNICEF was less outspoken than they should have been.”  Similarly, Susan states, “The Sri Lankan government couldn’t care less.  It was the Sri Lankan way of finishing things:  they just used the military option, they did what they wanted and they were praised. Even the Human Rights Council in Geneva were praised for how they dealt with things.  I will never forget that moment.”

An informant from Internews hints at the subtleties between actual risk and the recycling of this myth as a means to elide action:  “There is always that balance in between ‘If you want to remain here we cannot be too harsh’ and taking a moral, even ethical, stand. I understand the politics and everything but there is a limit. They have the casualty figures and they didn’t want to disclose them.  It was only when it was leaked to the media that the UN became anxious.  For instance, I had to work with Rajiva Sinha—I had an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) with him.  You are basically dependent upon someone in the government in Sri Lanka and it was pretty heavy in that sense…”

Natalie Grove addresses this myth which she has heard directly from supervisors:  “It is difficult to gage the right answer, but you do hear this excuse in the field, ‘You know nothing would have changed the Sri Lankan government. What was important is that we remained present in the country.  If we spoke out we would have been thrown out and nobody could have done anything to help the 300,000 surviving.’  This is an absolutely disgusting justification for silence!  You can’t make those predictions and say that you will say or do nothing because you don’t think it will work.  For me, at the end of the day sitting in front of someone like Andy Brooks, my issue with that is that you cannot censure yourself because of what you might think will happen in three weeks time in front of the Security Council.  But you don’t step back and fail your job as a Protection Officer because it is not what you want to hear, because you worry about what China will say.  I think this is an absolute myth this notion of expulsion.  In the Sudan yes, but not in Sri Lanka.  Sri Lanka is a government deeply concerned about its international reputation—you cannot convince me it was going to throw out an entire organisation. Yes it was going to choose individuals like Elder, but it was never going to toss out entire agencies.  The Sri Lankan government was unable to deal with all the issues which the UN was dealing with and it was in their interest to have the UN present.  This is when James [Elder] or Neil [Buhne] have to decide if their job is to protect the job and institution or to speak out and risk being thrown out.  They would say, ‘We didn’t want to say something because we were providing 300,000 people with water.’  This argument does not work in the context of Sri Lanka and they had never expelled a UN agency and they were never going to. Sri Lanka was a strong and powerful middle-income country.  To paint this picture any differently is a huge justification for doing nothing”.

The Politics of Accountability within United Nations

Tangential to the “myth of expulsion” are the many other problems involved in the ethical dimensions of reporting UN abuses of power and corruption of mandates that have to do with threats to UN staff’s economic interests, their professional standing within a particular UN agency, the duty station (ie. a posh family duty station), and other more subtle forms of nepotism.  The stories I collected relay an interior problem for these UN workers to do their job and to feel protected to report violations when they experience or hear about them.  Likewise the policies of the UN reveal a lack of maintaining the very same ethics the official doxa espouses when related to the ethical duty to expose illegal actions and other more minor wrongdoings and to act in accordance with the mandates of these agencies and UNHCR in maintaining a work environment that maintains an environment of safety and transparence.  These stories reveal the contradictions in the UN mandates to the people which it ostensibly serves and the ethical responsibility the UN has to its own employees.

Natalie Grove explains, “I was running the options through my head—it is not my identity that is in danger..there are only two international staff at the time and three national staff. So neither Barbara nor I speak Singali or Tamali. It is not particularly difficult to join the dots and this is a country where people do disappear.  Because of who you are you have to work alongside national staff—and this staff remain very much persons of interest by the state. There are reasons why people who have a story to tell are reluctant to tell the details. People were fired because of journalists’ articles. The repercussions can be grave but you attempt to correct misunderstandings.  I think what is valuable in this process is that these people will be externally held accountable. I think they should be worried that the information you are collecting could only have come from someone within the organisation.  One reason we need to be careful with our identity, we need people to have access to this information such as those people from the cluster system who work for a large NGO and who see the ethical problems.  I know that nothing I am saying is wrong, so why shouldn’t I have my name associated with this problem.  And later we discussed this and it was clear that we need to have people in these systems.  I made it known with UNICEF that I will not shut up about this. But we need to protect our identity from those who can have access to information.  Today, by not working directly for UNICEF, I don’t have any bargaining chips to shut me up.”

Grove continues, “The UN is the keeper of a normative framework and their work should advocate when the framework is not respected. On the other hand, in the case of the IDP camps, these were internment camps, these people were not allowed to move out, they were trapped and the conditions inside those camps were really dire. So does the UN do something? Do you say something about their conditions or not?  The shaming works for the UN, but the Sri Lanka government couldn’t care less. Where the international media can have an effect is on changing the behaviour of the donors and the UN.  As a result of this I left, I resigned with IOM.”  Another former UNICEF specialist states, “People shut up and don’t do their job because they didn’t want to lose their nice family duty station. A more generous interpretation of Neil [Buhne]’s position is that he calculated the effect of his being removed and the task going to the head of UNHCR.   To this day I am undecided.”  Grove also resigned her position as a result of the silence of the UN.

Attempting to put this into perspective of the larger situation since the tsunami, the Internews informant claims that the UN has been playing a diplomatic game since 2005 stating, “We just let those people get killed. If you lose the international position, the government of Sri Lanka could ask the UN staff to leave because they couldn’t assure their safety. How do you take that? Do you take your mandate to protect your civilians or do you stay because you know what would happen by leaving?”  The Internews informant attempts to put the political games into perspective, “Amin Awad was involved in making political decisions for UNHCR.   There was a group of powerful people in the UN, Philippe [Duamelle] and Neil [Buhne] were hanging out together and this goes back to 2005, to the tsunami.  You reach the one year anniversary and the shit starts hitting the fan because people are still in camps and we have to blame someone.  That is how things escalated:  you have a country where there is a very important nationalist movement, where they dislike international intervention because they consider it linked to the thirty years of development and international aid and the media is feeding this on a daily basis.  Add to this the fact that the UN works on the basis that no news is good news and that there was no dialogue between the Sri Lankan government and the UN.  This is how things escalated. The whole thing with Sri Lanka is that the UN didn’t want to push it too far. It reminds me of Haiti. It is one of the best family destinations you want to be—you don’t want to get kicked out if you are coming from the Sudan or Afghanistan.  For instance, there was a guy with no emergency experience, UNDP, a Canadian, and he was unable to lead whatsoever—and he was the Humanitarian Coordinator in Sri Lanka, Neil Buhne.  We remained silent and people were getting killed on a fucking daily basis and the UN said nothing.  Not just the UNHCR and UNICEF, the whole UN Family just remained silent.   We were very complicit in letting people get killed.  As part of the humanitarian family you feel ashamed, embarrassed.”

The Incompetent at the Top?

One thing I constantly heard from every single informant who contributed to this report and other UN staff with whom I worked in Haiti, was how there seems to be a perverse correlation between the lack of expertise and the ability to be promoted within the UN system. This is not a critique to be taken lightly since approximately half the people who contributed to this report did leave the United Nations permanently to create their own NGOs or to collaborate with organisations they esteemed had higher ethics than that which they found within the United Nations.  The other half changed agencies within the United Nations.  That most every person who is referenced here was discouraged from speaking out by their superiors within the United Nations also speaks to a certain desire to keep the problems of development, emergency relief and humanitarian aid within a hermetically and institutionally sealed bubble.  Needless to say there is a tautology of this order of incompetence being promoted and the more competent being threatened or coerced from speaking out and this is a systemic problem which needs to be addressed by UNHCR and the other UN agencies mentioned throughout this report.

A former UNICEF Child Protection Officer tells me, “It doesn’t surprise me the scale of how wrong this all is. Yet, you can still talk within the UN. There are people who are genuinely invested in changing things for the better. You have UN agencies which are not mandated in human rights issues having to deal with what another UN agency which is mandated in human rights, and these colleagues are not doing this for whatever reason. UNOPS  had an emergency unit, but this is not our mandate.  In Menik Farm I was first on the ground and I was doing some research for myself.  We couldn’t raise anything in Sri Lanka, and I was one of the investigators and I was questioning what happened there, who is alive, who is dead.  I was just thinking with the shelter team wondering what happened there.  We had to wonder if there was genocide or not.  And when you have the operational meetings and policy meetings at a high level, UNOPS raised these issues because we were on the ground and others like UNICEF said nothing. We are all part of the UN family, we are all in this together and we have a responsibility to speak out.  I am not going to shut down just because it is not part of my mandate, we have the same charter.  So a lot of raising issues you know has a lot to do with personalities.”  She then points to ironies of the those who made grave mistakes in Sri Lanka and the repercussions of their actions in the months following the end of the conflict in Sri Lanka:   “Awad has been promoted, but he has been promoted to a dead end job at least.  Probably the low level people you meet will never become high level—we will all resign.”

Natalie Grove doesn’t mince words on this subject:   “The UN wants staff who will tow the line.  For instance, it is harder for a Nigerian who is supporting seven families to denounce wrongdoings of the UN.  I recognise that.  If you are a father of five kids and supporting eight other families, it is hard to denounce.  UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sri Lanka, Neil Buhne, had to be approved by the Sri Lankan government.  Why the Sri Lankan  government would agree to have him there, but he didn’t have the skills required for the job and had never worked in a conflict zone before.  I to this day the position he took. There are two things that I am told: one that he is genuinely that optimistic, his position was to back away, and he took a softly softly approach. At some point you have to review your strategy.  The second complicating issue with Neil was, I think it is true, and this is where I think the myth of being expelled from a country needs to be addressed—if you are doing your job and kicked out of the country, PNG, great!  The Sri  Lankan government looked even more guilty because they cannot even bear to have a humanitarian coordinator. The problem is that the UN never pushed the issue to put Sri Lanka in a questionable light—it shouldn’t have been.  Sri Lanka should have been exposed for what it was.  So there was this constant debate about how many people were being killed.  The debate was should Neil have risked being expelled.  Regardless, who cares? That is his job.  He is the humanitarian coordinator, and if he gets expelled, the job falls to Awad.  One interpretation is that people shut up and didn’t do their job, they didn’t want to lose their nice family duty station in Colombo; another is that he calculated the risk and that the job would go to Awad.  To this day I am undecided, but I allow that to be a possible reading.  Just having known Neil and watching his inaction and his being frustrated.  In the end,  the incompetent people are promoted and moved out to another region.”

Barbara Profeta notes the problematic relationship between the extremely powerful within the UN and their choices for promotion:  “The Representative from UNHCR has been promoted to a higher position in Geneva. He was considered a ‘criminal’ by his own staff. He was similar to the UNICEF Representative [Philippe Duamelle] in his approach and they were friends. Since UNHCR had the lead on protection this meant that UNHCR got shelter and UNICEF was included in the pipeline in their joint negotiations with the SLA (Sri Lankan Army). On two occasions we learned that these two representatives had flown into Vavuniya with a military helicopter directly to the SLA base, in order to negotiate which agency would get which piece of the cake in the IDP camps.  Heads of field offices were just puppets for these two men. The UNICEF Field Head was there three years and recently has been promoted to a P4 position. He is still in Vavuniya as Head of Office.”

There were many reports lodged by these and other UN workers who do not appear in this report within the UN framework towards those senior officials who many believe to have committed egregious violations of their mandate.  The various UN agencies’ response to these complaints from staff members was to promote or shift these individuals out of Sri Lanka so that these all criticism would be elided and those accused of violations would not be subject to in country scrutiny.  Philippe Duamelle, Amin Awad, Neil Buhne and Andy Brooks were the focus of these UN workers’ complaints. Philippe Duamelle remained in Sri Lanka as the Head of UNICEF until 2010 when he was appointed as UNICEF Representative in Egypt.  UNICEF deployed Andy Brooks as head Child Protection in Haiti after the January 12, 2010 earthquake. Brooks was later transferred to head UNICEF in Tanzania and his post in Haiti was filled by Caroline Bakker who according to many of these informants, actively obstructed the UNICEF   mission in Haiti. Neil Buhne continued as the United Nations Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator in Sri Lanka until he was promoted to Director of Geneva Liaison Office of the UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery in 2011.  And Amin Awad was given a substantial promotion after his post as the Representative for UNHCR in Sri Lanka when he was appointed in 2009 as Director of UNHCR’s Department of Emergency, Security and Support  in Geneva.

Conflicts of interest

Throughout this report is are various underlying narrative of conflicts of interests: between the agencies’ need for objectivity and the need and desire to raise more donor monies; between the NGOs who collaborate with the UN agencies in the cluster system and the clamouring for media attention that does go on behind the scenes; the interconnectivity between media attention, raising donor funds and sticking to a mandate that is not in the explicit (or implicit) interest of raising donor monies; between the UN agencies’ need to focus on their mandate while not creating a diplomatic scene which will result in their being partially or completely ushered out of the country; and between the very subtle ways in which missions are sabotaged or not executed at all in the name of not disturbing the status quo of that agency (ie. that agency’s relationship to other UN agencies and NGOs or that agency’s relationship to the media image it wishes to maintain) in order for donor dollars to continue to flow in.  A few more examples are mentioned in relationship to the UN mission in Sri Lanka which entail conflicts of interest in the fields of international policy and inter-agency policy between the United Nations and other NGOs in the country.

A former UN worker who asked to remain anonymous told me:  “The Americans were very confused in their policy.  They would send USAID teams to discuss the humanitarian principals and they would be completely contradictory in their statements.  I remember the ambassador spent the weekend with us and he was concerned by the disappearances and all the security zones that were set up.  But I remember the Americans, the very same week, gave a load of equipment to the Naval base which contradicted their concerns with some sort of military assistance.”  Such pervasive structural and political conflicts of interest render non-credible the premise of development agencies which claim a desire to help countries in crisis.”  He also went on to note more obtuse conflicts of interests:  “Agencies representing the cluster were cutting their own deals, interacting with military.  People were in dreadful conditions and displaced time and time again; people in rags, with no food and medicine were restricted; half rations were implemented.  And there was not accountability for the various conflicts of interest evident on the ground.”

One UNICEF worker tells me about being called a “liability” by head of UNICEF, Philippe Duamelle and how this was in itself a conflict of interest since Duamelle had no interest in collaborating with the other agencies, or collaborating with those among his own staff:  “UNICEF wanted to build a rehabilitation centre for former child soldiers.  And as I was leaving I was told that Philippe Duamelle thought I was a liability.  And I said to this person, ”Why? because I was a liability for the children or to UNICEF?”  I would say this says something about how they are acting. We should have been together on these issues, but he was not.  In Geneva they know this was happening in Sir Lanka, in Geneva they know this is happening in Haiti.”

Natalie Grove and seven other UN staff also reported to me the conflicts of interest which grew out of UNHCR’s and UNICEF’s unwelcome attitude towards cluster meetings and collaborations, a formation which had evolved from the umbrella group.  This proved to be a great conflict of interest in terms of the 11 convoys sent to the Vanni wherein UNICEF decided to act in complete abandon to any notion of cooperation with other NGOs in the field.  Likewise UNHCR acted with complete disregard to the reality on the ground of the Sri Lankan government’s human rights violations, the myriad violations of UN Resolution 1612, malnutrition in the Vanni, and the elision of all complaints made by its own staff and other UN agency staff regarding every heretofore mentioned.  The conflicts of interest regarding professional ethics are clear and yet somehow dozens of UN staff were silenced or ignored after raising their voices regarding the incidents contained within this report.

Final Impressions

Every UN staff member whom I interviewed sees various options that the UN could have chosen in order to respond to the human rights abuses rather than remain in silence, the posture that dominated the United Nations in the final months of the conflict.  While each UN staff member acknowledges the importance of advocacy within the country, they were unanimous in their beliefs that the United Nations did not do enough and enabled a situation of human rights abuses to include, according to many, genocide.  This report is replete with options that each of these twelve informants details.  Here we see some concluding remarks made by some of these informants which attempt to bring to the fore some of the more structural problems of the United Nations in both Sri Lanka and Haiti.  It is no coincidence that several of these UN staff members sought me out, asking me to document their stories—for they witnessed a pattern in UN’s which demonstrated its inability to deal with human rights violations in both Sri Lanka and Haiti. Many told me what they saw in Haiti was exactly the same pattern of abuse as in Haiti, where in Sri Lanka there was the recruitment of child soldiers, in Haiti there was the trafficking of children.  These observations below reveal some of this sentiment.

Susan elaborates how she sees the problem of bringing the human rights atrocities to light: “There were many ways of addressing this problem after we were told to leave—there are many ways of addressing this matter now. The Secretary General could have made the call, someone could have gone to the press.  I think media pressure can work.  If you don’t have agencies that have an incentive to get involved, they have to play a delicate game of maintaining a presence in the country and advocating.”

Nathalie Grove’s assessment of the situation echos those of her colleagues. Grove notes:  “My impressions are about the people who had been there those final six to nine months, and who had seen the way the UN camps had become detention centres, manned by the Sri Lankan army. We built those, IOM built those, UNICEF organised them—people stayed on and tried to deal with the human emergency. When you go that far you do need to service these camps, like we did for the Sri Lankan government.  After three months, there was this feeling that you could not keep faith in this situation.  Many in the OCHA office left, people were discouraged. What we need to know is what is the failing of the humanitarian response there and it is important to know who did what and why? There were some dreadful decisions made about these IDP camps.  And there are so many things frustratingly written up as lessons learned.  But you really can’t call them lessons learned if you keep repeating the same mistakes.  There is a different story to tell.  Were people actually doing a bad job?  If I am a water engineer and I make a latrine that doesn’t work, I am a shitty engineer. But if I deliberately design a faulty latrine, then this is where the incompetence from the moral bankruptcy  needs to be decided.  It is not just bad decisions or incompetency. My problem is not with Caroline [Bakker] or with Philippe [Duamelle]—it is something else within the failing of the humanitarian response.”

Another UNICEF officer goes on to detail the organisation’s failures:  “Andrew Brooks is an example of a good person who didn’t do his job. He wants to do the right thing, but for whatever reason at an institutional level, he chose to do nothing, to say nothing, not to support the people he should have supported.  And I told him this to his face—I said he didn’t collectively do enough. I see the results every day of what he didn’t do.  Again I think the story is less a prediction of if the UN behaved better this many children would not have been trafficked, recruited or died. It’s simply this:  why were they not allowed to do their job?  Perhaps the Sri Lankan  government was so corrupt and stubborn, so powerful, so wilful that nothing would have changed. No matter what Neil Buhne said in the media, nothing might not have changed no matter what position UNHCR or UNICEF took.  But we don’t  know this.  And that can’t be the debate—the debate cannot be about an unknown which is would it have made any difference if we would have done it differently. What is very clear is that it should have been done differently.  If it failed to have an impact the UN has done its job, it’s reported, it’s adhered to its principles.  If the Sri Lankan  government continues to behave in this way or the outcome is the same—ok we lost out, but we did all we could. Can UNICEF say that they did everything they could to protect the rights of children? Has UNICEF done everything in its power to prevent the trafficking of children.  If the system of international trafficking is better than our powers at UNICEF, than we have to get better at our jobs.  You cannot know what the other will do, you can only act within your mandate.”

These conclusions of the problems within the humanitarian efforts made by UN agencies in Sri Lanka resonated with each and every interview I conducted. Simply put, the repetition of the above-mentioned paradigms indicates a systemic problem in the United Nations’ approach to development and humanitarian aid beginning with the ethos of what “humanitarian work” means on a human scale and how any such work ought to be recognised, theorised, organised and executed, if at all.  This latter thought is something that several interlocutors mentioned during the interview process, not as an exasperated plea to stop all humanitarian work, but as a need for current forms of human intervention in economically and politically delicate situations to be rethought completely, from the top down.  Also what is clear from these 12 interlocutors is that there is a desperate demand to rethink the human mechanisms—regardless of agency—in the field related to transparence, the execution of each agency’s mission, and an astute scrutiny of the links between donors and projects.  For instance, there needs to be an unmitigated process for any UN staff member to raise complaints or calls for investigations without suffering repercussions against their person or employment.  These workers need to have bilateral access to the very mission that on the one hand is supposed to authorise their work whilst concomitant to their projects they are being silenced by senior staff or having their reports tossed aside and obfuscated in the processes that occur post-mission.  Moreover, the way in which occurrences in the field of one UN agency or NGO paying off those seeking shelter to put up their tents and take down those of a competing NGO need to be treated as serious ethical violations. Similarly, UNICEF’s refusal to dialogue with other NGOs to ship humanitarian items—not cricket bats and chalkboards—needs to addressed on an official level as severely as it has been addressed by those workers on the ground who left their posts in protest to such abuses.

Also notable within the testimonies of the subjects of this report are the observations which many view as a mechanism used by UN agencies for covering up the acts of negligence which they have each cited in their End of Mission reports, namely the promotion of senior level UN officials wh .  According to all twelve informants here, the key players within UN agencies have not suffered any repercussions for the delinquency of their professional duties towards the mission of their respective agencies.  The top senior level players to whom they refer in Sri Lanka are namely Philippe Duamelle, Amin Awad, Neil Buhne and Andy Brooks.  Each of these men has either been shifted in duty station or given a significant promotion with absolutely no inquiry into the repeated End of Mission reports which do clearly put these men’s actions and ethics into question.

This report is a collective statement of individual experiences by twelve UN workers who lived and witnessed incredible abuses of the mission that they were supposed to fulfil in Sri Lanka.  Ultimately this study reveals repeated and corroborating testimony of those humanitarian workers and one press agent who witnessed and experienced an array of abuses which brought them within months of their missions in Sri Lanka to speak out.  Each and every interlocutor has compared the abuses in Sri Lanka to various abuses they witnessed in Haiti.  There seems to no doubt that changes need to be made within these agencies not to mention within the hierarchy of the United Nations which has demonstrated itself in Sri Lanka as an organisation which makes decisions that are often more political than in the interest of the people it ostensibly serves.

[1]  Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010, p. 347, http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2010, (19 May) US Department of State, 2009 Human Rights Report: Sri Lanka, 11 March 2010,

Arun Ghosh is a British-Asian clarinettist, composer and music educator.  Conceived in Calcutta, bred in Bolton, matured in Manchester and now living in London, Arun Ghosh’s musical vision and vocabulary reflect his rich geographical heritage.

Ghosh released his debut album “Northern Namaste” in 2008, and his second album, “Primal Odyssey” in Autumn 2011, both on camoci records. Both albums have received widespread critical acclaim and extensive airplay, and are prime contemporary examples of the IndoJazz genre.  The first Arun Ghosh IndoJazz Sextet performance took place at the London Jazz Festival in 2007 and Ghosh has since lit up the British jazz scene with numerous intense and cathartic performances at clubs, festivals and melas in London and around Britain. Internationally, Ghosh has performed at festivals and venues in France, Germany, Austria, India, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

In 2008, Ghosh was selected for Edition IV of the Jerwood/PRS Foundation ‘Take Five’ initiative for emerging jazz musicians produced by Serious and in 2009, he was invited to perform at the jazzahead! Festival in Bremen, Germany as part of the UK showcase presented by Jazz Services.  In 2010, he was made an Associate Artist at The Albany Theatre, London ˆ a position still held and in April 2011, Ghosh was made an Artist-in-Residence for the Southbank’s Alchemy Festival. September 2011 saw Ghosh feature as the cover star for Jazzwise magazine, the UK’s biggest selling jazz magazine and the end of the year saw Ghosh become an official Rico UK Artist.  Ghosh is one of the BT Celebrity Storytellers for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics and will also appear as a featured artist for the BT River of Music events as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Arun Ghosh’s music embodies a seamless syncretism of blues and beats indigenous to North Indian rāgas.  Ghosh takes this fusion and adds to it a splash of urban funk, postmodern punk, and the contemporary groove of rock ‘n roll set amidst a precipitation of dub bass and his rāg explorations. Together this confluence of various musical forms creates a sub-genre reminiscent of Coletrane’s harmonically static style which allows for rhythmic and melodic improvisation.  Arun Ghosh’s second album, Primal Odyssey, was released in October 2011 on camoci records and represents his exploration of the sound of the classical jazz ensemble with his Horn E Bass Quintet. 

Recently I met up with Arun Ghosh in a coffee shop around the corner from the BBC Broadcasting House where he had just come from a live interview with Cerys Mathews.  Arun generously shared his time to participate in a second interview that morning with me. 

Vigo:  Arun, thank you for meeting with me this morning.  Could you begin by talking a bit about your background and introduction to music?

Ghosh:  I grew up in the north of England in a town called Bolton. It’s a small town near Manchester.  My dad is from West Bengal and my mum is Sindhi, from Sindh, which later became a part of Pakistan. And I grew up in Britain. There was no real music in the family but I was always encouraged to play.  I started from a young age playing music in school—the recorder and the violin and instruments like that.  I knew right away that music was the real driving force in my life and from that time and I just carried on playing and making up my own tunes.  I started playing the clarinet when I was twelve or thirteen.   That was partly because I was told it was a good instrument for jazz.  By that point I was into jazz.  I was listening to Courtney Pine playing on the television at the Free Nelson Mandela concert and I was really taken with it. I realised that the music I liked had that kind of sound—that sort of jazz thing.  I started making up my own music and improvising a little bit, not really working too hard on it.  I was still playing classical music really and I thought of myself as…well, I was learning from the instrument in this way.  In the meantime I was growing up and listening to all sorts of music, all the music you are exposed to in Britain—Indie music, hip-hop, rock, all sorts of things, but I was still always into jazz.  And as I got older and started performing more jazz, I realised that I was looking for new forms of improvisation and went back into Indian music. I had listened to Indian music when I was growing up, taken by my family to concerts and there was always Indian music being played at home.  It really just resonated with me again.  Once I started  playing it and working with tabla players,  getting more involved in Indian music and listening to it more and thinking about it more, I realised that it was something that was really inside me and it started to affect how I was playing, what I was choosing to write, how I was thinking about music, and so on.

Photo by Sam Ellis.

Vigo:  Bengal is one of the major artistic centres of India for poetry, music and the sciences.  I wonder if you were particularly influenced by Bengali music and culture.

Ghosh:  I have been exposed to the music of Tagore and specifically Ali Akbar Khan.  Also Ravi Shankar has this close Bengali heritage as well. I know exactly what you are saying about the kind of love of poetry, art and music and it was always present in my life.  When I was growing up I was introduced to Rabindra Sangeet by family and friends to the extent that the songs became very important to me.  I couldn’t understand most of it because it was a quite high Bengali language but I always loved the inflections. So when I play Tagore songs I am playing them word for word as such.  I have a recording on my first album of  O Aamar Desher Mati where Tagore is singing about his homeland, his beloved Bengal and that is something I really wanted to capture.

Vigo:  We have similar upbringings I see. My father is Gujarati and I was raised with North Indian music but more so we had Gandhi and, well, you can’t compete with that…[laughing]

Ghosh:  Well, we had Subhas Chandra Bose, the real radical…

Vigo: I wish we had more Gujarati musician references growing up because whenever we misbehaved in school or at home, my father would have us read Martin Luther King and Gandhi [Arun laughs] and the next two weeks at the dining table conversations revolved around our social consciousness readings. What impressed me growing up was, being a child of a Gujarati father while being raised in New Orleans, we were exposed to all sorts of music and my father strictly enforced Indian music on Saturdays in the house.  My siblings and I hated it because we just heard noise as our ears were untrained and unaccustomed to these sounds.  What I really love about your music is that its syncretism maintains a balance that is not about “equal” but rather it maintains a syncretism that is balanced in the sense of taking from various traditions and creating a new and unique style and form of sound.

Ghosh: I never tried to emulate a particular style.  So once I started to record my own music I realised what it was that I wanted to do.  I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sound like a traditional Indian musician—I hadn’t grow up there, I wasn’t playing that instrument, I didn’t have the training, and so on.  What I took on was more of a sense of it, a sense of where the rāgs were from, where the melodies were from, where the rhythms were from.  And it just touched me—I think it has helped in that I didn’t have the training because I didn’t need to try to sound a particular way.  I heard a rhythm, a dhin dha or a dadra, a dip chandi rhythm, or I heard rāg malkos or vairagi and they just made sense to me.  I basically taught myself and I shaped my understanding of music inside rather than being told what it was.  I think that is why my music has its own sound.  At the same time, once it started coming into my jazz sound it was important to me that it wasn’t just a kind of Indian/Eastern styles melodies over a groove.  It was important that the drums played closely with the taal that we were in, and that the harmony, the baseline, the chords, everything all came from the rāg.  So I wasn’t mixing and matching—I had to say to the musicians, “Don’t play that note that’s not in this scale.”  So I was close enough to the music for that to be important but also detached enough from it to not mind about certain idiosyncrasies that developed because of who I was.  I think in that first album it was more important to have that Indian sound—we used tabla throughout and all the tunes were driven by the tabla.  I recorded the tabla first and then played the clarinet and then did the drums and so on because I wanted it all to be based on it so that the base patterns fitted with the groove of the tabla.  Through doing this and doing very much a studio album on Northern Namaste because I was working in the studio with Pro Tools and so on, I was able to shape it exactly how I wanted and because of this I got to work out exactly how I wanted my grooves to be.

Vigo: You produced it then?

Ghosh:  With the engineer, I was working with Will Worsley.  But we were working very closely together chopping up the loops and so on.  When it came to recording the second album by then I had a live working band and I knew how I wanted things to be.  In that time I had started to take the tabla away because I felt that I wanted the drums and the bass to open up much more rhythmically while staying true enough and strong enough to the original tabla patterns that had given birth to them.  And this then coincided with a move that we made to add an extra horn in the mix.  So before it was clarinet and saxophone, we added bass clarinet as well giving us this three horn front line. This was very much modelled on Bismillah Khan’s ensembles where he had two shehnais accompanying him as well as dolakh and tabla. I love the sound of those wind instruments playing together—playing the melody in unison or playing strongly rooted harmonies or just playing a drone underneath as we improvised and so on.  It led to this quite free-flowing improvisational way of arranging a piece. It was very spontaneous and there was just something for me in those two extra wind instruments that really gave a solidity to the sound.  Since then there that has been the sound that I have wanted to make.  So that is the sound of the new album, Primal Odyssey—the clarinet, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, double bass and drums.

Vigo: The group with whom you were playing at Foyles Bookstore during the London Jazz Festival last Fall, are they your regular ensemble?

Ghosh:  Well it’s slightly different because we didn’t have the bass clarinet that day so we used the alto sax instead.  I sort of have a regular circle of musicians who drop in and out when certain people can’t do things.  What is good about that is that it helps keep the sound fresh, always bringing new kinds of ways of looking at a tune.  Also if you haven’t rehearsed something but everybody knows how it is supposed to sound this means that the music can sound quite spontaneous.   So when we were playing that afternoon whilst everybody knew the tunes, it was clear that it could go anywhere and there was no set way of playing it.  That is quite important to me and it is very much the Indian aesthetic as well.

Vigo:  It is also part of the jazz tradition, especially present in the music musicians like of Billie Holiday.  I have listened to hundreds of her recordings and no two recordings of the same song are alike.  Also similar is Om Kalthoum’s repertoire as she reinvents song in each new performance.  Your performances recall this kind of temporality, this modality of being in the moment.  Even the way you move speaks to this kind of investment in the here and now which I much admire.
Ghosh: Performance is really important to me in terms of what I get out of myself and what I want to give.

Photo by Sam Ellis.

Vigo:  Immediately after the concert you gave at Foyles Bookstore, I literally ran across the river to catch Archie Shepp in concert at the Southbank Centre.  During that show’s intermission I was talking about your concert earlier that evening with two audience members who told me that you are active in community work and education.  Tell me about your work with children and adolescents here in London.

Ghosh:  I do lots and lots of different things.  Currently I am doing work with a big band at a school in East London—we are developing music and we are doing my music. That’s kind of interesting. I do a lot with young people who have never played music.  I am also introducing the young people to Indian music and making beats and so on.  When I am working with young people it is very “hands on” and we just play music really.  I have a way of getting through to young people because a lot of my music is quite easy in some ways—it is built on simple melodies or simple rhythms or looping base lines or looped drum patterns. So it works very well to have that headspace to work with young people because I am quite open-minded.  I think the great thing about produced and electronic music is that you can make it very easily.  Young people kind of have a great mastery of technology instinctively even if they have never used it before.  And they are also kind of experimental in terms of what they are prepared to play.  So they’ll listen to a crazy loop they’ve made, at times by accident, and they will really dig it.

Vigo:  What do you think about the place of music education today with the arts programs being cut and children having increasing difficulty in accessing music or any of the arts?

Ghosh:  Well, I think that music as we all know is an amazing thing to grow up with.  The more people who can be exposed to making it the better because it is such a great thing to be dedicated to but also because it changes the way you think about the music you hear and life in general.  I think people should be exposed to how music is created and what it is even if they don’t necessarily want to play it because I think that this kind of understanding is very important. What is difficult about the workshops I do is that I have young people that I would like to work further with but we only have one day, a week or even a one-session or two for a project.  So you don’t get the chance to develop something fully partly because you have to do something quickly and so you do something quite simply so you don’t necessarily explain.   I’ll say to them, “Use this combination of notes to make the base line and I won’t necessarily have the chance to tell them that this comes from the pentatonic scale that is a very strong combination of notes.  I just think that music education as it stands in this country hasn’t worked so well across the board because it’s been focused on people learning instrumentally (which is fine obviously) but they are learning to play just for music. That is to say they are learning in the Western tradition and you need a lot of people quite skilled in their instruments not being able to improvise or make up their own music.  Equally I think that kind of approach to playing music doesn’t turn a lot of people on and a lot of people would much rather be making electronic music.

What I would really like is for every young person in this country to be entitled to an hour’s worth of tuition—or at least half an hour—per week.  One on one is really important—there is only so much you can do in a big group. The problem with groups is that certain people always shout louder and are more keen and you don’t want to stifle that, but equally you are very aware that there are people who are too shy to say anything.  I think one on one is important even if it is shorter than half an hour.  If they want to play the cello, they should get to play the cello; if they are interested in playing the electric guitar or in singing or producing music or so on, and somehow they should be given that starting point so that they can work on their art.  What they do in Venezuela is amazing, for example. And the whole point of that is that people have got instruments to play and that is done across the board.  They are just dedicated to music education and here in the UK it is still quite elitist.  I know the previous Labour government did have a dream of universal music education for everyone but it started being cut.  In theory every child was entitled to free music tuition and it was never realised.  The workshops I do tend not to be like that—they involve working with a group in a school or a community centre, or also in the context of drama.  So I’ll be working with a youth theatre group where a couple of them will work on the music with me.

Vigo: How do you place British jazz, in the world today amidst other jazz traditions in the world from South Africa to Italy to Brazil, for instance?

Ghosh:  The amazing thing about jazz is that it is a global music from its starting point through the links between Africa, America and Europe and how this music combines politics and culture in order to create and to be what jazz wants.  Because of that it is such a universal music as it spread across the world people have made it their own.  So when you hear vulcan bands appropriating jazz harmonies and so on—you hear it in Klezmer music, you hear it in Italian and French music, we are hearing it in Indian music. It is just a headspace really with people taking their style of melodies and their style of rhythms and using it in a jazz context.

Vigo:  Would you say that jazz is one of those genres of music that is syncretic par excellence in the sense that it is one of the major music styles that has been fluidly appropriated within various culturally specific musical traditions?

Ghosh:  Yes, I would say so.  And I think also because in the history of the world jazz is a relatively new music, in that sense as it is.  I think jazz is always of the “now”.  I would say the same about reggae and I would say the same about hip hop and rock ‘n roll in terms of music developed in the last century.

Vigo:  So will we be seeing a rock ‘n roll album from you any time soon?

Ghosh:  I think my music is rock ‘n roll.  I think Primal Odyssey is very much a rock ’n roll album in terms of its drive and its influence and what it is doing. It is a mentality isn’t it really. Just as jazz is and in some ways, just as Indian music is.  It doesn’t have to be of the traditional instrumentation—it’s the spirit of it, isn’t it.

Links to Arun Ghosh:
www.arunghosh.co.uk
www.facebook.com/arunghoshmusic
www.soundcloud.com/arunghosh
www.twitter.com/arunghosh
www.youtube.com/camocivision

Brian Barnes studied at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design from 1961 to 1962 and the Royal College of Art 1962–1966. Based in Battersea, London since 1967, Barnes is known for his large, colourful murals in Battersea and throughout the London area, often designed in collaboration with local groups.  To date his most famous mural is “The Battersea Mural: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” also known as ”Morgan’s Wall” at Battersea Bridge road which was designed in 1976 and then collaboratively painted with a group of local residents from 1976 through 1978.  The 276-foot wide mural was demolished in 1979 by the Morgan Crucible Company.   Other important murals by Barnes include “Seaside Picture”, Thessaly Road (1979), “Nuclear Dawn” in Brixton (1981) (part of the Brixton murals), “Riders of the Apocalypse”, Cold Blow Lane, Deptford (1983),  the “HG Wells Mural”, Market Square, Bromley, (1986), “Battersea in Perspective”, Dagnall Street (1988), and the “Stockwell War Memorial”, also known as the “The Violette Szabo Mural” (2001).  Controversy over Barnes’ addition of Jean Charles de Menezes to the memorial broke out in 2005 and eventually this image was removed.  Barnes works as a printmaker, in particular dealing with local campaigns and issues, and he was also involved in the long-standing campaign to preserve Battersea Power Station. He founded the Battersea Power Station Community Group in 1983, to see that the listed building is preserved and that local people are involved in the redevelopment.  In 2005 Brian Barnes was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to the community in Battersea, London.

I visited Brian Barnes in his printshop in Wandsworth one morning and we sat down to discuss his art, social housing and capitalism.

Barnes:  The Battersea mural was 276 feet by 18 to 12 feet.  We were a group of people who collaborated on planning issues and I worked with with a voluntary organisation, the Mural Workshop, to set up the project.  We called ourselves Battersea Redevelopment Action Group [which was established] to make sure that planning related to local people and provided affordable housing, jobs and open spaces for all the people rather than the demolition of all the industries losing the jobs and the building of luxury flats. We have learned subsequently over the last 30 years that this was not to be.

Vigo: So in 1976 you decided to undertake a mural project. How did you choose the site?

Barnes: It was part of a campaign to get the site handed over to local people rather than be turned into private housing. It wasn’t our wall but we gained permission from the owner, the Morgan Crucible Company, to paint the mural.  The wall was later demolished when the factory was torn down.

Vigo:  Can you describe the processes you engaged from planning the mural to its construction?

Barnes:  No. [He laughs.]  Obviously we had to start with a design but we also went to various organisations in the community to ask them what they wanted it to be about. We sent a questionnaire to these organisations—tenant and residents associations, action groups, trade organisations, housing organisations—asking them what the mural be about if you were doing it yourselves.  So they gave us a list of things to get us started.  There were about 60 people involved in the mural’s painting with some people doing longstanding work and others infrequently contributing.  No other professional artists were involved—just me—and local people.  There were children, pensioners, people on the estates.  We painted the mural for two years, not every day.

Painting of “The Battersea Mural” in 1977

Vigo: How many of those people who were involved do you still see in the neighbourhood today?

Barnes: Uh [long pause]…none. The area has become polarised between very rich people and very poor people.  So the only housing now for poor people is from the estate where the council allocates housing to the really really poor people, who’ve got families and maybe disabled children.  And then rich people have moved into all the developments along the Thames and all the small housing. Even some of the council housing has been turned into luxury accommodation.  So the ordinary middle class people have moved away out of the area—they can’t afford it.  Many are not eligible for local authority housing and can’t afford to live in Battersea, so mostly people have moved.  Only very tenacious people have remained, like me.  This borough is now the fifth richest in London.

Vigo:  So the purpose of the mural in retrospect was purely symbolic?

Barnes:  It was a turning point. None of those things [depicted in the mural] happened.

Vigo:  I noticed.  And ironically many of these council houses that have been bought by the very occupants to whom social housing was made available. It seems problematic, if not immoral.

Barnes:  What has happened is that many of the people who bought their flats were then able to move out.  They kept the flat and then they moved out and then let it to people for much more rent than they had to pay themselves.  It was a the philosophy by the Tory council.  It was about offering these flats at a very huge discount at 70% off, so you only had to pay 30% cost.  So it was like an offer you couldn’t refuse on the understanding that if you are an owner/occupier or you sell again, that person will then vote Tory.  It seems to have worked.

Vigo: So this mural represents all that was really good about social housing just before the rise of Thatcher.

Barnes: Panorama did a program with the mural as an illustration called “When the Tories Take Over.”  This television documentary was about Wandsworth Council the year before Margaret Thatcher came to power.  And it just talked about the mural and that housing would no longer be for local people, there will be no facilities for children and all the things that people wanted that were shown in the mural would not happen after the Tories took over.  It was prophetic—it was exactly what happened.

Vigo:  What were some of those images that people dreamt for their futures?

“The Battersea Mural” (1978)

Barnes: They didn’t want to live in the big blocks of flats—they wanted small houses with gardens, family units where they could have their children on the ground floor.  People didn’t really want to live in these tower blocks with their families.  They are not really designed for families with children.  So people wanted these small houses and they aspired to a small council house that you might have got in the 30s, 40’s, 50’s—there were these big complexes of semi-detached houses. None of these flats in those days. But then in London it became twenty-story-high flats and people didn’t want to live in them. People wanted public transport and to have car-free streets where children can play safely, playgrounds, a public swimming pool, and allotments where they could grow food.  There were some allotments in Battersea; they wanted more. There are none now.  Industry—they wanted jobs.

Vigo: So the idea for the mural was to present these dreams as both the pictorial and realisable?

Barnes: Yes.

Vigo: Out of all these dreams, did any come true?

Barnes: There is quite a good transport system now—the buses are quite good.  Some of the things we swept away with a broom have gone like the big old, the polluting factories, the theme park in Battersea Park never happened and even the ugly blocks of the Department of the Environment which were in Victoria were demolished.  Thatcher got rid of all the jobs for people in this area: the power station which was working so there about 300 people working there and that was closed in 1983; the Morgan Crucible Company, that was 200-300 jobs in industry—they made carbon products (ie. switches); then there was the distillery Booth’s Gin; a waste paper merchant; a glass factory; gas works (all gone now); cement making factories (a few still exist) and there are lots of other industries which were lost.

Vigo:  On the site of the mural, what exists there today?
Barnes: Quite a nice complex of luxury housing—the type of housing that people wanted from the mural: low-rise, street-pattern housing.  Thatcher brought in the “right to buy” so if anybody had been there as a tenant they would have bought there and then sold again.

Vigo:  This is part of the problem isn’t it?  Some would argue that it is human nature to be selfish, but then I find it terribly problematic that those receiving housing benefits believe in community until the moment the are offered the “right to buy” and they become the very capitalists they had previously decried.   Sadly many of these new home owners are today part of the problem as to the present housing crisis.  Doesn’t the mural represent the turn in social thought demonstrating this switch in thought, this hypocrisy between selfish, individual benefit versus communal coherence and solidarity?

Barnes:  This estate is a good example—it was an unpopular place, the flats on this block. So when there was the “right to buy,” these flats were being sold and people were buying them and then losing money.  Many bought them for £30,000 back in the 1980 and they would be repossessed by mortgage lenders after people defaulted on payments.  Then these mortgage lenders would go into receivership and they would turn around and sell these properties at auctions—sometimes two flats for £15,000!  And that is where you couldn’t refuse to buy it. It was cheaper to buy your flat, than to pay rent.  If you were paying the full rent you got a better deal on a mortgage—it was actually a financial incentive rather than capitalism—and you saved money.

Brian Barnes painting the “The Battersea Mural” (1977)

Vigo:  But this situation does pose ethical and social problems today where you have in London many twenty and thirty-year olds who cannot afford to rent in the city and who have no way of getting social housing.  Ironically many of these people are now renting from the very former council housing tenant, renting the very flats that were intended to be shared by society and not privately owned.

Barnes:  My wife conducted the census last year on this estate and so a lot of the flats are full of young Eastern Europeans paying rent—four or five people in a flat—paying a landlord each upwards of £300, or whatever, and he is getting a lot of money. What happened is that a lot of speculators offered to help people to buy their flats if they would sell it to them—so a speculator would ask a tenant to put in for the “right to buy” and provide the money for it.  So then it became part of an empire of landlords who had ex-council flats who in turn would give people say £10,000 to move.  So this gave the buyers a 70% discount and the local resident was given money to move out of the neighbourhood.  In the end, the person who bought the property would have a cheap flat.  About 50% of the flats are occupied by these immigrant tenants and they can only stay six months—the landlord can rent for six months and then toss them out.

“The Battersea Mural” (1978)

Vigo: I have to say walking here to meet you I was impressed by the buildings and the inner green space and the sculptures…

Barnes: I have to say that our project was responsible for those sculptures—we engaged a sculptress to make them.

Vigo: So you look at this community and effectively all traces of that social group from 1978 are erased. What are the traces of the mural that exist?  I heard you have a plywood replica of it.

Barnes:  That’s here—not in this room.  But I do have two-thirds of the mural in replica.  It has been up a couple of times.  [He shows me a photo of the replica.]

Replica of “The Battersea Mural” (1978)

Vigo:  Do you find that the mural project brought the community together or was the project just a moment whose spirit is now lost?

Barnes: There was a totally different community then…completely different. It’s not like that now.  I think the only way I work is with the school—that is where the community is now. Community is not out there in tenants’ associations or residents’ association because of these very problems we are discussing—the disintegration of community by slumlords where those people have only got six months to be in the borough means that they don’t have any commitment to the community. They just work, come home, work, come home and then they pay the rent.  But they are beginning to stay—some are marrying English men or women and are becoming part of the regular community.  So many of the people I work with in the school are Portuguese and Eastern European people with children in the school and are now part of the Parents Teachers Association. They have the spirit that used to be in the borough.

Vigo: What about the communications between those who are here from the old community and the newer, posh crowd living in the privatised sectors?  Do you keep points of communication open?

Barnes:   [He laughs.]  No, we robbed them.  They won’t come here—there is a line, Battersea Park Road.  They will only come to Tesco and scuffle back.  Also, the government is trying to clamp down on tenants here in our blocks who have moved out and illegally sublet their flats for more money—so they live somewhere else and rent out their flats for a large profit. The Tory government is clamping down on this here and in Westminster especially.  Wandsworth Council wants to make it that all new council tenants have six months tenure, not tenure for life.  And if you become richer you have to move out and if you become unemployed you can’t be allocated a house.

Vigo: I cannot say I disagree that social housing should be for those in need and ought to be under periodic re-evaluation for those whose economic and personal circumstances have changed. There seems to be a misdirected critique from both the Left and Right when it comes to discussing social housing–the Left rebukes criticism of the abuses that do occur and so there is this perpetual wall of resistanc on the Left to any sort of re-evaluation of social housing while the Right pretends that social housing is somehow always a form of entitlement.  There must be a way for us to discuss the problems of social housing for which the Battersea mural’s vision remains apotheosis.  For instance, I know of many people in the city who received their council flats when they were students and today are professionals still living in flats they no longer economically need; yet there are many Londoners who struggle to find affordable housing due to occupying low-wage jobs.

Barnes: It is wrong that people take advantage of the system.  There are also a lot of people who pretend to be single when they have a partner with whom they live. If they don’t have a partner they can get a flat more easily, so some pretend that they don’t have a partner so they can get a two bedroom flat for the children.

Vigo:   So there is a privileging of single parents over married parents and both these groups over single people?

Barnes:  Yes.  That is why people were kind of keen to realise the “right to buy” because they were unfairly treated if they earned just over the limit to pay the full rent, the full tax as it was then, and it would more—it would be twice as much than if you got a mortgage from Halifax. So it was economically stupid not to do it.  I would have argued against it but then everybody else was doing it and the whole tenure of everywhere changed—I am still battling away, you know, but it is very hard when all these other people have none of your ethos and they rent out their flat or treat it as a second home.

Vigo:  This raises serious questions about community because I am still a Marxist—I might be the only person on the planet who admits this [Brian laughs and I join in]… But I do believe we should remain conscious when we are taking rather than sharing in community resources.

Barnes:  I think a lot of that is lost. On this estate I am working on this estate with the SWP (Socialist Worker Party) which I don’t particularly like.  There is an issue where one of the tenant’s mother is being threatened with eviction by Wandsworth Council because her son has been found guilty of rioting so they are going to throw out the mum and the sister because of the boy and his actions.  They want to do it and they are going to do it—that’s how bad they are in this borough.

Vigo: What I like about murals is that they are impermanent—they deteriorate due to the elements and this fact alone requires a rethinking of both the artefact itself and more importantly, the political message therein.  As we see with the Battersea mural, the ethos and spirit of the late 1970s was toppled by the greed of many who just wanted to get ahead. And here we see public space which is rendered private by the construction of luxury flats for the wealthy and by people who buy council flats intended for public use.  So today the issues of public space and shared resources are much more at the centre of the discussion.  So murals were once a thing of the poor neighbourhoods—from Mexico City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Port-au-Prince, Montreal, Brooklyn and London.  And now, not coincidentally, the murals have been toppled to remove the memory and to “gentrify” (“to people”)—that horrid word from the 1980s which “cleanses” space by removing the poor bodies and replacing them with the richer ones.  Murals today now occupy a strange social and artistic category that is almost in jeopardy because of this lack of social consciousness that is pervading these now “gentrified” communities.

Brian Barnes painting “Nuclear Dawn” in 1980

Barnes:  I think one of the things you are describing is that murals are thought to be in poor areas—you know Belfast, Brixton. They were thought to be poor people’s are—get the art out of the galleries into the streets and get people to participate in art as much as possible.  That is what we were into in the 1970s and 1980s.  But I think they won’t want a mural in rich Battersea—certainly not a political one—they will have John Paul Getty grinding it off the wall like he did with Rivera.

Vigo: Or they just knock them down to make another building.  But then there becomes a political co-optation of murals such as what happened in the early 1990s in New York City when the public transit authority (MTA) commissioned some murals, rendering them apolitical and more “art pieces” such as Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscope” in the Westbound B/Q tunnel going over the Manhattan Bridge or the various privately sponsored murals in London today whose sponsors can have direct political control over the content.

“The Violette Szabo Mural (2001)

Barnes:  The last really political mural I did was in 1983, the anti-nuclear mural down in Deptford which got me into a lot of trouble because I put up images of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.  I think I had the CIA and MI6 after me all the time [laughing] because I put these people on the mural and they were sensitive about nuclear weapons and cruise missiles both in America and the UK.  So to do a mural at this stage was dangerous I think—and I wasn’t really thinking how dangerous it was for me.  It is still there and now I am called a “Cold War artist” by the Imperial War Museum.

Vigo:  In Brooklyn there are so many wonderful murals that commemorate the Civil Rights movement—especially a wonderful mural dedicated to Medgar Evers—and more recently murals about 9/11. And what comes to mind is how murals have become more depoliticised as critique and now exist as pure memory, as memorial.  And so this recent phenomena of murals moving away from social critique to memorial buttresses the scene for any political mural’s exclusion, critique or removal. So like Diego Rivera’s mural, the contemporary answer to political murals is to remove them either directly or through censorship preventing their creation in the first place.

Barnes:  And Rivera made it again didn’t he?  He redid that mural for Ford Motor Company.  The right wing and the people who are involved in me lampooning them on a mural bring out every piece of armoury to stop you while you are doing it—-the press, your funding is cut, they do everything.  If I depict somebody on the mural, they don’t just try to get it erased, they try to erase me.  So Wandsworth Council said publicly, “They will never give Brian Barnes enough money to paint one brick.”  That is what they have said to me, so I will never get money from this local council.

“The Battersea Mural” (1978)

Vigo:  And now it is even sadder because it is no longer a problem of the left or right for they have become almost indistinguishable today.  It is a problem of truly constructing community.

Barnes: I keep seeing fantastic places for murals and I think, well, I will never permission for one thing and then I will never get money for another.  I’m ok around the school, because I am paid through the school, through an intermediary—that works for Wandsworth Council because they know I am going to be controlled in what I do.  I won’t be able to paint the Battersea Mural again in a school.

“Nuclear Dawn”, Brixton (1980)

Vigo:  Why don’t you just make another mural? [Brian laughs.] Or are there laws preventing you from doing so?

Barnes:  No, no laws—they would just paint it out.  Guerilla murals, well it’s Banksy now. Even he’s done wrong—he’s become a coffee table book. He’s kind of a one trick pony. He doesn’t really make a political comment with his work.

Vigo:  Well, he does but perhaps it is over now.  It becomes commodity because it is no longer a critique, the moment has passed.  Such as his mural with the children pledging allegiance to the flag of Tesco. Isn’t there a moment when the people should see the mural and turn around and say, “Hey, I am going to stop shopping at Tesco”.  So the component of political action is missing.

Barnes: It’s difficult because just today they [Tesco] were on the radio was saying “We are keeping down our prices for things people buy every day.” So people go there because they have to.

Vigo:  So Tesco is capitalism with a Communist face telling us “Brothers and sisters, we are working with you”?  [Brian laughs.]  There is that aspect as well to consider—the language of social praxis simulated borrowed and synthesised by capitalist strategy.

Barnes:  I do try to shop at the Co-Op as well but there aren’t as many Co-Ops as there are Tesco [laughing].

Vigo:  That is just it—instead of acting on political belief, we end up giving in, don’t we?  However, I do think we can do our best to resist.

Barnes: I’ll be straight out there to buy a sandwich in Tesco soon.  [laughing]  Where else do I get a sandwich?

Vigo: It’s just right there, isn’t it.

Barnes:  Yes. They have a very good selection of sandwiches—and for £2.

I was politically active within the gay community in New York City from the late 1980s through the 1990s, working on issues of what was then known as “gay rights.” With groups such as Act Up I worked on issues of equitable housing for gay men who were forcibly evicted from their apartments upon the death of their lover who held the lease, access to affordable and free healthcare by those living with HIV/AIDS, education and advocacy against homophobia within communities and the public school system, and access to affordable or free prescription medication for those living with HIV/AIDS.  These were just some of the issues facing many of us in the queer community in New York City at the end of the twentieth century.  Then in 1990 after recently deceased Malcolm Forbes was outed by journalist Michelangelo Signorile, discussions within the gay community shifted radically from healthcare and livelihood to that of one’s personal or political “coming out of the closet.”  Issues of privacy and public accountability of homophobic politicians were put into question and debates about the ethics of out took place in major US publications throughout the early 1990s. From this critique of outing public officials came the inauguration of self-outing as journalists, entertainers and other public figures began to engage in their own outing from the mid 1990s.  The freedom to be homosexual and to speak about one’s identity inevitably led to discussions regarding the equality of homosexual couples before the law, same-sex marriage, work-related benefits for same-sex partners, and legal access to adoption and reproductive rights.

By the end of the millennium the landscape of homosexuality in the United States had changed radically from the purely political and social to that of the personal as political through which the homosexual subject was then enabled to tell her “coming out” story freely and without fear of reprisal.  These stories today–even awkwardly for those of us who never left a closet because we refused any manifestation of having to conform to any one singular notion of sexuality–demarcate a point in which a certain truth is suddenly revealed to another.  For many homosexuals the “coming out story” lifted forever this taboo of speaking frankly or honestly about one facet of our identity, of our person.  Little did I suspect then, in my late twenties, that this would be one of the more easily opened closets I would encounter in my life.

I lived in New York City, a graduate student and young professor researching and teaching issues of gender, sexuality, anthropology and philosophy of science.  Certainly thoughts of a family were not only far from my mind, it was not uncommon for me when being asked for seating preference in a restaurant to point to the table with children and exclaim, “Anywhere far away from them.”  The joke was on me years later when in 2006 I decided to have a child through IUI (intrauterine insemination) and I became pregnant on my second attempt at the age of 39.  I was quite innocent about the entire process since I knew I wanted a loving relationship in my life and simply had found anything but this with my previous partners, the last of whom stalked me for over a year.  I had also come to personal realizations of my ability to nurture and love a child and to be a better mother than my own mother who holds the honorary Joan Crawford Prize of child rearing.  In short, I knew I wanted a healthy and loving relationship with a human and for most of my adult life I had assumed that the most important relationship I could have would necessarily be with another adult.  For me having a child was a logical extension of this process–of creating my own family, even without a partner.

Upon getting pregnant I continued the renovation of my house, I worked steadily upon research and book projects and undertook the search for the perfect nanny.  For months I interviewed candidate after candidate for the position of nanny–someone who could watch my child a few hours a day so I could bath, shop or go to yoga.  Months of searching left me with only a few solid candidates.  Dealing with pregnancy as a single queer woman had its own set of sitcom hilarity from the cab drivers who would tell me, “Now why did you do it at the hospital and spend perfectly good money to get pregnant? I would have helped you out for free!” one cab driver told me with a big smile on his face.  Others would share their divorce stories to exclaim, “I wish I had my child on my own since my ex-wife doesn’t let me see my daughter.”  And in a Montreal lesbian bar, I was given the “evil eye” for demonstrating my desire to be a single parent after having described my recent and rather disastrous relationships or attempts thereof with lesbians.  Overall I would have to stay that people were immensely supportive of me but the cultural baggage of sexism, homophobia, racism and classism reared their heads from time to time.

During my pregnancy what concerned me most were the allegedly “practical” ends of child rearing from the mountainous volumes of junk mail that arrived for me regarding life insurance and economic plans for the future education of my children to the sexist and classist presumptions about my child.  For instance, I did not wish to know the sex of my child and as such people would ask me, “But don’t you want to know?” Obviously my not wanting to know was in itself the answer to their question, but these individuals desperately needed to understand why I didn’t wish to know to which I would dryly state: “Sex is an invention.  I don’t think we should speak in terms of race or sex.  By giving into a system that creates such divisions we are repeating this.  For instance, why we have these valences demarcated on our driver’s licenses is mind-blowing to me.  After all we are driving a car, not fucking it.”  Others would push further and query, “But aren’t you dying to know?”  to which I would retort: “Are you asking me if I am dying to know if my child has a vagina or a penis?  If that is the case, no, I certainly am not.  If you are asking me–which is what I think you are insinuating–do I have a preference, the answer is no, of course not.  I want a healthy baby.”  And to the rare few who were more obnoxious in their insistence that I “had to know”, I would say, “Yes, I do have a preference: a hermaphrodite.”

And the sexism did not stop at my alleged “need to know” my child’s sex.  There were the questions from both women and men alike about the child’s “need” to have a “male role model”.  I would usually engage these questions head on with a deconstruction of sex by stating, “What makes you think that if I were with a man that both of us wouldn’t be the female role models, or that I might not be the male role model? What is a bloody ‘role model’ anyway?”   The discussions brought forth from such interactions were robust and often people would think about their own sexism implied within their questioning of my and my unborn child’s alleged “needs”. But there were times where I met those whose need to make me conform to their vision of parenting would persist. I was usually able to handle these interrogations with humorous retorts.  For instance, when one Haitian gentleman asked me, “How will you raise a child without a male figure present?” I answered, “The same way I will raise my child without the presence of my pet giraffe.”  He looked at me confused saying, “What does a pet giraffe have to do with having a child?” I responded, “Precisely as much as a “male figure” has to do with having a child. You know, I find most children in the West raised without any consciousness whatsoever of poverty, of our own countries’ imperialistic political and economic practices, but they still have hope to learn about this later in life.  There will always be something we are raised without in life.”  He looked up and smiled at me.

There were many times when parents would attempt to warn me about the task I was about to engage saying, “You will see–you will no longer sleep!  Say goodbye now to life as you know it.”  I always expected horror film music to start playing amidst these lectures (it never did) and I would usually answer such premonitions with , “I ordered the silent model.”  Others would make such comments as a means to discourage me which I could not really fathom from a personal perspective.  I would retort with my usual sarcasm about the fact that I planned for my child to bring in the bucks the minute he could sit up selling newspapers on a street corner.  I would even add a “kaching” just for effect. It seemed surreal to me that people currently engaged in child rearing would approach it with the same regard as wartime preparations.  But this is sadly how many in the West embrace parenthood–it is not an experience that is an incidental part of life but rather parenthood resembles a mission that must be undertaken with the same sort of planning, engineering and ethos that rocket launches entail.

The class situation was equally as unpredictable to me–I was truly puzzled by people’s need to project education and wealth onto my fetus. For those obsessed with my child going to the best schools and universities I would declare that my child would be an illiterate–albeit rich–plumber or electrician, joking of course.  I wanted to protect my child from expectations of any sort since it would be for her/him to decide all matters of life.  Some of my friends were perplexed as many of them were engrossed in the rat race typical to New York City parents where enrolling your child in preschool while the child was still in utero was considered a necessity.  I was told, “You don’t think of this now, but trust me, you will regret not getting on the list now.”  So “The List” became my reference for all the things I did not want to do.  And my not wanting to conform to such notions of parenthood was not in resistance to being “different” from the rest, but my reaction had much more to do with my having taught for over two decades in the university where I faced on a regular basis the products of parents who over-planned their children’s lives: university students with great doubt as to who they were, what they wanted to study, and tremendous fears of disappointing their parents.  So my response to this paradigm was that my child would be the king or queen (or both) of solar panels and I would proudly announce this telling those who insisted my child should be educated in a certain way, “I will retire and my child will take care of Mommy.”  My attempts to subvert were not always met with kind responses, but generally people in my life understood my desire to give my child the possibility of creating his/her own life far away from the weights of my own or society’s expectations.

Finally, my beautiful child was born in February 2007 and I was beyond euphoric.  I understood only then what parents meant when they would tell me, “You can’t understand being a parent until you do it.”  When I saw Umesh for the first time in his incubator, I remember feeling overpowered by the magnanimity of this new life, as if I had stepped into Michelangelo’s fresco lining the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling which reveals God’s and Adam’s fingers almost touching.  I was rolled closer to his incubator and Umesh knew immediately who I was–it was as if he saw through me.  And all I could think when I laid my eyes on him was not how beautiful he was, nor how he looked like myself.  Instead, I immediately thought, “No nanny is taking care of my child!”  I surprised myself by the speed with which I had become the cliché I had resisted all my life and I not only cancelled the nanny and back-up nanny’s services but I found myself bragging what a “genious” (I actually used that word) Umesh was when he latched onto my nipple on the first try.  While still in the hospital, I found myself unable to sleep until little Umesh urinated the first time, worried that his little kidneys might explode as we all awaited his first wet diaper.  I was so worried about every detail of this new life that the nurses in the hospital laughed at me and inevitably so did I.  From the moment my little tadpole was born there was nothing I would not do to protect him.  Our days were spent feeding, sleeping, and diaper changing and then in the evening we would listen to music, entertain dinner guests and even dance to an Om Kalthoum or Warda classic.  Occasionally we would watch an episode of The L Word and I would forewarn Umesh, “This is why your mommy is single.” I would cuddle him as we watched the drama unfold on my computer screen with my editorializing certain scenes with, “She is crazy.”  Umesh would just look around the room, at me and of course at my milk-filled breasts.  Life was beautiful…dare I say perfect.

During my child’s sixth week of life we went to visit my family and Umesh was in love with everyone and the sentiment was returned by all.  Upon our return to Montreal, I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea as we transferred airplanes in Toronto walking through airport crowds which would part as if magically with each passerby glowing over my child.  It is an incredible power to possess whereby carrying a child in one’s arms will cause people who are scampering for their flights to forget–even for one miraculous second–their travel plans in order to smile at your offspring whilst their body slows down to becomes one cog in this massive parting of human bodies that have created an empty, serene path amidst the hundreds through which you can now calmly walk.  Umesh was a magical, beautiful child whose power escaped even my own comprehension.  He rarely cried outside of the three photo “sessions” I made for him and he was an incredibly easy baby in every way.  So traveling back to Montreal on a delayed flight was also easy for him although I had a migraine that night. The moment we arrived home I fed him and put him to bed.  I went upstairs to counsel a friend going through a relationship crisis and heard Umesh rousing so I went back to feed him and put him in his co-sleeper.  I fell asleep and woke up later in the night to feed him.  Then at about 4h45 in the morning I woke up to find Umesh’s lifeless body next to mine.

I remember calling 911 and the drive to the hospital taking forever.  I remember the doctor saying, “I am sorry but I could not save your little boy.”  I remember a minister asking if I wanted to pray. I remember turning to her to say, “What for? There is no God.”  I remember a nurse coming into the room where I was asking me if I wanted to to take a photo of my dead child, lying on the gurney.  I refused.  She asked if I wanted his footprint saying, “you will want a memory of him for the future.”  I told her my memories where “here”, as I pointed to my heart.  I remember wishing that Umesh had not been “the silent model” so that I might have heard him.  I remember laying for six hours with my child’s body on a hospital bed before I was transferred to the psychiatric ward of another hospital.  Sadly, in Canada many institutions conflate mourning with psychiatric illness.  So I was sent off to spend the rest of the day watching people with various mental disorders hit walls and scream as I awaited a psychiatrist who would prescribe me 40 sleeping tablets.  In Islam the mourning period is 40 days.  I said to myself that I did not want to spend my life in grief so I gave myself these 40 days to take these sleeping pills, these forty days to mourn.  I do not remember much else. I had amnesia and to this day I have holes in my memory associated with the weeks and months following my son’s death.

What proved most troubling to me in the aftermath of my child’s death was how so many people, to include some friends, could not cope with my child’s death in any way.  Instantaneously people avoided me as if I had a communicable disease.  Some people were there for me, but mostly my contacts with the outside world were institutional (ie. a SIDS specialist from the Montreal Children’s Hospital to whom I owe my life) and the many strangers whom I would meet in my daily life.  It was through my isolation that I came to learn about so many other parents just like myself and I learned my isolation was not a unique story.  The Italian fruit and vegetable saleswoman at the Marché Jean Talon gave me a medallion of Maria as she confessed having lost her child many years before. The tears welled up in her eyes as she told me her story.  The salesclerk at the paint store in north Montreal similarly told me her story of having given birth to her daughter who had a congenital disease wherein every day of her daughter’s life had been spent awaiting her daughter’s inevitable death.  The man from whom I bought olive oil told me of his sister who was still struggling with her son’s death.  The Mexican immigrant who worked at Home Depot told me of his daughter’s birth defect and his family’s struggle to remain positive. On each occasion where people empathized with me it was often accompanied by their sharing their own personal stories of the loss of a child in their life.  I had stumbled upon, sadly, a closet I never wished to experience–that of the dead child.

There is something intrinsically taboo about a death of a child.  The innocence of the child’s life coupled with the loss of hope for the future and the finality of death create this unspeakable event that nobody wishes to discuss, especially in Western societies.  In the months following my son’s death, the way I viewed the world changed vastly for me both because of the loss of my son and because of the way people treated the subject of his death.  I remember having coffee two weeks after Umesh’s death with a friend who had brought her 10-month old daughter with her.  She turned to me and said, “At least he wasn’t her age when he died” as if there were a better age for a child to die.  I never heard from her again after this meeting.  Another friend advised me to “get a dog” as a replacement for my son.  Another friend was upset and found it “suspicious’ that I didn’t answer her email to explain my son’s death. I wrote her back asking her to “never contact me again.”  The blood stopped in my throat as I imagined the inhumanity of this person.  I remember one person telling me, “Everything happens for a reason… I know it hurts now but you will see.”  I did not strangle that person, but my eyeballs did.  And if I had a dollar for every time I heard about how my little Umesh was now an angel, I would be an extremely wealthy mother of a dead angel.  Like Nicole Kidman’s character in The Rabbit Hole, I would grow frustrated with people’s attempts to make me feel better by saying that God needed another angel.  Kidman’s response to this God’s need for an angel was spot on:  “Why didn’t he just make one? Another angel. He’s God after all–why didn’t he just make another angel?”  I could not relate to the religious metaphors, the afterlife beliefs, nor the pernicious desire to “see the bright side” of the situation. Many friends–especially those with children–avoided seeing me as if death were a contagion. I began to realize that the death of a child is a contagion, a kind of social malaise in our society.  Most people in our culture are uncomfortable around death–especially that of a child.  Because of others’ discomfort, my task in the following months was to deal with my loss primarily on my own and to attempt to forgive those who were not strong enough to be supportive.  I can say that was a most awful task.

So just weeks after becoming a mother, I had to rewind my life and step back to a pre-Umesh time demystifying anew all the cultural prejudices and projections that are married to our incapacity to deal with death.  And so it went that all the classist, homophobic and sexist and predilections were revealed in the mourning process just as they had been in the prenatal period.  The discourse of the natural was one of the most common references I heard and although this might not a seem to be an offensive discourse, the resonances of the “natural” were unavoidable even in this very de-homophobizing world.  For instance, I heard on many occasions:  “It’s not natural that your child dies before you.”  Of course I knew what the interlocutor meant by this statement, but it was hard–if not impossible–for me to respond to it.  Having experienced the death of dozens of friends from AIDS, I knew that neither life nor death was qualifiable.  Yet I cannot deny that the death of my son felt so much worse than even my own brother’s death years before. The discourse of the natural smacks of that which should be so, a form of biologistic entitlement, and it smelled of truisms which I found as comforting as they felt troubling.  After all, why enter into discourses of the “natural”? Certainly we cannot forget that this is the history of homophobia and of sexism to include the resentment towards women’s liberation from certain canonical (sic “natural”) roles they must play in society.  I was not about to enter into the discourse of the “natural” because what mattered was not the “unnatural” aspect of my son’s death, what mattered was the simple fact that he was dead.  Full stop.

Others would tell me, “It must be so much harder on you than on your husband” to which I would ask my interlocutor a simple “Why?”  The general response went something like this: “Well, your child came from your body…you carried him nine months.”  As someone who is adopted I realized the patent absurdity and offensiveness of this statement because attachment is not biological–it is emotional.  Indeed many women choose to create this “pre-birth love” narrative while only a few months pregnant and the subject revels in dreams of their genius child as they claim to already love that which they do not know, the idea of a child.  I never understood pregnant women who would exclaim, “I already love my baby” because I firmly distinguished between hoping the pregnancy would come to term and the actual love of a human which usually implicates the other human’s existence and subjectivity. I believe many expectant parents love the idea of what shall be–many of us hold onto that “child to be” as a symbol of hope and as an extension of the self.  Certainly I do not discount the pain of still birth because this occupies its own painful terrain of loss.  However, to allege that a child’s loss is harder because of the nine months of gestation unveils all the somatic and biologistic discourses that prefer the “natural” child to the adopted child and that evidence a society for which adopted children are the “backup plan” to the hetero-normative (sic preferred) reproductive model.  Such statements which implicated my suffering as somehow “worse” touch upon a societal eugenics which privileges emotional love based on knowledge over a constructed love based on biology.  In the months after my child’s death I found myself having to explain to complete strangers that loss is personal, that it is individual and it certainly has very little to do with the nine months I carried this child in my uterus.  For when I miss Umesh, I miss his smell, his stomach, his smile, the sounds he would make, and just about every living experience we shared.  I miss my beautiful child and not my emotional projections of a child I had not yet met.  What I mourn are the moments I will never have with my child to include the day he would have been crowned the king or queen or solar panels.

Within a couple months my yoga practice became a central part of each day and during savasana I would lie on the grown and tears would flow from my eyes.  About two weeks after my return to yoga, I noticed each day while leaving and returning home, a young boy gazing at me through a chain-link fence across the ally from my home.  He would smile and wave.  One day on my way back from yoga, I went over to meet this young boy and soon six-year-old Ulysse, his younger sister and his parents became my friends. We would have lunches together regularly and dine several times a week at either of our houses.  I was quite close to Ulysse’s parents but it was Ulysse who miraculously brought me out of a shell.  Ulysse had all the usually energy of a young child with a strongly inquisitive element to him.  At times I saw his mother grow impatient with his questions (questions which I actually found quite amusing and engaging) and she would chastise him for “draining” her energy and ask him to stop asking questions.  Once his mother turned to me while holding her infant daughter and said, in front of Ulysse, “I prefer having a girl to a boy.”  I was shocked and confused by her utterance and saddened for Ulysse.  When Ulysse had left the room I told his mother that sex was an invention and that she seemed to be exclaiming a preference for one of her children and not for a specific gender.  If it seemed impossible to think before my son’s death, certainly after I could not fathom a parent who did not appreciate their child.  Indeed there were many occasions when I had to restrain myself from reproaching parents in supermarkets, airplanes and subway cars as they flagrantly abused their children. I found it unbearable to witness parents who were lucky enough to have a child only to mistreat their position of authority with this tiny life.   With Ulysse I discovered that knowing the parent did not make this realization any easier.

Generally I felt close to Ulysse’s parents–we had joyous times together, enriching conversations and I felt as if I could be myself with them.  Well, that is until I mentioned Umesh.  Ulysse’s father was much better at allowing me to mention my son, but his mother would recoil, utter statements such as, “It’s best not to think about it” or  when Ulysse would ask me a question about Umesh his mother would state, as if a moratorium had been issued, “It’s better if we change the subject.”  Strangely it was with Ulysse that I felt better to discuss just about anything and even now I cannot quite understand how this young boy was able to understand death whereas his mother eschewed all references thereof.  I remember one day Ulysse came to visit and make pumpkin pies with me.  As we were walking upstairs to my kitchen he asked quite innocently, “Julian, what did you do with Umesh’s body?”  Initially I was shocked by his line of query and then I paused mid-staircase and thought to myself that this was a reasonable and intelligent question to ask.  So I answered it.  Then Ulysse followed up with another question: “What is cremation?”  I then explained cremation to Ulysse and in the explanation this subject of my son’s death somehow seemed all the less taboo.  Two days later when I went over to visit his mother, she asked me what I had told Ulysse about cremation.  I explained our conversation to her. She then informed me that earlier that day Ulysse had found a dead wasp in the garden and that he had taken the wasp, made a coffin for it out of an old matchbox and that he lit the “coffin” and created a funeral pyre.  I was so overjoyed by this story that I almost cried from sheer happiness; yet his mother was not at all pleased–to the contrary, she was quite horrified.  I had to calm her down and explain that this was just an act of recognizing life–that her son was not celebrating death but rather understanding it a bit better.  I think it was at this moment that I realized that Ulysse’s mother could not be friends with me because death was not only a taboo subject, it was entirely unmanageable for her be it my child or Ulysse’s wasp.  Our visits became rarer and soon I would no longer see Ulysse and his family.

What I have realized in the months and years since the death of my child is that one does not ever “get over” the death of a child.  We can just move through the pain and inhabit it in a way that becomes part of who we are in all the beauty and bitterness that life and death embody.  To this day I still maintain a rather bizarre relationship to the amnesia I experienced in the time after my son’s death as the impact of those beautiful seven weeks took over my heart and mind.  I realized I was in trouble when I found myself driving one day in Montreal and somehow ended up on Celine Dion Boulevard  in Charlemagne.  I could not remember where I was going and I certainly did not recall how I got there.  I just sat in my car and attempted to understand this strange geographic trajectory I had just made.

For months after my son’s death I would obsess over the following subjects:

cryogenics

time travel

why George W. Bush didn’t choke to death on the pretzel

the man who threw his child off the balcony somewhere in China

the Madeleine kidnapping

the couple who, after the death of their child, jumped off Beachy Head with the body of their son in a rucksack and his toys in another

what if I had just woken up five minutes earlier?

or ten?

what if?

why a terms like SIDS would be used to explain an unexplainable death?

why give it a name at all?

I looked for answers only to find there were none and I found myself isolated by our society’s refusal to embrace anything that would not sell fast cars and plasma televisions.  Indeed, my sympathizing with world news events made complete sense given that the community I had before 2007 was greatly reduced in and by death.  I felt more sympathy by world events and struggles of people who really were suffering than by platitudes to take up a hobby or dive into my work.   Also my political work in the field of human rights helped me grow stronger and more realistic about both life and death issues.  I met men and women who had lost all nine of their children and still continued living.  Ultimately, the gay closet was a piece of cake compared to the closet into which I was quite politely shoved from various sectors of our society.  There was no “coming out” of this closet since everyone made sure this door was nailed firmly shut.

I have tried to move on from this experience of having and losing my child only to realize that there is no “moving on”–there is only moving through.  While I learned that there is no correct way to discuss or represent my son’s life or death, I was thankful for those friends and colleagues who would make the simple gesture of stating, “I don’t know what to say.”  Their presence, their silence, their sitting with me in silence, meant more to me than comments which would attempt to dismiss death.  Indeed, these conversations incur bumps and ironing out of misunderstandings as we are not given a handbook called 101 Things Not to Say When Someone You Know Loses a Child.  I had to learn how to react to certain comments and not cut off completely from people who had good intentions but little or no tact.  For instance, one well-meaning friend turned to me after the death of my son and said, “Have you thought of adoption?” I looked at him and said, “If your boyfriend died today, would you want me to set you up with my hot, single friend tomorrow?”  He immediately apologized and I realized that many of these comments I was told that deeply hurt me were mostly made out of the individual’s inability to cope on a very raw level with the fact of death.  We do not like death, we do not wish to think about it and certainly we do not want to be reminded that we could lose that very precious promise of life, the child.  Certainly I felt much in common with some of those men and women with whom I had worked years earlier at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York as I recalled their stories of friends and family disappearing once they were diagnosed with HIV.

When I was two weeks pregnant I lectured at the university in Freiburg, Switzerland. I had already begun to be exhausted in the late mornings from the surge in hormones.  Just after checking in to my bed and breakfast, I laid down and turned on the television to watch Swiss television.  The first channel had a program on congenital birth defects.  I changed the channel.  The next channel had a show about a child who suffered from a debilitating disease whose name I cannot remember.  Even more quickly this time, I changed the channel.  I thought to myself how I should not think about such “negative” conditions.  Now I realize how in our culture we maintain superficial notions of “negativity” attaching it to something that is simply part of life–death.  Back in Freiburg I did not want to think that such diseases could occur in my life, I did not want to embrace their reality.  Ten months later however I was living a reality that was inescapable and that was there all the time, even had my son not died.

When you lose a child you remind people of what they stand to lose and there will never arrive a moment such as that which often occurs months after a break-up where you realize what you gained from such an awful situation thinking to yourself, “Well now I am so happy to be out of that unhealthy relationship!  I have learned a lot about myself from that dreadful experience.”  There is no way to represent that lost child as anything but the beautiful creature s/he was and there is no narration which will leave people feeling chipper and upbeat.  There is no “lesson” to be learned.  I have certainly tried and failed miserably on that count.  Once I walked into a small shop and the owner and his friends were inside telling comparative tragedy stories as part of a competition.  A woman who talked of her horrid childhood; a man who mentioned his ex-wife’s antics; another man who discussed his treatment and recovery from cancer and so the stories rolled out from one person to the next.  After finding what I had been looking for I returned to the front of the shop and one of the group turned to me and said, “Do you have a sadder story?”  I answered thinking I was being clever, “Absolutely…but if we were to take bets, I would win hands down.”  The crowd became silent in their curiosity and one woman asked me to share my sad story.  “My son died when he was seven weeks old,” I replied.  I don’t know what I was thinking–I imagine a small part of me was hoping they would laugh because indeed I had won the contest.  Instead, they all grew sad and said collectively, “I am so sorry.”   And that is where death is the most painful:  the silence after hearing “I am so sorry.”  I wish there were a follow-up as in quality control surveys:  “In order to serve you better, please give us your feed-back.” I certainly would have written this: Please kill sadistic world leaders and leave my child alone. Oh and make rose water and astroid ice cream. Thank you!

About a year after my son’s death I was in New York with an old friend, Noritoshi.  I hadn’t seen Noritoshi since before my pregnancy and when I told him about Umesh he retorted quite matter-of-factly, “So he decided to leave.”  Somehow those words helped me and I cannot completely understand why.  Perhaps it was this ability to lend agency to my son wherein he made a choice to leave this world and life was not taken from him?  Or maybe it was this notion that my son could possibly have had agency and I was unable to allow that thought into my head because Western societies do not allow infants such agency in relationship to their own lives and deaths?  Or could it have simply been the fact that Noritoshi came up with this response as an answer and not the answer?  I still do not know exactly why, but I feel comfortable with this idea that Umesh left and from his life I take inspiration for how I deal with his death.  So, instead of mourning the 60 years I so desperately wanted to know my child, I am thankful for the beautiful seven weeks that I shared with Umesh in which he was in perfect health and happiness.  Likewise, as hard as it is to understand why people abandon the site of death and scamper from anything that detracts from the projected televised “perfection” of family and friends, I have learned to remain vocal about my son while remaining compassionate to those who chose to live in their carefully constructed death-negating closets… And I still hope to one day taste rose water and asteroid ice cream.