Une place Bouazizi à Paris mais toujours pas de solution pour les migrants tunisiens du Botzaris 36

Une place Mohamed Bouazizi sera inaugurée le 30juin dans le 14ème arrondissement de Paris. Avec ce petit bout de Paris qui portera le nom du jeune vendeur ambulant dont l’immolation a été le point de départ de la révolution tunisienne, la France veut donc rendre hommage à un peuple qui se dressa comme un seul homme pour demander sa liberté. On s’attend à ce que lors de la cérémonie Bertrand Delanoë nous fasse part avec éloquence de tout son amour pour la Tunisie et les Tunisiens, de son admiration pour cette révolution pacifique, et même qu’il nous glisse sur le ton de la confidence une phrase ou deux d’un de ses nombreux potes tunisiens opposants politiques au régime Ben Ali exilés jusqu’à la chute du tyran (toute ressemblance avec Marzouki n’est que fortuite!).

Au même moment, dans le 19ème arrondissement, continuera de sonner un autre son de cloche, alors qu’on ne cherche ni trouve aucune solution pour les migrants tunisiens du 36, rue Botzaris. Ces Tunisiens arrivés en Europe via Lampedusa avaient squatté ce bâtiment qu’occupait la branche française du parti RCD de Ben Ali, avant que les forces de l’ordre françaises sollicitées par l’ambassade de Tunisie et le gouvernement tunisien ne les en déloge, et ce plusieurs fois.

Pour les représentants des gouvernements tunisien et français, c’est que le sort des quelques dizaines de migrants tunisiens du 36, rue Botzaris est infiniment moins important que celui de ceux dont les noms apparaissent dans les archives du RCD. La coopération des gouvernements français successifs avec le régime autoritaire de Ben Ali est de notoriété publique, bien sûr, mais des documents attestant de l’étroitesse de ces liens et des personnalités mises en cause sont des inconvénients que certains, qu’ils soient du gouvernement tunisien actuel ou du gouvernement français, aimeraient bien pouvoir s’épargner. Au final, les Tunisiens du 36, rue Botzaris n’ont pu compter que sur la mobilisation d’internautes français et tunisiens et de quelques associations, qui cherchent une solution, peu aidés en cela par la lâcheté et l’autisme des officiels français et tunisiens.Les politiciens ont beau nous avoir fait des beaux discours sur le rôle des médias sociaux dans les révolutions arabes, ils nous offrent actuellement en live une belle démonstration de leur mépris pour cette affaire qui n’a pu sortir de l’ombre que par la volonté de la scène virtuelle française et tunisienne (grâce au hashtag #botzaris36).

Dans les mots, dans les discours, la France, comme quand elle inaugure une place Bouazizi à Paris, aime se proclamer du côté du peuple tunisien et de ses revendications légitimes. Dans les faits, la France continue à n’apporter de soutien qu’au gouvernement tunisien, quand bien même celui-ci agit contre ses propre citoyens.

Mohamed Bouazizi est mort et le “Printemps Arabe” est certainement le plus bel hommage que les peuples auraient pu lui rendre; il est mort et il n’a certainement pas besoin que Monsieur Delanoë nous verse une petite larme pendant l’inauguration d’une place portant son nom; les Tunisiens du 36, rue Botzaris sont eux bel et bien là et attendent toujours qu’on décide de leur sort.

Rage Against the Junkies

Two events this week were featuring famous “junkies”: the first one was the disastrous concert of Amy Winehouse where she appeared too drugged/drunk to perform and the second one was the trial of John Galliano in Paris, facing racism charges after a video showing him drugged/drunk making the apology of Hitler.

In a way, both cases are he same: some very talented artist, praised for their outstanding performances/creations for years, openly and publicly addicted to drugs until their addiction leads to their dramatic lowering; and thus inspiring the general audiance rejection and anger. As long as Amy Winehouse or John Galliano were lucid enough to be able to offer quality services, there was indulgence regarding to their addiction (indulgence and even sometimes something of a fascination! Isn’t Winehouse’s biggest tune a song saying “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said No, No, No“?), but once they became too weak to produce what was exactly expected from them, once they became targets easy to reach, why bother to treat them with the minimum respect due to any human being? Is that the new mainstrean philosophy: treat artists like gods when they are OK, throw them away like old dirty tissues when too wasted to entertain?

Would have Amy Winehouse or John Galliano not been drunk/drugged, their behaviour would be totally unacceptable. But as junkies, they should be treated as they are: people in suffering, in need of assistance and not fully accountable or responsible of what they do/say when they are put in a situation they did not really chose. Indeed, John Galliano has not uploaded the video himself and Amy Winehouse did certainly not arrange herself her tour. In both cases, we have here people suffering from a disease (drug addiction IS a disease), tricked into a public appearance that do not represent them as human beings and as artists.

As junkies, it is of course absolutely necessary that measures are taken to withdraw them from the public scene: they need help and rest to quit drugs, the quality of their work suffers from their addiction and their employers are playing their reputation as well. But the same way no one would consider hooting an athlet for not running well when injured or put charges on somebody talking during their sleep, shouldn’t the public have a much more consideration to these two people who are, after all, the victims of the situation? Why not keep the rage against those who exploit a junkie singer to make money on her past fame or exploit the image of a junkie fashion designer? Maybe because those who are responsible of these two disasters are certainly convenable businessmen, wearing nice suits and having a nice office and all, and above all because they are able to answer the insults, unlike those who are too wasted to react? Actually, I always found very strange how our societies are able to make gods/icons/myths of normal human beings, just because they are beautiful, rich or famous. All we see here with Winehouse and Galliano is the exact counterpart.

The way Amy Winehouse and John Galliano reached the very bottom after reaching the very top, actually, is a reminder: we live in a world were might is right.

The constructive feminism of Manal Al Sharif and the destructive feminism of Femen topless activists

The story of Manal Al Sharif, a 32 years old Saudi woman  jailed 10 days for defying the driving ban in her country, is a perfect illustration of the extreme repression endured by Saudi women. Her act – being filmed while driving and uploading the video to promote the Women2Drive campaign – was courageous and thus inspired other women in the Kingdom to follow her example. She expressed in the video the wish that she would be only the beginning of the revolt of women like “the first drop is the beginning of the rain”.

She enhanced a movement that had repercussion far beyond Saudi Arabia: many feminist associations, many NGOs, many papers talked about the event and certainly contributed in the global awareness on the terrific situation of women rights in the Gulf. Meanwhile, Femen, a feminist association in Ukraine organized a solidarity protest protest in Kiev around the Saudi Embassy where several of the protestors showed up topless.

So what is the outcome of the Manal Al-Sharif case?

1. Manal Al Sharif encouraged women (and men!) in her country to stand for their rights. Several dozen of people follow now her example to break the unfair rules. She showed that Saudi  women are courageous enough to take themselves the initiative. What is interesting is that she cares more aboout driving than about, for example, wearing or not the veil: she wants to achieve men/women equality through equal rights to act (drive, express, vote, work, etc), not just through her appearance. Thus her contribution to women cause is positive.
2. Femen activists  exhibited their own bodies and contributed in nothing neither for Manal Al Sharif, neither for Saudi women, neither for Ukranian women. They finished doing exactly what sexists do: use women’s body as an object. What message did Femen send to the world? “We, women, we can’t do anything, we can’t draw attention unless we exhibit our breasts”. Thus, their contribution to women cause is negative.

The feminism of Manal Al Sharif is constructive because it breaks the prejudice about “women consisting only in an empty body”, while the feminism of topless Femen activists is destructive because it does nothing else than enforcing this prejudice. Manal Al-Sharif uses provocation as a tool to change the law, Femen use provocation for the sole purpose of having the feeling to exist. The sad thing is that certainly Femen wants to act to improve women’s rights: but just type “Femen” in a search engine, all you will find is hundreds of entries about the “topless protests”.

At the end of the day, Femen may be very active, the world associates Femen to nothing else than to naked women, while Manal Al Sharif  became a model for women not because of how she looks, but because of how she acts. And that makes a huge difference.

The Syrian Gay Girl hoax: reaching the limits of the social medias in matter of information

A couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of the Syrian uprising, a blog post went viral. It was called My father, the hero and it was the testimony of a girl living in Damascus on how she was saved by the powerful monologue of her father from being arrested by two men of the regime. The girl, Amina Arraf, also happened to be gay, and her whole blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, was a lively and passionating diary of an atypical person in the Middle-East. The father was so eloquent, the words sounded so true, so universal that the link was widely spread in the social medias and the story even ended in professionnal news websites and papers.

A few weeks later, the cousin of Amina Arraf posted a blog post where she was announcing the blogger was kidnapped and held in a secret place. The ‘Syrian Gay Girl’ story had so much moved arund the world that when this news came out, human rights activists began to advocate her cause, to ask for her release. It is at this point where a message was published on the blog, where a certain Tom McMaster was presenting his apologies: Amina was a fictional character, invented by this American man quite familiar with the Middle East culture, a wannabe writer. Things went out of control when Amina’s story became viral, and he tried to make her ‘disappear’ by publishing the news of her abduction. But when he saw that people were trying to get her released, giving time and energy they could use to release other real people in need of assistance, he understood he went too far: he couldn’t do anything else than revealing all this was only a hoax.

This story is interesting: it is actually like a real time and large scale experience on the biggest weakness of the social medias, the vulnerability to misinformation. The story was read thousands of times and reached all parts of the world. Today, even if the writer himself revealed the truth about it, there still must be hundreds of people still believing that there exists somebody called Amina Arraf, a anti-Assad gay girl in Damascus.

Tweets and wall posts are only transient in the sense that they are within seconds replaced by other tweets and other wall posts, but they might imprint a mind for a long time. Specialists in communication know well that the first contact with a topic has a stronger impact on the brain than the following. In a passionating article a few years ago in the New Yorker, I remember a neurologist explaining why, for example, the rumor on Obama being a Muslim is essentially more influential on the mind than any of the hundreds of denials of the fact and affirmations on Obama being Christian (the recent controversy on his birth certificate shows the confusion of some part of the American people about ‘who is’ Barack Obama). Basically, it is easier to make a rumor than to dismiss it, even with the strongest and most rational proofs.

To some extent, the Gay Girl in Damascus case reminded me a juridic case in France a couple f years ago: on a trial know as the ‘Trial of Outreau‘, the prosecutor took blindly as granted all what was said by two children accusing more than 20 persons to have performed on them pedophile acts, when flagrant contradictions and absurd descriptions should have warned him on some trickery, all because this was happening in a time where there was some sort of paradigm that children cannot invent such things and lie. Later, when there was deeper expertises that led to the conclusions that all what was said by the children were in fact all lies they were told to tell by their mentally disturbed mother, we realized that we went in very few years from an epoch were children were never listened to by judges to another one where any single word they pronounce is considered as being the exact truth. The trial of Outreau was a ‘wake up call’ to more critic distance with children testimonies: they are an essential evidence but they have to be examinated and analyzed, not straightforwardly validated without any verification.

Similarely, a few years back citing a reference/source/evidence from a website was something ‘not serious’; when writing an essay, students had to give ‘real’ references in hardcopy books and online content was considered to be reliable only when it was confirmed by some offline content. But somewhere between the Iranian martyr Neda and the web 2.0 revolution, internet became the ‘mother of all informations’. Today, if something isn’t referenced by Google, it is assumed that it simply  doesn’t exist and Wikipedia became the number one source of information in the world. Blogging was, a few years ago, seen as a narcissistic activity of those who want to live some substitute of fame, today bloggers are the new opinion makers. Posting on YouTube is something ‘raw’, it can only be true: people are less keen to believe a TV news professionnal  footage than a video taken by the mobile phone of an amateur.  Somehow, like the Trial of Outreau demonstrated how we swung very quickly from an extreme denial of children’s testimony to a blind belief in their words, the Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax showed us how we went from a disdain to any form of online content to a too big confidence in bloggers words. Not that we should dismiss bloggers when it comes to information, but we should maybe try to not forget that words are not evidence. Tom McMaster blogging as Amina Arraf depicted in an extremely absurd scenery how much we wanted to believe in her story, to the point to not ask anything close to an evidence of her existence. Even journalists, NGOs and companies could not resist to the trend: the more a story is retweeted, the more it is credible.

When an information jumps from one person to the other in less than 140 characters, the speed of propagation makes it possible to reach thousands of people before anybody even has physical time to verify the information. Most of the people retransmittnig it are ‘consumers’ of information, not professionals. They not only don’t have the means to lead an investigation, they also don’t have the ‘time’ or ‘interest’.

We, social media users, certainly also propagate around us the information that not only seems valid or relevant, but also what we feel emotionnally connected to. In the context of an ‘Arab Spring’ initiated by the tragic suicide of the Tunisian fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi, the ‘ordinary heroes’ like Wael Ghonim or Mohammed Nabbous are the living symbols of the causes we believe in, and in consequence we identify to them. In claims like ‘We are all Khaled Said‘, we all become victims of the abuse that was inflicted to the body of Khaled Said; it is like a projection. It is certainly why we all projected ourselves in the body of Amina Arraf when her father was challenging the two policemen; we didn’t need at that time any other proof of the story being true or not: do you need a proof to convince yourself when you experienced it yourself?

The sad counterpart of the propagation of a lie only because we are emotionnally connected to it is that the propagation through the social medias of the news that do not relate emotionnally to us are harder to propagate, regardless of it being verified or not, relevant or not. In perticular, news not involving ‘good characters’ like in any good story are more difficult to transmit: why the story of Manal Al-Sharif, the Saudi woman put in jail for defying the drive ban, moved all around the globe when the thousands of anonymous slave maids in Saudi Arabia never got 1% of such an interest? Because the maids didn’t put upload on YouTube a video of their work conditions? Why the fictional Amina Arraf got more audiance than other flesh and blood anti-Assad opponent caught and tortured and in dire need of a general mobilization around them? Why in Europe the citizen all know it all about DSK sex assault case while very few are aware that 2-3months ago an European country, Hungary, adopted the first autoritarian constitution in the history of the European Union?

For the Iranian Green Movement and the Arab uprisings, the social medias play an important role, in countries where individual rights are so restricted that the access to a reliable information is impossible through the official medias; the citizen doesn’t have the choice than to become himself the journalist that do not exist on the field. They upload on Youtube what they know their official TV channels will never broadcast and they post on their Facebook wall what they know they will not read in their newspapers. But it is a necessity arising from some special context: outside these ‘crisis management’ phases, most of the users would rely much more on professionnal information medias such as Al Jazeera or Euronews than on anything else. There still is a small but active fraction of the users that believe only in ‘bottom-up’ information. If this ‘civil journalism’ phenomenon is to consider as a key feature of the 21st century era of open information, the general public has to keep a bigger critical distance with the information extracted from the social networks. They give sometimes access to first hand and exclusive information, but they stay non-moderated medias and aren’t press agencies.

A worrying trend is the one that sees professionnal journalists take for granted almost blindly bloggers or viral tweets and cite them as sources. The barrier between bloggers and journalists is sometimes so dim that they more and more want to substitute to each other: almost all journalists have their blogs and twitter accounts, but also bloggers are published in professionnal information websites. The perfect illustration of this growing confusion is the Huffington Post, the daily newspaper writter by benevole bloggers. Without objecting bloggers might have very interesting and fresh views on many topics (after all, I am a blogger myself, if I blog it is because I certainly think what happens in my mind is worth being read), being a journalist is also having followed a training and having acquired technical skills to retrieve information, digest it and transmit it to the biggest number. But now we entered in a critical era where numerical information substitutes to physical information: we don’t need anymore to see the Damascus Gay Girl in person and interview her and get the testimony of eye witnesses, we just need to find the link to her blog. If opinions expressed on twitter, facebook or tumblr are certainly informative for journalists to ‘feel’ where the people stand on the acceptation or rejection of what is presented to them, a blog post or a tweet should never become a source of information in itself.

The problem finally is not the fact that the social medias and participative medias are part of the supply chain of the information; the problem consists only in giving them the right place and importance, and understanding what can we reasonnably expect from them. Our social media culture is still extremely young; maybe we just went too enthusiastic about the power of the web 2.0 after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and we needed to reach the limits of the social medias in matter of information to be reminded that we should always be critical and cautious about what happens behind the screens.

You heal, you change

Depression. It took me years to put that word on what I was experiencing; I don’t now eactly why. Maybe because we are tought so young to take seriously only what is properly visible. You can be pitied for a broken leg, but you can only be left misunderstood for a broken soul.

Healing, pushing depression out of one’s life is a continuous struggle. Antidepressant medecine makes only things easier in suppressing the physical symptoms such as excessive or too light sleep, state of uncontrollable anxiety or the ‘emotional rollercoaster’. The factual healing comes then from the ability of the depressed person to rediscover the “normal life”. Basically, this requires to work around two axis: oneself and the environment. One’s weakness results most of the time of unsolved inner conflicts, lack of confidence or any kind of hypersensitivity, while the environmental factors of a depression are a conjunction between initial conditions, randomness and consequences of interactions with the ouside world. Healing is basically finding a balance between the necessary acceptance of what we do not control or have no moral right to control and the necessary insubordination to what shouldn’t be inflicted.This balance requires to correct what has a negative impact on the quality of life from the inside and from the outside. To rethink some of one’s own behaviours, as well as moving away from some situations/conditions.  In one word: healing is changing. Some have to change their too stressful job, some others have to change their submission to the manipulative character of a parent or quit an unfair relationship with an unappropriate partner, som have to raise their self-esteem or learn to manage their own tendency to procrastinate.

The challenge is in the change, yet it is also in having an appropriate response to the reaction of the entourage during and after the change if one wants to make that improvement permanent. For most of the people, as long as one has a “good” job (good meaning well quoted on the social ladder), as long as one seems to have a few friends, a few family members and eventually a partner, there is no understanding on why changing. The most common sentence one listens when the change becomes effective is “You are not the same anymore.”. Sure, I am not the same anymore, the old “me” was broken from inside and I had to melt it!

One is also confronted to the critics. Sometimes, critics even turn fully opposite what they were a few months ago: when, for example, for years you was criticized for your unmotivation, your lack of implication and the waste of your precious time and abilities, how to understand that the same people end telling you you are too enthusiastic and agitated, too fully into the too many activities you are doing, that you have to “understand” that you cannot make this and that, or act like this or like that, etc? Or when you are accused to be all at once too distant or selfish when all you did is to put an end to years of suffering many negative consequences of the fact of being too disposable to everybody and anybody, to the point of losing your ability to build your own life?

It is true that it might well that one gets “too far” in the change, like a pendulum that swung from one extremum to the other, but if it is the case, the stabilization normally ends coming. It is highly improbbable that a too selfless person, a “Mother Theresa”, becomes a cruel selfish bastard all at once; mostly, they just need some time off, some time apart, a bit away from people and “normal routine” to be able to come back in a better shape.

Being confronted to this kind of criticism about the change is a bit disturbing. When I was confronted to it, I felt disturbed: “Am I becoming a bad person?“. But then I tried to look at where I was about two years ago and where I am now: no, I am not becoming a bad person. I was burried alive and I had to struggle to digg up my personnality and find my way to my own happinness. I had to learn to not be ashamed to rise my voice and listen to my inner wishes. I had to stop being in the unconditional despaired need of giving it all to the others just to exist for them, and to keep some of it for me.

In the same time, going out of my own suffering made me more sensitive to the suffering of the others, in the sense that when I stopped crying, it gave me the opportunity to “re-discover” the world we are living in, with new eyes. And this sensitivity sometimes turns into oversensitivity sometimes. I imagine it is a bit like when the teenager becomes suddenly aware of the cruelty and cynism of the “grown up world” and thinks he found answers to all questions in reading the Communist Manifesto to confront the corrupted world and argue over dinner with the parents about how pitiful is their pragmatism compared to his/her own idealism.

Maybe am I living my second adolescence? Maybe I will have to go through a new couple of years of over-reactions I will be ashamed about afterwards, mistakes I will have to apologize for,  whims that will put me in unconfortable situations. The parallel with adolescence is even extended to the physical change: depression craves sadness in the outer appearance and healing is also finding a better shape (some put on weight during depression, some lose too much weight, the quality of the skin and hair changes, the hormonal system is disturbed, etc).

The change is here, the change has just started. I don’t know where I will be five years from now, but I definitely know that everyday, I’d climb the hill so I could see the horizon.