The Yale Globalist Issue III - 2013/2014

GLOBALIST The Yale

Spring 2014 / Vol. 14, Issue 3

BO

UN

D

AR

IES

letter from the editor 03

GLOBALIST The Yale

An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs Winter 2013 / Vol. 14, Issue 2 The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

JOURNALISM ADVISORY BOARD Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs Jef McAllister, Time Magazine Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to rachel.brown@yale,edu Interested in subscribing? Log on to tyglobalist. org and click the Subscribe link in the upper right corner.

Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

This magazine is published by students of Yale College. Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

dear

Readers,

Much of international relations is about boundaries. For example, national borders demarcate the boundaries separating two countries, and tensions often arise when those boundaries are crossed. This scenario has been the impetus for many wars. In “A House Divided,” Syler Inman examines the barriers that persist between Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks two decades after the Bosnian War. Boundaries also play an important role in the movement of people around the globe. In his article “Beneath the Olympic Veneer,” Josh Feng explores the experiences of migrant workers living in Russia and hired to construct the Olympic facilities in Sochi.

Similarly, in her article “Invisible Barriers,” Anna Meixler describes the boundaries that refugees in New Haven continue to encounter even after they have traveled across borders to arrive in the U.S. Additionally, the figures who are often most admired on the world stage are those who are willing to push boundaries and challenge existing beliefs in politics, culture, and economics. This can entail challenging historical boundaries and taboos. In “Japan’s Invisible Minority,” Kelsey Larson explores how the Buraku people of Japan are pushing back against a legacy of marginalization.

We appreciate your interest in The Yale Globalist and hope that you will continue to read the magazine and follow us online. We are excited to be increasing our collaboration with other publications in the Global 21 network, including an article exchange with The London Globalist on the future of the trans-Atlantic relationship.

We would like to thank the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies for their continued support of The Yale Globalist.

Finally, we remind all of our readers to keep pushing boundaries.

Sincerely, Rachel Brown Editor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist Correction: In Issue II of The Yale Globalist we incorrectly referred to Lisa DiCarlo as “a professor of sociology at Brown University who specializes in Turkish anthropology.”

Her title should have been stated as “an anthropologist at Brown University who studies

ON THE COVER: Design by Chareeni Kurukulasuriya and Skyler Inman. for The Yale Globalist.

Photos courtesy of Creative Commons

identity politics in modern Turkey”. The mistake has been corrected in the online edition of the article.

www.tyglobalist.org

04 contents

Map of Contents

Production & Design Editor Chareeni Kurukulasuriya Chief Online Editor Emma Goldberg Associates Editors for Online Grace Brody, Danielle Ellison

Editor-in-Chief Rachel Brown Managing Editor John D’Amico, Aaron Gertler, Nitika Khaitan, Tara Rajan Associate Editors Angelica Calabrese, Charlie Goodyear, Eleanor Marshall, Zoe Rubin, Elizabeth Villarreal

Executive Director Ashley Wu Publishers Jackson Busch, Aobo Guo Events Coordinator Adrianne Elliott, Jade Shao

Copy Editor Ariel Katz Editors-at-Large: Charley Locke, Deena Rahman, Kelly Schumann, Anisha Suterwala, Sera Tolgay, Jason Toups, Emily Ullmann, Margaret Zhang

spring 2014, issue 3

contents 05

TABLE of CONTENTS

spring 2014 volume 14 issue 3

12

17 16

25

6

boundaries

06| Beneath the Olympic Veneer

08 | A Route to School Accompanied by Activists and Accordions

12 | Japan’s Invisible Minority

13 | Italy’s Door to Europe

16 | A House Divided

20 | Photo Essay: Border Crossing

Migrant worker exploitation in Sochi.

By Josh Feng.

Fighting discrimination through ignorance.

By Kelsey Larson.

Navigating the social, ethnic, and political divisions in Bosnia, Two Decades After the War.

By Skyler Inman.

As EU immigration laws change, the experience of one Roma family in Paris.

By Catrin Dowd.

Illegal migrants in Lampedusa, Italy.

By Nora Moraga-Lewy.

By Kelly Schumann.

23 | Invisible Boundaries

Refugee culture in New Haven.

By Anna Meixler.

glimpses and features 25 | Squatting Amsterdam

28| Party for the People?

29 | Behind “Ford Nation”

30 | Euskara

Reclaimed spaces and activist communities.

By Karolina Ksiazek.

What Rob Ford reveals about the shortcomings of the Canadian political system. By Lindsey Uniat

The politics of the world’s largest democracy are changing.

By Kartik Srivastava.

Differing views on a dying language.

By Nitika Khaitan.

www.tyglobalist.org

06 boundaries

Beneath the Olympic Veneer

Migrant Worker Exploitation in Sochi

By Josh Feng

W

ith the frigid peaks and lush valleys of their home in the Ukrainian Carpathians behind them, Maxim and Yaroslav departed for Sochi, the “Russian Riviera”—in search of a promised monthly salary of 50,400 rubles ($1,500), more than double the average wage in Ukraine. They were told by an intermediary to expect employment in interior finishing work during their time in Sochi.

But on their first day, the subcontractor MonArch informed them that the only employment available was arduous unskilled labor. For two months, they endured scanty food provisions, meager, accommodations, and 12-hour workdays—all without pay. Afterwards, they stumbled aboard a bus for the 2000-kilometer ride back home with a mere 14,115 rubles in their pockets ($420).

Sochi glistens with a post-Olympic pride.

The sleepy resort town, which once catered largely to Russian officials, has been transformed into an international hub. But stateof-the-art sports venues and lavish hotels haven’t been able to muffle the voices of thousands of Central Asian migrant construction workers who suffered the same abuse as Maxim and Yaroslav. After years of mistreatment, these laborers are making spring 2014, issue 3

themselves heard—with the help of Human Rights Watch (HRW), whose report Race to the Bottom: Exploitation of Migrant Workers Ahead of Russia’s Winter 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi brought dozens of these voices into a growing debate over the IOC’s responsibility for labor abuse in Olympic host cities.

Y

unus, a construction employee from Uzbekistan working at the Olympic Coastal Cluster, hoped for fair wages, but found only relentless hard labor in Sochi.

“I worked for 70 full days without pay,” he told HRW. “We worked from 8 am to 8 pm with no days off.”

Maxim, the Ukrainian migrant, explained the sinister mechanics behind these stories: “People work, they don’t get paid, and they leave. Then a bus comes and unloads a fresh group of workers to repeat the cycle.”

New streams of workers continue to flood Olympic construction sites, with the migrants either lacking knowledge of the abuse or desperate enough to test their luck.

But the gamble’s results can be devastating.

The story of Maxim and Yaroslav fits within a recent trend of migrant worker exploitation throughout Russia. Soviet-Era ties

continue to influence labor migration; 80 percent of all foreigners seeking employment in Russia come from nine countries in the former USSR. Ten to twelve million of these migrant workers—who benefit from free visas allowing passage to Russia—contribute to the foundations of the country’s economy. But only about two million live there legally with work and residency permits.

A majority of Russians are ethnic Slavs, but Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and other minorities make up much of the migrant worker population. Tensions between Slavs and other ethnic groups often leave migrant workers the target of nationalistic fury. According to a report compiled by the International Partnership for Human Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights, 568 Central Asian migrants were beaten and 220 killed between 2004 and 2012.

Though hate crimes and discrimination towards migrant workers in Sochi may not be anything new in Russia, this exploitation poses serious threats not only to the laborers themselves, but also to Olympic and Russian institutionalism.

According to the HRW, 16,000 migrant workers were employed in the construction

boundaries 07

Olympic infrastructure in Sochi. (Courtesy of Creative Commons) of 136 Olympic sites in 2013. A report released by the same organization found that employers’ abuse of these workers ranged from the withholding of wages and identity documents to inadequate housing and meals.

These abuses violate all eight of the core International Labor Organization conventions that Russia has ratified, as well as other international treaties. However, no penalties have resulted from these broken promises.

S

ome of Sochi’s most disturbing cruelties stem from the deplorable accommodations and food provisions supplied by employers with Olympic contracts.

According to workers interviewed by the HRW on the Central Olympic Stadium site, close to 200 employees were housed by the general contractor Engeocom in a single-family home with only one bathroom. Iskandar, who shares a 36-square-meter room with fourteen other men, said, “It [the housing] is like being in the barracks.”

A worker from Serbia added, “We slept on bare mattresses and bare pillows. Some of us got skin rashes. It was really unhealthy.”

A number of workers employed on the same site said that the food provided didn’t allow

them to sustain themselves for the pace and rigor of work required of them. HRW also found that although many migrant workers were promised food and accommodation in addition to salary, funds for these services were often deducted from their pay without warning.

Despite these circumstances, migrant workers are often unwilling or unable to seek redress through government agencies or courts. If an employer fails to provide work permits, employees could face fines and expulsion for entering the legal system.

Such was the case for Maxim and Yaroslav, whose employer placed them in a situation that left them with no way to seek restitution. As Maxim explains, “We have no contracts and no work permits. They’ve taken away our passports. They promised to help us with the work permits, but we got nothing. All I have in the way of an official document is a pass to enter the construction site.”

These broken promises become bargaining chips, allowing contractors and intermediaries to pressure migrant workers into remaining on site. And some workers’ attempts to address substandard conditions have been met with severe punishment. In October 2010, 50 Uzbek workers at Novii Gorod gathered to protest the non-payment of wages. The company retaliated by calling the Federal Migration Service to verify their documents, resulting in the deportation of dozens who demonstrated or complained.

Dilmurod, who participated in the demonstration, was never paid the money owed to him. “Everything was fine. I had a work permit, housing, food, insurance, and everything was paid for. Then they stopped bothering to pay us […] after our demonstration, everything went downhill. When we were trying to sort out some kind of payment from them, they kept 43,000 rubles [$1,360] owed to me.”

The dire detention conditions recently revealed by HRW render even the prospect of arrest frightening—a further barrier to protest. Beginning in September 2013, raids conducted by Russian authorities of workplaces, homes, and public places in Sochi resulted in the detainment of hundreds of migrant workers. Most of those captured were crowded into temporary holding cells that exposed them to the elements. During containment periods that lasted up to a week, many were also denied food and legal representation.

Though these raids coincided with the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) final inspection, IOC Coordination Committee Chairman Jean-Claude Killy remarked, “Everything [was] very impressive.” While he did respond

to questions regarding controversial Russian laws against gay “propaganda” (saying they violate no Olympic regulations), he has thus far made no public statement on labor abuses.

Though the IOC does not set forth detailed human-rights policies in host city contracts, actions by Russian contractors and authorities have not only violated national and international law ensuring labor protections, but have also smeared the integrity of the Olympic vision.

The Olympic Charter, the closest thing the IOC has to a constitution, states that Olympism, the committee’s guiding principle, “seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” Furthermore, its goals include placing “sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”

Perhaps the IOC would be better off not standing behind “fundamental ethical principles” and “human dignity”. The Olympics have a long and controversial history: child labor at the Beijing Games in 2008, civil rights abuses in Atlanta before the Games of 1996, and too many other incidents to list. The organization’s silence in Sochi is nothing new.

But assigning blame could be the wrong reaction. After all, the IOC is fundamentally an organization aimed at promoting and organizing international sports. It’s not the United Nations or the World Bank. Maybe the Committee should skip the ethical pronouncements entirely, focus on sprinting and ski jumps, and give up on the notion that the Games are anything other than—well, games.

Whatever you think of Olympic exceptionalism, the events in Sochi add another stain to the shine of the IOC’s brand. So long as the Committee fails to enforce the ideals of its own Charter, “the preservation of human dignity” will remain a collection of empty words. And before long, we may start hearing the same stories from Rio. 2016 is right around the corner.

Josh Feng ’17 is in Pierson College. He can be reached at josh.feng@yale.edu.

Interviews were conducted by Human Rights Watch and pulled from the report “Race to the Bottom: Exploitation of Migrant Workers Ahead of Russia’s Winter 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi ” © 2013 Human Rights Watch.

The last names of those who spoke were omitted from the report to protect privacy.

www.tyglobalist.org

08 boundaries

A Route to School Accompanied by Activists & Accordions As EU Immigration Laws Change, The Experience of One Roma Family in Paris

By Catrin Dowd

O

n an evening in the outskirts of Paris, 12-year-old Cristina and her siblings are dancing to Romanian superstar Nicolae Guta’s greatest hits. Amid an electric accordion’s choppy trills and a fouron-the-floor dance beat, it is hard to guess the Romani lyrics’ meaning. The setting is equally unsettling; Cristina laughs and experiments with dance moves in a small hotel room that serves as her family’s temporary home. Her parents sit nearby as a bespectacled social worker, Olivier Béthoux, puts Cristina’s favorite songs on a flash drive. When the current track ends, Béthoux asks Cristina to translate, and she becomes serious. “Nicolae Guta misses home,” she discloses. “He says, ‘each time I approach the border, my heart cries a little.’”

Cristina, like Guta, knows borders. Her family are Roma, historically known as gypspring 2014, issue 3

sies or “bohemians,” an ethnicity associated with statelessness. Roma like Cristina cross and are seen to cross several borders: those separating modernity from the past, France from other countries, and plenty from poverty. Cristina transverses other lines. Each day, with the help of Béthoux’s organization, the Federation of Associations providing Aid and Schooling to Roma Children and Disadvantaged Youth (la FASET), she shifts between Paris and its suburbs, Romani and French, and childhood and adulthood.

Like many 12-year-olds, Cristina is uninterested in ethnicity. She says, and it is true, that she is “Romanian.” Perhaps this choice recalls her previous home, or perhaps, like many in France, she conflates “Romanian” and “Roma.”

A minority in Romania, Roma form the majority of recent immigrants from that nation

to France. The words have different linguistic roots and describe distinct identities; many Roma in France are not Romanian. Cristina’s Romania is the territory of stars like Guta, a place filled with colorful houses like the rare pink one she stumbled across in Paris. Like countless immigrants, she wonders when she will revisit her native land. Then again, perhaps she feels the stigma that haunts the Roma.

Gypsies have long been unwelcome in France. Linguists trace the origins of Romani to India, but the history of their early migrations remains uncertain. Arriving in Europe in the 15th century, they have since been viewed as outsiders, as restless nomads moving across the continent. This idea exploded again in recent international news coverage about the unsanctioned migration of “Roma from Romania” (like Cristina) to France, and their subse-

boundaries 09

Today, many Roma live in informal settlements. (Courtesy romeurope.org)

quent expulsions by presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Holland. Such expulsions extend a hostile trend that began in 1427 when a troupe of gypsies, circulating around the Parisian outskirts, was barred from the city.

History, however, reveals change. France has, at other moments, embraced real and imaginary gypsies. Many were, in fact, allowed to settle, notably in Alsace-Lorraine. A descendent of these settlers, Django Reinhardt, became the face of 1930s French jazz. In the nineteenth century, Parisian artists, musicians, and writers, often lacking direct contact with Roma, celebrated imagined gypsy transgressions of the norms of work, sexuality, geographic stability, and even musical form. By the century’s end, Parisian artist-types had appropriated the label “Bohemian,” once applied only to Roma.

Though Roma faced more exclusion than lit-

erature suggests, they gained a mythical place in fiction. In Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the fictional gypsy Esmeralda inhabits the center of medieval Paris. Had she been real, she would never have been allowed to enter the city. But by Hugo’s day, her people had become a visible Parisian minority.

Over time, the popular image of gypsies, as quintessential Parisian beggars, emphasized poverty. Varieties of people panhandle in Paris, but tourists, influenced by stereotypes, tend to identify all beggars as “gypsies.” A Google search reveals that even in the art world, online galleries have translated the title of François Raffaelli’s painting of a suburban “Chiffonier,” a French rag picker, to “A Gypsy.” The impression that gypsies lived a distinct version of poverty, different from that of other disadvantaged Parisians, produced an ideal of artistic poverty that resists modernity’s demands.

French society generally treats Roma as distinct without recognizing distinctions among them. Roma activists want to change this. Informed by history, they identify the Roma as “a heterogeneous population.” They confront transnationalism and acknowledge the large and largely ignored differences among gypsies who have been dispersed for centuries.

Even the Romani language, the most uniting feature, has over 60 dialects. The descendants of the gypsies who came to medieval France might have little in common with today’s Romanian immigrants. But as ethnologist Martin Olivera explained, although there are 500,000 people of Roma origin in France, the media deploys the word “Roma” exclusively to describe the 15,000 recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. From 2008 to 2012, French journalists tended to identify Roma as such in stories rife with suburban shantytowns, juvenile delinquency, underage marriage, and unschooled children. Sociologist Olivier Peyroux affirmed that this “equation of ‘Roma’ with ‘poor’ is a cliché and an obstacle to immigration.”

This has led to a vicious cycle of exclusion leaving Roma immigrants with little choice but to exploit the classic image of the Parisian beggar. In 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union, France established restrictions on hiring their unskilled workers for a seven-year adjustment period. These laws appeared to target Roma, who often lack professional training. Unemployed and unable to apply for jobs, Cristina’s mother found that her most lucrative option was to go begging in Paris, armed with her baby and her most colorful scarf. The vicious cycle may soon be ending. Since January 1st, Romanians and Bul-

garians can work in the entire European Union without demanding a visa or work permit.

Cristina, like her mother and many other immigrants, seeks opportunity in France.

Upon arriving in Paris about two years ago, they moved into a phone booth near Bastille.

Although there was room for the family to lie down, it was cold and difficult. Life was lightened by old friends; Cristina describes Bastille as “little Buzau” because many people from her hometown live there informally. To further combat misery, Cristina threw herself into accomplishing a goal. Romania had provided her only two years of schooling, but living in a great city, even if in a telephone booth, was a chance to start again. Cristina became a figure in the neighborhood, posing a one-word question- “school?”- to passersby. This brought her family into contact with FASET and Béthoux.

Gypsies may lead more sedentary lives than popular lore suggests, but with globalization the entire world has become more nomadic.

Béthoux and other Frenchman have visited Romania, and familiarity with gypsies there encouraged activism at home. Ethnologist Olivera, a writer and the founder of the nonprofit Streets and Cities (l’Association Rues et Cités), went to do research for a doctorate; Julien Radenez, a teacher and linguist involved in FASET, investigated the Romani language and circus art. When Béthoux arrived on a volunteer trip, he connected with many Roma. Seeing gadjé (the Romani term for non-Roma) Romanians staring at him, this white-haired Frenchman liked to imagine them thinking, “Who is that bizarre gypsy with the glasses?” With a cheerful personality, a strong faith, and a desire to do good, he became involved in FASET. An efficient administrator, Béthoux became secretary general and helped coordinate FASET’s main operation: the truck schools (camion-écoles). Radenez and his colleagues drive into Paris’s poorer suburbs, to Pantin, or Bobigny, where Roma live on open plots of land, and FASET’s bright blue vehicles are soon filled with giggling youngsters who get a snack and lessons in everything from French to puppetry. Despite being an integral part of FASET’s work in the Paris region, camion-écoles have limited potential. The mayors of various constituencies may extol the camion-écoles as a clever solution, but FASET organizers like Radenez and Béthoux regard them with frustration, knowing that these classes a few times a week exist partly because governments are not more energetic in providing “real” schools.

Inspired by Cristina’s motivation, Béthoux is testing a different approach: individual acwww.tyglobalist.org

10 boundaries

Over time, gypsy caravans became artifacts in museums and theaters. Shown here, the Theatre du Soleil. (Dowd/TYG)

Cristina, like Guta, knows borders. Her family are Roma, historically known as gypsies or “bohemians,” an ethnicity associated with statelessness. Roma like Cristina cross and are seen to cross several borders: those separating modernity from the past, France from other countries, and plenty from poverty. spring 2014, issue 3

companiment. School is complicated, and not only because of homework. Children need addresses, places to sleep, bank accounts, tetanus shots, transportation, technology for homework (and, yes, music-listening), translators if they do not speak French, and hands to hold if they are young. Although schooling is obligatory for everyone between the ages of six and sixteen, immigrant and French children alike slip through the cracks. For Roma, according to Olivera, “there is always a ‘but;’” He means that it is convenient, from an administrative point of view, to just say ‘but they are gypsies!’” This seems like an activist’s exaggeration - the school system, after all, officially ignores ethnicity - but it tallies with Cristina’s experiences. Applications for a lunch scholarship disappeared into the confusion of city hall, and Cristina’s five-and-a-half-year-old sister was refused, for being too young, by an elementary school that accepted an underage American pupil a week later. Béthoux combats this with the help of journalists; FranceCulture and MediaPart have recounted Cristina’s journey.

It takes an army to cross such frontiers, but thanks to perseverance Cristina has been in school for over a year. She started in an UPE2A- essentially a one-room school house, despite its futuristic name, in which students learn French as a second language, and she is now in middle school. She speaks enthusiastically about endangered species and the school play; less so about technology and English. She has received a practical, immersed language education that is somewhat unusual in the memorization-based French system.

She has learned not only to speak French but to imitate classmates’ accents and to translate quickly into Romani. She knows the entire Paris region, its most downtrodden and its most educated people, its schools, subways, phone booths, and hotels. She has made up a song listing the 46 stops on the RER A, a subway line that spans about 70 miles.

The RER crosses under the boulevard périphérique, the famous autoroute that separates the city of Paris from its surroundings.

More porous than the medieval walls that

boundaries 11

Roma are now largely associated with subsidized housing, such as the buildings shown above, and informal settlements. (Dowd/ TYG) barred Cristina’s distant kin in 1427, it goes unnoticed as she glides beneath it on the RER. Yet Cristina has gotten to know the RER making a similar journey to that of the ancient French gypsies. Under the auspices of Paris’s public housing assistance, her family found themselves living in various suburban hotels.

The program provides shelter by using space efficiently, but its beneficiaries deal with the uncertainty of not knowing where they will live from week to week. Many of the hotels that volunteer vacancies are essentially truck stops. Smelling of cigarettes and surrounded by 1970s skyscrapers that appear as alien and artificial as an electric accordion sounds, these spaces are intended for still other kinds of nomads, not for residents and especially not for student residents. Cristina would leave her distant hotel room with a FASET volunteer at 6:00 a.m. to start school at 8:00.

Her family sometimes considered a caravan or houseboat, but contrary to myths they dream of a “maison stable” (“stable house”).

These were some of the first French words

they learned, soon after “école” (school). The Paris City Hall was able, after nudging from Béthoux, to procure stable lodging because Cristina was in school. They live in the Essonne, still far from the center city where Cristina studies and her parents spend their days; but with Béthoux’s Sunday visits to accomplish the important task of “keeping everyone’s spirits high,” Cristina remains motivated.

The end to restrictions on hiring Bulgarian and Romanian workers has further lifted the family’s spirits. But it has worried others; Le Monde recently documented fears that immigrants will “invade a saturated work market and siphon off social assistance.” Cristina’s family has indeed benefited from French assistance programs, but their greatest asset has been their daughter’s determination.

Béthoux comments that Cristina is “becoming a young French woman,” reflecting a central goal of the French school system. While Cristina has made the French language her own, she has also adapted its many flavors in a manner that echoes the evolution of the

Romani language, developing as the gypsies traveled and gathered words from Sanskrit, Armenian, and many Latin languages. Her story fits the newspaper descriptions, deplored by activists, of a gypsy family begging, living in precarious conditions, and mostly sticking to themselves. It also exemplifies the sacrifice of families and their desire, if given the chance, to find a physical and social place in France.

Béthoux does not know to what extent this desire will supersede old customs; “Cristina might get married when she is 17.” But standing on an RER platform on the way home from Cristina’s family’s hotel, he acknowledges that it is the action of crossing a boundary, rather than the destination, which lightens the process: “even if that happens, she and France will have learned from her experience in school.”

Catrin Down ‘15 is a French major in Branford College. She can be reached at catrin. dowd@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

Japan’s Invisible Minority

Fighting Discrimination through Ignorance

By Kelsey Larson

Map of Tokyo during the Edo period, 18441848. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

G

oogle thought it was posting an interesting map of historical Japan— until the image on Google Earth was attacked as a “tool of discrimination”.

The optional overlay of Tokyo seemed harmless enough, letting users compare the locations of old samurai residences and merchant districts in the 1800s with the city today. However, it also redrew something that Japanese Buraku activists have spent the last hundred years trying to erase: the lines marking out neighborhoods formerly designated as exclusively for the Burakumin, the “untouchables” who made their livelihoods in jobs—like leatherworking or police work— that were seen as “unclean” because of their association with death or crime. Since many of these districts still have majority Buraku populations, Buraku-rights groups attacked the map as a potential way for employers to identify and discriminate against the modern Buraku. Google took it down within days.

Walking across the lines on the map today, a visitor to a Buraku neighborhood would see the same apartment buildings as in the rest of Japan, filled with people eating the same foods and wearing the same clothes as the non-Buraku nearby. The only difference between these neighbors is the work their ancestors did during the Edo Period, before the caste system locking individuals into social positions and areas of residence was eliminated in the 1860s.

But abolishing the caste system didn’t abolish old stigmas; the Buraku kept their untouchable status, but lost their legal monopoly on profitable trades like leatherworking, as some other Japanese proved willing to trade traditional notions of “clean” work

spring 2014, issue 3

in exchange for profits. Throughout much of the twentieth century, employers routinely hired private investigators to screen out Buraku job candidates, and parents would forbid their children from marrying Burakumin.

An activist movement arose to challenge these practices in the 1960s—with only limited success. Even today, about 30 percent of Japanese stated in a 2009 survey by the Buraku Liberation League, a Buraku rights group, that they would not support their children marrying a Burakumin.

Few Japanese today genuinely believe the Buraku are inferior or unclean. Rather, as Buraku history expert Professor Jeffrey Bayliss of Trinity College explains, discrimination mostly stems from a “fear of doing anything that makes one seem different.” In one dramatic example, a family interrupted a wedding to beg their son’s Buraku fiancé to call off the marriage because his younger siblings were still unmarried, and the parents feared they’d become unmarriageable with a Burakumin sister-in-law.

To fight this persistent prejudice, the Buraku Liberation League has pushed for laws to lock up the information used to discriminate in the first place. The Japanese government accepted these demands, sharply restricting access to official government ancestry records written in the 1870s—the documents that private investigators used for a century to sniff out Buraku lineage in job applicants and marriage prospects. Even academic researchers have trouble acquiring access.

Beyond concealing birth records, the Japanese government and the Buraku rights movement also use the education system to keep discrimination out of the public eye.

Most Japanese schools only briefly mention the Buraku while discussing eighteenth-century Japanese society. Some young Japanese aren’t even aware of who the Burakumin are; in a generation or two, discrimination could be vanquished by the lethal weapon of amnesia.

Since few cultural differences exist between the Buraku and the rest of the Japanese—some traditional crafts and foods, nothing more— many Buraku see the erasure of history as a small price to pay for their total acceptance into mainstream Japanese society.

According to Japan-based reporter Philip Brasor, “there’s nothing tying the Buraku together except some vague connection to a community in the distant past.” The gradual erosion of this meager identity is only natural. A few Buraku-majority school districts choose to offer Buraku history classes to help students develop pride in their identities and learn to fight discrimination, but most Buraku have chosen to simply blend in with the crowd.

On Google Earth today, a Buraku neighborhood looks no different than any other. What marks Buraku neighborhoods as different is instead written in the history of the people who lived there and the cultural stigmas they’ve worked to cast aside. Now, to eliminate the last remnants of this old discrimination, many Buraku are choosing to hide their connection to their ancestors’ struggles. In a conservative society—one that fears any hint of deviance—historical distinction is a small price to pay for the prize of acceptance.

Kelsey Larson ’16 is an Economics major in Silliman College. She can be reached at kelsey.larson@yale.edu.

boundaries 13

Italy’s Door to Europe

Illegal Migrants in Lampedusa, Sicily

H

undreds of dilapidated wooden boats lie beached on the outskirts of Lampedusa’s Porto Nuovo and Porto Veccio, the island’s two main ports. From their peeling Arabic labels, the crafts can be traced back to departure ports in Libya, Algeria, and Morocco. Relics of the mid-twentieth century, these recovered vessels likely each have transported hundreds of illegal migrants on a desperate journey across the Mediterranean to the European border, often in the hope of escaping civil and political strife or a stifling lack of economic opportunity.

Each year, thousands of illegal migrants from the Middle East, sub-Saharan and Northern Africa risk their lives attempting to reach this seemingly insignificant, twenty-square-kilometer jagged rock, an island home to only 4,500 people. Since the province of Agrigento, Sicily, to which the island belongs, is one of the few municipalities in all of Europe equipped with a processing center that accepts undocumented immigrants, Lampedusa is a highly desirable destination for illegal migrants and asylum-seekers. The Guardia Costiera, or Italian Coast Guard, bears the responsibility for collecting the migrant-filled boats once they have crossed into European waters and transporting their passengers to the island’s center. There, the migrants are provided with shelter and a daily stipend until they receive papers to continue the process of temporary naturalization or, more rarely, are sent back to their country of origin.

Packed far past capacity, however, most of these fragile wooden boats can rarely withstand the shifty Southern Mediterranean’s weather long enough to reach the calm, crystalline waters surrounding Lampedusa. Some capsize entirely, while others barely hold up against the sea’s battering swells. Freak accidents, like fires, sometimes occur on board.

The distressed passengers that set out for Lampedusa share an unspoken acknowledgement of the risks associated with this perilous

By Nora Moraga-Lewy journey. Lacking the ability to radio for help, they understand that their journey, though often of less than 100 kilometers, may be fatal.

Occasionally near entire boatloads of migrants will perish before European officials can even detect them. From October to December of 2013, over four hundred migrants crossing from North Africa drowned in the waters surrounding Lampedusa.

Voyage-related risks are only one concern.

Like those crossing the Mexico-United States border, many African and Middle Eastern migrants are trafficked by organized crime rings, which exploit the migrants’ desperation for their own ends. Some migrants are cheated; others may be abused or assaulted along the way if they cannot deliver their payments in full.

Daniela Freggi, the director of the Lampedusa Turtle Group, a small NGO dedicated to marine conservation, first encountered the migration phenomenon under what she called “bizarre circumstances.” In the winter of 2011, the Guardia Costiera rescued over 800 migrants, primarily from East Africa.

Since her sea turtle rescue center shares a building with the Guardia Costiera, the facility was transformed into a shelter after the processing center overflowed. Arriving on site, Freggi discovered that much of her operating equipment and several of her holding tanks were lost or damaged in the “chaos and bustle”. Funded only by small donations, the Lampedusa Turtle Group could not work at full capacity for the entire following year Yet, Freggi harbors no negative feelings toward the individuals that passed through the makeshift shelter. An entire room of the Lampedusa Turtle Group’s conservation center now stands as a testament to the migrants, containing wedding pictures, baby dolls, and beaded necklaces. A poster reads in Italian: “Pain has no borders – the pain of the migrant, of the turtle, of our volunteers and the fishermen – is united by determination and makes a single world community.”

The local government erected its own memorial several years ago. Known as the “Door of Europe,” it commemorates those who lost their lives in crossing the maritime border to European waters and the risks that they took in the hope of a better life. Yet according to Aldo Croc-Cante of the Guardia Costiera, though most locals know of it, the site seems more visited by tourists. While the residents of Lampedusa understand the migrants aren’t associated with crime, they live their days detached from the situation. Interactions are rare and often solely business-oriented.

Visiting Lampedusa in the fall of 2013, Pope Francis called for action and solidarity, bringing greater attention to the migrants’ situation. His words, though, seemed more likely to be directed toward Europe as a whole; for there seems to be little more that Lampedusa’s residents can do in relation to this issue.

Upon receiving temporary naturalization papers or familial status, some migrants remain in Lampedusa to find employment.

Others continue on to continental Europe for the same reason. A great number of the migrants are never heard from again. Whether or not these migrants were able to obtain the lives they hoped for in crossing to Europe remains a mystery.

Abdul* came from Eritrea by boat five years ago. Now, he owns a rug stand at a small flea market on the island. Although glad that his life turned out “stable,” it is not as great as he had hoped. When he hears about shipwrecks or drownings, he feels “blessed that [he] wasn’t one of the dead ones” and wishes not to reflect on the others’ luck. “The risks of coming to Europe,” he says, “are higher than you might think.”

Nora Moraga-Lewy ’’16 is in Branford College.

She can be reached at nora.moragalewy@yale.edu. (*name changed to respect his privacy) www.tyglobalist.org

BOUND

DARIES

16 boundaries

A House Divided

Navigating Social, Ethnic, and Political Divisions in Bosnia, Two Decades After the War

By Skyler Inman

W

ith a population of just under thirty thousand, Široki Brijeg is not a city often in the international spotlight. In October of 2009, however, the small municipality in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina made headlines when fans of its soccer team clashed with those of the visiting team from Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo. An argument between soccer fans escalated into a citywide riot, ending in one death, thirty-one injuries, and accusations of police brutality and political corruption.

Soccer fights in Europe are rarely more than drunken brawls, but in Bosnia, where ethnicity and politics go hand in hand, sports matches can become the tense battlegrounds of nationalist sentiment. In 2009, fourteen years after the Dayton Peace Agreement put an end to the Bosnian War, these riots belied a problem far larger than a soccer rivalry.

Abroad, newsreels showed footage of burning cars and, more alarmingly, police officers seemingly engaged in the brawl rather than attempting to separate the two sides. When asked about the riots, Široki native Ivan Matej shook his head in exasperation: “It was all ethnically fueled. The Sarajevo fans were mostly Bosniak, and the Široki fans were mostly Croat.”

Despite its location just 15 miles southwest of Mostar, a city once known as a beacon of Bosnia’s proud multiculturalism, Široki is anything but diverse. “It’s completely Croat. Insanely Croat,” Matej said. The numbers agree—census estimates put the city’s population at around 98 percent Croat. Like many Bosnian cities, Široki’s popuspring 2014, issue 3

lation verges on complete homogeneity.

“It’s a very right-wing part of the country,” Matej said of Široki Brijeg, “Everybody’s just into religion and soccer. Growing up, you watch Croatian TV and follow the Croatian soccer team. My grandfather will watch daytime TV from Croatia and the Croatian news, but never the Bosnian news.”

Matej, now a junior at Yale, vividly recalled the riots in his hometown. “We had 15,000 people in the streets—that’s half the city. Everybody was protesting; everybody was unhappy.”

Reactions from the international community were mixed. While some dismissed the riot as nothing more than a part of Bosnia’s postwar growing pains, others marked it as another on a long list of signs that Bosnia, although no longer at war, was also not quite in a state of peace.

For the most part, Bosnia’s recent political situation has been just dormant enough to fall off the radar of the mainstream media. But the same ethnic tensions that led to the riots are, in visible ways, still paralyzing Bosnia’s progress towards coexistence.

I

n the Balkans, ethnicity, nationality, and religion have existed in complicated relation to one another for millennia. Over time, the region’s three major ethnic groups—Roman Catholic Croats, Eastern Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosniaks—have settled into a kind of geographic Venn diagram. Bosnia, sandwiched between Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia (and long a stronghold of the Ottoman Empire), prided itself for generations

as the crossroads of all three major groups—a kind of Balkan melting pot, the geographical epicenter of the region’s diversity.

Marshal Josip Tito, however, envisioned a future for the Balkans in which ethnicity and religion took a back seat to political doctrine. In the period following WWII until his death in 1980, Tito sought to keep the Balkan states united under the umbrella of Socialist Yugoslavia, bound together by the glue of socialist brotherhood.

But despite the highly propagandized rhetoric of unity through communism, many Yugoslavs privately carried on their cultural traditions and religious practices. “If you were a member of the Communist Party, you weren’t allowed to go to church,” said Dejan Gvozdenac, a freshman at Yale. “But I see a lot of people who were alive when Tito was alive and when everything was going really well. They are, I think, the most religious ones. Any time you have suppression, people just keep it secret, and once you remove that suppression, it’s just going to flourish.”

And flourish it did. When the heavy hand of Tito’s Yugoslavia lifted, ethnicity and religion again became acceptable aspects of personal identity, and this major societal change came hand in hand with a political one. While Communist regimes crumbled across the rest of Eastern Europe, politicians in the former Yugoslavia—members of Tito’s own party—turned to ethnicity as a way to divide and conquer.

Through half-histories and references to war crimes committed during the first and second

boundaries 17 world wars, politicians pitted neighbor against neighbor, fanning flames that had been suppressed under Tito’s regime. Along with this intensification of political rhetoric came the renaissance of the ‘Greater Serbia’ and ‘Greater Croatia’ movements, factions that called for the creation of nations intended to encompass all Croats and Serbs within their borders.

For Bosnia, home to significant Serb and Croat populations, these developments had grave implications. In order for a ‘Greater Serbia’ or ‘Greater Croatia’ to exist, it would need to be at the expense of Bosnia. Not only would its neighbors destroy the country geographically, they would also, many feared, ruin the multiculturalism that had come to define Bosnia. Bosnian Muslims—Bosniaks— were particularly fearful of the consequences of being overtaken by Serbia and Croatia.

Following a referendum in Bosnia, its representatives to the Yugoslav Congress declared independence from the Socialist Federation in April of 1992. According to the Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo, the ensuing war claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 people, 40 percent of whom were civilians. It was only in 1995, after three years of mass rape, torture, displacement, genocide, and confinement in concentration camps, that the international community was able to bring leaders of the warring parties together to negotiate peace.

“I’m

not nationalistic… I’m not even patriotic,” Dejan Gvozdenac cautioned, “But most people are.” Gvozdenac has called the city of

Banja Luka home for as long as he can remember. Before the war, the city’s population hovered around a 50-30-20 percent split between Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats respectively. Now, after a wartime influx of Serb refugees and a mass expulsion of the city’s Bosniak and Croat citizens, the city of about 200,000 has an overwhelming Serb majority. Gvozdenac’s family was one of many who came to Banja Luka after the war, choosing to stay in a majority Serb community out of fear. Like most Bosnian Serbs, they live past the line that divides Bosnia into its two major subsections; Banja Luka is the capital of what is known as Republika Srpska—the Serb Republic. “A lot of people didn’t move back [after the war] because they lost trust in other ethnicities.” Gvozdenac remembered: “People just didn’t feel safe.”

Although the Dayton Agreement of 1995 successfully ended the ethnic cleansing, genocide, and wide-scale destruction Bosnia endured during the war, it failed in many ways to set out a plan for long-term ethnic re-integration. The peace accords, which still function as Bosnia’s constitution, divided the country into two major parts: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is where nearly all of the country’s Bosniaks and Croats live, and Republika Srpska, home to a vast majority of Bosnian Serbs.

Bosniaks and Croats are also unevenly distributed across the Federation. Most Croats, like Ivan’s family in Široki Brijeg, live in the historical region of Herzegovina, whereas most Bosniaks live in the central

region, closer to Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo.

“Before the war, Sarajevo and Banja Luka were almost 30-30-30 percent, but now in every city it’s closer to 90 percent of one ethnicity,” Gvozdenac said, “and in Herzegovina, you know, you have [Croats] who are saying, ‘I’m not Bosnian, I’m Herzegovinian.’ ” Although diplomats argued in favor of the Dayton Agreement’s structure because it accomplished the set goal of ending the war, many now feel as though the nationalist goals that started the war were actually accomplished through the peace accords. Bosnia may not have been divided between Croatia and Serbia, but it was divided among itself.

“I would say that the real problem is that most people don’t have anyone to integrate with,” Gvozdenac said, referencing the homogeneity of most regions in the country. “But in the places that you do have different ethnicities, no one is doing anything to make it any more integrated.”

T

he divisions enacted by the Dayton Agreement permeate Bosnian life at every level, from simple geography to a split government and education system. Rather than a single head of state, a three-member “Presidency” governs Bosnia, whereby one president exists for each of the country’s three main ethnic groups. This conflict-avoiding arrangement is as inefficient as it sounds. For each of the three presidents, Bosnia maintains a parallel system of federal ministries, along with a heavy subset of local governance under each.

Previous page: An aerial view of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The city lies on both sides of the Neretva River, and is united by the iconic Stari Most, or “Old Bridge” (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) Right: Bosnia’s political divisions after the war. To the north and east, Republika Srpska, the ‘Serb Republic,’ where nearly all of Bosnia’s Serbs live; to the west and throughout central Bosnia, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where most of the country’s Bosniaks and Croats live. Bosnia’s biggest cities, like Banja Luka and Sarajevo, are largely monoethnic as a result of wartime displacement. Some cities, like Mostar, remain multiethnic, but deeply divided. (Map courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/CIA World Factbook)

www.tyglobalist.org

18 boundaries

The bright orange school building of United World College in Mostar, an international school dedicated to bringing students of Bosnia’s different ethnic groups together. Unfortunately, UWCiM is one of few multiethnic schools in the country.

(Courtesy Wikimedia Commons) Kristina Coric, one of the founders of the Bosnian youth coalition OKC Abrasevic, had harsh words about postwar governance: “Politicians are actually entrepreneurs, mismanaging, selling and stealing… purely for personal gain.” According to Coric, more than 65 percent of Bosnia’s public funds go towards the country’s federal and local bureaucracy. “Some statistics show that we have at least six times more public servants per capita than any other developed country of the western democracy.”

“When you saw Romney and Obama during the American elections, they talked about tax rates and real issues,” said Matej. “In Bosnian elections, I’ve never even heard the term ‘tax rates.’ Nobody talks about the economy; it’s always about ratios of representation.”

According to Coric, the stagnancy of the Bosnian political dialogue is exactly what politicians want. By avoiding issues like the economy, which affect all Bosnians, they instead use the divisive status quo to hold on to power and “buy time.”

“The same nationalist parties [who] started the war, fought the war, and signed peace after the war are still in power more than 20 spring 2014, issue 3

years later,” she said, “they play the same arguments, not for the sake of agreeing but [for] prolonging their positions [of power].”

B

eyond the repetitive cycle of Bosnia’s political dialogue, the most shocking consequence of the country’s split government may be the parallel existence of three distinct Ministries of Education, and, therefore, three separate school systems. For the most part, Croat children, Bosniak children, and Serb children attend separate schools with separate teachers and separate curricula.

“Children are taught different versions of history and facts [about] the recent war,” Coric said. Bosnia’s segregated schooling is one of the country’s most divisive forces, and not just because of the different curricula, she explained: “It creates [a] new generation so far apart [from] one another.”

Like most Bosnians of the postwar generation, Senija Steta initially attended a segregated public school. Now a junior at Wellesley College, Steta said she rarely saw her Croat classmates as a child. “The school was basically divided into two sides, and two different curricula.”

Steta’s elementary school was a part of the controversial “two schools under one roof” system in place in Bosnia’s more diverse cities.

“We had one or two classes together, but for the most part, our teachers were different, our classes were different… We were operating in entirely different educational systems.” Oftentimes, these parallel educational worlds have little or no relation beyond their shared roof.

Just north of Široki Brijeg lies the old city of Mostar, Steta’s hometown and one of the few Bosnian cities that still contains a fairly mixed population. Mostar’s mixed demographics are slightly misleading—the city may not have its own Berlin Wall, but it might as well.

When Bosnians speak of the city, they refer to it as two entities: Eastern, Croat Mostar, or Western, Bosniak Mostar. Bulevar, one of Mostar’s most important avenues, splits the city.

Once a frontline in the Croatian-Bosnian fight for Mostar, Bulevar still remains littered with crumbling buildings almost twenty years after the war’s end. Not far from the bullet-marked facades, however, stands one pristine, bright orange building: United World College in Mostar, an internation-

boundaries 19

Bosniak women at a 2007 memorial for the Srebrenica Massacre, one of the war’s most notorious acts of genocide. Memories of mass killings, forced displacements, city-wide sieges, and other wartime acts continue to make reintegration in Bosnia a struggle.

(Courtesy Wikimedia Commons) al boarding school with a special focus on fostering coexistence through education.

Steta, a UWCiM alumna, expressed gratitude for her multiethnic high school experience. “It’s very different for me than it is for someone who’s never been in an international environment,” she said. But only a small minority of Bosnian students get such a chance.

Although UWCiM strives to be the model for future reintegration, it is one of the few integrated, multiethnic schools in the country.

“Mostar is the most multiethnic city in [Bosnia],” Coric said, “but instead of becoming a paradigm of how the country can be organized, it is a deeply divided community.”

Coric’s organization, OKC Abrasevic, is devoted to bridging the gap between Mostar’s two sides, and sees promise in the younger generation. Working alongside UWCiM, Abrasevic is what Coric referred to as “a kind of oasis in the city,” a safe space for youth of different backgrounds to meet and mingle. According to Coric, as a multiethnic but deeply segregated city, “[Mostar] is literally the biggest problem in [Bosnia],” but could serve as the “solution model” for the country.

A

midst all of these separations and self-segregations, one thing is universal across Bosnia: a pervading sense of being stuck. Despite this feeling of stagnancy, change is possible on the generational level—slowly, and over a long period of time.

“I think it’s silly,” said Gvozdenac of the international community’s expectations, “It hasn’t even been 20 years [since the war]. It’s too early to see what will happen.”

Steta was similarly hopeful. “People are starting to communicate more and interact, to get past the ethnic hate and all that,” but she cautioned, “you just can’t tell someone who lost their entire family in the war, ‘Don’t be mad, don’t hate them.’” Coric agreed that Bosinas still need to grapple with the past to move forward.

But even in the face of a poor economy, a largely segregated population, and a highly corrupt government, it’s hard not to have hope for Bosnia. Just over twenty years ago, many in the international community had written of the Balkans as a hopeless place—too mired in its own ethnic hatred to be saved. In those years, Bosnia fell victim to hateful political doctrines. The country saw

genocide, mass rape, and wide-scale displacements—the kind of destruction that can wipe a country off of the map. Despite all odds, Bosnia made it through to the other side, but not without significant scars.

There’s a song by Bosnian rap artist Frenkie that addresses the country’s presidents: “You represent three different peoples, he says, but you steal like a team.” Steta almost laughed as she translated the song’s title, “Bring Them Down.” While there certainly aren’t any calls for mutiny in Bosnia, it does seem as though a rally for governmental change could bring Bosnians closer together. After all, in a land whose history saw Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian rule; in a land that has been home for centuries to many peoples of many faiths, it would take more, one hopes, than three years of war to destroy that legacy.

Skyler Inman ’17 is in Jonathan Edwards College. She can be reached at skyler.inman@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

Border 20 photo essay

Crossing

By Kelly Schumann

LEFT PAGE: [Above] “Let your hearts speak� in German and Italian above an image of two people embracing. German visitors leave much graffiti on the wall in Bethlehem reflecting on the similarities between the Berlin wall and the separation barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories.

RIGHT PAGE: [Above Left] Graffiti on the Palestinian side of the wall, showing a ladder from heaven reaching down to destroy the separation barrier in Jerusalem.

[Above Right] Exiting the checkpoint from Israel into the Palestinian territories. Fences, barbed wires, holding pens, and other de-humanizing security measures mark the daily life of those Palestinians with permits to cross the wall into Israel for work. However most Palestinians do not have permission to cross the border, and thus are imprisoned within their towns. Sometimes people are given permission to go into Jerusalem to pray during Ramadan, however for most this only occurs once every ten years.

[Below] A reflection of the prospects for the Israel-Palestinian peace process, created by British street artist Banksy. A few years ago Banksy visited Bethlehem, leaving about ten works of art which draw visitors to this day. This is one of his most famous pieces, along the main road heading into Bethlehem.

photo essay 21

www.tyglobalist.org

22 photo essay

[Above] An image memorializing Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, famous for hijacking airplanes in 1969 and 1970 around the events of Black September. She is currently a member of the Palestinian National Council. Next to her is an image of Bethlehem’s Christmas Tree from Manger Square surrounded by the separation barrier. The Church of Jesus’ Nativity is just a two minute drive from this portion of the wall.

[Below] A view of Bethlehem and surrounds at dusk taken from the outer limits of Jerusalem.

Photos courtesy of Attila Durak

boundaries 23

Invisible Boundaries

Refugee Culture in New Haven

By Anna Meixler

A participant in IRIS’ past World Refugee Day, a celebration of New Haven refugees’ lives and cultures.

(Courtesy of Marilyn de Guehery for IRIS)

“I

t is a hard thing, to be without your home,” an Iraqi refugee said. Hands clasped tightly in her lap, her gaze settled on the off-brand cola and packaged cookies set beside an intricately engraved silver teakettle. “But I will never go back,” she said. Her son, sitting on the opposite couch, hardly looked up from his chemistry textbook. He was only three when their family fled Iraq, and “[doesn’t] remember it well enough to miss it,” he said.

For refugee families, adjusting to American culture and its social and political climates inevitably poses challenges – but those challenges are also exacerbated between generations, at times creating divisions within families. This is the case in one of New Haven’s Iraqi refugee families. There is a disconnect between the sons, a high school student and

an elementary school student, and their parents. While the boys speak English comfortably, their parents struggle to string together sentences, insisting that the family speak Arabic at home. While the parents are frustrated by English, the sons are irritated with their parents lack of fluency, which has rendered them reliant upon their boys to translate for and guide them. The sons are tired of this dependence, and their parents are uncomfortable with this shift of familial power. “I wish my parents could help me apply to college. I am trying to do everything by myself—financial aid applications, the Common App. It’s too much, ” said their seventeen-year old son, Aban.* Though they cannot help their children with school-related matters, the parents strive to maintain their familial structure, having the

father settle most affairs with the family’s only cell phone, despite his wife’s and sons’ greater English fluency. But generational differences within refugee families can seem insurmountable. While the parents miss their social lives in Iraq, their sons have friends from all ethnicities at New Haven schools, and are less privy to the isolation and loneliness their parents feel. While their sons have embraced American education, the parents cannot partake in this learning. Aban tried to patiently explain his report card to his parents, but they do not seem to trust his translation. “Is that really what it says?” probed Aban’s mother upon hearing translations of Aban’s teacher’s comments. “Does it say you are doing badly?

I will go to school to speak with your teacher.”

Aban immediately tried to dissuade her from doing so. www.tyglobalist.org

24 boundaries Such cultural disconnect is common within refugee families, and is often tied to language, a challenge that is both technical and cultural. Since IRIS (Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services) opened in the 1980s, many refugees have settled in New Haven. “Refugee comfort in the U.S. is closely related to their English abilities,” said Laurel McCormack, the IRIS volunteer coordinator.

Many refugees noted that, even after gaining proficiency in English, they grappled with American communicative norms. For example, a middle-aged Iraqi refugee described that when Americans offer him refreshments, he is “not sure if I am to accept. I do not know if they are truly offering. Hospitality is very different in Iraq.” This refugee also mentioned that, while retaliation after insult is expected in Iraq, he was informed not to respond to racism or assault in America, “because I do not want trouble with the law. I fear that they will send me back to Iraq if I do something wrong.” But younger refugees seem immune to legal fears, perhaps because they have lived most or all of their lives in the U.S., not their families’ repressive countries of origin.

They also seem better acclimated to American social norms; refugee children who attend New Haven public schools have friends from diverse backgrounds and sometimes participate in local sports leagues. Malik*, an Iraqi third grader, is comfortable showing up at his neighborhood friends’ homes uninvited, and Aban said he has made friends “of many races, who are American and immigrants, and some are refugees, like me.”

Adult refugees, however, go to great lengths to preserve their cultures in New Haven, despite the pushback they may receive from their children. Many cook traditional foods, despite the difficulty in finding certain ingredients and their children’s predilections for Western tastes. “I’ll eat at Brian’s,” Malik called to his mother one afternoon, “they’re having pizza.” Hospitality customs are also commonly upheld in New Haven, across nationalities. Nearly every Yale student who volunteers with the Yale Refugee Project (YRP), which provides tutoring and assistance to New Haven refugees, is offered food and drink when they visit their refugee partners.

Brett Davidson, ES ’16, stressed that “reciprocity and demonstrations of gratitude” are paramount to the Ethiopian man with whom he works, who offers Brett small gifts whenever he visits. But many refugees, who could once display lavish hospitality in their countries of origin, cannot afford to express generosity in the U.S. McCormack described the distress refugees feel when they must budget their spring 2014, issue 3

finances given low-paying jobs and higher pricing; “they often cannot be generous while still being able to live,” she said. She recounted that refugees “surviving on food stamps distributed from IRIS insist upon bringing platters of food to the agency when they come for language classes.”

Refugees make other efforts to maintain their cultural identities. Some uphold religious tenets, for example, many Muslim refugees continue customs of diet and modest dress, with women covering their hair. Religious refugees strive to find worship communities, and many attend local church services and partake in holiday celebrations.

Preserving religiosity in New Haven is difficult, however, particularly for observant Muslims.

“Many work in food services, and it is difficult to find employers who do not require that they handle alcohol, or will give them time during the workday to pray,” explained McCormack. While some refugees have abandoned observance to secure work, others have not, and “are unemployed for months,” she said. “And while American labor culture is more conducive to Christian lifestyles, many Christian refugees cannot find communities of worship that speak their language. “ Unfortunately, cultural separation also exists between refugees of different nationalities, whom IRIS strives to connect. McCormack, who explained that refugees are very appreciative of the language, legal, financial, housing, and educational assistance that IRIS provides, added that they can feel disconnected from the agency upon which they rely.

“We realize everyday how little we understand about what’s going on in their communities,” McCormack noted. “But I’ve observed that groups are insular based on nationality,” she continued, describing the cultural boundaries. Some refugees work contractually with IRIS, and express to its staff that some refugees do not attend IRIS language classes due to divides between ethnic groups. Social tensions exist, but when IRIS workers have tried to confront this problem, “so much is lost in translation,” said McCormack.“Rumor mills are strong,” she added. For some refugees, “family image is more important than learning a new language; they fear others’ gossip.”

She also noted that some of IRIS’ programs aren’t compatible with refugee lifestyles, for example, few attended an IRIS walking group, as it conflicted with time refugees use to pray and nap.

Most adult refugees thus spend time with their families or other refugees from their countries of origin. Sadly, many do not leave their homes often, and their social circles are

restricted to the refugees with whom IRIS has paired them to live. IRIS takes great consideration in their housing arrangements, striving to house refugees who share nationality, gender, and stage of life, so they can best relate to one another. In fact, a single, female Eritrean refugee opted to live with a group of single Eritrean men instead of women from different nationalities, an arrangement that would be taboo in Eritrea. There are very few female Eritrean refugees in New Haven, and another “lives with a Congolese mother, also a very rare arrangement,” said McCormack, who says that IRIS “is instructed to almost never house refugees together from different nationalities.” Though divides exist between refugee groups, IRIS tries to foster friendships through the agency, but refugees “get tired of having to speak English with one another,” said McCormack. However, Arabic speakers of different nationalities have formed friendships, as have those from the same religious backgrounds.

Despite the isolation and tensions refugees may feel given their cultural differences, “they take great pride in their traditions and customs,” said McCormack. McCormack recounted that many refugee musicians and artists bring their work to IRIS to spread interest in and knowledge about their cultures. “It needs to come from them,” said McCormack, who expressed that IRIS’ efforts to showcase cultures have lead to unrest. “Many request cultural celebrations,” she said, but “if we host an Iraqi culture day, we must immediately have a Congolese one. Everything must be in measure, which makes it difficult to give enough attention to each nationality’s arts, dance, and cuisine. A lot of times we just don’t do it, which is a shame.” IRIS is working to empower their clients to share their traditions, and many now posses the knowledge, bravery, and resources to share their cultures in America, a difficult feat.

Complex cultural boundaries separate refugee groups from one another, and cause divides within families as younger generations grow more Westernized. But most refugees, regardless of age and nationality, express that they have gained more than they have lost in assimilating. Most appreciate the liberty they feel, embracing American norms of freedom of speech and expression. “I could never dance when I was with my family,” said an Eritrean refugee. “Here, I am free to dance.” *Name has been changed to protect refugee anonymity Anna Meixler ’16 is an Ethics, Politics, and Economics major in Ezra Stiles College.

feature 25

Squatting Amsterdam

Reclaimed Spaces and Activist Communities

By Karolina Ksiazek

Amsterdam’s Snake House (Ksiazek/TYG).

I

n the midst of my grocery shopping on a Saturday afternoon in Amsterdam, I wandered into a bookstore looking to find used novels in English. What I found instead was books about anarchy, inequality, and activism, and an advertisement for Zsa Zsa Zine, pointing down the stairs to the basement. I descended into the rabbit hole.

I stood at the foot of the stairs for almost a minute. My eyes scanned from the shelves of small booklets (organized into categories like feminist zines, local zines, zines by people of color), to the old couch on my left, to the bearded man at a table sketching a comic strip. In the distance there was a kitchenette and a chalkboard sign advertised cake for just one euro. Right in front of me, the thing I noticed last, was the large painting of a vagina on a tarp suspended in the air. “What is this?” I asked out loud.

This was Zsa Zsa Zine, I learned. Open only on Saturday afternoons, it’s an archive of zines and comics. But more importantly, it’s a space available for people to come and create whatever art they wish.

Over the course of the next three hours, people came and went. One girl brought a rambunctious puppy she was dog-sitting, and another popped in to work on some posters and didn’t say that many words.

“It’s awesome that you found this,” the cartoonist told me. “It took me years to discover this part of Amster-

dam. And most people never find it.”

“What is this?” I kept asking.

This wasn’t just a Saturday afternoon art club. This was my first interaction with Amsterdam’s activists and squatters. It felt like some secret underground club that I, as a study abroad student craving cool experiences, desperately wanted to be a part of.

I kept asking questions. They told me I should go to the film-screening at Cavia that night, and to Queer Night at the Vrankrijk on Wednesday. They explained about the dinners at a squat called Joe’s Garage, and told me I could find all these events on a site called Radar Squat. I fantasized that these people would become my new Amsterdam friends, but they never actually did. But I paid attention to their advice. I went to Cavia, to the Vrankrijk. I checked out the Free Sale at Joe’s Garage. I did a free capoeira workshop at De Valreep, and a stencil workshop at Plan B. I started paying attention to the buildings, to the posters and the politics of the city. I learned about what squatting is, and what squatting isn’t, and why Amsterdam’s squats were in threat. I had a shit ton of fun doing it, and it was almost all free. efore coming to Amsterdam, I’d perused Aaron Cole’s The Cool Guide to Amsterdam. In a brief “Note About Squatting,” Cole rails against the “conservative pigs” who force people out of squats. I didn’t get it. If you didn’t own the building, why should you feel that you have a right to live there?

B

It wasn’t until I went to Amsterdam that I realized that squatting was about more than avoiding the rent. In fact, the money is exactly what squatting wasn’t about. For Kees, a young guy who lives in a squat called Plan B, squatting was about freedom. After graduating from college, he knew he couldn’t afford an apartment in Amsterdam without a fulltime job, and that a fulltime job was not what he wanted. He attended an information session with volunteers that were experts in housing policy and squatting techniques. He found a group and they scoped out a building that looked abandoned enough. They did renovations to make it more homey, and now they run the household collectively, sharing food and responsibilities.

But even for those who don’t live in squats, the squatting culture is a place to connect with other people. A website called Radar Squat lists several events every day at Amsterdam’s squats. It’s Monday night and I’m writing a draft of this article way past the deadline.

I’m checking the website. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I could go to Office Hours at Joe’s Garage to learn about how I can squat a building. I could go to one of two “Weggeefwinkels” or Free Shops (like a thrift shop, but everything is free). I could eat a three-course meal for five euro made by volunteers at MKZ—or I could go to a different Voku (People’s Kitchen) at Zeeburgerpad 22. Or I could go to a seven-euro punk show. Or a three-euro movie.

In November, I went with my friend www.tyglobalist.org

26 boundaries

bike with Meghan and stepped in to check out the situation. After passing through several rooms furnished with posters and old couches and colorful walls, I found the capoeira instructor and one other participant in a room lit only by a few dim green lights.

The instructor’s name was Eline, and she taught the workshop patiently for the full hour, even though there were only three of us there.

It was cold in the room—I kept alternating between taking off my sweatshirt and putting it back on. And there was a sticky spot on the floor that we had to avoid during the moves where we touched the ground with our hands.

But she remained cheerful despite all that.

Eline is the workshops coordinator for De Valreep, so talking to her gave me some insight on how events like those on Radar Squat actually come into being. Basically, she explained, you could hold a workshop on anything you’d like.

The problem, though, is getting people to show up. “We really want to have more people from the neighborhood,” Eline told me. “We want to make a place of it that’s more accessible. Now it’s without electricity and water. We did something for children, but it was not really visited by a lot of people. But we really want to legalize the place so we can make it look better and cleaner.”

When Eline moved to Amsterdam from another city in the Netherlands, she came to De Valreep because of the people. “They want to make a nice world,” she explained. “That’s not everyone in Amsterdam, like in the places where you have to prove that you’re cool or something.”

It was nice to see Eline’s face light up as she talked about De Valreep. She told me about a Christmas dinner that they had for those who didn’t have family with whom to spend the holiday, and about the gardening program where community members get a patch of land and gather on Sunday evenings to make soup from the vegetables they grow there.

“De Valreep is a special place,” she said. “The squat scene has a bad reputation for some people. You always see images on TV when they get kicked out of such a building. But we try to show the other side—there’s empty buildings that need to be used and can be nice places for a lot of people. Now it’s the task to make other people enthusiastic about it.”

But when it comes to the legal battle of keeping a squat around, it takes a lot more than just enthusiasm. Honestly, sometimes it seems to come down to luck. spring 2014, issue 3

Take the Vrankrijk—the building that hosts WTF Queer Night, the event suggested to me by the folks I met at Zsa Zsa Zine. The Vrankrijk is just a block from tourist-laden Dam Square, and its façade is painted in blue with an awesome Lichtenstein-style explosion. (I’d instagrammed it before I even knew what it was.)

There was originally a printing press in that building, and after it was abandoned the space was slated for conversion into luxury apartments. In 1982, activists squatted the building to keep that from happening.

In 1992, those squatters managed to purchase the building to prevent their eviction. The Vrankrijk’s history since then has

But when it comes to the legal battle of keeping a squat around, it takes a lot more than just enthusiasm. Honestly, sometimes it seems to come down to luck. not been without its ups and downs, but at least the community that operates there doesn’t have to worry about being evicted.

But across the street, a squat just as historic hasn’t had that kind of luck with securing its own agency. Het Slangenpad (The Snakehouse) is another building I’d instagrammed before I got to know it. Its façade is a gradient from bright orange to sunny yellow, with a colorful snake dropping down from the roof to greet you just above eye level with an open-mouthed grin that remains cheerful despite its fangs. If you passed by The Snakehouse in December, you would have seen a banner across the middle of the building read, “Sign the petition now! Save the Snakehouse!”

Like the Vrankrijk, the Snakehouse was squatted in the early ‘80s in the site of an abandoned press. The new residents set up electricity and plumbing, built kitchens and put up new walls. The top four floors became the

living and working space for various artists, actors, and musicians over the years. Like in the Vrankrijk, the residents of the Snakehouse tried to purchase the building they were squatting.

But things didn’t work out so well for them. According to Het Slangenpad’s website, attempts to legalize the property in 1987 and 1989 came close but were unsuccessful partially due to an uncooperative owner. The artists tried to purchase the property from the owner’s heirs after he died in 1997, but they didn’t receive any response then either. The ownership of the property most recently changed hands in 2008 when the housing corporation De Key bought it as part of a larger row of houses..

Het Slangenpad is still a home for artists, but the garage section, De Slang, hosts events for the public. Occasionally, there’s a street art pop-up store, selling large-scale canvas prints and t-shirts of artwork by Amsterdam’s renowned graffiti artists. I approached the woman working the mini-bar at the pop-up store to ask about the petition, and the sign that said, “Fuck DeKey!” DeKey is the housing company that owned my student apartment.

“The housing company was supposed to let people continue to live here and preserve the exhibition space,” she told me.

“But the contract was written so poorly that they don’t actually have to do it.”

Though the Snakehouse had support from City Council, there wasn’t much they could do to prevent DeKey from implementing its plan to turn the building into luxury apartments and a parking garage. “A lot of people in charge of these properties are quite dull. They want everything to look the same,” Vinny told me.

The plan of the Snakehouse’s current residents would be converting it to 15 residential workspaces for artists, and a public art space in the garage section of the building. “If we knew we were going to be here for ten years, we would make the building look a little more stable. But we’re living month to month. We don’t even know if we’ll make it to our 31st birthday in March.”

It seemed saddeningly similar to the situation at De Valreep. “If we don’t get legalized, we probably have to move out in March or April,” Eline had told me.

De Valreep is much younger than the Snakehouse. It was 2011 when the volunteers squatted the abandoned animal shelter in Amsterdam East and turned it into a social center.

If legalized, De Valreep plans to create a cheap café in the building, creating just enough profit to organize cheap activities for the neigh-

boundaries feature 27

Activist signs covering the door to Plan B. (Ksiazek/TYG). borhood in the rest of the space. But already, a private contractor has made other plans for the space. “They want to make a restaurant or something from it,” Eline said. “But we think there’s enough of them in Amsterdam.”

Everyone I talked to about squatting told me about how popular it was in the ‘80s. Amsterdam’s squat scene is just a shadow of what it was back then. “Those buildings along the river there all used to be squatted—there were parties and events all the time,” Vinny had said.

When I talked to Kees, the squatter from Plan B, he too told me: “It used to be really common for students to squat. Now there’s a bit of a stronger conformity culture, and the squatting ban scares people away. People feel more powerless now.”

Squatting was officially banned in the Netherlands in 2010. But a judge ruled that the police couldn’t evict a squat without a judge’s orders. So until the owner of the building speaks up, squatters can live in peace.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend of absentee landlords starting to care about their property soon after it was squatted. The news feed on Squat.net depicts a constant stream of buildings being squatted and squats being evicted.

Sometimes the creation of a new squat brings on cheers of “Kraken gaat door!”

(Squatting will continue!) And sometimes

the eviction of a squat leads to petitions and protests. But when I met Kees at a stencil workshop one of his housemates was organizing, he held up Plan B’s eviction letter quite unceremoniously. The residents of Plan B had tried to contact the owner of their building, but his only reply was getting a lawyer and going to court. The residents are already scoping out a new place to live.

Plan B isn’t a social center like De Valreep and Joe’s Garage. Though its description on Radar Squat calls it “a home for a bunch of creative and anarchists,” Kees told me that several squatters in his group aren’t that political and are “just studying biology or something.”

I kept asking Kees about activism, but he emphasized that squatting wasn’t about politics. When I interviewed the performer I met at Zsa Zsa Zine, she stressed that while she organizes events at squats, it’s not her primary scene and she can’t speak for it. In the dozen or so interactions I had with the squatting subculture when I was in Amsterdam, I thought of the “squatting community” as a cohesive whole.

But it wasn’t until I had those conversations that I realized how many layers there were to it.

“Squatting is just to get a roof over yourself.

You shouldn’t have to be a left wing radical to be a squatter,” Kees told me. Then he admitted, “But squatting is so hard to do now that almost all the people involved are quite political.”

I thought of that statement when I saw a friend post on Facebook the Camus quote, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

And so it makes sense that the activists and anarchists come together in these squatted spaces. They are a refuge from the structure of the city that kept trying to convince me that if I wanted to live there, I just had to pay five euro for a small beer, 30 euro for a concert ticket, 120 euro to learn yoga. Squatting isn’t easy—the threat of eviction, the stigma, the renovation. Kees explained, “when you squat something, you do create an enemy for yourself. The owner might be a good person, but he’s got a different interest than you have.”

But it all seems worth it. Planning for the future, applying to fellowships, and thinking about jobs and classes that interest me less than other things interest me, I can’t help but think back to what I can’t stop reflecting back to what Kees said when I first went to Plan B: “You squat something to live the way you want to live. You don’t have to wait for a revolution. You can do your better living right here, right now.”

Karolina Ksiazek ’15 is an American Studies major in Jonathan Edwards College. She can be reached at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

28 glimpse An AAP Rally in India (Courtesy of Creative Commons)

Party for the People?

The politics of the world’s largest democracy are changing

S

udeep Das, an office clerk migrated to New Delhi from Odisha, a coastal state in the east, seven years ago. There are hundreds of thousands of people like him, who have come to Delhi from states across India. He voted for the first time in elections for Delhi’s Legislative Assembly two months ago. Das works for an honest living and lives a modest life, but he may also be helping to write his country’s political future.

The demographics of Delhi are changing, and the city’s politics are changing as well.

The Census of India reported that there has been an average migrant inflow of 80,000 people to New Delhi over the last five years.

Gradually, these people settle in the city for better work opportunities. As the land area and resources of cities like Delhi are limited, settlement areas arise in every major city filled largely with migrant workers.

A McKinsey India report in 2010 stated that India’s cities are grossly unprepared for this wave of urban migration. They estimate that over the course of the next ten to fifteen years, 590 million Indian people would be living in cities. Policymakers have overlooked the existence of this massive demographic base. Out of the current migrant population, more than 60 percent work as laborers and small businessmen. Living in the often extravagant setting of New Delhi with limited incomes and relatively basic needs, these people bring with them their own ideas of governance and policies, and vote accordingly.

Indian politics has never been strictly bipartisan, but out of the 67 years since Indian independence, two major parties, the Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have held office for 44. Additionally, voters in rural and urban constituencies have spring 2014, issue 3

differing expectations from their ministers.

Ministers kindle this fire with campaigns that are studded with extravagant speeches and theatrical elements. But at the core of general elections in rural India¬¬, where 65 percent of the country resides, lies the art of delivering hefty promises; a somewhat fractured barter system between the masses and their ministers. The electorate seems to stay in the relationship, year after year, mainly because of a lack of better options.As recently as last year, however, the Indian voters were handed an alternative. When elections for the Legislative Assembly occurred in the national capital New Delhi, the voters could choose a third party.

The Aam Aadmi Party (or Common Man Party. Their party symbol is a broom and their acronym AAP phonetically transliterates to the Hindi word for ‘you’) was born out of an anti-corruption movement. Three years ago, the nation saw ubiquitous protests against corruption in government, political parties, and among bureaucrats. This led to an effervescence of a long curbed emotion of angst in the general Indian population that, in the eyes of many, was sick and tired of graft. A group of activists vied with the parliament to bring about a specific piece of legislation with ambitious but debatable clauses. Gradually, the anti-graft movement was put on a parallel track when some of the activists decided to join politics to effect more direct change.

The pilot program for this change was to be tested in the Delhi assembly elections—New Delhi, the urban, modern epicenter of the protests and now the stage for a big surprise.

Less than a year later, the party sits at the helm of affairs in the national capital. Even as the nation is digesting what just happened in New Delhi, this fairy tale victory is attracting

By Kartik Srivastava

a lot of interest academically. To begin with, during the campaign, a welfare-politics model was adopted to complement the anti-corruption drive. AAP offered a 50 percent reduction of power prices and essentially free water to a bracket of households that used less than 700 liters a day—the “common men.” AAP also looked to migrants living in Delhi for support.

It was as if the ghost of Indian rural barter politics had finally made the jump to the cities.

With the promise of a corruption-free government as the base, several arguably populist but perhaps impractical cherries were added to AAP’s cake. And the urban population bought the idea, forgetting the not-so-popular flipside: for instance that the water reforms are being administered by a body that now sits on a debt of $5.7 billion, while it is being overhauled by the state government to address corruption. The essence of this success hinges on an apparent shift in urban politics, which is moving towards a level of discussion that is being called both rudimentary and fundamental—by different groups of people.

“For once I am looking forward to the electricity bill,” Das told me with hope. “This country is changing.”

These political changes are aimed at handing the people of India more power to choose and power to decide, but whether the people of this nation undergoing rapid demographic changes know what they want remains uncertain.

Kartik Srivastava ’17 is a Mechanical Engineering and Economics major in Trumbull College. He can be reached at kartik.srivastava@yale.edu.

glimpse 29

Behind “Ford Nation”

What Rob Ford reveals about the shortcomings of the Canadian political system

By Lindsey Uniat

T

he release date of Benjamin R. Barber’s highly anticipated book, “If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities” on November 1, 2013 came at an ironic time for Canadians. The central tenet of the book — that the key to more effective worldwide governance would be extending the power of city councils — became hard to imagine in light of Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s admission three weeks earlier to having smoked crack cocaine.

While this story catapulted Ford into the international media spotlight, it was certainly not his first indiscretion in office. Ford has become the subject of jokes around the world, and as a Canadian, I’m obligated to explain how he managed to hold onto executive power in Toronto and what this reveals about the shortcomings of the Canadian political system.

Since being elected mayor of Canada’s largest city in October 2010 with 47.1 percent of the vote, Ford has crossed nearly every boundary of decent and acceptable behaviour for a public official. In addition to the cocaine scandal, he has written letters of recommendation for two convicted criminals and was accused of groping a female political rival. He unfoundedly suggested that a reporter had molested children and he made shocking, cringe-worthy sexual remarks about his wife to interviewers. He violated the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act after having used mayoral stationary to solicit funds for his football charity, and most recently, his antics involved physically crashing into another councillor during a heated debate and knocking her to the ground.

Yet despite committing these numerous political faux-pas, Ford remains Toronto’s chief magistrate. What’s more, on January 2nd, he filed his papers to officially run for re-election in the fall of 2014 — and with current approval ratings of approximately 40 percent according to an Ipsos-Reid poll (a top Canadian poll), he actually stands a chance of winning.

Though hard to believe, the mayor has strong backing in “Ford Nation” (also the title of a TV show co-hosted by Ford). Low to middle-class residents of Toronto’s suburbs continue to support Ford’s fight for lower taxes, and Ford has been instrumental in ex-

tending subway lines to the suburbs and in reducing city councillors’ office budgets. But support is far from universal: in November 2013, the 44-person city council voted overwhelmingly to ask Ford to step down. When he refused to do so, the council voted to restrict his power and to transfer some mayoral duties to the deputy mayor, Norm Kelly. However, now that asking politely in true Canadian fashion has failed, there are few mechanisms by which Ford can be formally removed.

As noted by Julie Lowerstein ’16, a Toronto native, municipal recall elections do not exist in Canada, whereas in 19 American states they are an effective way to remove an elected official. In Canada, the only way to remove a mayor is to convict him of a crime, and surprisingly Rob Ford cannot currently be convicted: there is no hard evidence of him using cocaine and his admission was not under oath. Lowerstein said that the situation in Toronto illustrates the necessity of recall elections. “In order to prevent similar calamities in other cities, recall elections must be universally implemented,” Lowerstein wrote in a recent Yale Daily News column criticizing Ford’s leadership.

In the absence of any policy that would force Ford to step down, he will not relinquish his office without a fight. He refused to declare a state of emergency and elicit help from the army during the pre-Christmas ice storm and its aftermath — an action which, according to Canadian Adam Goldenberg LAW ’15, “cemented his reputation for stubbornness.” His reason for not doing so: the city council voted in November 2013 to remove Ford’s mayoral authority if a state of emergency was declared. Had Ford declared a state of emergency, he would have lost power. Lowerstein echoed the sentiment of many Canadians when she said she felt Ford under-reacted to the storm, which left approximately “a third of Toronto without power or heating for days in -20 degree weather.”

Unfortunately, Ford’s continued presence is effectively holding the city government hostage. Goldenberg noted that the council cannot legislate effectively while Ford is mayor. “If he is re-elected, which is a remote possibility, we’d look at four more years where the mayor of Toronto and the city of Toronto are

at loggerheads and unable to push through any kind of agenda,” he said. Even non-municipal politicians are refusing to work with the embattled mayor. During the height of the storm, Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne bypassed Ford in her communication with Toronto authorities, instead channelling discussion through the deputy mayor.

In an interview, Wynne said she was working with the Toronto City Hall’s “decision-makers,” raising questions about who is now calling the shots in the Ford Administration.

Goldenberg said that he thinks Ford’s chance of re-election is slim. He cautioned that the 40 percent approval rating does not translate to a commitment to vote for Ford in the next election. “More than in the United States, Canadians are willing to separate the public and private lives of their political leaders,” Goldenberg said. “That 40 percent may represent people who think he has not completely screwed up the government, but it doesn’t mean they are willing to vote for him again.”

It isn’t often Canadians find themselves at the center of attention. But news outlets and political satirists have now exhausted the topic of Toronto’s mayor and the jokes have grown old. Thankfully, the Ford fiasco may soon come to an end. As of January 6th , 21 candidates have registered to run in the upcoming municipal election on October 27th . While many Canadians, including Goldenberg and Lowerstein, expect Ford to lose, there are two factors that could lead to his re-election. One such condition would be a split opposition — especially one between left-leaning candidates who generally appeal to downtown Torontonians rather than suburban residents. Additionally, Ford’s die-hard fans may find it in their hearts to forgive his outrageous behaviour. As Goldenberg puts it, “as far as we can tell, the worst is behind us now. It’s possible that the story will get worse, but it’s unlikely that there will be a new revelation.” One can only hope so. But the election is ten months away, and as Ford has shown, lots can happen in that length of time.

Lindsey Uniat ’15 is an English in Saybrook College. She can be reached at lindsey.uniat@ yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

30 glimpse

Euskara

Differing Views on a Dying Language

By Nitika Khaitan

A view of Bilbao, an urban center of Basque Country in Spain (Villareal/TYG)

T

he metro map of Bilbao, Spain contains station names that you could imagine seeing in almost any other Spanish city: San Mames, Casco Viejo. But most of its stations have names that native castellano speakers—speakers of what most consider “Spanish”—from anywhere else in Spain find hard to pronounce: Etxebarri, Indautxu, Santurtzi, Plentzia.

These names on the station map of Basque Country’s capital come from the region’s other official language, Basque or euskara, which occupies the same legal position as Catalan in Catalonia and Galician in Galicia.

In Basque society however, unlike in Catalonia and Galicia, euskara faces is the center of a cultural controversy and faces extinction.

Despite being Europe’s oldest surviving language, euskara had neither a written nor standardized form until the late 1960’s, existing instead as a series of dialects that differed considerably across Basque Country.

As a result, under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, euskara suffered the most of Spain’s minority languages, all of which were banned in an effort to establish national homogeneity. Today, euskara is mandatory in public schools and for government jobs in spring 2014, issue 3

Basque Country. However, its status as a “language isolate”—a dialect with no relationship to any other known language—makes it far harder to teach to those who grew up under Franco and hence never learned it well enough to pass it on to the next generation.

Sofia Vasquez, an euskara language instructor at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, described this mandatory instruction as “unjust,” while recounting stories of how some government employees in her class had been told to learn euskara in a given time period or risk being fired. Many of them, she elaborated, were not native to Basque Country and questioned why they should have to learn euskara. Even Basque natives challenge the utility of the language, given it is spoken exclusively in a small region where the vast majority also speaks castellano.

Clara Alvarez, a 37-year old Bilbao resident originally from Madrid, complained that the time her son spends on euskara could be better spent on castellano or English, in her mind far more useful languages. “The imposition now is the opposite of the one before,” she said, comparing the present mandatory teaching of euskara in schools and the earlier ban on the language under Franco, “but it is still an imposition.”

Jabi Zabala of Zenbat Gara, an euskara academy and cultural center in Bilbao, has a response. He answers that just like people in Madrid need to speak Spanish to work there, people in Bilbao should learn euskara, simply because it is the language of the place.

“A language is not just a language,” he said, “[It is] what gives us identity. I wouldn’t feel Basque until I spoke euskara.” Indeed, this sentiment is demonstrated in the culture of the academy itself. Like-minded youth perform at Zenbat Gara’s radio station and cafe, making euskara music in genres ranging from ska to jazz. The academy’s language students, however, tend to be more pragmatically motivated—the majority of students in a class I interviewed were mothers learning the language so they could help their children learn.

Even proponents of euskara instruction like Zabala acknowledge that its mandatory imposition is problematic, but they believe it is the only way euskara has a chance to survive. Yet as Alvarez argues, if a language is not popular enough to survive on its own, what justifies efforts to conserve it? The Bilbao residents interviewed for this article all reported using castellano with their friends and family, creating the problem of passive speakers who learn eu-

glimpse 31 skara but never use it in outside the classroom.

Adriana Laespada, a recent Deusto graduate, agreed, saying she only uses euskara when she visits her grandparents in her native Basque village outside of Bilbao, where the status of Basque is quite different. The dialect she speaks there is markedly different from the standardized euskara taught in schools, and many of her relatives complain that the standardized language sounds ugly and takes away from the rich complexity of Basque dialects.

Euskara is more frequently used in social situations in villages than in Bilbao, according to Laespada, and there are even fundamentalist elements that spray over public signs in castellano, preserving only signs in euskara.

Xabier Kintana, the Secretary of Euskaltzaindia, the national euskara language academy, offers another argument for euskara instruction, saying that if a Basque villager could not participate in Bilbao society in ba-

sic ways—like ordering food at a restaurant or asking for directions on the street—in the language native to Bilbao, it would unfairly discriminate against him. But Laespada and

Phonetics Laboratory at Deusto, calls euskara “fascinating from a sociolinguistic perspective;” while languages around the world have been through similar phases of prohibition, standardization and imposition, euskara has undergone t h e s e in a remarkably s h o r t period of time.

Its end, however, might c o m e about just as quickly.

A sign in Basque (Euskara) and Spanish (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) Alvarez point towards another kind of discrimination. In government jobs nowadays, euskara speakers are given preference over people who are better suited for the job but do not speak euskara. “Usually the government needs to speak what the people speak,” said Alvarez, “but here it’s the opposite.”

Professor Alexander Iribar, who works at the

Nitika Khaitan ’16 is a Humanities and South Asian Studies major in Silliman College. She can be reached at nitika.khaitan@ yale.edu.The interviews for this article were conducted almost exclusively in Spanish.

Number of Native Speakers

www.tyglobalist.org