Mick Hartley

Building Africa

Those North Korean "fans" at the World Cup game with Portugal were employees - to use the term loosely - of the Mansudae Construction Company, working in Namibia. What does the Mansudae Construction Company do in Namibia? Well, one thing it does, throughout Africa, is build grandiose monuments and heroic sculptures in Juche-Socialist-Realism style to satisfy the tastes of Africa's rulers. The most famous - or notorious - is Senegal's African Renaissance, a huge muscled bronze figure which is the pride and joy (and source of income: he's taking a hefty cut of the entrance fee) of President Abdoulaye Wade. Equatorial Guinea, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo are also clients....and, yes, Namibia, with much-needed projects such as a Presidential Palace, and the Cemetery of National Heroes.

This piece at the Daily NK has more - with bonus pictures:

A Daily NK source in China revealed on the 18th, “Since 2000, North Korea has been earning colossal quantities of dollars through contracts for the Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies under the Mansudae Art Institute to construct sculptures.”

Mansudae Art Institute is an organization primarily dedicated to the idolization of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il through public works, one whose construction of edifices such as the Juche Tower and Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang has added to the status of the country.

It has also been building revolutionary monuments in African countries such as Ethiopia since the 1970s in order to maintain cordial relations with socialist states, but in the early 2000s started doing work in African countries to earn foreign currency as well.

According to the source, North Korea has earned $66.03 million from Namibia alone thanks to the construction of the Presidential Palace ($49 million); the Cemetery of National Heroes ($5.23 million); a military museum ($1.8 million); and Independence Hall ($10 million).

It has also earned almost $55 million from Angola via the António Agostinho Neto culture center ($40 million); Cabinda Park ($13 million); and the Peace Monument ($1.5 million)....

There are around 19.8㎢ set aside for a vacation spot for the president of Equatorial Guinea, which is supposed to earn Mansudae around $800,000, not to mention a government office building ($1.5 million), Luba Stadium ($6.74 million) and conference halls ($3.5 million).

The source also reported, “The money earned from these construction projects is managed by the No. 39 Department. Some of these dollars are used for domestic governance, while the rest go to secret accounts in Switzerland or Macau to become Kim Jong Il’s secret funds.”

The Dream Over

Faced with the predictable orgy of soul-searching after that 1-4 defeat by Germany, it's notable how nobody is using that Lampard non-goal as an excuse. When poor Fabio Capello suggested after the match that the incompetence of the officials was the major factor in England's defeat, he must have expected at least some support from the fans or the media. It just goes to show how much he has to learn; how little he understands English psychology. Nobody here - nobody - is buying that. The only reason we went out, as I've now read a thousand times and been told by scores of people who are all to a man (of course it's all men) experts on the game of football, is that we were crap. Useless. Pathetic. My granny could play better than that. Your granny could play better than that. Bunch of over-paid tossers. Wrong tactics. Useless manager. Rigid 4-4-2. No passion. Or rather, no intelligence. Heskey?? Matthew Upson?? What was Capello thinking? My granny etc. etc. No, we're no good at football; we're no good at anything. Same every four years. Will we never learn? Useless useless useless.

In fact it doesn't seem that exceptional a claim to me: that the decision cost us the match. Certainly we defended badly in that second half, but going in 2-2 at half-time, as we should have done, would have been a not unreasonable scoreline, and then...well, it would have been a different match. Who knows? Nor were the Germans that brilliant. That first goal of theirs, the goalie's long punt upfield, landed just perfectly for Klose, and just wrong for David James: to go for it or not to go for it? "Where were the defenders?" screamed the BBC pundits at half time. "Terry should have been 30 yards back....disgraceful...". Well certainly, if he'd known exactly the type of kick that was coming from the goalie, and where it would have landed, then yes, he was poorly placed. We're all experts in hindsight. And we all see the vagaries of luck and chance, of which there's plenty in football - far more, it seems to me, than most people acknowledge - as the workings of the footballer's art.

Peter Singer wonders why is cheating OK in football?, with special reference to that strike of Lampard's. The German goalie Manuel Neuer clearly knew the ball was over the line (as did everyone else apart from the ref and the linesman):

After the match, Neuer gave this account of his actions: "I tried not to react to the referee and just concentrate on what was happening. I realised it was over the line and I think the way I carried on so quickly fooled the referee into thinking it was not over."

To put it bluntly: Neuer cheated, and then boasted about it.

It's not as though morality is completely absent from football: the unwritten agreement that the ball is returned to the team that kicked it out when a player's down hurt is universally understood and respected, for instance. I tend to think that there's an analogy with the way that religion works: if an external set of morals (for religion) or rules (for a game) apply to certain behaviours, then it can be easy to justify ignoring the natural voice of morality that normally guides our behaviour and appealing only to the external constraints. So people can justify killing in the name of religion, or cheating in the name of football. Yes, I know: the analogy isn't that good. Its an interesting subject.

The Germans, apparently, see the non-goal as revenge for 1966. Indeed rather too many of the UK papers made the same point: as if there's any comparison between a genuinely borderline goal that, to this day, no one can be certain about (from 44 years ago! - I thought we were the ones who were supposed to be obsessed with 1966), and a clear-cut ungiven goal where everybody saw the ball bounce a good yard or so behind the line, and that even Sepp Blatter has felt it necessary to apologise for.

I'm sure if it had been the other way round, the Germans would have been far more ready to blame that fateful decision for their defeat. But that's the only piece of jingoism I can come up with at the moment.

Kamchatka Bears

at English Russia:

[Photos via Shpilenok]

Khaled Said

Soha Abdelaty writes about the culture of impunity enjoyed by the Egyptian authorities, with the recent renewal of the three-decades-long state of emergency that allows them to get away, literally, with murder:

On June 6, a pair of police officers entered an Alexandria Internet cafe and began asking for the identification documents of everyone present. When 28-year-old Khaled Said objected to being searched without a warrant, the officers began to attack him, beating his head against a table and kicking him in the chest. They tied his hands behind his back and dragged him to a nearby building where they continued to smash his head, first against an iron door and then against the building's marble steps. Witnesses heard Khaled begging them to stop, screaming "I'm going to die," to which the officers responded: "You're going to die anyway." The officers dragged Said into their police car and drove him away, only to return several minutes later to leave his lifeless corpse in the street.

The Ministry of Interior immediately attempted to blame the gruesome incident on "drugs": The young man had died when he choked on a joint he was trying to hide as he was approached by the police. Any injuries sustained -- his fractured skull, dislocated jaw, mangled face -- were the result of his resisting arrest, they claimed.  The bloodied pictures of the victim from the morgue, widely circulated on Facebook and through other networks, were likewise dismissed. Outrage has built across Egyptian political society, culminating in today's [last Friday's - MH] massive demonstrations in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. Protesters were assaulted and "kidnapped" by security officers in plainclothes from amongst the crowds in a well-orchestrated but unsuccessful attempt on the part of Ministry of Interior officials to make the incident go away.

The Khaled Said case has offered a graphic demonstration of the emptiness of the pledge by the government of Egypt when it renewed the country's decades-long period of emergency 'aw that it would limit its application to terrorism and drug-related crimes. Khaled Said's brutal murder is a chilling reminder of what emergency law -- and Interior Ministry impunity -- means for Egyptians. Frustration with that impunity is what leads protesters to take to the streets.  [...]

Ironically, as Said was being beaten to death in Alexandria, a high-level Egyptian delegation was in Geneva defending Egypt's human rights record before the U.N. Human Rights Council. One could hardly ask for a better example of how the new presidential decree offers no guarantee for the respect of human rights, but also of how flagrantly the Ministry of Interior acts in violation of any law. Said did not have any political affiliations, nor was he an activist -- and he was hardly a terrorist. That the ministry claimed in its defense that he was an ex-con, apart from being false, raises the harrowing possibility that it believes it justifiable for a man to be beaten to death by security forces, with no judicial recourse, for being a suspected criminal.

More here, from Khaled Diab:

Last Friday, large protests took place in a number of major Egyptian cities, with opposition figurehead and the main challenger to President Hosni Mubarak in next year's elections, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former IAEA chief, joining the Alexandria sit-in.

Despite this concerted show of public anger, the two officers allegedly behind Said's death remain on active duty.

"The nation is on the verge of social explosion, and amid all this, you'd expect the regime to act very cautiously regarding issues of political freedom and human rights to contain public anger, but they are just doing the exact opposite," my brother, Osama, tells me in disbelief. "It feels bad to be ruled by authoritarianism, but it feels even worse to be ruled by stupid authoritarianism that is unable to think before it acts."

Although Said's death is a huge tragedy for his family, if it helps to ram the final nail in the coffin of Egypt's emergency law, then this tragedy will not have been in vain. Three decades old, this draconian legislation has hung over the heads of Said's generation their entire lives and has effectively transformed Egypt into a police state.

It's Difficult to be an Optimist in the Middle East

Michael J Totten interviews Michael Young, the opinion page editor at Lebanon's Daily Star and author of a new book about Lebanon's troubles, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square. Young sees a bleak future for "the most liberal and open of the Arabic-speaking countries" as long as the Iranian-backed "anti-state" of Hezbollah - "a party whose very existence as an armed organization is conditioned on the absence of a Lebanese state able to impose a monopoly over the use of violence" - continues to enjoy the support of the Shiite community:

Hezbollah has the weapons required to engage in a substantial fight with Israel. In a future war, Hezbollah will have more firepower than it had in 2006, more advanced systems, and it will create a messier war that what we had four years ago....

The next war will be much more devastating. The Israelis will bomb Lebanese infrastructure. They may well bomb parts of Beirut. The Israelis will want to show Lebanon, Hezbollah, and the Shia community in particular that any future war will bring complete ruination. They will want to show that the next war would be the war that ends all wars between Lebanon and Israel. [...]

If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, I think the Israelis will come to the conclusion that they cannot allow Hezbollah to be strong on their northern border. They can manage Hamas to a certain extent, but Hezbollah is a different matter. So I think if Iran develops nuclear weapons, Israel will feel the need to attack Lebanon and try to neutralize Hezbollah. I'm not a military specialist, but I think that would have to involve a ground war and that the Israelis would have to move as far north as they can to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure. It would be, as I said earlier, a very messy affair.

It's worth reading the whole piece.

Hares

...by the late Barry Flanagan, in the courtyard of the Royal Academy:

 

 
 
 

Forgetting How to be a Part of the World

About those North Korean supporters at the Portugal match (thanks Martin):

[I]t was not the game that haunted me but the expressionless faces of those North Korean fans around me, all of them male. Clad in red jackets and hats, they appeared to be in their 40s and 50s (they wouldn’t tell me their exact age) with uniformly dark and haggard faces. Seated a few seats away from them were two younger men with healthier complexions who appeared to be their minders. They did not answer my questions, but this was how minders looked in my trips to North Korea, and they ordered the fans where to sit. Surrounded by overly exuberant, vuvuzela-blowing Portuguese fans adorned in bright green and yellow, this group appeared strangely out of place, perfunctorily waving miniature flags with the restraint of soldiers. 

Although my source told me that the group consisted of migrant bronze workers who had arrived here from Namibia on a 24-hour-long bus ride, the three I spoke to during halftime claimed that they came from Pyongyang via Beijing. One of them said that his team will certainly proceed onto the next round with their “Great General,” Kim Jong-il, leading the way. Another insisted that if the two Koreas came here as one, no team in the world could beat them. Unification, he said, was the key, and we, the Koreans, must all hope for one. I tried to speak to them further, but they looked away....

One of the most repeated World Cup mottos is “a time to make friends,” but what if a country has become so foul in its isolation that its government has forgotten how to be a part of the world and its people are never allowed to interact with those outside, even the casual attendees of a soccer match? That, certainly, was the question these silent North Koreans provoked in South Africa this year.

These men are, in effect, slave labourers. From the Chosun Ilbo:

They are workers of North Korea's Overseas Construction Company and overseas staff of Mansudae Creation Company who have been dispatched to Africa to earn foreign currency for the regime.

And then dispatched to South Africa as Potemkin fans.

Idyllic Moments in a Rough Ambiance

Plants in gloves? By the canal in Bow?

 

Blame the University of Innsbruck:

Along the Bow Back River runs a small path mainly used as a short cut and as a bycicle [sic] way. In contrast to the rough ambiance of the rivers surroundings one finds along the path almost idyllic situations as well as crop plants like rocket and rasperrie. The project is set up by a series of small interventions altering the perception of people passing by and creating urban farming. The idyllic moments are framed, public seating furniture is installed, patches next to the path and on the walls are created. The project aims to enhance the recreational qualities of the site as well as to activate local people to participate in the urban farming.
 

And 300 Grams of Egg, Please

Is this the end of the British way of life as we know it?

British shoppers will no longer be able to buy eggs by the dozen under new regulations approved by the European Parliament.

For the first time, eggs and other products, including oranges and bread rolls, will be sold by weight instead of by the number contained in a packet.

Last week, MEPs voted to bring an end to Britain's exemption from the metric policy despite objections from several UK members.

Eggs have traditionally been sold by the dozen or half-dozen because the old imperial measurements such as inches or pennies were calculated in groups of 12. But the new rules, to be introduced next year, mean that instead of packaging telling shoppers a box contains six eggs, it will show the weight in grams of the eggs inside.

Breastfeeding Foreigners

Only in Saudi Arabia...

Many were stunned when Saudi cleric Sheik Abdel Mohsen Obeikan recently issued a fatwa, or Islamic ruling, calling on women to give breast milk to their male colleagues or men they come into regular contact with so as to avoid illicit mixing between the sexes. But a group of Saudi women has taken the controversial decree a step further in a new campaign to gain the right to drive in the ultra-conservative kingdom, media reports say. If they're not granted the right to drive, the women are threatening to breastfeed their drivers to establish a symbolic maternal bond.

"Is this is all that is left to us to do: to give our breasts to the foreign drivers?" a Saudi woman named Fatima Shammary was quoted as saying by Gulf News.

Obeikan argued in his decree that if the women give their drivers their breast milk, the chauffeurs would be able to mingle with all members of the family without having to worry about violating Islamic law. Some Islamic scholars frown on the mixing of unmarried men and women. Islamic tradition, or hadith, stipulates that breastfeeding establishes a maternal bond, even if a woman breastfeeds a child who is not her own.

Drawing from the cleric's advocacy, the women have reportedly chosen a slogan for their campaign that translates to, "We either be allowed to drive or breastfeed foreigners."