By John L Esposito
Last year, at a European meeting of intelligence officials from the US and Europe, a Swiss participant commented on a proposed referendum on minarets. He was sure it would go nowhere since, as he said, Switzerland is a very pluralistic society; its Muslim population is relatively small and there are few mosques with minarets.
Enlightened Switzerland has now become part of an "Enlightened Liberal Europe" that is increasingly not all that liberal.
The stunning Swiss vote - 57 per cent - approving a referendum to ban minarets, should not have been all that surprising, considering the growing power of Islamophobia.
In both Europe and the US, right-wing politicians, political commentators, media personalities, and religious leaders continue to feed a growing suspicion of mainstream Muslims by fuelling a fear that Islam, and not just Muslim extremism, is a threat.
In the aftermath of attacks in the US and Europe, the relevance and viability of multiculturalism as a policy was challenged by those who charged that such an approach contributed to domestic terrorism.
They argued that such a policy helped in retarding Muslim assimilation and civic engagement, perpetuated foreign loyalties, and provided a space for militant radicals.
Integration versus assimilation
The process of integration, in which immigrant citizens and residents could retain their religious and ethnic differences, was rejected by many, in particular the far-right in Europe, who demand total assimilation.
Modern-day prophets of doom have predicted that Europe will be overrun by Islam - transformed by the end of the century into "Eurabia".
The media, political leaders, and commentators on the right warn of a "soft terrorism" plot to take over the US and Europe.
Bernard Lewis, a Middle East historian and adviser to the Bush administration on its failed Iraq policy, received widespread coverage when he chided Europeans for losing their loyalties, self-confidence, and respect for their own culture, charging that they have "surrendered" to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement," "political correctness," and "multi-culturalism".
Daniel Pipes, a columnist, political commentator and relentless Muslim critic who wrote an article called "The Muslims are coming. The Muslims are coming", also declared: "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene ... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."
European Muslim mosaic
Fortunately, many Muslim and Christian leaders, and major European politicians and human rights experts have condemned the minaret ban, and the Vatican has denounced it as an infringement of religious freedom.
However, the surprising gains made by Geert Wilders' Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Danish People's Party, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Hungarian Jobbik, and the British National Party in the recent European parliament elections emboldened many of their leaders to applaud the Swiss vote and encourage similar prohibitions.
Wilders, the leader of the anti-Muslim Freedom Party in the Netherlands, who previously warned that mass deportation of millions of Muslims from Europe may be necessary, called for a vote to stem the "tide of Islamisation" in the Netherlands.
The far-right persistently refuses to face a 21st century reality - to acknowledge and accept the fact that Muslims are part of the mosaic of their nations.
Islam is now a European religion, and, in fact, the second largest religion in many European countries. No longer predominantly first generation immigrants, many are second and third generation citizens.
Despite the acts and continued threat from a very small but dangerous minority of extremists, the majority of Muslims, like their non-Muslim fellow compatriots, are loyal citizens.
The Swiss ban, like some other European countries' policies, highlights a failure of Western liberalism and raises fundamental questions about religious discrimination and freedom of religion.
While there are only four minarets in Switzerland, a country that is home to approximately 400,000 Muslims, supporters of the referendum mindlessly charge that the minaret is a political symbol of militant Islam.
This makes about as much sense as saying that church steeples symbolise militant Christianity.
Dangerous precedent
So, where do we go from here?
Western political and religious opinion-makers and the media will need to resolutely address the dangers of Islamophobia as aggressively as they do other forms of hate speech and hate crimes, ranging from racial discrimination to anti-Semitism.
European Muslims will need to continue to speak out publicly, demanding their rights as European citizens and residents and also denouncing religious discrimination and violence as well as limits placed on constructing churches in the Muslim world.
Globalisation and an increasingly multicultural and multi-religious West tests the mettle of cherished democratic principles and values.
Islamophobia, which is becoming a social cancer, must be recognised and be as unacceptable as anti-Semitism, a threat to the very fabric of our democratic, pluralistic way of life.
The continued threat and response to global terrorism coupled with the resurgence of xenophobia and cultural racism have contributed to threaten the fundamentals of liberal democracies in the West and their Muslim citizens in particular.
The fine line between distinguishing between the faith of Islam and those who commit violence and terror in the name of Islam, between the majority of mainstream Muslims and the acts of a minority of Muslim extremists and terrorists, must be maintained.
Blurring these distinctions risks the adoption of foreign and domestic policies that promote a clash rather than co-existence of cultures. They play into the hands of preachers of hate (Muslim and non-Muslim), religious and political leaders, and political commentators whose rhetoric incites and demonises, alienates and marginalises.
John L Esposito is a professor of Religion and International Affairs, professor of Islamic Studies and founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
He is the editor-in-chief of the six-volume The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, and has written more than 35 books including 'Who Speaks for Islam?', 'What a Billion Muslims Really Think', and 'The Future of Islam'.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/12/2009124171829382892.html
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Halabja gas attack survivor reunited with mother
A man who as a baby survived a chemical attack on the Iraqi city of Halabja in 1988 has been reunited with his mother.
Ali Pour was taken to Iran by Iranian soldiers who stormed the Kurdish city days after the gas attack by Saddam Hussein's forces.
Mr Pour, now 21, had to wait for the results of a DNA test before it could be determined whose son he was.
His mother, whose husband and six other children had all died in the attack, fainted when she heard.
Five thousand people were killed in the Halabja attack, considered one of the worst atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Five other families were waiting to hear from a judge whether Mr Pour was their missing son, but Fatima Mohammed Salih, 58, was found to be his real mother.
"I'm in a dream," Mr Pour said as he comforted her, according to Associated Press news agency.
Mr Pour had been adopted by an Iranian woman and named Ali.
He grew up in eastern Iran speaking Persian, although he always knew he was from Halabja.
Co-operation between the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish regional governments led to this week's reunification - the first time a long-lost son of Halabja is known to have been reunited with his family.
Mr Pour, know as Zimnaku to his birth mother, has said he plans to stay in the region to study and learn the local language.
He is proud of his Kurdish identity, and is going to move in with his mother, he said.
"I wonder if it is a dream or a gift from God," his mother said.
Forty-one people - children at the time of the attack, are still registered as missing, the assistant chief of the Directorate of the Martyrs of Halabja said, according to AP.
As a four-month-old baby, Ali Pour managed to survive three days after the gas attack while his family died around him.
His mother remembers the gas burning her children, collapsing herself and then waking in a Tehran hospital.
An Iranian woman offered to adopt him.
When Mr Pour's adoptive mother died in a car accident four months ago, he said: "I felt lonely and I felt a strange feeling calling me to return to the arms of my relatives.
"I decided to go back."
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8397547.stm
Ali Pour was taken to Iran by Iranian soldiers who stormed the Kurdish city days after the gas attack by Saddam Hussein's forces.
Mr Pour, now 21, had to wait for the results of a DNA test before it could be determined whose son he was.
His mother, whose husband and six other children had all died in the attack, fainted when she heard.
Five thousand people were killed in the Halabja attack, considered one of the worst atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Five other families were waiting to hear from a judge whether Mr Pour was their missing son, but Fatima Mohammed Salih, 58, was found to be his real mother.
"I'm in a dream," Mr Pour said as he comforted her, according to Associated Press news agency.
Mr Pour had been adopted by an Iranian woman and named Ali.
He grew up in eastern Iran speaking Persian, although he always knew he was from Halabja.
Co-operation between the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish regional governments led to this week's reunification - the first time a long-lost son of Halabja is known to have been reunited with his family.
Mr Pour, know as Zimnaku to his birth mother, has said he plans to stay in the region to study and learn the local language.
He is proud of his Kurdish identity, and is going to move in with his mother, he said.
"I wonder if it is a dream or a gift from God," his mother said.
Forty-one people - children at the time of the attack, are still registered as missing, the assistant chief of the Directorate of the Martyrs of Halabja said, according to AP.
As a four-month-old baby, Ali Pour managed to survive three days after the gas attack while his family died around him.
His mother remembers the gas burning her children, collapsing herself and then waking in a Tehran hospital.
An Iranian woman offered to adopt him.
When Mr Pour's adoptive mother died in a car accident four months ago, he said: "I felt lonely and I felt a strange feeling calling me to return to the arms of my relatives.
"I decided to go back."
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8397547.stm
Thursday, December 3, 2009
My compatriots' vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear
The Swiss have voted not against towers, but Muslims. Across Europe, we must stand up to the flame-fanning populists
By Tariq Ramadan
It wasn't meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.
Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people's fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?
There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.
Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.
At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, "What are our roots?", "Who are we?", "What will our future look like?", they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.
Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?
The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.
Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely "integrated". That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.
Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/29/swiss-vote-ban-minarets-fear
By Tariq Ramadan
It wasn't meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.
Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people's fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?
There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.
Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.
At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, "What are our roots?", "Who are we?", "What will our future look like?", they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.
Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?
The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.
Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely "integrated". That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.
Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/29/swiss-vote-ban-minarets-fear
In fear of 'Eurabia'?
By Mark LeVine
The images were clearly intended to get out the vote, and judging by the 57 per cent "yes" vote to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland on Sunday, they worked all too well.
They included the depiction of minarets piercing through the Swiss flag; minarets on top of the flag, with a menacing, niqab-wearing Muslim woman in the foreground.
One could be forgiven for imagining that the Muslims were at the gates of Vienna, or even Lucerne, threatening to overrun Christian Europe. And of course, for the proponents of the ban, that is precisely the situation Europe faces today.
For centuries, the peoples of Europe have defined their continental identity against the threat of Islam. So much so that it is hard to imagine a European identity that does not have Islam as its foil.
There are, of course, good historical reasons for this.
From the eighth century Europe was in fact surrounded by Muslims to the East and South, who ruled much of the Eastern continent for the next millennium.
Of course, except in the wildest dreams of jihadists, Europe will not be taken down by Muslim swords today. But for right-wing fear mongers, the contemporary Muslim threat is just as nefarious, only the weapon is different.
The ultimate 'other'
That Muslim woman in the now infamous poster is not just the ultimate 'other' - totally impenetrable to the Western gaze in a social space where topless women are de rigeur on billboards, magazines, TV commercials and the beach - but, the niqab or burka-wearing Muslim woman is believed to stand for all Muslim women, who, it is assumed, possess little or no control over their own bodies.
And because of this, she is as dangerous as the H1N1 virus currently scaring people across the continent. Underneath her niqab lies a human bomb - not a suicide vest, but a baby; lots of babies, if you believe the hype.
All these Muslims babies threaten to transform the fundamental identity of Europe as a "Western," "modern," "secular-yet-Christian" space - the very antithesis of what most Europeans imagine Muslims to be.
In some sense, of course, the return of a robust Muslim presence in Europe would be a return to history, to a time when a good share of Europe was Muslim. But that is a history few Europeans hearken to. In fact, Europe's first post-Cold War conflict, in the Balkans, was driven in good measure by just this fear.
Beneath the fear, however, lies that undeniable reality that the combination in Europe of very low indigenous (meaning white and Christian) birth rates and increasing immigration of Muslims with higher birth rates means that the percentage of Muslims will continue to grow.
They will not, however, become a majority in Europe under any conceivable scenario in the coming decades.
In fact, the actual demographic trends show a decline in birth rates by Muslim women as they become settled into Europe, which corresponds to the declining birth rates across the Muslim world (many of whose governments have initiated aggressive family planning programmes).
Indeed, as Muslim women live in Europe, learn the languages, get educated and join the workforce, they become more "European" - or more accurately, like women globally, who, if they have the resources and freedom to control their reproduction, choose to have smaller families.
Of course, if they are marginalised and, along with their male counterparts, not given sufficient chance to become a functioning part of their new societies, this process will happen more slowly, if at all, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of recrimination and disintegration.
From Europe to 'Eurabia'?
Either way, it is clear that Europe is going to become more Muslim in the coming decades. The question is whether in the process it will become more Islamic - that is, publicly religious and impacted by Muslim religious symbols and practices - and which version of Islam will define the emerging European Islam.
Will it be a "Euro-Islam" that respects core liberal values of tolerance, openness and respect for the rule of law, or a "Ghetto Islam" that produces subcultures that are largely isolated and hostile to the European self-image (one which, it must be remembered, largely excludes Muslims in the first place)?
The fear mongers behind the rising tide of Islamophobia in Europe argue that the continent is on the way to becoming "Eurabia" - that is, taken over by a Muslim tide and losing its core Europeanness in the process.
It is hard to know how many Europeans buy into this argument. But, while it is rarely a good idea to generalise, the majority would likely prefer Muslims to assimilate into their host societies, to shed the outward appearances of difference, and not integrate - a process that inevitably changes the host culture as well, as it takes on elements of the newer arrival and, inevitably, loses some of its traditions in the process.
Picture-postcard Europe
It is not surprising that in Switzerland the focus would be on minarets.
More than most countries, Switzerland defines itself by its visual aesthetic. It is the picture postcard of Europe, with nothing out of place, the quintessential European destination.
Never mind that Swiss Muslims are among the least conservative in Europe and that the call to prayer is already banned in Switzerland; the presence of more minarets would call out to the Swiss, saying: "We are here and we're not going anywhere. And we're not just going to assimilate to your culture. We intend to keep core parts of ours as well."
Thus the referendum slogans calling for a halt to the "Islamisation of Switzerland". The minaret, as a highly visible sign of Islam's presence, becomes a "spearhead" of that Islamisation, "the symbol of political-societal power claim of Islam" as the website of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), the party behind the vote, describes it.
Never mind that most of the claims by the minaret ban's backers about Islam and the demographic threat are inaccurate. Islam, in their view, cannot exist without asserting unique claims to social and ultimately political power, which is why it is an existential threat by its very presence.
Muslims cannot just be; they have to convert others, and the voice of the muezzin "proclaiming down from the minaret" is the most powerful manifestation of this. Or so the backers of the minaret ban imagine.
Even Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, Switzerland's justice minister, admitted that the result "reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies," as if one cannot be Islamic without being fundamentalist.
This is the underlying problem in the debate over minarets, hijabs, or yet more troubling, attempts by European Muslims to establish separate courts and laws aligned with their interpretation of sharia to cover personal status issues.
At best, it says Muslims are willing to integrate, not assimilate into European society.
Comparisons to anti-Semitism
In the aftermath of Sunday's vote, many commentators, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are comparing Islamophobia in Europe today to the anti-Semitism that plagued the continent in the first half of the 20th century.
While understandable, such comparisons miss the fundamental difference between the position of Jews in Europe then and Muslims in Europe today.
Jews had lived in Europe for centuries and, despite anti-Jewish sentiments among huge swaths of Europe's population, were very much a part of their societies' cultures, economies, and increasingly politics.
Indeed, in Germany it was precisely the increasing full participation of Jews in so many parts of national life that made them such an existential threat.
They were Europe's most intimate 'other', inside the very fabric of European identity and increasingly, impossible to tell from "real" Europeans.
As such they became a lethal virus that, in the Nazi logic, had to be eradicated to restore the purity of the race.
The situation for Muslims today is very different.
Muslims are still relatively new to most European societies; at most a couple of generations old. As one Fox news report put it after a riot in Muslim neighbourhoods of the Swedish town of Malmö, they are "outsiders who are already inside" European societies.
What is worrying is that as a new generation of European Muslims come of age and move deeper inside European culture, economies and politics, the fears and prejudices against them will surely grow, especially if, as in Germany of the 1930s, the economic situation continues to deteriorate.
Mass violence against Muslims comparable to that visited against Jews is unimaginable. But as Muslims become, welcomed or not, part of the European fabric, the prejudices against them could begin to take on some of the form of the anti-Semitism that plagued pre-war Europe.
The larger picture
Ultimately, the vote to ban minarets, like other anti-Islamic legislation, is a symptom of a larger problem within contemporary European societies.
It is not just that Europeans are increasingly inhospitable to Muslims and other immigrants. These sentiments reflect the fraying of the social fabric of Europe more broadly, particularly of countries that have had strong recent traditions of social solidarity and welfare.
The larger implications have not been touched on in most of the commentary and reporting in the multi-lingual Swiss media, or the European press more broadly.
Instead, papers such as the German language Neue Zürcher Zeitung, described the vote as a revolt of "the people over the elites" and emphasised the need for rulers to "listen to the people" (a terminology which, in German at least, has alarming historical connotations).
The French language Le Temps questioned: "How can you dialogue when you're crushed by the weight of stereotypes?"
The answer is that people are increasingly scared that their social safety nets are fraying and that life is inexorably going to become harder. And they want quick solutions, not long and complicated dialogues.
And herein lies the real problem underlying the vote. It is not merely about Islam. It is also about the solidification of neo-liberalism economically and conservatism politically across the continent, and ultimately, about globalisation more broadly.
Together, the political, economic and social dynamics are creating a situation in which governments are less able to deliver the high level of services that post-war Europeans have gotten used to, at the moment that ideologically, people are increasingly unwilling to look out for their fellow citizens' welfare as they did previously - when, of course, they also happened to look, speak and act much more like them.
Sweden, where I'm currently living, has long had one of Europe's most generous welfare states, which is coming under severe strain just as the Muslim population is growing rapidly.
But as a priest who works with immigrants pointed out to me, the unwillingness of Swedes in the wealthy town of Vellinge (to cite one example), to allow a home for child war refugees from Muslim countries in their town owes not merely to a fear or loathing against Muslims.
In the "new" and increasingly ineqalitarian Sweden, the emerging wealthy class living comfortably in low tax areas like Vellinge are equally unwilling to pay high taxes to support their fellow Swedes.
Of course, it is much easier to blame it on the Muslims and to continue to push them away even as they find their way inside Europe.
But if history is any guide, Europeans will start out blaming the 'inside other' for their problems, but it will not be too long before their anger, and violence, turns on each other.
Mark LeVine is currently visiting professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden. His most recent books include Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009) and Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel-Palestine (Rowman Littlefield, 2008).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: Al Jazeera
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Biofuels scientist offered work to country
by Jonathan L. Mayuga (Correspondent)
13-March-2006 BusinessMirror
When Norman Secreto discovered there was high ethanol potential in molasses he didn't think twice about pursuing a thesis that would impact on the people and the economy.
Soon enough, the 22-year-old chemist found ways to extract high ethanol content from strains of molasses which can be used in the production of ethanol products - including alcohol and fuel.
Ethanol can be used as an additive for gasoline to mitigate the steadily increasing fuel process. It can also provide a cleaner and environment-friendly alternative to imported fossil fuels.
Norman got as far as his thesis, distinguished by having determined the highest percentage of ethanol (12 percent against the existing record of 9 percent) that can be extracted from molasses - and both his teachers at UP Los Baños and private firms looking to apply his discovery are excited.
But the brilliant young scientist is dead, victim of a recent freak accident. He fell last week from a jeep where he was hanging on the running board, on his way to a retreat in Mount Makiling. He suffered fatal blow on the skull.
His professor and thesis adviser Dr. Fidel Rey Nayve said Norman's experiment would have been the most significant scientific discovery in ethanol production and would have made him the youngest, sought-after biofuels scientist in the country today.
Norman, however, did not live long enough to enjoy the recognition - or perhaps even the monetary rewards, which would have been useful to his family in General Santos City.
"He was so young," laments Nayve. "He could have done more for the country."
Nayve described Norman as their "workhorse", doing much of the job with enthusiasm and high spirits.
"He was very patriotic. He dedicated his work to the Filipino people," he said.
Despite his humble origins and the oft-repeated admonition of people for him to do well for he can provide for a family of six children where he was the eldest sibling, Norman's sense of duty to country was overwhelming.
In the acknowledgement page of his agriculture engineering thesis: "Evaluation of Distillery Slops as Medium Component in Molasses-based Ethanol Fermentation Using Biotech Yeast Strains," Norman wrote:
"To my countrymen, the Filipino people, who subsidized my schooling in this University; may you reap the true worth of the taxes you paid when I graduate. It is my pleasure to serve you all in my own little ways…Mabuhay ang Pilipino! I keep on praying…Babangon ang Pilipinas."
Nayve admits he had a soft spot for his brilliant chemistry student. The eldest of six children, Norman belonged to a poor family like his teacher.
"He was very studious. He knew that his family is depending on him to finish his studies," says Nayve.
Nayve was able to study college of scholarship offered by the state university to deserving students in the countryside. "I didn't intend to study at UPLB because we were poor. I'm from Bicol. Even if I pass the UP College Admissions Test (UPCAT), we would not be able to afford the costs of my college education," Norman's professor said.
Nayve's mother, way back in the late 1970s, was a plain housewife while his father was an employee of a bottling company. When 20 application forms were raffled off by their school to 200 students, he was lucky to "win" one application form, prompting him to fill it up and take the test for UPCAT.
Like him, Norman had to work to be able to study - despite the fact that being a state university student entitled them to a lot of benefits, including free tuition and allowance as state scholars.
Norman graduated in 2005. He worked for a computer college before transferring to the UP Rural High School in Los Baños, where he taught mathematics last November.
Nayve says Norman continued to be involved in his biotech team, doing most of the work in their biofuels program. "He really supervised it closely, that's why the results came out well."
Norman's experiment was considered a breakthrough in ethanol production. Norman was able to produce ethanol at 12-percent volume per volume (v/v), even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops.
The thesis, which he shared with Nayve, and fellow researchers Irene Gabrido, Francisco Elegado and Catalino Alfafara, was presented at the 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology in July 2005.
It focused on the current thrust of the government to expand the use of nonoil energy and fuel sources, especially biofuel.
Norman used the simplest strategy of producing yeast strains that produce ethanol.
He explained that the expected increase in ethanol production will be accompanied by the increase in distillery slops generation, which is the main waste in the distillery industry.
Distillery slops is a major environmental concern because of their high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD).
Using the best combination of slops and yeast strain with bioreactor, Norman was able to determine potentially superior yeast strains among 10 local yeast isolates he used for the experiment.
He concluded that high ethanol production at 12-percent v/v was possible even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops, after one of the strains performed much better - perhaps better than most currently used industrial yeast strains.
Impressed by Norman's dedication to the experiment, Nayve sees a big a possibility for industry players using the thesis in the production of ethanol - both alcohol and fuel.
Although the results of the thesis have not yet been fully validated by industry players, Nayve is confident the result of the experiment is valid and will boost production of ethanol in the country in the future.
"This is a very important discovery. He got such a potent strain for use in ethanol production," Nayve says.
13-March-2006 BusinessMirror
When Norman Secreto discovered there was high ethanol potential in molasses he didn't think twice about pursuing a thesis that would impact on the people and the economy.
Soon enough, the 22-year-old chemist found ways to extract high ethanol content from strains of molasses which can be used in the production of ethanol products - including alcohol and fuel.
Ethanol can be used as an additive for gasoline to mitigate the steadily increasing fuel process. It can also provide a cleaner and environment-friendly alternative to imported fossil fuels.
Norman got as far as his thesis, distinguished by having determined the highest percentage of ethanol (12 percent against the existing record of 9 percent) that can be extracted from molasses - and both his teachers at UP Los Baños and private firms looking to apply his discovery are excited.
But the brilliant young scientist is dead, victim of a recent freak accident. He fell last week from a jeep where he was hanging on the running board, on his way to a retreat in Mount Makiling. He suffered fatal blow on the skull.
His professor and thesis adviser Dr. Fidel Rey Nayve said Norman's experiment would have been the most significant scientific discovery in ethanol production and would have made him the youngest, sought-after biofuels scientist in the country today.
Norman, however, did not live long enough to enjoy the recognition - or perhaps even the monetary rewards, which would have been useful to his family in General Santos City.
"He was so young," laments Nayve. "He could have done more for the country."
Nayve described Norman as their "workhorse", doing much of the job with enthusiasm and high spirits.
"He was very patriotic. He dedicated his work to the Filipino people," he said.
Despite his humble origins and the oft-repeated admonition of people for him to do well for he can provide for a family of six children where he was the eldest sibling, Norman's sense of duty to country was overwhelming.
In the acknowledgement page of his agriculture engineering thesis: "Evaluation of Distillery Slops as Medium Component in Molasses-based Ethanol Fermentation Using Biotech Yeast Strains," Norman wrote:
"To my countrymen, the Filipino people, who subsidized my schooling in this University; may you reap the true worth of the taxes you paid when I graduate. It is my pleasure to serve you all in my own little ways…Mabuhay ang Pilipino! I keep on praying…Babangon ang Pilipinas."
Nayve admits he had a soft spot for his brilliant chemistry student. The eldest of six children, Norman belonged to a poor family like his teacher.
"He was very studious. He knew that his family is depending on him to finish his studies," says Nayve.
Nayve was able to study college of scholarship offered by the state university to deserving students in the countryside. "I didn't intend to study at UPLB because we were poor. I'm from Bicol. Even if I pass the UP College Admissions Test (UPCAT), we would not be able to afford the costs of my college education," Norman's professor said.
Nayve's mother, way back in the late 1970s, was a plain housewife while his father was an employee of a bottling company. When 20 application forms were raffled off by their school to 200 students, he was lucky to "win" one application form, prompting him to fill it up and take the test for UPCAT.
Like him, Norman had to work to be able to study - despite the fact that being a state university student entitled them to a lot of benefits, including free tuition and allowance as state scholars.
Norman graduated in 2005. He worked for a computer college before transferring to the UP Rural High School in Los Baños, where he taught mathematics last November.
Nayve says Norman continued to be involved in his biotech team, doing most of the work in their biofuels program. "He really supervised it closely, that's why the results came out well."
Norman's experiment was considered a breakthrough in ethanol production. Norman was able to produce ethanol at 12-percent volume per volume (v/v), even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops.
The thesis, which he shared with Nayve, and fellow researchers Irene Gabrido, Francisco Elegado and Catalino Alfafara, was presented at the 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology in July 2005.
It focused on the current thrust of the government to expand the use of nonoil energy and fuel sources, especially biofuel.
Norman used the simplest strategy of producing yeast strains that produce ethanol.
He explained that the expected increase in ethanol production will be accompanied by the increase in distillery slops generation, which is the main waste in the distillery industry.
Distillery slops is a major environmental concern because of their high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD).
Using the best combination of slops and yeast strain with bioreactor, Norman was able to determine potentially superior yeast strains among 10 local yeast isolates he used for the experiment.
He concluded that high ethanol production at 12-percent v/v was possible even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops, after one of the strains performed much better - perhaps better than most currently used industrial yeast strains.
Impressed by Norman's dedication to the experiment, Nayve sees a big a possibility for industry players using the thesis in the production of ethanol - both alcohol and fuel.
Although the results of the thesis have not yet been fully validated by industry players, Nayve is confident the result of the experiment is valid and will boost production of ethanol in the country in the future.
"This is a very important discovery. He got such a potent strain for use in ethanol production," Nayve says.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Biofuels scientist offered work to country
By Jonathan L. Mayuga, Business Mirror Correspondent
Business Mirror; March 13, 2006
When Normand Secreto discovered there was high ethanol potential in molasses, he didn’t think twice about pursuing a thesis that would impact on the people and the economy. Soon enough, the 22-year-old BS Chemical Engineering graduate found ways to extract high ethanol content from strains of molasses which can be used in the production of ethanol products - including alcohol and fuel. Ethanol can be used as an additive for gasoline to mitigate the steadily increasing fuel process. It can also provide a cleaner and environment-friendly alternative to imported fossil fuels.
Normand got as far as his thesis, distinguished by having determined the highest percentage of ethanol (12 percent against the existing record of 9 percent) that can be extracted from molasses - and both his teachers at UP Los Baños and private firms looking to apply his discovery are excited. But the brilliant young scientist is dead, victim of a recent freak accident. He fell last week from a jeep where he was hanging on the running board, on his way to a retreat in Mount Makiling. He suffered a fatal blow on the skull.
His professor and thesis adviser, Dr. Fidel Rey Nayve, said Normand’s experiment would have been the most significant scientific discovery in ethanol production and would have made him the youngest, sought-after biofuels scientist in the country today.
Normand, however, did not live long enough to enjoy the recognition – or perhaps even the monetary rewards, which would have been useful to his family in General Santos City. “He was so young,” laments Nayve. “He could have done more for the country.”
Nayve described Normand as their “workhorse”, doing much of the job with enthusiasm and high spirits. “He was very patriotic. He dedicated his work to the Filipino people,” he said.
Despite his humble origins and the oft-repeated admonition of people for him to do well for he can provide for a family of six children where he was the eldest sibling, Normand’s sense of duty to country was overwhelming. In the acknowledgement page of his chemical engineering thesis: “Evaluation of Distillery Slops as Medium Component in Molasses-based Ethanol Fermentation Using Biotech Yeast Strains,” Normand wrote:
“To my countrymen, the Filipino people, who subsidized my schooling in this University; may you reap the true worth of the taxes you paid when I graduate. It is my pleasure to serve you all in my own little ways…Mabuhay ang Pilipino! I keep on praying…Babangon ang Pilipinas.”
Nayve admits he had a soft spot for his brilliant chemistry student. The eldest of six children, Normand belonged to a poor family like his teacher. “He was very studious. He knew that his family is depending on him to finish his studies,” says Nayve.
Nayve himself was able to study college through a scholarship offered by the state university to deserving students in the countryside. “I didn’t intend to study at UPLB because we were poor. I’m from Bicol. Even if I pass the UP College Admissions Test (UPCAT), we would not be able to afford the costs of my college education,” Normand’s professor said.
Nayve’s mother, way back in the late 1970s, was a plain housewife while his father was an employee of a bottling company. When 20 application forms were raffled off by their school to 200 students, he was lucky to “win” one application form, prompting him to fill it up and take the test for UPCAT.
Like him, Normand had to work to be able to study - despite the fact that being a state university student entitled them to a lot of benefits, including free tuition and allowance as state scholars. Normand graduated in 2005. He worked for a computer college before transferring to the UP Rural High School in Los Baños, where he taught mathematics last November.
Nayve says Normand continued to be involved in his BIOTECH team, doing most of the work in their biofuels program. “He really supervised it closely, that’s why the results came out well.”
Normand’s experiment was considered a breakthrough in ethanol production. Normand was able to produce ethanol at 12-percent volume per volume (v/v), even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops. The thesis, which he shared with Nayve, and fellow researchers Irene Gabrido, Francisco Elegado and Catalino Alfafara, was present at the 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology in July 2005.
It focused on the current thrust of the government to expand the use of nonoil energy and fuel sources, especially biofuel. Normand used the simplest strategy of producing yeast strains that produce ethanol. He explained that the expected increase in ethanol production will be accompanied by the increase in distillery slops generation, which is the main waste in the distillery industry.
Distillery slops is a major environmental concern because of their high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). Using the best combination of slops and yeast strain with bioreactor, Normand was able to determine potentially superior yeast strains among 10 local yeast isolates he used for the experiment. He concluded that high ethanol production at 12-percent v/v was possible even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops, after one of the strains performed much better - perhaps better than most currently used industrial yeast strains.
Impressed by Normand’s dedication to the experiment, Nayve sees a big a possibility for industry players using the thesis in the production of ethanol - both alcohol and fuel.
Although the results of the thesis have not yet been fully validated by industry players, Nayve is confident the result of the experiment is valid and will boost production of ethanol in the country in the future. “This is a very important discovery. He got such a potent strain for use in ethanol production,” Nayve says.
Business Mirror; March 13, 2006
When Normand Secreto discovered there was high ethanol potential in molasses, he didn’t think twice about pursuing a thesis that would impact on the people and the economy. Soon enough, the 22-year-old BS Chemical Engineering graduate found ways to extract high ethanol content from strains of molasses which can be used in the production of ethanol products - including alcohol and fuel. Ethanol can be used as an additive for gasoline to mitigate the steadily increasing fuel process. It can also provide a cleaner and environment-friendly alternative to imported fossil fuels.
Normand got as far as his thesis, distinguished by having determined the highest percentage of ethanol (12 percent against the existing record of 9 percent) that can be extracted from molasses - and both his teachers at UP Los Baños and private firms looking to apply his discovery are excited. But the brilliant young scientist is dead, victim of a recent freak accident. He fell last week from a jeep where he was hanging on the running board, on his way to a retreat in Mount Makiling. He suffered a fatal blow on the skull.
His professor and thesis adviser, Dr. Fidel Rey Nayve, said Normand’s experiment would have been the most significant scientific discovery in ethanol production and would have made him the youngest, sought-after biofuels scientist in the country today.
Normand, however, did not live long enough to enjoy the recognition – or perhaps even the monetary rewards, which would have been useful to his family in General Santos City. “He was so young,” laments Nayve. “He could have done more for the country.”
Nayve described Normand as their “workhorse”, doing much of the job with enthusiasm and high spirits. “He was very patriotic. He dedicated his work to the Filipino people,” he said.
Despite his humble origins and the oft-repeated admonition of people for him to do well for he can provide for a family of six children where he was the eldest sibling, Normand’s sense of duty to country was overwhelming. In the acknowledgement page of his chemical engineering thesis: “Evaluation of Distillery Slops as Medium Component in Molasses-based Ethanol Fermentation Using Biotech Yeast Strains,” Normand wrote:
“To my countrymen, the Filipino people, who subsidized my schooling in this University; may you reap the true worth of the taxes you paid when I graduate. It is my pleasure to serve you all in my own little ways…Mabuhay ang Pilipino! I keep on praying…Babangon ang Pilipinas.”
Nayve admits he had a soft spot for his brilliant chemistry student. The eldest of six children, Normand belonged to a poor family like his teacher. “He was very studious. He knew that his family is depending on him to finish his studies,” says Nayve.
Nayve himself was able to study college through a scholarship offered by the state university to deserving students in the countryside. “I didn’t intend to study at UPLB because we were poor. I’m from Bicol. Even if I pass the UP College Admissions Test (UPCAT), we would not be able to afford the costs of my college education,” Normand’s professor said.
Nayve’s mother, way back in the late 1970s, was a plain housewife while his father was an employee of a bottling company. When 20 application forms were raffled off by their school to 200 students, he was lucky to “win” one application form, prompting him to fill it up and take the test for UPCAT.
Like him, Normand had to work to be able to study - despite the fact that being a state university student entitled them to a lot of benefits, including free tuition and allowance as state scholars. Normand graduated in 2005. He worked for a computer college before transferring to the UP Rural High School in Los Baños, where he taught mathematics last November.
Nayve says Normand continued to be involved in his BIOTECH team, doing most of the work in their biofuels program. “He really supervised it closely, that’s why the results came out well.”
Normand’s experiment was considered a breakthrough in ethanol production. Normand was able to produce ethanol at 12-percent volume per volume (v/v), even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops. The thesis, which he shared with Nayve, and fellow researchers Irene Gabrido, Francisco Elegado and Catalino Alfafara, was present at the 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology in July 2005.
It focused on the current thrust of the government to expand the use of nonoil energy and fuel sources, especially biofuel. Normand used the simplest strategy of producing yeast strains that produce ethanol. He explained that the expected increase in ethanol production will be accompanied by the increase in distillery slops generation, which is the main waste in the distillery industry.
Distillery slops is a major environmental concern because of their high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). Using the best combination of slops and yeast strain with bioreactor, Normand was able to determine potentially superior yeast strains among 10 local yeast isolates he used for the experiment. He concluded that high ethanol production at 12-percent v/v was possible even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops, after one of the strains performed much better - perhaps better than most currently used industrial yeast strains.
Impressed by Normand’s dedication to the experiment, Nayve sees a big a possibility for industry players using the thesis in the production of ethanol - both alcohol and fuel.
Although the results of the thesis have not yet been fully validated by industry players, Nayve is confident the result of the experiment is valid and will boost production of ethanol in the country in the future. “This is a very important discovery. He got such a potent strain for use in ethanol production,” Nayve says.
Of ethanol and scientists’ options: A page from Prometheus Bound
By J.M. Bo
Published Mar 2006 in The UPLB Horizon
As the country reeled from the multiple increases slapped on gas and oil products after world oil prices surged to record-high levels, everyone went into action mode: law makers rushed legislation, government agencies created ad hoc bodies to address the issue, offices issued energy savings advisories, and homemakers pinched on their budget.
In the University, about two years earlier, the Environmental Biotechnology Program (EBP) of the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (BIOTECH) had reinvigorated its activities under the former Biofuels Program which had lain dormant after the energy crisis in the 1980’s. BIOTECH had at the time isolated HBY3, an indigenous and high-alcohol producing yeast.
But as BIOTECH scientist and EBP Leader Fidel Rey Nayve said, BIOTECH was only able to go as far as testing HBY3 at the industry level when petroleum prices plunged and biofuels research became a victim of fad-based research funding. So the world heaved a sigh of relief when petroleum prices fell and BIOTECH had no choice but to shelve biofuels research as funding dried up. One country (Brazil), however, refused to forget the lessons of the oil crisis, proceeded with dogged determination, and is now the world’s foremost producer and exporter of ethanol.
Meanwhile, BIOTECH’s HBY3 was not left entirely in a dusty corner. Under unknown circumstances, it was pirated and used by the distillery industry to produce ethanol for alcoholic beverages. As Dr. Nayve sadly related, BIOTECH did not get anything from HBY3. “We had no intention of keeping the yeast strain or any technology for that matter to ourselves. What we just wanted is for BIOTECH to get financial returns (royalties) from them,” he said. To emphasize his point, he intimated that this year, BIOTECH’s core budget is only P100,000 per program, that when divided among five projects of the EBP, will leave only a measly P20,000 for each! This amount may not even be enough to cover the cost of media, i.e., yeast-extract, peptone, or bacto-agar!
According to Dr. Nayve, what is happening in BIOTECH is an offshoot of the low level of support that our government allocates to research and development. He said that industrialized countries allocate up to 3% of their GNP to scientific R&D while the Philippines allocated a pathetic 0.14% of its GNP during the same period (2000-2002). Dr. Nayve said that what supports BIOTECH are the external projects and its income generating services. The royalties from HBY3 would have contributed much towards enabling its researchers to continue with their research work.
And continue with the research work on bioethanol is what Dr. Nayve’s team at EBP will do. There are a lot of things going for the research team including the renewed interest in fossil fuel alternatives that are not import dependent, are sources of clean energy, and could generate rural employment to boot. Moreover, the country is endowed with renewable sources of bioethanol such as sugarcane and sugar refinery waste, sweet sorghum, cassava, lignocellulosic materials such as corn stover, grasses, and leaves. The list can go on.
Probably the most important component in bioethanol research are the human resources, the committed researchers who despite the lure of better-paying jobs, are staying on in the University for love of country. Dr. Nayve is only one himself in the BIOTECH team, although how long he and the rest will hold out considering the frustrating work conditions and lack of opportunities in the country , we can only guess and await with bated breath.
The BIOTECH team recently achieved a milestone in their research in bioethanol through the findings of a BS Chemical Engineering graduate, Normand Secreto, who worked on his thesis under Dr. Nayve and Dr. Catalino Alfafara’s tutelage and with the help of fellow researcher Irene Gabrido. Normand was able to identify a yeast that worked better than HBY3. If HBY3 was able to get an 8-9% volume per volume (v/v) concentration of ethanol from molasses in the bioreactor experiment, this yeast initially attained an 11% v/v concentration in the flask experiment, and later a 12% v/v concentration in the bioreactor experiment.
What is more remarkable about Normand’s research was that he was able to attain these levels of ethanol concentration not from a conventional medium but from a molasses medium containing 40% distillery slops. What is the significance of this in distillery waste management? This means that distillery slops can actually be recycled to produce ethanol!
Although slops are not toxic, the volume that is generated by distilleries, estimated at 10-15 liters for every liter of ethanol produced, is enough to clog up rivers, kill our fishery and even the tourism industry, as well as obliterate our coastal resources. The slops deprive the bodies of water with oxygen that every living thing they host needs in order to survive. As Normand and Dr. Nayve’s team worked on increasing ethanol concentration, they anticipated that the volume of distillery slops will increase and aggravate the distillery waste management problem. So why not make the problem a part of the solution? And make it they did!
With Dr. Nayve’s team, Normand was poised to expand the tests on the high ethanol yielding yeast at the industry level when a freak accident snuffed out his young and promising life (see related story on this page). Dr. Nayve says that Normand was such a loss to the team, being the very dedicated and focused researcher that he was.
Although short, Normand’s life clearly had a purpose and his demise may just be equally meaningful. It could fast track the industry-research linkage that Dr. Nayve’s team was planning to enter into to further confirm their findings on the promising yeast strain. For starters, it brought the attention of a distiller, who, after reading Normand’s story that was published in a newspaper, expressed interest in funding further research on the promising yeast strain’s potential to produce ethanol. Dr. Nayve, however, is approaching linkages with caution because he does not want to lose this yeast strain to piracy. He expressed his anxiety about having to take care of intellectual property issues and wished that this will be taken care of by more knowledgeable people or units.
Fad-based if not low support for R&D, inadequacy in addressing intellectual property issues... these are just two long-festering issues that have made it harder for our scientists to practice in the country. The few ones who opted to stay may just bail out from frustration that their work would ever create the impact that they desire to see. Will our generation ever live to see our scientists and researchers contentedly practicing their craft in the country, not forever looking at other options where the grass is greener?
Published Mar 2006 in The UPLB Horizon
As the country reeled from the multiple increases slapped on gas and oil products after world oil prices surged to record-high levels, everyone went into action mode: law makers rushed legislation, government agencies created ad hoc bodies to address the issue, offices issued energy savings advisories, and homemakers pinched on their budget.
In the University, about two years earlier, the Environmental Biotechnology Program (EBP) of the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (BIOTECH) had reinvigorated its activities under the former Biofuels Program which had lain dormant after the energy crisis in the 1980’s. BIOTECH had at the time isolated HBY3, an indigenous and high-alcohol producing yeast.
But as BIOTECH scientist and EBP Leader Fidel Rey Nayve said, BIOTECH was only able to go as far as testing HBY3 at the industry level when petroleum prices plunged and biofuels research became a victim of fad-based research funding. So the world heaved a sigh of relief when petroleum prices fell and BIOTECH had no choice but to shelve biofuels research as funding dried up. One country (Brazil), however, refused to forget the lessons of the oil crisis, proceeded with dogged determination, and is now the world’s foremost producer and exporter of ethanol.
Meanwhile, BIOTECH’s HBY3 was not left entirely in a dusty corner. Under unknown circumstances, it was pirated and used by the distillery industry to produce ethanol for alcoholic beverages. As Dr. Nayve sadly related, BIOTECH did not get anything from HBY3. “We had no intention of keeping the yeast strain or any technology for that matter to ourselves. What we just wanted is for BIOTECH to get financial returns (royalties) from them,” he said. To emphasize his point, he intimated that this year, BIOTECH’s core budget is only P100,000 per program, that when divided among five projects of the EBP, will leave only a measly P20,000 for each! This amount may not even be enough to cover the cost of media, i.e., yeast-extract, peptone, or bacto-agar!
According to Dr. Nayve, what is happening in BIOTECH is an offshoot of the low level of support that our government allocates to research and development. He said that industrialized countries allocate up to 3% of their GNP to scientific R&D while the Philippines allocated a pathetic 0.14% of its GNP during the same period (2000-2002). Dr. Nayve said that what supports BIOTECH are the external projects and its income generating services. The royalties from HBY3 would have contributed much towards enabling its researchers to continue with their research work.
And continue with the research work on bioethanol is what Dr. Nayve’s team at EBP will do. There are a lot of things going for the research team including the renewed interest in fossil fuel alternatives that are not import dependent, are sources of clean energy, and could generate rural employment to boot. Moreover, the country is endowed with renewable sources of bioethanol such as sugarcane and sugar refinery waste, sweet sorghum, cassava, lignocellulosic materials such as corn stover, grasses, and leaves. The list can go on.
Probably the most important component in bioethanol research are the human resources, the committed researchers who despite the lure of better-paying jobs, are staying on in the University for love of country. Dr. Nayve is only one himself in the BIOTECH team, although how long he and the rest will hold out considering the frustrating work conditions and lack of opportunities in the country , we can only guess and await with bated breath.
The BIOTECH team recently achieved a milestone in their research in bioethanol through the findings of a BS Chemical Engineering graduate, Normand Secreto, who worked on his thesis under Dr. Nayve and Dr. Catalino Alfafara’s tutelage and with the help of fellow researcher Irene Gabrido. Normand was able to identify a yeast that worked better than HBY3. If HBY3 was able to get an 8-9% volume per volume (v/v) concentration of ethanol from molasses in the bioreactor experiment, this yeast initially attained an 11% v/v concentration in the flask experiment, and later a 12% v/v concentration in the bioreactor experiment.
What is more remarkable about Normand’s research was that he was able to attain these levels of ethanol concentration not from a conventional medium but from a molasses medium containing 40% distillery slops. What is the significance of this in distillery waste management? This means that distillery slops can actually be recycled to produce ethanol!
Although slops are not toxic, the volume that is generated by distilleries, estimated at 10-15 liters for every liter of ethanol produced, is enough to clog up rivers, kill our fishery and even the tourism industry, as well as obliterate our coastal resources. The slops deprive the bodies of water with oxygen that every living thing they host needs in order to survive. As Normand and Dr. Nayve’s team worked on increasing ethanol concentration, they anticipated that the volume of distillery slops will increase and aggravate the distillery waste management problem. So why not make the problem a part of the solution? And make it they did!
With Dr. Nayve’s team, Normand was poised to expand the tests on the high ethanol yielding yeast at the industry level when a freak accident snuffed out his young and promising life (see related story on this page). Dr. Nayve says that Normand was such a loss to the team, being the very dedicated and focused researcher that he was.
Although short, Normand’s life clearly had a purpose and his demise may just be equally meaningful. It could fast track the industry-research linkage that Dr. Nayve’s team was planning to enter into to further confirm their findings on the promising yeast strain. For starters, it brought the attention of a distiller, who, after reading Normand’s story that was published in a newspaper, expressed interest in funding further research on the promising yeast strain’s potential to produce ethanol. Dr. Nayve, however, is approaching linkages with caution because he does not want to lose this yeast strain to piracy. He expressed his anxiety about having to take care of intellectual property issues and wished that this will be taken care of by more knowledgeable people or units.
Fad-based if not low support for R&D, inadequacy in addressing intellectual property issues... these are just two long-festering issues that have made it harder for our scientists to practice in the country. The few ones who opted to stay may just bail out from frustration that their work would ever create the impact that they desire to see. Will our generation ever live to see our scientists and researchers contentedly practicing their craft in the country, not forever looking at other options where the grass is greener?
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Storyteller, Scholar: Macario D. Tiu
by Charina Sanz Zarate / Mindanews
DAVAO CITY -- “The art of storytelling lies within the storyteller, “ Ruth Sawyer writes, “to be searched for, drawn out, made to grow.” The secret of this gift, she says in her book “The Way of the Storyteller”, really lies in the storyteller’s creative imagination; her power to evoke emotion; and her sense of conviction.
It is in this narrative spirit and tradition that we celebrate the work of another gifted storyteller, Dr. Macario D. Tiu, whose prose and imagination and whose diverse writings – from literature to history – never fail to enthrall, captivate, even titillate, a generation of Mindanao readers.
Once again, with his latest work entitled “Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory”, Tiu presents us another historical narrative of Davao which is so far the most comprehensive and scholarly work on Davao. Written in fluid language and adhering to rigorous scholarship, Davao history is pushed back further than 1848 when it was conquered by the Basque adventurer Jose Oyanguren.
The book also features many new information: the most substantive discussion of each Davao tribe in any single volume, including a theory of their migration; the most in-depth discussion of Datu Bago as well as other Davao heroes; sample studies of the different settlers at different period of Davao history; and the widest collection of myths and legends representing almost all the tribes of Davao. The book is published by the Ateneo de Davao University Research and Publication Office for the Mindanao Coalition of Development NGOs.
Perhaps the reason why Tiu’s narratives resonate with us deeply is because he tells it in ways that we easily feel and understand. “Qualify, simplify,” he told a young scholar recently, who seemed lost in the maze of theoretical paradigms that complicate in what would have been otherwise clear and simple realities.
“The community poet”, he writes, “clarifies, simplifies, and makes things understood.” He likens the poet’s origins to a baylan. “The baylan is the bridge between humans and the spirit world. She interprets what the deities say. She clarifies what is strange or mysterious. She is the simplifier. She is the clarifier. She familiarizes,[xvii] and communitizes things. That is the role of the poet.”
Seeing the kinship between a poet and a balyan is very much like Tiu - - the home-grown Mindanawon scholar who asserts to make the strange familiar by “indigenizing and vernacularizing the foreign” as he puts it. One is therefore tempted to think that the “balyan” in his short story of the same title which won first prize in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial awards this year (Cebuano) can perhaps be a “self-representation” of sorts.
Last year, Dr. Tiu, a Palanca awardee in 2001 for short story in Cebuano and Philippine Graphic Fiction awardee in 2000, was also chosen one of four finalists for the history category of the National Book Award 2003 for "Davao 1890-1910: Conquest and Resistance in the Garden of the Gods."
Dr. Tiu is currently the editor of Tambara, the official journal of the Ateneo de Davao University and writes a column for Mindanews entitled “Bisag Unsa”.
In the book’s foreword, Patricio N. Abinales, author of “Making Mindanao”, has this succinct tribute to Tiu: “Mindanawons have something to be proud of in this work by Davao ‘s leading scholar and multi- awarded poet and short-story writer. For it is a major contribution to a Mindanao-wide effort of recovering our story as a people of an island that has, since its incorporation to the Philippine body politic, consistently shaped the directions and shifts of its national narrative.”
Macario D. Tiu is indeed an inspiration to a generation of Mindanao scholars and shows the way to an engaged scholarship, one that is imbued with a sense of purpose and conviction, pursued not for its own sake but to reshape realities and to advocate for changes, and to rewrite a marginal past from the vantage point of the silenced and the inarticulate.
(The book had its "soft launching" on December 15. It will be formally launched on January 14, during the inauguration of the new Davao Museum. Copies of the book are available at the AdDU Bookstore, AdDU Research and Publication Office, Mindanawon, Mindanews, and other outlets. For details, call 221-2411 local 8213 and look for Ryan Digan.)
DAVAO CITY -- “The art of storytelling lies within the storyteller, “ Ruth Sawyer writes, “to be searched for, drawn out, made to grow.” The secret of this gift, she says in her book “The Way of the Storyteller”, really lies in the storyteller’s creative imagination; her power to evoke emotion; and her sense of conviction.
It is in this narrative spirit and tradition that we celebrate the work of another gifted storyteller, Dr. Macario D. Tiu, whose prose and imagination and whose diverse writings – from literature to history – never fail to enthrall, captivate, even titillate, a generation of Mindanao readers.
Once again, with his latest work entitled “Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory”, Tiu presents us another historical narrative of Davao which is so far the most comprehensive and scholarly work on Davao. Written in fluid language and adhering to rigorous scholarship, Davao history is pushed back further than 1848 when it was conquered by the Basque adventurer Jose Oyanguren.
The book also features many new information: the most substantive discussion of each Davao tribe in any single volume, including a theory of their migration; the most in-depth discussion of Datu Bago as well as other Davao heroes; sample studies of the different settlers at different period of Davao history; and the widest collection of myths and legends representing almost all the tribes of Davao. The book is published by the Ateneo de Davao University Research and Publication Office for the Mindanao Coalition of Development NGOs.
Perhaps the reason why Tiu’s narratives resonate with us deeply is because he tells it in ways that we easily feel and understand. “Qualify, simplify,” he told a young scholar recently, who seemed lost in the maze of theoretical paradigms that complicate in what would have been otherwise clear and simple realities.
“The community poet”, he writes, “clarifies, simplifies, and makes things understood.” He likens the poet’s origins to a baylan. “The baylan is the bridge between humans and the spirit world. She interprets what the deities say. She clarifies what is strange or mysterious. She is the simplifier. She is the clarifier. She familiarizes,[xvii] and communitizes things. That is the role of the poet.”
Seeing the kinship between a poet and a balyan is very much like Tiu - - the home-grown Mindanawon scholar who asserts to make the strange familiar by “indigenizing and vernacularizing the foreign” as he puts it. One is therefore tempted to think that the “balyan” in his short story of the same title which won first prize in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial awards this year (Cebuano) can perhaps be a “self-representation” of sorts.
Last year, Dr. Tiu, a Palanca awardee in 2001 for short story in Cebuano and Philippine Graphic Fiction awardee in 2000, was also chosen one of four finalists for the history category of the National Book Award 2003 for "Davao 1890-1910: Conquest and Resistance in the Garden of the Gods."
Dr. Tiu is currently the editor of Tambara, the official journal of the Ateneo de Davao University and writes a column for Mindanews entitled “Bisag Unsa”.
In the book’s foreword, Patricio N. Abinales, author of “Making Mindanao”, has this succinct tribute to Tiu: “Mindanawons have something to be proud of in this work by Davao ‘s leading scholar and multi- awarded poet and short-story writer. For it is a major contribution to a Mindanao-wide effort of recovering our story as a people of an island that has, since its incorporation to the Philippine body politic, consistently shaped the directions and shifts of its national narrative.”
Macario D. Tiu is indeed an inspiration to a generation of Mindanao scholars and shows the way to an engaged scholarship, one that is imbued with a sense of purpose and conviction, pursued not for its own sake but to reshape realities and to advocate for changes, and to rewrite a marginal past from the vantage point of the silenced and the inarticulate.
(The book had its "soft launching" on December 15. It will be formally launched on January 14, during the inauguration of the new Davao Museum. Copies of the book are available at the AdDU Bookstore, AdDU Research and Publication Office, Mindanawon, Mindanews, and other outlets. For details, call 221-2411 local 8213 and look for Ryan Digan.)
Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times, May 4, 2008
KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.
Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.
At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.
The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.
They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.
“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”
That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.
“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”
The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.
Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”
The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.
In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.
The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.
“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.
Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.
“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.
“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”
That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.
“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.
The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their father was an imam.
His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.
“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”
Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.
In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.
Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”
That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.
“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.
Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”
In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”
Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.
Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.
“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”
But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.
Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.
“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.
He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.
The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.
“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”
Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.
“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul.
The New York Times, May 4, 2008
KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.
Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.
At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.
The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.
They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.
“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”
That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.
“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”
The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.
Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”
The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.
In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.
The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.
“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.
Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.
“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.
“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”
That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.
“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.
The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their father was an imam.
His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.
“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”
Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.
In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.
Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”
That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.
“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.
Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”
In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”
Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.
Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.
“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”
But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.
Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.
“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.
He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.
The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.
“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”
Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.
“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul.
Turkish honour killings: A dishonourable practice
Apr 12th 2007 | DIYARBAKIR AND VAN
The Economist print edition
Despite a government crackdown, honour killings persist in Turkey
WITH his soulful eyes and timid smile, Murat Kara, a 40-year-old stocking seller in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, is an unlikely murderer. Yet 13 years ago he pumped seven bullets into his younger sister. His widowed mother and uncles told him to kill the 17-year-old after she eloped with her boyfriend, staining the family's honour. Mr Kara resisted for three months because “I loved my sister and didn't believe she deserved to die.” But then the neighbours stopped talking to him, the grocer refused to sell him bread, the local imam said he was disobeying Allah, and his mother threatened to curse the milk she had breast-fed him. So he gave in.
The killing of women by male relatives who believe they have dishonoured the family-eg, by getting pregnant outside wedlock or wearing revealing clothes-has haunted Turkey for centuries. Bowing to pressure from the media, feminist groups and the European Union, Turkey's mildly Islamist government has launched an unprecedented campaign against honour killings, disarming even its fiercest critics.
State-employed imams now declare honour killings “sinful” in the Friday sermons they deliver across the country. Tens of thousands of army conscripts and police recruits are taught that violence against women is bad. Brooking the ire of his conservative constituents, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, told a gathering of foreign Muslims that “discrimination against women is worse than racism.” Nor is this mere talk. Turkey's penal code has been tweaked to stiffen penalties not only for those who commit honour killings but also for those who plan them. Had Mr Kara, who got seven years thanks to a judge who deemed he had been unduly provoked, killed his sister today, he would in all probability be serving a life sentence.
The trouble is that, despite the government's efforts, honour-related crimes show little sign of abating. A parliamentary report last August found that 1,091 such crimes had been committed in the past five years-over four a week. Only three of 51 honour killers interviewed for another study said they had any regrets.
In a society where female chastity is venerated and the motto “my horse, my gun and my woman are sacred” is common among men, “this should not come as a surprise,” notes Zozan Ozgokce, a female activist who runs an EU-funded project in Van to counsel abused women. Fatma Sahin, a deputy from Mr Erdogan's AK Party who drafted the parliamentary report, blames the deeply entrenched patriarchal and feudal system in the Kurdish provinces, where many of the murders occur. Rampant poverty and illiteracy have been exacerbated by the forced eviction of millions of Kurdish villagers by the army in its war against PKK rebels in the 1990s.
With refugee families of up to 20 or more crammed into tiny slums, incest and rape have shot up, says Handan Coskun, a social worker in Diyarbakir who is investigating links between female suicides and honour crimes. One survivor said she was ordered to take her own life (and locked in a room with a bottle of bleach) by her father, who sought to disguise his daughter's failed murder as suicide. She managed to escape; less fortunate souls have been found dead with their wrists slit or hanging from a rope.
In Diyarbakir and elsewhere in the south-east, new efforts are being made to protect vulnerable women through emergency hotlines and shelters for abused women. The first government-run refuge opened its doors outside Diyarbakir two years ago. Many of the residents are pregnant teenage rape victims, who risk being killed by relatives who blame them (and not their rapists) for their plight.
Still, male accomplices or perpetrators are often targeted, too. And honour crimes are not a uniquely Kurdish phenomenon, says Leyla Pervizat, an Istanbul-based expert. This is especially true of the fiercely conservative Black Sea region where “after the men are killed, their penises are cut off and stuffed in their mouths,” she adds laconically. What gives her hope is that the number of those willing to tip off the authorities about a planned murder is growing-so more lives are being saved. And many of the whistleblowers are male.
The Economist print edition
Despite a government crackdown, honour killings persist in Turkey
WITH his soulful eyes and timid smile, Murat Kara, a 40-year-old stocking seller in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, is an unlikely murderer. Yet 13 years ago he pumped seven bullets into his younger sister. His widowed mother and uncles told him to kill the 17-year-old after she eloped with her boyfriend, staining the family's honour. Mr Kara resisted for three months because “I loved my sister and didn't believe she deserved to die.” But then the neighbours stopped talking to him, the grocer refused to sell him bread, the local imam said he was disobeying Allah, and his mother threatened to curse the milk she had breast-fed him. So he gave in.
The killing of women by male relatives who believe they have dishonoured the family-eg, by getting pregnant outside wedlock or wearing revealing clothes-has haunted Turkey for centuries. Bowing to pressure from the media, feminist groups and the European Union, Turkey's mildly Islamist government has launched an unprecedented campaign against honour killings, disarming even its fiercest critics.
State-employed imams now declare honour killings “sinful” in the Friday sermons they deliver across the country. Tens of thousands of army conscripts and police recruits are taught that violence against women is bad. Brooking the ire of his conservative constituents, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, told a gathering of foreign Muslims that “discrimination against women is worse than racism.” Nor is this mere talk. Turkey's penal code has been tweaked to stiffen penalties not only for those who commit honour killings but also for those who plan them. Had Mr Kara, who got seven years thanks to a judge who deemed he had been unduly provoked, killed his sister today, he would in all probability be serving a life sentence.
The trouble is that, despite the government's efforts, honour-related crimes show little sign of abating. A parliamentary report last August found that 1,091 such crimes had been committed in the past five years-over four a week. Only three of 51 honour killers interviewed for another study said they had any regrets.
In a society where female chastity is venerated and the motto “my horse, my gun and my woman are sacred” is common among men, “this should not come as a surprise,” notes Zozan Ozgokce, a female activist who runs an EU-funded project in Van to counsel abused women. Fatma Sahin, a deputy from Mr Erdogan's AK Party who drafted the parliamentary report, blames the deeply entrenched patriarchal and feudal system in the Kurdish provinces, where many of the murders occur. Rampant poverty and illiteracy have been exacerbated by the forced eviction of millions of Kurdish villagers by the army in its war against PKK rebels in the 1990s.
With refugee families of up to 20 or more crammed into tiny slums, incest and rape have shot up, says Handan Coskun, a social worker in Diyarbakir who is investigating links between female suicides and honour crimes. One survivor said she was ordered to take her own life (and locked in a room with a bottle of bleach) by her father, who sought to disguise his daughter's failed murder as suicide. She managed to escape; less fortunate souls have been found dead with their wrists slit or hanging from a rope.
In Diyarbakir and elsewhere in the south-east, new efforts are being made to protect vulnerable women through emergency hotlines and shelters for abused women. The first government-run refuge opened its doors outside Diyarbakir two years ago. Many of the residents are pregnant teenage rape victims, who risk being killed by relatives who blame them (and not their rapists) for their plight.
Still, male accomplices or perpetrators are often targeted, too. And honour crimes are not a uniquely Kurdish phenomenon, says Leyla Pervizat, an Istanbul-based expert. This is especially true of the fiercely conservative Black Sea region where “after the men are killed, their penises are cut off and stuffed in their mouths,” she adds laconically. What gives her hope is that the number of those willing to tip off the authorities about a planned murder is growing-so more lives are being saved. And many of the whistleblowers are male.
After Lifetime in Germany, Turks Still Alone and Torn
By MARK LANDLER
March 25, 2007
The New York Times
DUISBURG, Germany, March 20 — The last cups of Turkish black tea had been drained, the platters of olives and goat cheese cleared, but the snowy-haired Turks lingered at the table.
“Of course I always think about going back,” said Yusuf Mermer, 69, who left Ankara in 1969 for the Ruhr, where he operated a forklift. He now lives in a nursing home here. “I have nieces and nephews in Turkey, but I would just be a burden on them.”
His voice cracked and tears trickled down his creased face. “Looking back, I don’t even know why I came to Germany,” he said. “Things were going fine for me in Turkey.”
Four decades after the first Turks arrived as guest workers, they are reaching retirement in a land that still feels foreign. For Mr. Mermer and many others, it is a bleak time with the recognition that they will live out their days in a place where they had planned to stay only a few years.
Germany never planned on them staying, either, and now faces a looming social and financial burden. Of its 2.7 million people of Turkish origin, 320,000 are of retirement age. That is expected to double by 2020.
Many of these immigrants, particularly older women, do not have the savings or pension and health benefits to afford a nursing home with round-the-clock care. The government has to pick up the shortfall — an unexpected payback for the long years of service of these guest workers, or gastarbeiter.
Socially isolated after decades of living in Turkish enclaves, these accidental Germans often speak little or no German. And having toiled in low-paying, physically taxing jobs, they are in poor health relative to native Germans of comparable age.
“For the first time in our history, we have to deal with considerable numbers of immigrants who are elderly,” said Reiner Klingholz, the director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “They age differently from Germans. They have different medical problems.”
But they do share one thing with Western Europeans: they cannot rely on their busy children to take care of them. Three cities are trying different approaches to help them.
In Berlin, the country’s first private nursing home exclusively for Turkish people opened last year. Called Turk Huzur Evi, or the Turkish House of Well-Being, it will eventually offer beds for 155 people. It has a Muslim prayer room, with a visiting imam who preaches regularly, and serves Turkish food and meat prepared according to Islamic rules.
In Frankfurt, the state of Hesse finances a retirement home with a section for Muslims. Its 11 beds are filled, the majority with Turks, though there have been Afghans.
Here in Duisburg, the nursing home, known as Haus am Sandberg and run by the German Red Cross, has 15 Turkish residents — 8 women and 7 men — and nearly 80 Germans. They share airy quarters around a two-story atrium. Ralf Krause, the director, said it made little sense to segregate the Turkish residents, since they were already a diverse group: Sunnis and Kurds, Anatolians and people from Istanbul, devout Muslims and acolytes of Ataturk, Turkey’s great nationalist leader.
There is plenty of room for friction. “It’s not even as if they all eat olives and goat cheese,” he said, referring to the traditional Turkish breakfast served each Tuesday.
On a recent morning, however, there was quiet harmony in the breakfast room. Young women, some in head scarves, served food to their parents. A little girl scampered about, chattering in German.
Children and grandchildren are the main reason these Turkish immigrants stay. With the passage of time, many of them have few friends or family members left back home.
“They always say they want to go back, but their families are in Germany, so they are torn,” said Bengi Azcan, 40, a German-born social worker who is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. “It is especially sad because they know they will never achieve their dream.”
Dilber Cevik, 67, moved to Germany three decades ago from Amasya, in central Anatolia. She worked in a fishery in Hamburg before moving to Duisburg, a forest of smokestacks and steel mills on the Rhine with one of the Germany’s highest concentrations of Turkish immigrants.
“When you’re young, of course, you never think about being retired,” Mrs. Cevik said, sitting in a wheelchair. “I never imagined I would end up in a retirement home in Germany. But it is God’s will.”
Two of her daughters live nearby and visit twice a week. Mrs. Cevik has other children in Turkey, but frets that the medical care would not be as good there.
Like most immigrants here, Mrs. Cevik speaks only Turkish. Some have forgotten their German — common among the aging, particularly those with Alzheimer’s — while others never learned more than a few words. “We never needed German; we were always surrounded by Turkish people,” said Mr. Mermer, who went back to Turkey once, but returned to Germany for good in 1972, the year before Germany stopped inviting workers from abroad.
The lack of connection to German society compounds the isolation that many Turkish immigrants feel after retiring, Ms. Azcan said.
The German government, which has struggled with immigration policy in general, has yet to come to grips with aging immigrants. In the 1980s, it tried to entice people to return home by paying them cash. About 250,000 foreigners — mostly Turks — did leave by 1984, but the flow soon dwindled because there were few jobs in Turkey then.
With only 4,000 Turks a year returning home these days, the German government and Turkish groups will have to share the burden of providing culturally aware nursing homes and caring for the growing number of retirees, said Faruk Sen, director of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen. There are signs of that. In another part of Duisburg, a Turkish group that is building one of Germany’s largest mosques has included plans for a small retirement community across the street.
The German and Turkish residents of Haus am Sandberg are experiencing genuine integration for the first time, after a lifetime in what social scientists have called “parallel societies.” Frieda Fuchs, a 90-year-old German, said her Turkish neighbors made life more interesting.
Multicultural living is not without its crossed wires, however. A few weeks ago, the staff brought the groups together for a dinner with cuisine from both countries. Sitting across the table from the Turks, the Germans broke into a quavering chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the former lyrics of Germany’s national anthem.
“Maybe they were rattled because we were playing Turkish music,” Ms. Azcan said, wincing at the memory. “This is a process. We’ll see as we go along which model works best.”
March 25, 2007
The New York Times
DUISBURG, Germany, March 20 — The last cups of Turkish black tea had been drained, the platters of olives and goat cheese cleared, but the snowy-haired Turks lingered at the table.
“Of course I always think about going back,” said Yusuf Mermer, 69, who left Ankara in 1969 for the Ruhr, where he operated a forklift. He now lives in a nursing home here. “I have nieces and nephews in Turkey, but I would just be a burden on them.”
His voice cracked and tears trickled down his creased face. “Looking back, I don’t even know why I came to Germany,” he said. “Things were going fine for me in Turkey.”
Four decades after the first Turks arrived as guest workers, they are reaching retirement in a land that still feels foreign. For Mr. Mermer and many others, it is a bleak time with the recognition that they will live out their days in a place where they had planned to stay only a few years.
Germany never planned on them staying, either, and now faces a looming social and financial burden. Of its 2.7 million people of Turkish origin, 320,000 are of retirement age. That is expected to double by 2020.
Many of these immigrants, particularly older women, do not have the savings or pension and health benefits to afford a nursing home with round-the-clock care. The government has to pick up the shortfall — an unexpected payback for the long years of service of these guest workers, or gastarbeiter.
Socially isolated after decades of living in Turkish enclaves, these accidental Germans often speak little or no German. And having toiled in low-paying, physically taxing jobs, they are in poor health relative to native Germans of comparable age.
“For the first time in our history, we have to deal with considerable numbers of immigrants who are elderly,” said Reiner Klingholz, the director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “They age differently from Germans. They have different medical problems.”
But they do share one thing with Western Europeans: they cannot rely on their busy children to take care of them. Three cities are trying different approaches to help them.
In Berlin, the country’s first private nursing home exclusively for Turkish people opened last year. Called Turk Huzur Evi, or the Turkish House of Well-Being, it will eventually offer beds for 155 people. It has a Muslim prayer room, with a visiting imam who preaches regularly, and serves Turkish food and meat prepared according to Islamic rules.
In Frankfurt, the state of Hesse finances a retirement home with a section for Muslims. Its 11 beds are filled, the majority with Turks, though there have been Afghans.
Here in Duisburg, the nursing home, known as Haus am Sandberg and run by the German Red Cross, has 15 Turkish residents — 8 women and 7 men — and nearly 80 Germans. They share airy quarters around a two-story atrium. Ralf Krause, the director, said it made little sense to segregate the Turkish residents, since they were already a diverse group: Sunnis and Kurds, Anatolians and people from Istanbul, devout Muslims and acolytes of Ataturk, Turkey’s great nationalist leader.
There is plenty of room for friction. “It’s not even as if they all eat olives and goat cheese,” he said, referring to the traditional Turkish breakfast served each Tuesday.
On a recent morning, however, there was quiet harmony in the breakfast room. Young women, some in head scarves, served food to their parents. A little girl scampered about, chattering in German.
Children and grandchildren are the main reason these Turkish immigrants stay. With the passage of time, many of them have few friends or family members left back home.
“They always say they want to go back, but their families are in Germany, so they are torn,” said Bengi Azcan, 40, a German-born social worker who is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. “It is especially sad because they know they will never achieve their dream.”
Dilber Cevik, 67, moved to Germany three decades ago from Amasya, in central Anatolia. She worked in a fishery in Hamburg before moving to Duisburg, a forest of smokestacks and steel mills on the Rhine with one of the Germany’s highest concentrations of Turkish immigrants.
“When you’re young, of course, you never think about being retired,” Mrs. Cevik said, sitting in a wheelchair. “I never imagined I would end up in a retirement home in Germany. But it is God’s will.”
Two of her daughters live nearby and visit twice a week. Mrs. Cevik has other children in Turkey, but frets that the medical care would not be as good there.
Like most immigrants here, Mrs. Cevik speaks only Turkish. Some have forgotten their German — common among the aging, particularly those with Alzheimer’s — while others never learned more than a few words. “We never needed German; we were always surrounded by Turkish people,” said Mr. Mermer, who went back to Turkey once, but returned to Germany for good in 1972, the year before Germany stopped inviting workers from abroad.
The lack of connection to German society compounds the isolation that many Turkish immigrants feel after retiring, Ms. Azcan said.
The German government, which has struggled with immigration policy in general, has yet to come to grips with aging immigrants. In the 1980s, it tried to entice people to return home by paying them cash. About 250,000 foreigners — mostly Turks — did leave by 1984, but the flow soon dwindled because there were few jobs in Turkey then.
With only 4,000 Turks a year returning home these days, the German government and Turkish groups will have to share the burden of providing culturally aware nursing homes and caring for the growing number of retirees, said Faruk Sen, director of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen. There are signs of that. In another part of Duisburg, a Turkish group that is building one of Germany’s largest mosques has included plans for a small retirement community across the street.
The German and Turkish residents of Haus am Sandberg are experiencing genuine integration for the first time, after a lifetime in what social scientists have called “parallel societies.” Frieda Fuchs, a 90-year-old German, said her Turkish neighbors made life more interesting.
Multicultural living is not without its crossed wires, however. A few weeks ago, the staff brought the groups together for a dinner with cuisine from both countries. Sitting across the table from the Turks, the Germans broke into a quavering chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the former lyrics of Germany’s national anthem.
“Maybe they were rattled because we were playing Turkish music,” Ms. Azcan said, wincing at the memory. “This is a process. We’ll see as we go along which model works best.”
Shipments of children, a darkly growing trade
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2005
MANILA — The young girls often come in groups of five or more, clustered in the farthest sections of passenger ships, away from prying eyes. They hardly talk to each other, but only because they hardly know each other. They are mostly teenagers, some as young as 14. Most of them are excited about the trip to Manila, which is usually their first.
But some, like Julia, know they made the wrong decision the moment the ship pulls away.
“I was afraid the whole time. I don’t know what would happen to me,” said Julia, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used.
Julia was 17 when a man approached her on the street in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines, and offered her a job as a housemaid in Manila. She was promised a monthly salary of $55 - a handsome sum for a girl whose parents earn hardly half of that in a month. All the man asked of Julia was that she lie about her age and leave that same night.
Together with four other teenage girls, Julia boarded a passenger ship bound for Manila last November, one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Filipino children being trafficked to Manila every day, most of them ending up in prostitution dens or in warehouses and factories where they are treated virtually as slaves.
It is a modus operandi that is being repeated all over the country, particularly in the poorest areas. As a result, the Philippines is now one of the hot spots in Southeast Asia for trafficking in persons, especially children, which generates approximately $10 billion a year worldwide, according to Unicef, the UN agency that works to protect children.
According to Unicef, a “good proportion” of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 exploited children in the Philippines have been trafficked. A decade ago, a national survey determined that a quarter-million Filipino children were working and living away from their homes.
While most trafficking is done domestically, many of the Filipino victims end up as prostitutes in Japan, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Europe.
The Philippines is also a transit point and destination for victims from China, the U.S. State Department said in a report on human trafficking released in June last year.
“Endemic poverty, a high unemployment rate, a cultural propensity towards migration, a weak rule-of-law environment, and sex tourism all contribute to significant trafficking activity in the Philippines,” the report said.
“There’s an increasing number of trafficking going on now,” said Dolores Alforte, executive director for the Philippines of Ecpat, an international network that opposes child prostitution, trafficking and pornography.
A recent study by Alforte’s group found at least seven “high-risk areas” in the country: the cities of Zamboanga, Cagayan de Oro, Laoag, Dumaguete, Cebu, and Manila as well as the province of Bicol.
Although the government, along with nongovernmental groups, has been active in its campaign against child trafficking, traffickers - usually friends and acquaintances, even relatives, of the victims’ families - have always found ways to be a step ahead, said Vicky Juat, Unicef’s child protection officer in Manila.
For example, when the government and these organizations, along with the coast guard and the maritime police, increased their inspection of passenger ships, even establishing halfway houses for trafficked people in certain ports, the traffickers merely used other routes or shifted to buses and small ferries, which are not as well-monitored.
But even with increased vigilance by the authorities, the traffickers still manage to lure victims. At the port of Manila, hardly a day goes by without minors’ being abandoned by their recruiters for fear of the police, according to the Visayan Forum Foundation, a Unicef-supported private group that put up a halfway house inside the port compound.
The number of trafficked children is often increased by the conflicts in the south. According to Rebecca Barrious-Ballesteros, head of Visayan Forum’s protective care unit, the number of trafficked children increased tenfold during certain months in 2003, when fighting broke out between the government and Muslim insurgents in Mindanao.
“We’ve noticed an increase in the number of those we help in recent months,” Ballesteros said. “That could mean that more trafficking has been going on, but that could also mean that it is because of the increased intervention by government and nongovernment groups.”
Visayan Forum has cared for more than 2,000 trafficked Filipinos since October 2003.
Juat, the Unicef officer, said the Philippines continued to be a hot spot because of a number of factors, foremost of which is the grinding poverty in the provinces, where most of the victims come from.
“We are country that’s very vulnerable mainly because of the poverty,” Juat said. She said that in many cases parents agreed to send their children away, partly to ease the burden on them but mainly so these children could work and help out. Often, the recruiters would give advance money to the parents.
In one instance, the Visayan Forum found out that many of the victims they thought they had sent home turned up later at the organization’s halfway house, indicating a reluctance among many of the victims to go home. “They’d be going home to the same poor environment so they probably thought, ‘Why bother?”‘ said Unicef’s Juat.
In fact, Julia, the girl from General Santos City, does not plan to go home soon. “I’d rather stay here at the halfway house for a little while, maybe finish high school,” she said.
Julia had been rescued from her recruiters when a fellow passenger learned that the girls were going to be sold to a prostitution den and promptly reported the situation to the authorities.
International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2005
MANILA — The young girls often come in groups of five or more, clustered in the farthest sections of passenger ships, away from prying eyes. They hardly talk to each other, but only because they hardly know each other. They are mostly teenagers, some as young as 14. Most of them are excited about the trip to Manila, which is usually their first.
But some, like Julia, know they made the wrong decision the moment the ship pulls away.
“I was afraid the whole time. I don’t know what would happen to me,” said Julia, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used.
Julia was 17 when a man approached her on the street in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines, and offered her a job as a housemaid in Manila. She was promised a monthly salary of $55 - a handsome sum for a girl whose parents earn hardly half of that in a month. All the man asked of Julia was that she lie about her age and leave that same night.
Together with four other teenage girls, Julia boarded a passenger ship bound for Manila last November, one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Filipino children being trafficked to Manila every day, most of them ending up in prostitution dens or in warehouses and factories where they are treated virtually as slaves.
It is a modus operandi that is being repeated all over the country, particularly in the poorest areas. As a result, the Philippines is now one of the hot spots in Southeast Asia for trafficking in persons, especially children, which generates approximately $10 billion a year worldwide, according to Unicef, the UN agency that works to protect children.
According to Unicef, a “good proportion” of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 exploited children in the Philippines have been trafficked. A decade ago, a national survey determined that a quarter-million Filipino children were working and living away from their homes.
While most trafficking is done domestically, many of the Filipino victims end up as prostitutes in Japan, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Europe.
The Philippines is also a transit point and destination for victims from China, the U.S. State Department said in a report on human trafficking released in June last year.
“Endemic poverty, a high unemployment rate, a cultural propensity towards migration, a weak rule-of-law environment, and sex tourism all contribute to significant trafficking activity in the Philippines,” the report said.
“There’s an increasing number of trafficking going on now,” said Dolores Alforte, executive director for the Philippines of Ecpat, an international network that opposes child prostitution, trafficking and pornography.
A recent study by Alforte’s group found at least seven “high-risk areas” in the country: the cities of Zamboanga, Cagayan de Oro, Laoag, Dumaguete, Cebu, and Manila as well as the province of Bicol.
Although the government, along with nongovernmental groups, has been active in its campaign against child trafficking, traffickers - usually friends and acquaintances, even relatives, of the victims’ families - have always found ways to be a step ahead, said Vicky Juat, Unicef’s child protection officer in Manila.
For example, when the government and these organizations, along with the coast guard and the maritime police, increased their inspection of passenger ships, even establishing halfway houses for trafficked people in certain ports, the traffickers merely used other routes or shifted to buses and small ferries, which are not as well-monitored.
But even with increased vigilance by the authorities, the traffickers still manage to lure victims. At the port of Manila, hardly a day goes by without minors’ being abandoned by their recruiters for fear of the police, according to the Visayan Forum Foundation, a Unicef-supported private group that put up a halfway house inside the port compound.
The number of trafficked children is often increased by the conflicts in the south. According to Rebecca Barrious-Ballesteros, head of Visayan Forum’s protective care unit, the number of trafficked children increased tenfold during certain months in 2003, when fighting broke out between the government and Muslim insurgents in Mindanao.
“We’ve noticed an increase in the number of those we help in recent months,” Ballesteros said. “That could mean that more trafficking has been going on, but that could also mean that it is because of the increased intervention by government and nongovernment groups.”
Visayan Forum has cared for more than 2,000 trafficked Filipinos since October 2003.
Juat, the Unicef officer, said the Philippines continued to be a hot spot because of a number of factors, foremost of which is the grinding poverty in the provinces, where most of the victims come from.
“We are country that’s very vulnerable mainly because of the poverty,” Juat said. She said that in many cases parents agreed to send their children away, partly to ease the burden on them but mainly so these children could work and help out. Often, the recruiters would give advance money to the parents.
In one instance, the Visayan Forum found out that many of the victims they thought they had sent home turned up later at the organization’s halfway house, indicating a reluctance among many of the victims to go home. “They’d be going home to the same poor environment so they probably thought, ‘Why bother?”‘ said Unicef’s Juat.
In fact, Julia, the girl from General Santos City, does not plan to go home soon. “I’d rather stay here at the halfway house for a little while, maybe finish high school,” she said.
Julia had been rescued from her recruiters when a fellow passenger learned that the girls were going to be sold to a prostitution den and promptly reported the situation to the authorities.
Breast-feeding: A Philippine battleground
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: July 17, 2007
MANILA: Nurjana Dones is bucking a trend in the Philippines. Now eight months into her first pregnancy, she decided early on that she would breast-feed her baby.
“I’m convinced this is the only way to feed my child,” said Dones, 21. “I don’t care about what all those television advertisements are saying: that formula milk will make my child smarter,” she said, while waiting for a checkup at a government health center in Quezon City.
Besides health, another factor is money: Dones, who is jobless, cannot afford the $50 a month that formula costs. Her husband works at a warehouse, earning the minimum wage of less than $200 a month.
Filipino and UN health authorities are heartened by the resolve of mothers like Dones, who make up a dwindling minority as breast-feeding rates decline in the Philippines and throughout Southeast Asia. As economies develop and more women take on full-time jobs outside the home, they have less time to breast-feed and more cash to spend on formula.
In the Philippines, the proportion of babies who are exclusively fed on breast milk in their first six months dropped from 20 percent in 1998 to 16 percent in 2003.
Throughout Southeast Asia, only 61 percent of women breast-feed their babies up to four months and 35 percent up to six months, according to the World Health Organization, or WHO.
But what has health authorities here most concerned is the role of aggressive advertising by formula producers. Now the long-running battle over what companies can say and do to promote commercial substitutes for breast milk has reached the Philippine Supreme Court.
“Infant formula has been glamorized to the point that many mothers are now convinced that it is superior to mother’s milk,” said Dr. Nicholas Alipui, the Unicef representative to the Philippines. He was referring to advertisements that claim formula milk and follow-on milk - for children one year old or older - make babies smarter.
For instance, Wyeth, a pharmaceutical and nutritional company based in the United States, has been running television advertisements for its Promil brand that feature child prodigies who can paint or play the piano. The ads have become so well known that a Filipino who shows above-average intelligence is often teased as a “Promil kid.”
Nothing, Alipui said, could be further from the truth. He said that about 82,000 children under 5 die each year in the Philippines, mainly because of poor nutrition. He cited a WHO statistic that said 16,000 of these deaths are caused by “inappropriate feeding practices, including the use of infant formula.”
He and other health officials are concerned that, while infant mortality rates remain high, the benefits of breast milk, such as enhanced immunity for the child, are being lost.
To encourage breast-feeding, the Philippines government enacted a Milk Code in 1986 that regulates the marketing of formula. The code bans advertisements and other promotional activities for formula intended for babies up to 1 year old. Last year, the Philippine Department of Health, concerned about the steady decline in breast-feeding and arguing that formula companies had been violating marketing regulations, revised the code, extending the promotion ban to milk substitutes for children up to 2 years old.
The companies, Wyeth among them, went to the Supreme Court to challenge the revisions, arguing that they were unconstitutional because they restricted free expression and that the health department had exceeded its mandate. The court issued a temporary restraining order against the new regulations and is expected to rule on their legality within a few weeks.
The companies have said they do not dispute the value of breast milk but that the new regulations unfairly restrict information from reaching women who cannot breast-feed.
“This is not a battle between breastfeeding and formula,” said Felicitas Aquino-Arroyo, a lawyer for the Pharmaceutical and Health Care Association of the Philippines, the industry group that filed the suit, in an interview in June. “This is about the arrogance of the Department of Health.” She called the assertion that formula was a factor in the high rate of infant mortality in the Philippines a “malicious insinuation.”
The Philippine Milk Code case is being closely watched because of its potential impact in Southeast Asia as a whole.
The stakes are certainly high for the milk companies, which sell nearly $500 million worth of milk substitutes annually in the Philippines, according to the Health Department. Breast-milk advocates also stress its importance to shaping how babies are fed.
“If the milk companies succeed in the Philippines case, it will have a huge negative impact because countries in the region will be deterred from promoting breastfeeding,” said Yeong Joo Kean, a legal adviser in Kuala Lumpur for the International Baby Food Action Network, a breast-feeding advocacy group.
Only the Philippines has a Milk Code that regulates the advertising and promotion of formula, Yeong said. “Most countries in Southeast Asia have been doing something to promote breast-feeding over the years but aggressive marketing by the milk companies have eroded these gains,” she said.
The WHO blames the decline of breast-feeding not just on advertising, but on other promotional tactics by formula manufacturers, such as giving free samples to health care professionals, sponsoring travel and seminars, even giving away such items as air conditioners.
In June, the WHO called such aggressive marketing tactics “an alarming threat to child survival” and said that in many countries in the region, “the combination of weak public health systems, slick and expensive marketing of milk formula and poor enforcement of marketing regulations have contributed to the decline of breast-feeding.”
In the Philippines, more than $100 million are spent annually to advertise milk substitutes, according to a 2006 report from AC Nielsen.
The companies have largely complied with the Milk Code restrictions pertaining to formula for infants up to 12 months; what they distribute are samples of products intended for kids 12 months and older. But according to the health department and Unicef, the promotion of milk substitutes for older children is dissuading mothers from breast-feeding newborns.
“They’re using follow-on milk as a backdoor,” Alipui, of Unicef, said of the companies.
This is why the Health Department revised the Milk Code to include a ban on advertising and promotion of follow-on milk products, said Alex Padilla, the Philippines undersecretary of health.
To be sure, health experts say, commercial promotions are not the only factor for the decline in breast-feeding. Alipui said that formula is a convenient fallback for many Filipino mothers who work outside the home.
Moreover, although the Health Department has ordered all government and public offices to provide breastfeeding stations or at least open their clinics to breast-feeding mothers, it has been less successful in persuading private establishments such as shopping malls to do the same.
For Dones, the mother from Quezon City, it is all about changing the mind-set created by advertising - a mind-set that, according to the Unicef and the health department, forces even poor mothers to spend what money they have on formula.
“Here we are, a poor country where many families cannot afford a decent meal on a daily basis and yet spend 2,000 pesos a month on formula milk - milk whose benefits don’t even come close to the benefits of mother’s milk, which is free,” she said. Two thousand pesos amounts to about $44. “It’s amazing what those television commercials can do.”
International Herald Tribune
Published: July 17, 2007
MANILA: Nurjana Dones is bucking a trend in the Philippines. Now eight months into her first pregnancy, she decided early on that she would breast-feed her baby.
“I’m convinced this is the only way to feed my child,” said Dones, 21. “I don’t care about what all those television advertisements are saying: that formula milk will make my child smarter,” she said, while waiting for a checkup at a government health center in Quezon City.
Besides health, another factor is money: Dones, who is jobless, cannot afford the $50 a month that formula costs. Her husband works at a warehouse, earning the minimum wage of less than $200 a month.
Filipino and UN health authorities are heartened by the resolve of mothers like Dones, who make up a dwindling minority as breast-feeding rates decline in the Philippines and throughout Southeast Asia. As economies develop and more women take on full-time jobs outside the home, they have less time to breast-feed and more cash to spend on formula.
In the Philippines, the proportion of babies who are exclusively fed on breast milk in their first six months dropped from 20 percent in 1998 to 16 percent in 2003.
Throughout Southeast Asia, only 61 percent of women breast-feed their babies up to four months and 35 percent up to six months, according to the World Health Organization, or WHO.
But what has health authorities here most concerned is the role of aggressive advertising by formula producers. Now the long-running battle over what companies can say and do to promote commercial substitutes for breast milk has reached the Philippine Supreme Court.
“Infant formula has been glamorized to the point that many mothers are now convinced that it is superior to mother’s milk,” said Dr. Nicholas Alipui, the Unicef representative to the Philippines. He was referring to advertisements that claim formula milk and follow-on milk - for children one year old or older - make babies smarter.
For instance, Wyeth, a pharmaceutical and nutritional company based in the United States, has been running television advertisements for its Promil brand that feature child prodigies who can paint or play the piano. The ads have become so well known that a Filipino who shows above-average intelligence is often teased as a “Promil kid.”
Nothing, Alipui said, could be further from the truth. He said that about 82,000 children under 5 die each year in the Philippines, mainly because of poor nutrition. He cited a WHO statistic that said 16,000 of these deaths are caused by “inappropriate feeding practices, including the use of infant formula.”
He and other health officials are concerned that, while infant mortality rates remain high, the benefits of breast milk, such as enhanced immunity for the child, are being lost.
To encourage breast-feeding, the Philippines government enacted a Milk Code in 1986 that regulates the marketing of formula. The code bans advertisements and other promotional activities for formula intended for babies up to 1 year old. Last year, the Philippine Department of Health, concerned about the steady decline in breast-feeding and arguing that formula companies had been violating marketing regulations, revised the code, extending the promotion ban to milk substitutes for children up to 2 years old.
The companies, Wyeth among them, went to the Supreme Court to challenge the revisions, arguing that they were unconstitutional because they restricted free expression and that the health department had exceeded its mandate. The court issued a temporary restraining order against the new regulations and is expected to rule on their legality within a few weeks.
The companies have said they do not dispute the value of breast milk but that the new regulations unfairly restrict information from reaching women who cannot breast-feed.
“This is not a battle between breastfeeding and formula,” said Felicitas Aquino-Arroyo, a lawyer for the Pharmaceutical and Health Care Association of the Philippines, the industry group that filed the suit, in an interview in June. “This is about the arrogance of the Department of Health.” She called the assertion that formula was a factor in the high rate of infant mortality in the Philippines a “malicious insinuation.”
The Philippine Milk Code case is being closely watched because of its potential impact in Southeast Asia as a whole.
The stakes are certainly high for the milk companies, which sell nearly $500 million worth of milk substitutes annually in the Philippines, according to the Health Department. Breast-milk advocates also stress its importance to shaping how babies are fed.
“If the milk companies succeed in the Philippines case, it will have a huge negative impact because countries in the region will be deterred from promoting breastfeeding,” said Yeong Joo Kean, a legal adviser in Kuala Lumpur for the International Baby Food Action Network, a breast-feeding advocacy group.
Only the Philippines has a Milk Code that regulates the advertising and promotion of formula, Yeong said. “Most countries in Southeast Asia have been doing something to promote breast-feeding over the years but aggressive marketing by the milk companies have eroded these gains,” she said.
The WHO blames the decline of breast-feeding not just on advertising, but on other promotional tactics by formula manufacturers, such as giving free samples to health care professionals, sponsoring travel and seminars, even giving away such items as air conditioners.
In June, the WHO called such aggressive marketing tactics “an alarming threat to child survival” and said that in many countries in the region, “the combination of weak public health systems, slick and expensive marketing of milk formula and poor enforcement of marketing regulations have contributed to the decline of breast-feeding.”
In the Philippines, more than $100 million are spent annually to advertise milk substitutes, according to a 2006 report from AC Nielsen.
The companies have largely complied with the Milk Code restrictions pertaining to formula for infants up to 12 months; what they distribute are samples of products intended for kids 12 months and older. But according to the health department and Unicef, the promotion of milk substitutes for older children is dissuading mothers from breast-feeding newborns.
“They’re using follow-on milk as a backdoor,” Alipui, of Unicef, said of the companies.
This is why the Health Department revised the Milk Code to include a ban on advertising and promotion of follow-on milk products, said Alex Padilla, the Philippines undersecretary of health.
To be sure, health experts say, commercial promotions are not the only factor for the decline in breast-feeding. Alipui said that formula is a convenient fallback for many Filipino mothers who work outside the home.
Moreover, although the Health Department has ordered all government and public offices to provide breastfeeding stations or at least open their clinics to breast-feeding mothers, it has been less successful in persuading private establishments such as shopping malls to do the same.
For Dones, the mother from Quezon City, it is all about changing the mind-set created by advertising - a mind-set that, according to the Unicef and the health department, forces even poor mothers to spend what money they have on formula.
“Here we are, a poor country where many families cannot afford a decent meal on a daily basis and yet spend 2,000 pesos a month on formula milk - milk whose benefits don’t even come close to the benefits of mother’s milk, which is free,” she said. Two thousand pesos amounts to about $44. “It’s amazing what those television commercials can do.”
Kabayan: A Captive Eagle Flies Home to the Wild
By Charina Sanz
Published in Newsbreak. (Vol. 4 No. 11, June 7, 2004)
KIDAPAWAN CITY –Somewhere in the mist-covered slopes of Apo Sandawa, a mighty banug once lived that was known to strike fear in the hearts of men. For this winged creature would descend from the sky and swoop down on a prey – man, child, beast – which it would carry home to a langub (cave) hidden far into the deepest recesses of the mountain.
For a long time, so goes this old Manobo legend, no one has seen this mighty banug who once lorded it over the highest of Philippine peaks – Apo Sandawa or Mount Apo – that majestic mountain shrouded in myth and mystery.
“We fear the banug,” says Obo-Manobo Datu Joseph Andot, 54, as he remembers this story told him by their kaapuhan (elders). “But we welcome him home because it is a thing of the forest, and all things coming from nature, should be returned. If they are lost, we too shall perish because they had been part of the lives of us lumads.”
Today, amid the rhythmic beat of the kulintang, Datu Andot along with other tribal leaders have set out to prepare lumps of betel nuts and apog (lime) wrapped in buyo leaves for a betel-nut chewing ritual called samaya in honor of one such banug called Kabayan who will be returning home.
Kabayan is a Philippine eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi) and the first captive-bred eagle in Asia to be released to the wild. The April 22 (Earth Day) experimental release was held inside the Philippine National Oil Corporation Geothermal Production Field 701 at the Mount Apo National Park.
Right now, Kabayan, who was earlier transported to the site on March 30, is fidgeting inside the hack box where he was temporarily caged apparently oblivious to the stellar status accorded him. Kabayan - named after his sponsor, vice-presidential bet Senator Noli de Castro - can be seen from a TV monitor installed near a stage where a pre-release ceremony was held. On stage were De Castro’s wife, Arlene Sinsuat, Presidential daughter Lulli Arroyo, PNOC chief Paul Aquino, Environment Secretary Elisa Gozun, Energy Secretary Vince Perez, and re-electionist Cotabato Governor Manny Pinol.
Towards the end of the speeches, the datus have formed a half-circle for a thanksgiving ritual called pamaas. One of them held aloft in his arms a white chicken which he placed on a table and, using a knife, sliced a tiny portion of the feet to let the blood flow. But only a trickle came out, leaving some of the lumads worried. “Dapat modugo,” someone in the crowd says. “Otherwise, the spirits would be angry.”
Later, betel nuts were handed to the VIP guests for “mama” (chewing) after the rituals were held amid a whiff of electoral fever in the mountain air. “There is no politics involved here,” Philippine Eagle Foundation chair Carlos Pedrosa earlier told reporters in a press briefing. “Kabayan was chosen because of his health conditions and the timing.”
Clouds of mist now descend on a mountain top as a motley crowd of journalists had begun to trek to the actual hack site. It was an hour before noon, just before the cicadas shrilled a noonday siren, and a moment Domingo Tadena, Kabayan’s caretaker, had been waiting all his life.
FREEDOM
Memories still flash across Tadena’s mind as he awaits along with the others Kabayan’s mow-wit od layang (soaring home). “He has an attitude, he is wild, different sa iba,” says Tadena who witnessed the hatching of captive-bred eagles, including that of Pag-asa, the first Philippine Eagle conceived through artificial insemination in 1992.
Tadena himself handled Kabayan’s hatching on November 23, 2002. The raptor, a product of cooperative artificial insemination on the female eagle Kahayag from the male eagle Junior, is one of 30 under the captive breeding program of the Philippine Eagle Foundation in Malagos, Davao City.
From the start, Kabayan was programmed for release to the wild and was reared in an environment that simulates forest conditions with limited human interaction. “We had to wear a mask and use puppets when feeding him,” Tadena says. Live prey is also occasionally brought to him to practice his hunting skills.
Kabayan, he recalls, struggled when they pinned him down to strap an aluminum leg band and a backpack-type radio transmitter to track his movements after the release. Also implanted in his breast muscle is a microchip for identification. “He was howling when we traveled him to Mt. Apo.”
The 57-year-old Tadena, who had worked with eagles for almost 30 years, says he believes that Kabayan longs for freedom because eagles, even those bred in captivity, carry in them an “instinct” of the wild. “They want to stay outside the cage. Napakasarap,” he smiles. “Sometimes when we forget to lock a cage, they fly on their own not wanting to return, that’s why we have to capture them back.”
It is now half an hour after the hack box had been opened and still Kabayan, who strikes an imperial pose, refuses to budge from his perch. By now, feathers crowning his head are raised into a crest, as he cranes his neck towards the direction of the viewing deck which, although sealed by a canvass blind, are pierced with square-shaped holes. Protruding from the holes are bulky camera lenses and curious faces. Hushed whispers and mobile phone ring tones also gave the masquerade away.
“He is distracted,” Tadena explains. “Or maybe he doesn’t know that the cage is open and that he is free to fly.” Someone had by this time slammed a steel roof, prompting the eagle to fly off to a nearby log. Kabayan was seen trotting to the far end of the log and once again, settled on a perch.
Finally, just before 1 p.m., Kabayan flew to freedom back to the wilds and was no longer seen in the hack site. “It is very fulfilling,” exclaims Tadena. “I have so much trust that he can survive.”
But the “wilds” Kabayan is coming home to is a troubled terrain that sits atop a potentially explosive ecological hotspot. “We do not discount the possibility that the eagle will die,” admits Lito Cereno, PEF program manager for education, and although all “methods and instruments” were in place to ensure his survival, "it is still part of the probability.”
Beleaguered mountain
Still, chances of Kabayan meeting another eagle in Mt. Apo which stands at 2954 meters above sea level are almost nil. With only seven pairs or 14 eagles spotted in the entire 72,112.59 hectares of the national park, Kabayan may have to mate with another captive-bred eagle to be released to the wild. “This could be Mia,” says Tadena. “She grew up with Kabayan together.”
Kabayan and Mia are only about 500 remaining pairs of Philippine eagles in the country, a number that is critically low, says PEF director Dennis Salvador. “That is why we do captive breeding . . . to put new blood in the gene pool”. This number can even dwindle due to the rapid destruction of their habitats, poaching and the disappearance of prey population.
Mount Apo, a known sanctuary and historic home of the eagle, had been tagged as one of the country's 17 environmental hot spots. Recently, the mountain was closed to climbers because of the tons of waste found in the trails that led to the further deterioration of the forest.
Located about 40 aerial kms. west of Davao City, Mount Apo straddles the mountain ridge dividing Davao City and Davao del Sur on the east and Cotabato on the west. The ASEAN Heritage Site Committee, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the World Bank had recognized it as a rich heritage site and an important center for biodiversity.
Revered as sacred mountain by the indigenous peoples living in its foothills, it is also being claimed by them as part of their ancestral domain. On February 14, the Obo-Menuvus had been issued a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title covering only about 3.2 hectares of land located in Barangay Ilomavis and Barangay Balabag, Kidapawan City.
A 12-kilometer road from Kidapawan City passing through Barangay Ilomavis however leads to the PNOC site where a 12-megawatt geothermal power plant was built right in the heart of the mountain. A massive opposition waged more than a decade ago was marked by a D’yandi ritual where 21 datus forged a blood pact, “vowing to defend Mt. Apo to the last drop of our blood”.
“We had survived the resistance but PNOC pledged that we help develop and replenish the natural resources,” says Energy Secretary Vincent Perez. He claims that they were able to reforest 591 hectares and drilled only 66 geothermal wells.
This remark though came in the heels of a new law passed on Feb. 3 excluding the PNOC’s geothermal reservation containing 7,010,000 square meters from the Mt. Apo Natural Park because of a “prior vested right”. The law - Republic Act No. 9237 also known as the Mount Apo Protected Area Act of 2003 - only mandates the PNOC to directly assist in “reforestation and other preservation activities” in the park.
But PNOC was caught in a controversy in recent months because of the alleged “arsenic poisoning” found among some villagers living near the geothermal plant. But while local environment and health officials have disputed findings made by experts led by Dr. Nelia Maramba, a toxicologist from the University of the Philippines, a group of NGOs advocating for environmental protection of Mt. Apo stands pat on Maramba’s findings.
“We are hoping that eventually he will settle here,” says Cereno referring to the PNOC’s Site B where Kabayan was released because of its “suitability in terms of food and vegetation”. Asked about the dangers of Kabayan being caught in the PNOC’s mammoth facilities and transmission lines, he replies that based on their studies the “live wires are only about three meters in distance and unless both ends are accidentally touched, it will not cause electrocution.”
But the fear of the mythical banug still remains among the lumads who are anxious about the eagle preying on their domestic animals despite assurances from PEF personnel that Kabayan is not inclined to do so.
"We would have wanted a meeting with all tribes to discuss the return of the eagle," says Datu Andot. He adds that while they were informed about the raptor's entry, other tribal groups do not seem to favor his return. Living around the park aside from the Obo-Menuvu are the Bagobo, K'lagan, Kaulo, and Ata-Manobo tribes. "But since he is already here, we might as well take care of him," he says.
Although feared, the banug was also known as a “protector of Mt. Apo”, so goes another legend. One day when the forest was about to be devoured by fire, the mighty bird dived into the water and soon darted up flapping its wet wings to douse the fire.
“This was how Apo Sandawa was once saved,” Loga, a young Manobo woman, says. “And when he was gone, the forest had also lost its protector.” ###
Published in Newsbreak. (Vol. 4 No. 11, June 7, 2004)
KIDAPAWAN CITY –Somewhere in the mist-covered slopes of Apo Sandawa, a mighty banug once lived that was known to strike fear in the hearts of men. For this winged creature would descend from the sky and swoop down on a prey – man, child, beast – which it would carry home to a langub (cave) hidden far into the deepest recesses of the mountain.
For a long time, so goes this old Manobo legend, no one has seen this mighty banug who once lorded it over the highest of Philippine peaks – Apo Sandawa or Mount Apo – that majestic mountain shrouded in myth and mystery.
“We fear the banug,” says Obo-Manobo Datu Joseph Andot, 54, as he remembers this story told him by their kaapuhan (elders). “But we welcome him home because it is a thing of the forest, and all things coming from nature, should be returned. If they are lost, we too shall perish because they had been part of the lives of us lumads.”
Today, amid the rhythmic beat of the kulintang, Datu Andot along with other tribal leaders have set out to prepare lumps of betel nuts and apog (lime) wrapped in buyo leaves for a betel-nut chewing ritual called samaya in honor of one such banug called Kabayan who will be returning home.
Kabayan is a Philippine eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi) and the first captive-bred eagle in Asia to be released to the wild. The April 22 (Earth Day) experimental release was held inside the Philippine National Oil Corporation Geothermal Production Field 701 at the Mount Apo National Park.
Right now, Kabayan, who was earlier transported to the site on March 30, is fidgeting inside the hack box where he was temporarily caged apparently oblivious to the stellar status accorded him. Kabayan - named after his sponsor, vice-presidential bet Senator Noli de Castro - can be seen from a TV monitor installed near a stage where a pre-release ceremony was held. On stage were De Castro’s wife, Arlene Sinsuat, Presidential daughter Lulli Arroyo, PNOC chief Paul Aquino, Environment Secretary Elisa Gozun, Energy Secretary Vince Perez, and re-electionist Cotabato Governor Manny Pinol.
Towards the end of the speeches, the datus have formed a half-circle for a thanksgiving ritual called pamaas. One of them held aloft in his arms a white chicken which he placed on a table and, using a knife, sliced a tiny portion of the feet to let the blood flow. But only a trickle came out, leaving some of the lumads worried. “Dapat modugo,” someone in the crowd says. “Otherwise, the spirits would be angry.”
Later, betel nuts were handed to the VIP guests for “mama” (chewing) after the rituals were held amid a whiff of electoral fever in the mountain air. “There is no politics involved here,” Philippine Eagle Foundation chair Carlos Pedrosa earlier told reporters in a press briefing. “Kabayan was chosen because of his health conditions and the timing.”
Clouds of mist now descend on a mountain top as a motley crowd of journalists had begun to trek to the actual hack site. It was an hour before noon, just before the cicadas shrilled a noonday siren, and a moment Domingo Tadena, Kabayan’s caretaker, had been waiting all his life.
FREEDOM
Memories still flash across Tadena’s mind as he awaits along with the others Kabayan’s mow-wit od layang (soaring home). “He has an attitude, he is wild, different sa iba,” says Tadena who witnessed the hatching of captive-bred eagles, including that of Pag-asa, the first Philippine Eagle conceived through artificial insemination in 1992.
Tadena himself handled Kabayan’s hatching on November 23, 2002. The raptor, a product of cooperative artificial insemination on the female eagle Kahayag from the male eagle Junior, is one of 30 under the captive breeding program of the Philippine Eagle Foundation in Malagos, Davao City.
From the start, Kabayan was programmed for release to the wild and was reared in an environment that simulates forest conditions with limited human interaction. “We had to wear a mask and use puppets when feeding him,” Tadena says. Live prey is also occasionally brought to him to practice his hunting skills.
Kabayan, he recalls, struggled when they pinned him down to strap an aluminum leg band and a backpack-type radio transmitter to track his movements after the release. Also implanted in his breast muscle is a microchip for identification. “He was howling when we traveled him to Mt. Apo.”
The 57-year-old Tadena, who had worked with eagles for almost 30 years, says he believes that Kabayan longs for freedom because eagles, even those bred in captivity, carry in them an “instinct” of the wild. “They want to stay outside the cage. Napakasarap,” he smiles. “Sometimes when we forget to lock a cage, they fly on their own not wanting to return, that’s why we have to capture them back.”
It is now half an hour after the hack box had been opened and still Kabayan, who strikes an imperial pose, refuses to budge from his perch. By now, feathers crowning his head are raised into a crest, as he cranes his neck towards the direction of the viewing deck which, although sealed by a canvass blind, are pierced with square-shaped holes. Protruding from the holes are bulky camera lenses and curious faces. Hushed whispers and mobile phone ring tones also gave the masquerade away.
“He is distracted,” Tadena explains. “Or maybe he doesn’t know that the cage is open and that he is free to fly.” Someone had by this time slammed a steel roof, prompting the eagle to fly off to a nearby log. Kabayan was seen trotting to the far end of the log and once again, settled on a perch.
Finally, just before 1 p.m., Kabayan flew to freedom back to the wilds and was no longer seen in the hack site. “It is very fulfilling,” exclaims Tadena. “I have so much trust that he can survive.”
But the “wilds” Kabayan is coming home to is a troubled terrain that sits atop a potentially explosive ecological hotspot. “We do not discount the possibility that the eagle will die,” admits Lito Cereno, PEF program manager for education, and although all “methods and instruments” were in place to ensure his survival, "it is still part of the probability.”
Beleaguered mountain
Still, chances of Kabayan meeting another eagle in Mt. Apo which stands at 2954 meters above sea level are almost nil. With only seven pairs or 14 eagles spotted in the entire 72,112.59 hectares of the national park, Kabayan may have to mate with another captive-bred eagle to be released to the wild. “This could be Mia,” says Tadena. “She grew up with Kabayan together.”
Kabayan and Mia are only about 500 remaining pairs of Philippine eagles in the country, a number that is critically low, says PEF director Dennis Salvador. “That is why we do captive breeding . . . to put new blood in the gene pool”. This number can even dwindle due to the rapid destruction of their habitats, poaching and the disappearance of prey population.
Mount Apo, a known sanctuary and historic home of the eagle, had been tagged as one of the country's 17 environmental hot spots. Recently, the mountain was closed to climbers because of the tons of waste found in the trails that led to the further deterioration of the forest.
Located about 40 aerial kms. west of Davao City, Mount Apo straddles the mountain ridge dividing Davao City and Davao del Sur on the east and Cotabato on the west. The ASEAN Heritage Site Committee, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the World Bank had recognized it as a rich heritage site and an important center for biodiversity.
Revered as sacred mountain by the indigenous peoples living in its foothills, it is also being claimed by them as part of their ancestral domain. On February 14, the Obo-Menuvus had been issued a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title covering only about 3.2 hectares of land located in Barangay Ilomavis and Barangay Balabag, Kidapawan City.
A 12-kilometer road from Kidapawan City passing through Barangay Ilomavis however leads to the PNOC site where a 12-megawatt geothermal power plant was built right in the heart of the mountain. A massive opposition waged more than a decade ago was marked by a D’yandi ritual where 21 datus forged a blood pact, “vowing to defend Mt. Apo to the last drop of our blood”.
“We had survived the resistance but PNOC pledged that we help develop and replenish the natural resources,” says Energy Secretary Vincent Perez. He claims that they were able to reforest 591 hectares and drilled only 66 geothermal wells.
This remark though came in the heels of a new law passed on Feb. 3 excluding the PNOC’s geothermal reservation containing 7,010,000 square meters from the Mt. Apo Natural Park because of a “prior vested right”. The law - Republic Act No. 9237 also known as the Mount Apo Protected Area Act of 2003 - only mandates the PNOC to directly assist in “reforestation and other preservation activities” in the park.
But PNOC was caught in a controversy in recent months because of the alleged “arsenic poisoning” found among some villagers living near the geothermal plant. But while local environment and health officials have disputed findings made by experts led by Dr. Nelia Maramba, a toxicologist from the University of the Philippines, a group of NGOs advocating for environmental protection of Mt. Apo stands pat on Maramba’s findings.
“We are hoping that eventually he will settle here,” says Cereno referring to the PNOC’s Site B where Kabayan was released because of its “suitability in terms of food and vegetation”. Asked about the dangers of Kabayan being caught in the PNOC’s mammoth facilities and transmission lines, he replies that based on their studies the “live wires are only about three meters in distance and unless both ends are accidentally touched, it will not cause electrocution.”
But the fear of the mythical banug still remains among the lumads who are anxious about the eagle preying on their domestic animals despite assurances from PEF personnel that Kabayan is not inclined to do so.
"We would have wanted a meeting with all tribes to discuss the return of the eagle," says Datu Andot. He adds that while they were informed about the raptor's entry, other tribal groups do not seem to favor his return. Living around the park aside from the Obo-Menuvu are the Bagobo, K'lagan, Kaulo, and Ata-Manobo tribes. "But since he is already here, we might as well take care of him," he says.
Although feared, the banug was also known as a “protector of Mt. Apo”, so goes another legend. One day when the forest was about to be devoured by fire, the mighty bird dived into the water and soon darted up flapping its wet wings to douse the fire.
“This was how Apo Sandawa was once saved,” Loga, a young Manobo woman, says. “And when he was gone, the forest had also lost its protector.” ###
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