"There are children starving in Africa. Eat your peas"

A very quick post to an interesting blog on Africa that has just been published in the Harvard Business Review. Jonathan Berman's article challenges the stereotypes that so many of us have about the continent and makes refreshing reading for Culturissima, as so much of our work and so many of our clients are based in countries such as Libya, Algeria and Tunisia.

More to follow!

Two very useful English words that don't exist in French...

Delphine Autret, a Meribel-based translator, has emailed Culturissima the following humorous take on why English language is littered with so many French words... we particularly enjoyed the last paragraph.

It’s magnifical!

Further proof, if proof were needed, of two self-evident facts from the world of translation, namely:

i. translators are a waste of money because anyone can translate;

ii. every French man or woman that the Good Lord has so graciously bequeathed to us speaks perfect English.

Or maybe not...

Why head for the Med when you can spend August in Paris?

Paris' last remaining vineyard, Montmartre

Contrary to popular belief, not all of Paris closes down during the month of August. What does happen, though, is that as soon as July nears its end thousands and thousands of Parisians flee the city for their second homes in the country or on the coast.  And, let’s be honest, what could be more pleasurable than Paris without Parisians?

The city's residents, both young and old, are noticeably friendlier, more “cool” and “zen” as the French themselves put it, during August. Sure, some of the cafés and restaurants (and seemingly all of the boulangeries) pull down their shutters for the month, but just as many stay open. And though the main tourist sites – the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, Paris Plage – still teem with foreign visitors, the morning streets are deserted. 

Ebrahim Hamidi is 18 years old and is going to be hanged

This article first appeared in Le Monde; it was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter, on behalf of an American client.

After Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, recently condemned to death by stoning for committing adultery, Iran is refusing to backtrack with the sentencing to hang of a young man suspected of being homosexual.  

Ebrahim Hamidi is eighteen and is going to die. Ebrahim’s country, Iran, has found him guilty of an abominable crime: he is alleged to be homosexual. And so he must die. Because Tehran's judges are eager to hand over to the executioner a man suspected of sleeping in the same bed as his fellow man. 

This prospect alone, so contrary to the very notion of humanity, would be enough to horrify us, and we can only imagine the terror in which Iranian homosexuals live, obliged to be silent, to lie and to deny their identity.  

The charges are said to have been fabricated following a trivial quarrel; the accusations made up by fellow detainees in return for promises about being released; and Ebrahim's confession extracted under torture.

During Ebrahim's trial, the defendant did not have the right to any form of legal representation. And the verdict itself was delivered by a magistrate who based his decision on a special procedure known as “judge’s knowledge”, which allows for subjective judicial rulings when no formal proof exists.    

In a spectacular new development in July, Ebrahim Hamidi’s alleged victim admitted that he had made a false accusation under pressure from his parents. You might have thought that such a retraction would have led to the sentence being quashed. Far from it. Ebrahim Hamidi is still guilty of a "crime" that he has not committed. Is he homosexual or not? It makes no difference. He has to die.  

Ebrahim Hamidi a 18 ans et il va être pendu

Après Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, condamnée à la lapidation pour adultère, l'Iran persiste et signe en condamnant à la pendaison un jeune homme soupçonné d'homosexualité.

Ebrahim Hamidi a 18 ans et il va mourir. Dans son pays, l'Iran, il a été reconnu coupable d'un crime abominé: Ebrahim Hamidi serait homosexuel. Donc il doit mourir. Car les juges de Téhéran n'hésitent pas à livrer au bourreau l'homme soupçonné de dormir dans le même lit que son semblable.

Cette seule perspective suffirait à nous horrifier, tant elle est contraire à la notion même d'humanité et nous laisse imaginer la terreur dans laquelle vivent les homosexuels iraniens, obligés de se taire, de mentir, de nier leur identité.

L'accusation aurait été montée de toutes pièces à la suite d'une rixe banale, les dénonciations faites par des emprisonnés l'auraient été au prix de promesses de remise en liberté, les aveux d'Ebrahim extorqués sous la torture.

Au cours de son procès, l'accusé n'a pas eu droit à la moindre représentation légale. Quant au verdict, il a été prononcé par un magistrat qui s'en est remis à son propre jugement, procédure utilisée lorsqu'il n'existe pas de preuve formelle.

Au mois de juillet, en un rebondissement spectaculaire, la "victime" présumée d'Ebrahim Hamidi a reconnu avoir porté contre lui de fausses accusations sous la pression de ses parents. On pourrait croire que cette rétractation aurait entraîné l'annulation de la sentence. Pas du tout. Ebrahim Hamidi est toujours coupable, d'un "crime" qu'il n'a pas commis. Est-il homosexuel ou non ? Qu'importe. Il doit mourir.

What did the Romans ever do for Tunisia? Bulla Regia, that's what!

Detail of an underground mosaic, Bulla Regia

If you’ve just climbed to the top of the Roman amphitheatre at El Djem or are fresh from wandering across the seemingly endless ruins of Dougga, then your first feeling on arriving at Bulla Regia is likely to be one of disappointment.

It’s true, the theatre at Bulla Regia is impressive and the Memmian baths are immense. But, but... well, the Roman remains elsewhere in Tunisia are so outstanding that dusty old Bulla doesn’t quite seem to match up. So, why not push on back to the coast for a quick dip in the Med?

Because, if you do, then you’ll miss one of the most unique ancient sites anywhere in the world. If I had to make a choice between visiting, say, the Colosseum in Rome, England’s Stonehenge or Tunisia’s Bulla Regia, then it’s Bulla that’s going to win hands down every time. 

Britain’s most daring engineer

Culturissima has just finished a short - very short! - biography of Britain’s most daring engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), for a Cambridge-based travel specialist. Here is a sneak preview of the highlights of the long-weekend tour that we have put together:

Brunel is often thought of as a Bristol man, but many overlook the fact that he spent virtually his entire life in London. We will admire Brunel’s achievements in these two great cities, travelling from east to west on the great man’s own railway.

Brunel’s first project, aged just 19, was the Thames Tunnel, where he worked with his father on what was first dubbed “the Eighth Wonder of the World” and later – with no little wit and equal cruelty – “the Great Bore”. We will enjoy a privileged visit to the Brunel Museum, lodged in the tunnel’s engine-house, and descend into the underground entrance hall, a grand amphitheatre over half the size of the dome of St Paul’s. A few hundred yards along the Thames lies the launch site of the Great Eastern, where Brunel’s meteoric career came to an end at the untimely age of 53.

In 1828 Brunel was dragged, more dead than alive, from the chamber of the Thames Tunnel and sent to Clifton to convalesce. Here he won a competition to design a bridge across the Avon Gorge which, together with Bristol docks and Temple Meads railway station, still bears unmistakable witness to Brunel’s creativity and ingenuity. We will also climb aboard the Great Britain, Brunel’s famous iron ship, and visit the Brunel Institute to view the collection of papers and memorabilia bequeathed by Brunel’s grand-daughter.

Dog-faced creatures and creatures without heads

An adapted version of this article, written by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter, was first published in History Today Magazine.

He bites

Few countries have had such a profound impact on anyone at Culturissima as Libya.  Tripoli, where I'm sipping a mint tea in a semi-derelict café just off Green Square, isn't a particular favourite - too many cars, too many bureaucrats, too many nondescript blocks of offices - but the rest of the country... it's just fabulous.

Swimming in the Sahara

The most striking aspect of Libya, besides its vastness (it takes nearly a whole day, for example, simply to drive along the Mediterranean across the Gulf of Sirte), is the friendliness and openness of the people, their kindness and their readiness to smile and engage in conversation. “Dog-faced” they’re not.

I find myself here for three reasons: first, since I was a child I have loved North Africa, and Algeria in particular.  Trouble is, it’s a bit too dangerous to go to Algeria at the moment (at the time this article was written, May 2008) , so Libya – in spite of its reputation! – seemed a good second choice.  I guess that’s another one of the reasons why I’m here: no one has a good word to say about the country… so why not come and see for myself? 

And finally, as a lapsed Classicist who spent nearly half of his life studying Greek and Latin, how could I refuse the offer to accompany a handful of historians to the sites of ancient Libya, in particular those magna opera, Sabratha and Leptis Magna? 

He doesn't bite

Ask yourself this: can you think of any country that has been as insidiously daemonised as Libya over the past few decades? In the modern era, Libyans have learnt that, courtesy of Mr Bush's government, they inhabit a land “beyond the Axis of Evil”. Going further back into the annals, most histories of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya begin with Herodotus’ 5th century BC account of a land of “dog-faced creatures and creatures without heads, their eyes in their breasts”.  

"Get your head around this", suggests Beni, my London-educated, Tripoli-born colleague: "You wake up one morning, just like any other morning, you're having a fag, you turn the radio on - and wham! - you're informed by the BBC that you're part of the 'axis of evil'. That's worse than learning the tube is on strike as you're munching your bowl of Frosties, I can tell you." 

Beni, like his parents and his parents’ parents, has seen it all before, though. From 1922 onwards Mussolini, driven partly by a nostalgia for Italy’s Classical inheritance and partly by a need to house the peninsula's expanding population, embarked on a “civilising” mission to make Libya Italy’s “fourth shore”.  Anything ancient Rome could do, Mussolini could do better: a dozen years later a new country with a new name had emerged under Italian rule - “Libya”, an amalgam of the traditionally disparate regions of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan.

Giacometti in the Sahara?

Even though a late entrant in the North African colonial race, Italy managed to leave its mark on Beni's homeland.  As the self-styled "protector of Islam", Mussolini let Italian aircraft loose on Libyan horsemen; when that failed, Il Duce savaged the territory with deliberate starvation, sowed the country with concentration camps, deported families en masse, and erected a barbed-wire fence stretching 200 miles along the border with Egypt.

"So you see", suggested Beni, "We Libyans look on your - the West's - mistrust of all things Libyan with a little bit of irony.  American and UN sanctions? No worse than the Italians starving my brothers to death. Trying to murder Colonel Gaddafi?  The hero of our revolution - Omar al Mukhtar - he was hanged in public in front of 20,000 of loyal followers".

"Does President Reagan really think that we Libyan savages are quivering in our sandals when he rants ‘You can run but you can't hide'?  Your friends the Americans can bomb the buggery out of Benghazi if they want - when the Italians were here, they killed one in four of my brothers and sisters".

And he's right, is Beni. When Libya finally came of age as an independent nation in 1951, it was a country on its knees, with an infant mortality rate of 40 per cent and an illiteracy rate of over 90 per cent.  The very act of autonomy was riddled with Western caprice: an independent Libya was a way of ensuring that British and American troops could be installed on Libyan territory - although for most Libyans this was preferable to one of the alternatives proposed: that France be granted stewardship of Fezzan and Britain be awarded Cyrenaica. Most astonishingly in view of her history of barbarity, Italy was initially granted Tripolitania.

Anyway, I’m on my way to the south, to the Akakus, where I can forget about Europe's colonial past.  The Akakus is a Saharan landscape of soaring dunes and colossal rock formations – rough arches, steep gorges and buttressed mountains.  This remote terrain, ineffably beautiful, is studded with thousands of lonely rock carvings - alligators and elephants, giraffes and buffalos (see photos) - that date back as far as 12,000 B.C.  Arid and ancient, the Akakus was once the dwelling place of Herodotus’ Garamantes, whilst today the nomadic, indigo-veiled Tuareg still wander across the vast expanses close to the frontier with Algeria and Niger. 

So you see, these mythical concoctions mask a tragic reality: Libya is a land whose ineffable beauty - from Leptis to the Sahara - has no need of mythologising.

Turkey eats dirt

Café Babel, "the first multilingual European current affairs magazine", has just published a translation by Culturissima's David Winter (written by Tania Gisselbrecht) that draws worldwide attention to the rigging of football matches in Turkey.

What on earth has stung Turkey into action? For more than a month now a new broom has been sweeping clean not just the streets of Istanbul but also the country's football and armed forces. But who’s wielding the broom? And what "rubbish" are they trying to get rid of? Worthwhile questions to ask because it’s clear the idea did not come from "Mr Clean".

On July 3 the Turkish judicial authorities disclosed that they are investigating a series of rigged matches involving Turkey's most prestigious football clubs. Official phone tapping has led to search warrants being issued and a succession of highly publicised arrests, police interrogations and detentions. The tally to date, based on 19 matches that have allegedly been rigged, stands at almost 80 arrests with 31 people held in custody. 

With football being a veritable religion for Turks, it is not hard to imagine the shock waves that the announcement has set off. There are even rumours that the government stalled before deciding to reveal the details of a scandal that could have had an influence on June's general election. Although the league winners Fenerbahçe - whose chairman, Aziz Yıldırım, was arrested on the very day that the investigation officially opened - seem to be at the heart of the storm, the zealous authorities have not spared other big clubs, including Beşiktaş, fifth in the league and winners of the national cup competition, and Trabzonspor. 

Fenerbahçe have not been slow in seeing the hand of the "police state" behind the highly unusual investigations – an overtly political accusation levelled by the club's chairman that has generated contradictory and often far-fetched rumours amongst supporters: it is a campaign to replace the chairman with an ally of the government or the real target of the affair is prime minister Erdoğan, a well-known supporter of the Canaries and a member of the club's governing body. It is worth remarking, though, that Erdoğan has welcomed the current "purification process". 

So, is it political manoeuvring or a genuine attempt to clean up a sport that only last year was shaken by a murky illegal betting affair? The baffling wait-and-see approach adopted by the Turkish Football Association does not bode well. Apart from deciding to postpone the start of the league season by a month, the association has not taken any action against any of the individuals who have been charged or any of the clubs cited in the dossier. Indeed, several websites specialising in sports news are suggesting that, if it ends up being proven that the association has deliberately dragged its feet, the national team could be excluded from Euro 2012.

In a communiqué released on July 12, UEFA did not rule out the possibility of excluding Turkish clubs from European competition if the Turkish authorities end up by confirming the facts. There was a new twist on August 24 when, to everyone's surprise, the Turkish Football Association announced that it was excluding Fenerbahçe from the Champions League. This decision, which amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of the club's guilt, left many observers feeling sceptical: how could the association, which up till then had used the alleged lack of evidence as an excuse to justify their inaction, suddenly take such a radical measure? 

Everything points to the hand of UEFA. After the chief legal counsel for integrity and regulatory affairs made a surprise visit to Istanbul, UEFA laid down a clear ultimatum: if Fenerbahçe did not withdraw from the European competition or if the Turkish Football Association failed to exclude them, then UEFA would mount a disciplinary investigation and sanction the association. 

The question to be asked now is: will the other clubs that have been tainted by the scandal also pay the price for UEFA's zero tolerance policy regarding match rigging? Given the scale of the investigations, which are based on a recent law that targets organised crime, supporters are in no doubt that convictions will follow. It remains to be seen whether legal sanctions will only be taken against the individuals charged or whether they will include the clubs as well. If it is only the former, as many football lovers fear, then the show of force will miss its stated object: to wipe out the corruption that is endemic in Turkish football. There again, sweeping things under the carpet always has been an art.

Libya after Gaddafi: Europe’s Iraq?

Café Babel, "the first multilingual European current affairs magazine", has just published a translation by Culturissima's David Winter that draws timely comparisons between post-Gaddafi Libya and post-Saddam Iraq.

Libya after Gaddafi: Europe’s Iraq?

The post-Gaddafi era is taking shape around the National Transition Council, which is currently in control of Tripoli. Uncertainty about the future is already taking hold though, with fears that Libya could become a new Iraq. This time it is up to Europe to avoid repeating the post-Saddam disaster.

The Iraq experience has left its mark. The triumphalism which was the order of the day amongst US hawks immediately after Saddam Hussein’s fall has this time round been replaced with caution: there is no question of repeating the mistakes of Mesopotamia in the southern Mediterranean. Barack Obama, anxious to avoid being seen as the "worthy" successor to Bush Junior, has hammered home a clear reminder in all his speeches that "Libya is no Iraq".

It is difficult to disagree. Whereas eight years ago the Americans intervened (almost) unilaterally in their rush towards Baghdad, their intervention in Libya has been much more subtle. This time an international coalition - originally European and American and later with the gradual and grudging support of Arab countries, Russia and China - has come into play under the mandate of the United Nations... the same UN that in 2003 could only watch US military action helplessly from the side-lines.

Exit the crudely assembled case about weapons of mass destruction. Exit the arrogance and ignorance of an international community largely opposed to the intervention. Eight years later, Obama has abandoned the Bush way of doing things and the United States has kept a fairly low profile, accounting for "only" 27% of all NATO’s air-strikes. Instead, "old Europe" has more or less taken over.

Their war, their victory

In particular, Great Britain, France and Italy have assumed the burden of intervening and assisting the rebels in order to protect the civilian population in accordance with resolution 1973 of the UN security council. Their operations have been on a larger scale than expected, particularly as concerns aerial intervention and the supply of weapons, to the extent that they have at times been in danger of going beyond the UN framework. Nevertheless, the overall idea has not changed: NATO should not be on the front line.

The determining factor in the fall of Gaddafi was the successive rebellions of tribes

In an article for Slate.fr, Fred Kaplan, former war correspondent of the Boston Globe, writes of the Libyan rebels: "It was their war, and it will soon be their victory, not ours". While the West has supplied the drones, missiles and automatic weapons and has almost certainly trained part of the rebel forces, the determining factor in the fall of the Gaddafi regime was actually the successive rebellions of various tribes. According to Patrick Haimzadeh, a former French diplomat stationed in Libya, it was the actions of the Zintan clan (named after the eponymous town) that brought about Gaddafi’s overthrow.

Libya: a failure in European political policy?

However, France, Great Britain and Italy, having served as a particularly substantial auxiliary force, have run the risk of seeing Tripoli take on the appearance of a second Baghdad. This is not just because Libya is an economic wasteland, but also because the national transition council is an unknown political force. The European countries are going to be obliged to take on the leadership that they have assumed for seven months and avoid making the same mistakes as the United States in Iraq. In particular, they will have to take into account the importance of Libyan tribalism and local realities.

Yet is Europe really ready to meet the political challenge of Libya? Nothing could be less certain. While it is true that London, Paris and Rome have been the most active participants in Libya, the old continent remains divided. Half of NATO's members, including countries such as Poland and Germany, refused to take part in the intervention. "The sad reality", AFP quotes one former European diplomat as saying, "is that the idea of Europe as a political and strategic concept has been entirely missing". Although bitter, this is not necessarily a final assessment. The European union clearly has the chance to bring hoped-for multilateral success that will be based, we can hope, on the interests of the Libyan people rather than multi-national oil companies, as was too often the case in the Iraqi desert. The stakes are high – both for Libya and, beyond her shores, for Europe.