Mideast Blog 28 January, 2016

The Arab winter

"I AM the free and fearless. I am secrets that never die. I am the voice of those who will not bow…” The voice in question, raised in song amid the crowds packing Avenue Bourguiba, a promenade in Tunis, at the beginning of 2011, was that of Emel Mathlouthi. For a moment of calm in a month of clamour, she gave voice to the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of her compatriots.

On January 14th those protesters forced Zein al Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator for the previous quarter-century, from office. What followed was not easy. Terrorism hindered both economic progress and deeper political reform. But in 2015 the country became the first Arab state ever to be judged fully “free” by Freedom House, an American monitor of civil liberties, and it moved up a record 32 places among countries vetted by the Vienna-based Democracy Ranking Association. In December Ms Mathlouthi sang before another spellbound audience—this time in Oslo, as part of celebrations surrounding the award of the Nobel peace prize to four civil-society groups that shepherded in the new constitution of 2014.

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Mideast Blog 11 January, 2016

In Tunis, a new home for comics

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When it comes to Arab comics, Tunisian graphic designer and comics artist Othman Selmi (born in 1977) is an invaluable guide, with his home-studio being a carnival for urban cultural production enthusiasts. Among French and Arabic books on literature and movies, I see collections of old comics from the Arab world, filling the shelves of a large bookcase covering an entire wall. This is where you find the first issues of Majid, a magazine for children that was established in 1979 in Abu Dhabi and still enjoys circulation in the Arab world. Plus stunning glimpses into the rich imaginative life of the Egyptian cartoonist and visual designer Mohieddine Ellabbad and of the Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. I also notice stories from Tunisia by Moncef Elkateb or the style of Chedly Belkamsa when drawing in the popular children magazine Qaws Quzah (Rainbow), the first founded in Tunisia in 1984 by a private editor.

Holding a degree from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Tunis, Othman Selmi has been enjoying some popularity abroad for his editorial illustrations, and was asked by the Italian weekly Internazionale to recount the Tunisian spring in a series of cartoline (literally postcards) using the comics medium.

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Mideast Blog 11 January, 2016

How Refugees Find Jobs in Germany

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On a recent blustery Sunday, I joined a tour group huddled by a schoolyard fence in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. A gust of wind pushed dead leaves across the basketball court as Ali, a Sudanese refugee, blew into his hands. He was showing us the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, an abandoned edifice from whose rooftop he had threatened to jump when, last summer, police tried to evict six hundred refugees who were living there. Ali continues to live at the school with twenty-three others; together with Mo, a guide from Somalia who was among the hundreds relocated from the school to a camp outside the city, he explained that the eviction effort had lasted more than nine days, involving more than seventeen hundred police officers and costing the city five million euros.

About a dozen of us were present outside the school, attracting uneasy glances from the security guards posted just inside the locked gate. We were participating in the inaugural outing of Refugee Voices, a donation-based “solidarity tour” that allows sympathetic locals and tourists a peek at Berlin’s subculture of asylum seekers and their allies. Other stops on our tour included Oranienplatz, a nearby square famous for activist gatherings, and Görlitzer Park, where young African refugees hang out and sell baggies of marijuana—for many newcomers the only work on offer. At each location, Ali and Mo shared stories of activism, police harassment, and efforts to study and find work. (All of the asylum seekers in this story asked to be identified only by their first names.)