'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

New York, Cairo kids, the universe

Every so often it's good to pause and count my blessings.  This past week I've had a number of really interesting, powerful experiences, and I thought I'd tell you about some of them.

Last Sunday, I took the train to New York City.  Now our passenger train system here in the US is antediluvian and, in general, quite unworthy of any polity that tries to present itself as part of (let alone the leader of) the "civilized world."  But still, there is one train per day that crawls up the eastern side of the country from New Orleans to Boston, and another that makes the return trip.  This train goes through Charlottesville, and so does the three-time-a-week "Cardinal" train that loops down from New York through Virginia, West Virginia, and Cincinnati and ends up in Chicago.  I love trains!  I rode the Thalys from Paris to Den Haag back in July.  And last Sunday, I rode the Crescent from C'ville to New York.  Okay, engineering-wise and amenities-wise there is no question but that the Thalys is hugely superior.  But still, it's great to step onto the train in Charlottesville at 7 a.m. and step off it six and a half hours later in Penn Station, New York...

People in Gaza, or Bethlehem, or Nablus could only dream of being able to enjoy such freedom of movement.

I stayed with my daughter Leila and her spouse Greg Curley in their place in Brooklyn.  Monday and Wednesday I got to run  the 3.43 mile circuit round Prospect Park , which is a most amazing, publicly owned resource for the people of Brooklyn.  When I ran, the weather was crisp and sunny; and actually, given that I also run from their house to the park, it must come in at around 4 miles for me.  Somehow, when I'm there that doesn't feel burdensome, though at home I generally only run 3 miles each time.

Tuesday, I went to a day-long conference the American Bar Association's Section of International Law had organized at New York University.  It was titled something like "Legacies of Nuremberg for Africa", and someone from SIL from the west coast had persuaded me to speak there about the lessons from my book Amnesty After Atrocity?  I was on a morning panel with Ruti Teitel, an ultra-brainy law professor of Argentinian origin who a while ago published an iconic book titled Transitional Justice.  It was an interesting experience, since I was one of very few non-lawyers there.  Perhaps the only one?  Indeed, the main argument of my book is that judicial remedies are really not terribly useful for societies reeling from recent and perhaps still ongoing atrocities.  So I made the best case I could, based on my research, and sticking more or less within the prescribed time-limit of 15 minutes.  Afterwards, there were some tinteresting questions, and a few very interesting people came up and chatted.  So I think it went pretty well.

I stayed on for the lunch discussion, which featured Ted Meron, a former NYU law professor who went on to become a judge at the International Criminal Triibunal for former Yugoslavia.  Indeed, Meron was for a time the President of that court, and head of the single Appeals Chamber that works for ICTY and for ICTR.  Long, long ago, too, he was the legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.  I suppose he must have been an Israeli citizen then.  I don't know if he still is?

Earlier, the conference had been opened with an address from Ben Ferencz , a New Yorker who worked as a prosecutor at one of the "follow-on" Nuremberg trials (i.e., one of the single-power, US-run anti-Nazi  trials that followed the more wellknown, four-power International Military Tribunal there.)  I found Ferencz very interesting when he talked about the rough, "drumhead justice" that he had helped mete out when, as a sergeant in the US forces, he had advanced with them into the heart of Germany.  He had helped run (and had sat on) US field tribunals that tried people accused of having killed downed US airmen, and also. some that tried former guards of the concentration camps that his unit had liberated.  He noted that those former guards had been the object of numerous lethal revenge attacks from the liberated camp residents.  "This was not something we organized, or something we could stop-- even if we had wanted to," he said at one point.  Once they did get "Military Commissions" (trials) organized for some camp administrators, they tried these people in batches of 50 or 60 at a time.  "Each one was given a full trial that lasted perhaps half a minute... All the defendants were found guilty as a batch after perhaps ten minutes of deliberation, and sentenced to death. Some of these sentences were then carried out immediately."

He described Nuremberg as "a perfectly fair trial in every respect."

I would dispute that... But in comparison with the military commissions he described, yes, they were a lot fairer than those.

Anyway, it was really interesting to listen to those two fairly iconic figures at the conference.

Thursday, I had a huge treat.  My friend and former sister-in-law Tahani Rached had her film El-Banat Dol  (These Girls) showing at the New York Film Festival, so Leila, Greg, my son, his significant other, and I were all invited to go to the screening at the Lincoln Center and the post-film party.  The film is a beautifully made representation of some days in the lives of six female "street kids" from the Cairo neighborhood of Muhandiseen; it came to the NYFF after a very well-received screening at the Cannes Film Festival, in the summer.

The girls were shown in the film as smart, tough, and very resourceful... not "victims" at all, though their circumstances are tragic in many respects.  Tahani has this amazing ability to direct films of huge intimacy that get right into the lives of her subjects.  (Check out her Soraida, A woman of Palestine, or her Four Women of Egypt, too.)  For this film, she and her crew spent five weeks hanging out on the street with these girls before she even started shooting.  This was her first film working with an all-Egyptian film crew.  Until recently, she worked for the National Film Board of Canada; now she has returned "home" to the city she was born in back in 1947.

She told us she had sent the film to the jury at Cannes "on a hunch"; and how totally surprised she'd been when one of the officials there called her in Cairo and told her it had been accepted.  Over the dinner, Thursday, her assistant producer told us a bit more of the back-story.  Tahani, she said, had had great confidence that the film would do well, "because a fortune-teller in Montreal had told her 2006 would be a good year for her career."

The discussion after the film Thursday didn't focus much on the (certainly impressive) technical aspects of the film, but rather on the circumstances of the street girls themselves.  Tahani told us there were estimated to be "between 200,000 and one million" street kids in Cairo-- but that many of them seemed to have much more robust support networks than street people she has seen in Europe or the US who, to her, often seem very isolated and alone.  "These girls live at the margins of society, but the other people near those margins give them significant help," she said.  And indeed, in the film we saw the girls getting handouts from small local cafes and other businesses-- as well as a large share of abuse from various people including the young men who often prey on them.

Tahani said she had given one screening of the film at a film club in Cairo, where it was much better received than she had dared hope.  "Afterwards, one guy who saw it, a journalist, wrote that until he saw the movie he had always felt scared of those girls, but after seeing it he saw them more clearly as fellow humans, so that was good," she said.  I notice, too, that the p.r. newsleter put out by the Egyptian Embassy in Washington has a very laudatory half-page article on the film. However, Tahani didn't seem very hopeful that the Egyptian censorship board would be clearing the film for public screening any time soon...  ("Their objection is mainly to the language the girls use," she said.  "But what can we do?  If we use a beep instead, the whole soundtrack would be 'beep,beep, beep, beep, beep...' ")

One of the most intriguing people in the film is a motherly-looking middle-class woman called Hind, a veiled Muslim, who had started out as a volunteer "outreach worker" with the girls for a local NGO, but ended up just becoming their friend, going down to the street regularly to chat with the girls and to help in a quiet, non-judgmental way to solve their problems.  When she walked onto the street, you saw these very tough girls running to her to envelope her in big hugs; and you just had to believe that if the girls had received a lot more decent mothering along the way they might never have run away from their homes??

... Anyway, a great movie, and a super experience to be there with Tahani, and two of my kids, and everyone else.

Yesterday, Friday, I took the train back to Charlottesville.  I didn't get as much work done on the train as I'd hoped.  Oh well.  But in the evening, our friends Anne McKeithen and Erik Midelfort had organized another treat for us, which was a visit to the twice-yearly open night at the University of Virginia's Fan Mountain Observatory .  We trekked up the mountain there at around 9 p.m.  It was a completely ideal night: very crisp and clear.  In fact, even without going into the domed observatory there, we were all stunned by the broad canopy of stars you can see once you're up on the mountain and away from the reflected lights of the town.  The Milky Way was quite clear; and there were so many bright stars it was even kind of hard to figure out where familiar old constellations like the Great Bear or the Pleiades were.

When we went inside the observatory that houses a 31-inch reflecting telescope, we edged slowly round inside the room's circular wall to wait our turn at the eyepiece.  The telescope had been focused onto a nebula 2,000 light-years away, which showed up as a dim and fuzzy ring.  But how amazing: that that light had started its journey into our eyes at around the time of Jesus Christ!  Wow!

Afterwards, as we wandered around the outdoor slide show some astronomy students were presenting, they were talking blithely about things happening many millions of light-years away, and were throwing around various other ungraspable figures like the numbers of stars in the Milky Way or the numbers of galaxies in the whole universe...

When I was 15 and 16, I strongly wanted to become an astrophysicist.  I adored physics and mathematics, and would read about astronomy and marvel at the power of those concepts to lift me out of the humdrum and into another realm.  Then I went to Oxford to study math, and almost immediately hit a serious math wall.  Nowadays people understand a lot more about why that happens to young women and have many more ways, I think, of helping the young women concerned to overcome it.  But for me it felt really cruddy, being there with all these men who had been so much better prepared for Oxford math by their schools than I had been by my all-girls' school.  So I ended up doing Philosophy and Economics instead.  It's been okay...  I never even really thought very much about that aspect of my 16-year-old self until last night.  

There were lots of people up there-- maybe about 200 or 300, all stumbling around a bit because we had to be very careful about wrecking other people's ability to see by using flashlights more than minimally .  But lots of people seemed to have taken their kids up there.  How exciting and inspiring for them!

Wouldn't it be great if someone could take some of those girls from Tahani's film to a place like an astronomical observatory, or a large aquarium, or a coral reef, and start to show them something about this world that would be very different from their highly circumscribed life there on the streets... Wouldn't it be great if the kids caged up in the vast holding pens into which the Israelis have transformed the whole of occupied Palestine could do the same?

I also, while I was in New York, had some very interesting conversations with people who've been working on the issue of the detainees in Guantanamo.  Now there is an experience that is almost the exact opposite of what I've been writing about here:  a systematic attempt by the camp's administration to strip down the lives of the detainees to an absolute minimum, in physical terms, while cutting off any possibility of an intellectual life, of artistic development, of engagement in any sembalnce of normal social interaction or, in many cases, in any form of social interaction at all.

Next Wednesday is when I make my trip there.  I'll write much more about the whole phenomenon later.