Ernesto Pagano interviews Jan Keulen, Director of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom25 January 2013
The Doha Centre for Media Freedom is an organization founded in 2008 with the political and financial support – a 4 million dollar annual budget – of Mozah bint el Misnid, the Emir of Qatar’s powerful wife. Its objective: to assist journalists whose lives are in danger and promote media freedom from the heart of the Persian Gulf. For two years Jan Keulen is at its head. Dutch, class of 1950 and a life spent as a Middle East correspondent for Volkskrant daily newspaper. This is certainly not a simple task because prior to fighting for journalistic and media freedom in the world, Qatar, Al Jazeera’s homeland, finds itself fighting against its own same contradictions: a forty year old press law, a marked attitude of self-censorship by local media and a closure towards freedom of expression by the country’s more conservative fringes. Unsurprisingly, the Doha Centre’s former director, Robert Ménard, founder of Reporters without Borders was accused by the Qatari press of having invited “the Devil in person”, Flemming Rose, director of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that published the infamous satirical cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in 2005, to Doha. Ménard denied this incident in his book Mirages et Cheikhs en Blanc. According to the French journalist this was just a pretext to be rid of an uncomfortable presence for some elements of the country’s ruling class. In 2009, in fact, little more than a year after the Doha Centre’s inauguration, Ménard handed in his resignations
The President’s Letter
This text, in the form of a letter, was sent to Reset by President Giorgio Napolitano whom we had asked to contribute to a special section marking the fiftieth anniversary of Luigi Einaudi’s death on October 29, 1961. The special section dedicated to this founder of the Republic appeared in Reset no. 127 and included articles by Enzo Di Nuoscio, Paolo Heritier, Paolo Silvestri, Corrado Ocone, Flavio Felice, and excerpts from Einaudi’s correspondence with Luigi Albertini. After I met with Napolitano early last September, the pressure of events forced him to postpone writing until recently. Although much has changed since last October, recalling what Einaudi can teach us remains important above and beyond an anniversary. Einaudi was president of the Bank of Italy from 1945 to 1948 and president of the Republic from 1948 to 1955, but his legacy also includes his writing, his work as economic columnist for Il Corriere della sera until 1925, and his teaching at the Bocconi University where Carlo Rosselli was his assistant.The heart of the matter that we wanted Napolitano to take on is the crisis of Italian politics and the reasons why the values espoused by a father of the Republic as important as Einaudi are no longer evident in the Italian ruling class except in a very few cases. This was also an occasion to reflect on Italian reformism (a tradition that our President represents in all respects) and on lost opportunities across the entire political spectrum.Napolitano’s letter takes full advantage of this occasion and offers many useful suggestions about work—both inquiry and action—that we must continue. We thank him for this.In a letter to the President sent after our conversation last September, I quoted the work of the recently deceased historian Tony Judt. The President refers to this quotation in his text, so I’ll repeat it here: “During the long century of constitutional liberalism…Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen. Whatever their political affinities, Leon Blum and Winston Churchill, Luigi Einaudi and Willy Brandt, David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities. It is an open question as to whether it was the circumstances that produced the politicians, or the culture of the age that led men of this caliber to enter politics. Today, neither incentive is at work. Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies” (Ill Fares the Land, Penguin Press, 2010, pp. 164-165). In the same letter, I mentioned that reading the Einaudi-Albertini correspondence (published by the Corriere della Sera Foundation and excerpted in Reset) reveals the magnitude of the work undertaken by earlier statesmen with such great scientific, political, and moral rigor on a daily basis. “This strengthens my conviction,” I wrote, “that the gap Judt speaks about is quite dramatic.” I asked the President to reflect on the issues raised by Tony Judt’s “open question.”
Giancarlo Bosetti, Editor of Reset-DoC
Elections in Iran have always had a contradictory meaning. On one hand, they have always been less than free and fair, even when the polls were basically correct, (meaning not materially rigged), because of the vetting of candidates by the Guardian Council. On the other, they have been a flexible mechanism measuring the relative strength of the different components of the regime. Not a democracy, certainly, but a sort of pluralistic oligarchy.
The political landscape of the Arab world has been dramatically transformed by the events of 2011. After decades of sterile politics and engrained authoritarianism Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria have embarked on a courageous journey aimed at fostering inclusive societies based on the rule of law and accountable governance. While we are only at the beginnings of what will be a long and arduous process, it is hard to believe that things will ever go back to the way they were. From Morocco to Bahrain the Arab public is on the march, and representation through elections is what they demand.
One is immediately captured by an incredible rhythm, a narration that is apparently broken but is on the contrary coherent and fully unitary. It is almost a script ready for a movie. What came to my mind was Altman’s “Short cuts”, which is not surprising, since Mastur is the Farsi translator of Raymond Carver, the author of the literary work from which that movie was drawn.
By Nicola Missaglia
Navid Kermani, an Iranian and German citizen, was born in 1967 in Germany to a family of Iranian origin. He is one of the most interesting personalities among the young Muslim intellectuals who were born and grew up in the West
“It seems today that the acceptance of secularism within the Muslim world is extremely far away. It is as if, on the basis of deeply-held convictions, Muslim society were demanding a form of not exactly theocracy, but certainly a ‘moralisation’ of public life.” So says Abdou Filali-Ansary, director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations at the University of Aga Khan, London. The director and founder of the Moroccan literary review ‘Prologues,’ Filali-Ansary is also the author of a number of works on the reformist tradition within the Islamic world, including L’Islam est-il hostile à la laïcité? (2002) and Réformer l’Islam? – Une introduction aux débats contemporains (2003). He recently spoke at ResetDoc’s Istanbul Seminars 2011 (19-23 May).
Steven Livingston talks to Mauro Buonocore5 April 2011
“We are all Khaled Said”. There was a young 28-year-old man who kept united the protesters filling the Egyptian squares to oppose Mubarak. Tortured and killed by policemen who wanted to search him at an internet café in the suburbs of Alexandria last June, Khaled was at the heart of mobilization. His name united an entire people, who allowed him to speak out with one single voice to say “enough” to the regime’s abuse of power. The images of his tortured body circulated the country and were shared online by millions of Egyptians. Beaten up and killed, probably because he wanted to post online a video showing two policemen involved in drug trafficking, Khaled’s name has been used for the Facebook page around which protesters gathered to then physically take to the streets to oppose Mubarak and his system. Would all this have taken place even without Facebook, Twitter and other social networks? According to Steven Livingston, professor at George Washington University and an expert on the way in which the media influences mechanisms in democracies, the answer is linked to technology, more specifically to multiple technologies, such as mobile phones, computers, satellites and cables for the high-speed transmission of data. All this creates a new environment for news that allows citizens to be more aware of what is happening around them and demand power to be more transparent, open and efficient. This provides an immense opportunity for democracies in emerging countries, as the American professor stated in a recent study entitled Africa’s Evolving Infosystems: A Pathway to Stability and Development. He emphasizes the manner in which digital media increase the possibility of creating health systems, helping the agricultural produce market, setting up banking services as well as improving public security and the very quality of democracy itself.
Marcella Emiliani talks to Ernesto Pagano10 June 2010
President Obama “has not lifted a finger” for the Middle Eastern peace process according to a caustic Marcella Emiliani, expert on the Middle East and associate professor at Bologna University. In spite of the media uproar, the Israeli blitz on the “Freedom Flotilla” has revealed the entirety of the White House’s inability, and that of the whole international community, to restart the peace process. And while Turkey “draws dangerously close to Iran,” the Israeli government, “accustomed to never-ending international isolation,” continues to “move forward on its own path.”
How the Jamaat-e-Islami developed and transformed itself within the boundaries of a modern pluralistic democracy, the Indian democracy, is the subject Irfan Ahmed has devoted his research to. To write this book, Irfan Ahmad conducted extensive fieldwork in several small Muslim towns near Delhi, and he describes the gradual process of change and openness, following in particular the development within Jamaat’s universities and their student organisations SIMI and SIO.
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