The chronology of a Twitter battle

Those of you who have been following this blogsite have read my previous post about the power of the web in inciting and supporting ethnic nationalism. Consider this the second part of that post.

A couple of weeks ago, as the EU-encouraged Serbia-Kosova talks went into the abyss, the Kosovar government took it upon itself to reciprocate Serbia’s trade boycott of Kosovar products by disallowing Serbian trucks destined for Macedonia and Kosova to get through the border. Similarly, it ordered a takeover of the border posts near Serbia, both of which had been under a state of anarchy, since Kosovar Serb police officers couldn’t control the flow of goods (possibly because they feared Serbian retaliation or because they sympathized with fellow Serbs). This triggered an increase in tensions, leading to a Serb hooligan chaos at both border posts, resulting in the burning of one. Following KFOR negotiations with the political leaders of Serbia and Kosova, it was agreed that NATO would make the area an emergency security zone, meaning it would be a sealed off border area, and anyone provoking a change the status quo could be shot. Serbs then placed roadblocks outside of borderposts, but near both sides of the border. They began removing some of those by August 10th. Macedonia immediately offered replacing the boycotted Serbian goods and services for ones made in Macedonia, and I think Gov’t of Kosova has taken them up on it. A most recent, EU-mediated agreement between Kosova and Serbia resolved the trade embargo, although the border dispute is still unresolved.

During this whole time, one looks for information on the latest updates, and since the Kosovar TV and web media kept playing the same story over and over again (sometimes sounds so repetitive I read their script in unison), I looked to Twitter for information. I followed two hashtags: #kosova and #kosovo (For anyone who doesn’t know why there are two spellings of the name for a single country, read this).

Most of the initial posts comprised of angry tweeple (Twitter users), largely Serbs, who supported the action of the organized bands that burnt the border posts, but also of people who wanted more up-to-date information on the emergency. Most of the conversation using the #kosovo hashtag was in Serbian. By the end of the day, someone suggested that English-speaking Twitter users may not understand what is being said, so it was better to write some tweets in English, so as to make others understand what the issues were.

Within 5 minutes, a new Twitter user emerged: KosmetNews and ObjectiveOnly (objective, as in being ironic) began to tweet links to articles by Serb and Russian authors in English about Albanian revenge killings against Serbs post-June 1999. For the next two days, these two users inundated the #kosovo hashtag with repeated link references to incidents that took place in 1999 and 2004. Presumably, this link-flooding was done to remind English-speaking users of Twitter that burning border posts and not recognizing Kosova as an independent state was justifiable under the circumstances of crimes against Kosovar Serbs. What I found fascinating was the fact that crimes committed by the Serbian military and paramilitary, as well as ethnic Serb volunteers of various supra-military groups pre-June 1999 against Albanian and other Kosovar citizens was not mentioned once. Similarly, faulty, unproven and outright false claims about the history of Kosova became the norm in this one-sided exchange: “astara231: @remzicej The “people of #Kosovo ” used to be predominantly Serb, Albanians began pushing them north many decades ago. WORK THINGS OUT.”

Once again, I was reminded that this was nothing but nationalist propaganda. The risks of such propaganda include a reinforcement of negative feelings or hatred against the other side, reinforcement of (flawed and biased) facts that one is right, and a reinforcement of a sense that one is a member of a large group of users who may share those former two emotions.

At one point, I asked expressly if a user would condemn the crimes that the Serbian military and volunteers committed against Kosovars in 1999. They responded: “zilez2003: @remzicej Who r you to claim what was done in my name? What u have done ever to stop bad things Albanians did on #kosovo Condemn? Brave” Upon a persistent request, the user replied (in a private tweet, without hashtags, so no other Serb users could see it): “@remzicej I condemn ALL crimes made by anybody. Including ones made by Serbs against Albanians, and Albanians against Serbs. Clear enough ?”

Three different Albanian users kept replying to tweets, and although they kept replying with facts early on, it turned into a bickering, an exchange of facts and bias, emotion and anger, hatred and cussing. This exchange turned into an intense throwing back and forth of words. A tweeter sent me a message, saying that the fact that I spoke Serbian attested to the fact that Kosova belonged to Serbia. When I replied that my parents taught me to speak the language of my neighbours, the tweeter replied, stating that he doubted I was telling the truth. Another one wrote saying that she had traveled to Brezovica, a skiing mountain in Kosova, and had not had to speak any Albanian, which she considered proof that Serbians were a majority in Kosova. When I replied that that was because all Albanians had been forced out of their jobs because they did not accept Milosevic’s rule, she wrote back saying “well, it was beautiful [to be there] anyway “. I saw it as a German citizen feeling ok with the fact that the streets had been emptied of Jews during the Olympic Games in Berlin; she saw it as a normal holiday. A disconnect happened somewhere, and I couldn’t quite figure out where. She then added me on Facebook as a friend, which she later described as a step she took to let me know that not all Serbs hate Albanians (if only any of these people knew that I’m not quite Albanian). I didn’t accept the request (because I don’t really know her), but I appreciated the effort. A few days later, she replied to a tweet I posted by saying that I was full of hatred because I had mocked the anti-independence protests in Belgrade, in which many local shops were looted. Serbian media mockingly called the protests “sneakers for Kosova”.

I concluded three different things from the nationalist Twitter battle:

1. As few as two people can take over the control of a hashtag, which means potentially millions of people relying on an update will receive propaganda updates from individuals who may have a specific goal in mind. By posting frequently, these tweeple give the impression of providing reliable information, posting older, biased, and nationalism-geared posts instead. As someone I had a Facebook exchange with wrote, the ten loudest people on Twitter don’t represent all of Serbia. It is easy to overestimate the extent to which public opinion is widespread through Twitter posts;
2. What is right is diluted in this social media platform. As a friend pointed out at an Amnesty International gathering recently, the unfortunate thing about the internet is that everyone finds what they are looking for – in other words, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong at the same time. This sort of encouragement only fuels further ethnic nationalism, convincing different sides not to find commonality and points of convergence, but of difference and divergence instead.
3. Emotions run high during a Twitter battle. In one exchange, I had 10 different messages back and forth. While it appeared that at one point, I had managed to convince one (!!!) user that I wasn’t out to get him or any other Serbs, but that I simply wanted to have a normal exchange with someone, he wrote back to say that he wasn’t sure he could trust me and that he couldn’t write anymore because it was too emotionally difficult for him.

My Facebook non-friend’s second last sentence was “We are all sick of hate”. I hope to live to see the day when that view is shared by everyone.

On equality and women

WARNING – SPOILER ALERT

For 2+ hours today, I spent a late afternoon with one of my best friends in Oxford, watching Alejandro Amenabar’s recent film, Agora. I was prepared to see something akin to Alexander, a film I felt lacked a good storyline and featured more CGI effects than true acting talent, but what I saw was more than a two-hour return to ancient Rome, seeing the founding years of Christianity from a different perspective.

Perhaps the most powerful part of Amenabar’s film is perhaps one that he intended as such – the repression of women by religious opportunists who saw them as a political threat in the early years of monotheism.

The main character of Agora is based on the historic figure of Hypatia of Alexandria, an atheist astronomer and philosophy professor during the last years of the Roman Empire. Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), the way she is depicted in the film, is an influential woman of great intellect with hunger for knowledge and curiosity to find out the relationship between the Sun and the Earth. She’s empathetic to her slave, interested in imparting her knowledge to students who will become influential leaders as the film progresses. The film is true to the story of Hypatia as reported by Socrates Scholasticus, who wrote that Hypatia’s influence on the Roman prefect was perceived as a threat by the increasingly powerful Christian bishop Cyril, marking the beginning of the attacks on intellectual knowledge:

She fell victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.

Amenabar does not let us see this aspect of the cruelty of human nature, perhaps because he cares too much for Hypatia’s character. He picks a painful, but a more respectful death for her, as a former slave-turned-into-a-Christian strangles her lovingly, if one can ever do that. The director nevertheless lets the viewer get a taste of this poisonous environment, the nature of Alexandria overrun by religious zealots, Christians suppressing any opposition, opposing Jews who counterattack and, as a result, pay a hefty price of being forced out of the city. This is the rise of Christianity told from a very different, negative point of view. I am not sure I know enough about it to comment, but what struck me is something else – the position of women at such an early period of monotheism.

In the film, the Christian bishop Cyril orders that Orestes, the Roman prefect, publicly accept Christianity by affirming his faith in scriptures stating that women must dress modestly and must sit and stand silently. Cyril quotes this as the word of God, though it is difficult to take it as such. Amenabar paints him as a man hungry for power who will use any means at his disposal to remove obstacles to his reaching the top – Hypatia represents an important obstacle, as she influences Orestes’ decision-making on Christians in Alexandria.

It is incredibly unfortunate and sad for humanity that women, at a moment when they could have led the world toward progress and change, were [and in some ways, still are] confined to the shadow of men. More than anything, I was saddened at the sudden realisation that the world today would have been a different place had women been the equals of men, as religion preached. Think of the perspectives that would be represented in war and peace – contrary to the beliefs of some feminists, I don’t think the world would have been a more peaceful place if women had ruled it. To make such an assumption would be to ignore the role of some prominent female leaders who led their countries into conflict, i.e. Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and why not, Tansu Ciler and Benazir Bhutto. But to have that view represented would have made such a difference in human progress.

As I watched the film, I kept thinking of the discoveries that would have been expedited with their help. Surely, two minds are better than one, and two minds thinking in different ways would have certainly led to more positive progress in less time than it took the male-dominated fields of history, science, philosophy, and literature. Amenabar symbolically illustrates this absence as he depicts Hypatia discovering the Earth’s revolution around the Sun 1200 years before a male astronomer made the realisation (it has not been confirmed that Hypatia actually discovered this fact – most of the information present on her is in the form of letters by her students and philosophers who wrote after her death).

For the last three hours since I saw the film, I couldn’t help but think “what if…? what if…? what if…?” What if women had been treated as men’s equals from the beginning? What if they had been treated the way scriptures (including the Bible and the Qur’an) intended them to be treated, as equal to, but different from men? What would the world be like today if women had not been cut off from public presence? What would the world be like today if women had not been burnt at the stake for conducting research, for asking questions, for doubting?

Women’s informal influences on the way men handled the world should not be underestimated, and we will perhaps never know to what extent men’s actions have been affected by Hypatias of the world. However, we will never know how the world would have looked today if women had been treated as men’s intellectual equals.

As I walked home with my dear friend, a young woman whose high level of intelligence and wisdom continually dwarves mine, I remembered Fatima-al-Fihri, who, in the nascent days of Islam, founded the first and oldest degree-granting university in the world in year 859. A single woman, a historic moment.

My friend, when asked what she thought of the film, responded that she thought it was bad because it conveyed a dangerous message proposing that religion produced discrimination against women. But to see it this way is to deny Agora’s true objective, that of showing how threatened religious leaders felt by the presence of women. I walked on and did not say anything, though in my mind, I kept thinking of one of the most memorable quotes of the film, uttered by Hypatia in one of her most desperate moments: “Synesius, you don’t question what you believe, or cannot. I must.”

Pink’s “Ne me quitte pas”

I don’t know why, over the last century, there’s been such an obsession in the pop music world with the sentence “don’t leave me”…It started with Edith Piaf and her unforgettable voice, then continued with Marlene Dietrich‘s German rendition (amazing!) Jacques Brel’s average rendition, and even Natacha Atlas‘s great East-West mix with Middle Eastern sounds (my favourite, by the way). Most recently, Regina Spektor has completely revolutionized the submissiveness of the sentence when she performed an alternative to the traditional rhythms and even lyrics (her song is about Paris, not so much about begging someone not to leave you). I don’t know why I’m so attracted to Pink’s own “Don’t leave me,” but I am very much enjoying it…and the video, priceless. So bad, but so good.

Cremation stories in Birmingham and other adventures of the last week or so…

Thursday, I wrote the qualifying test that allows me to continue into the second year of my degree.

I spent Friday studying a bit for a presentation I have in a couple of weeks [that is 10% of my final IR mark], and then went to Birmingham to catch up with Natalia, a great friend from France that I met while on a German lit. course a few years ago. Birmingham was great – I very much liked the city, and I couldn’t help but notice how Marxist and industrialist the architecture was – long, factory chimneys everywhere [even as a highlight of the University of Birmingham], terra cotta red bricks, very geometric, symmetrical buildings adorned with sickles, hammers, miners, hardworking members of the proletariat, etc. You get the point. So different from Oxford!

As Nat and I walked back to the bus station on Saturday afternoon, I realized my left foot was hurting [I just found out that I have a sprained ligament]. It was all a result of Nat’s courageous French quest to find all the cute and edgy restaurants in town. We dined at a place called the Warehouse Cafe [check out their menu online], and had lunch the next day at Handmade Burger Co, which, I just found out, is a chain [see here]. I had the cajun burger, and by the time I finished eating it, I wanted to have another one – it was really good [they claim their meat comes from cows fed grass in natural conditions, without any chemicals, maybe that's why it tasted so good].

At the bus station, a hippy-looking couple, returning from Scotland, where they clearly spent their holiday camping out [they had huge bags, the ones you stuff tents in]. The woman, with a shaved head, , wearing six earrings on each ear and sporting a small, wallet-like purse made of hemp, and showing off her sky blue shorts, asks me if I’ve come from as far as her and her boyfriend. I smile and say “No, I just came from Oxford.” She adds, “I’m from Oxford! Where are you from?” – “North America.” – “I have some music from Indian Americans in my backpack.” – (smile) – “Is she your girlfriend?” – (smile) – “My husband died ten years ago. He was thirty-five years older than me. You know what killed him? Smoking. And funny, he smoked himself to death, and then wanted to be cremated. On the same day, I had barbequed chicken, which might as well be cremated. It was all about smoking up that day! (laughs) – (I don’t know how to react, so I turn to Nat).

She goes on: “But now I’m vegetarian. I don’t eat meat. I don’t even eat his meat (points at her boyfriend…The man blushes). And you?” I turn away once again. As I enter the bus and I settle in my seat, I overhear her story about the cremation again: She’s telling it to the people opposite her seat. Great memory from Birmingham!

I’ve spent the last few days counting the hours before I get my marks. Now I’m indifferent and sort of think I don’t want to know anymore [I really do, but I don’t want to think about it anymore…).

did I mention that I like the fact that cash machine withdrawals in Britain are free? It’s great!

Oh, I also just learned how to say “wha’eva” in English accent…

Last week in St. John’s

This summer has flown by and I am still scratching my head, wondering where the time went. With the exception of some fun and required course reading, I engaged in very little academic work.. Rather, I spent the summer relaxing, seeing friends, taking some photographs, engaging in my new project of learning Arabic, and, among other things, volunteering here and there for various events.

The last day of my contract with the Department of Justice ended on Friday. I had a wonderful time working with some of the brightest minds in the justice system of the province. Everyone was friendly, welcoming, helpful when I asked the silly and sometimes naive questions, or when I pressed the wrong button on the shredder. I truly felt I was among friends! I met some incredibly fascinating and inspiring people, individuals who share their passion for justice in their job. 

While many expected that this summer would be a deterrent for my plans to study law, it actually further reinforced my desire to become involved. It was food for further thought and consideration!

The division I was involved with held a going away social at the end of the day on Friday, where they gave me a beautiful framed photo of St. John’s and the Narrows, taken by Brian Ricks. I will take it to Ox. with me, so I am not too homesick while away

Tom, a friend and lawyer in the division, organized a going away event for me at his house, invited many mutual friends, and made a wonderful evening out of it. It was a great way of saying goodbye to friends I won’t be seeing for a while . Thanks, Tom!

“Take Back the Night” was also on Friday night, and as member of the Men’s Auxiliary, I found it important to take part this year, as well. The event was incredibly well organized, there were many participants, and as always, lots of food (served by men!). 

As every year, I am taking part in the AIDS Walk tomorrow. Friends were really generous this year – I raised over $380, when I had, in fact, made plans for only $200. Thanks, everyone! The Walk is taking place at Quidi Vidi lake and should go well – The weather forecasters are calling for a partly cloudy and sunny afternoon…

This summer, I have been working to get my driver’s licence, and try 2 is on Monday. We’ll see if I actually get it or end up waiting a whole year before I come back to do the test again.