Found at http://www.mapleleafweb.com/political-cartoons/revolving-door-canadas-refugee-systou-have-a-friend-in-canada/

Early last week, my op ed on the federal government’s Bill C-4 came out in the Toronto Star. The bill is not new – it was known previously as Bill C 49,  but it did not pass in the House when first introduced before the last federal elections, re-introduced with much the same wording as the pre-election version.

In the middle of last week, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney introduced the new Bill C-31, which includes the contents of Bill C-4 in it. Kenney expects that the bill will pass into law by June of this year. The new bill goes back on a number of improvements to the Canadian refugee determination system, the introduction of which was negotiated with the opposition parties in the last session of the Parliament. I imagine that with a majority Tory representation, the bill will pass this time, barring public opposition.

I’ve pasted my op ed below. Many of the points I make are equally valid for the new bill. One of the few changes is the fact that under Bill C 31, children under 16 will not be detained for 12 months, but will instead have the choice (???) of either joining their parents (in a detention centre), or of being taken in by a foster family. Both are equally, terribly, and incredibly traumatic for anyone who has just escaped war, conflict, or persecution, only to end up in a detention centre for at least 12 months, until two conditions are satisfied: claimants’ identities are confirmed, and they are found to be refugees according to the UN Convention on Refugees.

The bill also apparently tackles marriage fraud – to what extent this has been thought through is questionable, or is irrelevant. Under the new bill, spouses will have to remain married for at least two years in order to maintain their immigration status. Considering that the Minister is regularly stating how Canada is a safe country where everyone enjoys equal rights, I don’t see how this latest bill will respect the rights of a spouse who, brought to Canada under potentially false pretences, is verbally and physically abused – what recourse would someone like that have? None at the moment.

Bleak times ahead for the Canada that I know and love.

Found at http://www.good.is/post/refugees-you-have-a-friend-in-canada/

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Bill C-4 tips the balance against refugees

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1129738–bill-c-4-tips-the-balance-against-refugees

Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney says Bill C-4 will punish human smugglers, but in reality the law would punish refugees who have given up everything to reach Canada.

Last year, Citizenship and Immigration Canada unveiled a $500,000 monument at Halifax’s Pier 21 in memory of MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 907 Jewish refugees who were refused entry to Canada in 1939. The monument, The Wheel of Conscience, reminds Canadians of our collective responsibility to others.

But the reintroduction of an immigration bill that punishes refugee claimants for seeking refugee status in Canada suggests that we don’t seem to have learned much from the St. Louis.

Bill C-4 calls for a “balanced refugee reform.” In certain cases, the law would prevent recognized refugees from reuniting with their families or from traveling abroad to visit them, limiting their mobility rights for up to five years.

At the unveiling of the monument in memory of the MS St. Louis, Kenney said Canada “will never close its doors to legitimate refugees who need our protection and who are fleeing persecution.” Sadly, the new bill threatens to do just that by creating two categories of refugees: The first group is comprised of those government considers legitimate refugees — individuals who had the patience and the option to wait in refugee camps for up five years while their applications were processed. The second group comprises refugee claimants who are “queue jumpers,” which includes those who could not afford to wait and apply through the standard procedure either because there was no processing centre in the countries they fled or because they had to leave urgently to escape persecution.

Under Bill C-4, individuals whom an immigration officer might suspect of having committed a crime would be detained for a minimum of a year, even if they were not charged or convicted. Australia, which detains all of its refugee claimants while their applications are processed, is now conducting an investigation into more than 1,100 attempts at self-harm and suicide by detainees in 2010-2011 alone. U.K. detention centres also have a high rate of detainee self-harm.

Most worrying is children’s detention: In a recent issue of the Paediatrics and Child Health journal, some Canadian pediatricians point to previous examples of children’s detention in the U.K. and Australia, that show how detention will trigger scarring, permanent trauma on refugee children.

In addition to causing psychological harm to the detained refugee claimants who, having fled violence, would be treated as criminals, the necessary creation of new long-term detention centres in Canada to accommodate the high numbers of detainees would cost Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars. The 2008 auditor general’s report estimated that detaining and housing a detainee costs from $120 to $238 per day, based on 2006-2007 expenses. Based on this estimate, the cost of holding a single person in detention for 12 months will cost taxpayers up to $86,870.

Funding for such expensive infrastructure and punitive projects should instead be directed to expediting processing times in current immigration processing centres, hiring more staff, even opening new assessment centres if necessary, but not by abandoning Canada’s obligation to uphold the dignity and basic human rights of people who escape war and conflict.

The Prime Minister, the minister of immigration, and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews have repeatedly used the word “queue-jumpers” to delegitimize refugee claimants who come to Canada by boat. It is as if these so-called “queue-jumpers” who run for their lives were doing something illegal. Canada is one of the founding signatories to the UN Refugee Convention, which allows claimants to seek refugee determination once they arrive in the country. The Convention is based on the principles of “non-discrimination” and “non-penalization,” both of which are threatened by Bill C-4. Article 31 of the Convention states that refugees entering a country using irregular means cannot be penalized for fleeing conflict and persecution.

Confronted with the desperate pleas of the 907 Jewish refugees seeking shelter in Canada in 1939, prime minister Mackenzie King said that Jewish refugees simply weren’t a Canadian problem. Over 70 years later, when 492 Tamil refugee claimants sought protection from Canada after reaching our waters, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended stringent laws to keep out refugees in difficult circumstances: “We are responsible for the security of our borders and the ability to welcome people or not welcome people when they come,” he said.

Can we claim today that desperate groups of people who make it to our waters are not our problem because they use different ways of entering the country? Should we detain and punish individuals, families and children who come to us for protection? If we allow Bill C-4 to become law, we will be responsible for this moral crime.

Remzi Cej is a 2011-12 Action Canada fellow.

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.

A light display in front of an Istanbul mosque with "Welcome , Ramadan" text in Turkish

This morning:

Coworker *shows up with a box of chocolate chip cookies, munching one as they speak*: Hey, would you like a cookie?
Me: No, thanks, it’s Ramadan.
Coworker: Oh, I thought that was in October or something.
Me: Nope – just began today.
Coworker continues munching on the cookie in front of me while standing there with the box of cookies.
Me: Um, I think eating in front of someone who is fasting may be considered rude.
**awkward exchange of looks**

After experiencing two more food offers (a delicious cheesecake slice and homemade smoothie) by dear coworkers, I thought I’d write this blogpost on some details about Ramadan for the information of both my coworkers and my friends.

Ramadan is a month that is very near and dear to my heart because it is the month that has made me appreciate Islam for what it truly is over what the media, and indeed political manipulators claim it to be sometimes.

Having grown up in a Kosovar home largely devoid of religion (my father frequented the mosque on holidays and some Fridays, very different from my grandfather, who was an imam), I learned to appreciate the beauty of Islam in St. John’s, on my own time, without the social pressures that are sometimes part of being a member of a faith community.

It’s been extremely exciting and eye-opening to learn to distinguish context from literal interpretations, history from the present, culture and religious norm from quranic rules and guidelines (something that is not always easy to do).

What makes us who we are today is the context in which we were born, in which we have grown up, and in which we live – three different realities seeking harmony in the present, but what is often claimed by traditionalists is that Islam is a timeless religion, a religion that fits to all times. I agree, but I think the way in which we understand Islam should change, and not lack the context of the dawn of Islam, in the 700s, when many of the rules and laws were created.

Kandil (mini-lights) around the mosque minarets in Istanbul lit for iftar

I digress – I began this blogpost to write about a holy month that has inspired me to embrace Islam more than anything or anyone ever has. Ramadan, the most important month of the year for Muslims, is upon us.

It is said that Ramadan is the month when Prophet Muhammad received the entirety of the Qur’an in 30 days. To commemorate this time, most Muslims (except for travelers, pregnant women, children, the elderly, and individuals with health problems) must commit to a month of fasting from dawn (around 3:50 am in NL this year) to sunset (8:40 pm, changing every day by a minute or so). As the Qur’an states, you may eat and drink at night

until you can plainly distinguish a white thread from a black thread by the daylight: then keep the fast until night.

The fast is the first step towards reaching a state of full self-reflection, i.e. re-examining one’s connection to Allah and the earthly deeds connected to that relationship.

Ramadan is the month when Muslims can start afresh – the practice of giving up vices (in some Muslim cultures, including Northern Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, and former Soviet states – vices may include alcohol) and abstaining from food, water, and physical relations is meant to awaken a sense of heightened awareness about our needs and wants, as well as our ability to help others. You know how you always say you really want to help others, but you don’t know how? Ramadan teaches one to begin with a single person and a single act – anyone can do a single act of charity towards someone else in need, and this includes talking to people who are lonely or who may be new to your surroundings. The point is, one gives what one has.

During the month, Muslims are encouraged to adopt families in need and to support them in any way they can, be it financial or amical (with hopes that that support will be extended beyond the month of Ramadan). This is part of sadaqah, or charity, that Muslims are encouraged to make throughout the year. As President Obama stated in his 2011 Ramadan greetings, charity is direly needed in places like Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

Prophet Muhammad is attributed the following quote:

Every day the sun rises, charity is due on every joint of a person. Administering justice between two people is a charity; and assisting a man to mount his beast, or helping him load his luggage on it is a charity; and a good word is a charity; and removing harmful things from the road is a charity.

The fast is also intended to help individuals who are better off learn to sympathize with those who are not – humility and empathy for others are some key lessons to be drawn from Ramadan.

In addition to fasting, Muslims are encouraged to take part in the tarawih, daily evening prayers, usually held at 10:30 pm, and lasting a couple of hours, of repeated prayers to Allah, some individuals choosing to learn to recite the entirety of the Qur’an during the month the same way in which the holy book was dictated to the Prophet Muhammad.

A typical iftar in a Kosovar home

I remember Ramadan in Kosova as a delightful time, when the smell of warm, delicious bread in local bakeries permeated the air as I played outdoors with friends. Just as exciting were the last 5 minutes before iftar (or the breaking of the fast). We all waited in anticipation for the lighting of the local mosque minaret mini lights in the horizon: the moment we saw the minaret light up, we all ran to our homes as fast as we could, shouting “it’s over! it’s over!”, mostly just excited that we could finally enjoy all the delicious food our parents had spent hours cooking. To break the fast, we would eat turkish delight, or llokum, as we call it, or dates, followed by some substantial foodism.

My Ramadans in St. John’s have been very different – no minarets, no shouting children on the street, and no smell of warm homemade bread to excite my senses as I come back from work. However, what I’ve grown to appreciate over time has been the open-minded curiosity that friends and colleagues have shown in wanting to learn about what Ramadan means to me; their curiosity, respect, and indeed, repeated invitations to have iftar exchanges in their homes continue to feed my excitement today.

So, as you look around your workplace and/or your friends’ circle, consider the following article about Ramadan etiquette.

You may notice your colleagues’ absence around the lunch table over the next month (until August 29^th in St. John’s). If you really feel so inclined to induce a happy face or smile reaction off your co-worker and/or friend, wish them “Ramadan kareem” or “Ramadan mubarak”.

And if you really want to visit the local mosque in St. John’s during one of the prayers to see what this is all about, check out the Muslim Association’s website. I’m not affiliated with the Association in any way, but I do frequent the mosque – alternatively, you can just let me know.

Ramadan Mubarak!

P.S: My Twitter post is still not done, but coming soon!

The experience was great, and the short of it all is that I was selected as an Action Canada fellow this year, an honour and privilege, one that I hope to use to advance concerns important to Canadians across this vast country and the world over.

The way in which the fellowship works is that we form groups of fellows working on separate issues. Mine, for example, is working on the energy concerns of Canadians. We are excited about the year ahead, after spending two meetings, one in Kananaskis, Alberta, and another one in Vancouver, BC talking about where we are headed with our project and what we want to get out of the work we will be preparing over the next 9 months.

In a few days, I will be heading to Amnesty International’s International Council Meeting, which is held every two years to discuss the organization’s global priorities and objectives. This year’s meeting will be held near Amsterdam, and promises to be exciting, inspiring, and hopefully, productive. The lineup of keynote and panel speakers is impressive, and I hope to write more on that as it happens.

In the last few days, I’ve had a bit of a Twitter battle with some tweeple about Kosova. It was an annoying, but addictive experience, writing back endless replies to tweeters who asked the same questions over and over again but refused to listen. I am preparing a post on that experience and will hopefully be posting it by the weekend sometime.

In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter if you have an account there. Tweet y’all later!

I can’t quite figure out what made the trip so enjoyable. It could be one of the following things, or a combination of all three: the care and attention to the smallest detail the organizers and the selection committee placed on my needs and interests; the fact that I sat at the head of a table of 14, feeling relaxed and ready to answer any questions the selection committee members felt they needed to ask; the opportunity to meet some inspiring individuals who have changed the world over (and others who haven’t, but are on their way to doing so very soon).

I don’t know what the outcome of my interview will be, but just before my interview, I took a look back at my past, my childhood, where I was 10 years ago, and I sensed an enormous sense of debt to so many people who have helped me get where I am today. Eleven years ago, right around this week, I was dodging bullets in Kosova, as Serbian paramilitary forces indiscriminately fired around the neighbourhoods of Mitrovica, my town of birth. Five years ago this time, I was preparing to go on an exciting summer fellowship and course on German Literature at the University of Berlin. Last weekend, I spent two days with former and current federal and provincial government officials who are just as passionate about Canada as I am, international humanitarian lawyers who continue to defend human rights in Canada and abroad, heads of organizations striving for a more equitable society, and philanthropists who have spent their lives bringing change about in any way they can. I met young people whose life goal, either through personal experience or an event that inspired them, have become women’s rights, children’s rights, the connection between business and art,and support for non-profit organizations.

Receiving a compendium of the biographies of all the shortlisted candidates and of all the selection committee members and advisors probably inspired me the most – in a group of 34 future (and current) shakers and movers and 15 other individuals, each of whom could be a motivational speaker, based on their life work, how could one not feel inspired to make change happen?

The cliche has been said – just by being at the interview, we as shortlisted candidates were winners. However, nowhere was this more true than this last weekend in Ottawa. As for the question one of the candidates told me she had a hard time answering (“how do you make change happen?”), what else is there to say?

You know you have made change happen when you bring a group of Canadians from all walks of life, living in Canada and abroad, as far as Australia and Kazakhstan, and you give them a chance to get to know one another. That’s how you make change happen. The rest of us, having met each other, are already pairing our common interests to our ambitions, thinking about how we can keep in touch, and who knows, maybe even work together.

What a breath of fresh air this has been.

I didn’t know what to say. There isn’t much I could have said, except to tell him that he could rest assured the doctors had tried their best to help his daughter live.

He looked up, nowhere in particular, then turned to me, and following a long breath that he let out, added: “I am grateful for everything they did. They asked me for permission every time they wanted to conduct a test on her. I felt respected and treated like a human being. For the first time in a long time, I was human. I wasn’t a minority, my skin colour did not matter, and my lack of English was irrelevant.”

For anyone who was born in Canada or anyone spent most of their life here, this man’s words may sound strange and out of context. But for someone who arrived here only a few months ago, respect, equal treatment, and non-discrimination are a treasure. Especially when you’re a Roma from Europe.

For all the pain that I felt for this father’s loss, I was inspired by this man’s humanity  to have such an appreciation of the kindness shown to him in the face of great difficulty.

One of my favourite quotations comes from the French poet of the late 19th century, Edmond Haraucourt: “Partir, c’est mourir un peu” (To leave/go away is to die a little bit), he wrote.

I remember leaving Newfoundland two years ago, and if anyone could imagine a person who is torn about staying home and discovering a new world, that was me. I wanted to see a new place, experience what it meant to study in one of the oldest universities in Europe, make new friends, but most of all, expand my knowledge of conflicts and the ways to prevent them. Yet, my desire to be away was met with much emotional distress, that impossible wish to discover the world’s ills by staying in the shelter of the island of Newfoundland – managing to think about the wars, the issues, the seemingly endless problems that follow after conflict is transformed into a more peaceful, manageable feat.

After two years in Oxford, I am back in Newfoundland and feeling quite refreshed. I am enjoying the wind, the rain, the routine hellos from random strangers I meet on the street, the hilly streets I can’t conquer with my bicycle, the endless questions ending with “what now?” [i may be enjoying these less than I would like to, particularly because people appear to have visions of where they would like me to be, as opposed to where I would like to be].

The point is, I graduated with an MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford at the end of July, spent August working and seeing Northern Italy and visiting a dear friend there, and the last month or so reading fun fiction and practising my shoddy Arabic script. Oh, and I’ve also been going out for meals with friends and watching news (switching back and forth from CBC’s “Here and Now” to the main RTK news program). And in between all of this, I’ve had some extra time to think about the things that make me as attracted to this land as to the land I left behind long time ago.

One cannot help but notice how much everything changes in so little time. I have changed much, and in many ways, my idealism has changed from what it once was (not to suggest in any way that it is no longer idealism). My friends too, have changed: They now have children, partners, husbands and wives, new houses, new jobs, new homes in other towns and even other provinces. We have all changed in many ways. But one thing that remains the same is this land: The patchy green on the rocky hills, the greys of the skies and the sturdy trees, a design of the winds that blow ceaselessly, meshing perfectly to evoke a sensation of a safe place.

No matter how many of us go away or stay, move in or out, this place will remain alive, as strong today as ever, to overcome whatever may come in its way. It may be because there will always be someone to keep a fireplace going, or to joke about the disasters that came over them the way that only Newfoundlanders and Labradorians do.

Perhaps, more than for any other reason, I am back because I found I have so much in common with the kind, generous, welcoming, but also patient and resilient residents of this land. Perhaps that brought me back, even if I died a little when I left it two years ago, even if I died a little when I left Oxford a month ago.

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.”

The examples are numerous: Last year, a Kosovar hackers group attacked a Serbian government website. What did they do, you wonder? They placed the Albanian national flag on the website – Big deal, right? It just meant the Serbian government had to fix their servers and make them more secure. Besides, I have no doubt the Serbian counterparts to Kosovar cyber-pirates hacked some Albanian or Kosovar site in revenge.

What happened to the Estonian internetage in 2007 was far worse: The whole government website system was under attack and more. Banks, cultural institutions, community centres – it didn’t matter whose website it was, if it was Estonian, it was targetted by Russian hackers for a simple reason – The Estonian government had removed a 1947-Soviet-Union imposed statue on the main square in Tallinn, the capital, in remembrance of the fallen Soviet soldiers in Estonia. For Estonia, the hack was disastrous. The country is, after all, the most wired country in Europe, with the highest percentage of internet users per capita.

Most recently, some months ago, a friend sent me an invite to a group calling for the closing of a Facebook page created by Serbian nationalists who claimed that one of the examples of genocidal mass murder in Srebrenica, Bosnia, was a hoax. The group was indeed shut after hundreds of thousands of concerned Facebookers joined within a matter of days.

Stickers stating Kosova is the heart of Serbia are nothing new. I used to see them when I was in Montreal, and I would routinely remove them. If Kosova was the heart of Serbia, Serbia would have had a heart attack and probably triple bypass by now – You don’t treat your heart the way Serbia treated Kosova and the great majority of its citizens.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned in a conversation that there is someone in Oxford who keeps placing the stickers all over town, and he apparently removes them every time he sees one. The name of the printing house is on the stickers. So is the name of the group posting the stickers [apparently they call themselves "Delije" - Serbian for "hero", Turkish for "fool"]. His comments during the chat reminded me of not only the new age of nationalism, but the continued facilitation of nationalist propaganda distribution in the age of technology.

It was expected, with the spread of the internet, that people around the world would find commonalities between them and people they consider “others.” Instead, it appears that the opposite has happened: People around the world are re-asserting themselves, their values, their beliefs, on the new platform for nationalist propaganda. The act of placing stickers all over a town is not necessarily physically endangering anyone’s safety, but the taking of the issues outside of their original geopolitical sources naturally carries some danger. Namely, it creates a new battlefield – convincing the persons of the new region that the nationalist cause is genuine and that the foreigner to the cause should not be an outsider, but an adopted nationalist.

..more to come.