How difficult it can be to find an appropriate date can be seen in Germany’s debate about its national day 20 years ago. Shouldn’t it be today, 9^th November, the day when the Berlin Wall fell? Certainly, for Germans East and West the fall of the Wall was the single event where all would agree that it was worth a party. Those restrictions on travel and exchange with the other Germany, which the Wall represented, were a burden for all of us, whether one supported the GDR or not. That summer of 1989 I had spent two days in Berlin mourning our childhood friendship with friend from Potsdam because he was off to study Physics in Jena and thus forbidden to have friends in the West. We were prepared to never see each other again.  Obviously, he was the first person I phoned the morning of the 10^th November (well, actually I called his mum because they didn’t have a phone at home, only at work). It is also the date where all options still seemed open, where we were not yet talking of “re-unification”, where a third way seem possible, where there was hope, joy, relief and fun, fun, fun (to get a grasp of this time you can watch the film “Good-Bye Lenin” or “Sonnenallee”). Much of this hope vanished quickly after and much of the enthusiasm turned very quickly sour, leaving more than one East German and also some West Germans bitter and disappointed.

So, why then did the German government choose the faceless date of the 3^rd October, the day that German unification in 1990 was completed, rather than the much more symbolic 9^th of November? The 9^th of November is known in Germany as the “destiny date”. Actually, the only happy event of the 9^th November is the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, three more times Germany  saw events unfolding  on the 9^th of November which significantly marked the history of the country. On the 9^th of November 1918, Philip Scheidemann proclaimed the German republic. The German Reich had lost the war, the German Kaiser had abdicated and Germany was about to unconditionally surrender. The First World War was declared over on the 11^th November 1918.

Five years later, the first fascist uprising took place on the 9^th of November. Hitler tried to take power by force but failed in Munich, leaving 19 dead. He succeeded in taking power nine years later through elections. And it was also a 9^th November when the brutal physical persecution of Germans of Jewish origin was carried out in the public eye. The night of the 9^th is remembered officially nowadays as “The night of the pogrom” yet the Nazi name “Crystall Night” is more telling about the horrors of that night. Hordes of SS and Hitler youth smashed and looted Jewish shops and businesses, set fire on synagogues and destroyed cemeteries. Hundreds of Jews were killed and more deported. The machine of destruction which would have killed over 6 Million Europeans of Jewish origin by the time Germany capitulated in May 1945, had been set in motion that night of the 9^th November 1938.

It is mainly out of respect for these dead that the German parliament and the large parts of the German population were wary to celebrate the “cycle” of the German Republic from the proclamation of 1918 to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As good as the Champagne tasted that evening of the 9^th November 1989 when masses of East Berliners strolled over the border to West Berlin, it would be a disastrous invitation to forget the dark chapters of German history and the enormity of the Nazi horror if the 9^th November had been made the day of such a joyful remembrance.

I believe that the cornerstone of life is education through experience. A journey to Nepal that I participated as a volunteer for a nongovernmental organization, has given me and the other three participants a whole new way of life to discover; I would never come across the reason for nor understand the nation-wide load shedding (12 hours scheduled electricity cut) in a country that has abundant water resource had I not spent life there. Four of us, each with different views and skills, have volunteered as a group to conduct a research for the organization Volunteer Aid Nepal in Kathmandu city.

Before our arrival, we were not sure what to expect of Nepal, a country we know too little about. Four weeks earlier, the organization did send us an electronic copy of a booklet containing the country profile, information on flight schedules, addresses and numbers of embassies etc. However, it was not enough for us to start drawing a picture of the lives we would be experiencing for the next three weeks.

Our arrival at the airport, I thought, was worth noting. Kathmandu airport was as simple as a purpose of an airport can be. There were neither fancy duty free shops nor countless choice of restaurants to pick from. The Korean Boeing 777 aircraft seemed like an out of place object when situated at Tribhuvan International Airport of orange coloured bricks. There was a sign welcoming passengers to the 2011 Year of Tourism in Nepal.

We mostly lived in hostels and buy fruits from street vendors and water bottles from an imported-goods supermarket. Living with candles has become something we were accustomed to by the end of first week. Not once did we forget to look at the load-shedding schedule (electricity cuts) to know when to lit candles and when to charged our electronic appliances in advance (sometimes if the electricity generates late at night, we would have our laptops and mobiles plugged in before we went to sleep). Load-shedding schedule was an excitement for me. Literally not once in my life have I truly enjoyed passing the hours (without complaints) with just candle lights and was thankful that it was a continuous routine. I believed we have all paid more attention of what was surrounding us   because we were no longer distracted. We appreciate more and we observe better.

Do not be surprised to see a familiar dish of dumplings as a local delicacy in Nepal – after all, Nepal is situated between two giant nations! The dumplings are called Momo and they are stuffed with a choice of chicken or buffalo meat. One of us had decided to strictly order only local dishes like Dal Bhat, a simple, tasty Nepali meal of rice and lentils. In case you were wondering, there is only one branch of KFC and Pizza Hut in all of Nepal.

Our research focused on the topic of sanitation in regards to socio-economic factors in the Sangla Village Development Community (VDC) in the Kathmandu Valley. There was a continuous collaboration between us and the organization. Language was no longer a barrier towards our research because we were assisted with a local Nepali throughout the project. Sangla was divided into eight areas where some districts require walking uphill to a very high altitude. The challenges were if we truly grasped the meaning that the answer regardless of the translation. This is because we were conducting our survey in a rural area where most households are self-sustain through agricultural means. It was a different lifestyle from those living in the capital Kathmandu as well our way of life. One of the interesting encounters we had was with a young man who recently earned a master degree but has returned home to live and work in the fields with his family due to the lack of jobs.

The entire research project could not have been successful without the welcoming attitude of one hundred Nepali households, from the moment they served tea to answering our survey with honesty and patience. The interviewees were curious about our arrival and attempted to make conversation. For my part, I admit that I have no complaints or disappointments towards Nepali people as a whole.

Nadia Husam Al-jasem
2011/11/8

What was expected to happen? Some 200,000 people from over the country were supposed to gather in Piazza S. Giovanni in Rome, denounce the responsibility of bankers and politicians in their mismanagement of the economic and financial crisis, and especially the poor performance of the Italian government whose major worry is not people’s well-being but simply to stay in power for purely personal interests. The key aim was, thus, to denounce current politics and to discuss concrete alternatives. For this event, political parties flags were not going to be displaced, but simply two banners were going to be used: ‘People of Europe Rise Up’ and ‘Cambiamo l’Europa, cambiamo l’Italia’ (Let’s change Europe, let’s change Italy).

What did indeed happen? Although the demonstration began peacefully through the roads of Rome, S. Giovanni square was soon transformed into a quasi city guerrilla: some 400 hundreds of hooded radicals, known as ‘black blocs’, infiltrated the peaceful protesters, set cars and garbage bins on fire, smashed banks’ and shops’ windows, destroyed traffic lights and signposts. The police made use of tear gas and water cannon to try to disperse the violent protesters, while the peaceful ones tried to escape and find safe haven in closeby churches and hotels. After five long hours of guerrilla fights, some 135 people were ingured and only 12 people arrested. Although, the special police unit, Digos (The General Investigations and Special Operations Division), was informed that violence was likely to happen, very little has been done to prevent the distruction of an important part of the city – with an existimated damage up to one million euros – severed injured people and the lost occasion of peacefully celebrating the 15^th October as done in all other part of the globe. The day after, the media could not certainly talk of what has not happened – a public debate on the needed alternative politics that the vast majority is now hoping, but about the violence. Once again, Italian mass media could not engage into a public serious debate that tries to evaluate how the country might possibly transit out of the crisis, a crisis which the government refuses to tackle, and a crisis in which those most affected by it are not allowed to have a voice. Some 400 black blocs have ‘occupied’ and destroyed the hart of Rome and some 2,000 security forces have not been able to prevent this to happen. The doubt that the Berlusconi government is complicit in this tragic event – in the sense that it has been unable to prevent and to stop such violent acts – is quite strong. Once again the voice of those affected by the mismanagement of the economic crisis has remained unheard.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/smashed-windows-and-torched-cars-occupy-protests-turn-violent-in-rome/

http://rt.com/news/gaddafi-captured-sirte-wounded-289/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/opinion/gilad-shalits-release.html

Two important events that have significant ramification happened last week. The two happening almost simultaneously in a volatile region of North Africa and the Middle East. On one hand was the release from captivity (since 2006) of a long held Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by a militant Palestinian group Hamas through a ‘peaceful’ trade-off or prisoner swap. On the other, the violent ‘conclusion’ of the Libyan conflict with the summary justice by execution of the eccentric Colonel Muamar Gadhafi, the former leader of Libya. These two events can be situated within the broader context of conflict resolution.

The Colonel had ruled Libya with an iron fist for 42 years and the Arab spring attempt to unclench this fist was meant by an equal determination to fasten his grip characterised by a brutal repression of the uprising. Unfortunately for the Arab strong man, the world has changed since 1969 when he took power and now democratic norms and values and what has become known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) have become largely accepted global doctrines. Why this is important is three-fold.

NATO intervention in Libya within the context of UNSC resolution 1970 and 1973 reiterated the increasing relevance of the liberalist school that advocates international norms and responsibilities, in this case a responsibility to protect those that are threatened by their own governments. Two, it also raises a related and the quintessential question upon which the very basis of the international state system rests; state sovereignty. There has been an emerging debate that speaks to earned sovereignty that goes against the long assumed giveness of national sovereignty. What this means is that when governments who are the guardians of the state abdicate their responsibility to safeguard the general welfare of their citizens they forfeit the right to state sovereignty and its attendant protective cloak. This has had the effect of sending out a strong signal of the need to ensure good governance, popular legitimacy and accountability but most importantly the possibility of external intervention in national affairs of a state. Who intervenes, when and how is an equally interesting line of debate. Three, the crisis clearly showcased good old fashioned power politics and national interests. Gadhafi was no friend to many in the region and not least in the west. But most tellingly, in the frame of the Middle East context, he was marginal to the geopolitics of the region and so became expendable and the poster child of the moral conscious of the West. As they say in politics there are neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies only permanent interests. While the west is unashamedly not in the rush to drop bombs on Syria or Yemen, despite thousands dead and the fact that tanks and snipers have become a regular sight on the streets of these two countries, for whatever reasons France, Britain, US, Qatar and Oman with other supporting casts were in an unusual haste in responding to the Libyan conflict. Was this dictated by purely humanitarian concerns or is there more to it in the frame of various interests at play? Why respond to one conflict and not the other? Shouldn’t the people of Yemen and Syria enjoy the R2P doctrine as so touted in the case of Libya, why selective response? To some, perhaps the French will get to sell more of their new generation fighter jets now that they have been tested and showcased in battle or the British and US companies partake in some new oil deals while the Omanis and Qataris have gotten rid of an old foe. While I had no sympathies for Gadhafi I was often railed by the blatant attempt to cast this operation ‘Unified Protector’ as one that was purely humanitarian. The western leaders and NATO chief and cohorts unashamed assertion that they were flying to protect civilians was stretching the truth too far. The clear unstated aims were far from humanitarian, in fact NATO actions and tactical operations were in essence the rebel air force; crude politics which ever you want to put it. To spend tax payers’ money at a time of unprecedented foreclosures, high unemployment and job losses to partake in a civil war was highly insensitive to the domestic electorate irrespective of the outcomes. This is made even more profound by our selective response to similar conflicts. My argument here is that lets be better students of history or history will judge us harshly.

Today, the NTC is declaring the revolution complete. The road ahead is certainly going to be arduous, bumpy and the ramification of the violent end of its leader of 42 years and conclusion of the conflict will cast a dark shadow onto the next phase of post-conflict reconstruction. What this brings into sharp focus is the debate of conflict resolution in this case when is force a relevant and legitimate tool of conflict resolution? What efforts are to be directed towards conflict transformation as a long term goal? These answer I am afraid are not as straight forward in the context of the Libyan conflict.

The second interesting event in the past week is literally a ‘game of numbers: 1-1027. The release of the captured Israeli soldier Shalit in exchange for over 1000 Palestinian prisoners is a mind boggling prisoner swap. Why was Shalit worth more than a 1,000 Palestinians?  Why was Israel willing to pay such a cost? Superficially was one Israel life worth that many Palestinian lives? As my students have mused, does this mean Palestinian lives are too cheap that it takes over 1000 of them compared to one of Israeli? Perhaps the answers go beyond the simple anecdotal narratives. But in the broad scheme of things, was the overall event a reflection of the limitation of force as conflict resolution?

The initial attempt to use force to retrieve Shalit ended in utter failure despite Israel’s vast military resources against a determined but calculating adversary-Hamas. Hamas upon capture of Shalit knew the cost of its captive, given a history of prisoner swaps between the Palestinians and Israel. Once the option of force proved futile, a negotiated settlement appeared the only real alternative one that proved a long drawn out affairs between Israel and Hamas. Why was this one soldier so important to Israel? Well the military forces of Israel are based on a conscription system or mandatory military service. To give confidence to the conscripted a no-soldier-left-behind principle operates. As such, Israel would go to unimaginable length to recover dead or alive its soldiers. Shalit was not just a captive, he represented the resilience of the Israeli nation, the importance of the military establishment to the very survival of the Jewish state. To the Jewish state, Shalit was not just a soldier he represented what one commentator referred to as a ‘nation in uniform’; the soul of the nation.

But his return was equally facilitated by the shifting dynamics in the Middle East. With Fatah President having pulled off a re-legitimating coup with his UN recognition quest, Hamas saw an opportunity to counter that with its willingness to make a deal with Israel when it had long dragged its feet. The Egyptian role cannot be under-estimated. The men in uniform in Egypt saw an opportunity to re-state their relevance as key players within the region by brokering this deal. All in all, years and months of dogged negotiations eventually culminated in one family in Israel and 1027 in Palestinian territories having family reunions, a happy ending for many.

The two events within the context of conflict resolution could not be much different, on one hand, violence as a means to conflict resolution on the other negotiated/peaceful settlement. While the two events are certainly different, at the heart of both lays the debate about the strategies of conflict resolution, its attendant costs and benefits.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. “One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable,” President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

“In statistics used to underline the unequal access to food, the IFRC stressed there were 1.5 billion people suffering obesity worldwide last year, while 925 million were undernourished.”

1.5 billion people are obese? It sure looks like it in places like Australia and America. Now there are problems with the definition of obesity but there is no denying that the world is getting better fed. It is one of the big changes in my life time – when I was a teenager famine was an ever-present reality in the Third World. Now we should worry about Africans with diabetes and heart disease? Well maybe not yet.

Is this good news? I think so. The Red Cross does not.

“If the free interplay of market forces has produced an outcome where 15 percent of humanity are hungry while 20 percent are overweight, something has gone wrong somewhere,” secretary general Bekele Geleta said in a statement.”

I know what he means, but I am not sure that a system that means one in five of the world’s population is obese is all that bad. It is better than the alternative. Or to put it another way, the American political comedian said, and I am paraphrasing (which I am allowed to do because I have cited him – see no plagiarism), mankind has moved forward from saying “Are we going to be lunch?” to “Is there going to be lunch?” to “Where are we going to eat for lunch?” Everyone in UNNC simply assumes there will be plenty for lunch if they want. That is not true for all people in China, but I doubt any of us even think about it for two seconds.

What is interesting is what the Red Cross does not blame. Something else happened this week”

“It turns out that a lot of corn is used to make the biofuel. in 2010, for the first time, farmers actually used more corn for ethanol than they did for animal feed. The difference was small (5 billion bushels for feed, 5.05 billion for ethanol) but the implications may be big. More corn is now being feed to our cars than to our animals.”

By corn, the article means sweet corn or maize. Which the West usually uses to feed animals or to make sweeteners. Now most of it goes to making ethanol for cars? It is not cost-effective but the American and European governments now require by law that ethanol is used.

What the Red Cross does not point out is that the main danger this century from famine has not been natural disaster but government mismanagement. The greatest famine ever in the history of humanity was a result of the Great Leap. When these ethanol laws were passed in 2008 there was a massive spike in food prices and riots all over the world. Less damaging than collectivisation, but still the result of government policy.

Which means that someone ought to be studying history and political science so they can learn the right lessons and give our governments some better advice.

Sakura by Keith Mallett

虹と言えば

君への架け橋

風と言えば

愛の言葉を

ささやいている

Speaking of rainbows

Is a bridge to you

Speaking of the wind

Is like telling you

Tender whispers of nothing

However, with widening access to universities and notably with the introduction of fees these attitudes became inacceptable. Now universities have to make sure that the teaching is well done and that all students have fair chances of learning properly what they are supposed to learn. SETs and SMEs are means to make sure that a high level of quality teaching is provided. Both forms are sent back to the module convenors and the Head of Divisions. SETs are additionally processed by the Human Resources department back at the University of Nottingham. Lecturers need to provide their scores when they are applying for promotion. Aggregate SET scores above 2.5 necessitate a talk between convenor and Head of Division – in our division this has not happened ever as there have been only twice scores above 2.0 and the average score is regularly around 1.6. Lecturers write a report on their SME results in which they explain what conclusions they draw from the SMEs and what they intend to change, if changes seem necessary. These reports are published on the share drive so that students can see the reactions to their feedback. So, SETs and SMEs are not simply forms that disappear in some mysterious drawer but are taken very seriously by academic staff, the Heads of Division and the university.

Students have hence a high responsibility when filling in the forms. They are not only giving their opinion on the module they have just experienced but they are also shaping the outlook of future modules. Students have to think carefully about the answers they give. They need not only tell us what they liked or not but also what they learnt or not. This is indeed the difficult part as often we learn a lot in those modules which we like the least. When I was in my masters degree I had one very charismatic lecturer who was a brilliant speaker (and who later moved on to become Minister in his home country) but, frankly, I would not know anymore what he said and I even cannot remember the title of his lecture. On the other hand, I had this dreadful European Law lecturer who would, every session, read his lecture notes in the same monotonous and high pitched voice, and I would regularly fall asleep in this overheated and stuffy classroom… but today I do not only remember which French expressions this lecturer taught me (“en tant que tel” was his favourite) but also quite some things about European law: the Cohn-Bendit case and the Cassis judgment,  the fact that European law does not exist “en tant que tel” but only as delegated national law (at that time) but that national courts can transfer cases to the European Court of Justice, that its decisions cannot be appealed and so on. It was exactly because his lecture was so tiring and hard to follow that I worked much harder on that class and, in the end, I learnt masses – something I cannot say of the other lecturer whose lectures were clearly fun but as nutritive as a KFC lunch. So, even if you resent a module you might be learning a lot in it, so let us know and think twice which box you are going to tick in those evaluation forms!

http://webusers.globale.net/josborne/OsborneCartoon.jpg