The mosque in Tadamun was empty, badly damaged by the fighting, and we had to run across the street to avoid the snipers’ fire and reach the blood stained prayer’s hall. Copies of the holy Koran, some riddled with bullets, were scattered on the marble floor. And I was told by a security guy from the local defence unit that the salafi insurgents had set up a sharia court in…
Gone are the roaring days of rage on the Nile’s banks. Now it’s the time of fear and frustration for the Brotherhood supporters. Today their call for a “martyrs’ Friday” brought only few thousands demonstrators in the streets of Cairo, mainly in the popular suburbs of Giza and Helwan. There were clashes in the Delta and a stronger turnout in Asyut, but nothing compared to the millions who propelled the…
I met only two check points on the desert road to Suez where I went to meet father Bishay in his torched and ravaged churches. He showed me the burned books, the broken crucifixes, the smashed windows and altars, the charred remnants of the orphanage and the looted monastery. In the early morning of Wednesday, August 14th, hundreds of Islamists (and possibly some thugs on the government’s side) stormed and…
Two days after the bloodshed the army has conquered the city. Tanks and armored vehicles surround the mosques and the public buildings, line up in the streets, roll down the Nile corniche. Mobile check points appear and vanish. Soldiers in combat gear watch from the rooftops while plaincloth policemen manning pistols and machine guns check documents and keep the press at bay. A curfew is enforced at 7 pm. The…
The rain is a blessing. It pours lavishly from the thundering clouds filling the ponds and the scorched fields. Now the Beroms in Dogo Nahawa can plant the corn and water their gardens outside the village: they’ll soon harvest new food for their children. I walk a short distance towards the rocky hills to the burial ground: a large stone platform and an iron cross mark the mass grave where…
Apartheid is a state of mind. I spent a week in a township on the Cape Flats and never spotted a white person around, not even a coloured. Self-segregation is firmly in place. Whites drive fast on the freeways cutting through the endless lines of tin/plastic shacks without stopping. After dark no outsider dares to roam the dirt and volatile narrow alleys of Crossroads, Guguletu or Mitchell’s Plain; althought it…
I was standing in front of my son’s high school in Brookline, Boston, where students were supposed to stand silent for a minute exactly one week after the Marathon bombings: few seemed to care. The CNN is desperate to keep the story alive with “exclusive details” (Anderson Cooper: pressure cookers used in attack were bought at Macy’s) and meaningless “breaking news” (my old friend Nic Robertson, hastily dispatched to Daghestan,…
Thousands of flickering lamps floating in the hills and down in the valley: at night the miners leave the digging holes and flock to the village, hungrily looking for women, chanvre and cheap liquor. Drunk soldiers roam the muddy streets, girls peep from the shacks, armed youngsters sit on beer boxes outside the dens, porters pull overloaded bikes and shout in the dark. I hear the kids coughing in the…
His dad left home long before he was born, so at the age of two James had no option but to spend two and a half years behind bars at Nairobi’s Langata prison with his mother, convicted for robbery. At ten he dreamed to be a pilot but was already the youngest member of the gang in the Korogocho slum. He was smart. He was the lookout. And was the…
I came to Fortaleza, Brazil, to research on sex slavery and women’s trafficking. My friend Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap should come over from Kolkata and see! Twelve to sixteen years old kids from the slums flock to the back street bars near Praia de Iracema every night and look for tourists, both Europeans (mainly Italians) and Brazilians, while dozens of sordid motels cater for low scale prostitutes and truck…