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…
Back to Haiti. Almost three years after the earthquake it’s still a desperate place. Hurricane Sandy has brought more misery and destruction, with dozens of victims swept away by the floods. I travelled north to Cap Haitien where another tropical storm hit the battered town last weekend: roads were cut, people were shaken, houses were flattened and corpses surfaced in the mud. Then I returned to Port au Prince on…
I went to the El-Fateh mosque in downtown Tunis for the Friday prayer. It’s a militant mosque. That’s where the hardline muslim leader Seif Allah Ben Hassine was holed up by police three days ago after he blamed the government for the killing of four demonstrators during the storming of the American embassy last week, in the riots sparked all over the muslim world by an obscene low cost film…
Lo provoco: gli dico che sulla scrivania dove lavoro troneggia – venerata reliquia – un frammento del tagliamare della nave “Otago”, primo comando del capitano Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, alias Joseph Conrad, acquistato a un’asta e donato a mio padre dall’editore Ugo Mursia. Accusa il colpo, ma controbatte con una modesta pieza pequeña della torre d’artiglieria pesante “Anton” della “Graf Spee”, la corazzata tedesca colata a picco nel 1939 a…
Damascus is rapidly becoming a new Baghdad: carbombs, IEDs, nighttime gunfire, check points, suicide attacks. And all the rest: paranoia, mukhabarat, internet failures, histerical journalists, visa’s extensions, drunken UN guys, stringers, drivers, fixers… Early on Wednesday “terrorists” stormed the premises of the semi-official tv channel Ikbariyah: they killed seven people and ransacked the building before setting it on fire and turn it into ashes. And Thursday two bombs went off…
It’s not easy to venture into Damascus’s suburbs without the minder. It’s dangerous and you do it at your risk. But I have a smart driver, he knows where and when and has some contacts. We were in Saydat Zeinab to interview Ruhla, a young woman who fled a village near Homs. Four months old Wael sleeps on the sofa and his two years older brother plays around the empty…
Deep in the night and away from the bloodshed, out in the backstreets of the old city. Hadi and Basel sit smoking and drinking beers in a garden sorrounded by ancient Roman columns and cascades of pink bouganvilles. They are painters, and young, and thought the uprising would have brought freedom and peace. They saw the Syrian spring sour into a chilly winter, slide into a civil war, hijacking their…
The day started with a funeral, of course. Every day in Damascus starts with a multiple funeral at the cavernous Tishreen military Hospital in the outskirts of the city. This morning the honor guard and the band gave farewell to seven martyrs and paid respect to 58 years old Brigadier General Ghassan Khalil Abu al-Dhahab, instantly killed in front of his house in Rukn ed-Din: someone had placed a bomb…
The boy in a blue dishdash sits comfortably in the throne-like princely armchair of the “mudhifa”, the large marble-covered meeting hall. At 17 young Saddam Sattar Abu Risha already shows a commanding allure when he orders the coffee. He is planning to visit Italy and loves Dubai, for the fancy shopping, the Ferraris and the high buildings. “My dad was killed” he snaps abruptely pointing to a row of six…
Weddings are going strong this Friday night at my hotel on the Tigris’ bank. Nobody seems to bother that yesterday a carbomb went off in a nearby street killing two people and barely missing the health minister: just one in the string of deadly explosions and suicide attacks that shook Baghdad, Kikruk, Ramadi, Baquba, Samarra and Mosul, leaving 34 people dead and more than 100 wounded in a single day….