Category: News & Politics

Egypt’s first Oscar-nominated film not shown at home

Directors of Egypt’s first Oscar-nominated film will be walking the red carpet at the Oscars ceremony this weekend in Los Angeles, but most Egyptians have yet to see the hard-hitting movie that chronicles the country’s unrest over the past three years.

Far from being widely celebrated in Egypt, the film has not been shown at Egyptian film festivals or theaters after running into problems with censorship authorities. The filmmakers say they have been blocked because of their portrayal of the country’s military-backed governments. They still hope to get approval for wider distribution.

“It’s a kind of politics disguised in bureaucracy,” said Karim Amer, the film’s producer, taking a line that one of the film’s central character uses to describe the government’s counter-revolutionary actions.

The Square, named for Tahrir, or Liberty Square, is built around the geographic focal point of the uprising, where millions of Egyptians gathered to protest Hosni Mubarak’s regime, the rule of the generals who succeeded him and now-deposed Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. It recounts the country’s recent turmoil, beginning when Mubarak stepped down in 2011 through August 2013, right before security forces stormed two protest camps of Morsi supporters, killing hundreds.

The filmmakers tell the story through the eyes of three protesters hailing from different backgrounds. The self-described revolutionaries are Ahmed Hassan, a streetwise idealist; Khalid Abdalla, a British-Egyptian Hollywood actor raised abroad by his exiled activist father; and Magdy Ashour, a member of Morsi’s Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been outlawed and labeled a terrorist organization by the government installed by the military.

The movie follows their ideological trajectories, from hope and exuberance to disappointment and disillusion.

Ashour grows apart from the Brotherhood. He goes to protest in the square even after the group has prohibited members from demonstrating because, he says, the demands of the revolution have still not been met by the country’s interim leaders. Abdalla struggles to convince his exiled father that his activism will bear fruit, and Hassan suffers a head injury while throwing rocks at security forces and falls into a depression.

“The good and free people are being called agents and traitors, and the agents and traitors are being called heroes,” Hassan narrates over scenes of ambulances carrying away wounded protesters.

The film’s director, Jehane Noujaim, who grew up in Egypt, said she wanted to tell the story in a way that would let viewers in 50 or 100 years feel “that energy and that spirit of being in the square.”

Depiction of the military
The footage includes graphic images of bloodied bodies getting smashed by military vehicles, police dragging a protester’s limp body across the street and other scenes of brutality. At one point, a protester kneels on the sidewalk, weeping, with the blood of comrades on his hands.

“Our army is killing us. They are killing us,” the protester says. “They’ve forgotten Egypt.”

That depiction of the Egyptian military, which removed Morsi in July, is the reason the filmmakers believe the film has not been licensed for showing in Egypt.

But the project has gained acclaim in the West, winning audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival and at Toronto and Montreal festivals. It was acquired last year by subscription service Netflix.

In Egypt, it’s only available through YouTube and illegal downloads. After the academy announced the Oscar nominations, the film was hacked and released on the Internet. Amer estimates that more than 1.5 million people have watched it online.

“What’s been fantastic is to see the overwhelming ability of the internet to show truth from fiction,” he said.

Censorship authorities
Ahmed Awad, undersecretary to the Minister of Culture and head of censorship, told The Associated Press that the film has not been banned in Egypt for any political reasons. He said it was not shown because the film’s producers did not file the proper paperwork. He called the filmmakers’ accusations of repression “propaganda” designed to attract more attention.

“I am very happy about the Oscars, because it’s a very high level of art,” Awad said. “We are not against the film, but there are laws. I can’t make exceptions.”

Noujaim said that the team submitted the film to censorship authorities in September and received verbal permission to show it at a festival. But, she explained, the film never received an official letter to that effect, and the filmmakers did not feel comfortable proceeding without a formal permit given the tense political climate. She said they are appealing and submitting additional paperwork.

Some Egyptians who have seen the film say it is designed more for educating a Western audience than interpreting the country’s recent history, that it glosses over some events and does not capture the nuance of post-revolutionary politics.

Joe Fahim, an Egyptian film curator and critic, said the film is not an artistic masterpiece, but he believes it’s an important film for Egyptian audiences because it can serve as a record of the country’s political upheaval.

“It’s a reminder of the turbulent history of the past three years,” Fahim said.

Noujaim, who last month received a Directors Guild documentary award for The Square, said the film is ultimately an ode to the activists who made the revolution happen.

“That’s the only thing that’s ever worked – a dedicated few that stick to their principles, stick to every battle, and once in a while, they’re able to inspire the majority,” she said.

Despite the setbacks, Amer added, what’s fundamentally changed in Egypt is that “the young Egyptian voice that’s been born in that square is unwilling to give up, and I think that’s what our film chronicles and shows.” – Sapa-AP

11 years ago

Mugabe at 90: ‘I feel as youthful as a boy of 9’

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, celebrating his 90th birthday before thousands of people at a soccer stadium on Sunday, said he felt like a young boy and urged the nation to shun homosexuality.

“I feel as youthful and energetic as a boy of nine,” said Mugabe, at the event in Marondera, 75 kilometres east of Harare. More than 45 000 people gathered at the stadium, said organisers from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.

President Robert Mugabe talks during celebrations marking his 90th birthday in Marondera on February 23 2014. (Pic: AFP)

Mugabe gave his trademark clenched fist salute to the crowd, as he and his wife, Grace, stood at the back of a truck that drove around the stadium. Mugabe holds a giant birthday party in a different city each year, to take the festivities around the country.

He cut a 90-kilogram cake, one of five cakes served, and 90 cows were butchered for the massive party, estimated to cost $41-million.

Mugabe’s actual birthday was on February 21 but he was away in Singapore for a “cataract operation” on his left eye, according to his office. He returned to Zimbabwe on Saturday.

Mugabe claimed to be as “fit as a fiddle” in an interview broadcast on state television, although at times he appears frail. On Sunday he looked robust, speaking to the crowd for an hour.

“We don’t accept homosexuality here. God made men and women so they can bear children,” Mugabe said.

Retirement
In the birthday broadcast, Mugabe insisted he isn’t ready to retire.

“Why should it (retirement) be discussed when it is not due?” he said in an interview broadcast on state television. “The leadership still exists that runs the country. In other words I am still there … When the day comes and I retire … I do not want to leave my party in tatters. I want to leave it intact.”

Mugabe claimed he is the harbinger of good tidings for the nation, as the country has been soaked with rains around his birthday.

“My mother told me I was born during a year of plenty, in a year of a good harvest,” he said. “Now we see rains coming down as I turn 90, this is going to be a year of good harvests.”

Mugabe’s 90th birthday comes amid intense speculation about Zimbabwe’s future when his grip on power loosens.

Vying to replace him are Vice President Joice Mujuru and Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa.

In July Mugabe, who has ruled the nation for 33 years since 1980, won disputed elections for another five-year term that will take him to age 94.

Zimbabwe’s economy
In his early years in power, Mugabe expanded public education and health services that were the envy of the continent. But Zimbabwe’s economy went into meltdown in 2000 after Mugabe ordered the seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms, leading to the collapse of the agriculturally based economy, once the region’s breadbasket.

Unemployment has soared to an estimated 80%. Hundreds of long established industries have closed, often blaming Mugabe’s new black empowerment laws that compel companies to give black Zimbabweans 51% control.

Mugabe has blamed the economic slump on Western economic sanctions, mostly travel and banking bans imposed on him personally and his closest associated to protest human and democratic rights violations.

In recent weeks the country has seen allegations of massive corruption in state enterprises at a time when many Zimbabweans are surviving on less than $2 a day. – Sapa-AP

11 years ago

Kenya: Cervical cancer vaccine offers hope but challenges persist

Life is rough for women with cervical cancer in Kenya. Some of those attending the country’s only public treatment facility sleep on benches and concrete floors outside the hospital to save money for their treatment. Others never make it to the capital for assistance because they cannot afford the bus journey. Now, a vaccination programme has been rolled out, offering hope for future generations.

“Cervical cancer vaccine now available for girls in primary school free of charge!” reads the turquoise poster outside the office of Christina Mavindu, senior nursing officer at the Kitui district hospital. Mavindu is two-thirds of the way through implementing Kenya’s first public cervical cancer vaccination campaign in Kitui county. The third and final jabs will be administered in the next few weeks.

The campaign has been challenging. The number of children wanting the vaccine has exceeded the doses available and, at a cost of more than $50 per vaccine, many people have been unable to pay for it privately. “It should be for everybody,” says Mavindu. Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) supported the trial to enable Kenya to demonstrate that it has the necessary infrastructure and capacity to vaccinate nine- to 13-year-olds on a national scale.

Vaccination is needed urgently; cervical cancer is a growing cause of morbidity among women in Africa, and a rising concern. The disease is nearly six times more prevalent in Kenya than in western Europe, according to WHO data. It is also the cancer that kills most women in Kenya, whose neighbour Rwanda became the first low-income African country to achieve nationwide access to the vaccine.

The treatment for cervical cancer is inadequate: nearly half of the women who were being treated in Kenya “disappeared” from their programmes, according to the results of a recent survey published in the journal Plos One of patients at the only public cancer treatment centre. “Most likely they could not afford treatment,” says Dr Ian Hampson, head of gynaecological oncology at the University of Manchester, who oversaw the research. Just 7% of women received “optimal treatment”, while 41% dropped out.

(Pic: Reuters)

From screening to diagnosis and treatment, best practice in Kenya is impeded at every stage. Beatrice Ngomo, a nurse in Kitui district hospital’s maternal and child health clinic, has a hard time persuading women to get screened. Many cannot afford medical care so do not want to know if they are ill, she explains. Others do not like invasive procedures, she says, and are scared.

Even when a woman starts experiencing symptoms, she will often not seek treatment, Ngomo explains. Some women think cervical cancer is a result of witchcraft so they prefer to see traditional medical practitioners. “They lose a lot of time while they’re doing that,” Ngomo says. Or they go to witchdoctors because they are more affordable than modern medical care. As a result, 80% of cases at the hospital are late stage cancer, according to doctors’ estimates.

Ngomo has diagnosed two women with cervical cancer this year. She recalls that at first the women assumed that the cancer would kill them. Ngomo told them that treatment was poshsible and referred them to the Kenyatta national hospital in Nairobi. “But there the problems really start,” she says. In Kitui, most people are farmers and the average daily wage is less than $2. Women cannot afford to travel to the capital, let alone buy high-cost drugs, she adds. Sometimes they reappear at the hospital in Kitui months after referral, having never made it to Nairobi.

The next problem is that the waiting time for a first appointment at Kenyatta national hospital can be up to six months, according to Dr Orora Maranga, who conducted the Manchester research and is now practising in Kenya. “The cancer is not waiting,” he says. In six months, it can grow from stage two to stage four, drastically reducing the chance of survival.

Once patients receive an appointment, they are faced with the costs of treatment. Elizabeth Mumbua Njeru, 35, sits on a step outside the casualty ward hugging her handbag to her chest. Njeru has a cancerous tumour in her cervix and is two months into a course of radiation and chemotherapy. Njeru, from Embu, 120km to the north, is unable to afford accommodation in the capital. She has been a resident of the casualty ward for two months and is sometimes forced to sleep on this outside. But she is determined not to become another women who “disappears”.

Her malnourished body is struggling to cope with the treatment regime. Her nails have turned brown, she suffers from nausea and diarrhoea, and her immune system has been severely compromised by daily injections of cytotoxins. Njeru knows the emergency department is no place for her; it is a hub of infectious diseases which she might catch at any moment. But she has no option.

Maranga’s study found that just 7% of patients at Kenyatta national hospital were receiving optimum treatment. But it is not just the cost that prevents them getting the correct treatment. The hospital lacks one crucial piece of equipment: the brachytherapy machine.

As Njeru sits in the hospital canteen enjoying a rare plate of fried chicken, she is joined by her friend, Rhonda Waeni Ndundua, who also has cervical cancer. Ndundua has also spent two months sleeping rough in the hospital grounds. Rhonda has received good news – she has been discharged. Scribbled on her patient records was one word: “brachytherapy”. Rhonda is free to go home, but has to return to see the doctor in two months. Then, she will be told that she needs to have brachytherapy, radiotherapy delivered internally, in order to receive the recommended treatment.

Hampson describes Kenyatta national hospital’s brachytherapy unit as having been “in a state of disrepair for several years”. Patients like Ndundua must travel to either Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, or to Kampala in Uganda. There, they pay 30 000 Kenyan shillings ($360) for the brachytherapy; food, accommodation and transport are additional.

This may go some way towards explaining why just 7% of women in the Manchester study received optimal treatment. Hampson suggests there is no money, and therefore no political will from the government to repair the brachytherapy machine.

11 years ago

Ugandan president condemned after passing anti-gay law

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. (Pic: AFP)

Rights campaigners and health professionals have condemned Uganda’s president after he said he would approve controversial anti-homosexuality laws based on the advice of “medical experts”.

President Yoweri Museveni told members of his governing party he would sign the Bill – prescribing life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality” – that was passed by Parliament late last year, dashing activists’ hopes he might veto it.

Ofwono Opondo, a government spokesperson, tweeted on Friday that “this comes after 14 medical experts presented a report that homosexuality is not genetic but a social behaviour”.

The MPs, attending a party conference chaired by Museveni, “welcomed the development as a measure to protect Ugandans from social deviants”, Opondo added.

When Twitter users from around the world then criticised the announcement, Opondo responded: “Hey guys supporting homosexuals take it easy Uganda is a sovereign country #you challange [sic] the law in the courts.”

Under existing colonial-era law in Uganda, anyone found guilty of “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” can already face sentences up to life imprisonment. But the new Bill represents a dramatic broadening of penalties. It bans the promotion of homosexuality, makes it a crime punishable by prison not to report gay people to the authorities and enables life sentences to be imposed for various same-sex acts, including touching in public.

When the Bill was abruptly passed by MPs just before Christmas, Museveni came under pressure to ratify it both within his own party and from Christian clerics who see it as necessary to deter western homosexuals from “recruiting” Ugandan children.

‘Scientifically correct’ position on homosexuality
The president, who has been in power for 28 years, said he wanted his governing National Resistance Movement (NRM) to reach what he called a “scientifically correct” position on homosexuality. A medical report was prepared by more than a dozen scientists from Uganda’s health ministry, officials said. They told Museveni that there is no gene for homosexuality and it is “not a disease but merely an abnormal behaviour which may be learned through experiences in life”. Dr Richard Tushemereirwe, presidential adviser on science, said: “Homosexuality has serious public health consequences and should therefore not be tolerated”.

Anite Evelyn, spokesperson for the NRM conference, said: “[Museveni] declared that he would sign the Bill since the question of whether one can be born a homosexual or not had been answered. The president emphasised that promoters, exhibitionists and those who practise homosexuality for mercenary reasons will not be tolerated and will therefore be dealt with harshly.”

The Bill is popular in Uganda, one of 37 countries in Africa where homosexuality is illegal. Ugandan gay activists have accused some of their country’s political and religious leaders of being influenced by American evangelicals.

Frank Mugisha, who heads Sexual Minorities Uganda, said: “President Museveni knows that this Bill is unconstitutional and that we shall challenge it after he signs it, although I still think he will not sign this particular Bill the way it is. But his political remarks about signing will only increase violence and hatred towards LGBT persons in Uganda.”

The findings by Museveni’s medical experts were disputed in an open letter by more than 50 of the world’s top public health scientists and researchers. “Homosexuality is not a pathology, an abnormality, a mental disorder or an illness: It is a variant of sexual behaviour found in people around the world,” they wrote. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are normal.”

They warned that the laws could undermine the fight against HIV by driving these groups away from public health services because of “fear of arrest, intimidation, violence and discrimination”.

Robyn Lieberman of the watchdog group Human Rights First said: “There should be no doubt that Museveni’s latest words on the subject have been influenced by the reaction to similar legislation in Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere.”

David Smith for the Guardian

11 years ago

FGM in Kenya: ‘Daughters seen as cattle for sale’

There can be few women who understand both the agonies and the economics of female genital mutilation better than Margaret, a grandmother in her 70s from Pokot, northern Kenya.

Her life has spanned the clumsy colonial efforts to ban the practice, which saw it become a cultural cornerstone of the Mau Mau uprising against British rule, right through to independent Kenya’s decision to reimpose the prohibition.

She has also put more girls than she can remember under the knife. When Margaret started, the tool of choice was a curved nail; more recently this has been replaced with imported razor blades.

The work, she concedes, is gruelling: frightened young girls would typically sit naked on a rock; once done, their excised clitorises would be thrown to the birds. For the cutters, or “koko mekong”, who can earn 2 500 Kenyan shillings (£18) for each girl, it is a livelihood.

“The cutters ask me: ‘If we leave doing this thing, what will we eat?'” Margaret says. “Tell the government to give us what to eat. If it’s just workshops then it will be no use. The circumcisers will not leave their career simply because they’re being told to leave it.”

The “cut” has been outlawed in Kenya since 2001. Despite this, a public health survey in 2009 found that 27% of women had been subject to FGM. Among some ethnic groups – such as the Somalis (98%) and Masai (73%) – that figure is much higher.

A second set of laws passed in 2011 made it illegal to promote or to facilitate what used to be known as female circumcision, and stiffened penalties. But changing the law was easier than changing practice.

Among communities such as the Endorois, who live near the picturesque Lake Bogoria, the cutting season has endured. But the ban has driven it underground, according to Elijah Kipteroi, the government-appointed chief of nearby Loboi, a role he describes as part policeman, part doctor, with a dash of marriage counsellor thrown in.

“In the old days there were preparations that you could see,” Kipteroi said. “Now, because of the law, the practice is carried on in hiding. It’s happening without ceremonies.”

The laws are still seen as foreign by many Endorois, especially the male elders, says the chief. They accuse him of criminalising their culture.

Dowry
Underpinning the practice is a sharply divergent vision of the roles of sons and daughters. In Kenya, a dowry is paid by the groom’s family. As a result, girls are seen as a valuable asset to their families, if they can be offered for marriage in the “right” condition.

“The daughters are seen as cattle to be sold,” said Kipteroi, who added that a bride price would be typically counted in livestock, worth perhaps as much as 30 cows. “No one will even negotiate a bride price for uncut girls.”

On the surface, communities in places such as Loboi are broadly supportive of traditions such as FGM. Uncut girls, sometimes referred to as “raw” as opposed to mutilated “ripe” women, can expect to be shunned by their neighbours. They are forced to walk for miles to fetch water so they don’t “contaminate” pumps and wells; local midwives even refuse to deliver their “unclean” babies.

Reuben Orgut, a wiry man in his 60s with a sprinkling of silver stubble, one of the elders in Sandai, is unapologetic about FGM and the economics behind it.

“When I get this dowry it’s a way to support the other siblings. It means that when my sons also marry I have something to give out.”

He says the girls who refuse to be cut and married off are “stealing” from their own families. “It is not fair since they are a source of wealth. Some who have not been circumcised leave the family without us getting the bride wealth.”

However, not everyone is so keen to defend the rite.

Changing attitudes
Joseph Kapkurere is one of a trio of local teachers who have been trying to change ingrained attitudes among pupils and parents, even if doing so comes at the cost of frequent confrontation with relatives, friends and neighbours.

Kapkurere escaped the strictures that he grew up with when he went to college in Kisumu, a city in western Kenya where female genital mutilation is not common. “I was able to question why this happens and make up my own mind,” he said.

He married a woman from another ethnic group and resisted his relatives’ entreaties to have her undergo FGM. In Kapkurere’s home community he estimates that nine out of 10 girls are mutilated. As a teacher he found that schoolgirls would tell him that their parents were arranging for them to be cut against their will. He decided to start offering sanctuary during the school holidays which were often used by parents to have the girls mutilated.

“We thought at least we can keep them in school for longer, we can buy some time and subvert the parents’ plans,” he said.

And so now, during the longer holidays, dozens of girls will stay in the sanctuary of the school in Sandai to avoid the rite of passage.

Kenyan teenage Maasai girls attend an alternative right of passage on April 19 2008 at a ceremony organised by an anti-female genital mutilation campaign, Cherish Others Organisation. (Pic: AFP)

The Cana girls’ rescue centre, set among the dark volcanic rock, aloes and thorny acacias north of Lake Baringo, is home to more proof of the limits of legislation in changing lives.

The Rev Christopher Chochoi, a Catholic priest, set up the shelter in 2002 after praying with a young girl as she died from the rat poison she had consumed rather than return to the violent and abusive old man she had been forced to marry.

Today, it houses around 50 girls, some of whom have fled forced marriages, as well as runaways or outcasts who have refused to submit to FGM and have been ostracised by their families.

One of them is Diana (16), who came to Cana two years ago. She walked for nearly three days through the bush to avoid being married off after being pressured into being cut – a brutal procedure that left her angry and disillusioned.

“I knew I was going to be circumcised because we were being pressurised but I didn’t know it was bad and would lead to marriage afterwards,” she said.

She had been expecting a “good adventure”, she remembers ruefully, and was ignorant of what was coming when she went to see the koko mekong with four friends.

“I regret having undergone the circumcision because some of my friends, after undergoing it, bled to death. Some of them had challenges when giving birth because of age and as a result they ended up dying while giving birth.”

Chochoi’s wife, Nelly, hopes that the experience of young women such as Joan Rikono, who stayed for five years at Cana, will inspire other girls. The 25-year-old earned a scholarship at a college and returns to mentor the rescue centre’s current residents.

Nelly hopes Rikono can show the community they are wrong to think of educated girls as lost or worthless.

Nonetheless, the job of persuasion is slow and dangerous. The centre’s matriarch came to face to face with the risks two years ago when furious and armed male relatives of one of the girls stormed into the centre. They demanded that one of the girls who was due to be cut and married off be handed over. A tall woman with a strong, clear voice, she stood her ground: “I told them we don’t have any wives here, just schoolgirls.”

Daniel Howden for the Guardian