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Luciana Bohne

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The little body of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, 3, who drowned along with his brother (aged 5, and their mother), as his parents desperately tried to reach the Greek shore, has become yet another heartbreaking symbol of the inhumanity behind global capitalism and its many social and political metastases.  It is therefore ironic that the New York Times, a leading mouthpiece of the US ruling class, a paper that has contributed so much (along with the rest of the Western media) to hide and encourage the real causes of epidemic war and migrant chaos, not just in the tormented Middle East but around the globe, would suddenly find eloquence to describe the latest drama. That said, duty to its paymasters comes first, so the Times, in the long report it published on Sept. 3, 2015 on Aylan’s fate, manages to give many sympathetic and illuminating details about the personal tragedy that befell Abdullah Kurdi , the only surviving member of the Kurdi family, but omitted the most important fact, without which no real remedial action , no justice can be taken: who caused—and is still fueling—the horrid, cold-blooded disintegration of Syria as a nation, and for whose benefit? Surely the Times knows. In fact, hundreds of websites with no claim to journalistic fame, but which have no obligation to cover up for the imperial plutocracy, have no trouble identifying the culprits, the men who make the wounds, the politicians, the autocrats, and the military and intel henchmen sitting in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Ryad, Ankara, and lesser complicit capitals. Those are the people who must answer the real questions.

Read now the The New York Times report below (click on the bar) and find me one, just one reference to Washington’s hand in these horrid events. —PG

[learn_more]

Image of Drowned Syrian, Aylan Kurdi, 3, Brings Migrant Crisis Into Focus

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By ANNE BARNARD and KARAM SHOUMALI, SEPT. 3, 2015
The New York Times. 

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The father of two Syrian boys, who drowned with their mother as they were trying to reach Greece, spoke before they were laid to rest in the Syrian town of Kobani.

VIDEO BY THE TELEGRAPH (U.K.)

ISTANBUL — The smugglers had promised Abdullah Kurdi a motorboat for the trip from Turkey to Greece, a step on the way to a new life in Canada. Instead, they showed up with a 15-foot rubber raft that flipped in high waves, dumping Mr. Kurdi, his wife and their two small sons into the sea. Mr. Kurdi tried to keep the boys, Aylan and Ghalib, afloat, but one died as he pushed the other to his wife, Rehan, pleading, “Just keep his head above the water!” Only Mr. Kurdi, 40, survived. “Now I don’t want anything,” he said a day later, on Thursday, from Mugla, Turkey, after filling out forms at a morgue to claim the bodies of his family. “Even if you give me all the countries in the world, I don’t want them. What was precious is gone.”

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It is an image of his youngest son, a lifeless child in a red shirt and dark shorts face down on a Turkish beach, that appears to have galvanized public attention to a crisis that has been building for years. Once again, it is not the sheer size of the catastrophe — millions upon millions forced by war and desperation to leave their homes — but a single tragedy that has clarified the moment. It was 3-year-old Aylan, his round cheek pressed to the sand as if he were sleeping, except for the waves lapping his face.

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Rocketing across the world on social media, the photograph has forced Western nations to confront the consequence of a collective failure to help migrants fleeing the Middle East and Africa to Europe in search of hope, opportunity and safety. Aylan, perhaps more even than the anonymous, decomposing corpses found in the back of a truck in Austria that shocked Europe last week, has personalized the tragedy facing the 11 million Syrians displaced by more than four years of war.

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The case of this young boy’s doomed journey has landed as a political bombshell across the Middle East and Europe, and even countries as far away as Canada, which has up to now not been a prominent player in the Syria crisis. Canadian officials were under intense pressure to explain why the Kurdi family was unable to get permission to immigrate legally, despite having relatives there who were willing to support and employ them. So far, the government has only cited incomplete documents, an explanation that has done little to quiet the outrage at home and abroad.

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Mr. Kurdi, a Syrian Kurdish barber, and his brother Mohammad wanted to immigrate under the sponsorship of their sister, Tima Kurdi, 43, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. She had invited Mr. Kurdi to live in her basement with his family and work in her hair salon. “They can work with me, doing hair, I can find them a job, and then when they are financially O.K., they can move out and be their own,” she said by phone on Thursday. Mr. Kurdi, too, said his sister had told Canadian authorities that she would be “responsible for our expenses,” but that “they didn’t agree.” In fact, Ms. Kurdi said, she had applied at first only for Mohammad’s family, teaming up with friends and relatives to make bank deposits to prove she could support the family. But in June, she said, Mohammad’s application was rejected for lack of a required document proving he had refugee status. But under Turkish refugee policies, such documents are nearly impossible for Syrians to come by. In any case, the experience persuaded the family that neither brother would ever get a Canadian visa. That, Ms. Kurdi said, was when she offered to help her brothers finance the boat trip — something, she said through tears, “I really regret.” Now, she said, “All what I really need is to stop the war. That’s all. I think the whole world has to step in and help those Syrian people. They are human beings.”

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Aylan was named after a cousin, Ms. Kurdi’s son Alan, she said. She had never met Aylan or his brother Ghalib, 5, but saw and talked to them often on video chat. Aylan’s father grew up in Damascus, the Syrian capital, in the neighborhood of Rukineddine, but was originally from the Kurdish city of Kobani near the Turkish border. A year or so ago, he said in a telephone interview, he moved his family to Kobani because of increasing strains in Damascus. But he said it was not safe there either, with the Islamic State increasingly attacking the area. The family eventually moved to Istanbul, but it was difficult for Mr. Kurdi to support himself, and he had to borrow money from his sister for rent. Ms. Kurdi turned to her local member of Parliament, Fin Donnelly, who hand-delivered a letter appealing for help to Chris Alexander, the citizenship and immigration minister.

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Tima Kurdi, said the toddlers’ mother told her she didn’t know how to swim before the family attempted to cross the Mediterranean. “We waited and waited, and we didn’t have any action,” he said. In Canada, a country that has long prided itself on openness to refugees but has shifted that policy under a conservative government, this amounts to a campaign issue; Mr. Alexander had promised to admit 10,000 refugees from Syria, just over 1,000 had arrived by late August, and opposition parties like Mr. Donnelly’s say more should be welcomed. On Thursday, Mr. Alexander rushed back from the campaign trail to Ottawa, the capital, to deal with the family’s case, declaring that it “broke hearts around the world.” Mr. Kurdi said he tried several times to cross to Europe on his own. He almost drowned trying to cross the river at Edirne, in Turkey, he said, “and once from the borders with Bulgaria and I got caught and sent back.” Then he paid 4,000 euros, about $4,450, for the sea crossing — paying extra supposedly to avoid using a rubber raft. “Of course we were afraid of drowning,” he said, “but the Turkish smuggler said it was going to be a yacht.” Mr. Kurdi said the family had life jackets that were lost in the accident, but a senior Turkish security official said they were unavailable.

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“Instead of focusing on the real issues, people blame the father for not putting a life jacket on his children,” the official said, noting that Turkish patrols have seen countless similar tragedies pass unnoticed. “Well, I’ll tell you this: Life jackets in sizes that small simply aren’t available here.” Indeed, many refugees buy plastic beach toys for flotation.  The voyage started in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m. in five-foot seas, he said. It is the season of the relentless Meltemi winds, when the waves can be 15 feet high. Choking back emotion as he spoke, Mr. Kurdi described how he had flailed about while trying to find his children as his wife held on to the capsized boat. “I started pushing them up to the surface so they could breathe,” he said. “I had to shift from one to another. I think we were in the water for three hours trying to survive.” He watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned, spitting up a white liquid, he said, then pushed the other toward the mother, “so he could at least keep his head up.” Mr. Kurdi then apologized, saying he could no longer speak, and ended the conversation with one parting message. “What I really want now is for the smuggling to stop, and to find a solution for those people who are paying the blood of their hearts just to leave,” he said. “Yesterday I went to one of the smuggling points and told people trying to get smuggled at least not to take their kids on these boats. I told them my story, and some of them changed their minds.”

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Karam Shoumali reported from Istanbul, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by Ceylan Yeginsu from Istanbul; Ben Hubbard, Hwaida Saad and Maher Samaan from Beirut; and Ian Austen from Canada. Bernadette Murphy contributed research.[/learn_more]

That Summer of 2000 in Croatia

By Luciana Bohne

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he vicious ideology of “humanitarian wars” invests war with merit while canceling responsibility for consuming the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings.  The new wretched of the earth are fleeing the American and European wars and the miserable impoverishment of their countries, rich in resources and lands, by the wars’ mother-ideology—rapacious neoliberalism. A report by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War informs us that, following 9/11, the victims of humanitarian wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone were 1.300.000 people. This body count excludes the victims of the subsequent wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Donbas—as well as Somalia, the symbol of this epochal turn to the balkanization of the world, which also expressed itself in the actual Balkans in the 90s, killing Yugoslavia. 

I still remember the shock in the 1980s when I returned to Italy after a five-year absence and saw my first beggar–the first since the war. It’s not that I didn’t already know theoretically that market fundamentalism would have this result. But seeing a mother with a child in one arm and the other stretched out begging in the street of a post-war Italian city felt uncanny. And nothing in the mid-1980s had happened yet–nothing like the monumental misery that followed the West’s peacock strut across the globe after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

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[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I write, 1.2 million people in Yemen are internally displaced; a lorry with seventy-one decomposing corpses of Syrian refugees was found abandoned on an Austrian highway. Vacationers on the Greek island of Kos, sunbathing on the beach throughout August, beheld the surreal emergence from the sea of exhausted “migrants”—and watched behind cold, dark sunglasses, without the wonder or solicitude of a Nausicaa, this new Odysseus shipwrecked by the phony “War on Terror,” collapsing on the beach. On the coast of dismembered Libya, “migrants”—30,000, reported in July– waited in terror on land to escape by terror on sea: fifty asphyxiated bodies found the previous week by Italian sea patrols. “Migrant,” is a legalistic cynicism to avoid using the legally binding term, “refugee,” which requires asylum. 

Then, there was the Syrian little boy–drowned and washed up on a beach in Turkey.

But all this was preannounced.

Trieste, my city, borders on Croatia and Slovenia—Yugoslavia, once upon a time.  In the so-called Cold War, Trieste was where the “Iron Curtain” ended in the south—and a “Cold War” hot spot. Fear of “commonism,” as Eisenhower and LBJ pronounced it, was propagandized by the military allied occupation, which governed the city until 1954. The American military base in Aviano, with nuclear capability, lies today fourteen kilometers from Trieste. From here, the bombers took off, headed for Serbia every day between March and June of 1999 at 7:30 am, my mother told me, shivering as she remembered the roar of the engines overhead.

I had to fight hard in my youth to get from under the induced spectral fear of “commonism.” Coming to New York City, ironically, helped: I realized that the United States, the capital of the “Free World,” was an apartheid society with an impeccable history of aggression, then displaying itself spectacularly with genocidal zeal in Vietnam. But I still held some tiny residue of the erstwhile illusion of a reformed, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, social-democratic Europe—more humane than the United States. The begging mother was, therefore for me, the last corrective sign to false consciousness.

Back in what I still call Yugoslavia in summer of 2000, a few kilometers east of Trieste, I was in Opatjia, on the Gulf of Kvarner, at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea. Before 1918, Opatjia had been the Riviera of the land-locked Viennese aristocracy and bourgeoisie. After 1945, Opatjia was in Yugoslavia, and after the fratricidal wars of the 1990s, it found itself in Croatia. Sumptuous art nouveau villas perched on white karst rock over the emerald sea; luscious parks and gardens; shaded, wisteria-scented paths winding above lapping waves, the resort town’s beauty seemed both intensified and diminished by a sense of desolation, as though ruing that it no longer belonged to itself, or even to a country, but to something transient and mercenary, calling itself the market. Neo-capitalist entrepreneurs from Zagreb were buying up the villas for a song. I was buying all I could from the street vendors, who were actually beggars–exquisite lace work; artifacts in wood, even Tito’s bust in a junk shop. One woman told me her mother worked all winter to make the lace to sell in Optajia’s streets to feed the children. The lace I bought from her is my loot from the “triumph of the West” over “commonism”–way too cheap for its incomparable skill and beauty, worked in little light and less warmth by old, patient hands somewhere in the hinterlands of Croatia.

It was a hallucinating summer. Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a global nightmare was materializing before my very eyes, disorienting because it felt as though the earth had suddenly turned on its axis to move in the opposite direction. A world, as before the war in the bourgeois liberal democracies, full of scrupulous social meanness, xenophobia, farcical politics, racial prejudice, bombastic military adventurism, intellectual bankruptcy—a world now bloated with a triumphant lack of solidarity, smirking at all humanity with the hubris of naked greed.  In 2000, this old New World Order had behind it already, to its shameful credit, the bombing of a capital in the heart of Europe: Belgrade; the slow starvation and bombing of Iraq; the invasion of Panama, and the martyrization of Somalia.

One Sunday, I was invited through a friend to the country retreat of one of those Zagreb entrepreneurs who were buying up Opatjia’s post-socialist real estate. The house was a converted farmhouse, overlooking the Gulf of Kvarner, as far as Rjieka, from its lofty height on the rocky hill. It was stuffed with antiques–“from Tuscany.” One large, cool room, as stark and white as a monastic refectory, was set aside for “artist seminars.” The dining room was dominated by a life-size (if such a thing can be anything like life) wooden crucifix. “Freedom,” said our host pointing at it. I thought he would make a good Mephistopheles to Marlowe’s Faust.

We ate under the grape pergola, in the heat of the day, with that emerald sea down below languidly caressing the white fringe of coastal rock–that invaluable Istrian rock which, transported to Venice, shapes its architectural bone structure. We were not the only guests: there was the young son, and his companions–all amiable, all at ease with their Western guests, including, and especially, with the guest of honor, the “retired” American Pentagon man, in his prime, ending his two-year contractor’s tour advising the Croatian military on “how to modernize its army.” Huh, huh. The NATO makeover artist. He read my mind.  He was insidiously seductive in his approachable, laid-back posture of unassuming power. In fact, even the boiling heat of the day seemed to calm and cool down around the solid perimeter of his imperturbable self-assurance. Not that his family was all-military, he suggested. I was not to think, he implied, that he was a vulgar “ugly American.” They had a son, of whom they were “very proud,” who taught philosophy at Brooklyn College. He and I, he added with a charming, self-effacing smile, would have much in common.  I found this performative vulnerability his most lethal weapon.

Flitting around from guest to guest, like a nectar-sucking bumblebee, rolled the rotund shape of a Brussels financial bureaucrat, scraping and bowing around the military contractor and the Zagreb neo-capitalist. He would have made a good barber of Seville.  But when the opportunity arose to agree, behind the American’s back, with some cautious remark critical of the “coarseness of American culture compared to European culture,” the wasp came out of the bumblebee with all the resentment of an opportunistic, frustrated Othello’s Iago.

Seated around the white-clothed table, we were served authentic peasant food: grilled sardines, fresh from the sea; purple malvasia wine; the crusty Istrian bread made from hard, unprocessed flour I loved so much; aged, hard and salty goat cheese; Istrian prosciutto, sliced by hand from the whole ham, as had been the custom in prosperous peasant homes. The Zagreb cosmopolite knew how to pay homage to local culture—and he wanted us to know that he knew it.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut who cooked and prepared the food? That was the former owner of the farmhouse and now a “friend”—Branko.  By then, I was hardly steady on my feet, drunk with wine, heat, and the surreal conversation of an unaccustomed cast of characters.  I made my tottering way to the back, where Branko was grilling more sardines. My Serbo-Croatian amounts to a barbarous Istrian village dialect.  I was under strict orders not to attempt it in public, lest I dishonor the family making such infamous, never-forgotten mistakes as asking an octogenarian lady from Bosnia on a train if she was pregnant when I meant was she well. But the sweet malvasia had worked magic, giving me a reckless linguistic confidence, so I dared ask Branko, “Where you in the wars?” Branko started flinging sardines on the grill at the speed of flying bullets. When he stopped, his face was stained with tears and his words broken, “Brother killing brother . . . it was terrible . . . Tito was dead . . . we fought the Nazis together and then we started killing each other.” Unless he was telling me he was pregnant. I can’t be sure. But, all the same, I thought how intolerably humiliating it must be for a former partisan to be cooking sardines in the house he no longer owned for a military, financial, capitalist troika lounging on the pergola. We both cried, in between a sardine or two and a glass of thick, fleshy, purple wine.

On the pergola, a party of Hungarians had joined the rest. They were staying in one the host’s villas turned hotel. They smiled politely at everyone and everything, like extras without a script. Urged energetically by the host, we dutifully scrambled down the steep, rocky decline in single file to see the host’s cave (he owned the whole mountain, apparently), no doubt a former partisan or arms hideout. As the sun sank red into the sea, inflaming the evening horizon, we all peered down into the cave’s dark mouth from the top. Nothing to see.

Driven home around midnight by the host’s son, I was racked by such fits of nausea that I vomited out the last of my rasping, embittered soul onto the hairpin mountain road at punctuated intervals.  Was it the heat, the sardines, the malvasia, Branko’s grief, or this absurd, surreal New Europe, with its beggars in the streets and its rapacious compradores in the hills? I don’t know, but some intimation of the nasty world we live in now occurred there.

Luciana Bohne is a retired teacher.

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