Umbra Sumus

Oh dear. If there’s one  thing that unites Pakistani’s it’s cricket, so it’s with great sadness that I read about the twists and turns of the latest betting scandal involving the touring team at the moment. I never really ‘got’ cricket: I’m a Spurs fan (it’s a world of pain…) and grew up playing football. I did however make two reportage features about Imran Khan over the years. As for trying to actually photograph cricket – or any other sport for that matter – it’s a fantastic skill that I don’t possess.

Here’s a couple of images of him at home in Lahore (in more peaceful days) explaining the intricacies of the game to his nephews…

Pakistan - Lahore - Imran Khan the former Pakistan International Cricket player at home with his nephews playing cricket

Pakistan - Lahore - Imran Khan the former Pakistan International Cricket player at home with his nephews playing cricket.

In an extraordinary and wonderful turn of events, I have just heard that India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blocked Vedanta Resources’ controversial plan to mine bauxite on the sacred hills of the Dongria Kondh tribe.

Vedanta Resources, a UK-registered ftse -100 company wanted to mine The Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa which are sacred to  Dongria Kondhs, a protected tribal group of ‘original’ Aboriginal peoples.

According to Survival International, Mr Ramesh said Vedanta has shown a ’shocking’ and ‘blatant disregard for the rights of the tribal groups’. The Minister has also questioned the legality of the massive refinery Vedanta has already built below the hills.

I wrote about this back in May 2009 (India – Vedanta’s shame) and also for Tehelka in late 2007 (Knocked Out by Bauxite).

Here are some images from the story.

India - Orissa - Dabu Limajhi, a Dongria Kondh tribal woman in Kankasarpa village, shares a joke with friends in her house

India - Orissa - Dabu Limajhi, a Dongria Kondh tribal woman in Kankasarpa village

India - Orissa - A Dongria Kondh woman carries a pot of water on her head in front of the Vedanta plant, Lanjigargh

India - Orissa - sunset over the Niyamgiri hills. The hills are sacred to the Dongria Kondh and are worshipped as a deity

Today’s newspapers are full of jubilant American troops leaving Iraq after completing their mission to bring peace, democracy and their ‘way of life’ to the uncivilised. A tremendous success. The ‘surge’ worked and all those Allied soldiers didn’t die in vain.

Well, not true. The war, born of a lie, born of greed and evil has been a disaster for America and for the world. There is also no end to the violence: more civilians died last month in Iraq than in Afghanistan. There is no political settlement and the Iraqi Resistance is as strong as it ever was. The Occupation hasn’t ended, it’s just been privatised. Apparently there around 10000 armed mercenaries in the country working in the State Department’s interests and the American’s want this increased (Blackwater helpfully calls this ‘the coming surge’). Of course the advantages of having cheap mercenary armies made up of contractors (notably from the Developing World) are clear: cost and (non) accountability. In any case, someone has to patrol the oil fields under (long, probably illegal) contract to the Americans and their friends joyfully raping Iraq’s natural resources.

Still, we haven’t really seen this. What we have seen is the war as viewed from the back of American and (sometimes) British armoured cars. It’s rare to see or hear Iraqi voices despite the war lasting seven years and we’ve generally had to endure the war through embedding and spin. The few cracks in the information blackout have been enlightening but as rare and as elusive as peace itself.

Iraq - Baghdad - Two women wearing chador gossip and laugh on the street

Iraq- Basra - Boys climb what is know locally as the tree of Adam at Al Qurnah near Basra. The Holy Tree, according to the legend marked the Garden of Eden, at the convergence of the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers

Iraq- Baghdad - A man in the Oum Kalsoum cafe

Iraq - Babylon - The restored walls of the Temple complex. Babylon, an ancient city when mention in the Bible is dated at around the 24th Century BC. In 1985, Saddam Hussein started rebuilding the city on top of the old ruins (because of this, artifacts and other finds may well be buried under the city), investing in both restoration and new construction. To the dismay of archaeologists, he inscribed his name on many of the bricks in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar. One frequent inscription reads: "This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq".

Iraq - Mosul - A Yezidi priest lights a lamp in a religious service at a Yezidi temple. The Yazidis believe in God as creator of the world, which he placed under the care of seven angels the chief of whom is Melek Taus - the Peacock Angel. Speculation that worship of Melek Taus was worship of Satan (who fell) have resulted in Yezidi's being persecuted as 'devil worshippers' throughout their history and persecuted.

Iraq - Mosul - An old Yezidi woman

Iraq - Ur- A man walks past the ziggurat at Ur, supoosedly the city of the prophet Abraham's birth. Ur was a principal city of ancient Mesopotamia. The Ziggurat was dedicated to the moon and was built approximately in the 21st century BC by king Ur-Namma. In Sumerian times it was called Etemennigur.

Iraq- Basra - A shepherd boy and his flock

Iraq - Samarra - A man climbs the minaret of the Al-Mutawakkil mosque. The first mosque, built in 836, has now disappeared; it was replaced in 849-852 by a new mosque built on a grand scale, which for a long time was the largest mosque of the Islamic world. It continued to be used until the end of the 11th century.

Iraq - Basra - A boat on the River Euphrates at sunset

A taste of a new project that I started to work on this year about the mental health crisis in Delhi is showcased by my agency Panos here.

The poor have fallen out of the narrative of modern India. Delhi, the nation’s capital, has been transformed into a vibrant, wealthy metropolis. But where extremes of wealth tread, illness and despair follow, and Delhi is today in the grip of a mental health crisis.

An estimated 20 million Indians suffer from serious mental disorders, many of them hidden from public view by their families. Delhi is a city of migrants and every day thousands more arrive to try to escape the poverty of the village. Many will remain homeless, divorced from the traditional family structure and culture. Delhi’s army of homeless is conservatively estimated to number around 100,000 people. Mental illness in this group is treated either by violence from the rest of the community or traditional ‘quack’ or faith healers. Delhi has had a traumatic history. The city was destroyed by the British in 1857, by Partition nearly a century later and riven by anti-Sikh violence in 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s murder. It seems to me that Delhi has lost a great deal of its culture and sense of itself; a dangerous thing to lose. A psychiatrist might contend that by its rampant consumerism it is trying to ‘feed itself’ an identity.

Nimesh Desai, head of psychiatry at the New Delhi-based Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences, estimates that India has fewer than 4,000 psychiatrists, and even fewer general mental health professionals. ‘The lack of psychiatrists is bad and the shortage of psychologists, social workers and councellors is even more alarming,’ Desai told me. ‘It meets about five to seven percent of the projected need.’ Desai has however attempted a solution. After eight years of intense lobbying, his team have started to conduct weekly open air surgeries for the mentally ill homeless in Old Delhi. He is accompanied by a High Court judge who assesses each patient to decide whether or not Desai can inject them with anti-psychotic drugs. On rare occasions he sections them to his mental hospital in the east of the city.

India - Delhi - A homeless mentally ill man picks up a rock to throw at passing traffic

India - Delhi - A mentally ill man kisses his wife who visits him in the secure ward

India - New Delhi - A Pir, exorcises a spirit from a mentally troubled who believes herself possessed at a dargah (shrine) in South Delhi

Afghanistan - Kandahar - A portrait of an Afghan boy

I had been debating for days whether to post something on Afghanistan (in light of our Great Leader’s brilliantly orchestrated ‘outburst’ about Pakistan’s involvement) when Time Magazine produced its most blatantly propogandist cover story for decades. The piece cynically manipulates Jodi Bieber‘s (a friend and ex-collegue from Network Photographers) dignified image of a mutilated woman to suggest that a withdrawl from this illegal, NeoCon war would lead to more barbarity. Presumably similar barbarity to the drone attacks killing countless civilians in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and the illegal, drug-infested, torture-soaked, Karzai government.

Let’s make no mistake here, the excuse that the brave forces of democracy are in South Asia to prevent another 9/11 is entirely spurious. Afghanistan did not attack America. The majority of those that did came from our staunch ally, Saudi Arabia – known for its robust defence of human, especially women’s rights. That a minority of Islamicists may have had bases in Afghanistan is more the result of Indo-Pak (and therefore CIA) intelligence machinations. Afghanistan has been raped and used by every invading army since the British had a go twice in the Nineteenth century. Are we surprised that such actions have spawned amongst the Pashtun tribes a spiteful and extreme Islam? I’m more surprised that it hasn’t been worse. My visits to Afghanistan (starting in 1994 to cover the Siege of Kabul for Der Spiegel) have consistently shown Afghans to be peaceful and kind – not that you’d get that from a whole generation of photographers and writers who have covered this forago ‘embedded’ courtesy of the American Industrial-Military Complex. Surely they are all turban headed (‘rag-heads’ are Iraqis… obviously) women-hating, primitives. Still, if we can’t understand ‘em and they don’t want our democracy, let’s bomb them, eh? Bomb them ‘back to the Stone Age…’.

According to Matthew Hob, the former US Marine who resigned his post as Political Officer in 2009, “The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies … I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.”

This campaign is lost as is the Mirage of the Good War.

My usual response to a magazine (or indeed anyone these days) asking for images for nothing usually elicits a response that is better left unwritten. However I was recently approached by a very interesting Dutch academic journal in the Hague called Donau who were making a special about sex and money… specifically permission to use the Albanian Virgin images in relation to a fascinating article by Gerda Dalipaj. Of course I said yes. It’s here.

You can see my last posting about the Avowed Virgins here

So, for the second time in a few days I find myself writing about Pakistani militant attacks designed to destabilse religious harmony. On Thursday night, at least 42 people were killed and hundreds wounded when two suicide bombers attacked a the famous Data Ganj Baksh Sufi shrine in Lahore. The Lahore commissioner, Khusro Pervaiz, blamed the attack on a “conspiracy in which locals are being used” – a euphemism often used to point the finger at neighbouring India. A dangerous remark that even if true does nothing to answer the charge that Pakistan is actually at war with itself. The so-called Pakistani Taleban funded by Wahabi and other conservative sects (the same groups conveniently used by the Pakistani army in the 1990s to attack Indian troops in Kashmir) are the likely culprits for this and the recent attack on the Ahmadiyya community. Despite what fanatics in both Pakistan and the West would have us believe, the dominant tradition within Pakistani society is a tolerant, peaceful Sufistic based Islam. Wherever I have travelled within the Islamic world it is the presence of Sufis that has reassured me and added to my knowledge of religion. Sufism – a mystical, internalised form of Islamic worship that centres on love and prayer and charity seems to spring up to defend Islam when repression threatens. I have met many Sufis – often practising in secret – and my admiration of their practice is matched only by my hope that this will be the last outrage against all people who seek only to practice their religion peacefully as they see fit.

I’ve never worked in the Data Ganj Baksh shrine but here are some other images linked by ‘Sufism’ from my archive:

India - Delhi - Worshippers (both Hindu and Muslim) pray and make offerings over the tomb of Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia, a famous Sufi of the Chisti Order

India - Delhi - Musicians play and sing Qawwali (Sufi devotional songs) at the Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia Shrine

Somaliland - Hargeisa - Men perform Zikr (recitation of the name of Allah - a key Sufi practise) in secret at a house in Hargeisa, the capital of the Self Declared Independent country of Somaliland.

Albania - Tirana - A Bektashi Dervish elder in the Order's mosque. in Tirana Albania. The Bektashi's, an order of Sufi's were persecuted along with all other religions under the Communist regime

UK - London - A portrait of a young man in the Peckham Mosque who has converted to Islam in the Sufi tradition

Some years ago I travelled to Pakistan to make a set of images about religious persecution. I lasted only a few days – for the first time in my career, I left a story because I honestly felt that my presence was putting lives at risk.

I had been invited to Rabwah, the spiritual home of the Ahmadiyya community, a peaceful minority Islamic movement that questions the finality of the Prophet Mohammed. Pakistan is the only country to classify Ahmadiyya’s as non-Muslims.

In 1984 General Zia issued Ordinace XX supposedly to prevent “anti-Islamic activities”. It forbids Ahmadiyya’s to call themselves Muslims, call their places of worship mosques and worship publicly. It forbids them from quoting from the Koran, preaching in public, seeking converts, or producing, publishing, and disseminating their religious materials. To gain a passport, all Pakistanis must declare themselves non-Ahmadiyyas.

The repression is of course a smokescreen to hide Pakistan’s myriad social and political problems and the Ahmaidiyyas are a perfect scapegoat. This is not about religion, it’s about state power. As Tariq Ali wrote in the London Review of Books in 2007:

“Back in the heart of Pakistan the most difficult and explosive issue remains social and economic inequality. This is not unrelated to the increase in the number of madrassas. If there were a half-decent state education system, poor families might not feel the need to hand over a son or daughter to the clerics in the hope that at least one child will be clothed, fed and educated. Were there even the semblance of a health system many would be saved from illnesses contracted as a result of fatigue and poverty. No government since 1947 has done much to reduce inequality”.

On 28 May 2010, 93 Ahmaiddyas were murdered in Lahore by gunmen who attacked two of their mosques during Friday prayers.

Ali Dayan Hassan of Human Rights Watch told the BBC the worshippers were “easy targets” for militant Sunni groups who consider the Ahmadis to be infidels. The Pakistani state is in trouble however and Ahmadiyyas are not the only minority to suffer persecution. According to Minority Rights, Baluchis, Hindus, Mohhajirs, Pushtuns, Sindhis and Christians all suffer.

Today, I read with interest an opinion piece in Dawn by Moshin Hamid (an author whose Moth Smoke I read and enjoyed some time ago) called Fear and Silence from which I take the liberty of quoting from at length. I think it elegantly echoes Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous (attributed) quote “First they came for the Jews…”. Hamid says:

“Because the heart of the issue isn’t whether Ahmadis are non-Muslims or not. The heart of the issue is whether Muslims can be silenced by fear.

Because if we can be silenced when it comes to Ahmadis, then we can be silenced when it comes to Shias, we can be silenced when it comes to women, we can be silenced when it comes to dress, we can be silenced when it comes to entertainment, and we can even be silenced when it comes to sitting by ourselves, alone in a room, afraid to think what we think.

That is the point. ”

One can only hope that all people of tolerance and faith will not be silenced.

Pakistan - Rabwah - A man holds a portrait of the Ahmadiyya prophet, Ahmed. Also known as Qadiani's, the Ahmadiyyas are the followers of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani (1835-1908). According to his followers, he was the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at and The Promised Messiah and Imam Mahdi. The Ahmadiyya (Qadiani) movement in Islam is a religious organisation with more than 30 million members worldwide. Ahmadiyyas are now banned from calling themselves Muslim in Pakistan and suffer terrible discrimination under anti-blasphemy laws and are regularly murdered for their faith.

Pakistan - Rabwah - Two Ahmadiyya men after prayers at their mosque

Pakistan - Rabwah - An Ahmadiyya imam leads his congregation

Pakistan - Rabwah - An Ahmadiyya woman weeps at the grave of her murdered child

Pakistan - Rabwah - An Ahmadiyya elder, blinded for his faith

Pakistan - Rabwah - A woman beneath a portrait of her murdered husband

Pakistan - Rabwah - Ahmadiyyas praying at their mosque

Pakistan - Rabwah - After prayers, a boy plays ball in a mosque

I have written before about the increasing use of private security and the erosion of liberty in public space so I was interested in a piece in today’s Guardian, ironically, the result of a Freedom of Information request:

City of London security guards told to report ‘suspicious’ photographers

It seems increasingly clear that unelected, untrained and under qualified security guards from private companies (operating for profit) are deciding who has freedom to walk the streets and carry out perfectly legal activities … like taking photographs in a public space.

Interestingly, the article asserts that both the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and John Yates, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, have warned that police risk losing the support of the public through the inappropriate use of section 44.

Surely not.

I first photographed the burgeoning private security industry in the late 1990s for several magazines and over the years have continued to have assignments to do so.

UK - London - A private security 'operative' patrols South London council estate

UK - London - A security guard at a gated community monitors a bank of closed circuit television screens.

As the Labour government loses power and its party leader, the front runner to take the reins is David Miliband. I made a large story about him for the Times Magazine a little over a year ago.

UK - London - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at his home in London

UK - London - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at his home in London

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear during a live broadcast with a TV channel in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

UK - London - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at a meeting at his official residence with the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mr Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Hussain Qureshi

Ukraine - Kiev - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear with his staff on Board the Queen's flight bound for Kiev, Ukraine for talks with the Ukranian government

UK - Birmingham - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at a meeting in Birmingham with the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mr Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Hussain Qureshi and members of the British Pakistani community

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear during an informal meeting with the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair in his office in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear during an informal meeting with the Serbian Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremich

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear holds his head in his hands during a live broadcast with a TV channel in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium