:: WEB archives ::
June 02, 2005
[Thinking-East] Web - ad-Dar al-Internet
۩ Dar al-Internet, House of the Links.۩
For your web-browsing pleasure...
۞ Siberian Light's Carnival of the Revolutions index, "a sampling of how democracy is marching forwards (and sometimes backwards) in the world today."
۞ The Registan's May 30th, 2005 Carnival of the Revolutions, " humble collection of democracy news–good and bad–from the past week."
۞ The website for Berkeley, California-based Students for Global Democracy, whose motto is, "Make the world a better place by promoting political liberties worldwide."
۞ The website for Friends of Democracy, "Ground-level election news from the Iraqi people." [Contributors to Thinking-East.]
۞ On a voyage to an untamed land, the LiveJournal personal/professional blog for Christopher Schwartz.
This entry shall be updated from time to time...
Thinking-Eastmentions in Technorati search as of 6/2/2005:
Ben's Mongolia coverage: Global Voices Online Friday World Blog Roundup 5/21/2005
Olesya's Andijon coverage: The Golden Road to Samarqand Interesting Places to Visit 5/16/2005
Nathan Hamm's Craig Murray article (Is. 2.5): Coming Anarchy My boy is wicked smart! 4/28/2005
Daler Rahimov's TZ elections article (Is. 2): Americans for Freedom Thinking-East presents Daler Rahimov... 3/30/2005
The Tulip Revolution: Nomad Photo montage from Thinking-East blog
2/21/2005, Kristin at the The Boylan Blog writes,
With President Bush vowing to spread democracy across the globe, it is ever more imperative that students are informed about the world that lies east of Long Island.
A pioneering project from the University of London, created by students for students strives to bring to light the struggle for freedom of choice and thought in countries in North Africa, the Near and Middle East, and Central Asia. Thinking-east.net is a nonprofit e-publishing platform where students who live in these areas – about which most of us know shamefully little – provide a fresh and informative perspective on their lives.
In a special issue on elections, one can hear first-hand accounts of election concerns from students in Tajikstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Get out your world atlas before you log on.
The editors, Ben Paarman and Christopher Schwartz, both students at U of L, are always looking for contributing writers, so if any of you know of students who live in those areas and speak at least some English, they would be happy to hear from you.
[Thinking-East] Web - ad-Dar al-Internet
۩ Dar al-Internet, House of the Links.۩
For your web-browsing pleasure...
۞ Siberian Light's Carnival of the Revolutions index, "a sampling of how democracy is marching forwards (and sometimes backwards) in the world today."
۞ The Registan's May 30th, 2005 Carnival of the Revolutions, " humble collection of democracy news–good and bad–from the past week."
۞ The website for Berkeley, California-based Students for Global Democracy, whose motto is, "Make the world a better place by promoting political liberties worldwide."
۞ The website for Friends of Democracy, "Ground-level election news from the Iraqi people." [Contributors to Thinking-East.]
۞ On a voyage to an untamed land, the LiveJournal personal/professional blog for Christopher Schwartz.
This entry shall be updated from time to time...
Thinking-Eastmentions in Technorati search as of 6/2/2005:
Ben's Mongolia coverage: Global Voices Online Friday World Blog Roundup 5/21/2005
Olesya's Andijon coverage: The Golden Road to Samarqand Interesting Places to Visit 5/16/2005
Nathan Hamm's Craig Murray article (Is. 2.5): Coming Anarchy My boy is wicked smart! 4/28/2005
Daler Rahimov's TZ elections article (Is. 2): Americans for Freedom Thinking-East presents Daler Rahimov... 3/30/2005
The Tulip Revolution: Nomad Photo montage from Thinking-East blog
2/21/2005, Kristin at the The Boylan Blog writes,
With President Bush vowing to spread democracy across the globe, it is ever more imperative that students are informed about the world that lies east of Long Island.
A pioneering project from the University of London, created by students for students strives to bring to light the struggle for freedom of choice and thought in countries in North Africa, the Near and Middle East, and Central Asia. Thinking-east.net is a nonprofit e-publishing platform where students who live in these areas – about which most of us know shamefully little – provide a fresh and informative perspective on their lives.
In a special issue on elections, one can hear first-hand accounts of election concerns from students in Tajikstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Get out your world atlas before you log on.
The editors, Ben Paarman and Christopher Schwartz, both students at U of L, are always looking for contributing writers, so if any of you know of students who live in those areas and speak at least some English, they would be happy to hear from you.
June 01, 2005
[Thinking-East] Web - Issue 3 is published!
Issue 3.0 is online!
Peter Biar Ajak (20, Sudan/USA) bemoans Darfur's betrayal by the world. Cklara Moradian (18, Iraq/USA) relives the extermination of her hometown, Halabja. Dr. Yair Auron discusses 1915, 1948, and definitions of genocide.
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
Muzaffardjon R. Khudoikulov (25, Cyprus/Tajikistan) argues, Make Jerusalem the seat of the United Nations. Chris Wake (23, UK) sees flickers of hope's light in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tzadik (23, Israel) recounts a harrowing tale of obsession and war.xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
Ali Tawfik-Shukor (25, Iraq/Canada) remembers a courageous cousin slain by a suicide bomber. An anti-Iraq War protest in Viet Nam (video by Maria Grazia Moncada) inspires soul-searching e-mails between Christopher Schwartz (23, USA) and Ali: Should America stay in Iraq?xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
Coming during the next two weeks
New East in the West: The New World, the New West
۞ "The Face of the West is Changing" by Ludwika Chrzstowska
۞ "US immigration in the Age of Terrorism" by Michael P. Gallen
۞ "When will we be recognized?" by Kurdish students
More Baghdad is Bleeding: interviews from Sipan
More Allah against Elohim: a photo-essay of the Oasis of Peace from Schwartz
Another article from Christopher Wake
May 31, 2005
[Thinking-East] CA/NA - American bikes across Siberia to fight slavery
From the iAbolish e-newsletter...
This Saturday, May 28th, Andrej Mucic, an amateur cyclist and Home Depot employee, will embark on a journey of 7,000 miles over 100 days through Siberia, Russia. Andrej will bike through the harsh climate and abrasive terrain of the Siberian tundra in order to raise $10,000 to benefit the American Anti-Slavery Group. To donate, visit www.SiberiaRide.com.
His grueling course will begin at Magadan, known as the Portal to Hell, the notorious first stop on the way to the gulag slave camps of the Stalinist era. He will bike 1,000 miles over nearly impassable roads to Yakutsk and on to a remote village called Suntar, where roads vanish and maps are of little assistance. From there Andrej heads south to the Lena River and will follow a path along its northern bank for 1,000 miles. The road picks up again in Ust-Kut, and Andrej will continue along to his final destination in St. Petersburg. What motivates someone to undertake this tremendous challenge? Burning moral indignation against slavery, and a powerful motivation to support the work of AASG.
Check out www.SiberiaRide.com for more information and to support Andrej's Siberian Freedom Ride by making a donation.
As a small non-profit organization, the American Anti-Slavery Group relies on concerned individuals like you for financial support. Your donation is urgently needed to continue our work to abolish modern-day slavery. Below are just some of the projects your donation will support.
Slave Rescue : Through working with Christian Solidarity International, we are able to pay or barter for the release of slaves. $36 will cover the costs of a survival kit for a fomer slave; $50 will free a mother or child and feed them for a month; $100 will feed a family of five Sudanese refugees for two months. How many slaves will you rescue?
Empowering Survivors : We train and support former slaves from around the world to speak out about slavery at anywhere from Congressional hearings to high schools and universities across the U.S. These survivors need your support to get their message out.
Grassroots Activism: By organizing rallies, supporting Sudan divestment in state legislatures, raising awareness on university campuses, and petitioning foreign governments, we are leading the grassroots abolitionist movement in the U.S., but we need your contribution to strengthen this movement.
Please support the American Anti-Slavery group by contributing to Andrej's Siberian Freedom Ride. For information about modern-day slavery, visit Posted by Schwartz at 07:44 PM | TrackBack
May 30, 2005
[Ben] Web - Carnival of Revolutions
Be sure to check out this week's Carnival of Revolutions over at Registan.Net. Lots of interesting stuff in it.
Thinking-East will host this event in the first September week. Also, we're currently overhauling the site, the blogs, and ... everything! Keep your eyes peeled for us in June 2005, lots to come.
May 17, 2005
[Thinking-East] TV - We'll be watching this tonight
If you are in the United States, tune into the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) tonight at 21:00 (9 EST) for "Frontline/World: Lebanon and Syria; Liberia," two 30-minute dispatches from reporters in Lebanon and Liberia report on the youthfulness of the Cedar Revolution and peace in the African coast.
This New York Times reviewer writes,
"[These segments] show that there can be grass-roots idealism among a new generation of nation-building survivors. Given the destruction they have endured, these idealists in Beirut and Monrovia seem like seedlings sprouting from a forest fire's charred floor."
Obviously these themes interest us over at Thinking-East, as we are a student/youth organization and, by the demand of history, have focused alot of energy covering the ongoing phenomenon of the "colour revolution", pro-democracy activism, and conflict and peacemaking. (Check out our coverage of the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.)
Thinking-East Editor Christopher Schwartz is working on a special article regarding our generation's "hidden revolutionary potential"--and he doesn't mean "revolution" in the old Marxist sense of the word, nor the neo-Conservative "domino theory."
Click on "continued reading" for the full review (copyright, New York Times)...
Trouble Spots Where Hope May Have A Foothold by Ned Martel, New York Times, Tuesday, May 17th, 2005.
Two 30-minute back-to-back dispatches from Lebanon and Liberia tonight on PBS document some actual optimism, a strain of good vibes rarely recorded in urgent public-broadcasting reports from these places, which usually command attention for intractable violence, not high hopes.
The segments, on ''Frontline/World,'' show that there can be grass-roots idealism among a new generation of nation-building survivors. Given the destruction they have endured, these idealists in Beirut and Monrovia seem like seedlings sprouting from a forest fire's charred floor.
The segments, however, don't resort to flowery imagery, and the two lead reporters, Kate Seelye and Jessie Deeter, each stare down threats to their well-being and speak in that mournful monotone, so common to war correspondents, that suggests a communal effort to keep calamity at bay.
In her more personal account of life in Lebanon, Ms. Seelye, the daughter of a former United States ambassador to Syria, begins her report with a bang. Last February, an explosion killed Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister, and she watches the smoky aftermath from her balcony. ''He represented strong Lebanon, international Lebanon,'' one mourner tells her on the street. Ms. Seelye blames Syria for this and other ruinous acts that have prolonged Lebanon's civil strife.
While difficult to doubt, the correspondent never presents much evidence against the Syrians, whose ''intelligence officers,'' she says, have looted many Lebanese industries. At a news conference, she boldly confronts the nation's justice minister over his inability to stop such corruption and, with a forcefulness that belies her diplomatic upbringing, asks if he shouldn't just resign.
Her insistence comes off as showboating as those she interviews defer to her good name and regal bearing. But obviously, she knows what she is asking about, and her sense of adventure serves the program very well: she visits the outer edges of Lebanon to make sure that Syrian tanks are rolling toward home. Then, after capturing a sense of the police state inside Syria, she ventures to its eastern border. Sand walls divide Syrian guards and American troops camped out in the Iraqi desert.
A pro-democracy movement helped to hound Syrians out of Lebanon, and the threat of American intervention has Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president, working to keep his name off a watch list of regimes worth changing. Ms. Seelye never reaches the Syrian leader, only his defensive spokeswoman, who insists that there can be no comparison between him and Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Assad is not producing nuclear weapons or hiding a massacre of domestic enemies, the spokeswoman says.
But the Syrian-backed Hezbollah must been seen as either a threat to Lebanese stability or a new partner in the tough tasks of democratization, and Ms. Seelye's reporting emphasizes that amid the new nationalist euphoria, ethnic discord could still pull the nation back into its bloody past.
In Liberia, the recent history of carnage is even more extreme, but antagonists in the military and in the rebel forces have recently learned to live with each other, as if the last decade of civil warfare had not seen 200,000 citizens slaughtered. The West African nation is now overseen by United Nations peacekeepers, commanded by Daniel Opande, a onetime Kenyan general, who persuades leaderless rebels to swap their AK-47's and ammunition for identity cards and a $300 nest egg. Mayhem is all that these teenage guerrillas have known, and now, as the documentary makes clear, they literally pine for the calm of an education, or at least an adolescence, so that they can reorder their traumatized brains.
Ms. Deeter's reporting is less personal than Ms. Seelye's but just as determined as she visits and revisits several Liberian locales over the course of a year. One rebel, who cagily calls himself Wolfcatcher, tells her of his plan to become a journalist. Upon her return, Ms. Deeter persists till she relocates Wolfcatcher in happier circumstances, employed in Monrovia (where unemployment is 80 percent), proving what a difference a year -- and some international intervention -- can make.
[Frontline/World: Lebanon and Syria; LiberiaPBS, tonight at 9; check local listings. David Fanning, executive producer; Stephen Talbot, series editor; Sharon Tiller, executive in charge of production. Produced by WGBH Boston and KQED San Francisco.]
From Schwartz:
Also, check out this interesting PBS piece about Israeli Punk Rock music culture. "Maybe we like Israel because it's difficult to be a punk here."
May 15, 2005
[Thinking-East] Web - Thinking-East in Uzbek
From UzbekVoice
Vebda yaqinda paydo bo'lgan "Thinking-East" saytining yangi 2.5 soni nashr etildi. Bu yerda men ushbu sonning O'zbekistonga tegishli bo'lgan qismlari to'g'risida qisqacha sharhlar berib o'taman.Saytda xalqaro va mustaqil ommaviy axborot vositalarida katta shovshuvga ega bo'gan Kreyg Marrey(Craig Murray) janoblari haqida alohida debat sahifa ajratilgan. Agar siz siyosat bilan qiziqsangiz va O'zbekistonning tashqi siyosati bilan xabardor bo'lsangiz Marrey janoblari haqida xabardorsiz.
Shunday bo'lsada bu odam haqida qisqacha ma'lumot:
Kreyg Marrey -Buyuk Britaniyaning O'zbekistondagi sobiq elchisi(2002-2004-yillarda). 47 yoshda. 2002 yilda Toshkentga yuborilgan bu janob, 2004 yil 14-oktyabrida o'z lavozimidan chetlatildi. Chetlatilishining sababi o'zi va uni qo'llovchi manbalar uning Buyuk Britaniyani O'zbekistondagi inson huquqlarini buzilishida unga hamkorlik qilayotganini tanqid qilgani uchun deyishsa, boshqa manbalarda uning Toshkentdagi o'zini ko'rsatishga bo'lgan "hatti-harakatlari" sabab qilib ko'rsatiladi. U o'zining vebsaytiga ham ega. Asosiy raqibi - uni elchilikdan chetlatgan odam, Britaniya Tashqi ishlar Vaziri, Jekk Strou(Jack Straw) janoblaridir. Agar siz BBC va Ozodlik radiosini muntazam tinglab borgan bo'lsangiz u haqida batafsil ma'lumotga egasiz degan umiddaman.
May 05, 2005
ASIA QUAKE UPDATE
Tens Of Thousands Still Missing In Tsunami by Lawrence K. Altman, New York Times World Briefing for May 5th, 2005: "More than four months after the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 200,000 people, tens of thousands of people are listed as missing and thousands of the bodies that have been recovered have not been identified, experts said at a meeting sponsored by the World Health Organization in Phuket, Thailand. Although forensic scientists from 29 countries have collaborated to speed up identification of bodies, their work has been hampered by lack of medical records and information from relatives. In some parts of Indonesia, where 93,000 people are listed as missing, 'entire villages including families and paperwork that could help identify bodies were swept away,' said Dr. Luis Jorge Perez, a W.H.O. official. Many bodies were buried quickly for fear that they would start epidemics, despite repeated advice from the W.H.O. that dead bodies were not a health hazard."
December 27th, 2005
PLEASE HELP ASIA QUAKE SURVIVORS
Please donate to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent
ISRAEL-PALESTINE SPECIAL EDITOR WANTED!
Thinking-East.Net needs a new Special Editor for Israel-Palestine!
Because of manifold duties and responsibilities here in the United States and elsewhere, I feel unable to continue as Thinking-East.Net's Special Editor for Israel-Palestine. I shall continue on as an Editor and the Special Editor for Religion and Ideology.
We are seeking a student of or from either the State of Israel, the Occupied Territories or the Jewish and Palestinian Diaspora, who is intimately acquainted with the land and people, and possesses at least a rudimentary working knowledge of Hebrew and/or Arabic.
The duties of the Special Editor for Israel-Palestine are:
-to gather articles, Guest Authors and Permanent Authors for our monthly publication cycle;
-to translate (by whatever means) our advertisements into modern Hebrew and fus`ha as well as amiyyah Arabic, and if possible Yiddish, Amharic, classical (Bedowiyya or Bedouin) Arabic, and Druze Arabic;
-to spread the word about Thinking-East.Net.
If you are interested or someone you know would be interested, please contact me:
Christopher Schwartz
schwartz@thinking-east.net
nyspaceman@writing.com
April 28, 2005
Thinking-East 2.5 published
After some technical difficulties with Schwartz' laptop (not this kind of stuff), we finally got around publishing 2.5. It's got some great stuff in it -- including Zamir's sober Kyrgyzstan North-South-divide analysis.
Also, the Craig Murray Controversy is still topical amid next Thursday's UK elections.
Additionally, we have got articles on the Human Rights situation in Uzbekistan by Fardona, and in China by Kilic. Schwartz has written a poem; and Wisam has made some amazing pictures during Arafat's burial.
The next issue (Number 3) will be published in the beginning of June after we're done with our exams. Expect some intriguing material.
April 23, 2005
Thinking-East #2.5
Thinking-East's new issue (#2.5) will be published on Monday morning. The themes for this month's special:
A brief introduction to the debate by Ben
Nathan lays out his counterargument to Murray
Readers of Registan.net react
Olesya from Uzbekistan has a distinct take
Dinara from Uzbekistan on living in a post-Soviet state
Kilic analyses Uighur prisoner Rebiya Kadeer's release
Nafisa visits Samarkand's Rroma, the Luli
Wisam visited Yassir Arafat's burial and has phantastic photos
Elnura pictured the Kyrgyz 'Tulip Revolution'...
...and shows us why it sparked off
Thinking-East covered the events in Kyrgyzstan
Schwartz witnessed the Palestinian plebiscite
Diana is aghast reading Bek's article
Ben zig-zagged ancient Kashgar
Much more in the archives
Issue #2
March 09, 2005
Thinking-East.Net - Call for Writers
This call for writers can also be downloaded as a PDF.
Thinking-East
Giving voice to people left behind unheard
CALL FOR WRITERS
"Thinking-East is an innovative venture grounded on intelligent, honest dialogue across frontiers of geography and mind in the service of understanding. It deserves respect and support."
David Hayes / openDemocracy.net
"Thinking-East is a splendid source of on-the-ground information on Central Asia. Its authors give voices and faces to people who all too often only appear as statistics and cliches in the mainstream media."
Lutz Kleveman, author of The New Great Game. Blood and Oil in Central Asia
Thinking-East is a fresh, pioneering project started by two young Western academics to bring together young thinkers from North Africa, the Near and Middle East, and Central Asia to report and reflect upon issues that are important for their homelands. Too often the important issues are overlooked and always the voices of the educated youth - YOU - are ignored.
It is the dream and hope of Thinking-East that by offering regional young thinkers space to publish their ideas in English, unrestrained from the agendas of established publishers and political-intellectual elites, bit by bit we can effect positive changes in our troubled era.
Thinking-East is seeking Guest and Permanent Authors from Central Asia:
-> Guests may submit any article at any time.
-> Permanent Authors commit to submitting at least one article every two months. In return, they become members of the Thinking-East network, an Internet community now stretching from New York City, London and Berlin to Jerusalem, Tashkent and Bishkek, with increasing publicity and growing institutional ties to other reporting projects and youth movements in Central Asia and the United States.
Students of journalism, the social sciences and humanities are preferred, but all our welcome. Furthermore, you do not need to have any prior experience in writing, reporting or activism.
Thinking-East publishes articles of any type (written and photographic essays, interviews, videos, edited e-mail debates, etc.). All published articles are freely licensed to their original authors. The project provides free English language editing for all submissions.
If you are interested or would like more information, please contact us:
Ben Paarmann
Editor
ben@thinking-east.net
Tel: 0044 7906 712 699
"True investigative journalism is more than just detective work... it bears witness and investigates ideas."
John Pilger, Australian journalist
September 09, 2004
Thinking East #2
Schwartz and I will take some energy away from this blog - putting it into a new project called 'Thinking East'. We will start looking for other contributors, soon. Our new statement follows:
Ours is a time of new frontiers in religion, science, politics, economics and morality. The boundaries of human civilization are reaching once unimaginable new heights, with results both glorious and grotesque... and all of these frontiers are violently converging upon one terrain: North Africa, Israel and the Arab States, Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia – the spine of the Earth – the East.The earliest migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa arrived in the regions of the East before anywhere else. The epic struggles of the Bible and Qur’an unfolded here. Across this tumultuous landscape stretched the Silk Road, the great caravan route of precious metals, spices and fabrics, for the mastery of which warred the empires of the Classical Age.
Today, scholars, journalists and leaders are once again recognizing the region as the linchpin of civilization. The collapse of the Soviet Union has left a vacuum which has changed and charged the geopolitical composition. Local and world powers now vie to control a new Silk Road, a great transit route of oil and natural gas, radical religious ideologies, and drug and human smuggling.
Yet, the conceptual frameworks of the global intelligentsia are too deeply rooted in the fossilized thinking of the Cold War to truly understand just what it is that is happening in this multifarious region. Innovative visions are desperately needed.
Thinking-East.Net is a nonprofit e-publishing platform, started by two young academics for other young academics who believe they can develop innovative thinking about current events in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia; who are daring enough to physically and intellectually trek across the manifold thematic borderlands posed to the human mind by the modern “Wild East.” The network specifically seeks individuals under the age of 25, wherever they may be in Asia, whatever their expertise (preferably politics, social sciences, etc.), whatever their race, gender and religion, who are not professional journalists but seek to thoughtfully cover and reflect upon Asian issues.
For more information, please don't hesitate to contact us.
July 21, 2004
Would you like to do something positive this summer?
A friend asked me to put that one up:
Join a photo competition!
Young & Equal, a new youth network for gender equality run by a group of very enthusiastic young people from Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, invites you to join a photo competition called
“INEQUALITY BETWEEN MEN and WOMEN AS SEEN BY YOUTH”
Photographs submitted to the competition will be displayed at least in four major cities of the regions where Young & Equal are represented in fall 2004, as well as on the website of Young & Equal.
The author of the best work will be awarded a digital camera.
CRITERIA:
You must be 14 to 28 years old, live in Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, Afghanistan or Eastern Europe.
Residents of other regions are welcome to participate - your entries will be displayed, but will not be eligible for competition.
Entries will be selected on the basis of their originality, creativity and impact.
HOW and WHEN to send your photograph(s):
The deadline is 25 August 2004
- Photograph(s) should be e-mailed in JPEG format to young_equal@yahoo.co.uk
You may send up to 5 photographs
- Each photograph should be sent with text (500 words maximum) containing the following information:
1. Your name, age, occupation, postal address, telephone number and e-mail address.
2. Title of your work and a short explanation of where and how the image was taken, if desired.
3. You may send photographs taken by other people (your family, friends, from books, magazines, newspapers, Internet, etc) – however, you MUST make note of it. Please provide a detailed description of where you obtained the photograph if it is not your work.
PLEASE NOTE THAT ENTRIES SUBMITTED WITHOUT THE INFORMATION REQUESTED IN 1, 2 AND 3 WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED.
If you have questions about this contest, please write us at young_equal@yahoo.co.uk
GOOD LUCK!!!
- YOUNG & EQUAL -
July 12, 2004
Thinking East
As previously announced, Schwartz and I had been planning to launch a project beyond this rather personal weblog. Things got sorted out within the last two weeks, and we are proud to give birth to Thinking East, a nonprofit e-publishing platform. Our preliminary mission statement:
Israel, Turkey, the Caucasus, the Arabs, Iran and the ‘Stans –- these peoples and places comprise the eternal frontier of human history. Welcome to the Wild East!The earliest migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa arrived here before anywhere else. The epic struggles of the Bible and Qur’an unfolded here. Across this tumultuous landscape stretched the Silk Road, the great caravan route of precious metals, spices and fabrics, for the mastery of which warred the empires of the Classical Age.
Today, scholars, journalists and leaders are once again recognizing the region as the linchpin of civilization. The collapse of the Soviet Union left a vacuum which has changed and charged the geopolitical composition. Local and world powers now vie to control a new Silk Road, a great transit route of oil and natural gas, radical religious ideologies, and drug and human smuggling.
Yet, the conceptual frameworks of the global intelligentsia are too deeply rooted in the fossilized thinking of the Cold War to truly understand just what it is that is happening in this multifarious region. Innovative visions are badly needed.Thinking-East.Net is a nonprofit e-publishing platform for young academics daring enough to physically and intellectually trek across the manifold thematic borderlands posed to the human mind by the Wild East. The network specifically seeks individuals under the age of 25 who are not professional journalists but seek to thoughtfully cover and reflect upon Asian issues.
Thanks to Ollie from Berlin-based creative design manufacture Graco, we will be able to use an innovative content-management-system, allowing us to enable people from the concerned countries to directly publish and share their ideas with interested readers.
More is yet to come as the ideas will take shape within the next weeks.
May 07, 2004
Elena's Motorcyle Ride through Chernobyl
Although this does not have anything to do with Central Asia, I thought it might be worth putting up. Elena, a Ukrainian bike-rider, has made a photo-documentary about her favourite destination, the Chernobyl death-zone - which became a 'no-go' area after the fatal accident in 1986. The website was reviewed quite often in Germany, however, I don't know whether it found attention over here. It showcases breathtaking insights from the inner circle - a place where life suddenly came to an end. A visit to the website is highly recommended, though it leaves you with a strange feeling in your stomach.
From the website:
I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.
The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.
In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now.
As I pass through the check point, I feel that I have entered an unreal world. In the dead zone, the silence of the villages, roads, and woods seem to tell something at me....something that I strain to hear....something that attracts and repels me both at the same time. It is divinely eerie - like stepping into that Salvador Dali painting with the dripping clocks.
April 29, 2004
Let’s make an “information explosion” on the situation in Uzbekistan!
A friend of mine from Kyrgyzstan has asked me to put this one up:
30 April – 1 May 2004 there will be “Information explosion” on the Internet to demonstrate the power of the net which was shown during the March events in Uzbekistan when authorities once again employed the traditional means of information (blockade), with the result that large numbers of people turned to Internet as their main source of real information.
On the morning of 30 April, 100 participants, including journalists, analysts and sociologists, are gathering in Osh, Kyrgyzstan to discuss various aspects of free media development in Central Asia and the situation in Uzbekistan. They will compose a number of questions about the recent developments in Uzbekistan and their consequences.
These questions will be posted on www.fergana.ru at 10:00 am Uzbek time on the morning of 30 April.
We would like to invite everyone to join the “Information explosion” which will not only distribute information about the situation in Uzbekistan and increase the level of discussion about it, but also show the power of the Internet, as of a new type of mass media.
This action is conducted by a UK-based magazine “Index on Censorship” – www.indexonline.org
April 27, 2004
Links
By the way, hier sind die Links zu den Organisationen:
- http://www.opendemocracy.org
