Not since the Satanic Verses madness have Muslims been as up in arms about so-called blasphemy. The Washington Post:

Additonally, the muslim world’s two main political bodies — the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, with respectively 22 and 57 member states — will be seeking a UN resolution banning “attacks on religious beliefs.”

Meanwhile, in the Sudan:

As noted in a recent post, the Sudanese regime continues to sponsor such attacks. Yet to my knowledge, neither of these organizations has made any kind of brouhaha over the matter, let alone sought UN declarations. Indeed, in March the Arab League is to hold its summit in Khartoum, perhaps there to continue its foaming at the mouth over the cartoons.

Sudan on its part has denied a Danish government minister permission to visit and asked its national companies to boycott all Danish goods, al-Jazeera reports.

Sudanese defense minister Abdel Rahim Mohammad Hussein declines to welcome his Danish counterpart to Sudan

And thus the Arab nations have turned hypocrisy into an art form more sublime than any pencilwork.

I will return to this topic.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

They say his music boosts your IQ and makes cows produce more milk. I don’t know if this is true, let alone whether he is the “greatest” composer ever. But the unbelievable legacy of the world’s only posthumous pop star speaks for itself!

In a book cheesily entitled Mozart and the Wolf Gang, written for a previous anniversary, Anthony Burgess — who himself was trained as a composer — muses thus:

We often forget how recent is Mozart’s place in the trinity of “all-time greatest,” alongside Bach and Beethoven. It was secured in the post-WW2 era, before which he was mostly thought of as an opera composer. Also, it owes deeply to conductors like Böhm and von Karajan striving to make of Mozart what he isn’t: a Grand Heroic Symphonist in the Teutonic mould. It’s funny to hear these recordings now, when more authentic performances informed by historical research are the ideal. But it says a lot about this music that it remains so stylish even when shoehorned into an alien romantic form.

Burgess concludes:

Today the world is celebrating Mozart’s 250th anniversary. Far better than fireworks is the exuberant final movement from the “Jupiter.”

Update: downloads now closed.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

“Kofi Annan,” writes Nicholas Kristof in the February 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, “while trying to help Darfur, has been trapped in his innate politeness. He should be using his position to express outrage about the slaughter, but he seems incapable of the necessary degree of fury.”

As if to prove this point, yesterday’s Washington Post carried a characteristically flaccid opinion by the UN Secretary-General on what his High Commissioner for Refugees simultaneously called the “largest and most complex humanitarian problem on the globe.” But for all the blandness of his prose, Annan aptly summarizes the status quo:

People in many parts of Darfur continue to be killed, raped and driven from their homes by the thousands. The number displaced has reached 2 million, while 3 million (half the total population of Darfur) are dependent on international relief for food and other basics. Many parts of Darfur are becoming too dangerous for relief workers to reach. The peace talks are far from reaching a conclusion. And fighting now threatens to spread into neighboring Chad, which has accused Sudan of arming rebels on its territory.

Despite a chronic funding crisis, A.U. [African Union] troops in Darfur are doing a valiant job. People feel safer when the troops are present. But there are too few of them — a protection force of only 5,000, with an additional 2,000 police and military observers, to cover a territory the size of Texas. They have neither the equipment nor the broad mandate they would need to protect the people under threat or to enforce a cease-fire routinely broken by the rebels, as well as by the Janjaweed militia and Sudanese government forces.

Seven thousand lightly armed troops are now supposed to secure a virtually roadless area larger than France. Consequently, Annan is prevailing upon the Security Council to replace the AU operation with a “larger, more mobile and much better equipped” UN peacekeeping mission. “Those countries that have the required military assets must be ready to deploy them,” he affirms.

Aye, there’s the rub: “We, western countries, we are not ready to send troops there despite the fact that what is going on there is very serious,” admits Jean-Christophe Belliard, a French diplomat and top advisor to the EU. It certainly is serious: the UN estimates the death toll at 100,000 a month if and when Darfur collapses completely. With the black rebel movements taking the fight to the enemy using increasingly heavy weapons, probably supplied by Chad, which has announced a “state of belligerence” with Sudan, that could well happen this year. Meanwhile the Janjaweed is escalating the humanitarian disaster, burning abandoned villages and driving cattle up from southern Darfur to ruin the crops.

Janjaweed commanders. Photo: Amy Costello

As for the unreadiness to send troops, it has to do with commitments in Afghanistan — and, in regard to at least two central NATO members, an exercise in futility elsewhere. Now, western forces are not ideal for this region in any case. And arguably, the 51 other members of the AU should be able to produce more troops, at least if funding can be arranged from the West. After all, military forces are the one thing that continent has in abundance. But as Annan told Le Monde during a previous genocide, they “probably need their armies to intimidate their own populations.” (See, Mr. Annan, you know how to bell the cat when you want to.)

Also, “we, western countries” aren’t too eager to even contribute financially. The EU has cut off support. The US was asked for $50 million to help fund the AU mission until March. These the Bush administration put into the DoD budget, whereupon the US Congress — whose both chambers have unanimously declared the situation to be “genocide” under the 1948 Convention — unceremoniously crossed them out. True, western countries have donated handsomely to humanitarian aid. But what Kristof says about the US holds in general: we have “provided abundant band-aids-so that when children were slashed with machetes, we could treat their wounds. But we did nothing about the attacks themselves.”

Besides machetes, the said attacks have a number of remarkable characteristics.

According to the report, during one attack in June last year, Arab women allegedly stood by during rapes, joyfully singing: “The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God.”

This blood-churdling chant is instructive, so let us examine its elements in turn.

The first sentence cuts to the core of the ethnic conflict: since the 1980s, desertification has pitted Arabic-speaking camel- and cattle herders against non-Arabic speaking farmers in a ferocious struggle over water. Tougher and much more mobile, the herders have the edge, and we get Genesis 4 inverted: Abel slaying Cain. This is an ancient pattern of warfare.

But as the second sentence suggests, Abel has friends in high places. The al-Bashir military regime in Khartoum has been backing the ethnic cleansing, probably to remove the demographic basis for two rebel movements which took up arms in 2003 in response to discrimination and neglect from the central government. Nicholas Kristof:

To cap it off, Khartoum has systematically deployed its air force against villages, letting Antonov supply craft drop barrel bombs filled with metal shards and using MiGs and helicopter gunships for added punch.

Drawing by Taha, a child survivor

The ending of the chant — “we have killed your God” — is puzzling: unlike the north/south civil war, all parties in this conflict are Muslims. The mystery deepens when we learn of systematic burning of mosques, desecration of Qur’ans, and targeting of imams.

The explanation can only be that the Janjaweed don’t acknowledge the blacks as fellow Muslims, regarding them as unworthy of Islam. But why? Presumably because they consider them racially inferior. This, again, is absurd on the face of it, the Arabs being far from pale-skinned themselves. However, in his superb article “Arab Racism against Black Africans,” the Nigerian scholar Moses Ebe Ochonu offers some enlightenment:

And this “construction,” boosted during recent decades, has had its engineers. Writes Darfur specialist at the University of Bergen, Professor Sean O’Fahey:

This last is an interesting point. Let’s return to the chilling testimony of the victim quoted above: “[The Janjaweed tell us] that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish.” This matches many other eyewitness accounts, including ones in a 2004 BBC documentary, The New Killing Fields. Describing a typical attack on a Fur village wherein 80 children were burned alive or otherwise massacred, a rape victim reports that the aggressors “were saying: ‘The blacks are slaves, the blacks are stupid, catch them alive, tie them up, take them away with you.’ They would say: ‘Kill them.’” And here is an eye witness of another such attack: “I heard the horsemen, they said: ‘Kill them all, kill all of the slaves.’”

Arab with Sudanese slave girls, early 20th century

Though obscure and rarely discussed, there are over 1,300 years of precedence for Arabs enslaving black Africans. Starting around 650 AD and continuing even today in places like Mauritania and Sudan, this ancient tradition is estimated to have involved between 11,000,000 and 15,000,000 slaves – numbers equal to or exceeding the more short-lived Atlantic trade. (For more on this in the context of Central Africa, see this previous piece of mine.) Apparently, the racist sentiments associated with this vile tradition are alive and kicking, having lent themselves well to manipulation by the Khartoum regime.

Which brings us back to practicalities and how to deal with the latter. For while a UN peacekeeping mission will be hard to man, equip, and fund, the biggest hurdle is likely to be the Khartoum regime’s allies in the Security Council. As the scholar Eric Reeves puts it in a brilliant recent article, “the real question is whether the US will use its diplomatic and political leverage within the UN Security Council to support an authorizing resolution, and to address the clear threat of a Russian or Chinese veto.”

Of course, moral leadership from these is best sought at the bottom of a bottomless pit. China gobbles up nearly all of Sudan’s oil and is reluctant to disturb the flow. Russia peddles weapons to Khartoum. As to the US, it is now painfully clear that the Bush administration’s interest in Darfur flagged soon upon its reelection. Reeve’s article devotes a whole section to its naked hypocrisy, concluding so: “Collectively, the actions by the Bush administration State Department and the CIA amount to virtually complete acquiescence before what it has described as ‘genocide’ in Darfur.”

And so it goes. But next time, world leaders should spare us all that pious cant about “never again.”

In February 2005 a bizarre incident was reported in news media the world across: a 20-foot statue of King Léopold II (1835-1909) on horseback was reerected near Kinshasa’s central station after having spent four decades in an open-air dump. The statue was removed a few hours later, but would, according to Culture Minister Christophe Muzungu, be restored to a prominent location in a grand ceremony. The minister said people should not just see the negative side of the king, but also the positive aspects. “We are restoring the history of our country because a people without history is a people without a soul,” he declared.

That is one way of looking at it. Another was succintly put by Richard H. Davis in his book The Congo and Coasts of Africa (1907), based on travels in the country then King Léopold’s personal fiefdom: “Happy is the country without a history!”

The Congo has had no such luck. As we saw in the first installment of this series, four centuries of slave trade had already left a devastating impact on the societies of the Congo at the dawn of the colonial period. Yet the worst was still to come. The historian Robert Edgerton:

Who then was this tyrant of the rain forest, to be honored with statues by the descendants of his hapless victims? Léopold II of Belgium, a first cousin of Queen Victoria known for his sly and deceitful nature, was an unlikely imperial ruler. He was, after all, the purely titular monarch of a tiny country barely four decades old, composed of two ethnic factions and faced with a constant threat of annexation by greater powers. Despite this, or perhaps rather because of it, he kept harping on the boons of overseas expansion: “[S]ince history teaches that colonies are useful, that they play a great part in that which makes up the power and prosperity of states, let us strive to get one in our turn.” But his countrymen flatly refused.

For the Parliament, colonies meant huge investments in administration, education, infrastructure, and health care, with at best uncertain prospects of return, especially as economic analysis had shown free trade to be as profitable. Leopold’s dreams of empire by purchase - buying land on Fiji and Formosa; buying lakes on the Nile and draining them out; buying an island from Argentina; buying land in China, Vietnam, and Japan; buying the Philippines - all came to nought. Until, that is, he on January 7 1876 came across a brief note on the bottom of page six in The Times, which cited the explorer Verney Lovett Cameron on the “unspeakable richness” awaiting an “enterprising capitalist” in the Congo.

To get “a slice of this magnificent African cake,” which due to its inaccessibility had still escaped European conquest, Léopold concocted a three-step plan.

The first step came later that year as he hosted a conference in Brussels, gathering the leading explorers, scientists, and geographers of the day. Proposing to “open to civilisation the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate, to pierce the darkness that envelopes entire populations,” he secured the founding of an international philantropic society to be known as the Association Internationale Africaine (AIA). Léopold became the chair and only shareholder of what was in effect a private holding company with its own flag - a bright star shining in the center of a dark blue surface - and funded by a multinational banking consortium.

The next step, undertaken in 1878, was to hire as his agent the legendary Henry M. Stanley, just returned from his epic quest for David Livingstone. Stanley had for some time been trying to interest the British government in colonizing the land he had been mapping, without success. The King’s instructions were clear: “It is not a question of Belgian colonies. It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible, and of running it [without] granting the slightest political power to the negroes. That would be absurd.” Stanley, a ruthless man considered by the notorious Tippu Tip a worse slave driver than any Arab, set to work using trinkets; an electric handshake to suggest supernatural strength; and as a last resort, naked force. Thus he persuaded 450 chiefs to sign away their lands, and the labor of their peoples, “for all posterity.”

Stanley’s compass pointing out the course of the Congo upon his water-stained map, photographed at Christie’s, 2002

Five expeditions later, in 1885, the AIA had established a string of trading stations along the Congo River. The uppermost one, the “Inner Station” in Joseph Conrad’s immortal novella Heart of Darkness, was located at Stanley Falls by agreement with Tippu Tip, who had his own bases there. Tip, the last of the great Zanzibari slave traders, would in fact be made a district governor of the entity created by Leópold’s final step.

In this brilliant move, Léopold had the AIA morph into a sovereign state with himself as chef d’état. By deft maneuvers centered on free trade guarantees, the “treaties” collected by Stanley, and a vow to combat the slave trade, he won diplomatic acceptance for this novelty. (Portugal’s claim to the Congo based upon Cão’s 1482 “discovery” was defused by a public campaign in Britain highlighting the crimes of the past, and the other powers were pitted against each other.) In April 1884, after relentless lobbying in Washington, the US recognized the AIA’s flag as that of a friendly government. 13 nations followed suit at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, where most of Africa’s current borders were drawn up with pen and ruler.

Thus Léopold had pulled off what reason would suggest to be impossible: acquiring a region the size of India and bigger than Germany, England, Italy, France, and Spain combined, as probably the only private colony in history. Generous loans from Belgium enabled the new absolute monarch to get up and going his enterprise, which he for good measure baptized “The Congo Free State.”

The Berlin Act called for “effective occupation” of the territory, a requirement to which Leópold had no objection. The key to this was the creation in 1886 of the “Force Publique,” a mercenary-led “conscription army” based upon levies placed on local chiefs and on forced recruitment of children it rendered orphans. Led by European officers, armed with modern weaponry and peaking at nearly 20,000 men, it brutally quashed all resistance (”pacification”), forcing the Congolese to do their new master’s bidding. Between May and October 1887 alone, some 60,000 porters carried almost 1,000 tons of freight, mostly disassembled steamers, the 250 miles from Boma to the capital Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). Thousands died from the strain. In 1890 the slaves started on a railroad over the Crystal Mountains, completed eight years later. Now the Congo was open for business.

Hitherto the chief commodity pursued by Léopold’s men had been ivory. Unforgettably described in Conrad’s novella, which is inspired by the author’s stint as a steamer captain on the river in 1890, this trade was not all that profitable; the King ran up a troubling deficit. Over the next decade, however, the red numbers would turn a shiny black as the focus shifted to another natural resource of the Congo’s forests. The invention of the inflatable tire led to an insatiable demand for the sap from rubber wines.

This rubber boom would bear out a wry observation made by some American in 1885: Léopold related to the Congo just as Rockefeller did to Standard Oil. Incidentally, Rockefeller capital was itself involved via the American Congo Company, one of the numerous private contractors granted local monopolies on extracting rubber in return for half the proceeds. Such concessions were Léopold’s way of circumventing the Berlin Act’s ban on “a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters of trade.” Though trade was nominally free, Léopold declared by fiat that all rubber belonged to “the State”; thus there was nothing to buy or sell. He controlled many of the private companies himself and even reserved the better part of the Congo for his exclusive exploitation.

However, this was by far the least unethical side of his operation. Influenced by a book called Java, or How to Manage a Colony by a British attorney named Money, he had realized from the start that only a liberal use of slavery would return a handsome profit. He therefore unleashed a reign of terror upon his 20 million subjects to, as he put it, instill in them “a higher idea of the necessity of labor.” The slavery was imposed in the guise of “taxation.” Bertrand Russell sums it up well:

In the words of a stunned missionary, Léopold had created “a system of devilry hitherto undreamed of by his victims.” A late 19th century native song goes like this: “We are tired of living under this tyranny. We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away and dealt with by the white savages. We shall make war…. We know that we shall die, but we want to die. We want to die.”

The royal slave army, with its artillery and machine guns, unfailingly fulfilled such wishes. It even found the time to defeat the forces of the remaining Afro-Arab slavers, on whom it waged ferocious wars concluded by 1894. This was not necessarily to the advantage of the Congolese, however:

One of said blacks is on recording as lamenting: “No, we are not even slaves.”

On the bright side, profits could reach up to 700 percent. Léopold’s exorbitant returns, which he reinvested to make at least a billion in present-day dollars, financed lavish villas for Caroline: the prostitute teenage mistress he later married. He spent the equivalent of $6 million to enhance his palace at Laeken. To the 1897 World Fair in Brussels he contributed three artificial villages showcasing 267 Congolese who would sing, dance and conduct mock “tribal battles” for the spectators. By the toil of their countrymen the site of this human zoo would eventually become the sumptuous Cinquantenaire park with its Triumphal Arc, one of many public works that now grace the EU capital and have earned their donor a nice cognomen: “the Builder King.”

His underlings in the Free State had their own decoration projects. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, Force Publique commander Léon Rom ornated the fence posts around his flowerbeds with human heads on poles; he also had a rock garden full of rotting heads. An agent named Moray recounts the butchery of a village deemed insufficiently busy at work: “Thereupon the officer ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, and to hang the women and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.” This was, after all, a Christian civilizing mission.

As mentioned, troops were instructed to bring back a right hand for each cartridge fired. American missionary Joseph Clark reports in a letter of April 12 1895 that “it is blood-curdling to see them returning with hands of the slain and to find the hands of young children, amongst bigger ones, evidencing their ‘bravery.’” Indeed, hands and other limbs were routinely hacked off the living, smoked, and brought forth in baskets at the feet of officers to extract more bullets or prove that native ’sloth’ had been duly punished. Many units on patrol had a designated “keeper of the hands.”

Children mutilated by the soldiers. Photo: Lachlan Vass

Then there were certain other vices of the royal gendarmerie.

Click here for the famous photograph of Nsala staring at the scant remains of his daughter.

Unlike mass mutiliation, cannibalism did have a precedent in pre-colonial Congo, but it was not as widespread and brutal as it turned after the Arab slave trade had unraveled traditional societies. In the Free State period things deteriorated further. Much of the Force Publique was recruited from the most savage peoples of the Upper Congo, where the slave trade had hit the hardest; now cannibals with breechloading rifles were unleashed on the entire region. On occasion it was used as a means of terror: one would seal off a recalcitrant village and send in the cannibals, who were known to consume their victims more or less alive. White officers too ate human flesh. Meanwhile, Léopold, who never set foot in his fiefdom but kept informed, exulted in his newsletter: “The many horrors and atrocities which disgrace humanity give way little by little before our intervention.”

Léopold’s big lie did not go long unchallenged. The expression ‘crimes against humanity’ was coined as early as 1890 in a 16-page open letter to the King from George Washington Williams, an Afro-American minister and reporter whom the Belgian state had sent on an investigative tour. Though long extracts of his letter were published on both sides of the Atlantic, Williams’ account was largely ignored and he died the following year. His mantle was however donned by another Afro-American: William Sheppard (see photo), a Presbyterian missionary and himself the son of a slave. Sometimes known as “the black Livingstone,” Sheppard made pioneering use of photographic evidence. The Congo Free State sued him for libel and lost.

In time, such whistle-blowers would rally around the Englishman Edmund D. Morel. A shipping agent working in Antwerp for a major Liverpool line, Morel had made some intriguing observations. First, ships arrived from the Congo crammed with valuables (the difference between the real and the official value amounted to tens of millions in 2005 dollars). Second, the Free State imported chiefly guns and ammo. Inferring that he had “stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a [partner],” Morel quit his job in 1901 to found an activist newspaper. For the next twelve years he devoted his every waking hour to attacking “the system that is eating into the vitals of Africa.”

In 1904 Morel established the Congo Reform Association along with Roger Casement, the former British consul in the Congo, whose vivid accounts of flogging, murder, and the wholesale annihilation of villages outraged the British public. However, the Association was shunned by most European governments and the US, neither of whom wanted diplomatic unpleasantries. It was also fiercely resisted by Léopold’s international propaganda machine. For instance, a book-length shilling effort published in 1905 by a certain H. W. Wack concludes on this lofty proposition:

That appearance notwithstanding, the Congo Reform Association grew, enlisting such celebrity champions as Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The first mass human rights movement in the 20th century, it was instrumental in shaming the Belgian Parliament into annexing the territory in 1908 - two years before it was contract-bound to do so anyway and eight years after it could have. Though the murders and slavery continued for a few more years, claiming an additional million lives, they had by the end of WWI been replaced with a kinder, gentler form of exploitation.

There were also less uplifting yet arguably more important reasons for the said transition. For one thing, industrial demand for wild rubber was being eclipsed by that for cultivated rubber, so that looting the Congo ceased to be as profitable. For another, labor was becoming a resource too scarce to waste by the methods which, together with the ensuing humanitarian disaster, had slashed the population in half in 23 years. The estimated death toll of ten million exceeds that of WWI.

One might expect this Holocaust-scale crime firmly to establish Léopold II and his business associates in the “monsters of history” hall of infamy, but this never really happened; and least of all in Belgium. Upon annexing the Congo the Belgian Parliament not only compensated the previous owner with 50 million francs to be drawn from there; it also commended his “grands sacrifices en faveur du Congo.”

Indeed, a mere decade after his death the following year, his compatriots had mostly forgotten about the scandal. At the famous colonial Tervuren museum in Brussels, there is still no mention of it. In 1995 Gerard Jacques, a former top diplomat who had just retired as head of the King’s ceremonial office, published a book which unabashedly charges: “The vicious campaign against Leopold II was caused by the greed of his adversaries [whose] campaign against the Congolese ‘atrocities’ culminated in the establishment of the Congo Reform Association in England.” And the airing in April 2004 of a BBC documentary film on the horrors was protested by the Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, who denounced it as “biased and unnuanced”; the Belgian royal house, which usually stands aloof from such matters nowadays, expressed “concern.”

Even among historians the story was largely unknown until the 1970s when Jules Marchal, then the Belgian ambassador to Liberia, saw a passing reference to a democide of ten million people in a local newspaper - ironically mirroring how King Léopold “discovered” the Congo a century before. Looking into this preposterous claim in order to refute it, he learned that the few surviving documents not burned by Léopold in a week-long bonfire had been classified by Belgian authorities. This spurred Marchal to produce a trailblazing four-volume work that rescued the atrocities from the memory hole, making him a successor to Edmund Morel. His treatise became the basis of Adam Hochschild’s best-selling King Leopold’s Ghost, in turn leading R. J. Rummel, the noted historian of modern genocide, to significantly revise upwards the sum total of people murdered by government in the 20th century.

Statue or no, King Léopold keeps haunting the Congo. In its 46th year of independence, what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a treasury plundered by private armies to benefit wealthy foreigners, not seldom through non-voluntary labor. So it was perhaps darkly fitting when on independence day June 30 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium, himself a major stockholder in a mining company established by his grand-uncle, declared: “The independence of the Congo is the crowning of the work conceived by the genius of King Léopold II.”

These inflammatory words drew an impassioned reply from the infant nation’s first prime minister, to this day the only democratically elected leader in the history of the Congo. But less than 7 months later, Patrice Émery Lumumba had been literally liquidated by Belgian government agents in the wake of a CIA-sponsored coup.

And that shall be the focus of the next installment in this series.

In theory, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) should be among the richest countries on earth. After all, its vast territory brims with cobalt; copper; cadmium; oil; industrial and gem diamonds; coltan; flaggold; silver, zinc; manganese; tin; germanium; uranium; radium; bauxite; iron ore; timber; coal; and hydroelectric potential. Yet the DRC consistently ranks in the bottom ten of the Human Development Index. In its northeastern region the deadliest conflict since WWII continues to claim about 1,000 lives a day. Not inappropriately then, the name of the capital Kinshasa, where nearly 80% dwell in slums or squatter settlements, derives from the word kinsasa, meaning “why are things happening this way?”

This series of mine on Congolese history seeks to shed some light on why. The first two installments appeared in slightly different form on various other websites, including dKos and Booman Tribune.

The initial entry, below, looks at how the advanced Kongo Kingdom fell prey to the European - and later, Arab - slave trade that began in the 16th century, robbing the region of no less a resource than its people.

You may want to start with my primer on the stunning lay of the land.

On the ancient maps, regions marked terra incognita were not left blank but rather filled in by the imagination. And in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, European mapmakers would conjure up two-headed people, dragons, and the fabled Prester John. Thus the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão must have been astounded when in 1482, arriving by chance at the Congo’s mouth, he found an organized society with a common language and a stratified political system - not at all unlike the fledgling nation-states of Europe.

Cão and his crew were the first Europeans ever to hit upon a large-scale foreign civilization. This was the Kongo Kingdom, evolved in the late 14th century when a bundle of Iron Age chiefhoods joined into a federation governed by a king. At its height extending from present-day northwestern Angola to Gabon and from the river’s mouth to Malebo Pool, the Kongo enjoyed a number of satelite states; a powerful urban nobility; the cultivation of twelve kinds of vegetables with a different one becoming ripe each month of the year; a complex religion with belief in an afterlife; sophisticated crafts including copper metallurgy; a money economy; and trade routes stretching thousands of miles across the African continent. The king (Manikongo) could levy an 80,000 strong army if required and maintained an elaborate court in the capital, Mbanza Kongo.

A representation of the first encounter between Portuguese and Bakongo. The latter initially thought the former to be water spirits.

Spurred by Cão’s discovery, a Portuguese expedition arrived at this capital in 1491 and was warmly welcomed by the king, Nzinga Nkuma. The travelers, impressed with the dignity and civilized mores of the Bakongo (people of the Kongo), were invited to build mission schools and churches. Indeed the Franciscan missionaries secured the prompt conversion of the king, who was baptized Dom João I - the name of his Portuguese counterpart. They also administered a decade of religious instruction to Nzinga Mbemba, the first-born son of his principal wife, who succeeded his father in 1506 or 1507. His seizure of the throne was a clear violation of tradition contingent upon the imported European notion of primogeniture and backed by Portuguese cavalry and rifles.

Better known as Afonso I, the new Manikongo was not only a zealous Christian but an aficionado of European culture, science and statecraft. On a 1514 visit to Portugal during which he amazed his hosts with his great piety, he plowed through five thick volumes of Portuguese law and remarked on its excessive harshness. He made Christianity the state religion, built churches and introduced an extensive program of education for the nobility. One of his sons became a professor in the humanities in Lisbon and another, Henrique, became the first black African Bishop in the Catholic Church - as well as the last until 1970.

Unfortunately, in keeping with the traditions of his society, Afonso agreed with the Church that slavery was consistent with the faith. Little did he know that this stance, and the Faustian bargain built upon it, would spell the doom of his civilization.

There is little doubt that slavery was a long-established practice in the Kongo, and apparently slaves could be bought and sold. However, a majority of the population were free subjects, slaves being either convicts; debtors; members of other societies captured in war; or children given away in dowry settlements. Most were domestic servants in noble households and fairly benignly treated. They were status symbols more than means to profit - until Afonso unwisely sold the Portuguese a few.

The customers soon returned for more. Based farther north on the island of São Tomé (see map), slave traders used a panoply of devious tactics to secure the supply. One such was inciting communities to revolt against Afonso so they could legally wage war upon them and enslave the resultant prisoners. Another was extorting the king to sell them slaves by threatening to provide his aristocratic enemies with arms and other commodities or refuse to ship his other wares like copper, silver, ivory and peppers. Eventually Afonso resorted to raiding neighboring inland peoples to meet their demands. Though the considerable revenues financed the hiring of priests, artisans and teachers as well as luxuries for the ever-wealthier nobility, and enabled the empire to expand until it was one of the mightiest on the continent, these gains would prove sadly ephemeral.

By 1516 the Kongo was exporting 4,000 slaves annually. By the 1520s big equitorial areas were becoming depopulated. By the 1530s the slave trade had become so profitable that some Bakongo were selling off their family members; the Milky Way, which traced the axis of slaves from the inland to the coast, was nicknamed Nzila Bazombo - “the Road of the Slavers.” In several parts of Portugal more than half the population were slaves, and as the market was being saturated there increasing numbers were shipped across the Atlantic to work the mines and plantations of Brazil.

Upon Afonso’s death in the 1540s, which tellingly enough went unnoticed by his “royal brother,” the Devil would at last exact his due. The depopulation and social disruption wrought by the slave trade led to political disintegration as the country was thrown into turmoil, culminating in a 1568 foreign invasion from which it never recovered. Civil strife yielded ever new fodder to the slave trade, the proceeds from which financed ever more civil strife. Eight kings ruled between 1614 and 1641. In 1678, following a crushing defeat of the Bakongo by a Portuguese army, a visitor to the capital described it as an abandoned ruin where flocks of elephants roamed. The Kongo persisted for two further centuries as a nominal entity encompassing hundreds of tiny chiefdoms dependent on the slave trade. Today the Bakongo survives as an ethnic group of more than ten million, yet its political dissolution is complete: villages being fully independent, the ancient kingdom is but legend.

‘Der König im Congo,’ from Allain Manesson Mallet: Beschreibung des Gantzen Welt, vol. II. Frankfürt am Main 1685.

There is perhaps some poetic justice in the fact that Portugal too was ultimately ruined by the slave trade. Soaking in the cash flow and neglecting to reinvest, it lost control of the trade routes during the late 17th century as British, Spanish, French and Dutch traders appeared on the scene.

When effectively terminated by the end of the Napoleonic Wars following the British ban in 1807, the European slave trade had unraveled traditional communities throughout the Congo basin. In 1816 a British scientific expedition sailed up to the town of Boma, the farthest navigable point; its leader Captain James Tuckey found the locals to be “sulky looking vagabonds, dirty, swarming with lice.” He noted that they had been given only gunpowder, muskets and liquor in exchange for slaves.

As the European slave trade waned, other sharks began plying the waters. Though the Arab slave trade had long traditions on the continent, a major slave revolt near Basra in present-day Iraq significantly cut back its scale in the 9th century. However, by the late 18th century it had resurged with a vengeance - 50-70,000 slaves were now taken annually to the Middle East, some winding up in India or even China. By the 1880s it had accomplished what even the European slave trade did not: undoing the highly advanced Luba states in the Kasai province of present-day DRC.

Based on Zanzibar, Afro-Arab slavers and their local allies would conduct savage raids on villages, marching off their captives to East Africa in massive caravans the routes of which were littered with the corpses of the fallen.

“Slaves abandoned”; engraving based upon a sketch by David Livingstone. Originally in Horace Waller (ed): The Last Journals of David Livingstone. London 1874, p.62.

On June 27 1866, David Livingstone recorded in his diary: “To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation… One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.”

Like the European equivalent it gradually replaced, the Arab slave trade did much to depopulate the Congo and grind down its social structure. In his classic Dick Sand, Jules Verne describes the effect of the slavers’ raids:

The Arab slave trade would prove a brutal interlude between rounds of European exploitation. In 1878, the very year Verne’s book was published, the latter of the said explorers was hired by a scheming European king to establish a state on the wooded plateau. Authorized at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, where the heart of Africa was carved up by the Europeans, this project ostensibly aimed to end the Arab slave trade in the Congo Basin.

Aboard an Arab slave ship intercepted by the Royal Navy, 1869.

And so it did, but only to get rid of competition. For as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later remarked, King Léopold II of Belgium had a new idea in the name of progress: he would enslave the natives in their home to extract other riches. In the next installment of this series we shall move upstream to see the rainforest becoming a vast genocidal gulag designed for stealing rubber - the Congo Free State.

Her Excellency the Imperial Chancellor of the Outer Territories raps an errant provincial government on the fingers (NTB/Aftenposten):

“Serious political consequences” is just about the harshest diplomatic phrase there is, short of threatening war. As far as I recall, the US has never openly addressed Israel this way, nor the likes of Russia and China. Needless to say, no European country made such threats against the US over Guantánamo, prisoner flights, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, or even the Iraq war itself.

One wonders what the “consequences” might have come down to. Trade sanctions? Expulsion from NATO? Moving the US embassy to an even more attractive outdoors area?

The latter, I think, we should offer on our own account. Only the finest location suffices for where Norway’s foreign policy is fixed.

Crossposted and expanded from European Tribune.

That is the question up here in Norway, where the Socialist Left – the pop-radical maverick among three coalition partners – calls for a consumer boycott of Israel over its continuing occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in defiance of international law. (If the timing seems off, note that it was launched before Sharon fell ill.)

Last week, finance minister Kristin Halvorsen caused a diplomatic incident by backing the boycott in her capacity as party leader. This prompted the prime minister and the foreign minister, both from Labor, to stress that boycotting Israel “is not and will never be” government policy. Halvorsen was forced to retract, but her party continues its boycott campaign without her endorsement.

Now, most Norwegians will ignore the boycott. But should they – and others – join it? A tricky question.

First of all, any consumer boycott of Israel would be largely symbolic. The mainstay of Israeli exports isn’t oranges these days: look inside your computer for the stuff that is. One would have to eschew so many electronics, software, and hardware brands as to make an effective boycott unfeasible. But setting this aside, is it ethically sound to boycott Israel?

Per se, I don’t see why not. There is a catch, however. Where are the calls to boycott products from:

• China, for its continuing occupation of Tibet and oppression of the Uighurs?
• Russia, for its massive human rights violations in Chechnya?
• India, for persistently flaunting its promise of referendum in Kashmir?
• The US, the UK, Poland, Italy, & co, for aggressive warfare in breach of the UN Charter?

These are just the big guys; the list could go on for half a page. Is Israel worse than all these, and so deserving to be singled out?

The advocates of boycotting Israel point to a precedent: in the 1980s, South Africa was considered so beyond the pale as to be singled out in precisely this way. A case can be made for the analogy. Here is Ronnie Kasrils, a South African minister and a former commander in the ANC, writing with the journalist Victoria Brittain in a Guardian op-ed last year:

Persuasive? To some. The county parliament of Sør-Trøndelag, in mid Norway, has just adopted a boycott of Israeli products based on the supposed equivalence in question. But even aside from the historical context of the desire for a Jewish state, there are disanalogies. Although subject to de facto discrimination, the Palestinian Israeli minority is unquestionably better off than was the black South African majority.

That is not obviously so with the Palestinians of the occupied territories. Then again, these are not, nor do they wish to be, Israeli citizens. Most dispute Israel’s right to exist and many, probably most, support violent action against Israeli civilians. This by no means justifies the segregationist policies, but is a somewhat mitigating factor.

On the other hand, much of the anger would dissipate were said policies lifted following a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied land in accordance with UNSC Resolution 242 and its countless follow-ups.

In conclusion, I don’t find Israel quite as bad as apartheid South Africa. I do, however, find it bad enough to be singled out in a consumer boycott.

After returning this blog from hiatus, I tried reading it in Internet Explorer. This was a first, since IE, being the inferior browser it is, was uninstalled on my computer until a recent Windows XP upgrade.

And what does my eye spy? Unlike Opera and Firefox, IE displays the sidebar at the bottom of the page, starting where the main column ends. So for all these many months, visitors using IE - as most, inexplicably, do - have been unable to access the menu save by scrolling down. Death, where is thy sting?

If anyone has any idea how to fix this in WordPress 1.5 CSS, please drop a comment or an e-mail. I certainly don’t.

Meanwhile, let’s sing it together: Internet Explorer is a worthless excuse for a browser. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and visit one or both of these sites for a free download:

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5
• Opera 8.51 for Windows

So, which is better? For me, it’s a draw. Opera has the more functionality, but Firefox can be customized with extensions such as Adblock. On a Windows platform, Opera is a little faster; both are appreciably faster than IE. Both allow tabbed browsing.

And both display my sidebar where it belongs.

Update: thanks to Shana in the user forums, I found a fix. Of course, my indictment of Internet Explorer stands!

PS. Shana’s web development blog, 2+designs, is worth a look.

Crossposted with revision from European Tribune and My Left Wing.

“Chess is everything: art, science and sport,” said Anatoly Karpov. During the Cold War, it was also world politics, but those glory days have passed. Although chess is flourishing on the Internet and spreading like wildfire on the Asian continent, where it once originated, the sports dimension of the game is going through some trying times. Argues Daniel Johnson in Prospect Magazine:

Meanwhile, last year saw Garry Kasparov, larger-than-life personality and probably the strongest player in history, retire from the king-hunting business to rather take on a President, namely Ilyumzhinov’s patron, “the dictator Vladimir Putin.” (Listen to an interview with ABC: Windows Media Player; Real Audio Player.) The sport’s only other global icon is exiled on Iceland, barking mad. And as if this weren’t enough, the mystique of the chess Grandmaster is being challenged in the public mind by number-crunching contraptions.

The monsters are coming

Meet a talented young machine called Hydra:

In November, the (unsurprisingly) Dubai-based Hydra joined two of its kind to mop the floor with three former world champions in the annual Man vs. Machine exhibition match in Spain, which ended 8-4. The one game won by an organism had GM Ruslan Ponomariov blundering a pawn by forgetting, no less, the en passant rule (how’s that for human error?). In a strange fluke, however, his opponent – perhaps busy pondering whether meat can be sentient – suddenly threw the game.

Not that it takes 3,000-rated supercomputers to make mincemeat of the strongest gray matter. The 10th edition of Ubi Soft’s popular Chessmaster, which runs in the background as I write, features a 2002 online exhibition match in which its immediate predecessor scalps the then US Champion, GM Larry Christiansen, while by turns imitating three other previous world champs – Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer, and Mikhail Botvinnik (who said machines are short on personality?). It is not known whether the hardware also balanced itself on one corner, juggling balls.

“Thank you for a very enjoyable game.” HAL 9000 crushes Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

OK, we get it: the silicon stuff beats the natural, at least in this department. But then, who made the silicon? As John Searle, the famous philosopher of mind, remarked upon Kasparov’s deep blue day in 1997 (full report here), if the machinery in question were built by Martians or chimpanzees, then we might be in for some competition. As far as known, the IBM team didn’t include any chess proficient Martians; and as to chimpanzees, one must agree with Edward Lasker: “It has been said that man is distinguished from animal in that he buys more books than he can read. I should like to suggest that the inclusion of a few chess books would help to make the distinction unmistakable.” (The Adventure of Chess, 1949.)

In fact, as IM Eric Schiller pointed out to me: “The computer programs have extensive opening strategies which are 100% human-designed. Without these “opening books” the machines play terribly…. No computer unaided by a human-crafted opening book has ever defeated an accomplished chessplayer.”

Anyhow, for those still concerned about the pride of humankind, there remains the 4,000 year old game which Lasker helped introduce to the West: Go. It has been said that Go stands to chess as philosophy to double entry book-keeping, and though the rules are simple enough for a 3 year old to learn, the play emerging from those rules is too complex for a computer to best even a middling human.

Magnificent Magnus

There’s something special about prodigies that brute machines and mad dictators lack. At the moment, my country is seized by a modest chess fever on account of Magnus Carlsen, “the Mozart of Chess.” At 13 – about the time his biography appeared - he became the world’s youngest Grandmaster, the second youngest ever. By then the fearless attacker had drawn with Kasparov and defeated the likes of Alexei Shirov and Anatoly Karpov. Days after turning 15 on November 30 2005, Carlsen became the youngest ever World Championship candidate by sensationally finishing 10th in the FIDE World Cup. Neither Kasparov nor Fischer got that far until later in their careers. Can Magnus make it to the final? And could he be the new charismatic attraction the chess sport needs?

The boy wonder and the tyrant tycoon: Magnus and Kirsan in the FIDE World Cup.

While waiting for those answers, let’s treat ourselves to some belated New Year’s fireworks. Below are three brilliant wins by Carlsen, the last one against former prodigy Gata Kamsky, who lost the FIDE World Championship finale to Karpov in 1996.

If you’re ready for more extraordinary games, check out this annotated one between none other than God and the Devil - undeniably preferable, I submit, to betting on poor Job.

Inspired to play, but rusty on the rules? Try this amusing tutorial.

Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre on the set of ‘Casablanca.’

North Africa has become a transit point for multitudes of sub-Saharan Africans who fling themselves at the walls of Fortress Europe. But sub-Saharans are not alone in scrambling to cross the straits of Gibraltar, Europe’s Rio Grande. Every year, for example, tens of thousands of Moroccans risk their lives on ramshackle rafts; countless others strive by other means to join their millions of countrymen in Europe. Of those who make it, 90 percent stay for good. The annual €2-3 billion they send back home are a major source of national income.

These are developments of the last generation. In colonial times, Europe imported food from, and exported people to, North Africa; since the 1970s, the reverse has held. One reason is that the EU’s export subsidies and import tariffs have damaged the regional agriculture, boosting urbanization and unemployment. Meanwhile, the population has exploded, one third of the total population now being younger than 15. In Egypt the median age is 20 and up to every fourth male is without a job.

On top of this are various other trends. Since the 80s, the rooftops of North Africa have been littered with satellite dishes reaping dreams of Europe from the skies. In Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt the tourist boom offers direct exposure to Western consumerism, transforming the social fabric and stretching traditional norms to the breaking point. Vacationing members of the diaspora relish in displaying whatever wealth they have amassed, which can be impressive by local standards. Yet the grass on the other side of the fence need not, upon closer inspection, be all that greener. Prejudice and social strictures ensure as much.

In what follows I will try to portray, if only in glimpses, a few of the people with Europe on their minds whom I have met on travels in the region. I apologize for the gender-skewed selection; one does not, as a male outsider, get in touch with lots of females in this part of the world. Most names have been changed for anonymity.

I find myself on Interrail with two friends, taking the ferry from Algeciras and proceeding down the coast by public transportation. In Asilah, a pictoresque whitewashed town southeast of Tangier, we make the acquaintance of a lively hassler and hashish dealer named Abdul. Not long ago he married Mette, a Danish tourist. Late one night he shows us the wedding photos: they depict an odd but happy couple, the vaguely coarse-looking bride being taller by a head.

Their Moroccan honeymoon was marred by robbers tossing their luggage out of the train window to accomplices on the ground. The daring Abdul jumped off in speed to reclaim it by force. He succeeded, but couldn’t salvage his wife’s enchantment with his homeland: “until then, she loved Morocco. Afterwards, she hated it.” Safely back in Denmark, she gave birth to a daughter.

Abdul was supposed to come after. Recently, however, she has broken off contact, not returning his calls or letters for reasons unknown. Now he struggles to save up for the airfare. “My heart,” he laments, “cries out to see my daughter.”

On his request I help him pen a desperate love letter in Danish. The next day we try to call his family-in-law from a teleboutique. Though Abdul slots in dirhams in a steady flow, the line keeps going dead every fifth second; the sister-in-law, who answers, speaks little English. Talking to her I learn that Mette has moved; I get the sense that another man has entered the picture. Abdul is in tears, his hopes of seeing his daughter dwindling. I cannot but share his feeling of helplessness. In the shabby teleboutique, Scandinavia feels as remote as a receding galaxy.

We must regretfully decline to take along a package for his family to Europe. He does, after all, peddle drugs.

I am about to tour southern Morocco with three friends during Ramadan. On the bus from Agadir Airport to the town of Aït Ben Yahia we meet Halim, a talkative twentysomething eager to continue the conversation in a café. Not being in a hurry, we agree. Before long, we are joined by Bursuq, his pal, who could be seen approaching others on the airport bus, clearly in vain. We end up accepting a dinner invitation at Halim’s.

He has only known us for hours when he vows to return the visit in our country; his parents, he says, have already agreed. No doubt these guys spend a great deal of time befriending tourists in hopes of being invited to somewhere, anywhere, in Europe. Whatever moves them, it is not destitution, for they are lower middle class and trained as electricians. More likely they are unemployed and have the means, such as satellite TV, to imagine Europe as a land of opportunity. Life is elsewhere.

After a not especially memorable night out, my friends and I sleep on the floor in the house of Halim’s parents. The next day we continue on to Taroudant, where we rent a car to explore the country. On our way back two weeks later we give Halim and Bursuq a miss.

I have been backpacking in Upper Egypt in the wake of 9/11. Tourism has collapsed, leaving the cruise ships like stranded turtles along the banks of the Nile.

In the sprawling Red Sea resort of Hurghada I meet Toto, as he calls himself: a happy-go-lucky guy in his early twenties, working in a gift shop. Toto and his buddies make a sport of ripping off tourists (one claims to have ’sold’ an island to a Japanese, who returned for another) and, if attractive, young and female, luring them to bed. The latter is almost too easy: frivolous sidewalk catcalls, they report, land one in five.

A fishing village in living memory, Hurghada is the kind of place nobody is from. On his part, Toto is from the beautiful Aswan in the south. Yet he doesn’t like going home anymore. I gather that his family, while appreciating the money coming their way, recoil from his freewheling lifestyle. Lately he has had it: “I help my family no more,” he defiantly declares. The story is familiar. Throughout the region the traditional authority of the father, based on being the provider or owning the land, is eroding - particularly among young sons who, working in tourism, rake in more than their dads.

His boss the shopowner is a more somber type, but according to Toto, “crazy in the head.” Having smoked some weed with the man, I find myself offered “cocaine, heroin, LSD, anything you like.” I politely decline. Ah, so that’s how the capital for the souvenir business was raised.

The guys tend to find Egyptian females shallow and conventional: “One can’t talk with them as with European girls,” they complain. Both Toto and his boss have, of all things, Norwegian girlfriends; the boss plans to marry his, though I am not sure if she knows yet. He will be visiting Oslo shortly. I quietly hope he finds the climate too cold for his liking.

Tozeur is an ancient oasis town near Algeria, transformed for the worse by tourism. Here I meet Mahmoud: a kind-eyed, slightly knock-kneed man around fifty, who runs a family-owned café and kiosk opposite my hotel. It is an unexpected pleasure to speak my mother’s tongue instead of French spiffed up with Arabic; this is possible because he lived in my country for years.

He tells his story, beginning with his marriage to a compatriot of mine who bore him two daughters. Rising at 4 AM, he worked 14 hours a day at cleaning and other menial jobs to buy and equip a home. Unfortunately, his stay-at-home wife, who had never worked a single day in her life, couldn’t be bothered to cook or even keep the apartment tidy. Worse, as Mahmoud one day discovered to his horror, she neglected to change their baby’s napkins, resulting in vexing sores. When he respectfully demanded change, she mulled it over and took out separation.

Soon after, he came home from work to a deserted flat. An acquaintance at the sheriff’s office broke the news: his wife had moved with the kids to a secret location in Northern Norway. Apparently her friends had persuaded her that Mahmoud might abduct them to Tunisia, something he vehemently denies having even considered. It took years of uphill legal battle for him to see his children again; when he finally won through, they barely knew him.

Striving to resurface financially, he worked flat out in a construction firm he founded with a friend and the latter’s father. All day, every day, for months, he would paint and tile floors. It was a bolt from the blue when the father suddenly emptied the company coffers and fled to the Netherlands, where the trail disappeared. Then Mahmoud gave up, returning to Tunisia. He now lives for the day when his oldest, at eleven, will come to visit. In the meantime, he is extending the family house to be able to accomodate tourists.

After he closes the café, we sit and talk deep into the night outside his kiosk, enjoying hurried shots from my well-concealed bottle of scotch. Despite having known Norwegian society squarely from the bottom up, Mahmoud really misses its transparency, deploring the corruption permeating Tunisia from the presidency to the street cops. The issue cannot even be addressed in public, as freedom of speech is nil. The agents and informants of La Sûreté are ubiquotous, he believes; our very conversation owes its safety to linguistic obscurity.

As I withdraw, Mahmoud remains manning his kiosk into the small hours. His work ethic is about the strongest I have seen anywhere, and certainly unique by local standards. Here, as in much of North Africa, the men sit around in cafés all day sipping mint tea and smoking shisha. Not, says Mahmoud, because there isn’t work, but because it pays too poorly to be worth their while. The only attractive jobs are in the tourist industry.

On my way back to the coast I stop in Metlaoui, a dusty phosphate mining hub in the middle of nowhere. In the vast surrounding desert, bedouins dwell in tents and flocks of camels roam by the roadside.

I have an appointment in Metlaoui with three jovial twentysomethings - call them Hassan, Saïd, and Anwar - whom I met on the crowded local bus from Gafsa, where they study mechanics. After a tour of the town, we talk over dinner in an otherwise empty hotel restaurant (I foot the bill). At one point a busload of Germans thunder past into the dining hall. Anwar, after querying the word, exclaims a “willkommen!”, but could scarcely have been more disregarded were he furniture.

The scrawny Saïd, who speaks no English but excellent French - he has a sister in Paris - is keen on body building, but the local food is sadly poor on protein. Can I send him some? The town, I learn, is heavily polluted, giving rise to illness. Anwar’s big brother, who worked at the phosphat processing plant, just died from cancer. But complaining to the authorities, especially in public, is not an option for the citizens of Metlaoui.

Like Mahmoud, the guys could use some basic freedom of speech. For instance, they hold passionate views on the Israel/Palestine conflict, as encouraged by the state-controlled media, but discussing the matter with foreigners is forbidden. They do so anyhow. And since phosphate is used in the weapons industry, even sketching the history of their hometown is a no-no.

All three take a dismal view of the future in Tunisia, convinced that they face unemployment upon graduation, or at best, decades in a low-paying menial job before something opens up. Inquiring minds need to know every detail about economic life around my parts. They are pleased to learn that a dinar equals five kroner, thinking this implies a favorable exchange rate. Surely I can help with the visas? And can I spare a room?

The friendly, phlegmatic Hassan hopes to complete his studies in Europe and, because “Tunisian women are not the future,” find a girlfriend there. With his handsome Mediterranean features, the latter should present no problem if the former can be arranged. For starters I give him twenty dinars to buy a pair of jeans and a shirt; those he is wearing are supposedly borrowed.

The guys have since called me often on my cell phone. But much as I hope their dream of happiness in Europe will come true, I fear it has all the substance of a distant mirage.

The world’s northernmost desert wind picks up again.