Category: national

Naheed Mustafa: an interview, stories and radio documentary

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Naheed Mustafa is an award-winning journalist and writer.  This interview with Naheed and a story – “We Felt No Mercy” – are featured in the Spring 2011 issue and website of maisonneuve, a quarterly of arts, opinion and ideas  – an award-winning Montreal magazine. Listen to Taking the Oath, her CBC radio documentary on immigration. Her story  Three Meals in Afghanistan is published in The Walrus.
 

When covering important political stories, some journalists talk to the major players. But other writers strive to let the underdogs be heard. In her new Maisonneuve cover story “We Felt No Mercy,” which appears in Issue 39 (Spring 2011), Naheed Mustafa offers an unmediated look at the lives of Afghan citizens. Neamatullah Arghandabi, a former mujahed who helped fight off the Soviets, opens up about life as a young soldier and the current state of his country.

Mustafa is an award-winning print and radio journalist. We talked to her about the difficulties of foreign correspondence and how to tell personal stories from countries in conflict. To read “We Felt No Mercy,” pick up a copy of our Spring 2011 issue or contact us to order it.

Mick Côté: Can you tell me about the initial contact with Arghandabi?

Naheed Mustafa: It was straightforward. I basically phoned him up and just asked him. Obviously, I had to tell him how I got his number and then I just asked him if he was interested in trying to meet. He said sure. The issue was nailing down a time with him because he was really busy. He comes to Kabul once every few months. The other thing that I found while working in Afghanistan—and not just there—is that people don’t really stick to their times.

MC: Was he reluctant to share his story?

NM: He didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. Not in terms of literally understanding, but he didn’t really “get it.” He didn’t really understand why I was interested in his story and he didn’t really understand why I wanted to construct this particular piece.

The project is actually a lot bigger than this particular item. I’ve been collecting stories for a while, but I’m not really sure what I’m going to be doing with them. It’s an opportunity I take when I’m working on other things over there. He asked, “What’s the point? It’s not really a story. I’m not anyone famous or particularly influential.” But to me, that’s what was interesting. That’s the story I wanted.

MC: In the article, you allotted a lot of room for quotations and very little for narration. How did you make this decision?

NM: This was the first time I’ve tried this type of format. The model for it was Studs Terkel’s book, The Good War. He collected stories of people who participated, in various ways, in World War II. He has these long types of discursive quotes. I’ve seen that style in other places but I hadn’t ever done something like that myself. The point of the oral story is to get people to tell their own story, and that seemed like the most obvious way. I was pretty nervous about using that style, and I wasn’t sure that people would find it compelling.

I’ve done long feature-style narrative from Afghanistan in other ways. I’ve done it in broadcasting, and I’ve done it in other print features. But part of the effort for anybody is: how much of ourselves do we insert into that story? We’re going to insert ourselves in various ways. The most obvious way would be that first-person narrative about who you’re meeting and who you’re talking to and your impressions. The other part of it is really about what we choose to quote.

Obviously, even the way that I’ve done it—even in selecting these particular passages—that’s still mediating his story. But I think it comes closer to an unmediated story than if I had written my version of what he was saying. That’s one of the things that I was struggling with a lot. It’s not always easy to figure out how to quote people because people don’t always just talk in short form. When you look at those kinds of interviews, people have a lot to say about themselves, and they tell you because they want you to hear it.

Part of that discussion for me, internally, is: how much of a duty do I have to report that? If I’m there to talk about people’s experiences, then how much should I keep myself out? I thought it was one way to get a story out, with as much content as I could in the style that he would tell it….more

This interview with Naheed Mustafa can be read in full here on the maisonneuve website.

Rita Wong on Courageously Speaking Against the Politics of Fear: Thank You to Brigette dePape

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 A Fresh Page in an Old Story

Rita Wong is a poet, blogger, teacher, cultural critic, and contributor to the pomegranate

You may not agree with Brigette dePape’s protest – she displayed a “Stop Harper” sign during the throne speech in the Senate – but dePape acts from a place of genuine concern for Canadians. She feels that we are in danger, and this justifies stepping outside the mode of business-as-usual into creatively thinking about how to best warn her fellow citizens. Living through a year with the highest greenhouse gas emissions on record, I take her warning seriously.

Interviewers in the mass media seem to miss or avoid engaging with dePape’s point that our government’s parliamentary system will not protect the peace and the environment that most Canadians value. They take a superficial definition of democracy that begins and ends with an election, whereas dePape asserts that democracy is much wider and deeper than an election where three quarters of the Canadian population did not vote for Harper. The Conservatives got 40% of the votes from the 61% of Canadians who participated in the election, translating into one quarter of the population. Ms. dePape’s math turns out to be more accurate than her media interviewers’ calculations that accept the conventional definition of a majority government and disregard the many people who did not vote.

Math aside, it is very important to consider DePape’s argument—broadcast on CTV news June 4, 2011—that millions of Canadians will not see their concerns adequately addressed within the Canadian parliamentary system for the next four years. A quarter of the country helped to elect a government that will build enormous, expensive prisons, buy fighter jets, and speed up the destruction of our planet through increased global warming. The 75% of Canadians who did not vote for this violent, fearful agenda are nonetheless held hostage to it, and the sooner they realize this, the better. It is our children and grandchildren who will pay for our mistakes, as they inherit a more polluted, degraded planet with acidifying oceans, as well as a more violent society with greater extremes of inequality. The Tory agenda is a corporate agenda, specifically a tar sands agenda where the rich will increasingly rule, at least temporarily, before leaving an enormous toxic mess for everyone else to clean up. Continue reading “Rita Wong on Courageously Speaking Against the Politics of Fear: Thank You to Brigette dePape” →

Sheila Pratt on “The Rule of Law” and Omar Khadr’s lawyers

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The Rule of Law

Sheila Pratt is a contributor to the pomegranate, senior feature writer at the Edmonton Journal and co-author of Running on Empty: Alberta after the Boom. This is the first third of an article that appears in Alberta Views (June 2011) – available at your local newstand!

The jury of seven military officers filed back into the courtroom in Guantánamo Bay at the end of eight long hours deliberating the fate of Omar Khadr. Sitting next to Khadr, watching tensely, were two Edmonton lawyers, Nate Whitling and Dennis Edney. For the past seven years, the two Albertans had waged a determined battle for legal rights for Khadr. They had been to the Supreme Court twice, with some success, in their effort to bring the rule of law to bear on the case. They’d travelled a dozen times since June 2007 to visit their client at this notorious US military prison and to help his American military lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, prepare the defence. This day, October 31, 2010, was a critical point in their journey—the fate of their client would finally be decided.

“Make no mistake, the world is watching,” the military prosecutor told the jury. “Your sentence will send a message.” Indeed. The court had accepted Khadr’s guilty plea (part of a plea bargain) the week before. Today it would recommend a sentence—and signal of the kind of justice to be had from the contentious and deeply flawed US military justice system.

Whitling and Edney knew the legal deck was stacked against their client in the military commission system, which violated the rule of law and other fundamental principles of justice. For instance, in the military court, evidence obtained under torture was admissible—unthinkable in regular courts.The prosecution was not required to disclose its evidence, as required in regular courts. The military commission system, devised post 9/11 and modified by the Obama administration, was so stacked against the accused that the US government ruled its own citizens could not be sent to trial there. This was justice suitable for foreigners only.

But the US government was not the only one to ignore its own traditions concerning the rule of law. Months before the trial, the Canadian government ignored the recommendation of its own courts, which ruled Khadr’s Charter rights had been violated when Canadian security officials participated in illegal interrogations of Khadr. To remedy that wrong, the government should bring Khadr home, the courts said. Instead, the Harper government played to the politics of the day by leaving him in Guantánamo, argues Edney. By failing to uphold the rights of one citizen, he adds—however unpopular the citizen—the government undermined the legal rights that protect all Canadians.

The defence of Omar, second youngest son of Canada’s notorious al Qaeda-linked Khadr family, was not a popular cause. The family’s ties to terrorist Osama bin Laden were a shocking betrayal of national values and an affront to Canadians. For Whitling and Edney, however, a greater principle was at stake: the rule of law, so fundamental to democracy. Every Canadian citizen is entitled to the right to counsel, protection from torture and to a fair trial. Khadr had none of that in Guantánamo. Continue reading “Sheila Pratt on “The Rule of Law” and Omar Khadr’s lawyers” →

Heather Mallick: Meet the woman who counsels torture victims

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The Toronto Star Heather Mallick: Meet the woman who counsels torture victims.

…In the course of her intensely lived life, Bamber, who helped found Amnesty International, once put a torture hood on her head to describe to a court what it feels like — the suffocation, the gagging and the panic in the dark — and has spent decades counselling people who will never recover from the bodily and mental insult.

You don’t get better after torture. It is the most isolating experience possible, and this is what the torturers intend. Every day, Bamber dresses with precision and elegance — it’s a form of armour, she agrees — and goes to her London office to sit with and listen to people who endured it.

Bamber campaigned for codifying medical ethics in Britain, helped build the now-thriving Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and now operates her own Helen Bamber Foundation, offering clinical help. The waiting room is worrying, with people who look simultaneously dead tired and alarmed. They are very, very thin.

What I’m trying to find out from Bamber is where she gets her strength. How do you see the worst that humans can do and then confront it over and over again in a lifetime?…