The latest e-newsletter from the development charity Oxfam highlights an issue we have looked at here before, the humanitarian consequences of climate change, increasingly at the root of natural disasters and consequent population displacement. Oxfam has released a report on the issue, 'The Right to Survive' (the report, summary and background paper can be downloaded here). According to Oxfam, in six years time the number of people affected by climate crises is projected to rise by 54 per cent to 375 million people, threatening to overwhelm the humanitarian aid system. There is a slideshow of images here and case studies here.

Migration Matters ran a series of reports on the issue of Environmental Refugees in January this year. 

An interesting collaboration between Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts, and the Irish Travellers Movement, sees Saami theatre maker and musician Åsa Simma come to Dublin for a public lecture on 'Performing Culture'.

The Saami (Sámi) people are the indigenous people of northern Europe, inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. (There are in Norway approximately 60,000-100,000; in Sweden, 15,000-25,000; in Finland, 6,400; and in Russia, 2,000.) Their traditional languages are the Saami languages. The best known Saami livelihood is semi-nomadic reindeer herding, with which about 10% of the Sámi are today involved.

Åsa Simma is Artistic Director for Saami Theatre. Her work as an actress, singer and director serves as a medium to bring Saami culture to the wider world.
 
Åsa’s approach to performance is to combine the traditions of her culture with her theatre training and modern media. The content of her work deals with both the day-to-day and the spiritual. She is particularly concerned with how Saami women, “as important bearers of culture within the Saami world, can reach out and receive essential support from Swedish society as a whole.”
 
Åsa will be in conversation with Catherine Joyce, Chair of the Irish Traveller Movement. The event is at 7pm on June 17 at Sean O Casey Community Centre, St Mary’s Road, East Wall, Dublin. The event is free to all but places need to be booked, via email to communications@create-ireland.ie or telephone, 01- 4736600.
 
Asa on Saami culture:
 
“When I was brought up, Saami people were not respected. Our language and traditions were made fun of. So for me it doubled the disappointment I had to carry. When I was brought up, our traditional singing was not heard, our Yoiks were not heard because that was a time of oppression. Everything Saami was blaah. It didn’t sound like anything. It sounded like something boring and monotonous. My mother taught me the songs in secrecy and she told me not to tell anybody I was learning these songs, because it would put me into trouble. And then, while I was brought up the sort of Saami culture Renaissance was just starting in the seventies. When I was nine years old, a Saami artist, who had meant very much for me, heard that I was singing the traditional songs. So he took me on a tour, when I was nine years old, among them to inspire the Saami people not to forget the songs. We were many children and lots of old people. We traveled together one summer. For me it was of big importance, because I learned so much about the singing tradition. Not only how to do it, but the whole philosophy behind it. I think the fact is when we look at the western way of conceiving a piece of music;
somebody sits down and composes music, writes it down, then puts his little signature on it: “This is mine! I did it!” But we did the Yoik tradition and the most beautiful thing in our singing tradition is that it is totally the opposite.”
 
You can hear Asa singing here. That is the track 'Shaman's Journey', which can also be found here.
 
There is a Guardian article on yoik traditional music here.
 
Create's arts audio site, Create Exchange, is here. 
 

Monday is Africa Day internationally, and Irish Aid has coordinated a series of activities and celebrations around the country, running this weekend and on. The headline event is a huge, free concert in the beautiful Iveagh Gardens in Dublin, this Sunday afternoon. The headline act is Malian blues musician, Vieux Farka Touré - yes, he is the son of the father, and himself a widely-renowned musician. There are also a series of spoken word performances, storytelling and interactive workshops at the Gardens. Other events include an Africa Day Film Festival at the IFI on Sunday, screening 'The Story of Concern', 'Kirikou and the wild beasts' (Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages) and 'Bled Number One'. For events across the country, see here.

Yes, it sounds like an outlandish satire, but the Newsnight team on BBC put their tongue firmly in cheek last week and paralleled the Eurovision Song Contest with their own Immigrant Song Contest, inviting immigrant musicians to play cover versions of classic British Eurovision hits of yesteryear in a week-long series of reports. You could deconstruct it on many levels, but the combination of earnestness, originality and craft of the entries seemed to outweigh the Oxbridge ironic cool of the idea and make this a surprisingly affecting piece of entertainment journalism which also raised some of the geopolitical issues underlying migration.

The competition was won by Font, an Iranian indie rock band, who were once jailed for playing a gig in their native Tehran. Watch them playing their winning version of Cliff Richard's Congratulations here. Readers in the UK can review each night's programme on the BBC iPlayer, access to which is blocked in Ireland (and presumably other countries).

However, you can catch up on it by working through the Newsnight blog. Monday's blog entry, with the intro report on the contest is here. You can then follow the contest through the week. Thursday's entry has a round up of all the contestants, here.

A friend recently drew my attention to the overlap between the work of PEN International and the areas of interest to Migration Matters, notably PEN's work with writers in exile. PEN is an international organisation devoted to promoting literature, facilitating writers, and freedom of expression. PEN maintains a Writers in Exile Network, which partners with Exiled Writers Ink, a London-based organisation that has a magazine, a monthly cafe, and various events (including an upcoming poetry evening), and with Icorn, the International Cities of Refuge Network. Icorn leads me on to Shahrazad, a project of 'stories for life'. According to their description:

'Shahrazad will bring new, original and challenging stories from all over the world into Europe. These stories will be created, told and disseminated by poets, journalists, novelists, editors, cartoonists, translators and essayists who are persecuted and silenced in their own homelands.

'Human rights, free speech, diversity and solidarity are core values within the project. Shahrazad will become a unique tool for integration and for understanding between insiders and outsiders within communities, countries and even continents. It will also generate a great number of literary events and projects, dialogue and debate, within the six partner cities...

'Ultimately, the Shahrazad project aims to provide Europe with new, more open and sustainable narratives about itself. By opening up to human and artistic impulses from ‘outside’, Europe can regain and revitalise some of its capital values: freedom, democracy and solidarity.'

For more, and some sample digital stories, see here.

Hot off the presses: RTE's current affairs programme Prime Time will feature a report this Tuesday night (19th) at 9.30pm on the pending changes to the Irish work permits system, due to come into effect on June 1. The Migrant Rights Centre is campaigning to have the changes postponed. They are holding a press conference on Wednesday, so look out for further reports on the issue on Wednesday evening and in Thursday's newspapers.

According to the MRCI, the changes would make it almost impossible for non-EEA migrants who are made redundant to get another job, regardless of how long they have lived or worked here. Many people and their families will be forced to leave Ireland or will have no other choice but to stay and work informally. For more information on the campaign to postpone the changes, see here.

If you miss the Prime Time report, you can watch it on RTE's new online player, here (this only works in Ireland).

Kirin Kalia at the Migration Information Source included the following compilation of links on the crisis in Pakistan's Swat valley in last week's e-newsletter:

The number of people fleeing fighting in Pakistan's Swat valley has increased steadily since May 2 to nearly 1 million as of today, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The latest figures from UNHCR: 987,140 people registered from the current influx, with only about 80,000 in camps. These people are in addition to 550,000 who have fled fighting since August 2008. UNHCR head Antonio Guterres is warning of a humanitarian disaster (more from UNHCR here).

Dawn, an English-language Pakistani media company, has photos of displaced children and vulnerable religious minorities in its media gallery.

Pakistani photojournalist Sajjad Ali Qureshi has uploaded numerous photos of a refugee camp near Mardan.

In times of crisis, the diaspora are often a source of financial support. A study of the philanthropy habits of Pakistanis in the United States showed they have a strong preference for giving directly to individuals in need.

Also, Reuters AlertNet is a useful source for reports on humanitarian crises.

FOMACS will be screening a series of digital stories at the Irish Film Institute on Thursday 28 May at 11 am.

‘Living in Direct Provision: 9 Stories’ was made in the context of a six-month participatory media workshop run by FOMACS, in partnership with Integrating Ireland and Refugee Information Services.

The nine storytellers participated in a collaborative process that integrated storytelling, group and individual reflection, creative writing, photography and the use of multi-media technologies, in order to make a 3-5 minute story about their own experiences as asylum seekers and refugees.

I saw these at an earlier, informal showing in FOMACS and they are very powerful.

The stories are the product of the FOMACS Digital Storytelling Project.

In order to secure a seat at the screening, please RSVP to Maeve Burke at FOMACS: T: +353 (1) 402 3006  E: maeve.burke.fomacs@dit.ie

Irish Modern Dance Theatre's 'Fall and Recover' was staged again in Dublin last weekend, and was the subject of a substantial article in the Irish Times as well as a striking audio-slideshow of the company in rehearsals. (The latter is a medium the Irish Times is now making good use of.)

The show is the result of a collaboration between John Scott of IMDT and the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture in Dublin, which provides care to asylum seekers, refugees and others who have suffered torture.

Here is an earlier article on the BBC site, which coincided with a feature on Radio 4's 'Dance Saves Lives' series (no longer archived online).

A new exhibition in Dublin features the life stories of ten survivors of the Holocaust in Lithuania, where ninety-five percent of the 240,000-strong pre-war Jewish population was annihilated, many at the hands of Lithuanian killing squads. 'Surviving History - Portraits from Vilna', by Irish-born researcher Shivaun Woolfson, is at the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland from May 27-30.

The four-day event will feature a photographic exhibition, a series of public talks by Holocaust historians Ruta Puisyte and Robert Gerwarth and survivor Tomi Reichental, and screenings of the Surviving History documentary which follows Shivaun’s journey to Vilnius as she interacts with the narrators. This documentary premieres at the Cannes Short Film Corner this month.

Shivaun Woolfson is of Jewish-Lithuanian descent. She said: ‘To hear these experiences has been so meaningful for me, as the fate of these individuals is what would have awaited my own family had they not escaped to Ireland during the Czarist pogroms in the early 1900s. It is particularly timely to present these stories as Vilnius takes on the coveted role of European Capital of Culture for 2009 against a backdrop of increased anti-Semitic activity.’
 
The exhibition is a collaboration between UK-based Living Imprint, Holocaust Education Trust of Ireland and UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, is free to the public. It will be officially opened by the Lithuanian ambassador to Ireland, H.E. Ms Izolda Bričkovskienė on Wednesday, 27 May.

The full programme is here. Pre-registration for the evening events is required and can be done online here or by calling Valerie Norton on +353 1 716 4690.

'Diversity' and 'integration' are opposing ideals, and the contradiction between them reduces much of the well-meaning pieties of pro-immigration campaigners to incoherence. That's the provocative argument of a new book on immigration in Europe, 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West' by Christopher Caldwell.

Perhaps surprisingly, Caldwell's argument gets a positive airing in two leading publications of the mainstream British left, the Observer newspaper and Prospect Magazine. Prospect publishes an excerpt in its May issue and David Goodheart (who is editor of Prospect) reviews the book in the Observer.

In Goodheart's introduction:

Caldwell 'asks some unusually direct questions: can you have the same Europe with different people? Why did mass immigration happen when so few people actually wanted it? Immigrants want a better life but how many of them want a European life? Why is minority ethnic pride a virtue and European nationalism a sickness? Is political correctness just fear masquerading as tolerance?'

And he concludes: 'As you can tell from those questions, the book is a sustained attack on the well-meaning liberalism that is still the dominant note in official immigration debates. Yet although Caldwell, a conservative American, believes that European immigration has not been a success, at least for the host societies, he is not anti-immigrant and says that he is a great supporter of the American melting pot.'

Prospect's archive of articles (and blog entries) on immigration and race is here. The Guardian's is here. Both are rich pickings...

FOMACS is undertaking a documentary project on immigrant participation in the local elections. A feature article is to be published in the Sunday Tribune, and a radio documentary will follow. These will, of course, be highlighted here. In the meantime, Metro Eireann offers comprehensive coverage of immigrant candidates and related issues.

Last Sunday saw an article in the Sunday Times on contention between three Nigerian candidates in the Mulhuddart area of Dublin, Fine Gael’s Adeola Ogunsina, Independent Ignatius (Iggy) Okafor, and Fianna Fail’s Idowu Sulyman Olafimihan. I haven’t been able to find this online – the Sunday Times doesn’t appear to archive its Irish edition comprehensively – but if anyone comes across it, please let me know. The Sunday Tribune wrote an earlier article on the rivalry last November and Metro Eireann has covered it also.

A recent article in the Sunday Independent gave voice to some of the anxieties around immigration now that the economy has hit a crisis. Journalist John Whelan (recently made redundant) documented some of the 'urban myths' and anti-immigrant prejudice and fears that are being generated by the downturn, in an article that was generally sympathetic. He wrote:

'Signing on last week the queue was getting longer and more restless. The talk was mounting of "those foreigners ripping off the country", "who do they think they are", "getting the dole sent to their bank account and they not even in the country", "getting the children's allowance as well and the kids not even here"...

'It all brings to mind the fantastic stories that were peddled when our black brethren started to arrive in droves on the back of the boom a few years ago... My own personal favourite was the one from the taxi driver who told me that as he collected a couple of black women on Main St it started to rain as they tried to get their children's buggies into the boot. Struggling in the shower they said to hell with it, left them on the pavement outside Shaws and declared they would get two new ones from the Health Board. Curious and concerned as to the possible veracity of the story I pressed the taxi driver, a sound man known to me, who explained that it hadn't actually happened to himself but to another colleague who told him. Duirt bean liom, go nduirt bean lei. [This is an Irish expression, meaning, 'A woman said to me, that a woman had told her...']

He conlcuded: 'A far cry from all that when in 2004, Nigerian Rotimi Adebari was elected to Portlaoise Town Council and in June 2007 became the country's first ever black mayor. Rotimi and Portlaoise beat Obama and the White House to it. The story was printed and broadcast in a positive light all over the world... Rotimi recently was a prime mover in establishing a new organisation in town called SUIL - Supporting Unemployed in Laois. Interesting to see how he fares in the local elections on June 5.'

One of the most significant issues facing immigrant candidates is the low voter registration amongst immigrant communities, many of whom are not aware that they are entitled to vote in the local elections, whatever their status in Ireland.

Integrating Ireland has launched a voter registration drive and a website, ivote.ie, offering key information and forms in a variety of languages.

They write: 'The website aims to provide you with information and materials to support immigrant organizations and immigrant voters around the country to have access to and share basic information and materials on registering to vote and the voting process, as well as highlighting events and activities taking place in the run up to the elections. It’s being updated every day, with more FAQs in more languages, the next being Romanian and a variety of new videos in other languages are also to be added on the weekend, in English, French, Urdu, Portuguese, Filipino and Russian.'

Tomorrow, Thursday May 14, they are holding a voter registration clinic in the Integrating Ireland offices, from 2-6 pm. There will be a community Garda present so that anyone who has not registered can come along and have their form stamped and submitted there and then.

Integrating Ireland and Dublin City Council have also produced posters in a variety of languages, which can be found here.

Some key dates and information:

Local and European elections will take place on Friday June 5th 2009

Deadline to Register to Vote is Monday 18th May 2009

The voters’ register was published on February 1st and was made available from February 15th. You can check it here.

As new figures suggest half a million failed asylum seekers are living destitute in Britain, the Guardian recently spoke to some of those for an online video report. According to the accompanying story: hundreds of thousands of failed asylum seekers are living in the UK in extreme poverty, because they fear torture or death if they return to their home countries, according to a report released today. (Download the report here.)

The report warns many failed asylum seekers are living in a "twilight zone", with no housing or financial support, and no right to work. Many failed asylum seekers are living on less than "a dollar a day", the global yardstick for extreme poverty, it claims. Recent research by the London School of Economics estimated there are 500,000 failed asylum seekers in the UK.

Christine Majid, from the refugee charity Pafras, who commissioned the Underground Lives report, says the number of destitute asylum seekers the charity dealt with tripled in the past two years and called destitution a "deliberate" policy to force asylum seekers out of the country.

She said: "In the 21st century the fact that the government is trying to starve people out of the country, it is absolutely inhumane and it just isn't working. These people would rather starve on the street here than return to their own countries."

A series of governmental policy decisions including preventing asylum seekers from working in 2002, cutting legal aid in 2004 and an overhaul of the system in 2007 has lead to an "untenable strain" on local charities, she added.

The report found that, on average, failed asylum seekers were surviving on £7.65 per week, but the majority lived on less than £5. Two thirds had experienced torture in their countries. Following the refusal of their asylum claims, 72% have spent time sleeping outside; of these, 38% have experienced physical attacks. More than a third of the women sleeping rough had experienced sexual assault, including rape.'

Connect-World is an Irish NGO that works with the development NGOs to foster improved coverage of development issues in the media. Migration is one of those core issues, and there is a wealth of information, media and links on their site. Here is a quick sample.

There is a short overview on the interrelation of migration and development, and selection of key links here
(various sub-headings give more substantial information and references, such as on international migration flows and trends).

Connect World runs a media funding scheme to promote coverage of development issues, the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund (funded by Irish Aid). Their site showcases funded projects in their ‘standard’ funding round (covering print, radio and multimedia), and in the ‘tv seed’ round (providing seed funding for tv documentaries). Some samples:

Fiona Whitty’s pilot on the migratory connections between Ireland and Nigeria, ‘Pathways of Movement’

Patrick Butler’s project to film in a rehabilitation centre for trafficked children in Benin.

My own story from Morocco and Melilla on people trying to enter Europe from north Africa.

Louise Williams’s award-shortlisted radio documentary from Senegal on the same subject.

There is also this short video documentary on FGM and the story of Pamela Izevbekhai, shortlisted in the multimedia awards run by Connect World for media students.

Connect World also produces an excellent fortnightly e-bulletin on development stories and issues in the media. Sign up here.

The next funding round is the tv seed, deadline September 30.

IDP Voices is an online project that aims to let internally displaced people tell their life stories, in their own words. According to the site, ‘the narratives in these pages are valuable complements to the official information on conflicts which governments and international organisations offer’. Thus far, the project covers Colombia and Georgia, with further countries to be added.

Here is Inga’s story. In summary: she is 38 years old. She is Abkhazian and her husband is Georgian. There are four children in the family. Fifteen years have passed since the family went into exile; they lived in Ochamchire district in Abkhazia before the war. Inga talks about the difficulties and hardship experienced during the period of armed conflict, how hard it was even to get bread to eat and the problems of equipping a new place. She speaks of the sadness of losing her home and leaving behind her elderly parents, whom she sees very seldom…

Inga’s story was originally recorded in Russian, but is presented here in English. (I’m not clear on whether they have used an actor, or she is reading a translation of her original script.) Her story is accompanied online by a map of her journey. There are a further 28 Georgian stories here. A book comprising a selection of these stories of displaced people from Georgia can be downloaded here.

IDP Voices is a collaboration between the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and Panos London's Oral Testimony Programme. (There is more on Panos in this week's other reports.)

This week's Soul Beat e-newsletter draws my attention to a manual, 'Heeding the Voiceless', offering guidance to the use of oral testimony in radio documentary. Following our recent focus on oral history, I thought it might be of interest. The manual is published by Panos Institute West Africa (PIWA). According to the publishers, the oral testimony approach focuses on "hidden" voices, contexts, and content. The hidden voices refer to the masses in the country that do not have the opportunity to make their voices heard at government level, or on public platforms. The manual can be downloaded here. The newsletter is published by the Communication Initiative Network, which I have cited before. 

In an introduction, Diana Denghor, director of the centre, describes their approach to oral testimony:

The Oral Testimony is a new format in community radio, adapted from a social research tool set up by Panos London. It is an inverted interview because it is guided by the interviewee and not the interviewer. It stems from the principle that to know what is really going on in a community, you have to listen patiently to the people at grassroots level, instead of asking only the leaders of that community as is usually the case. These leaders tend to hide problems in their efforts to present a nice face of their community to outside eyes and ears. The consequence is the vast majority of community members who effectively shape social trends, never get a chance to say their views, perceptions, experiences, priorities, values. Thus, a lot of projects have failed and a lot of community conflicts have remained unsolved because the attempted solutions have ignored the silent majority, or did not have the right approach in identifying the pitfalls ahead.

Because it goes deeper, the Oral Testimony is much longer and much more structured than a classic interview or traditional researchers questionnaires. In the classic interview, the questions are based on what we believe listeners want to know, or facts we want to establish for a project. In the Oral Testimony, the resource person is called the narrator. He or she is encouraged to tell things through his or her experiences, values, priorities. This is what informs behaviour more than hard facts. The idea is, for instance in cases of conflict in a community, when the adverse side hears the deep motivations of the narrator, his or her fears, aspirations, beliefs, it can foster understanding. The recorded interview can last several hours. For community radio it is adapted to the documentary format by selecting the dominant topic.

About to open in Lodz, Poland, is an exhibition of Irish photography, as part of fotofestiwal09, which features work by Mark Curran, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice here at DIT. His project, ‘Breathing Space’, which previously exhibited in Dublin, documents ‘the role and representation of labour and global labour practices’ in contemporary Ireland (albeit an Ireland that is fast disappearing, apparently). Another of Curran’s striking images is here.
Other artists on the festival programme are:
David Farrell – Nè vicino Nè Iontano. A Lugo // Neither Close, nor Far. Lugo.
Seán Hillen – The Troubles
Jackie Nickerson – Faith
Eoin O’Conaill – Common Place.

The guide issued by Panos West Africa on oral testimony, as reported above, leads me to the various websites of the Panos organisation, a development NGO focussing on the issue of communication.

The global organisation is a partnership of eight independent institutes in different countries/regions (West Africa being one of those). Panos London is currently showcasing an online video on asylum seekers in Britain, ‘Still human, still here’. (There is a collection of the photographs involved, as stills, here.)

From their site: ‘The shocking, hidden lives of refused asylum seekers are revealed in a new film by Panos Pictures. Abbie Trayler-Smith has photographed men and women who have fled torture and persecution. They had hoped to find sanctuary in the UK but instead are enduring a new kind of torment - destitution. All of the individuals featured in the exhibition have been refused asylum and are living in extreme poverty rather than return to their home countries, in most cases out of fear of what might await them upon their return. With just a handful of possessions they move from place to place, sleeping in phone boxes, on night buses or park benches'

The video was produced for Panos London by Panos Pictures, an independent photo agency who document issues and geographical areas which are under-reported, misrepresented or ignored.

Amongst the projects of particular interest on the site of Panos Pictures are this series of photographs of the Raika, a nomadic people in Rajasthan, India, and these pictures by George Georgiou of the Balkans in the aftermath of the Kosovo war. A collection of the agency's pictures on the subject of Migrants is here.

The image used in the thumbnail here is from the 'Still human, still here' collection, and is of a snow covered phone box in Highgate, North London. '28 year old Hamid from Iran used to shelter in phone boxes in this area in the years he spent living on the streets. "When you're sleeping outside one night feels like one year because it's so cold. I never managed to sleep for more than an hour or two and when it's raining it's hard to sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time." Hamid is one of an estimated 300,000 rejected asylum seekers living in the UK.'

The Irish Times has a simple but impressive audio slideshow on its website today, featuring the work of celebrity photographer Rankin who has recently photographed displaced people in Congo. This work is being exhibited in Dublin at the moment, in Wolfe Tone Park, beside the Jervis Centre, in collaboration with Oxfam Ireland. In the audio, Rankin tells how he had felt that, in photography of crises in Africa, the pictures tended to show "people that don't seem to have any emotional connection with you". "They seem to be objects in a landscape." He set out to photograph displaced people in Congo in "the same way that I would photograph somebody famous." Specifically, he took his picture against a white backdrop, so as to focus on people's features, removed from oppressive context. "I was hoping I would get something full and spirit and light," he says, "to humanise the people" so that viewers here could "connect" more readily with them. The results seem impressive. The accompanying Irish Times article is here. Rankin's own site is here. An earlier slideshow on the Irish Times site of pictures from Congo, by Cork photographer Michael MacSweeney, is here.