New York, Cairo kids, the universe

Every so often it’s good to pause and count my blessings.  This past
week I’ve had a number of really interesting, powerful experiences, and I
thought I’d tell you about some of them.

Last Sunday, I took the train to New York City.  Now our passenger train
system here in the US is antediluvian and, in general, quite unworthy of
any polity that tries to present itself as part of (let alone the leader
of) the “civilized world.”  But still, there is one train per day that
crawls up the eastern side of the country from New Orleans to Boston, and
another that makes the return trip.  This train goes through Charlottesville,
and so does the three-time-a-week “Cardinal” train that loops down from New
York through Virginia, West Virginia, and Cincinnati and ends up in Chicago.
 I love trains!  I rode the Thalys from Paris to Den Haag back
in July.  And last Sunday, I rode the Crescent from C’ville to New York.
 Okay, engineering-wise and amenities-wise there is no question but
that the Thalys is hugely superior.  But still, it’s great to step onto
the train in Charlottesville at 7 a.m. and step off it six and a half hours
later in Penn Station, New York…

People in Gaza, or Bethlehem, or Nablus could only dream of being able to
enjoy such freedom of movement.

I stayed with my daughter Leila and her spouse Greg Curley in their place
in Brooklyn.  Monday and Wednesday I got to run  the 3.43 mile
circuit round Prospect Park
, which is a most amazing, publicly owned resource for the people of Brooklyn.
 When I ran, the weather was crisp and sunny; and actually, given that
I also run from their house to the park, it must come in at around 4 miles
for me.  Somehow, when I’m there that doesn’t feel burdensome, though
at home I generally only run 3 miles each time.

Tuesday, I went to a day-long conference the American Bar Association’s Section
of International Law had organized at New York University.  It was titled
something like “Legacies of Nuremberg for Africa”, and someone from SIL from
the west coast had persuaded me to speak there about the lessons from my
book
Amnesty After Atrocity?
 I was on a morning panel with Ruti Teitel, an ultra-brainy
law professor of Argentinian origin who a while ago published an iconic
book titled Transitional Justice.  It was an interesting experience,
since I was one of very few non-lawyers there.  Perhaps the only one?
 Indeed, the main argument of my book is that judicial remedies are
really not terribly useful for societies reeling from recent and perhaps
still ongoing atrocities.  So I made the best case I could, based on
my research, and sticking more or less within the prescribed time-limit of
15 minutes.  Afterwards, there were some tinteresting questions, and
a few very interesting people came up and chatted.  So I think it went
pretty well.

I stayed on for the lunch discussion, which featured Ted Meron, a
former NYU law professor who went on to become a judge at the International
Criminal Triibunal for former Yugoslavia.  Indeed, Meron was for a time
the President of that court, and head of the single Appeals Chamber that
works for ICTY and for ICTR.  Long, long ago, too, he was the legal
advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.  I suppose he must have been
an Israeli citizen then.  I don’t know if he still is?

Earlier, the conference had been opened with an address from Ben Ferencz
, a New Yorker who worked as a prosecutor at one of the “follow-on” Nuremberg
trials (i.e., one of the single-power, US-run anti-Nazi  trials that
followed the more wellknown, four-power International Military Tribunal there.)
 I found Ferencz very interesting when he talked about the rough, “drumhead
justice” that he had helped mete out when, as a sergeant in the US forces,
he had advanced with them into the heart of Germany.  He had helped
run (and had sat on) US field tribunals that tried people accused of having
killed downed US airmen, and also. some that tried former guards of the concentration
camps that his unit had liberated.  He noted that those former guards
had been the object of numerous lethal revenge attacks from the liberated
camp residents.  “This was not something we organized, or something
we could stop– even if we had wanted to,” he said at one point.  Once
they did get “Military Commissions” (trials) organized for some camp administrators,
they tried these people in batches of 50 or 60 at a time.  “Each one
was given a full trial that lasted perhaps half a minute… All the defendants
were found guilty as a batch after perhaps ten minutes of deliberation, and
sentenced to death. Some of these sentences were then carried out immediately.”

He described Nuremberg as “a perfectly fair trial in every respect.”

I would dispute that… But in comparison with the military commissions he
described, yes, they were a lot fairer than those.

Anyway, it was really interesting to listen to those two fairly iconic figures
at the conference.

Thursday, I had a huge treat.  My friend and former sister-in-law
Tahani Rached had her film
El-Banat Dol
 (These Girls) showing at the New York Film Festival, so Leila, Greg,
my son, his significant other, and I were all invited to go to the screening
at the Lincoln Center and the post-film party.  The film is a beautifully
made representation of some days in the lives of six female “street kids”
from the Cairo neighborhood of Muhandiseen; it came to the NYFF after a very
well-received screening at the Cannes Film Festival, in the summer.

The girls were shown in the film as smart, tough, and very resourceful…
not “victims” at all, though their circumstances are tragic in many respects.
 Tahani has this amazing ability to direct films of huge intimacy that
get right into the lives of her subjects.  (Check out her Soraida,
A woman of Palestine, or her Four Women of Egypt, too.)  For
this film, she and her crew spent five weeks hanging out on the street with
these girls before she even started shooting.  This was her first film
working with an all-Egyptian film crew.  Until recently, she worked
for the National Film Board of Canada; now she has returned “home” to the
city she was born in back in 1947.

She told us she had sent the film to the jury at Cannes “on a hunch”; and
how totally surprised she’d been when one of the officials there called her
in Cairo and told her it had been accepted.  Over the dinner, Thursday,
her assistant producer told us a bit more of the back-story.  Tahani,
she said, had had great confidence that the film would do well, “because
a fortune-teller in Montreal had told her 2006 would be a good year for her
career.”

The discussion after the film Thursday didn’t focus much on the (certainly
impressive) technical aspects of the film, but rather on the circumstances
of the street girls themselves.  Tahani told us there were estimated
to be “between 200,000 and one million” street kids in Cairo– but that many
of them seemed to have much more robust support networks than street people
she has seen in Europe or the US who, to her, often seem very isolated and
alone.  “These girls live at the margins of society, but the other people
near those margins give them significant help,” she said.  And indeed,
in the film we saw the girls getting handouts from small local cafes and
other businesses– as well as a large share of abuse from various people
including the young men who often prey on them.

Tahani said she had given one screening of the film at a film club in Cairo,
where it was much better received than she had dared hope.  “Afterwards,
one guy who saw it, a journalist, wrote that until he saw the movie he had
always felt scared of those girls, but after seeing it he saw them more clearly
as fellow humans, so that was good,” she said.  I notice, too, that
the p.r. newsleter put out by the Egyptian Embassy in Washington has a very
laudatory half-page article on the film. However, Tahani didn’t seem very
hopeful that the Egyptian censorship board would be clearing the film for
public screening any time soon…  (“Their objection is mainly to the
language the girls use,” she said.  “But what can we do?  If we
use a beep instead, the whole soundtrack would be ‘beep,beep, beep, beep,
beep…’ “)

One of the most intriguing people in the film is a motherly-looking middle-class
woman called Hind, a veiled Muslim, who had started out as a volunteer “outreach
worker” with the girls for a local NGO, but ended up just becoming their
friend, going down to the street regularly to chat with the girls and to
help in a quiet, non-judgmental way to solve their problems.  When she
walked onto the street, you saw these very tough girls running to her to
envelope her in big hugs; and you just had to believe that if the girls had
received a lot more decent mothering along the way they might never have
run away from their homes??

… Anyway, a great movie, and a super experience to be there with Tahani,
and two of my kids, and everyone else.

Yesterday, Friday, I took the train back to Charlottesville.  I didn’t
get as much work done on the train as I’d hoped.  Oh well.  But
in the evening, our friends Anne McKeithen and Erik Midelfort had organized
another treat for us, which was a visit to the twice-yearly open night at
the University of Virginia’s
Fan Mountain Observatory
.  We trekked up the mountain there at around 9 p.m.  It was a
completely ideal night: very crisp and clear.  In fact, even without
going into the domed observatory there, we were all stunned by the broad
canopy of stars you can see once you’re up on the mountain and away from
the reflected lights of the town.  The Milky Way was quite clear; and
there were so many bright stars it was even kind of hard to figure out where
familiar old constellations like the Great Bear or the Pleiades were.

When we went inside the observatory that houses a 31-inch reflecting telescope,
we edged slowly round inside the room’s circular wall to wait our turn at
the eyepiece.  The telescope had been focused onto a nebula 2,000 light-years
away, which showed up as a dim and fuzzy ring.  But how amazing: that
that light had started its journey into our eyes at around the time of Jesus
Christ!  Wow!

Afterwards, as we wandered around the outdoor slide show some astronomy students
were presenting, they were talking blithely about things happening many millions
of light-years away, and were throwing around various other ungraspable figures
like the numbers of stars in the Milky Way or the numbers of galaxies in the
whole universe…

When I was 15 and 16, I strongly wanted to become an astrophysicist.  I
adored physics and mathematics, and would read about astronomy and marvel
at the power of those concepts to lift me out of the humdrum and into another
realm.  Then I went to Oxford to study math, and almost immediately
hit a serious math wall.  Nowadays people understand a lot more about
why that happens to young women and have many more ways, I think, of helping
the young women concerned to overcome it.  But for me it felt really
cruddy, being there with all these men who had been so much better prepared
for Oxford math by their schools than I had been by my all-girls’ school.
 So I ended up doing Philosophy and Economics instead.  It’s been
okay…  I never even really thought very much about that aspect of
my 16-year-old self until last night.  

There were lots of people up there– maybe about 200 or 300, all stumbling
around a bit because we had to be very careful about wrecking other people’s
ability to see by using flashlights more than minimally .  But lots
of people seemed to have taken their kids up there.  How exciting and
inspiring for them!

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could take some of those girls from Tahani’s
film to a place like an astronomical observatory, or a large aquarium, or
a coral reef, and start to show them something about this world that would
be very different from their highly circumscribed life there on the streets…
Wouldn’t it be great if the kids caged up in the vast holding pens into which
the Israelis have transformed the whole of occupied Palestine could do the
same?

I also, while I was in New York, had some very interesting conversations
with people who’ve been working on the issue of the detainees in Guantanamo.
 Now there is an experience that is almost the exact opposite of what
I’ve been writing about here:  a systematic attempt by the camp’s administration
to strip down the lives of the detainees to an absolute minimum, in physical
terms, while cutting off any possibility of an intellectual life, of artistic
development, of engagement in any sembalnce of normal social interaction
or, in many cases, in any form of social interaction at all.

Next Wednesday is when I make my trip there.  I’ll write much more about
the whole phenomenon later.