On a quest for new horizons, Bassifondi sets sail with its Stories.

“The first thing I saw was a lot of soldiers and police officers beating the crowd with electric batons and then arresting demonstrators and loading them onto trucks”.
“I saw that they were firing straight at people”.
“I saw up to 30 people crowded into 30-40 square foot cells. There was no space to sit down so detainees had to stand most of the day and night. The cells had no toilets but prisoners were not taken out and had to relieve themselves inside the cell. They were given one bowl of rice congee a day. Many were subjected to beatings”.
These excerpts were taken from three of the 203 eyewitness statements recounting the abuse inflicted by Chinese security forces and paramilitary groups (all belonging to the Han ethnic group) during protests staged in Tibet in 2008 and over the last two years.
Independent organisation Human Rights Watch has compiled these statements in a report denouncing acts of violence inflicted on the women, children, monks and nuns who assembled in Lhasa in March 2008 and which very few people know about. According to its authors “the human rights violations that took place were much more severe than anyone might have imagined.” The report also states that “dissenters and their families are still going missing and continue to be the victims of violence, imprisonment and persecution.”

Click here to download the full report

Let’s play the game of Don Mariano, a character in Leonardo Sciascia’s novel The Day of the Owl.
According to that old mafia Padrino, humanity is divided into five categories: Men, of which there are very few, then Half-Men, few and still decent. Then there are the Pigmies, who are like children trying to be grown-ups, and the “pigliainculo”, the losers, passed over by everyone. Last place is taken by the “quaquaraquà” who, as the name’s sound suggests, are like ducks in a pond, and whose lives have no point or meaning.

To start this game, the player has to be prepared to put himself out there. Only then is the game on. Jon Krakauer, the writer and journalist known for his non-fiction books such as “Into Thin Air” and “Into the Wild”, has put himself out there, placing himself among the half-men or even the “quarter-men”, half of a half-man, but perhaps he’s unconsciously thinking of the quarterback in American football to lessen his limitations (the quarterback is after all the most important man on the pitch).
For Krakauer, Men are people like the protagonists of his books. Especially the last one: Pat Tillman, an American football player who left his career and enlisted to go to Afghanistan, where he was killed in a friendly fire incident. His story is told in the book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.
«He walked the tightrope between opposites. He was full of contradictions and doubts but he accepted them. He managed to control them. Once he had chosen his path, he followed it all the way» Krakauer tells me. Then he quotes Emerson: “Always do what you are afraid to do”.

As you can see, this game can become very dangerous. But the risk isn’t physical. «Taking risks is easy, especially when you’re young» says Krakauer, who has taken his fair share and almost put an end to his human adventure on Everest. Real danger is finding yourself on murky ethical ground, giving in to pride, losing yourself in that theatre of shadows where honour and courage may just be a front for arrogance and egocentricity. Where men would like to be men, but little by little slip into the lower categories. This is, in Krakauer’s view, what happened to General McChrystal, “a man of great skills, who would not normally compromise his principles to get results”, but who appears to have done just that when he allegedly concealed the real cause of Tillman’s death for personal ambition.

It’s an even more dangerous game for those that tell the story of these Men: they move in treacherous territory, where they need to walk a fine line between demons and influences, where it's easy to fall into moralising or even abuse. As Nietzsche wrote: "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you".

This also happened to Sebastian Junger, another American reporter known mainly for The Perfect Storm. His latest work is Restrepo, a multimedia operation that relates the life of a platoon of American soldiers in a remote Afghan outpost. It's a powerful, epic work of extraordinary complexity. A work which embodies what the philosopher James Hillman called a terrible love of war, where one is pushed into a “martial state of the soul”. This is why Junger was accused of writing about war “as if it is a storm at sea, a force of nature that is ... put on earth to test men’s strength, wits and courage. Junger’s view of war is a purely apolitical one, a timeless condition of man”.

Junger, even more than Krakauer, is open to contradictory, even unsettling, interpretations. But both are testaments to total, uncompromising journalism. In the end neither Krakauer nor Junger, nor even a thousand heroes’ faces can be pigeon-holed into Don Mariano’s game. Maybe this is the real solution to the game. Don’t play it.

The Thai censorship board has banned the broadcasting of a video clip entitled “We’re Sorry Thailand”. According to the board, the clip, which includes scenes from last May’s uprising, may trigger further protests and clashes among factions.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has asked for the ban to be removed, judging the video for what it actually appears to be: a declaration of shared responsibility. By doing so he is sending a strong signal, which seems to demonstrate a serious will to move towards national reconciliation, and above all towards implementing profound change in the culture and society.
Unfortunately, censorship appears to be sending an even stronger signal, one inspired by the desire to continue presenting the country as the “Land of Smiles”.
If this line prevails, perhaps even more apologies will have to be made to Thailand.

The banned cip

A street kid from Mumbai who escapes the reformatory and rescues a child from a vicious dog. He then begins a search for the boy’s mother. The problems faced by a young Japanese divorcee who returns to her hometown with her daughter. The lives of three Beijing taxi drivers, between memories of the Cultural Revolution and aspirations of entrepreneurial success. The strange journey of a Palestinian man who washes dishes in a Japanese restaurant while attempting to become a sumo wrestler. The tale of how music and dance can help a group of Filipinos address anger issues. These are the protagonists and stories of the films presented in Hong Kong at the latest edition of the Asia Society Summer Film Series. These are the stories of the Aspirasians, of those attempting to enter or living on the margins of the new Asia, which is widely expected to control the future of our planet. In order to do that, however, it will first have to deal with hundreds of millions of people such as these.

The government-owned daily newspaper “New Light of Myanmar” has announced that a rare white elephant, a 38-year-old female standing over two metres tall, has been captured in Maungtaw, in the state of Rakhine. Analysts have underlined the fact that for some Myanmar people the white elephant is a symbol of political change, thus connecting it with the upcoming elections set to take place in October.
For others, better acquainted with the superstitions of the ruling junta, the news has a more worrying meaning.
A report by the Democratic Voice of Burma has alleged that the Myanmar government is developing a secret programme to create nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles: a “Great White Elephant”, a magical symbol of power. It's to be hoped that the project remains just a symbol. But it may turn out to be one of the worst monsters populating the Asian imagination thanks to the government’s cooperation with North Korea.
The real mystery of this latest act of lunacy by the military junta is not if they can make weapons of mass destruction, but why. For a dissident exile in Bangkok, this is proof that the generals are nothing more than a bunch of psychopaths living in fear of invasion. Others see it as a move controlled by the Koreans. Yet others see it as a much more complex strategy to gain control over the region. In the meantime, the new planes made for the top junta chiefs have also been named “White Elephant”.



Click here to see the full DVB documentary.

Drug use in the richest countries of the world is stable, but is on the up in developing countries, where methamphetamine is increasingly widespread. This from the 2010 World Drug Report, produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The standout factor that emerges from the report is that the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs are now almost indistinguishable, in both marketing and financial terms, from those of other basic commodities. Drugs seem to be becoming a metaphor for the global market.
The other factor is the rise in the use of methamphetamine in developing countries. Speak to a taxi driver in Jakarta, a bricklayer in Shanghai or a factory worker in the textile factories all over Asia and they will tell you exactly why: stimulants are crucial to sustaining heavy workloads.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:14.6MB) .

The U.S. Department of State has published the 2010 report on human trafficking.
According to the report, 12.3 million men, women and children around the world are forced into work or prostitution, with the traffickers earning up to 32 thousand million dollars per year. In some cases the victims are literally kidnapped or reduced to slavery. In the majority of cases they are forced to sell themselves to escape ethnic persecution, war and subhuman living conditions.
All of this means that that initial figure could be increased ten-fold to give a more realistic idea of the numbers of people that are The Wretched of the Earth.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:22MB).