Libyans in US allege coercion

The Libyan government allegedy paid citizens to attend rallies when Gaddafi visited the UN in 2009 [EPA]
The Libyan government allegedy paid citizens to attend rallies when Gaddafi visited the UN in 2009 [EPA]

In an apparent effort to control the public narrative in the wake of rare protests that have spread throughout Libya, the country's government is threatening to withdraw scholarship funding from citizens studying in the US unless they attend pro-government rallies in Washington this weekend, Al Jazeera has learned.

 

 

Several Libyans studying in the US said they and their peers have received phone calls this week from a man employed by the Libyan embassy instructing them to join rallies in the capital on Friday and Saturday.

 

The man told the students that their government-funded scholarships would be cut off if they did not attend.

 

Several Libyans studying in the US said they and their peers have received phone calls this week from a man employed by the Libyan embassy instructing them to join rallies in the capital on Friday and Saturday.

 

The man told the students that their government-funded scholarships would be cut off if they did not attend.

 

The apparent coercion comes as protesters in Libya attempted to mount a "day of rage" on Thursday and continued their calls for the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign as Libya’s leader.

 

At least 14 people are reported to have died as a result of unrest that began on Monday and has broken out in cities throughout the country, including Tripoli, the capital, and Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, where most of the deaths have been reported.

 

The Libyan embassy employee in the US told students that the government would pay for all the expenses associated with attending the rally, including a plane ticket, hotel room and food, the students said.

 

They spoke with Al Jazeera on the condition they remain anonymous because they feared retribution from the government if their identities were made public.

 

'Consequences'

 

One student in his mid-20s who graduated from medical school in Libya and is preparing to take his physicians’ licensing exam said that the man from the embassy called late on Tuesday night and identified himself as a cultural liaison.

 

"He said, 'Listen, you’re going to have to come … it's not your choice, it's best you go, it's better than the consequences'." the student said. 

 

"I said, what do you mean, the consequences? And he said, 'You’ll lose your scholarship.' And I said, 'Are you threatening me?' And he said, 'No it's not a threat, it's the reality'."

 

The cultural liaison said he had a list of names and that the government would note those who attended, the student said.

 

"I felt embarrassed, I felt coerced," he said.

 

Another student who also received a late-night phone call on Tuesday said that the caller, a man he knew, told him he was carrying out government instructions. The student said he too was threatened with the loss of his scholarship.

 

"I told them I had an exam coming up in the next few days and they told me, ‘It’s a serious situation, you have to go,’ and if I don’t go they told me, 'Most probably (the government) will cut off your scholarship,'" the man said.

"We have your birthday and we have your full name and we need you to say that you are coming," the caller said.

 

Both students said they had spoken with more than a dozen peers who also reported receiving similar threats.

 

'Act of desperation'

 

Abdulla Darrat, a 28-year-old co-founder of the "Enough Gaddafi" movement who is based in New York City, told Al Jazeera he had heard of the threats as well.

 

The Libyan embassy in Washington referred questions about the coercive phone calls to Alsudik Ali, a second secretary at the mission, who had not responded by early afternoon local time on Thursday.

 

One of the students said he had called Libyan peers whom he considered close friends to ask about the threats, but he said he was afraid too afraid to ask other Libyan student acquaintances because he feared they might report him to the government.

 

"Among Libyan students, we have informants," he said. "I can’t just go through a list and call them ... Some of them would call the Libyan embassy and tell them that he has talked to Jazeera."

 

Darrat said his group had applied for permits to protest at the Libyan embassy on Friday and Saturday and planned to hold a demonstration at the White House on Saturday as well.

 

A pro-government student group has applied for permits to demonstrate next to them, he said.

 

Darrat compared the government’s current public relations effort with the event it staged during Gaddafi’s visit to the United Nations in September 2009, when the Libyan government erected a stage that featured African dancers and a large television screen that projected Gaddafi’s one-hour-and-40-minute speech to the General Assembly.

 

Darrat and others claimed the Libyan government had paid citizens in the United States to attend pro-Gaddafi rallies during the visit.

Some were given $2,000 and took the money "as a way to get out of studies and enjoy a weekend," one of the students said.

 

"This time it’s much different," he said. "The embassy officials are desperate and are now attempting to force us to go. This an act of desperation."

 

Dissidents face retribution

 

When Libyans protest against the government, Darrat said, they usually anticipate that the government will retaliate somehow.

 

"If you refuse to go [to the protest], it’s not just the scholarship, it is when you return, you will have problems," he said.

 

"Basically in Libya, it’s all about intermediaries. You get a job through intermediaries, basically bribing and nepotism … If you want a job, if you want to live a comfortable life, it can be very difficult to do so without acquiescence to the demands of the regime."

 

Many Libyans are well aware of the heavy hand the government has applied, even internationally, since Gaddafi fully consolidated power in the late 1970s, Darrat said.

 

"It was the end of that decade the regime became more vicious and more violent," said Naeem Gheriany, Darrat’s 56-year-old father-in-law and a nuclear engineer who works for the US Energy Department. Gheriany has been involved in Libyan opposition politics for decades and said he was warned once during a trip to Italy that government agents planned on attacking him.

 

"They started essentially tracking dissidents not just in Libya but overseas, and of course managed to liquidate a number of Libyan citizens outside of the country, in England and other places," he said.

 

Gheriany became involved with the opposition General Union of Students of Libya and left his home country permanently in the late summer of 1980.

"Of course, I was blacklisted, so I couldn’t go back to Libya, and a lot of my friends were arrested in Libya," he said.

 

'Kicked out'

 

Activists hope that the tens of thousands of Libyans they say have taken to the streets around the country finally will bring an end to the Gaddafi era and its repressive tactics.

 

The government has shown no signs of making any concessions to the demonstrators thus far, but for some of the students in the United States, the sight of citizens publicly calling for Gaddafi’s ouster was enough to inspire them to defy the embassy's demands to come to Washington DC.

 

"I was up late all last night watching the videos of masked youths pleading to the Libyan people to rise against the oppression," one of the students wrote in an email.

 

"These videos have been circulating on Facebook, and after watching them I broke into tears. I will no longer accept this oppression."

 

The student said he had stopped answering all unknown phone calls, which he assumes are the embassy checking to see whether he will accept the ticket.

 

His brother, in Libya, has told him that the government has blocked Internet access and severed communications with eastern parts of the country.

He and others say their attention is now directed to Tripoli, where protests could prove decisive.

 

Another student, who also has been watching videos of the protests on social media websites, said he was inspired to refuse the embassy’s instructions by recent upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt - where longtime leaders both stepped down from power following mass protests.

 

"I mean today people are protesting in the different cities in my country, now I saw the videos on the Facebook and YouTube," said one man, who told the embassy officer he could not postpone his upcoming exam.

 

 "I’m not afraid anymore, because I’m feeling that it’s gonna be over, Gaddafi’s gonna be over, it’s happened in Tunisia and Egypt …  This guy, he’s not gonna [step] down, he’s gonna be kicked out."

 

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Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


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DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

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03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

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