Archive - Jul 22, 2008 - Article

Two sides of a coin

It might seem like the US consul setting up shop in Iran is only going to help those who need visas to avoid having to go to Dubai anymore. But as small overtures always do, they end up becoming far more than they started out to be. This time there seems to be a huge wave of good karma pointed at this latest ray of hope. On one side you have the legitimizing effect of giving one of the most brutal and murderous empires Persia ever had, regional credibility, and the tough admission that the US policy of isolation for the past 30 years, was wrong>>>

Ciudad Juarez: the undiscovered

It was a sweltering hot day in July, perfect for a stroll by the beach with a cold beer in hand and, shit, there I was instead at Department X receiving instruction for my next assignment – to kill a gringo in San Diego, without knowing, or asking, why and what his sins were. My boss corrected me when I said that I thought my job was limited to going after our bad guys here in Mexico. “This is a top priority, I ‘ve got orders from the very top, you know what that means?” I actually didn’t and seeing that I was shaking my head negatively, he elaborated, “that means national security stupid. So don’t waste my time any more and get on with it, the reputation of this whole department is on the line now, so don’t disappoint me.”>>>

Those days

If Afghanistan is the poorest country in the world and Nigeria the most religious, our community was like Afghanistan inhabited by white Nigerians! With the exception of a few, our neighbors were not monetarily any better off than we were. Most other houses were not any fancier than ours. Privacy had no safeguard in our community, personal and confidential information could be disclosed routinely. We used to know almost everything about our immediate neighbors from garlic to onion so to speak. At the other side of our house lived two families in the same house, a brother, Mashdi Esmaeel, in his sixties, with his wife and many kids in one side and his sister, Fatemeh Sultan with her kids on the other. >>>

Twenty Years of Silence

This summer, thousands of bereaved families will defy the Iranian government and gather at the mass graves in Tehran’s Khavaran cemetery to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1988 massacre of Iranian political prisoners. If you have forgotten this grim anniversary, then you are not alone. In fact, you are not alone if you did not even know that such a massacre ever occurred. In scale and brutality, the 1988 massacre is unparalleled in contemporary Iranian history. It is the darkest irony of this very dark episode, that of all its human rights violations the Iranian government has been most successful at keeping the 1988 killings a secret from the international community and from many Iranians>>>

اشگ شراب...

از وقتی تو رفته ای
صد ها نخ سیگار
در لابلای انگشتان تو
خاموش مانده است
و دودشان در دل من به آهی بدل.
>>>