So the man has passed on.

Not sure how I managed to miss the news of Ornette Coleman’s death at the time six weeks back, but I did. Now it’s reached me I find myself locked in a bittersweet combination of sadness-at-the-passing and recollection of the joy and inspiration his music has so often provided me. Above all it was thanks to Ornette that at the age of 16 I discovered the world of free jazz, of boundless improvisational freedom bound together with collective emphathy and  responsiveness in a musical embrace that – for me at least – opened up amazing new worlds.

As is the way with new enthusiams, I quickly tried to convert others to the cause. It was uphill work. When aged 17 I was given the opportunity to select a piece of music for me and my college contemporaries to listen to, I went straight for Coleman’s Free Jazz, a seminal recording in the history of modern music that remains as stimulating as it is – difficult. Can’t say my efforts to bring more bright young teenagers into the free/improv music fold were that successful. Afterwards, however, I consoled myself with the thought that: well, at least I tried.

Back to Ornette: for some reason I never did get to see the man live. But I never stopped listening to him over the years – and even played a few of his compositions with jazz-inclined university mates. Challenging? Yes, often. Capable of exquisite beauty laced with an often piercing sadness? Definitely.

So here’s a small tribute to him . or rather by him. ‘Lonely Woman‘, an early ballad from the seminal album ‘The Shape of Jazz To Come’.

Here is a thoughtful review of Sri Lankan Tamil intellectual and human rights activist Rajan Hoole’s new book: Palmyra Fallen; From Rajani to War’s End. Having made my way through a fair bit of the book – which could certainly have used a decent editor – I find myself firmly in agreement with this reviewer’s main conclusions, reproduced below:

Former Sri Lankan President Mahindra Rajapaksa meets with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo in 2013.

“Hoole does not exonerate the Sri Lankan military and indeed, at considerable personal risk, he has meticulously reported on their war crimes and human rights abuses. But, he argues, the state’s sins are well known and widely reported while the LTTE’s grisly record has not received the attention it deserves, especially now that many Tamils are glorifying the Tamil Tigers. Hoole asserts that the LTTE had a number of chances to cut a deal with the government that would have been acceptable to the Tamil population, but walked away from compromises that would have spared the nation so much sorrow and loss.

Just heard from the publishers that the book is finally going to the typesetters today. So should be on course for publication by the end of July: watch this space for more information . . .

Between 1983 and 2009 the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger guerillas engaged in a bitter civil war, with the Tiger’s goal of an independent Tamil polity the key issue of contention.

The conflict’s end came in May 2009 with the Tiger’s crushing defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan army. Prior to this grim finale, however, for some time there had been hope for a peaceful end to the conflict. Starting with a ceasefire agreement in early 2002, for almost five years a series of Norwegian-mediated peace talks between the two sides took place in locations ranging from Thailand and Japan to Norway, Germany and Switzerland.

This book tells the story of how the process of trying to bring peace to Sri Lanka unfolded. In particular it tells the story of how a faraway European nation – Norway – came to play a central role in efforts to end the conflict, and what its small, dedicated team of mediators did in their untiring efforts to reach what ultimately proved the elusive goal of a negotiated peace.

While some aspects of Norway’s role have been documented elsewhere, the deeper story of that involvement has not yet been told. This book tells that story. In the process it fills a critical gap in our understanding of the Sri Lankan conflict, and highlights lessons the Norwegian mediation effort may offer for internationally-supported attempts to end conflicts elsewhere.

In the aftermath of the murderous attacks on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo at the beginning of 2015, calls to rally to the defence of French ‘republican values’ have resounded throughout the country and indeed, much of the rest of the world.

Beyond a simple enumeration of the fundamental human rights these values are supposed to represent, what does the historical record look likes when it comes to the actual application of those rights to citizens of la patrie? The answer to that question, it turns out, very much depended on who you were.

Simply put, from 1881, all citizens of the republic enjoyed legal freedom of the press; and those who weren’t didn’t. No small matter, moreover, when those excluded from the category of full citizens mostly included the millions of French colonial subjects living in its the country’s imperial posessions scattered across Africa, Indochina and elsewhere.

Most srikingly, in the case of colonial Algeria – officially a part of France – citizenship was specifically defined as including all those who were not Muslims – a racialised appropriation of religious identity for the purposes of exclusion that remained in force right up until the country finally achieved independence in 1962 following a brutal and protracted liberation struggle against the French.

An excellent short article by Arthur Asseraf – an online contribution to the St. Anthony’s College Oxford ‘Free Speech Debate‘ project led by Timothy Garton-Ash – sets out the historical record. Asseraf’s conclusion makes clear the connection between examining past French uses and abuses of citizenship and contemporary efforts to build more inclusive societies:

As we struggle to respond to [the Charlie Hebdo] massacre and to find a definition of free speech appropriate for our times, we will have to come to terms with the past uses of free speech to exclude and control certain populations. Claiming free speech as a ‘Republican’, ‘French’ or ‘Western’ value by conjuring a mythical pantheon of canonical Enlightenment figures will not help us build more inclusive societies.

http://freespeechdebate.com/en/discuss/has-france-been-hypocritical-about-free-speech/

The cartoon sequence below,  a visual adaptation of passages from Neil Postman’s seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death by artist Stuart McMillan, is featured in a stimulating openDemocracy article just published  under the title ‘Are you cultivating knowledge – or just consuming information?’ I’m reproducing it here because I think it speaks to some fundamental concerns of our times.

While highlighting the main thrust of the cartoon’s warnings regarding the dangers of ‘amusing ourselves to death’, article author Gregory Ciotti nonetheless argues that it, along with much contemporary discussion of the internet’s impact on human behaviour and consciousness, is in danger of both oversimplifiying matters. Critically too, what’s often left out of the debate, he argues, “is the fact that emerging technologies are a double-edged sword. Whether the internet is a mindless distraction or the greatest educational tool ever invented is all in how you use it.” (my italics).

See what you think!

Full credit to the highly talented Stuart McMillen for this. Stuart is also the artist for Gregory Ciotti’s Supernormal Stimuli series.

I have several eminently worthy recipients for this cartoon lined up. You?

It’s the inauguration of your country’s newly-elected President, and you’re a sharp, enterprising young female journalist covering the event. One of the guests at the ceremony turns out to be Robert Mugabe, that African paragon of democratic virtue. This is what you do as a consequence – if you’re Nigeran satirist Adeola Fayehun at least – as revealed in a YouTube clip that’s already scored over 270,000 views since it was first broacast following the 29 May inauguration ceremony for the country’s newly-elected president Muhammadu Buhari:

Fayehun has been beavering away at this kind of thing for some years: since it was launched in November 2011, her weekly nearly 30 minute satirical news show on Sahara TV – launched in 2006 to promote media coverage of corruption and mismanagement in Nigeria – Keeping It Real has clocked up over 150 episodes. While she has an established fan base spread far across the continent it’s thanks to her recent intrepid ambush of Robert Mugabe that Fayehun has taken a step towards the international limelight.

Watching her, it’s tempting to fall into comparisons with US frontliners such Jon Snow’s The Daily Show. But I’d suggest you leave all that aside for now, and check Fayehun rapping on the state of Nigerian politics in her own inimitable mix of pidgin and English. Here’s a tasty sample – you may find yourself hungry for more!

Here’s a very strong piece from two Sri Lankans looking at the uses – and abuses – of the demand for accountability in post-war Sri Lanka. In particular the politicization – domestic and international – of the accountability agenda and the way in which it is used by hard-liners on both sides of the ethnic divide to attempt to ‘discipline’ their only people.

Don’t give into demands for international involvement in war crimes investigations – that’s imperialism pure and simple (Sinhalese version). And don’t countenance, let alone attempt to accomodate proposals for a domestic accountability mechanism – that the siren call of the sell-out, the lure proffered by traitors to the nation (Tamils).

That’s the issue the piece is mainly addressing, at least as I read it. There’s also an impassioned call for introspection and acknowledgement of the real harms done to each other in the past – whether the issue is historic LTTE (and indeed Rajapaksa regime-supported) mistreatment of Muslims, the Tiger’s ruthless pursuit of dissident Tamil political voices during the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) era, or the persistent supression, and more often that not annihiliation, of oppositional Sinhalese forces by successive Sri Lankan governments, starting with – but not confined to – the second JVP uprising of the late 1980s.

I’m not sure Lankan nationalists of any stripe are going to like this piece. But the fact remains that it raises vital – and ultimately, unavoidable – issues in the debate over the country’s future trajectory.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/ahilan-kadirgamar-mahendran-thiruvarangan/beyond-accountability-struggle-for-coexis

A stimulating piece by Michael Massing in the latest edition of The New York Review of Books takes a look at the present state of online media: tunrs out in fact, it’s the first of three articles on the subject. While understandably skewed in the direction of US media, plenty of the points he makes are relevant for a much wider audience, Europe included. Online media outlets covered in a wide-ranging analysis include Huffington Post (of course), Andrew Sullivan’s popular but now discontinued blog The Dish, The Drudge Report, Salon.com, Politico and ProPublica – most, but not all, of these publications being familiar names.

Massing argues – convincingly, I think – that a common feature of the initial wave of online media is that, having started out by developing pioneering new online approaches that produced a wide range of innovative and original media content, 10 years and some down the line many appear to be stuck in what he calls ‘middle-aged’ slackness. ‘They helped lead journalism out of the kingdom of traditional print and broadcasting into the liberating lad of the Internet’, he argues, ‘only to become stranded’.

Massing views Politico as pretty much the lone exception to this rule – and as someone who has recently taken to visiting their site occasionally, I definitely perked up at this point in the argument – not least because it is expanding its base beyond North America. In April this year, in partnership with German publishing behemoth Axel Springer, Politico launched a new European edition based in Brussels.

Even more strikingly, by the end of 2015 Politico’s European edition apparently expects to ‘have more reporters and editors covering European politics and policy than any other organization on [the] continent’. Which if it proves to be an accurate prognosis, would constitute an extraordinary media development – online or otherwise: not least for media consumers – and producers – living on the continent in question.

So, fellow Europeans: who’ll be the first of your acquaintainces to be signed up by Politico? Come to think of it, could it be you?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/digital-journalism-how-good-is-it/

Dawn arrests in 5-Star Zurich hotels. A special press conference called by US Attorney Loretta Lynch to present a charge sheet of what she called “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” international corruption spanning decades and involving eye-watering kick-backs, fixed tournament allocations and rigged presidential elections . . . Except we’re not talking about an authoritarian statelet here. Not in the slightest. No, this is all about the latest attention-grabbing developments in FIFA, world football’s governing body.

Here’s my old friend David Goldblatt’s take on the FIFA corruption scandal – an extraordinary story that he has been following closely, writing about and campaigning on for years. Predictably, much instant media coverage of the US, and now also Swiss criminal investigations is focused on the lurid details of the corruption charges: who paid how much to who, when and so on. In one sense this is both obvious and understandable, because by any standard the details are extraordinary.

A personal standout concerns Chuck Blazer, an American described as a ‘soccer dad’ who by 2010 had risen to the higher echelons of Fifa, football’s world governing body. Whatever it was he was doing for Fifa it was certainly proving remunerative. By 2011 Blazer had supposedly acquired two flats above Fifa’s regional office in  Trump Tower close to Fifth Avene Manhattan, in New York. Why two you may ask? Answer (reportedly): one for him – and one for his cats. The presumption is that Blazer managed this, morevoer, with his cut from the massive sums – allegedly in the $150m plus category – Fifa had allegedly received in bribes and kickbacks over the last 20 years.

Finally cornered by the FBI and US Internal Revenue Service over failure to pay tax on any of this not-so-mysteriously gained income, Blazer eventually agreed to co-operate with US law enforcement agencies. The result was a spectacular series of revelations over internal corruption in Fifa that doubtless contributed to to the charge sheet against Fifa read out yesterday by the US Attorney.

As I read it David’s main point, however, is the need to use this headline-grabbing development to focus on the causes of corruption in world football’s governance, not just its financial consequences, however outrageous they indeed are.

When it comes to global football governance, he argues, it is high time for ‘the politics of Fifa to be extended beyond the eternal insiders of the dysfunctional football family, the royal houses of the Gulf, and the stooges of authoritarian regimes and commercial interests that pass for representatives of the world’s football nations.’ To who? At the very least’, he suggests, ‘representatives of fans, players, football NGOs and grassroots football should have a seat at the table’. A modest but eminently democratising proposal.

Beyond the composition of governance structures, David argues for a rewrite of Fifa’s constitution specifying and intensifying the democratic and social obligations of its constituent members, and transforming its mode and rationale for awarding World Cups.. All in all such moves are, he suggests, ‘the bare minimum that the situation demands’.

‘Democracy is coming – to the USA‘, Leonard Cohen once sang famously. Who knows? Perhaps this time round a US-prompted inititative could actually help to kickstart a process of genuine democratisation on the international scene. Now wouldn’t  be something?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/27/fifa-fiasco-football-corruption