One organisation that is well accustomed to mediating between such arguments is the United Nations. The recent Iraq crisis exposed the UN to a barrage of criticisms from almost every political angle, including George W. Bush’s notorious threat that the organisation would be rendered irrelevant if it failed to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq in a manner approved of by George’s administration.

Now that the war is over and the UN was neither able to endorse it nor prevent it, the question of the UN’s utility is even more pertinent. We open this, the Liberation Issue of the LIP, by allowing Edward Mortimer, Director of Communications in the office of the UN Secretary-General, to put his case forward for the relevancy of his employers.

However fractured and imperfect the United Nations may be, its spirit of cross-cultural dialogue should surely be commended by all those who claim to be supporters of multiculturalism. The LIP rejects the idea that absolutism – epitomised in the coarse nature of wartime propaganda – provides a healthy model for interaction on any level.

In Britain, one of our most respected living philosophers takes a different view. Roger Scruton is a self-confessed opponent of both multiculturalism and globalisation. In a challenging interview with Tim Glencross, he outlines his suspicion of the UN and his opposition to its multilateral ideals.

By contrast, Ziauddin Sardar, co-author of Why Do People Hate America? provides us with a strong defence for multiculturalism on the basis that it is ‘all about subverting the power of Western civilisation.’ For Ziauddin, the process of encouraging multiculturalism is primarily a way of resisting Western domination on an international scale, and transforming our precepts internally.

Despite the uncertainties of our current historical moment, Ziauddin is hopeful that we can work to create a future based on a dialogue, rather than a clash, of civilisations. Learning to accept that no-one has a monopoly on the truth – that we all see things differently – is surely the first step.

Evil men try to narrow your horizons. They try to control your thoughts. They try to tell you who you are. They spread falsehoods, by saying that the public wants only celebrity and sensation. They give this as the reason for their bland magazines and TV shows that patronise us all. Do not believe their lies!

Beware the magazines which look the exactly the same, from issue to issue.

We have shown that there is a latent mass of people in this country, who are sick of this “media-by-numbers.” With our glorious success we have shown that people want to hear from new lands. They want to hear new politics, new music. They want to judge new ideas for themselves. People who revel in the diversity of our great species are coming together at last, to celebrate the humanity we share.

We ask for your help, to accelerate the coming of our certain victory. You owe yourself the chance to become involved. Now, at the genesis of the project, is when you will harvest the greatest rewards.

We are building a coalition of the willing. We wish to recruit LIP operatives for every UK city. We require advertising and marketing managers, regional editors, news hunter-gatherers, legions of reviewers, web-masters. If you would like to help propagate the LIP, please send an e-mail to MinistryOfTruth@theLIP.org

You’re either with us or against us. You decide.

This euphoria came to an abrupt end in 1993, with the débâcle in Somalia and the gruesome stalemate in Bosnia. The Clinton administration blamed both these on the UN, although they were mainly caused by the US’s own mistakes and those of its European allies. Then in 1994 came the genocide in Rwanda – which none of the great powers made any attempt to halt until it was almost over – and then the loss of both houses of Congress to the Republicans. After that, Bill Clinton was unwilling to take any risks to defend the UN. In 1996 he even vetoed a second term for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in order to deprive his presidential opponent of a campaign issue.

Kofi Annan, who replaced Boutros, adopted a low-key approach and had had some success in improving UN-US relations by 2001, when the terrorist attack of September 11 dramatically reawakened US interest in the rest of the world, including the UN, and temporarily won sympathy for the US around the world. Within weeks, the Security Council not only affirmed the US’s right to defend itself against the attack (without specifying where or when), but also adopted a highly intrusive US-drafted resolution requiring all states to cooperate in hunting down terrorists and their sources of income.

A year later President Bush came to the UN General Assembly to lay out his case against Iraq in terms of previous Security Council resolutions, and to demand that the Council now take action to enforce them. In the six months that followed the Council was at the centre of an extraordinary drama. As its five permanent members slid into confrontation, the ten elected members found themselves asked to choose sides between the US and their own public opinion. In all but two cases (Spain and Bulgaria), the latter won. This infuriated the Bush administration, but cheered many other people by showing that the UN was not, after all, an automatic rubber-stamp for US wishes.

What the Council could not do, however, was actually to prevent the war. Ironically this led many opponents of the war to reach the same conclusion as George Bush and his supporters – that the UN had become futile and irrelevant – even if for the opposite reason.
Both sides apparently had expectations of the UN that its track record scarcely justifies. There have regrettably been hundreds of wars in the world since 1945. Very few of them were authorised by the Security Council. In fact there are only two major examples: the Korean war in 1950 and the Gulf war in 1990-91. In the Kosovo crisis of March 1999 the Council failed to agree but NATO went ahead with military action anyway, much like George and Tony in March 2003. The main difference was that then France and Germany – and millions of Muslims around the world – were on the US side.

It is sad that the Council failed to solve this latest Iraq crisis, but those who were disappointed should not give up hope. Governments on both sides of the argument found it very bruising, and they are now trying to come together again and find common ground on Iraq’s future.
Already the UN is playing a leading role in bringing humanitarian relief to Iraq’s people. And the Security Council has been able to agree on extending the oil-for-food programme until 3 June, allowing the Secretary-General direct control of food shipments for which the now defunct Iraqi government had signed contracts.

It is increasingly clear that France, Germany and Russia – the countries that led the opposition to the war – now want to be involved in the peace. They are anxious to mend fences with the US, and to keep it engaged in the UN. France has said that it will propose immediate suspension of the sanctions on Iraq. The US, flushed with victory, is playing hard to get – it would prefer to keep Iraq fully under its own control until it has groomed a new Iraqi government to which it can hand over. But until sanctions are lifted no one will have a clear legal right to sell Iraq’s oil. This gives the other members of the Security Council some leverage. They will want the US to comply with earlier resolutions – the very ones it went to war to enforce – that say that Iraq’s disarmament must be verified by UN inspectors. They will want the oil-for-food programme phased out gradually, so that the two thirds of Iraq’s population that depend on it are not faced with sudden starvation. And they will want some form of accountability, so long as Iraq is under foreign occupation, to ensure that its oil resources and revenues are indeed being used for the benefit its people.

They will therefore probably be willing, if the US meets them half way, to frame a UN resolution giving some kind of international legitimacy to a post-war Iraqi government. That is what happened in Kosovo, where the Russians – who had frightened NATO away from the Security Council before the war by threatening a veto – co-operated in drafting the peace settlement in the form of a Council resolution.

That resolution set up a UN civilian administration in Kosovo. The same is unlikely to happen in Iraq, which neither wants nor needs to be run by foreigners – it has many qualified technicians and administrators. International administration was a useful compromise in Kosovo because there was no agreement about whether it should become independent, or remain part of Yugoslavia. But one thing all parties agree on about Iraq is that it should remain a single, independent state with its present borders.

A closer precedent might be Afghanistan, where, after the fall of the Taliban, the UN presided over a political process enabling the Afghan parties to agree on an interim authority, and then sent an assistance mission, which is now helping that authority to rebuild the country. Certainly any new Iraqi government will want to be recognised by the rest of the world, and accepted as representing Iraq in the UN.

The examples of Kosovo and Afghanistan should also remind us that the UN has an agenda far beyond Iraq. It is involved in peacekeeping and peace-building in many countries around the world. Its Development Programme and other specialised bodies are working in almost every developing country. They are at the forefront of the worldwide battles against poverty, ignorance, disease and environmental degradation. They are also working to promote human rights, including women’s rights, and better governance.

They are not there as unsolicited busybodies, but to carry out mandates from the UN’s member states – most notably the Millennium Declaration, adopted by all the world’s political leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000. Among the pledges given there are the eight Millennium Development Goals, most of which are supposed to be achieved by 2015 – including the halving of extreme poverty, universal primary education, equal access for both sexes to all levels of education, reductions in child and maternal mortality, and a halt to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Whether these goals will be achieved is, in the last resort, up to the world’s peoples, who must keep their governments up to the mark. But it is by success or failure in implementing that broad agenda, not just what happens in Iraq, that the UN’s utility should be judged.
The UN can work, if the peoples of the world want it to, and put enough pressure on their governments to make it happen.

New York, 25 April, 2003.

Edward Mortimer is Director of Communications in the office of the UN Secretary-General. He writes here in a personal capacity.

The development of museums is inextricably bound to the creation of nation states and cultural identity. To display an object in a museum is a political, message-bearing act. During the era of colony and empire, the creation of Western cultural identities was invariably at the expense of colonised peoples, unifying imperialist elites against conquered races by labelling the latter as ‘primitives’, displaying their cultural artefacts and even human remains. The unparalleled collections in the British Museum and the South Kensington enterprises were a declaration that Britain occupied a large part of the world, and was now busy classifying it. During the 1848 Chartist marches on Parliament, British Museum staff were sworn in as special constables, the authorities fearing that the building and its contents would be seen as an institutional embodiment of the philosophies and doctrines of the ruling classes.

Saddam claimed ownership of Iraqi history and constructed a national cultural identity. Palaces were built next to significant historic and archaeological sites, and the bricks of the rebuilt Babylon inscribed with ‘Saddam Hussein, protector of Iraq, rebuilt civilisation’. Al-Serai Palace in Baghdad contained a museum devoted to showing how Iraq triumphed over the Allies, and Saddam’s image looked down on some of the world’s oldest artefacts throughout the Baghdad Museum. It is clear what the political agenda for these museums was. Perhaps that’s why they became a target. They were an institutional embodiment of an Iraqi history as defined by Saddam.

Thankfully, an unofficial amnesty on the return of stolen artefacts seems to be paying off, with dozens of objects being returned daily – including a seven-thousand year old Mesopotamian vase – no questions asked. It often takes time, but evidence would show that nations invariably come to the realisation that for political independence to be meaningful, it has to be buttressed by a programme of cultural identity, once intentionally erased by colonial or oppressive regimes. Disempowered indigenous populations have pursued such programmes with museums most energetically. This is a direct consequence of years of silencing and suppression of cultural identity (but also a promising sign that democratised modern museums now enter dialogues that result in partnership or direct repatriation).

Following crisis and destruction, there is a psychological and social need to find continuity between past and present, to create a sense of sequence that will enable us to cope with the chaos. This healing and impulse for preservation is a means of conceptualising and dealing with loss… which is where museums come in. The museum can offer people tangible manifestations of their identity and confidence in the value of that identity.

The imperative now is to reclaim, restore and reinterpret as many artefacts as possible, and to rebuild Iraq’s museums as democratised institutions of participation and education. Appealing to a sense of cultural identity and nationhood pre-Saddam, symbolised in the ancient artefacts of their history, may be a vital contribution to establishing a sustainable democratic future for the people of Iraq.

To help please visit www.baghdadmuseum.org.

Eleri Lynn works for English Heritage

Banned from Indian occupied territory, Iftikhar has been working for Kashmiri independence for decades. He frequently returns to Azad (Urdu for ‘free’) Kashmir to visit family. The area has its own legislative assembly, but remains administered by Pakistan and under threat from India. ‘In 1998, eight of my relatives died in an Indian mortar attack. On the same day, a sniper shot dead a cousin of mine, a teacher, as she crossed the courtyard of her house. She was 27, the breadwinner for her family. The papers didn’t even mention it.’

He is dismissive of the token UN observation group. ‘I served in the Royal Navy for eight years, including the first Gulf War, and have seen Indian shells coming into the towns. The UN say it was “small arms fire”.’ UNMOGIP (UN Military Observer Group India and Pakistan) was set up to monitor the 1949 ceasefire, not promote diplomacy. The Kashmiri conflict, he continues, could showcase the strengths of the UN, but the organisation is unwilling to commit the resources.

In turn, India accuses the Pakistani army and groups of mujaheddin of engaging in covert cross-border operations. Iftikhar admits that three Kashmiri women were executed in December (allegedly by the obscure Islamic group Lashkar Jabbar) for not wearing burqas. Acid throwing and rape have been carried out in the name of Islam and the ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. However, he believes the widespread, state-sanctioned rape of thousands of Kashmiri women by the Indian army is not comparable to the actions of a few militants. He vehemently denies that the majority of Muslims support groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, made up exclusively of foreign veterans of the Afghan wars.

‘The splinter groups are unpredictable and uncoordinated, and responsible for many abuses. Attacks like these alienate most Muslims; so who really gains? Fiqh (the jurisprudence of Islam) states Islamic penal law does not apply in occupied territories, so these executions are not sanctioned by our creed, if indeed Muslims are responsible.

‘The international community must support moderate negotiators, or fundamentalists on both sides will benefit. In south east Asia, the West was indifferent to the suffering of the Afghan people, so the war against foreign occupation was led by Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar.’ He stresses that an armed struggle cannot succeed without political focus, but does not condemn the guerrillas. Members of his own family have died fighting for Kashmir. Iftikhar cites South Africa as an example of a country transformed by a successful armed struggle, ‘but sucess was through forcing the involvement of the international community, and not through bombs.’ Islamabad has also expressed interest in negotiations hosted by a third party, using the American-led Northern-Ireland peace initiative as a model.

Iftikhar welcomes the recent London meeting between the All-Parties Huriyat Conference (APHC, the collection of Kashmiri separatist groups) and delegates from India’s opposition group (The Congress Party, led by Sonia Ghandi). However, travel restrictions, lack of parliamentary representation and the threat of an Indian army crackdown all hobble the APHC. India will not soften its stance under Prime Minister Vajpayee’s current right wing government. Unless the UN brings its power to bear, negotiations will fail.

Can the APHC control violent splinter groups? Although he does not doubt their commitment to peace, Iftikhar thinks true progress towards Kashmiri self-determination would achieve more than APHC decrees. ‘The UN must not forget its resolutions of August 1948 and January 1949. As the former colonial power, and home to the largest expatriate community of Kashmiris in the world, Britain bears particular responsibility for fostering negotiations between India and Pakistan.’

The lack of core values and inaction by British Kashmiri organisations frustrates him. ‘Fifty years have elapsed; yet Kashmir remains in the shadows. Because we don’t have passports of our own, we are classed as Pakistanis, but for Kashmir the ideal is independence, not Pakistani or Indian domination.’

As I have been writing this interview, at least 30 more civilians have died. The largest massacre, allegedly by Islamic militants, was squeezed between headlines on the Iraqi war and rising council tax. While attention is focused on Iraq, Muslim and Hindu extremists in south Asia flourish. Every bomb that hit Baghdad shook the foundations of the UN. Rather than sulking on the sidelines, the UN should rebuild its authority by spearheading peace initiatives between the Muslims and Hindus of Kashmir.

Here is a wonderful film that plays out with the subtle depth of a good novel. An unusual amount of time is spent on rounding out each individual character; each thread of the film is explored in substantial detail, so that by the end of the film we are completely emotionally involved with each of the characters. 25th Hour tells the story of one man’s last day before he has to go to prison for seven years, following years of small time drug dealing. And so we follow Edward Norton and his friends, over these last twenty-four hours.

Spike has a wonderful cast in the shape of Edward Norton, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Brian Cox and the always-excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman. With these actors in place, Spike is comfortable enough to let the camera linger for a very long time over the performances, until the story needs to be propelled forward, at which point the director, as always, proves himself particularly adept at various cinematic tricks (jump-cuts, steadicams etc.). What makes this film stand out more than his recent output is the fact that, although Spike still manages to cram an awful lot of insight into a particular community (in this case, post-9/11 New Yorkers – Spike being the first filmmaker to deal explicitly and honestly with the aftermath of this tragedy), and while he still manages to throw up enormous questions about race, heritage and culture, for once he portrays loveable three-dimensional characters, that, when push comes to shove, represent individuals. Edward’s character does not ‘represent’ the middle-class Irish-American youth: he is, and only is, Montgomery, a character we will end up feeling emotionally connected with.

Spike has finally managed what some have been unsure he would be able to achieve. To bring his political sensibilities, his love of New York, his sheer technical brilliance, to a film that can be read on many levels, while remaining at its core, an excellent, involving, funny and moving story.

Marc travelled through what was French Equatorial Africa (‘the Congo’) with André Gide whose obsession with the African continent had led to the writing of L’Immoraliste. Marc was to act as secretary to André, documenting details of interest to the writer during their year-long journey which stretched from July 1925 to May 1926. Greatly influenced by the seminal documentary film made in 1922, Robert J Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (a film which explored the lives of the Eskimo people) Marc decided to create a cinematic document of his journey with André Gide. Impeded by the heat and the weight of his equipment, however, he soon found himself frustrated in his efforts to give an objective picture of African life. As André put it in his travel journal also entitled Voyage au Congo, just as the cameras would stop filming, an act of spontaneity would occur that film could not capture.

One of the most frustrating events for Marc is also recounted by André, who describes attempts to film ‘documentary’ scenes as producing ‘nothing of note’. Marc was aiming to obtain footage of people of the village of Yakoua, men and women, swimming together. Impossible. The people of Yakoua considered it indecent for men and women to swim together, and as the men waited on the shore they put their under-garments back on. Marc explained to André that the men would undress as they entered the water, and he hoped for a certain effect to come from this. Yet, as André puts it, their modesty before the cameras was too great; the men preferred to soak their clothes, which would soon dry out under the sun. The women were equally shy, demanding that all the men, all spectators except the film-makers, left the ‘scene’. All of which resulted in a pathetic spectacle, according to André.

Such limitations meant that Marc became more and more obsessed with the staging of his film, so much so that film expert Daniel Durosay has described Voyage au Congo as a film-chimère – half-documentary, half-fiction. Voyage au Congo suppressed all evidence of a journey and instead became an abstracted cinéma du corps (cinema of the body) presenting an idealised vision of native Africa divorced from time and space. In his attempts to justify this, Marc described the film as providing a pedagogy of the Western gaze which would teach the Western eye to see the African’s beauty. Instead it became a film of clichés, living up to Edward Said’s observation that in order to survey a different world one must ‘see every detail through a device of a set of reductive categories.’

After the completion of Voyage au Congo, and particularly after World War I, ‘reportage’ film equipment was highly improved and the possibilities of capturing the everyday life of other cultures increased. Yet a question André put to himself remains pressing: ‘My imaginary representation of this country was so lively (I mean, I had imagined it so vividly) that I wonder whether in the future this false image will not be stronger than my memory of the reality and whether I shall see Bangui, for instance, in my mind’s eye as it really is, or as I first of all imagined it would be.’

Voyage au Congo can be seen in extracts at Tate Modern or in full at the National Film and TV Archive, London.

by Nemonie Roderick and Dylan Lowthian

Ms Dynamite: One shout is louder than a thousand whispers…

Nina Simone’s death silenced an abrasion. ‘Peaches’ never could keep quiet – she was a troublesome loudmouthed noisemaker. So was Fela Anikulapo Kuti. In 1996, a year before his death, he sang this:

‘Shhhh. Listen. Listen to me with open minds
I want you to take your minds out of this musical contraption, and take your mind into any goddam church
Everyday my people suffer. Suffer, suffer, suffer for what? enjoy for heaven?

Chorus: (loud) AMEN, AMEN.
Them go follow for shop. Them go follow Imam. Them go go for London, them go go for Mecca’

This juxtaposition of religious metaphysics with global reality is called ‘Schuffering and Schmiling’. Its central concept: Africans, slaves to an oppressive economic system, live in misery for the profit of a distant world whose luxuries they never see. Here, in this context, the song’s second half places its original Nigerian audience:

‘We now have to carry our minds out of those goddam places, back into this musical contraption right here… This is what happens to we Africans everyday. A confidential matter. Don’t tell anybody outside, now between me and you, now listen. Shhhhhhh’:

Every day my people work work work. Everyday my people they inside bus, 49 seats and 99 standing. Them go faint, them go sick, them go go for cook, them go home, they no go water … them no get pocket money. Weeping weeping. Suffer for what? Enjoy for heaven?’

Fela’s call for intimacy was both a genuine show of solidarity for his audience, and a big fat middle finger up to authority. So he was arrested. 150 times. By an oppressive Nigerian military regime that exploited its people for the sake of profit.

Elsewhere across the globe, it sometimes seems the true spirit of protest against oppression has got lost in the big bad greedy money machine. Nas is selling himself as Jesus with heavy gold chains, and even the Fugees, releasing a ‘Best Of’, are cashing in on banality and ease. (And that’s not to mention Madonna dressing herself up as Che).

But there’s hope yet. Six years on from Fela Kuti’s death and Kelis, a queen of the multicultural Kaleidoscope, is singing a funeral dirge on the Red Hot + Riot compilation. Discordant trumpets in minor keys accompany her song: ‘It is for the dignitary that I carry a coffin. To bury corruption, I carry a coffin. It is for the police that I carry a coffin.’ Playing on verbal ambiguity (‘for’ expressing both dedication and blame) her smoked honey voice leaves a hope hovering over a slowly funking base: ‘One day…’

… ‘Utopia’? The word is as mystifying as war. People once used it to try and improve things, yet now we cynically dismiss our dreams with it – ‘yeah, nice idea, but it’s utopian’. Give it up and get back to your desk. Sell out. Nowadays we’re more cynical, and we try to deal in realities: ‘globalisation’, ‘multiculturalism’. As did Hanif Kureishi, who said in LIP#1 that multiculturalism enables us to see in new ways and be creative; and globalisation is the opposite, reducing everything to sameness. Globalisation, for Hanif, is money ruling the world: life, melted down to a dollar. The once-innovative voice of the suppressed and repressed has been buffed to a bling.

Or not quite. Over sixty African loudmouths precede Kelis: ‘Can’t keep quiet / This time could be more than a riot’. And elsewhere on Red Hot + Riot Dead Prez and Talib Kweli rework Fela’s steady growls to a hyperactive stream of syllables: ‘Imperialism in the form of spirituality, slave mentality, escape reality / What is it worth to have the biggest religion when the people have miserable living conditions?’. Beneath the lyrics lie shuffling percussion, kick drums and a slapping bass, a reworking of Fela’s own reworkings, who as the inventor of ‘Afrobeat’, synthesised traditional Nigerian rhythms with free jazz and funk.

Later on the album comes Meshell Ndegeocello, accompanied by sax-bending Ron Blake. They insist on continuing Fela’s fearless confrontationalism: ‘Did your mind write a check that your soul can’t cash? / Suit and tie / Demon in a suit and tie / C’mon / You just thieves in a suit and tie / You murder in a suit and tie.’ Then Sade wraps us in soothing solace: ‘Think I’d leave you way down on your knees? You know I wouldn’t do that’, and Baaba Maal lulls us through insomnia with ‘No Sleep Yanga Wake Am’; both artists sending love and spirituality as the alternative to selfish greed.

Red Hot are an organisation who have released over twelve albums to raise money and awareness in the fight against Aids worldwide. Fela Kuti died of the disease, and Red Hot + Riot is the proactive tribute by a collection of dedicated musicians who, like Joseph Stiglitz, know that globalisation is what people make of it.

www.redhot.com

It was in the villages of Punjab, centuries ago, that festivals such as harvest brought together communities in colourful excitement. After months of toil in the fields, the fruits of labour were celebrated by music and dancing, induced partly by the effects of ‘bhang’ (Punjabi slang for weed) on the farmers. Arms swinging and bodies twisting, this exuberant form of music came to be known as ‘bhangra’.

Today, bhangra is no less than an art form, encapsulating not only a unique form of music and dance but also the cultural identity of millions of Asian people. The contagious beat is provided by the ‘dhol’, a large double-headed drum worn around the neck. Lyrics, rooted in traditional folk songs, usually revolve around love, marriage and Sikh pride, and are sung energetically with sporadic insertions of such phrases as ‘balle balle’. Stirring up lively enthusiasm with the mere tremor of a dhol player’s hands, bhangra is still commonly associated with Indian festivals. Familiar at any Indian wedding is the sight of young and old, aunties and uncles, getting up and shaking their hips to the rhythm of a popular tune.

The history of bhangra in Britain starts in Birmingham in the 1970s when Asian immigrants in search of the sounds of home transported their love of music across the seas to produce bhangra for a small market. Over the next decade, their children began adopting bhangra as their own. By appealing to this generation, artists such as Malkit Singh became legends in the British Punjabi community. Over time, the West made its pervasive influence felt: Bhangra tunes were mixed with rap, reggae, hip-hop and R’n’B to generate a unique sound that found an eager audience. Bally Sagoo in particular began an overnight phenomenon by creating the hugely successful ‘Ragamuffin Mix’ from one of Malkit Singh’s more traditional tunes. His hit spawned even more hopeful stars, including B21: with their name based on a Birmingham postal district, this boy band occupied an almost parallel existence to other groups of the nineties, regularly topping the Bhangra charts and finding themselves unlikely superstars.

The most revolutionary phase of bhangra however is taking place today. The children that grew up listening to bhangra over the past two decades are now creating an incredible pool of talent, which is taking the music from a few underground clubs in the Midlands to the masses. With the pitiful watering down of pop music, the proliferation of manufactured bands, and the seemingly stage-managed career of every group, bhangra is a breath of fresh air to the British music scene. The highly skilful mixes and intelligent use of instruments means that bhangra appeals to people of all races.

The success story of the moment is Panjabi MC. The artist has managed to achieve the seemingly impossible by breaching the gulf from underground to mainstream with the single ‘Mundian to Bach Ke’ (Beware of boys), featuring a sample from the American hip-hop artist Busta Rhymes. The single reached the top ten in the UK pop charts after being played to popular acclaim on the London radio station Kiss FM.

And yet bhangra still has its heart in northern India, and the motivations of many of the people who listen to and create the music go far beyond the superficial. Asian communities such as those in Wembley and Southall represent the staunch refusal of Indian immigrants to assimilate and lose a connection to their rich heritage. Grocers piled high with fresh mangoes and chillies, and shops selling countless reams of beautifully embroidered silks line the streets of these parts of London. Also here are small music stores, walls plastered with posters advertising Bollywood movies and stacks of CDs and cassettes of Hindi and Punjabi songs. Here lies the seed of bhangra’s propagation.

From the dawn of time music has been an outlet for human emotion and articulated the concerns of generations. The Black youth of America, with a history of oppression and in the face of an aggressive ghetto culture, founded rap and hip-hop as a channel for their creative talents. In the same way, a growing number of young Asians in Britain have found themselves without a voice and feel that bhangra provides a unique form of personal expression.
The frustration felt by Asian immigrants came to a violent climax in 2001 when race riots in North England dominated the headlines. Growing antipathy towards asylum seekers, the rise of the BNP, and racist campaigns by the right-wing press have all lead to an uncomfortable atmosphere for minorities. For second and third generation immigrants, resolving their Asian background with being British has become increasingly difficult. In the absence of cultural icons in the media industry, the newly emerging form of bhangra has managed to express this immigrant experience:

‘I’m a first generation Indian and I’m proud of my roots. My music is the natural transgression from the traditional, to the music we witness in the west. People will always refer to this music in times to come, much like we do with the music of our forefathers.’
– Producer, Panjabi MC.

What is interesting about the music scene is the absence of misogyny and violence, so common in rap and hip-hop. Instead, bhangra lyrics often celebrate women and the positive aspects of Punjabi identity. Bhangra seems to reject all the rules common to popular music and maybe this is the key to its popularity among wider audiences. Whatever the reasons for its appeal, bhangra is unintentionally breaching cultural divides between all races in Britain. Like the adoption of chicken vindaloo as the British national dish, and the screening of Bollywood movies in UK cinemas, bhangra is a sign of flourishing integration. Rather than just assimilating, Asian immigrants are able to share their culture. Whether bhangra will continue to be a worldwide contagion is unknown, but what is certain is that a minority has found a voice… and it’s a language that everyone wants to dance to.

A short plane ride from Bangkok or Phnom Penh will take you to Siem Reap, a city famous for the city within it. The Royal City of Angkor, ‘rediscovered’ by French archaeologists in the 1860’s has given Cambodia a little limelight as the harbourer of a special World Heritage Site. No longer hampered by security concerns, Cambodia enjoys a yearly influx of tourists who try to fit a trip to Angkor into their already stressed itineraries. Despite this new wave of attention, Angkor and Cambodia itself remain relatively unchallenged by the outside world. The roads in Siem Reap are red and dusty, flanked on each side by a sea of green, cut now and again by the sight of peasant women in bamboo hats. And in the horizon, the dark stupas of Angkor stand out, foreboding in their majesty.

It is difficult, however, not to feel uneasy in the face of Siem Reap’s inertia; its pleasant but unchanging air. It feels like history has kept the place, indeed the whole country, in a kind of spellbound state, from which it is only beginning to recover. The lush paddyfields that stretch undisturbed across miles bring on a jolt of shock as one remembers scenes from The Killing Fields. How many bodies and how many mass graves lie still undiscovered beneath the ploughs? Next to the benignly smiling faces of Jayavarman I and II, and Buddhas caught in the light and shadow cast by their saffron robes, are gaping bullet holes left by the Khmer Rouge. The ghost of Pol Pot also seems to hover in contemporary politics. Many Cambodian politicians still refuse to acknowledge guilt for the holocaust that happened here. No doubt there is still a great deal of voter intimidation and human rights abuses. Poverty too, though not strikingly severe, is evident. Our guide signalled at a few houses across the road, calling them ‘the houses of rich men’. They were simply concrete homes with encircling walls, as opposed to mud huts topped with corrugated iron.

Cambodia, in the short time that I spent there, seemed to me a country in the process of recovering, still removing its landmines, still trying to soothe its many wounds. But, as the monumental structures of Angkor bear witness, vision and energy are also characteristics of this country. Today though, the Gods and Demons of history continue to fight, occupying the limelight of Cambodia’s stage. One can only hope that in time, newer actors will venture forward and respectfully replace the old.

by Aparajita Basu