Tales From The Underground

Any short term visitor to London will go home to their loved ones and marvel on about the tube. They will tell you how efficient it is, how quick it is. Young children would probably put the tube on their list of London Loves alongside Madame Tussaud’s and the Tower of London.

For me the tube is my reading time, I plough through books. It is especially good in the morning, when I get my own seat and read away.

However, reality sets in when one finishes that chapter and does not want to go onto the next, and one takes away their eyes from the book and looks up and around. Your gazing eyes will be met by emotionless faces, faces that don’t smile, faces that stay still and blank, except to grimace and frown of course.

You will get up and offer your seat to a pregnant mom or an aged person who clearly needs the seat, but the rest of the people will look down, they wont give up that seat at any cost.

I have heard stories about the Mumbai train which is apparently one of the 100 things one needs to experience before you leave this planet. Rush hour traffic in Zone 1 of the tube will not come close to the amount of people who occupy a carriage on a train in Mumbai. I have heard that it is sheer hell, however, somehow, there is a communal spirit. People have this attitude that there is always room for one more.

This attitude of concern for the other is a rarity on the tube.

Strangers don’t converse on the tube, if you ask someone about the book they reading or try and engage them in any form of polite discussion, they will sneer and look away and think that you are one of the mentally unstable people who was released by Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister

Most of the time all what one can hear is the thumping sounds of an iPod which is surely deafening the person with the earphones and causing irreparable hearing damage to those in a 1 metre radius.

The worst is the trip home, you have had a long day at work you board the tube and you are packed into the carriage like a sardine, and this gangly person’s arm hovers around your leg, and this person who has not brushed their teeth for 4 days breathes heavily next to you and this punk is listening to some hard core death metal hate-rock. I always thought death metal lyrics were impossible to understand, due to the loudness of their iPod, one can definitely understand every word and actually decipher what they are singing about.

I don’t know what it is, but as soon as one goes underground one retracts into this soulless ghoul who has no concern about anyone else…

I have to go catch my tube…..

Never Again-Maybe after Darfur?
The world uttered these famous words after the Holocaust, leaders, governments held these words to heart, but put them away and forgot about them when Pol Pot and the murderous Khmer Rouge murdered over 1,5 million people, and also forgot about these words in Rwanda in 1990, when the Interhamwe murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi’s.

Is the world going to forget the words-Never Again-again.. In 12 days from now the African Union will remove their peace-keeping troops from the Darfur region in Sudan, and when that will happen, the Janjaweed militia will re-enter the area to murder, kidnap, and rape the Darfurian people. It will be nothing short of a bloodbath.

On Friday morning, whilst eating my breakfast, I saw a resolute, determined George Clooney address the United Nations Security Council. Sitting alongside, his journalist father, Jim Clooney and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, he launched a brazen attack on the UN pleading for the:

1) The AU forces to stay longer
2) The aid workers to remain
3) The UN to replace the AU forces

Clooney was quite candid- "After Sept. 30 you won't need the U.N. You will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones,"

I saw that there was a global Day For Dafur yesterday and I decided to go.

The demonstration was set for outside the Sudanese Embassy in London, in one of the most august settings by St. James Park.

The event was organized by the Aegis Trust, Darfur Union and Amnesty International.

What started out as a small and vocal demonstration of about 400 people quickly grew to more than 2000 people. There were a lot of Darfur refugees in attendance.

Everyone was given a blue beret, as a call for the UN to come into Darfur.

The crowd were chanting slogans such as

-No More War for Darfur
-Stop the Rape in Darfur
-Free, Free, Free Darfur
-Take Omar Bashir to the ICC

I started moving forward and soon found myself near the front.

I was very near the Sudanese Embassy and, the embassy was all shut up, with the curtains closed, except for one window, where one occasionally see a camera taking photographs from the Embassy.
The MC was Stephen Twigg who used to be the Minister of Education up until the last election where he lost his seat.

The event had cross party support, with Hillary Benn, the Minister of International Development and a Labour MP, sending a message of support via video and Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative Shadow Minister of International Development giving a rousing address.

However, what was amazing was that they had a Holocaust survivor, Susan Pollack, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Beata Uwazaninka-Smith, and a survivor of the Bosnian atrocities all speaking out against the impending genocide.

Adam Siraj, a Darfur refugee gave this amazing speech, explaining how the Janjaweed, attacked the people and expanded are the Janjaweed mission to make it to an Islamic area and drive the animists and Christians out.

What was very strange was this lone pro-government protestor. I really thought that this would be one issue where Londoners would all be united in their opposition to the Sudanese government. I fear that this woman was either a staffer at the embassy or someone who was insane.

We then marched to through the streets of London and the rally got bigger and bigger, with blue berets being seen in all places.

I had long discussions with Susan, Beata and Adam, all truly amazing people.

In the late afternoon, I went to an exhibit on the genocide at the Old Vic Theatre. This is a building which was bought by Kevin Spacey, and the reason why the event was held here was because Aegis thought Kevin Spacey would be there. Like, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey is a devout Democrat, and social activist. Annie Lennox was also supposed to come. However, both were out of town on the day, and then to organizers apparent dislike, the only celebrity who showed up, not because she understood the issue, nor because she really identified with the issue, but more as an exercise of self-promotion was Heather Mills (currently divorcing Paul McCartney).

I spoke to the Darfur Union and Aegis activists, while they saw the day as a success, they quickly reminded me, that with only 13 days to go until the withdrawal of troops, it was going to take much more than a global day of action to stop the region from being on the brink of genocide.

This is a crisis which needs all our attention and energy, because in 12 days, Never Again, might just become again….
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I suggest you look at these websites to learn more about the situation www.savedarfur.org and www.aegistrust.org