Bono: Time to Think Bigger About the Refugee Crisis

Bono with kids at a refugee camp 

I’VE recently returned from the Middle East and East Africa, where I visited a number of refugee camps — car parks of humanity. I went as an activist and as a European. Because Europeans have come to realize — quite painfully in the past year or two — that the mass exodus from collapsed countries like Syria is not just a Middle Eastern or African problem, it’s a European problem. It’s an American one, too. It affects us all.

My countryman Peter Sutherland, a senior United Nations official for international migration, has made clear that we’re living through the worst crisis of forced displacement since World War II. In 2010, some 10,000 people worldwide fled their homes every day, on average. Which sounds like a lot — until you consider that four years later, that number had quadrupled. And when people are driven out of their homes by violence, poverty and instability, they take themselves and their despair elsewhere. And “elsewhere” can be anywhere.

But with their despair some of them also have hope. It seems insane or naïve to speak of hope in this context, and I may be both of these things. But in most of the places where refugees live, hope has not left the building: hope to go home someday, hope to find work and a better life. I left Kenya, Jordan and Turkey feeling a little hopeful myself. For as hard as it is to truly imagine what life as a refugee is like, we have a chance to reimagine that reality — and reinvent our relationship with the people and countries consumed now by conflict, or hosting those who have fled it.

That needs to start, as it has for me, by parting with a couple of wrong ideas about the refugee crisis. One is that the Syrian refugees are concentrated in camps. They aren’t. These arid encampments are so huge that it’s hard to fathom that only a small percentage of those refugees actually live in one; in many places, a majority live in the communities of their host countries. In Jordan and Lebanon, for example, most refugees are in urban centers rather than in camps. This is a problem that knows no perimeter.

Another fallacy is that the crisis is temporary. I guess it depends on your definition of “temporary,” but I didn’t meet many refugees, some of whom have been displaced for decades, who felt that they were just passing through. Some families have spent two generations — and some young people their entire lives — as refugees. They have been exiled by their home countries only to face a second exile in the countries that have accepted their presence but not their right to move or to work. You hear the term “permanent temporary solution” thrown around by officials, but not with the irony you’d think it deserves.

Those understandings should shape our response. The United States and other developed nations have a chance to act smarter, think bigger and move faster in addressing this crisis and preventing the next one. Having talked with refugees, and having talked to countless officials and representatives of civil society along the way, I see three areas where the world should act.

First, the refugees, and the countries where they’re living, need more humanitarian support. You see this most vividly in a place like the Dadaab complex in Kenya, near the border of Somalia, a place patched together (or not) with sticks and plastic sheets. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is doing noble and exceedingly hard work. But it can’t do everything it needs to do when it is chronically underfunded by the very governments that expect it to handle this global problem.

Second, we can help host countries see refugees not just as a burden, but as a benefit. The international community could be doing much more, through development assistance and trade deals, to encourage businesses and states hosting refugees to see the upside of people’s hands being occupied and not idle (the World Bank and the Scriptures agree on this). The refugees want to work. They were shopkeepers, teachers and musicians at home, and want to be these things again, or maybe become new things — if they can get education, training and access to the labor market.

In other words, they need development. Development that invests in them and empowers them — that treats them not as passive recipients but as leaders and partners. The world tends to give humanitarian efforts and development efforts their own separate bureaucracies and unlisted phone numbers, as if they’re wholly separate concerns. But to be effective they need to be better coordinated; we have to link the two and fund them both. Refugees living in camps need food and shelter right away, but they also need the long-term benefits of education, training, jobs and financial security.

Third, the world needs to shore up the development assistance it gives to those countries that have not collapsed but are racked by conflict, corruption and weak governance. These countries may yet spiral into anarchy. Lately some Western governments have been cutting overseas aid to spend money instead on asylum-seekers within their borders. But it is less expensive to invest in stability than to confront instability. Transparency, respect for rule of law, and a free and independent media are also crucial to the survival of countries on the periphery of chaos. Because chaos, as we know all too well, is contagious.

‎Bono‬, in an art gallery led by refugees, in the refugee camp in Zaatari, Jordan.

What we don’t want and can’t afford is to have important countries in the Sahel, the band of countries just south of the Sahara, going the same way as Syria. If Nigeria, a country many times larger than Syria, were to fracture as a result of groups like Boko Haram, we are going to wish we had been thinking bigger before the storm.

Actually, some people are thinking bigger. I keep hearing calls from a real gathering of forces — Africans and Europeans, army generals and World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials — to emulate that most genius of American ideas, the Marshall Plan. That plan delivered trade and development in service of security — in places where institutions were broken and hope had been lost. Well, hope is not lost in the Middle East and North Africa, not yet, not even where it’s held together by string. But hope is getting impatient. We should be, too.

UPDATE:

Bono Opening Statement Senate. Foreign Aid Isn't Charity Its National Security Foreign Assistance and Violent Extremism U2 lead singer and activist Bono and United Nations and military officials testified at a hearing on the role of foreign assistance in combating violent extremism worldwide.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Bono For New York Times Co. CEO?

Yesterday afternoon, New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson abruptly announced her resignation. She may have been pushed out, though she got a nice fat "consulting" paycheck to cushion her fall. The important question now: who takes over?

Bono takes over.


Let's be clear about what's really needed in this job. The next CEO of the New York Times Co. will have the vague and weighty-sounding responsibility of "guiding the company into the digital age" and "navigating the transition of a legacy newspaper company into a multiplatform digital media company" and things like that. What it means is that the CEO must generally figure out how the NYT Co. can survive the next decade or so without collapsing into rubble. Janet Robinson was not a horrible CEO, but there's little question that someone better is out there.

It's a rough time for anyone to be in the newspaper business.(...)The actual nuts-and-bolts job of transitioning the NYT Co. into the "digital era" can be handled by any number of bright, lower-level functionaries. Plenty of those around. Here is what the NYT Co. actually needs in a CEO:

1. A big name. Someone who will help keep the company itself relevant and in the news.
2. Someone who is well-connected to the rich and politically powerful.
3. Someone with an actual personal interest and belief in good journalism for good journalism's sake.
4. Someone who has no personal need to plunder this financially stretched company for millions to line their own pockets.

Allow us to introduce you to Bono. Already writes for the New York Times! Sure, he's a little bit of a self-centered guy, but who isn't? He has quite a few things going for him: he's a real, from the heart, do-gooder. He believes in the mission of the NYT (above and beyond its financial performance), and would be well-motivated to do anything to keep the company healthy. He's as well-connected in moneyed and political circles as anyone this side of Bill Clinton, without being a political veteran himself, which brings lots of bullshit baggage to a media company. He could work for a dollar a year, no problem. The validation conferred upon Bono's own self-importance by such a job would be its own reward


The New York Times Co. needs a figurehead. It needs a symbolic leader more inspiring than Pinch Sulzberger. The process of saving this company from irreversible decline could very well soon involve summoning up the good will of the public, the political establishment, and the financial titans of this world—the good will of the New York Times readership. The NYT Co. must sell itself as a public good. The newspaper business is bad. The business of being the most honest, meticulous, and civically-minded purveyor of journalism left in America is good. Frankly, the NYT Co. needs attention, at this point. Bono could use a real job. He can keep his hobbies. Everyone wins.

For all those little "operational" issues, hire a freaking deputy. Poll the staff. Whatever. Shit. Think big, New York Times! Bono already does.

Read the complete article: http://gawker.com

Bono's New York Times Column

What I Learned From Sargent Shriver

 The Irish are still mesmerized by the mythical place that is America, but in the ’60s our fascination got out of hand. I was not old enough to remember the sacrifices of the great generation who saved Europe in the Second World War, or to quite comprehend what was going on in Vietnam. But what I do remember, and cannot forget, is watching a man walk on the moon in 1969 and thinking here is a nation that finds joy in the impossible.
 The Irish saw the Kennedys as our own royal family out on loan to America. A million of them turned out on J.F.K.’s homecoming to see these patrician public servants who, despite their station, had no patience for the status quo. (They also loved that the Kennedys looked more WASP than any “Prod,” our familiar term for Protestant.)

I remember Bobby’s rolled-up sleeves, Jack’s jutted jaw and the message — a call to action — that the world didn’t have to be the way it was. Science and faith had found a perfect rhyme.

In the background, but hardly in the shadows, was Robert Sargent Shriver. A diamond intelligence, too bright to keep in the darkness. He was not Robert or Bob, he was Sarge, and for all the love in him, he knew that love was a tough word. Easy to say, tough to see it through. Love, yes, and peace, too, in no small measure; this was the ’60s but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at him. No long hair in the Shriver house, or rock ’n’ roll. He and his beautiful bride, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, would go to Mass every day — as much an act of rebellion against brutal modernity as it was an act of worship. Love, yes, but love as a brave act, a bold act, requiring toughness and sacrifice.

His faith demanded action, from him, from all of us. For the Word to become flesh, we had to become the eyes, the ears, the hands of a just God. Injustice could, in the words of the old spiritual, “Be Overcome.” Robert Sargent sang, “Make me a channel of your peace,” and became the song.


Make me a channel of your peace:

Where there is hatred let me bring your love.

Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord,

And where there’s doubt, true faith in you.

Oh, Master grant that I may never seek,

So much to be consoled as to console.

To be understood as to understand,

To be loved as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace,

Where there’s despair in life, let me bring hope.

Where there is darkness, only light,

And where there’s sadness, ever joy.



The Peace Corps was Jack Kennedy’s creation but embodied Sargent Shriver’s spirit. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty but Sarge led the charge. These, and the Special Olympics, were as dramatic an incarnation of the ideas at the heart of America as the space program.

Robert Sargent Shriver changed the world more than a few times and, I am happy to say, changed my world forever. In the late ’90s, when the Jubilee 2000 campaign — which aimed to cancel the debts that the poorest nations owed to the richest — asked me to help in the United States, I called on the Shriver clan for help and advice. What I got were those things in spades, and a call to arms like a thump in the back.

In the years since, Bobby Shriver — Sarge’s oldest son — and I co-founded three fighting units in the war against global poverty: DATA, ONE and (RED). We may not yet know what it will take to finish the fight and silence suffering in our time, but we are flat out trying to live up to Sarge’s drill.

I have beautiful memories of Bobby and me sitting with his father and mother at the Shrivers’ kitchen table — the same team that gazed over J.F.K.’s shoulder — looking over our paltry attempts at speechifying, prodding and pushing us toward comprehensibility and credibility, a challenge when your son starts hanging round with a bleeding-heart Irish rock star.

Toward the end, when I visited Sarge as a frailer man, I was astonished by his good spirits and good humor. He had the room around him laughing out loud. I thought it a fitting final victory in a life that embodied service and transcended, so often, grave duty, that he had a certain weightlessness about him. Even then, his job nearly done, his light shone undiminished, and brightened us all.



www.nytimes.com

Emergency surgery has led Bono into a spurt of creativity.

 Emergency surgery in which he faced being paralysed has led the world's most famous rock star into a spurt of creativity.Bono, who is bringing his band U2's behemothic stadium show U2360 to Australia in early December, entered surgery in Munich last May, unsure if we would walk again.
The 50-year-old had slipped a disc in his back that punctured a ligament and broke into two pieces.

 

"I was walking around saying I could handle it but it turns out I was in grave danger," he told The Age this week, in an exclusive interview to be published in EG tomorrow. "Those little bits that had broken off were starting to sever nerves in my spinal canal. I was losing the ability to walk."

Remarkably, just ten weeks after the operation, he was back on stage in Europe. More ambitiously, he has revealed his band is working on three new albums.
The first, which is likely to be released early next year, is being produced by Danger Mouse, the alias for American production ace Brian Burton (Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz).

"We have about 12 songs with him," Bono said. "At the moment that looks like the album we will put out next because it's just happening so easily."

The second album is what he calls a "club" record, that will feature Lady Gaga collaborator RedOne, Black Eyed Peas rapper Will.I.Am and French superstar David Guetta.
"U2's remixes in the 1990s were a real treasure," he said. "So we wanted to make a club sounding record. We have a pile of songs."

Bono and guitarist The Edge are also attempting to sell their bandmates, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen jnr, the concept of a U2 album based on the 20 songs the two have written for a Spider-man musical that opens on Broadway next month.
"We haven't convinced the rest of the band to do that yet," he said. "Larry definitely has a raised eyebrow."

www.theage.com.au

M.D.G.’s for Beginners ... and Finishers

Another Op-Ed Guest Column by Bono for the New York Times.

I’ve noticed that New Yorkers, and I sometimes try to pass for one these days, tend to greet the word “summit” with an irritated roll of the eyes, a grunt, an impatient glance at the wristwatch. In Manhattan, a summit has nothing to do with crampons and ice picks, but refers instead to a large gathering of important persons, head-of-state types and their rock-star retinues in the vicinity of the United Nations building and creates, therefore, a near total immobilization of the East Side. Can world peace possibly be worth this? Never, never...Eleanor Roosevelt, look what you’ve done ... .
Recent global summit meetings, from Copenhagen to Toronto, have frankly been a bust, so the world, which may not know it yet, is overdue for a good multilateral confab — one that’s not just about the gabbing but about the doing. The subject of the summit meeting at the United Nations this week is one whose monumental importance is matched only by its minuscule brand recognition: the Millennium Development Goals, henceforth known as the M.D.G.’s (God save us from such dull shorthand).
The M.D.G.’s are possibly the most visionary deal that most people have never heard of. In the run-up to the 21st century, a grand global bargain was negotiated at a series of summit meetings and then signed in 2000. The United Nations’ “Millennium Declaration” pledged to “ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people,” especially the most marginalized in developing countries. It wasn’t a promise of rich nations to poor ones; it was a pact, a partnership, in which each side would meet obligations to its own citizens and to one another.
f course, this is the sort of airy-fairy stuff that people at summit meetings tend to say and get away with because no one else can bear to pay attention. The 2000 gathering was different, though, because signatories agreed to specific goals on a specific timeline: cutting hunger and poverty in half, giving all girls and boys a basic education, reducing infant and maternal mortality by two-thirds and three-quarters respectively, and reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. All by 2015. Give it an A for Ambition.
So where are we now, 10 years on, with some “first-world” economies looking as if they could go bang, and some second- and third-level economies looking as if they could be propping us up?
Well, I’d direct you to the plenary sessions and panel discussions for a detailed answer...but if you’re, eh, busy this week...my view, based on the data and what I’ve seen on the ground, is that in many places it’s going better than you’d think.
Much better, in fact. Tens of millions more kids are in school thanks to debt cancellation. Millions of lives have been saved through the battle against preventable disease, thanks especially to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Apart from fallout from the market meltdown, economic growth in Africa has been gathering pace — over 5 percent per year in the decade ending in 2009. Poverty declined by 1 percent a year from 1999 to 2005.
The gains made by countries like Ghana show the progress the Millennium Goals have helped create.
At the same time, the struggles of places like Congo remind us of the distance left to travel. There are serious headwinds: 64 million people have been thrown back into poverty as a result of the financial crises, and 150 million are hungry because of the food crisis. And extending the metaphor, there are storms on the horizon: the poor will be hit first — and worst — by climate change.
So there should be no Champagne toasts at this year’s summit meeting. The 10th birthday of our millennium is, or ought to be, a purposeful affair, a redoubling of efforts. After all, there’s only five years before 2015, only five years to make all that Second Avenue gridlock worth it. With that in mind I’d like to offer three near-term tests of our commitment to the M.D.G.’s.
1. Find what works and then expand on it. Will mechanisms like the Global Fund get the resources to do the job?
Energetic, efficient and effective, the fund saves a staggering 4,000 lives a day. Even a Wall Streeter would have to admit, that’s some return on investment. But few are aware of it, a fact that allows key countries — from the United States to Britain, France and Germany — to go unnoticed if they ease off the throttle. The unsung successes of the fund should be, well, sung, and after this summit meeting, its work needs to be fully financed. This would help end the absurdity of death by mosquito, and the preventable calamity of 1,000 babies being born every day with H.I.V., passed to them by their mothers who had no access to the effective, inexpensive medicines that exist.

2. Governance as an effect multiplier. In this column last spring, I described some Africans I’ve met who see corruption as more deadly than the deadliest of diseases, a cancer that eats at the foundation of good governance even as the foundation is being built. I don’t just mean “their” corruption; I mean ours, too. For example, multinational oil companies. They want oil, and governments of poor countries rich in just one thing, black gold, want to sell it to them. All well and good. Except the way it too often happens, as democracy campaigners in these countries point out, is not at all good. Some of these companies knowingly participate in a system of backhanders and bribery that ends up cheating the host nation and turning what should be a resource blessing into a kind of curse of black market cabals. 


Well, I’m pleased to give you an update on an intervention that some of us thought of and fought for as critical: hidden somewhere in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill (admit it...you haven’t read it all either) there is a hugely significant “transparency” amendment, added by Senators Richard Lugar and Benjamin Cardin. Now energy companies traded on American exchanges will have to reveal every payment they make to government officials. If money changes hands, it will happen in the open. This is the kind of daylight that makes the cockroaches scurry.
The British government should institute the same requirement for companies trading in Britain, as should the rest of the European Union and ultimately all the G-20 nations. According to the African entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, who has emerged as one of the most important voices on that continent, transparency could do more to transform Africa than even debt cancellation has. Measures like this one should be central to any renewed Millennium Development Goal strategy.
And the cost to us is zero, nada. It’s a clear thought in a traffic jam.
3. Demand clarity; measure inputs and outputs.

Speaking of transparency, let’s have a little more, please, when it comes to the question of who is doing what toward which goal and to what effect. We have to know where we are to know how far we’ve left to go.
Right now it’s near impossible to keep track. Walk (if you dare) into M.D.G. World and you will encounter a dizzying array of vague financing and policy commitments on critical issues, from maternal mortality to agricultural development. You come across a load of bureau-babble that too often is used to hide double counting, or mask double standards. This is the stuff that feeds the cynics.
What we need is an independent unit — made up of people from governments, the private sector and civil society — to track pledges and progress, not just on aid but also on trade, governance, investment. It’s essential for the credibility of the United Nations, the M.D.G.’s, and all who work toward them.
And that was the deal, wasn’t it? The promise we made at the start of this century was not to perpetuate the old relationships between donors and recipients, but to create new ones, with true partners accountable to each other and above all to the citizens these systems are supposed to work for. Strikes me as the right sort of arrangement for an age of austerity as well as interdependence. (The age of interrupted affluence should sharpen our focus on future markets for our sake as well as theirs.)
No leader scheduled to speak at the summit meeting is more painfully aware of this context than President Obama, who one year ago pledged to put forth a global plan to reach the development goals. If promoting transparency and investing in what works is at the core of that strategy, he can assure Americans that their dollars are reinforcing their values, and their leadership in the world is undiminished. Action is required to make these words, these dull statistics, sing. The tune may not be pop but it won’t leave your head — this practical, achievable idea that the world, now out of kilter, can re-balance itself and offer all, not just some, a chance to exit the unfathomable deprivation that brings about the need for such global bargains.
I understand the critics who groan or snooze through the pious pronouncements we will hear from the podium in the General Assembly. But still in my heart and mind, undiminished and undaunted, is this thought planted by Nelson Mandela in his quest to tackle extreme poverty: “Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great.”
We have a lot to prove, but if the M.D.G. agreement had not been made in 2000, much less would have happened than has happened. Already, we’ve seen transformative results for millions of people whose lives are shaped by the priorities of people they will never know or meet — the very people causing gridlock this week. For this at least, the world should thank New Yorkers for the loan of their city.
 

 www.nytimes.com

In Ireland, Tuesday’s Grace

Another column signed by Bono for the New York Times...

One of the most extraordinary days in the mottled history of the island of Ireland was witnessed on both sides of the border last Tuesday.

The much-anticipated and costly Saville report ... the 12-years-in-the-making inquiry into "Bloody Sunday,” a day never to be forgotten in Irish politics ... was finally published.

On that day, Jan. 30, 1972, British soldiers fired on a civil rights march in the majority Catholic area of the Bogside in Derry, killing 14 protesters.

It was a day that caused the conflict between the two communities in Northern Ireland -- Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist -- to spiral into another dimension: every Irish person conscious on that day has a mental picture of Edward Daly, later the bishop of Derry, holding a blood-stained handkerchief aloft as he valiantly tended to the wounded and the dying.

It was a day when paramilitaries on both sides became the loudest voices in the conflict, a day that saw people queuing to give up on peace ... mostly young men but also women who had had enough of empire and would now consider every means necessary -- however violent or ugly — to drive it from their corner.

It was a day when my father stopped taking our family across the border to Ulster because, as he said, the "Nordies have lost their marbles." And we were a Catholic-Protestant household.

Contrast all this with last Tuesday ... a bright day on our small rock in the North Atlantic. Clouds that had hung overhead for 38 years were oddly missing ... the sharp daylight of justice seemed to chase away the shadows and the stereotypes of the past. No one behaved as expected. The world broke rhyme.

A brand-new British prime minister, still in his wrapping paper, said things no one had imagined he would ... could ... utter ....

"On behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry."

And there was more ....

"What happened should never ever have happened," said the new prime minister, David Cameron. "Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that, on behalf of the government, indeed on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry."

It was inconceivable to many that a Tory prime minister could manage to get these words out of his mouth. It was also inconceivable -- before he uttered the carefully minted phrasing -- that he would be listened to by a hushed crowd gathered in Guildhall Square in Derry, a place not famous for its love of British leaders of any stripe, and that he would be cheered while speaking on specially erected screens that earlier had been used to relay images from the World Cup.

Thirty-eight years did not disappear in an 11-minute speech -- how could they, no matter how eloquent or heartfelt the words? But they changed and morphed, as did David Cameron, who suddenly looked like the leader he believed he would be. From prime minister to statesman.

Joy was the mood in the crowd. A group of women sang "We Shall Overcome." There was a surprising absence of spleen -- this was a community that had been through more than most anyone could understand, showing a restraint no one could imagine. This was a dignified joy, with some well-rehearsed theatrics to underscore the moment.

As well as punching the sky and tearing up the first "Bloody Sunday" inquiry -- a whitewash by a judge named Lord Widgery who said the British troops had been provoked -- these people were redrawing their own faces from the expected images: from stoic, tight-lipped and vengeful to broad, unpolished, unqualified smiles, unburdened by the bile the world often expects from this geography.

Derry is a community and these Derry people looked like guests at a wedding -- formal only for as long as they had to be, careful of their dead but not at all pious. Some began to speak of trials and prosecutions but most wanted to leave that talk for another day.

Figures I had learned to loathe as a self-righteous student of nonviolence in the '70s and '80s behaved with a grace that left me embarrassed over my vitriol. For a moment, the other life that Martin McGuinness could have had seemed to appear in his face: a commander of the Irish Republican Army that day in 1972, he looked last week like the fly fisherman he is, not the gunman he became ... a school teacher, not a terrorist ... a first-class deputy first minister.

Both Mr. McGuinness and Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, seemed deliberately to avoid contentious language and to try to include the dead of other communities in the reverence of the occasion. Though a few on the unionist side complained that the $280 million spent on the inquiry, commissioned by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 and led by Lord Saville, a top judge, could have been used to improve Northern Ireland's schools or investigate unionist losses, they mostly accepted the wording of the report that the deaths were "wrong" and "unjustified"; Protestant clergymen spoke of "healing" and held meetings with families of the victims.

Healing is kind of a corny word but it’s peculiarly appropriate here; wounds don't easily heal if they are not out in the open. The Saville report brought openness -- clarity -- because at its core, it accorded all the people involved in the calamity their proper role.

The lost lives rose up from being statistics in documents in the Foreign Office to live once again. On the television news, we saw them ... the exact time, the place, the commonplace things they were doing ... William Nash, age 19, shot in the chest at close range, his father wounded trying to reach him ... William McKinney, age 26, shot in the back while tending the wounded ... Jim Wray, age 22, shot twice, the second round fired into his back while he was lying on the ground outside his grandparents’ house. We saw their faces in old photographs, smiles from 38 years ago ... the ordinary details of their ordinary and, as Lord Saville repeatedly pointed out, entirely innocent lives.

It's not just the Devil who's in the details ... God, it turns out, is in there too. Daylight ...

Even the soldiers seemed to want the truth to be out. In the new report, some contradicted statements they had been ordered to make for the Widgery report.

It is easily forgotten that the British Army arrived in Northern Ireland ostensibly to protect the Catholic minority.

How quickly things can change.

In just a couple of years, the scenes of soldiers playing soccer with local youths or sharing ice creams and flirting with the colleens had been replaced by slammed doors on house-to-house raids ... the protectors had become the enemy ... it was that quick in Derry.

In fact, it can be that quick everywhere. If there are any lessons for the world from this piece of Irish history ... for Baghdad ... for Kandahar ... it's this: things are quick to change for the worse and slow to change for the better, but they can. They really can. It takes years of false starts, heartbreaks and backslides and, most tragically, more killings. But visionaries and risk-takers and, let's just say it, heroes on all sides can bring us back to the point where change becomes not only possible again, but inevitable.

•

A footnote (some light relief), November 1983:

U2 is in a studio in Dublin, playing its new song, "Sunday Bloody Sunday," to the record company. The melody is a good one but the lyric is, in hindsight, an inarticulate speech of the heart. It's a small song that tries but fails to contrast big ideas ... atonement with forgiveness ... "Bloody Sunday" with Easter Sunday. The song will be sung wherever there are rock fans with mullets and rage, from Sarajevo to Tehran. Over time, the lyric will change and grow. But here, with the Cockneyed record company boss at the song's birth, the maternity ward goes quiet when the man announces that the baby is "a hit"... with one caveat: "Drop the 'bloody.' 'Bloody' won't bloody work on the radio." 

© The New York Times Company, 2010.

source:www.nytimes.com

The Top 10 Songs About NYC

Consequence of Sound lists the their top 10 songs about the world’s cultural mecca. U2's "The Hands That Built America" is ranked  Nº 2 following close not other than the ultra famous and iconic Sinatra's "Theme From New York, New York" .

Here's the complete list:


Frank Sinatra – "Theme From New York, New York"
U2 – "The Hands That Built America"
The Velvet Underground – "I’m Waiting For The Man"
John Lennon – "New York City"
Interpol – "NYC"
Beastie Boys – "No Sleep till Brooklyn"
The Ramones – "53rd and 3rd"
Billy Joel – "New York State of Mind"
Bob Dylan – "Talkin’ New York"
Jay-Z and Alicia Keys – "Empire State of Mind"





"The Hands that Built America" was released on the soundtrack to the film Gangs of New York.It was one of two new songs on their The Best of 1990-2000 compilation. It was nominated for Best Original Song at the 75th Academy Awards which didnt win but got the Golden Globe for Best Original Song.

Is Spiderman Coming?

The New York Times has published an article on the upcoming(?) Spider musical.

From U2: A Song for Spidey

Reeve Carney

The rock band Carney on Tuesday unveiled a new song by U2, “Boy Falls from the Sky,” an emo-like mix of ballad and hard, aching energy that is intended as a major number in Act II of the coming Broadway mega-musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Bono and the Edge wrote “Boy” and a dozen more songs for the show, their first Broadway musical, which has suffered production delays because of financial problems but is expected to begin performances in New York this fall.

Reeve Carney, the singer-frontman of the band that bears his name, is set to play Peter Parker and Spider-Man on Broadway, though he did not act in character while performing “Boy” at a luncheon honoring the musical’s director, Julie Taymor. It was the first time that Mr. Carney had performed a U2 song from “Spider-Man” before several hundred Broadway artists and producers; his singing voice sounded both younger and sharper-edged than Bono’s.

In the musical, Peter Parker sings the number after his love interest, Mary Jane, has been abducted and his superpowers are gone. The song was by turns romantic and introspective, with lyrics like “you can change your mind/you can’t change your heart” and “I did not have to move so far/to find myself alone.”

source:www.nytimes.com

Bono:Africa Reboots

pic by  Calef Brown

Another issue of his column as Op-Ed Guest Columnist in The New York Times, Bono talks about his trip to Africa last March.

I spent March with a delegation of activists, entrepreneurs and policy wonks roaming western, southern and eastern Africa trying very hard to listen — always hard for a big-mouthed Irishman. With duct tape over my gob, I was able to pick up some interesting melody lines everywhere from palace to pavement ...


Despite the almost deafening roar of excitement about Africa’s hosting of soccer’s World Cup this summer, we managed to hear a surprising thing. Harmony ... flowing from two sides that in the past have often been discordant: Africa’s emerging entrepreneurial class and its civil-society activists.

It’s no secret that lefty campaigners can be cranky about business elites. And the suspicion is mutual. Worldwide. Civil society as a rule sees business as, well, a little uncivil. Business tends to see activists as, well, a little too active. But in Africa, at least from what I’ve just seen, this is starting to change. The energy of these opposing forces coming together is filling offices, boardrooms and bars. The reason is that both these groups — the private sector and civil society — see poor governance as the biggest obstacle they face. So they are working together on redefining the rules of the African game.

Entrepreneurs know that even a good relationship with a bad government stymies foreign investment; civil society knows a resource-rich country can have more rather than fewer problems, unless corruption is tackled.

This joining of forces is being driven by some luminous personalities, few of whom are known in America; all of whom ought to be. Let me introduce you to a few of the catalysts:

John Githongo, Kenya’s famous whistleblower, has had to leave his country in a hurry a couple of times; he was hired by his government to clean things up and then did his job too well. He’s now started a group called Inuka, teaming up the urban poor with business leaders, creating inter-ethnic community alliances to fight poverty and keep watch on dodgy local governments. He is the kind of leader who gives many Kenyans hope for the future, despite the shakiness of their coalition government.

Sharing a table with Githongo and me one night in Nairobi was DJ Rowbow, a Mike Tyson doppelgänger. His station, Ghetto Radio, was a voice of reason when the volcano of ethnic tension was exploding in Kenya in 2008. While some were encouraging the people of Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa, to go on the rampage, this scary-looking man decoded the disinformation and played peacemaker/interlocutor. On the station’s playlist is Bob Marley and a kind of fizzy homespun reggae music that’s part the Clash, part Marvin Gaye. The only untruthful thing he said all evening was that he liked U2. For my part, I might have overplayed the Jay-Z and Beyoncé card. “They are friends of mine,” I explained to him, eh, a lot.

Now this might be what you expect me to say, but I’m telling you, it was a musician in Senegal who best exemplified the new rules. Youssou N’Dour — maybe the greatest singer on earth — owns a newspaper and is in the middle of a complicated deal to buy a TV station. You sense his strategy and his steel. He is creating the soundtrack for change, and he knows just how to use his voice. (I tried to imagine what it would be like if I owned The New York Times as well as, say, NBC. Someday, someday...)

In Maputo, Mozambique, I met with Activa, a women’s group that, among other things, helps entrepreneurs get seed capital. Private and public sectors mixed easily here, under the leadership of Luisa Diogo, the country’s former prime minister, who is now the matriarch in this mesmerizing stretch of eastern Africa. Famous for her Star Wars hairdo and political nous, she has the lioness energy of an Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala or a Graça Machel.

When I met with Ms. Diogo and her group, the less famous but equally voluble women in the room complained about excessive interest rates on their microfinance loans and the lack of what they called “regional economic integration.” For them, infrastructure remains the big (if unsexy) issue. “Roads, we need roads,” one entrepreneur said by way of a solution to most of the obstacles in her path. Today, she added, “we women, we are the roads.” I had never thought of it that way but because women do most of the farming, they’re the ones who carry produce to market, collect the water and bring the sick to the clinics.

The true star of the trip was a human hurricane: Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese entrepreneur who made a fortune in mobile phones.
I fantasized about being the boy wonder to his Batman, but as we toured the continent together I quickly realized I was Alfred, Batman’s butler. Everywhere we went, I was elbowed out of the way by young and old who wanted to get close to the rock star reformer and his beautiful, frighteningly smart daughter, Hadeel, who runs Mo’s foundation and is a chip off the old block (in an Alexander McQueen dress). Mo’s speeches are standing-room-only because even when he is sitting down, he’s a standing-up kind of person. In a packed hall in the University of Ghana, he was a prizefighter, removing his tie and jacket like a cape, punching young minds into the future.

His brainchild, the Ibrahim Prize, is a very generous endowment for African leaders who serve their people well and then — and this is crucial — leave office when they are supposed to. Mo has diagnosed a condition he calls “third-termitis,” where presidents, fearing an impoverished superannuation, feather their nests on the way out the door. So Mo has prescribed a soft landing for great leaders. Not getting the prize is as big a story as getting it. (He doesn’t stop at individuals. The Ibrahim Index ranks countries by quality of governance.)

Mo smokes a pipe and refers to everyone as “guys” — as in, “Listen, guys, if these problems are of our own making, the solutions will have to be, too.” Or, in my direction, “Guys, if you haven’t noticed ... you are not African.” Oh, yeah. And: “Guys, you Americans are lazy investors. There’s so much growth here but you want to float in the shallow water of the Dow Jones or Nasdaq.” 




Mr. Ibrahim is as searing about corruption north of the Equator as he is about corruption south of it, and the corruption that crosses over ... illicit capital flight, unfair mining contracts, the aid bureaucracy.

So I was listening. Good for me. But did I actually learn anything?

OVER long days and nights, I asked Africans about the course of international activism. Should we just pack it up and go home, I asked? There were a few nods. But many more noes. Because most Africans we met seemed to feel the pressing need for new kinds of partnerships, not just among governments, but among citizens, businesses, the rest of us. I sense the end of the usual donor-recipient relationship.

Aid, it’s clear, is still part of the picture. It’s crucial, if you have H.I.V. and are fighting for your life, or if you are a mother wondering why you can’t protect your child against killers with unpronounceable names or if you are a farmer who knows that new seed varietals will mean you have produce that you can take to market in drought or flood. But not the old, dumb, only-game-in-town aid — smart aid that aims to put itself out of business in a generation or two. “Make aid history” is the objective. It always was. Because when we end aid, it’ll mean that extreme poverty is history. But until that glorious day, smart aid can be a reforming tool, demanding accountability and transparency, rewarding measurable results, reinforcing the rule of law, but never imagining for a second that it’s a substitute for trade, investment or self-determination.

I for one want to live to see Mo Ibrahim’s throw-down prediction about Ghana come true. “Yes, guys,” he said, “Ghana needs support in the coming years, but in the not-too-distant future it can be giving aid, not receiving it; and you, Mr. Bono, can just go there on your holidays.”

I’m booking that ticket.

In South Africa, with Madiba, the great Nelson Mandela — the person who, along with Desmond Tutu and the Edge, I consider to be my boss — I raised the question of regional integration through the African Development Bank, and the need for real investment in infrastructure ... all the buzzwords. As Madiba smiled, I made a note to try not to talk about this stuff down at the pub — or in front of the band.

“And you, are you not going to the World Cup?” the great man chided me, changing the subject, having seen this wide-eyed zealotry before. “You are getting old and you are going to miss a great coming-out party for Africa.” The man who felt free before he was is still the greatest example of what real leadership can accomplish against the odds.

My family and I headed home ... just in time, I was getting carried away. I was going native, aroused by the thought of railroads and cement mixers, of a different kind of World Cup fever, of opposing players joining the same team, a new formation, new tactics. For those of us in the fan club, I came away amazed (as I always am) by the diversity of the continent ... but with a deep sense that the people of Africa are writing up some new rules for the game.

source:www.nytimes.com