When Freemuse approached our organisation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Middle East Office in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2004, to inquire whether we would be willing to collaborate on a regional conference about freedom of expression in music, I was instantly thrilled. We have been active in human rights and we have been working on cultural expression, but to combine both sounded especially compelling. In the Arab world, infringements on the freedom of expression occur on a daily basis. To boil it down to a simple formula, from Morocco to Iraq, from Syria to Saudi-Arabia, taboos surface in three main areas: politics, religion and sex. And yet, censorship is an extremely complicated and multi-layered problem. The life-worlds in all these countries couldn’t be fuller of shades and colours, and sometimes we are faced with surprisingly contradictory realities.
To map out a regional conference that would pay justice to all this diversity while at the same time single out some common threads and encourage more regional solidarity, appeared to be a particularly challenging undertaking. And since this would be a pioneer event for the Middle East and hence potentially pave the way for more of such engagement, it also promised to be particularly rewarding.
A long dialogue with Marie Korpe and Ole Reitov at Freemuse started, during which programs were drafted and re-drafted, names of potential contributors added and stroke out, priorities formulated and revised, ideas developed and criticism exchanged – and during which we became friends. We met and consulted with remarkable Arab musicians, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists, novelists, censorship employees, religious leaders, academics and filmmakers in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Iraq — among whom we encountered little scepticism and loads of enthusiasm. In Beirut, we had occasional doubts. Would these people with such different backgrounds really be willing to talk to each other? And how openly would they speak out? But Freemuse insisted, and in November 2005, heavy metal heads shared the conference table with a Shaikh, Sufi musicians jammed with rappers, celebrities debated with students.
Looking at the various results that the conference triggered – from the dynamic discussions, to the output in terms of information and networking, to all those enjoyable performances that enriched Beirut’s cultural life for a few days — I can say that it has been one of the most demanding, but also most exciting and delightful events that I’ve ever been involved in. It however also created both the soil and the need for continuous engagement and follow-up in the Middle East. I therefore hope that there will be further opportunities for co-operations between the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Freemuse in the future, in order to build on the momentum this encounter created.
|
|
|
