Open skies | May 2012

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND WHERE HAVE ALL THE RUSSIAN WRITERS GONE?

EvEry rolEx is madE for grEatnEss. thE submarinEr, introducEd i n 19 53 , wa s t h E f i r s t watc h to b E wat E r r E s i s ta n t up to 10 0 mE tr E s . it wa s l atEr strEng thEnEd by its patEntEd tr iplE-sE al triplock winding crown, making it capablE of withstanding dEpths of up to 300 mE trE s.

t he subm a r ine r d ate

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EDITOR’S LETTER

I

t may seem ironic, sitting as you are, some distance above the Earth, that we have devoted an issue to all things ‘underground’. Yet we mean the term in both the literal and metaphorical sense – from little-known musical scenes to underground hospitals, you will find it all inside this very issue.

We love illustrators at Open Skies, and this month we are delighted with the work of Paris-based duo Almasty, whose graphic rendering of the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict is stunning. The article, by Daniel Connell, is not bad either. We take a look at ambitious plans for a

new underground park in Manhattan, check out West Africa’s most happening city, and discover the world according to a hipster named Glenn Sugar. These are mere morsels, however, when compared to the feast that is our feature section. Our cover story focuses on Russia, its writers and whether conflict is needed to create great literature. Does being ‘forced underground’ unleash creativity? Or does it, as one writer claims, just make you go mad or hungry? Elsewhere we check out five of the best underground music scenes in the world, from Manchester and Seoul to Melbourne and Athens. Just don’t tell anyone we told you. Japan’s most famous crime reporter, Jake Adelstein, reports on how new laws are affecting the Japanese mafia – and he should know, having been a victim of the Yakuza himself. Enjoy the issue.

CONOR@OPENSKIESMAGAZINE.COM

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact The Editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Telephone: (+971 4) 282 4060 Fax:(+971 4) 282 4436 Email: emirates@motivate.ae

89,396 COPIES Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai, UAE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid Al Tayer GROUP EDITOR & MANAGING PARTNER Ian Fairservice GROUP SENIOR EDITOR Gina Johnson • gina@motivate.ae SENIOR EDITOR Mark Evans • marke@motivate.ae EDITOR Conor Purcell • conor@motivate.ae DEPUTY EDITOR Gareth Rees • gareth@motivate.ae DESIGNER Roui Francisco • rom@motivate.ae STAFF WRITER Matthew Priest EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Londresa Flores SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER S Sunil Kumar PRODUCTION MANAGER C Sudhakar GENERAL MANAGER, GROUP SALES Anthony Milne • anthony@motivate.ae GROUP SALES MANAGER Jaya Balakrishnan jaya@motivate.ae ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Murali Narayanan SENIOR SALES MANAGER Shruti Srivastava EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS FOR EMIRATES: Editor: Siobhan Bardet Arabic Editor: Hatem Omar Website • emirates. com. CONTRIBUTORS: HG2, Noah Davis, Mitch Blunt, Gemma Ray, Henry Mason, Francesco Franchi, Makoto Yamashita, Evan Minsker, Jake Adelstein, Dan Connell, Daniel Kalder, Gemma Correll, Stefano De Luigi, Almasty, Edward McGowan, Axis Maps, COVER ILLUSTRATION by Jeremy Kalgreen MASTHEAD DESIGN by Quint • www.quintdubai.com

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES: AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Okeeffe Media, Kevin O’ Keeffe; Tel + 61 89 447 2734, okeeffekev@bigpond.com.au, BENELUXM.P.S. Benelux; Francesco Sutton; Tel +322 720 9799, Fax +322 725 1522, francesco.sutton@mps-adv.com CHINA Publicitas Advertising; Tel +86 10 5879 5885 FRANCE Intermedia Europe Ltd; Fiona Lockie, Katie Allen, Laura Renault; Tel +33 15 534 9550, Fax +33 15 534 9549, administration@intermedia.europe.com GERMANY IMV International Media Service GmbH, Wolfgang Jäger; Tel +49 89 54 590 738, Fax +49 89 54 590 769, wolfgang.jager@iqm.de HONG KONG/MALAYSIA/ THAILAND Sonney Media Networks, Hemant Sonney; Tel +852 27 230 373, Fax +852 27 391 815, hemant@sonneymedia.com INDIA Media Star, Ravi Lalwani; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, Fax +91 22 2283 9619, ravi@mediastar.co.in ITALY IMM Italia Lucia Colucci; Tel +39 023 653 4433, Fax +39 029 998 1376, lucia.colucci@fastwebnet.it JAPAN Tandem Inc.; Tel + 81 3 3541 4166, Fax +81 3 3541 4748, all@tandem-inc.com NETHERLANDS GIO Media, Giovanni Angiolini; Tel +31 6 2223 8420, giovanni@ gio-media.nl SOUTH AFRICA Ndure Dale Isaac; Tel +27 84 701 2479, dale@ndure.co.za SPAIN IMM International, Nicolas Devos; Tel +331 40 1300 30, n.devos@imminternational.com TURKEY Media Ltd.; Tel: +90 212 275 51 52, mediamarketingtr@medialtd.com.tr UK Spafax Inflight Media, Nick Hopkins, Arnold Green; Tel +44 207 906 2001, Fax +44 207 906 2022, nhopkins@spafax.com USA Totem Brand Stories, Brigitte Baron, Marina Chetner; Tel +212 896 3846, Fax +212 896 3848, brigitte. baron@rtotembrandstories.com

29

CONTENTS

MAY 2012

WILL MANHATTAN’S SUBTERRANEAN PARK GET THE GO AHEAD?

(P36)... THE W ISTANBUL GETS THE ROOM ONCE OVER (P38)... WE GIVE THE MAPPED TREATMENT TO ONE OF WEST AFRICA’S COOLEST CITIES:

ACCRA (P44)... ONE OF THE PLANET’S LEADING TREND WATCHERS TELLS US HOW TO SPOT THE NEXT BIG THING (P49)... IT’S ONE OF LISBON’S OLDEST COFFEE SHOPS, BUT IT IS ANY GOOD? WE FIND OUT (P58)...

DID THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION SIGNAL THE END OF THE

UNDERGROUND

THETOKYO CRIME REPORTER JAKE S FROM NOTEGIANTS? RUSSIAN LITERARY (P62)...

ADELSTEIN EXAMINES WHAT HOLDS FOR THE YAKUZA WHERE HAVE ALLTHE THEFUTURE RUSSIAN WRITERS GONE? (P72)... UNKNOWN AND UNLOVED, ERITREA’S REBELS WERE ONE OF THE MOST FORMIDABLE FIGHTING FORCES ON THE PLANET. WE CHRONICLE THEIR STRUGGLE (P82)... WE DISCOVER FIVE UNDERGROUND MUSIC SCENES AROUND THE WORLD FROM SEOUL TO ATHENS (P90)...4/19/12

NAL COVER.indd 1

IRAN HAS A VIBRANT CINEMA CULTURE AND STEFANO DE LUIGI’S STUNNING PORTRAITS SHOW ITS CREATIVITY AT WORK (P96)...

31

5:20 PM

CONTRIBUTORS

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

GEMMA RAY: British singer and songwriter Gemma Ray is rapidly gaining global attention for her smoky, wide-screen sounds. She has released four albums so far, her latest entitled Island Fire. She provides us with this month’s Skypod.

DANIEL KALDER: A writer based in the US who lived and worked in Russia for ten years, he is the author of two books: Lost Cosmonaut and Strange Telescopes. He also writes a weekly column for the Russian State News Agency website.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE RUSSIAN WRITERS GONE?

JAKE ADELSTEIN: A crime reporter with the Tokyo daily, Yomiuri Shinbun for 12 years, Adelstein eventually left the newspaper after receiving death threats from a Yakuza crime family. His book on his time in Japan, Tokyo Vice, was a best seller.

DAN CONNELL: A photographer and author of numerous books and articles on Eritrea, he travelled to the country and reported on the conflict there in the late 1970s. He currently teaches journalism and African politics at Simmons College in Boston.

STEFANO DE LUIGI: One of the leading photographers in the world, his work has appeared in Time, The New Yorker, Stern and Paris Match. He has won the World Press Photo three times in three different categories.

ER.indd 1

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4/19/12

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INTRO P. 36 • MANHATTAN UNDERGROUND

P. 44 • ACCRA MAPPED

P. 56 • PRAGUE METRO

R COUNTEE R U CULT

OUT WE CHECK ON’S SB ONE OF LI FES A C IC SS CLA

P58

35

ILLUSTRATION: MITCH BLUNT

here most New Yorkers saw an abandoned trolley terminal covered in 60 years of Gotham grime, James Ramsey and Daniel Barasch envisioned a beautiful underground park illuminated by sunlight piped in via fibre-optic cables. Over dinner a couple of years ago, the architect and former Googler decided to pursue their dream: They would build the Delancey Underground.

The plan centres on a 60,000sq ft space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The 1.5-acre area served as a turnaround point for streetcars heading

W

over the Williamsburg Bridge, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) decommissioned it in 1948. Dust has fallen from the 20-foot ceilings ever since. Ramsey and Barasch hope to turn the ne-

OUR MAN IN

NEW YORK AN UNDERGROUND PARK IN MANHATTAN? TW O NEW YORKERS WANT TO BUILD ONE

Noah Davis is a freelancer writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Twitter: @noahedavis 36

glected location into a green space where neighbourhood residents and tourists can find respite from the intensity of the bustling city above.

If building an underground park in an unused terminal sounds crazy,

TWITTER

PITCH well, that’s because it kind of is. The pair readily admits their vision, which will require raising “tens of millions of dollars” from private donors, is ambitious. But they have a model: The High Line. In 1999, Robert Hammond and Joshua Davis started a decadelong fight that transformed a strip of overgrown, abandoned railroad tracks 20 feet above the street on the city’s west side into a pristine park.

The High Line’s first section opened in 2009 to wild acclaim. Locals love the space and tourists flock there en masse. “They paved the way,” Barasch says. “If we came up with this idea for Delancey Underground 15 years ago, people would have said we were insane.

But because the High Line revitalised the remnant infrastructure in such a compelling way, the community and the state can really imagine our plan.”

Ramsey and Barasch are taking inspiration from the High Line – their project is nicknamed the ‘Low Line’ – but they are also benefiting from it in more tangible ways.

Hammond and Davis serve as informal advisors to the new venture.

Making Delancey Underground is not a short process. Nor is it a fait accompli. They need to win over the community, the city, and, most importantly, the MTA, who controls the master lease on the space. To do this, they have to prove that Delancey Underground can generate revenue and that their solar technology works.

To accomplish the first task, they are modelling different scenarios such as leasing the space from the MTA or buying it outright. The only limit is imagination. In order to demonstrate how the ‘remote skylight’ technology brings in light and allows photosynthesis, the

pair rented a warehouse where they will build a model park in September. The kickstarter.com campaign they launched to fund the effort hit its $100,000 target in less than a week.

Almost 3,000 backers from all over the world donated, sometimes just a $1, to support the potential park. “We hope we can show that our community approach combined with a popular idea and a business model that works will win over the MTA,” Barasch says.

But Delancey Underground is about more than one space in New York; it’s about unused places around the world.

“A lot of our most populated urban areas are the ones that have remnant

something incredible can be built in the underground spaces infrastructure in them,” Ramsey says.

“The idea that we can employ technology to convert them into a community resource is one that we would love to see applied across the world.”

In New York’s five boroughs alone, there is an additional 11.5 acres of underground space. People from London, Paris and Shanghai have said they want to follow the Delancey Underground model. The momentum is building and that wave of support could lead to a park below Manhattan’s streets. Barasch says: “There’s magic in these underground spaces and it’s possible to build something incredible, but New York hasn’t focused on them.”

Two New Yorkers are. And Delancey Underground is just the beginning.

FIVE SUBTERRANEAN HANGOUTS THAT YOU SHOULD BE FOLLOWING

CHINESE LAUNDRY One of the most well established clubs in Sydney spins all kinds of party tunes, from hip hop to house. @_ChineseLaundry

ZOUK Based in a historic underground warehouse, this super-club has won Singaporean nightspot of the year eight times. @ZoukSingapore

SUNSET-SUNSIDE An unpretentious, quintessential Parisian basement jazz club in the city of light. @Sunset_Sunside

LA ESQUINA Hidden beneath a Mexican food vendor, this Brooklyn-based underground bar is brimming with beautiful people. @LaEsquinaNY

NIGHTJAR Behind the façade of this London bar live jazz, swing and cabaret is washed down with prohibition-era cocktails. @barnightjar

37

ROOM ROOM

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ISTANBUL INTERNET SPEED: 16MB, $20/24 hours PILLOWS: Four IPOD DOCK: Yes CLUB SANDWICH DELIVERY TIME:

30 minutes COMPLIMENTARY SNACKS: None TOILETRY BRAND: Bliss DAILY NEWSPAPER: International Herald

Tribune, Turkish Daily News EXTRAS: Complimentary magazines

including Time Out Istanbul

W Hotels specialise in properties aimed squarely at young professionals – preferably creatives – and W Istanbul doesn’t disappoint. With just 136 rooms, the hotel is big enough to provide all the luxuries a modern traveller requires – a spa, two restaurants, a lively cocktail bar, terrace and gym – but not so large that it loses the ‘boutique’ feel. Built amongst the attractive 1870s Akaretler Row houses in the chic, upmarket and distinctly European, Beşiktaş district, the W Istanbul is ideally located for both shoppers, with the designer boutiques of Nisantasi nearby, as well as for those seeking to explore the older parts of the city. The rooms have a 32” LCD flat screen, an iPod dock and movies on demand. The hotel does charge for in-room internet, which takes away from the creative vibe somewhat.

TV CHANNELS: 30 VIEW: 2 /5 RATE: From $350 WWW.W-ISTANBUL.COM.TR

MAY CALENDAR

MAY 4

MAY 4-7

MAY 17-20

MAY 19

The world’s beautiful people descend on Sydney for a week of haute couture as the southern hemisphere takes centre stage. australia.mbfashionweek.com

More than 1,000 artists will be exhibiting their work on New York’s Randall’s Island in the centre of Manhattan. www.friezenewyork.com

For the fifth year running Hong Kong will showcase the best of the contemporary art scene across 266 galleries.

All the fanfare and the glory will go to one team, as they are crowned kings of European football in Munich’s Allianz Arena.

www.hongkongartfair.com

uefa.com/uefachampionsleague

Australian Fashion Week

38

New York Frieze

Hong Kong Art Fair

Champions League Final

BOOKED PETER RICHARDSON A HISTORY OF RAMPARTS Ramparts is one of the best – and yet one of the most unheralded – American magazines of the 20th century. It started off in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, but under the editorship of Warren Hinkle, soon turned into a leftist muckraking magazine that combined slick covers and some remarkable investigative journalism. Richardson’s book faithfully chronicles that metamorphosis, and the mayhem that continually surrounded the magazine. Hinckle, a hard-drinking, eye-patch wearing editor (who kept a pet monkey in his office), drove the magazine with his energy and nose for trouble. And trouble came; the magazine was spied on by the CIA, got involved with the Black Panthers, and ultimately imploded. Its legacy was lasting; former staff members include the founders of Rolling Stone and Mother Jones magazines and it forced its more upright competitors such as Time and Newsweek to raise their game. Its design-led, boundary-pushing covers were years ahead of their time. And despite Richardson’s occasional lapses into hippy-speak, this is a faithful look at an important magazine.

The New Press, 2009

MAY CALENDAR

MAY 20

MAY 18-26

MAY 26

MAY 27 - APRIL 20

The annual eclipse of the sun should fall on May 20 this year, with it being most visible in China, Japan and the western US.

Moroccan capital Rabat hosts a line-up of artists that includes ageing singer Lenny Kravitz at the annual world and Arabic music festival.

The climax to the English rugby union season will see the best team triumph at Twickenham.

The Japanese music scene lets its hair down with this annual international rock music festival in the world’s coolest city.

eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov

www.festivalmawazine.ma

www.premiershiprugby.com/final

www.rockstokyo.jp

Solar Eclipse

40

Festival Mawazine

Aviva Premiership Rugby Final

Tokyo Rocks

SKYPOD BRITISH SINGER/SONGWRITER GEMMA RAY SHARES HER FAVOURITE TRACKS. WWW.GEMMARAY.TV

ELENI MANDELL – MIRACLE OF FIVE I love the swoon and idle thrum of this song – the stillhumidity and thirsty woozy vocals are a welcome respite from this world whenever it comes on.

MIDLAKE – VAN OCCPANTHER (DARWIN SONG) I like to think this is written from the perspective of Charles Darwin and how he felt when he was about to unleash his discoveries.

KORT – PENETRATION I never heard the original – but this version feels so modern. I love this project and the album Incredibly Lonely is one of my favourites of 2011.

ETTA JAMES – AT LAST The intro to this song is as sumptuous as a string arrangement gets and however overexposed this has become, it still feels like a piece of magic every time I hear it.

41

LITTLE BROTHER MONTGOMERY – I KEEP ON DRINKIN’ The vocal melody feels like an apple cart being overturned, and is such a joy to sing – it feels like a real folk song. It just begs to be sung and played.

LEE HAZELWOOD – RIDER ON A WHITE HORSE I love the pushy trashy cymbal, ridiculous shooting star synths, brass, reverby snare, country bass – fun production and brilliantly simple lyrics.

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS – THE SINGER I love this version – all gunslinger guitar, brutal girl group drums and soaring strings.

It’s so cinematic and I really like the space in there too.

THE SEEDS – CAN’T SEEM TO MAKE YOU MINE I played this with Matt Verta Ray when he last come to London.

It’s one of those perfect, passionate songs that are so satisfying to cover.

42

GARETH REES OUR DEPUTY EDITOR on why being underground is of little value y first job in journalism was working for a prestigious literary magazine. I won’t name it here, but it was established in 1732 and boasts a list of former contributors that includes literary luminaries such as William Burroughs, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It all sounds terribly thrilling, doesn’t it? And my time on the magazine was, indeed, an ‘experience’. But not because I spent my days hobnobbing with Harold Pinter.

Oh, no. I travelled each day to an upper middle class neighbourhood in a semidetached home in south London, where the mysterious patrician publisher and his alluring European wife lived, often alongside a visiting Indian artist who specialised in, shall we say, anatomical paintings. Once I was even sent to the Stoke Newington home of the editor, a lovely gent and sometimescelebrated poet who assembled the – often rather uninspiring – short stories and poetry into something resembling a magazine. But sipping champagne while trading quips with Martin Amis it was not. Unintentionally, and after more than 250 years, the magazine had gone underground. So far underground, in fact, that I doubt more than 100 people read it. At the same time – juggling three jobs, such is the life of the rookie wordsmith – I had a short story published in a small but edgy literary magazine, which, I would wager, was produced and read by the same 20 or so graduates, funding their little beauty with terrifying overdrafts. It sadly no longer exists. Just as the music free-sheet

M

I helped to launch from a rodent infested former warehouse near London Bridge has probably been recycled and used to make that scratchy toilet paper you find in public loos. So, although being underground is often very cool, if nobody knows you exist, what is the point, eh? A magazine is nothing without its readers. That doesn’t mean a magazine should pander to popular tastes – down that vulgar road lurks mediocrity. But, the lesson I learned from striving away on those luckless titles, was: never take your audience for granted. Never lower your standards. Now, there are fewer rodents, we are occasionally permitted a glass of fizz and we always deal with great writers, but we will never forget why we are doing what we do – as you will find out in this beautifully put together – if we do say so ourselves – issue of Open Skies.

Blimey, was that a mouse?

MAPPED ACCRA

TESANO TESANO

LEGION LEGION VILLAGE VILLAGE

ABELEMKPE ABELEMKPE KOTOBABI KOTOBABI

ABEKA ABEKA

NIMA NIMA OKAI KOI OKAI KOI

NORTH INDUSTRIAL NORTH INDUSTRIAL AREA AREA

2011 HAJ 2011 HAJ

ASYLUM ASYLUM DOWN DOWN

NORTH RIDGE NORTH RIDGE

ABOSSEYOKAI ABOSSEYOKAI

SOUTH SOUTH INDUSTRIAL AREA INDUSTRIAL AREA LARTEBIOKORSHIE LARTEBIOKORSHIE VICTORIA BORG VICTORIA BORG USSHER TOWN USSHER TOWN JAMES JAMES TOWN TOWN KORLE GONNO KORLE GONNO 44

KOTOKA KOTOKA BURMA BURMA INTERNATIONAL CAMP INTERNATIONAL CAMP AIRPORT AIRPORT KPESHIE KPESHIE

Accra is beginning to take centre stage in West Africa. Ghana is now seen as a safer alternative to Nigeria and the discovery of oil off the coast has triggered an economic boom centred on its capital. To match this the hotels, restaurants and bars are having a renaissance – and with the arrival of some of the more luxurious brands in Accra, it is a city on the move.

WWW.HG2.COM

VILLAGE VILLAGE CANTONMENTS CANTONMENTS LABADI LABADI

OSU OSU

HOTELS 1. Mövenpick Ambassador 2. Beachcomber Hotel 3. Fiesta Royal 4. Paloma Hotel RESTAURANTS 5. 1A at Villa Monticello 6. Asanka 7. Il Cavaliere Pazzo 8. Maquis Tante Marie BARS / CLUBS 9. Escobar 10. 3121 11. Bywell’s 12. Bella Roma GALLERIES 13. National Museum of Ghana 14. Artists Alliance 15. Aburi Botanic Gardens 16. Alliance Francaise 45

MAPPED ACCRA

HOTELS MÖVENPICK AMBASSADOR The Movenpick is in the centre of the city among 16 acres of landscaped gardens. The rooms border on the luxurious, the restaurant is excellent, as is the cocktail bar.

2 BEACHCOMBER

3

HOTEL Cheap and cheerful, the Beachcomber is all about its relaxing seafront location, complete with a private beach. The chalets are basic but the restaurant has a superb ocean view.

FIESTA ROYAL The Fiesta Royal is 15 minutes from the centre of Accra. The 100 comfortable rooms, suites and chalets, (with free WiFi), are targeted at the business traveller. Has a good pool, spa and gym.

4 PALOMA HOTEL

IL CAVALIERE PAZZO Set in the confines of the Polo Ground, this place is best enjoyed as the sun is setting. The colonial-style lounge sets the scene, while the restaurant upstairs serves the best Italian food in Ghana.

8

The Paloma has been around since before the oil boom and the Champs Sports Bar downstairs, a firm favourite of the expat community, is one of the liveliest bars in town.

RESTAURANTS 5 1A AT VILLA

MONTICELLO One of the finest restaurants in Accra, 1A’s menu mixes local seafood with an international twist. The cocktail bar next door is perfect for a pre-dinner aperitif.

6 ASANKA

Asanka is the place to sample proper Ghanaian dishes, serving up kenkey (fermented cornflour balls), kontumbre (cocoyam leaves) and, of course, fufu (pounded cassava and yam).

7

MAQUIS TANTE MARIE Maquis Tante Marie explores Africa’s diverse cuisine, with a Ghanaian and Ivorian twist. The restaurant is comprised of three separate areas, of which the garden is the most sought after.

BARS/CLUBS 9 ESCOBAR

Escobar is the place for Accra’s elite. A restaurant, bar and lounge, the BBQ draws diners during the day and once happy hour begins the drinking gets into full swing. Watch out for the theme nights too.

10 3121

Named after Accra’s international dialling code, 3121 attracts a hip, young crowd for a dance and a drink. Weekends are packed as dancers take to the tables and DJs spin R&B and hip hop.

11 BYWELL’S

Bywell’s is the place to come for live reggae, a cold beer, some spicy food and a dance.

Frequented by everyone from backpackers to locals and expats, the atmosphere is great.

12 BELLA ROMA

Bella Roma is the epitome of Accra cool. There’s a sophisticated Italian restaurant and an open air dancefloor for kicking off the heels and getting down to everything from African dance to house.

GALLERIES 13 NATIONAL MUSEUM

OF GHANA Opened to celebrate Ghana’s Independence it contains a large collection of artefacts from the country’s history, especially from the Ashanti period.

46

14 ARTISTS ALLIANCE

Built in the 1960s as a cultural hub of the newly Independent Ghana, the gallery contains three storeys of painting, sculpture and tribal art both from established and new artists.

15 ABURI BOTANIC

GARDENS Founded in 1890, the Aburi Botanic Gardens cover 65 hectares of land. and is perfect for a peaceful escape from the city on the cool peak of the Akwapim Ridge.

16 ALLIANCE FRANCAISE

The Alliance is a French cultural outpost in Accra.

It hosts a range of events from exhibitions and live music to theatrical productions and film screenings. It also houses a lovely little restaurant.

SECRET BAR YOU’VE FOUND IT. A WANDERING WARDROBE, PARKED SURPRISINGLY IN A SUN-DAPPLED CLEARING. AN ARMOIRE STOCKED WITH SPIRITS, MIXERS, JUICES, ICE, SHAKERS AND GLASSES. A SECRET HONESTY BAR WHERE YOU FIX YOUR OWN SUNDOWNERS. HELP YOURSELF BUT PLEASE SIGN THE BOOK. CHEERS.

For more info, please call (230) 698 2222 / 2727, email us at reservations@luxislandresorts.com or visit our website at luxislandresorts.com LUX BELLE MARE, MAURITIUS LUX GRAND GAUBE, MAURITIUS LUX LE MORNE, MAURITIUS LUX ILE DE LA REUNION LUX MALDIVES PRODUCED BY LUX : TAMASSA, MAURITIUS MERVILLE BEACH, MAURITIUS ILE DES DEUX COCOS, MAURITIUS HOTEL LE RECIF, ILE DE LA REUNION

COLUMN

Lords of the underground T REND WATCHER HENRY MASON LETS US IN ON HIS TECHNIQUE S FOR FIND ING THE NEXT B IG THING.

C

ontrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be a mysterious guru to call yourself a ‘trend watcher’. Trend watching is not about predicting the future.

It is about observing and understanding what’s already happening – from the underground to the mainstream. So look past the gurus.

You also need to know what trends are about, as the word is often misused.

People often think trends are about fashion and skirt lengths. But trends emerge from new ways of satisfying basic needs and desires, which don’t change that rapidly (if at all). Even the most niche practices are usually grounded in fundamental needs, even if just the desire to be different.

We still get asked about how to distinguish between consumer trends and fads. All we can say is this: whether pigs are the new cats, or pizza cones are the new ‘it’ snack, these phenomena won’t

reshape people’s lives. They show that consumers want to be unique or crave convenience and surprise. The latter are actually trends. The products (pigs, cones) are fads. So you will need to know a fad when you see (or smell) one.

Even the most niche trends are usually grounded in fundamental needs, if only the desire to be different Remember, in life and in trends, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whatever catches your fancy while spotting and tracking trends, please remember that not everything applies to everyone, and that virtually every trend has its 49

anti-trend. E-commerce may be booming, but real world retail is far from dead. Has retail changed in response to ecommerce? Sure. But look at excited shoppers in Apple stores from New York to Shanghai, and it’s clear that both online and offline retail have many years of opportunity ahead of them.

Similarly, while underground habits influence mainstream culture, they won’t just suddenly dominate and replace it.

That’s just now how it works.

Observing the world around you, with an open mind, is something many professionals have unlearned, but it’s something that we’re all born with. Just ask yourself why

whenever you notice something new, instead of immediately looking for shortcomings.

Curiosity is everything. Groundbreaking innovations and bar-raising customer experiences may well be happening in industries other than your own. Take the best, and adapt and apply it, and you’ll be endlessly inspired.

Benefit from the unprecedented abundance of resources: in a world that is more connected now than ever, there are countless resources that you can use to identify new trends.

From magazines to social media (check out Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and Quora), from TV to travel, from shops to air-

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CULT FILMS freaks

Rocky Horror Picture Show

1

With a cast comprised mostly of real carnival performers, this was a film that conservative 1930s moviegoers were not ready for.

Having been cut to a short 64 minutes by the studio censors, the film nevertheless grew into a classic decades later as taboos began to be broken.

2

Fun, camp and neither as good as die-hard fans suggest nor as dire as critics would have you believe, Rocky 50

Horror is central to the history of cult films, having kick-started the craze for fancy-dress-wearing, food-throwing, midnight-screening cinema going.

3

plan 9 from outer space

the big lebowski

There are few film characters that trigger fanatical devotion, but Jeff Bridges’ lethargic layabout, The Dude, is one of them. Not impressive at the box office, the Coen Brothers’ film nevertheless struck a chord with home cinema audiences, so much so that it inspired not only the annual Lebowski

Fest, but also its own spin-off religion, Dudeism. The Dude abides.

4

From the infamous director Ed Wood, Plan 9 has generally been heralded as the worst film ever made.

However, remember there is no such thing as bad press, and with infamy came spin-off video games, comic books, stage shows and remakes with puppets.

5

Good-looking ‘indie’ lead actor?

Check. A moody convoluted

ports – inspiration is everywhere. Don’t worry about timing, life cycles or regional suitability.Worried about being either too early or too late? Well, major consumer trends are about deep social and cultural change, meaning things typically won’t change tomorrow – it takes time.

Think that a trend is too distant? Take it back to basic needs and desires, and see how when it comes to brands and consumption, people’s similarities worldwide far outnumber the differences.

Applying trends is all about innovation. Ask yourself if the trend you’ve spotted has the potential to: 1) influence or

donnie darko

The Room

storyline only relatable to an audience of angst-filled teenagers?

Check. Patrick Swayze? Check. A demonic rabbit called Frank?

Check. This movie has all the necessary ingredients for a cult classic. Despite failing to make money on its cinematic release, Donnie Darko garnered a dedicated army of fans who were so devoted that a trendy cinema in New York ran midnight screenings of the film for 28 months.

shape your company’s vision, 2) come up with a new business concept, new venture or brand, 3) launch a new product or service, or 4) speak the language of consumers currently ‘living the trend’. This way you’ll have a better idea of where you’re going with the information that you’ve gathered. And a final bonus tip: have some fun! Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Trend watching is about coming up with exciting new products and services for your customers: nothing more, nothing less. So relax, observe, adapt, apply, and enjoy the ride.

Henry Mason serves as Head of Research and Analysis for trendwatching.com

Eraserhead

6

The phrase ‘so bad, it’s good’ was invented for this film. The largely ignored $6 million vanity project from actor/director Tommy Wiseau was given a new lease of life when independent cinemas picked up on viral YouTube videos of the film and the commonly held belief that The Room was officially ‘the worst film of all time’. After Ed Wood’s Plan 9, of course.

7

You know a film is weird when even its oddball director David

This Is Spinal Tap

Lynch labels it his most ‘spiritual’ movie ever. Taking more than five years to make, the terrifyingly barmy film went on to inspire directors like Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas.

8

The fact that it was deemed ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ by the US Library of Congress highlights just how well this rock musical mockumentary has done for itself – especially as most of the dialogue was ad libbed.

51

INTERVIEW

MY TRAVELLED LIFE GLENN SUGAR, HIPSTER, 27

ON BEING COOL

bedroom. Cutting edge man, cutting edge.

It’s not like I try. I just am. It’s a Zen thing I

but instead they are stuck in some midtown office block, er, updating their Tumblr sites.

guess. I see people staring when I am wearing

Not that I use Tumblr. That site is so over.

my lavender skinny jeans (so tight you can

ON HUMOUR

make out my cartilage) and Reebok Pumps,

Some people say that hipsters have no sense of

and I know what they are thinking: ‘who is

humour, but that’s definitely not the case yeah?

ON NOT BEING A HIPSTER

that guy?’ Well I don’t fit into any boxes. I am

Check this joke: How many hipsters does it take

I am definitely not a hipster. Not at all. Just

me. Even without all my vintage clothes and

to change a light bulb? Some number you have

because I have a handlebar moustache and

dad’s expense account, I am just plain old me.

probably never heard of. Funny yeah?

avoid gluten like it was anthrax, does not make me a hipster. No way man. If I was

Definitely not a hipster.

wearing ‘mom jeans’ and had a crew cut

ON THE MEDIA

they would call me health conscious. But

ON THE UNDERGROUND

The suits love to give hipsters a hard time.

once you are seen riding a 10-year-old girl’s

Mainstream? Lamestream. Yeah? So Sarah

Which is ironic, given most of the media

bike through The Village, with a stuffed

Palin might have made that phrase famous,

is staffed by hipsters. They are just jealous

fox skin draped over your man-bag, people

but I was like, using that word years ago. All my

– they would love to be hanging out on a

make assumptions. That’s just not hip. Not

friends were. So what does being underground

street corner updating their Tumblr sites,

hip at all. Yeah?

mean? Well, it means not doing what everyone else is doing. So it might look like me and all my friends dress alike (we do), but that was just a coincidence yeh? If we all shop in American Apparel and the same three vintage stores, what do you expect to happen?

ON MUSIC Baile funk yeh? Grimestep. Albanian nu-jazz.

Trojan breakbeats. Crunk rock yeh? Bedroom minimal. Heard of that? Didn’t think so. It’s basically a scene made entirely up of bedroom DJs. The only way you can hear them play is if you know them and they let you into their 53

GRAPH INFORMATION ELEGANCE

the penrose triangle or penrose tribar, is an impossible object. it was first created by the artist Oscar ReutersvArd in 1934. the mathematician roger penrose independently devised and popularised it in the 1950s, describing it as impossibility in its purest form.

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55

ILLUSTRATION: FRANCESCO FRANCHI

PLACE

PHOTO: MAKOTO YAMASHITA

A RC H I T E C T U R E M APPED

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STANICA MALOSTRANSKÁ

•

P RA G U E

•

YEAR BUILT: 1987

STORE U R BA N C ARTO G RA P H Y

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A BRASILEIRA

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LISBON

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CAFE

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t is impossible to visit Lisbon without stopping off for an obligatory bica at A Brasileira, with its famous statue of Fernando Pessoa sitting on a chair amongst the camera-toting customers. The imposing bronze sculpture features an empty chair beside the trilby-wearing poet, inviting tourists to have their photo taken beside the great man. For the record, a bica is a short strong espresso coffee, a term coined at A Brasileira meaning ‘Bebe isto com açucar’, or ‘drink this with sugar’. The cafe is always busy, mainly with tourists who come to admire the Art Deco interior with its mirrored walls, marble pilasters, brass chandeliers and oak wood furniture upholstered with red leather.

One of the oldest surviving coffee houses in Lisbon, the space became fashionable when it opened in 1905, and immediately attracted Lisbon’s literati, including the Portuguese poet Pessoa, who lived in the next block.

The statue, by sculptor Lagoa Henriques, was placed outside the cafe in 1988, even though Pessoa favoured another intellectual haunt, Café Martinho da Arcada on the Praça do Comércio. Today the current owner Jaime Silva employs some 30 staff but the waiters and waitresses today, he says, are no longer the political conspirators that the cafe was once famous for.

The cafe looks onto Praça de Camões, a small cobblestone square that divides the upmarket shopping district of Chiado and the bars and clubs of Bairro Alto.

In the middle of the square a monumental statue of 16th-century epic poet Luis de Camões stands on a pedestal with other smaller statues of Golden Age Portuguese writers set around him. Behind Camões is a historical 1920s kiosk serving traditional Portuguese refreshments. The cafe large terrace also faces Largo do Chiado, where TEXT: RUPERT EDEN / IMAGE: RENATA GINZBURG

58

there are two must-see ornate Baroque churches – Loreto, also known as ‘Church of the Italian’s, and Encarnação.

When A Brasileira first opened its doors in 1905 (it had housed an old shirt shop at the top end of Rua Garrett) it offered its customers ‘genuine roasted coffee beans from Brazil’ – at that time 1 kilo of ground coffee cost about 0.5 cents, and for each kilo a customer was given a small cup of coffee on the house. The original owner, Adriano Telles, shipped his coffee beans from the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, an exotic product generally unappreciated by Lisboetas of that era.

It was the first shop to sell the bica and it also originally stocked imported products such as guava paste, tapioca, spices, preserves, teas and flour, in addition to local wine and olive oils. What was originally a store where wares could be tried and tested soon became a cafe and, in 1908, Brasileira was refurbished in order to sell drinks and food. The ornate green-and-gold entrance and wooden interior still stands today.

The walls of A Brasileira have also amassed an impressive art collection.

Dozens of important Portuguese artist are represented in a kind of shrine to the early literary movements and anti-Fascist thinkers including works by António Soares, Eduardo Viana, Jorge Barradas and Eduardo Nery.

As time has passed A Brasileira has become too busy, noisy and crowded for any serious intellectual discussions, and is perhaps better known as a slightly overpriced place to meet, with poor food and brusque service than as an artists’ hangout.

Whether it can relive its glory days remains to be seen.

A Braziliera, 120 Rua Garrett, Largo do Chiado; www.cafe-abrasileira.com; +351 213469541

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MAIN P. 62 • RUSSIA’S LITERARY UNDERGROUND P. 72 • THE END OF THE YAKUZA? P. 96 • IRAN’S MOVIE MAKERS

ROUND UNDERGR EA IT ER

UND WITH ON THE GROLD’S BEST THE WOR GHTERS GUERILLA FI

P82

61

tHe rIsE aNd fAlL oF rUsSiAn lItErAtUrE

62 WRITERS OF RUSSIA

WRITERS OF RUSSIA 63

n Moscow, a statue of the national poet, Alexander Pushkin, stands at the heart of the city, mere minutes’ walk from a monument to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Metro stations carry writers’ names, and across the vast country the homes of famous authors have been converted into museums.

In Russia the w ritten word has power, and relations between writers and the state have often been antagonistic. Almost all significant Russian authors of the last two centuries have battled censorship, oppression and – as often as not – their fellow scribes.

Russian writers have thus earned an intimidating reputation as philosophers, martyrs and, in some cases, madmen, responsible for an epic literature that inspires global fascination. In the West, awe at the perpetual turbulence, strife and disaster of the country’s history has led to a belief that Russian literature must contain uniquely profound insights into the terrible depths of the human experience.But how much of that is myth, and how much is truth?

In fact, by European standards, Russian literature is young: it was not until the 19th century that the country acquired its ‘national poet’, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Pushkin is a crucial figure for anyone trying to understand Russian literature, even if he is little read in the West. Descended from an ancient aristocratic family but with the blood of an Abyssinian slave running through his veins, the youthful Pushkin flirted with political radicalism. Indeed, the only thing that prevented him from joining the doomed Decembrist uprising against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825 was that he had been exiled to his mother’s estate for possible atheism. He struggled with debts, fretted about his reputation, and 64 RUSSIA

died at age 37 in a duel fought over his wife’s honour.

Thus Pushkin seems to be the archetypal Russian author: anti-establishment, passionate to the point of tragedy, creating works of genius in the face of oppression. Perhaps, however, that is too simple an explanation.

Pushkin’s patron was the Tsar himself, and Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian at New College, University of Oxford, argues that censorship was “very mild” in Russia until the Decembrist uprising, after which Pushkin lost interest in revolutionary politics: “Pushkin was close to Radicalism in

his early period and in exile,” says Professor Zorin. “His Radicalism subsided later, but not his creativity – his most important works were all written after the end of his radical period.”

Meanwhile, although much of Pushkin’s later work contained implicit criticisms of the system and was initially suppressed by hyper-sensitive censors, it was not inspired by censorship – Pushkin always wrote for publication, and covered an astonishingly broad range of themes.

To truly understand Russian literature, one must also consider Puskin’s ‘dark twin’, Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852).

In a story by Gogol you might encounter a demon with a single giant eye so huge it needs assistants to help it blink, a nose might escape from the face of its owner and become a prominent member of society, or a ghost might run around Saint Petersburg stealing overcoats.

Gogol was a strange character: celibate, stooped, frail and with a huge hooked nose, he was originally hailed by liberal critics as a ruthless satirist exposing the horrors of Tsarist tyranny, but his personal preoccupations soon overpowered his work and reputation. Possessed by a messianic, religious fervour, he became a fervid supporter of the Tsar and began writing an epic trilogy which he hoped would ‘save’ Russia.

Ultimately he became convinced that literature itself was sinful, burned his manuscript, collapsed in a nervous fever and died. Legend has it that Gogol, who suffered from narcolepsy, may have been buried alive.

Pushkin was aristocratic, classical and ‘enlightened’; his verse is univer-

sally regarded as approaching perfection, and in his writing the world can be analysed rationally.

Gogol represents the other side of the Russian tradition, spinning bizarre, grotesque narratives, as if the nation’s readers can only be attracted through distortion, absurdity and lunacy.

The approaches of the two writers were an immense influence on everything to follow.

In the mid 19th century, the novel became the major form of Russian literature. It was the perfect vehicle for discussing history, philosophy and the battle of ideas that raged in the country. Opposition to the Tsar had grown more extreme, and liberal humanists were replaced by anarchists, nihilists and terrorists who embraced murder as a political weapon.

Emerging against this background of increasing extremism was the man often cited as the greatest novelist of all time: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Like Pushkin, Tolstoy was an aristocrat, but he was also a man of action who had spent his youth fighting in Russia’s then-as-now volatile Caucasus region.

Tolstoy’s ex perience of combat informed the book regarded as his masterpiece, War and Peace , which he wrote between 1862 and 1869. The book was ostensibly about the Napoleonic wars, but Tolstoy’s ambitions for it were colossal. He admitted himself that it was not really a novel, nor history, but rather a hybrid encompassing philosophical discussions, historical analysis, psychology and much else besides.

But as much as Tolstoy was capable of writing about the vast sweep of history, so too could he write about the intimate inner life of a lonely woman; indeed, he viewed

Anna Karenina , a tragic story about doomed love (which also contains long discussions on serfdom, and profound meditations on death, naturally) as his greatest work. Moving from epic battles to private emotional turmoil, Tolstoy displayed the breadth of scope and piercing psychological insight for which Russian authors are rightly held in awe.

Tol s toy, say s P r ofe ssor Zor i n , strongly believed in the powerful moral and political role of literature and the writer. “Both novels [ War and Peace and Anna Karenina] were meant as a direct contribution to the ideological battles of the age, and his contemporaries could easily recognise the message,” he adds.

Tolstoy was feted as a genius in his own lifetime, but he was ambivalent about literature. He disliked other writers, hated the writing life, and periodically abandoned it as not ‘useful’ RUSSIA 65

for dealing with Russia’s problems.

He then lost his faith in conventional Christianity and became a moral ‘prophet’ propounding his own version of Jesus’s teachings. When Tolstoy returned to writing, he was excommunicated by the church, and found his work banned. Unlike Pushkin’s experience of censorship, however, Tolstoy’s did not coincide with the production of great work. Tolstoy’s later books are didactic and little read; oppression and struggle do not necessarily lead to interesting prose.

Tolstoy’s great rival, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), led an extraordinarily dramatic life, even by Russian standards: his father was murdered while he was a student; he was arrested for revolutionary activities and sentenced to death, only to be dispatched to Siberia for 10 years; he had mystical religious experiences, suffered from epilepsy and was a compulsive gambler who lived on the verge of ruin.

Thus, like the life experience of Tolstoy, the soldier-prophet, Dostoevsky’s was rich and extreme. But in Dostoevsky’s case, conflict and struggle did 66 RUSSIA

produce great work. He went into exile as a minor writer and emerged a great one. Dostoevsky had gained an almost supernatural degree of insight into the depths of the human soul, and in his novella Notes from Underground he offered a portrait of human nature as dark, irrational, self-destructive and perverse – a view in striking contrast to that of his optimistic, rationalist peers, who dreamt of building a new world on the ruins of Tsarism. Dostoevsky wrote for money, and so filled his books with melodrama, violence and murder, but in his 1866 masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, he took that base matter and explored pro-

found spiritual questions regarding sin and redemption. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky threw himself into the ideological battles of the age. In The Devils, he launched an attack on Russia’s radicals that was so vicious it was banned in the USSR for much of the 20th century.

If Tolstoy was classical and rational à la Pushkin, then Dostoevsky had plunged headfirst into the grotesque and abominable, uncovering the fantastical, irrational nature of reality, resulting in a vision much darker even than Gogol’s. The lives and work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky also exemplify the violent extremes of experience with which Russian authors are per-

ism, even if it was the politically radical Russian avant-garde that made the biggest impact internationally.

The October Revolution of 1917 had a catastrophic effect on all forms of Russian art, and quickly turned violent, oppressive and totalitarian. The poet Nikolai Gumilev was executed in 1921 and, taking the hint, many authors fled abroad, among them Vladimir Nabokov and Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the science fiction dystopia We

haps uniquely familiar. Had life been more stable in Russia, then no doubt a nation so vast and populous would still have produced great authors, but they would have written about quieter things – like Jane Austen in England, or Gustave Flaubert in France. Russians have been ‘lucky’ to have fantastic source material to work from; their Western European peers really had nothing comparable. And so War and Peace is still cited as the greatest novel of all time, while Dostoevsky’s probing of the lower depths had a huge impact not only on the 20th century novel, but also on psychology and our very understanding of the self. And, most importantly, neither author ever forgot to include a good plot.

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky defined the expectations of millions as to what a Russian author should be: serious, philosophical and bearded. And yet at the start of the 20th century, many Russian writers were disengaged from the ideological battles of the day. Tolstoy himself complained that nothing happened in Anton Chekhov’s “boring” plays, while many poets embraced symbolism, decadence and spiritual68 WRITERS OF RUSSIA

(a major influence on both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World).

Inside Russia, the prominent poets Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide. A new kind of censorship was emerging, much worse than anything that had preceded it: the Tsars had told their poets what not to write, but the new Communist regime preferred to dictate explicitly what they had to write.

In 1932, all independent literary organisations were abolished and replaced with the Union of Soviet Writers. According to Joseph Stalin, authors were “engineers of human souls” and their books had to reflect and promote “socialist reality”, which was, needless to say, absolutely wonderful. Anyone who dissented from the doctrine of Socialist Realism either stopped publishing or went to the Gulag.

Natasha Perova, editor of Glas , a journal of contemporary Russian literature in English translation, points out that censorship and dissent split the writing profession under the Soviets and influenced authors’ writing one way or another. “You were either pro or anti-Soviet,” she says. “If you practised ‘art for art’s sake’ then you were anti-Soviet anyway.”

So too Socialist Realism led to a perception in the West that the only good writers in the country were dissidents, working underground, circulating

critiques of the system in samizdat (documents produced and distributed by hand), or smuggling them out of the country for publication abroad.

The most celebrated dissident author was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918– 2008), who spent eight years in prison camps and a further three years in ex-

ile for criticising Stalin in a letter sent from the front during World War II. Like Dostoevsky before him, Solzhenitsyn found that his experiences in prison opened his eyes to a world of extremes. Solzhenitsyn’s short novel about those experiences, One Day in

the Life of Ivan Denisovich , was a literary sensation at home and abroad.

The Soviet authorities, however, blocked publication of Solzhenitsyn’s subsequent works. When The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn’s threevolume exposé of Stalin’s crimes, appeared in the West in 1973, he was declared persona non grata in the country and exiled. Meanwhile, as

Solzhenitsyn sold millions of copies of his books, so Western publishers started to churn out other forbidden works by a seemingly endless series of oppressed literary geniuses.

Nowadays, most of those other dissidents are forgotten, suggesting that the interest in them was primarily political and not literary. Even Solzhenitsyn’s reputation has waxed and waned. In the West, he was accused of anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism, and the Red Wheel cycle of novels, which he considered his major work, languishes half published. In Russia, Solzhenitsyn remains controversial, even though The Gulag Archipelago is today a set text in schools. According to Lev Danilkin, one of Russia’s leading literary critics, Solzhenitsyn will never be forgiven for his The Gulag Archipelago. “Not because it is not true,” he says, “because maybe it is true, but it was written for foreign export, and this book helped destroy the Soviet Union – which many people believe did Russia more harm than good.”

Increasingly, meanwhile, it is Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) who is viewed inside Russia as the greatest prose writer of the 20th century. His haunt70 RUSSIA

ing novels The Foundation Pit , Soul and Chevengur feature tragic souls struggling to build the socialist paradise, suffering terribly for their ideals.

Uniquely, Platonov was neither dissident nor propagandist, but rather a believing Communist with the unfortunate habit of telling the truth – which was, of course, a dangerous thing to do under Stalin’s rule.

“It’s hard to know just what Platonov thought he was writing, but he was certainly writing with the aim of publication,” says Platonov’s translator, Robert Chandler.

“There were many occasions when he got contracts for work that, in the end, remained unpublished, but there are only two or three occasions when he clearly wrote something ‘for the drawer’, as Russians say. I think he was, above all, a philosophical writer. He returns again and again to the same huge and impossible questions, but he does this in a unique way.”

In t he m id 19 80s, Mik hail Gorbachev r ela xe d cen sorsh ip in the USSR. Previ-

ously banned books such as The Gulag Archipelago circulated in their millions, while works by other dissidents, foreign literature and trash genres flooded Russia. Stalin-era Absurdism emerged from desk drawers where it had been hidden for half a century. It was a confusing time.

Then, following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, censorship broke down completely, and, in spite of Western media reports to the contrary, it has never returned. Certainly the Kremlin keeps a close eye on the mass media, but Russia’s modern rulers don’t seem worried about books.

“The authorities have finally realised how harmless intellectuals really are, and have left them alone,” says Natasha Perova. “Now they can say whatever they like, let off steam, and the authorities could not care less about their dissent so long as it is published in small print-runs. Writers yearned for freedom, but when they were granted that freedom they found that nobody cared much about their brave ideas.”

Once again, Russian authors were at the centre of the historical hurricane, but the result this time was chaos.

During the 1990s Russian authors revelled in themes that had previously been forbidden: the grotesque, the absurd, the nihilistic. The long-suppressed Gogolian tradition returned in extreme form. And the most famous exponent of this trend was Vladimir Sorokin, whose scandalous, pornographic works, according to Perova, are “Bosch-like visions of the world, or rather X-ray pictures which show the ugly truth, but not the whole truth”.

Sorokin got so accustomed to shocking the bourgeoisie and being rewarded for it that he was extremely surprised when protestors threw copies of his novel Blue Lard inside a giant toilet

erected outside the Bolshoi Theatre in 2002. Ultimately, however, his sales benefited, he won more awards, and the publicity helped sell his books to foreign publishers.

Around the same time as Sorokin was being attacked, Edward Limonov, another scandalous writer and opposition figure, was imprisoned for two years. Limonov was not imprisoned for his books, but rather for his political activities: he was accused of trying to buy weapons to invade Kazakhstan.

Limonov claimed that the charges were false and intended to silence him.

Even so, the authorities permitted him to write while in prison, and his The Book of Water won the prestigious Andrei Bely prize in 2002.

Nowadays, in Russia, as in the West, dissent and scandal are good marketing, helpful for boosting sales.So, after two centuries of censorship and oppression, where does Russian literature stand now? Where is it going?

It’s difficult to say. The fashion for fantastical, grotesque narratives has passed, and while major authors of the 1990s, such as Viktor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, remain popular with audiences and critics. According to Perova, all styles exist in Russia today, with no one trend dominating.

Lev Danilkin, though, sees a return to an almost classical realism: “Literature as a whole has moved away from postmodernism, the concept of all-out game, experiments with language, the techniques of narrative, and returned to life as it is lived,” he says.

A new generation are coming of age, and for them the USSR is as remote as the Tsars. None of these authors has yet broken through internationally, although some of the finest, such as Olga Slavnikova and Roman Senchin, have had works translated into English. Russian critics are unanimous

in their view that the new era has not produced a genius to compare with the authors of the past. There is no bearded giant towering over the field, rather there are lots of writers who are very good, if none who are truly ‘great’.

But one thing is for sure, as Perova argues, there is no need to mourn the end of censorship and oppression: “Many people believe that art is stimulated by oppression. I don’t think so,” she says.

“A little hunger may stimulate an artist, but a prolonged hunger will simply kill him. Thousands of talented writers died in the Gulags and the best Russian thinkers were killed due to this, reducing Russia’s cultural level dramatically. Oppression has always existed everywhere and will always be part of our lives. In sensible quantities it may indeed be stimulating – some artists probably need to be disciplined occasionally – but if you live in a prison, you’ll simply dry up or go mad.”

Daniel Kalder is an author and Russian expert currently living in the United States

RUSSIA

71

YAKUZA

THE YAKUZA ARE FACING THE BIGGEST FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES AS TOUGH NEW LAWS CURTAIL THEIR POWER. JAKE ADELSTEIN WONDERS IF THE JAPANESE MAFIA WILL DIE OUT OR SIMPLY ADAPT TO THE 21ST CENTURY. ILLUSTRATION BY TANG YAU HOONG

redux

D

o you know who I am? Do you have any idea who you’re screwing with? I’m not just some comedian – I’ve got the yakuza Yamaguchi-gumi behind me, so you better just shut up and get out of the way.” Shimada Shinsuke, once Japan’s most popular TV host, allegedly uttered these words at a Tokyo bar in the spring of 2010. The effect was immediate: the party of noisy guests quickly left the bar and did not look back. Everyone in Japan knows what the Yamaguchi-gumi is: Japan’s most powerful organised crime group Yoshimoto Kogyo, one of Japan’s largest talent agencies, which managed Shimada, fired him for his cosy t ies w it h t he yakuza. Sh imada’s links with crime were chronicled in 106 emails between Shimada and a Yamaguchi-gumi member from 2005 to 2007. Although Yoshimoto Kogyo forced Shimada to resign from his six TV shows, the agency allowed him to have a press conference in which he ‘resigned’, so that he could leave the industry with some dignity.

Japan has an unusual approach to handling organised crime. The crime gangs – 22 recognised by the Japanese state – number roughly 80,000 members. The groups are subject to regulation but not banned. The groups claim to be humanitarian organisations not criminal syndicates, and there exist fan magazines, comic books, movies and animation in their honour.

The three major crime groups, the Yamaguchi-gumi in Kobe, and the Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai in Tokyo, all have listed offices, corporate logos, and business-card-carrying CEOs. Together they comprise 60,000 of the 80,000 yakuza in Japan. The Yamaguchi-gumi, with 40,000 members, almost has a monopoly.

The yakuza are a source of fasci74 YAKUZA

nation for Japan and the West. Each group is structured along familial lines with a father figure – the oyabun – and underneath him, his children: the older brothers (executives), younger brothers (foot-soldiers) and associates (shatei). The groups seal their ties with ritual exchanges of sake, usually performed under the auspices of a Shinto priest, with elaborate ceremonies and all the participants in traditional Japanese garb. The yakuza in the business world dress in black Armani suits, wear Patek Philippe watches and drive luxury cars.

While some yakuza groups did amazing relief work after last year’s earthquake, most of them are not a beneficial force in society, deriving their income from gambling, extortion, financial crimes, loan sharking, the sex industry and drug deals.

They also manage hundreds of front companies that hide their illegal activities in a veneer of legitimacy. The last comprehensive police study counted more than 900 yakuza front companies in Tokyo, primarily in real estate, construction and finance, but also in the restaurant and bar businesses. The yakuza are everywhere. They are not bent on world domination – they are focused on one thing: making as much money as possible.

Yet while the yakuza are involved in criminal activities, most traditional yakuza groups have in place an ethical code which ensures that organised crime in Japan stays very organised, and also helps keep street crime in check. The codes are usually posted on the wall of the organisation offices, in handwritten script. The rules are intended to prevent yakuza from getting involved in ordinary street crime such as purse snatching or mugging. These crimes are considered undignified and arouse public resentment. Some

THE YAKUZA HAVE CEOS, LISTED OFFICES AND CARRY BUSINESS CARDS groups do adhere to these rules, and violators are quickly expelled.

A typical code forbids the use or selling of drugs, robbery, indecent acts, or anything else that would be shameful under nikyodo, the chivalrous way.

The other rules are about relationships among yakuza. A fairly recent addition to the code mentions not having any unnecessary contact with the authorities. In the old days, it was not uncommon for detectives to drop by yakuza offices and have chats over tea.

Of course, extortion and blackmail are not expressly forbidden. One yakuza boss explains it as follows: “If you’re being blackmailed by the yakuza, obviously you’ve done something bad and deserve it. We’re enforcing social justice and fining people for their misbehaviour. What’s wrong with that?”

And the fact is that many people in Japan agree with the yakuza boss’s view. A study by the Nara Police last year showed that 1 in 10 Japanese approve of the yakuza or feel they are a necessary evil.

In such an environment, it’s only natural to wonder why a series of emails proving what everyone already

knew would make such a difference.

The emails that doomed Shimada Shinsuke were first seized as evidence in an extortion trial involving the same Yamaguchi-gumi member and Shimada’s friend, former boxing champion Jiro Watanabe in 2007. Why they were delivered to Yoshimoto Kogyo (Shimada’s employer) and then distributed to most of the Japanese media is a mystery, but most reliable sources maintain that the emails were delivered to the public as an act of revenge by a former crime boss with a grudge against Shimada and his yakuza backers.

It wasn’t that the information was new. Yakuza documentarian Atsushi Mizoguchi first wrote of Shamada’s ties to the Yamaguchi-gumi as early as 2006. Everyone knew that Shimada had yakuza ties. What changed everything? Why did the emergence of the emails last year force Yoshimoto Kogyo to fire him?

The answer is the new organised crime exclusionary clauses that went on the books nationwide in 2010. The new laws not only make it easy for the police to label those associating with the yakuza as ‘yakuza associates’ but they also criminalise capitulating to the yakuza, paying protection money, providing the yakuza with financial support, or using their services.

A security official explained the significance of the new law: “Previously there was no penalty for associating with organised crime members or using their services. In other words, the mobsters would be arrested for performing illegal activities, but not the people who employed them. There was no punishment for the end user.

This created a grey zone for the mob to operate in.”

The official used the 2008 Suruga Corporation case to explain. In March of 2008, the Tokyo Metro Police ar-

rested several Yamaguchi-gumi members working for a front company, on charges of violating the barrister’s act, which forbids non-lawyers from negotiating eviction terms with tenants.

Suruga Corporation – a firm listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and a major real estate developer – had hired the Yamaguchi-gumi members. Suruga had paid over $100 million over several years to the yakuza to have them remove tenants from properties that Suruga wished to buy.

Mariko Kageyama, a bar owner in central Tokyo, reflects on her troubles with Suruga’s paid flunkies. She had refused to give up the lease on her bar in a building Suruga wanted to raze and redevelop. After she made that clear to Suruga, the problems began.

“One or two yakuza would show up at the bar and order just one drink.

They’d stay for hours, glaring at customers, making everyone uncomfortable. Sometimes, they’d flash their tattoos by rolling up their sleeves. They didn’t do anything overtly criminal, so YAKUZA 75

there wasn’t anything the police could really do. Yakuza can be bar customers as well.” The harassment didn’t stop with just glowering looks and long stays. Signs were posted on the property saying that the building was condemned, and fake health inspection notices were posted in the hall outside the bar telling customers there had been an outbreak of food poisoning in the bar. It seemed hopeless.

However, when the police arrests made the paper, Suruga was quickly put into a tough spot – banks refused to loan the firm money, the firm’s cash flow stopped, and it was delisted. The yakuza thugs did not show up any more. Kageyama was able to negotiate a fair settlement with Suruga (after the firm was bankrupted) and finally moved on. However, while the yakuza that indirectly worked for Suruga were arrested, no one from the Suruga side was sent to jail or even arrested – because it wasn’t illegal to hire yakuza to perform services. To add insult to 76 YAKUZA

injury, on the board of directors for Suruga Corporation was a former National Police Agency Organized Crime Control Division official and a former prosecutor. The firm had the veneer of corporate compliance, but the reality was very different.

CITIBANK JAPAN WAS PUNISHED TWICE FOR

LAUNDERING MONEY IN THE 2000’S

Up to now, not only have Japanese firms been able to do business with the yakuza without facing criminal penalties, US-tied firms have been able to do the same. Citibank Japan was punished twice by Japan’s Financial Services Agency for laundering money for organised crime in 2004 and 2009, but the bank was never held criminally responsible. Now, if a bank does business with organised crime, it will get one warning; the second time, those involved will be arrested for violating the organised crime exclusionary ordinances, and the company’s name will be released by the police.

The seedy red-light d ist r ict of Kabukichō in Shinjuku, with its countless massage parlours, illegal underground casinos, strip shows, hostess bars, host clubs and loan sharks is, not surprisingly, a haven for all the yakuza groups in Japan. Everyone has an office there, and each group has a claim to part of the territory. That is how most people still view the yakuza – as shadowy merchants skimming profits from seedy businesses and gambling – but it’s an old-fashioned viewpoint.

Increasingly, the yakuza are locating their offices in places such as Roppongi Hills, an affluent part of Tokyo, where companies like Google have also set up business. The yakuza moved into the finance industry in such an alarming

fashion that, in 2008, the National Police Agency in a special white paper on so-called ‘yakuza money’ noted that: “The rapid invasion of the yakuza into the financial markets threatens the very basis of the Japanese economy.”

Imagine if you woke up one day, turned on the news, and were alerted that Facebook has been taken over by the Mafia, giving the mob access to all your private information – your date of birth, where you live, where you went to school, who were and still are your friends – and maybe even enough damaging information to blackmail you for the rest of your life. This happened in Japan in 2007, when a Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department investigation revealed that 45-year-old Yoshio Shimomura, a former gang leader in the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodokai faction, had taken control over the firm Yubitoma, which ran the website Konoyubi Tomare! (Join Us!). Yubitoma was a nationwide networking site for alumni of schools ranging from primary schools to universities, and for former and current teachers. The website has a reported 3.58 million members. Yubitoma closed operations after the scandal but has once again begun recruiting members.

The Yubitoma case for many was a landmark in the evolution of the yakuza groups, They have changed greatly over the past 55 years, after they came into a force of their own post World War II. In 1992, the first anti-organisedcrime laws forbade them from displaying their emblems and signs openly, forcing many to set up front companies to continue operations. This led to the birth of the economic yakuza: criminals who were investment savvy and who could manipulate the stock market, execute corporate takeovers, and extort millions out of listed companies. By 1999, with the birth of the 78 YAKUZA

tech boom and the popularity of the Internet in Japan, the yakuza moved into the industry faster than anyone imagined.

Liquid Audio, the very first listed company on the Japanese equivalent of NASDAQ, in 1999, was later revealed to have been run by yakuza members.

One of this new breed – Yusuke Takada (not his real name) – spoke to me about his profession. “The yakuza have always been in the information industry. Information technology just allows us to do what we more efficiently that we used to,” he said.

“Information is power and money, and it’s the biggest component of our business model: information, money, intimidation, extortion and, as a last resort, violence. You can’t blackmail someone or leverage him without information, and the more you know about the person the better. Japan is still a culture of shame, and the threat of scandal for a company or blackmailing the right executive or sucker makes a lot more money than selling drugs or skimming protection money from the adult entertainment industry.”

Takada expounds on this quite philosophically while smoking an American Spirit cigarette at the Peninsula Hotel in Tokyo. At 45, he runs the investment branch of one of Japan’s three largest crime groups. He graduated from the Japanese equivalent of an Ivy League school in the 1990s, and after working for a media conglomerate for a decade was persuaded to take a job with ‘The Company’. It offered better hours, more freedom to make decisions, access to beautiful models, and a lot of money. They even threw in a Mercedes (the car of choice of all discerning yakuza) to sweeten the deal.

“You and I are essentially in the same business. You gather information and you sell it as an article. The rareness of

the information or the better it is, the more value your articles have. It’s the same with us. The difference is you get paid for making scandals known, and we get paid for making sure that scandals remain hidden and that you don’t do your job – unless it’s convenient for us. That’s how it’s always worked.

If someone doesn’t pay up, we give the information to you, and the mark learns his or her lesson. Or we put out just enough to give them a warning, and hold the really damaging information and try to blackmail them again.”

Takada is a bright man. He has two faces and two names. One of them is his yakuza persona, the other is his business persona. Most of the people working for him have no idea that their boss is really a ‘boss’.

The capital for his venture businesses comes from organised crime coffers, but the businesses are legitimate. One of them, which makes accounting software for Japanese cell phones, is in the sights of Google Japan. “And why not?”

Takada says. “We do good business.

Japanese banks are too conservative to loan money to anyone new. We are gamblers, and venture capital is the ultimate gamble. In our case, it paid off.”

The yakuza have long gone global.

They are setting up front companies

YOU CAN’T

BLACKMAIL WITHOUT INFORMATION, THE MORE THE BETTER

in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and even the US. In January of 2011, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and the Fukui Police Department arrested a Yamaguchi-gumi associate for his part in a massive personal identity fraud. His group raked in 3 billion yen – roughly $400 million. Police investigations revealed that a large chunk of the profits were sunk into foreign exchange trading companies also run by the Yamaguchigumi, firms that were making good profits.

Nat io n a l P ol ic e A ge n c y sources estimate that yakuza groups run as much as onefifth of the foreign exchange trading in Japan. Japan’s Financial Services Agency still has a warning in English on its home page, aimed at foreign investors, urging them not to fall for a growing number of fraudulent investment schemes being run out of Japan. The firms have web pages and phone numbers, and piggy back off established Japanese corporate brands like Mitsubishi to create legitimate-sounding investment firms. In Northern Europe, individual victims have lost over a million dollars in these new scams.

People don’t expect Japan to be a haven for investment scammers.

These scams were part of the reason that President Obama declared war on the yakuza on July 24 in an executive order which stated that “[The yakuza] are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous to the United States; they are increasingly entrenched in the operations of foreign governments and the international financial system, thereby weakening democratic institutions, degrading the rule of law, and undermining economic markets.” The new 80 YAKUZA

orders allow for the federal government to freeze and seize suspected yakuza assets or holdings within the US if they simply suspect the funds are tainted. The burden of proof is on those with their assets frozen to prove that they do not have yakuza ties. The US has seized yakuza assets in the US before, but the burden of proof was on the law enforcement agencies. The new laws make the underlying principle ‘presumed guilty until proven innocent’.

This is also the basic idea behind Japan’s new organised crime exclusionary ordinances. In the case of the celebrity Shinsuke Shimada, once Shimada’s ‘guilt’ had been proved incontrovertibly via his own emails, Yoshimoto Kogyo had to deal out the only punishment that would keep the agency clear of being tainted in the process: banishing the former star from the company.

If the authorities are able to make those who do business with the yakuza calculate the costs versus benefits and refuse to engage in new transactions, they will be wildly successful in depriving the yakuza of revenue and dealing a body blow to the groups.

The curtain fall for Shimada signalled the beginning of the end for Japan’s yakuza, but they will not leave the stage as graciously as he did.

Since 1965, the Japanese police have made a series of high profile crackdowns on the yakuza with little or no effect. Since 1992, the numbers have remained more or less the same, still hovering around 80,000.

It remains to be seen whether the Yakuza’s days really are numbered. I for one wouldn’t bet on the show ending quickly.

Jake Adelstein is the author of Tokyo Vice, and has written for Time and The Atlantic

Rebels Without A Pause Inside the underground world of the world’s best guerrilla fighters by dan connell illustrations by almasty

A t one time Africa’s longest-running war, the conflict between the Eritrean rebels and Ethiopia lasted from 1961 to 1991. The rebels, known as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, or EPLF, were considered by american intelligence to be the most sophisticated guerrilla fighters in the world.

The 35,000 rebels faced off against 150,000 of Black Africa’s best standing army. Despite being supported by no one, the Eritreans fought for more than thirty years and gained independence in 1993. In Asmara today stands a concrete sculpture of a pair of sandals; the type worn by the EPLF, a tribute to a hard won victory.

T

wo silver MiG -21s knifed through the morning sky to awaken me at 7.30am on a hot July day in 1979.

The y c i r cle d h i g h over the hidden guerrilla camp as I crawled sleepily out of my tent to squat silently in the brush, covering my watch as I had been instructed so no light would reflect off it and give away our position.

Banking sharply, first one and then the other dropped toward us in steep dives from the east, the blinding sun glinting off their sleek delta wings.

Each dropped a single bomb that fell harmlessly onto the cradle of rocky hills that encircled us.

It was the start of a typical day for the Eritreans, who were by then in their 18th year of war for independence from Ethiopia, which had annexed the former Italian colony in the 1950s to access the Red Sea. Within minutes, the shrill whine of the departing jets faded to a murmur and a young guerrilla fighter in a tattered T-shirt, khaki shorts and black rubber sandals appeared with a steaming flask of hot tea and kitcha,

84 ERITREA

the doughy flatbread that was the staple food for the Eritrean nationalists.

From dawn to dusk Ethiopia’s Soviet-supplied fighter-bombers patrolled the skies. But apart from a network of entrenched positions along the outer edge of this rugged redoubt, the Eritreans offered few visible targets. By day they were hidden beneath the flat-topped thorn trees in the thick underbrush, alongside the now-dry riverbeds, or in underground caverns and camouflaged shelters of dried mud and stone.

But when darkness fell and the Ethiopian aircraft were grounded, the barren, volcanic hills came alive as the desert was transformed into a virtual city. Scores of cooking fires twinkled around us. Long, broken strings of light bounced off the rock walls as convoys of captured Ethiopian trucks snaked their way over crude guerrilla-constructed roads, the deep throb of their diesel engines echoing through the mountains. Close by my canvas ‘guest house’, a portable generator chugged.

It was as if day and night were reversed, as hundreds of field-trained mechanics and technicians picked up tools and cranked up machines to go

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to work in the warren of underground workshops, garages and cottage industries. There they manufactured everything from medicine tablets and primary school books to uniforms and gun stocks.

The carefully dispersed and camouflaged medical facilities of the central hospital stretched more than nine kilometres across two major ravines and their tributaries, making it the largest public hospital in the world.

One ‘ward’ was for patients with tuberculosis, the most common problem requiring hospitalisation for the chronically malnourished farmers in this windy, dust-filled environment.

One large canvas tent covered with a thick mantle of thorn branches was jammed up against the mountainside with its front flaps rolled up to reveal two tight rows of empty bed frames and army cots. The 40 or so TB patients were outside, lying on burlap sacks in the sun where they remained throughout the hot days and sultry nights unless it rained.

A short hike up the gorge was the 86 ERITREA

hospital’s laborator y, a 3x5-metre stone building hidden by the valley’s only tree, whose cover had been thickened by weaving in dead branches.

Inside were two field-trained medical technicians doing smear tests with a pair of microscopes seized in a rebel raid. In the corner stood an X-ray film processor and a kerosene-powered refrigerator also taken from a government facility. On the wall was a chart: The Developmental Cycle of Malaria.

Even then, before the advent of chloroquine-resistant mosquitoes, malaria was a leading killer, along with diarrhoea, largely because its victims were sapped by malnutrition before they were infected.

“Food is the best medicine we can offer most of these people,” said Dr. Nerayo, a short, balding man in his early 40s who headed the rebels’ newly formed health department. Hospital workers maintained a small vegetable garden and kept a herd of goats to feed their patients, but it was never enough.

Around a bend was a string of tents and shelters twined among the thorn trees, where 35 civilians with a variety of wounds, infections and relatively simple ailments were recovering.

Above this, and separated by a sharp twist in the valley, was the chronic ward for patients expected to remain for six weeks or more. Most people were outdoors, and the majority had been wounded by air raids in their home villages.

The worst cases – largely amputees – were in a separate tent at the head of the canyon, where an air attack was least likely. Inside, a literacy lesson was in progress, with five patients grouped around a young paramedic who taught from a Tigrinya text produced on mimeograph machines in one of the underground workshops.

Even here, it was rare to see anyone

The rebels fought an army

twenty

times bigger

idle for very long. There was simply too much to do for the struggle, as one after the other would point out to a curious visitor.

And it was just such determination and rugged ingenuity that allowed them to survive against enormous odds as they battled a predatory state – Ethiopia – that was more than 20 times their size and had an army that was equipped, advised and trained at one time or another by both the United States and the Soviet Union.

On this trip I was merely trying to find out whether they had a future, after a massive Soviet-backed Ethiopian invasion the previous year forced the rebels to withdraw from the cities and towns they had captured in the central highlands when the U.S.-backed government of Emperor Haile Selassie collapsed. With a new regime in Addis Ababa under a faceless military committee known as the Derg, and with the Soviet Union pumping more than $1 billion in new arms into the conflict while the United States stood on the sidelines, the world media had declared the Eritrean struggle all but over.

The only way to find out was to go behind the front lines to see for myself.

The only way to get there was on foot.

Simply to cover the distance from the Sahel base area to the densely populated central highlands and back took five weeks. I set out late one night with a guide, Goitom Asghedom, with whom I had worked frequently over the previous three years while reporting on the Eritrea war for the BBC, Reuters news service and other media. We were accompanied by a squad of guerrillas from the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and half a dozen camels.

We followed ancient foot pat hs etched into the stone by an endless procession of unshod hooves and bare feet. A small caravan of merchants edged past us on their way to neighbouring Sudan. Then came two families of refugees fleeing Asmara, the Eritrean capital, their tailored slacks and leather shoes a pointed contrast to the mismatched uniforms and patched sandals of the guerrillas.

Day after day we walked, stopping ever y four hours at small, hidden camps for food and rest. The yellow, scorching midday sun sent rivers of gummy sweat down my chest as we climbed the honeycomb of ridges and crossed freshly ploughed terraced farms where peasants sliced narrow furrows in the dry earth with their hand-hewn wooden implements.

This was both my most difficult and my most rewarding journey into Eritrea of the 20 or so such trips I made between 1976 and 1991, not only for the chance to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the two warring sides, but for the insights it provided into the people themselves and their drive to be free of foreign rule.

I travelled where no journalist had gone, interviewed people utterly without guile or pretension on their life experiences and their views of the conflict, and witnessed the relations be-

tween fighter and civilian up close and personal in ways I never had before.

There were amusing, if disconcerting, moments when young children shrieked at the sight of the pale-faced foreigner, wondering if I were an apparition. Or when angr y farmers approached with raised sticks and threatening countenances, relaxing only when reassured that I was not, after all, a captured Russian fighter pilot.

There were frightening times, too, such as when a flash flood nearly washed us away as we emerged from a deep crevasse through which we had been ascending the central Eritrean plateau. Or when we completed our journey at the point where we had begun, Nakfa, only to discover that the Ethiopians had that day launched their largest military offensive in months – aimed at retaking that very town.

But in circumstances like these, I took sustenance from the stoical strength and the indomitable spirit of those around me. I, after all, could leave. This was their life.

After 10 days we arrived at the outskirts of Asmara, where 10,000 Ethiopian troops were encamped in a state of semi-siege. The Eritrean fighters

they thought I was a captured russian fighter pilot

were dug in on three sides of the city.

A veil of grey-brown haze lay over it as we peered at it through a thicket of evergreen trees.

Kneeling behind a two-man stone fortification with the commander of a rebel unit, I surveyed the vacant landscape in front of us. A kilometre away, across a shallow valley of uncultivated farmland, sat the deserted village of Waukie, the site of a brutal massacre of civilians in 1975, one of several the Eritreans often cited as motivation for their fight.

“That is where their artillery is,” whispered the guerrilla fighter, pointing to a small hill. He said there were only 350 Ethiopian soldiers stationed there, with their ammunition and supplies loaded aboard a truck in case they needed to make a sudden retreat.

On either side of us, an unbroken chain of stone and dirt blockhouses – miniature versions of the underground workshops in the Sahel, each disguised with branches and shrubs to make them invisible from the air – stretched along the spine of the hills ringing Asmara. The chain was interrupted only by the highways linking the city with other government-held towns. With the exception of a handful of villages on the plains surrounding Asmara, the countryside appeared to be entirely under rebel control.

Many of the people I met in these communities were members of rebelsponsored associations of farmers, women and youths that carried out warrelated tasks, like preparing food in time of battle, building roads, repairing bomb damage. They also acted as the eyes and ears for the nationalist fighters, providing them with a steady stream of intelligence that gave the rebels a marked edge over their adversaries. And they were not shy about their allegiance, developed during the time the guerrillas ERITREA 87

administered these areas, before the Soviet intervention in 1978.

The women were among the most vocal. “There are none among us who have not buried one who was close to us,” said one young widow in Fische, a village of fewer than 2,000 people on the edge of a steep escarpment that dropped nearly 3,000 metres to the coast below.

“But now that we have tasted freedom,” she added, “we will never go back.”

As I stood to leave, Nur Humedai, a 75-year-old farmer, added: “We have been struggling for 18 years. We have been beaten, we have been imprisoned, killed, cut to pieces by the enemy, but this is our land.

“We don’t want anyone else’s land, just our own, and even if Russia and Cuba help Ethiopia, we will fight until there is only one man left.”

Several days later, as Goitom and I made our way back toward the base area through a narrow canyon that snaked down the mountainside, I got a

88 ERITREA

first-hand look at the price the Eritreans were paying for their patriotism.

We took a break to sit under the checkered shade of an acacia tree, where we watched a procession of nomadic, seasonal farmers trundle past in the opposite direction, their camels laden with the curved wooden poles of their portable homes. The men for the most part led the camels, with the women perched above them beneath brilliantly coloured straw canopies.

The children ran alongside, herding their sheep and goats.

These families were migrating inland from the parched Red Sea coastal plains, where they tended their herds in the winter months when it rained there, to farms they had on the plateau, where rain fell during the summer months, as they did at this time each year. The practice dates back to an era long before the territory was colonised. There was no mistaking the processions for anything but civilians.

the fighter jets’ bombs exploded in a deafening

noise

Suddenly, we heard two jet fighters overhead. Seconds later, the first explosion echoed off the rocky hills. For six or seven minutes we lay with our noses in the sand, listening to the now familiar high-pitched whine of the MiG 21s as they broke into screeching dives that climaxed with the sharp cracks of bursting rockets.

Abruptly they were gone, and all we could hear was the whisper of a hot,

dry wind. By the time we reached the attack site, the only sign of what had transpired was a crimson pool of blood in the sand. Nearby lay a grotesquely twisted steel bomb fragment bearing Cyrillic script. Two women and a small boy were wounded. Five camels were hurt, one dying.

“They were on us in a moment,” said Saleh Mohammed Ali, the 20-yearold bridegroom of one of the wounded women. “They passed us on both sides and turned around to bomb us before we could hide.”

Goitom tore cloth strips from the sheet he carried on his webbed belt and bandaged one woman’s leg to cover a hole the size of a golf ball. As he wrapped a gash in the other’s neck and swabbed the child’s bleeding head, he told them to go directly to the nearest EPLF field clinic, a three-hour walk.

Again we moved on. The final stop on our tour came at a camp for wardisplaced civilians on Eritrea’s western border with Sudan – Chalhanti. By this time, I was back in a car – a camouflaged, four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser – and we were moving about in daylight. But many of the ‘permanent’ buildings here were, like those in the base area, constructed below ground and disguised from aerial view by random swatches of grass and scattered stone to protect from potential attack.

The sun beat down with ferocious intensity at nine in the morning as we drove into the secluded camp, nestled in the Red Sea hills some 60 kilometres from the coast.

It housed 9,750 people, mostly women and small children who had been driven from their homes by the fighting but who resisted leaving their homeland altogether to seek safety in the sprawling United Nations-supplied refugee camps inside Sudan.

Chalhanti was run as though it were

an Eritrean island, much in the way the nationalists administered villages within Eritrea behind their front lines.

One section of the camp was dominated by a school for some 2,000 children, mostly orphans or the offspring of fulltime fighters. Another was set aside for disabled former rebel fighters. And a third area was for civilian refugees and their children.

The students lived a Spartan life together in the burning hills as they attended classes in reading, writing, maths, geography, science, health, politics and current events. Boys and girls could be seen toting water from a well dug deep into the centre of the otherwise dry river bed, scrubbing their clothes with sand and flat stones and cooking the traditional flatbread over scattered fires. Nearby were the more than 1,650 handicapped war veterans, many of whom had lost eyes, arms and legs, and who were there to learn a simple skill that would allow them to continue to participate in the independence struggle, Goitom said.

There were small metal, carpentry and electronics workshops camouflaged under the trees, but severe shortages of equipment and materials limited the possibilities for rehabilitation on a large scale.

A 29-year-old relief worker who walked us around the camp said there were three-month typing courses for those with leg injuries. But there were only a handful of aging mechanical typewriters.

“Our main problem is finding ways to keep the people busy,” he commented as we toured the civilian area. There were 400 men there kept occupied with house construction, he said, but there was little to do for the more than 2,000 refugee women.

Adults and children attended daily literacy classes, he explained. But the blistering heat – then nearly 50 degrees Celsius – discouraged outdoor activity in the daylight hours.

Most of the inhabitants spent this time in their canvas tents, occupied with household chores among their meagre belongings.

Access to medical care was severely limited. There were 70 outpatients a day in a single clinic, according to a paramedic there, and with shortages of medicines and medical equipment, the camp’s resources were badly strained.

Nevertheless, Chalhanti residents appeared to be in good spirits, regarding themselves not as refugees but as people only temporarily forced out of their homeland who will speedily return.

“We will not be here long,” insisted one wrinkled elderly woman who fled from the city of Decamare ten months earlier. “The enemy will be defeated soon, we know this.”

More than a decade later, in 1991, it was. And in May 1993, following a United Nations-monitored referendum on the territory’s political status in which 99.8 per cent of those voting opted for sovereignty, Eritrea declared its independence.

Dan Connell is an author and journalist who specialises in Eritrea ERITREA 89

five cities; five underground music scenes. by evan minsker

90 MUSIC

TANVEER BADAL

new york

Where: Check the listings, because it’s happening all over the city.

What: The new, weird rap game.

Who: Das Racist, A$AP Rocky, Main Attrakionz, Mr. Mutha..’ eXquire Why:

Yes, New York has always been a mecca for hip hop, going back to when DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa were locked in a three-DJ turf war in the late 1970s. Today, some of hip hop’s best and strangest MCs live in the city’s boroughs. There’s the A$AP Mob from Harlem, headed up by A$AP Rocky. His LiveLoveA$AP mixtape was one of 2011’s essential releases, due to its atmospheric beats and braggadocio. There’s Das Racist, the trio of Indian American crazies who are just as obsessed with partying as they are with making salient sociopolitical points. There’s Main Attrakionz, the primary duo behind the subgenre ‘cloud rap’.

And then there’s the stripper-obsessed and lyrically sharp Mr. Mutha..’ eXquire.

Face it – you want the cutting edge of rap? You’ll find it somewhere in New York.

MUSIC

91

MACSKSAPOCS NAKASHIMA

athens

Where: Katarameno Syndromo.

What: A few Greek garage, punk, and hardcore bands making an impact in the US. Who: Acid Baby Jesus, Bazooka, Gay Anniversary.

Why: Last year, international punk label Slovenly Records introduced the world to

Greece’s Acid Baby Jesus. The band’s self-titled LP is a largely unheralded masterwork in ragged garage rock. And shortly after that album was released, that band began introducing the world to Athens’ largely unknown garage and punk community, talking about hardcore band Gay Anniversary and sludgy punks Bazooka in interviews. (Bazooka’s just-released All the Girls in My School EP is as catchy as it is intense). And clearly, those three bands are only the tip of the ratty rock’n’roll iceberg. The best spot to explore punk bands in Athens is Katarameno Syndromo.

92 MUSIC

RACHEL D

manchester

Where: The Warehouse Project in Manchester.

What: The new wave of British producers.

Who: Evian Christ, James Blake, Jamie xx, Holy Other, Rustie, Star Slinger.

Why:

Although Four Tet and Burial are both still going strong, England has an entirely new swathe of dub and house producers, and right now, their impact is pretty huge in the underground. James Blake and Jamie xx of, uh, The xx, have quickly established themselves as rising stars. R&B interpreter Evian Christ, whose mixtape Kings and Them was released this year on Tri Angle Records, recently unveiled himself as 22-year-old Joshua Leary from the tiny working-class town Ellesmere Port. Glaswegian post-dubstep producer Rustie is gearing up for a hotly anticipated release later this year. It’s a tough scene to keep up with – it seems like a new guy pops up every month.

MUSIC 93

RACHEL BAILEY

SEOUL Where: AGIT in Busan, Club Freebird in Seoul.

What:

The AGIT art space in Busan is home to a scene of diverse artists who make atmospheric, dreamy music. Seoul also has a burgeoning set of rock bands.

Who: Wagwak, PIGIBIT5, Lhasa, Sleepstalker.

Why:

At this point, the go-to image for ‘Korean music’ is K-POP. AGIT is many things – a gallery, a studio, a former kindergarten – but it seems to encourage creative types to take residence and work on their latest stuff. It’s the home to Dreampoppers, Sleepstalker and the recently defunct Lhasa (whose members have now moved on to new projects). An the other end of the country in Seoul, bands like Wagwak and PIGIBIT5 are flying the indie rock flag.

94 MUSIC

NAPKINSHOE

melbourne

Where: The Palace Theatre, the Workers Club.

What: A tight-knit scene of Australian bands that pop up on each other’s records and

run the gamut from jangly pop to aggressive punk.

Who: Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Twerps, Beaches, Super Wild Horses, The UV Race.

Why:

Who knows what’s in the water over in Melbourne, but it’s producing some incredible rock bands. The Twerps’ self-titled album last year was post-Flying Nun jangle at its best. Eddy Current Suppression Ring have explored the full spectrum from ramshackle punk to extended jams. The UV Race do paced, sadistic 1960s psych. Super Wild Horses write kinetic, melodic rock songs. Beaches’ last EP on Mexican Summer will be released later this year. And that’s only scratching the surface of what’s going on Down Under.

MUSIC 95

96

Inside the Iranian film industry Photos by Stefano De Luigi

97

Production pauses on set during the filming of A Woman Is Always Involved

by Kamal Tabrizi.

// Tehran, Iran. 2007

98

The assistant director prepares for a scene on the set of a war film.

// Tehran, Iran. 2007

Production pauses on set during the filming of A Woman Is Always Involved

by Kamal Tabrizi

// Tehran, Iran. 2007 100

A production crew on set watch the recorded rehearsal of a scene during the making of a war film.

// Tehran, Iran. 2007

101

Lighting designers prepare for a war scene on a film set.

// Tehran, Iran. 2007 102

103

BRIEFING P. 107 • SKYWARDS ARTISTS

P. 108 • REAL RECYCLING

P. 114 • ROUTE MAP

ON B S I L OVE TO LATES HEADSG

EMIR STUNNIN PITAL THE ESE CA UGU PORT

P106

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EMIRATES EMI RATES NEWS NEWS

FLEET GU I DE

1 JERÓNIMOS MONASTERY

Built in 1502, this magnificent monastery is not only listed as a World Heritage Site, but is also the resting place of the legendary Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama. The cloisters are considered among the most beautiful in the world.

2 BELÉM TOWER

This Unesco protected tower was built in the early 1500s to defend the mouth of the Tagus River – the traditional gateway into Lisbon. Throughout time it has served many purposes including as a lighthouse and as a jail for political prisoners.

3 CASCAIS

This former fishing village is now one of the plushest parts of Lisbon, and is a popular vacation spot for the Portuguese.

Here restaurants, bars, casinos and nightclubs dot the coastline. A nice way to spend the day.

Inspired by the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon’s Cristo-Rei statue towers over Almada.

The statue was erected as a sign of gratitude that Portugal was spared damage during the Second World War.

5 BERNARDO MUSEUM

This free museum houses a remarkable collection of modern art, including works by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí among others. A cultural gem.

LISBON

TIMED TO PERFECTION

In air travel, timing is crucial. To ensure that you don’t miss your next flight, you should aim to be at your departure gate no later than 35 minutes before the flight departs.

For all Emirates flights boarding gates close 15 minutes before departure. If you report any later than this you risk not being accepted for travel so make sure you are aware of your travel and boarding times.

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ILLUSTRATION: EDWARD MCGOWAN

4 CRISTO-REI

FLEET GUI DE

EMIRATES NEWS EMIRATES NEWS

Skywards Future Artists SKYWARDS FUTURE ARTISTS is set to be bigger than ever in 2012. Whether artists are at college, self-taught or have been pursuing their passion for years, Emirates aims to give them the opportunity to gain worldwide exposure through Skywards membership cards.

Artists can submit their entries across three broad media categories: Painting/Illustration, Photography/Digital Media and 3D – Sculpture/Glass/ Ceramics.

The entries submitted will be judged by a panel of judges and the finalists will be voted upon by Skywards members. The winning artworks will be featured on the Skywards 2013 membership cards.

The artist’s name will be displayed alongside their work on the card and will be seen by Skywards’ members around the world.

The creators of the winning artworks will receive US$5,000 and have their work showcased through the Skywards membership cards. This year, there is also a prize of US$2,000 for the institutions, if the winning artist is an art student.

For more information: skywardsfutureartists.com

Find out how to enter at swfutureartists.com

Future Artists

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EMI RATES NEWS

EN VIRONMENT

€2 BILLION THE AMOUNT OF INVESTMENT THAT AIRBUS HAS PLEDGED TO SPEND ON ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE NEXT YEAR. SOURCE: ENVIRO.AERO

LIFE ON SATURN?

RECYCLING ON THE RISE AT EMIRATES NEW FIGURES RELEASED by the Emirates Group show that the company’s departments are not taking any half measures when it comes to in-house recycling, as they expect a 22 per cent rise on last year’s figures.

In 2011, the group’s recycling volume exceeded 3.5 million kg, while recycling in 2012 is projected to rise 22 per cent to reach 4.29 million kg.

Last year saw the implementation of initiatives such as staff accommodation and e-waste recycling, both of which contributed to its impressive numbers and its commitment to recycling.

“2011 saw Emirates launch a number of

new recycling programmes across the group and we are very pleased with the result,” said Andrew Parker, the Senior Vice President of Public, Industry, International and Environment Affairs.

“As a responsible airline, we will continue to find innovative new ways to reduce our environmental footprint.”

Last year saw more than 415,045kg of office waste recycled across the Emirates Group, including paper, plastic bottles and tin cans. Another 32,799kg of used clothing and shoes, and 1,206 items of staff IT and e-waste, including mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and desktop PCs were also recycled.

AN EXPLORATORY SPACECRAFT launched

by NASA has revealed that one of Saturn’s moons may be capable of hosting some form of life found on Earth.

Results from the Cassini spacecraft claim that more than 90 jets on the Enceladus moon are spurting water vapour, salt and icy particles – essentially making it snow.

A CLEARER PATH THROUGH THE STORM NAV CANADA ESTIMATES that they can save $91 million in fuel costs and drastically reduce greenhouse emissions, after adopting new technology allowing them to monitor more airspace over the Atlantic Ocean.

The new satellite-based system operated by the Canadian air navigation provider has allowed them to expand their coverage of the world’s busiest oceanic airspace to 1.3 million sq. km.

108

100KG THE AMOUNT OF CO2 SAVED PER MINUTE BY SHORTENING AIRCRAFT FLYING TIMES. SOURCE: ENVIRO.AERO

EMI RATES NEWS

COMFORT

BEFORE YOU R JOU R N EY CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR BEFORE TRAVELLING IF YOU HAVE ANY MEDICAL CONCERNS ABOUT MAKING A LONG JOURNEY, OR IF YOU SUFFER FROM A RESPIRATORY OR

IN THE AIR

CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITION. PLAN FOR THE DESTINATION – WILL

TO HELP YOU arrive at your destination feeling relaxed and refreshed, Emirates has developed this collection of helpful travel tips.

Regardless of whether you need to

rejuvenate for your holiday or be effective at achieving your goals on a business trip, these simple tips will help you to enjoy your journey and time on board with Emirates today.

SPECIAL MEDICATIONS? GET A GOOD NIGHT’S REST BEFORE THE FLIGHT. EAT LIGHTLY AND SENSIBLY.

AT TH E AI R PORT

SMART TRAVELLER DRINK PLENTY OF WATER

YOU NEED ANY VACCINATIONS OR

ALLOW YOURSELF PLENTY OF TIME FOR CHECK-IN.

TRAVEL LIGHTLY

AVOID CARRYING HEAVY BAGS THROUGH THE AIRPORT AND ONTO THE FLIGHT AS THIS CAN PLACE THE BODY UNDER CONSIDERABLE STRESS. ONCE THROUGH TO DEPARTURES TRY AND RELAX AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

REHYDRATE WITH WATER OR JUICES FREQUENTLY.

CARRY ONLY THE ESSENTIAL ITEMS THAT

DRINK TEA AND COFFEE IN MODERATION.

YOU WILL NEED DURING YOUR FLIGHT.

MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE

DU R ING THE FLIGHT CHEWING AND SWALLOWING WILL HELP EQUALISE YOUR EAR PRESSURE

KEEP MOVING

DURING ASCENT AND DESCENT. BABIES AND YOUNG PASSENGERS MAY SUFFER MORE ACUTELY WITH POPPING EARS, THEREFORE CONSIDER PROVIDING A DUMMY.

LOOSEN CLOTHING, REMOVE JACKET AND

EXERCISE YOUR LOWER LEGS AND CALF

GET AS COMFORTABLE AS

AVOID ANYTHING PRESSING AGAINST YOUR BODY.

MUSCLES. THIS ENCOURAGES BLOOD FLOW.

POSSIBLE WHEN RESTING AND TURN FREQUENTLY.

WEAR GLASSES

USE SKIN MOISTURISER

AVOID SLEEPING FOR LONG PERIODS IN THE SAME POSITION.

W H EN YOU ARR IV E TRY SOME LIGHT EXERCISE OR READ IF YOU CAN’T SLEEP AFTER ARRIVAL.

CABIN AIR IS DRIER THAN NORMAL THEREFORE

APPLY A GOOD QUALITY MOISTURISER TO

SWAP YOUR CONTACT LENSES FOR GLASSES.

ENSURE YOUR SKIN DOESN’T DRY OUT.

110

EMI RATES NEWS

CABIN L BE CREW WIL LP HE HAPPY TO D E IF YOU NE

CUSTOMS & VISAS

E C N A T S I S S A PLETING COM THE FORMS

TO US CUSTOMS & IMMIGRATION FORMS WHETHER YOU’RE TRAVELLING to, or through, the United States today, this simple guide to completing the US customs and immigration forms will help to ensure that your journey is

as hassle free as possible. The Cabin Crew will offer you two forms when you are nearing your destination. We provide guidelines below, so you can correctly complete the forms.

CUSTOMS DECLAR ATION FORM

IMMIGR ATION FORM

All passengers arriving into the US need to complete a CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM. If you are travelling as a family this should be completed by one member only. The form must be completed in English, in capital letters, and must be signed where indicated.

The IMMIGRATION FORM I-94 (Arrival / Departure Record) should be completed if you are a non-US citizen in possession of a valid US visa and your final destination is the US or if you are in transit to a country outside the US. A separate form must be completed for each person, including children travelling on their parents’ passport. The form includes a Departure Record which must be kept safe and given to your airline when you leave the US. If you hold a US or Canadian passport, US Alien Resident Visa (Green Card), US Immigrant Visa or a valid ESTA (right), you are not required to complete an immigration form.

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OPEN SKIES HALF PAGE AD ENGLISH.pdf 1 4/17/2012 8:45:55 AM

FLEET GUI DE

ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR

WILL EXPIRE ALONG WITH

TRAVEL AUTHORISATION (ESTA)

YOUR PASSPORT.

IF YOU ARE AN INTERNATIONAL

APPLY ONLINE AT WWW.CBP.GOV/ESTA

EMIRATES NEWS

TRAVELLER WISHING TO ENTER THE UNITED STATES UNDER THE

NATIONALITIES ELIGIBLE

VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME,

FOR THE VISA WAIVER *:

YOU MUST APPLY FOR

ANDORRA, AUSTRALIA,

ELECTRONIC AUTHORISATION

AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRUNEI,

(ESTA) UP TO 72 HOURS PRIOR

CZECH REPUBLIC, DENMARK,

TO YOUR DEPARTURE.

ESTONIA, FINLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, HUNGARY, ICELAND,

ESTA FACTS:

IRELAND, ITALY, JAPAN, LATVIA,

CHILDREN AND

LIECHTENSTEIN, LITHUANIA,

INFANTS REQUIRE AN

LUXEMBURG, MALTA, MONACO,

INDIVIDUAL ESTA.

THE NETHERLANDS, NEW

THE ONLINE ESTA SYSTEM

ZEALAND, NORWAY, PORTUGAL,

WILL INFORM YOU WHETHER

SAN MARINO, SINGAPORE,

YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN

SLOVAKIA, SLOVENIA, SOUTH

AUTHORISED, NOT AUTHORISED

KOREA, SPAIN, SWEDEN,

OR IF AUTHORISATION

SWITZERLAND AND THE

IS PENDING.

UNITED KINGDOM**.

A SUCCESSFUL ESTA

*

APPLICATION IS VALID

** ONLY BRITISH CITIZENS QUALIFY UNDER THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME.

FOR TWO YEARS, HOWEVER

AD

80 mm wide x 224 mm high

SUBJECT TO CHANGE

THIS MAY BE REVOKED OR

1000 THE NUMBER OF TELEPHONE LINES AT THE DNATA CALL CENTRE, OFFERING 24-HOUR SUPPORT FOR ALL ASPECTS OF TRAVEL:

7

THE NUMBER OF FULLY AIR-CONDITIONED HANGARS USED FOR ROUND THE CLOCK MAINTENANCE ON THE EMIRATES FLEET

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EMI RATES NEWS

114

ROUTE MA P

ROUTE MA P

EMIRATES NEWS

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EMI RATES NEWS

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ROUTE MA P

ROUTE MA P

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AD 117

EMIRATES EMI RATES NEWS NEWS

FLEET FLEETGUI GU DE I DE

ET INS E L F THE NTA

CO OF LEET ADE UP F R S OU ES. M PLANE LAN R E P S 5 G E 7 N 1 N ASSE GO PLA 167 P R A 8C AND

Boeing 777-300ER Number of Aircraft: 70 Capacity: 354-442 Range: 14,594km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-300 Number of Aircraft: 12 Capacity: 364 Range: 11,029km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777-200LR Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 266 Range: 17,446km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-200 Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 274-346 Range: 9,649km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777F Number of Aircraft: 4 Range: 9,260km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m 118

FOR MORE INFORMATION: WWW.EMIRATES.COM/OURFLEET

FLEET GUI DE

EMIRATES NEWS

Airbus A380-800 Number of Aircraft: 22 Capacity: 489-517 Range: 15,000km Length: 72.7m Wingspan: 79.8m

Airbus A340-500 Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 258 Range: 16,050km Length: 67.9m Wingspan: 63.4m

Airbus A340-300 Number of Aircraft: 8 Capacity: 267 Range: 13,350km Length: 63.6m Wingspan: 60.3m

Airbus A330-200 Number of Aircraft: 26 Capacity: 237-278 Range: 12,200km Length: 58.8m Wingspan: 60.3m

Boeing 747-400F/747-400ERF Number of Aircraft: 2/2 Range: 8,232km/9,204km Length: 70.6m Wingspan: 64.4m

AI RCRAFT N UMBERS AS OF 3 1/ 0 5 / 2 0 1 2

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N

NEXT MONTH

ext month we are not going anywhere. We have decided to stay at home and celebrate Dubai, the city of gold, glitz, and good times. We will be showcasing some of the lesser-known delights this city has to offer: the hidden gems, side-streets and shwarma stands that offer a respite from the five-star frivolities. We will be checking out some of the city’s hidden architecture, paying a visit to the city’s oldest toy shop and hanging out in some unusual places. We will also be talking to some of Dubai’s most interesting people. It all promises to be a lot of fun – see you in June.

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Amazing camera.

Authentic sound.

Shot on Nick’s HTC One X while free falling at 126 miles per hour

As recommended by Nick Jojola Freefall fashion photographer

Watch Nick’s personal experience at htc.com

| Capture HD video and photos at the same time | | Includes HTC Sense |