The news that the Basque separatist group, ETA, had called for a ceasefire last Sunday, 5 September caused little commotion in the Spanish capital, Madrid.  The Spanish government rejected ETA’s offer as “insufficient” saying the armed group had not unequivocally renounced the use of violence.

The story behind the news was that Sinn Fein, the political wing of the erstwhile Irish Republican Army, which waged its own decades-long armed struggle against Great Britain, had been “heavily involved” in ETA’s decision to put down its arms, “the culmination of years of debate, discussion and strategising among Basque activists”, according to Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader writing in the Guardian 6 September.

Why Spain won’t accept the ceasefire as is

Adams is optimistic and urges the Spanish government to seize the opportunity to enter into a political dialogue with ETA. The Spanish government is understandably reticent: experience, including the breaking of two previous ceasefires called by ETA in the past dozen years, argues against it; politics stays its hand too: the political right in Spain is not willing to cede an inch on the matter, and Spain’s ruling Socialists are in for a drubbing over the economy in next year’s elections.

ETA is on four different “designated terrorist” lists. Sinn Fein met with ETA “in the Basque country, sometimes in Belfast, and on a number of occasions in recent years Sinn Fein representatives travelled to Geneva for meetings with Basque representatives”. According to a strict interpretation of a recent US Supreme Court ruling, such activity may be illegal.

A sometime armed non-State actor. Photo by Alan Light

What is material support?

Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project, a case that was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court in June 2010, argued that portions of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 were too vague. The Humanitarian Law Project argued that sitting down and talking to armed groups who are on the State Department’s terrorist lists could not be viewed as criminal activity. The Supreme Court held in July that providing “material support” to an armed group, which may include legal or other advice, frees up resources that the group may use to further its violent cause.

Correct. But in Sinn Fein’s case it may have been providing advice about a peace process that worked out relatively well. In other words, the advice seems to have been clearly to convince ETA that a ceasefire may be an important first step in a political process that could actually save lives.

Don’t criminalize dialogue

Other actors are also involved in furthering peace processes. Many NGOs need to talk to armed rebel groups in order to negotiate terms for humanitarian assistance of some sort or another. The International Red Cross springs to mind, as do countless others who operate in conflict zones around the world. Denying these groups the possibility of at least talking to armed groups because they appear on the designated terrorist group list seems short-sighted and counter-productive. Past US actions now also seem hypocritical. For years, the IRA raised funds openly in the USA to the chagrin of the British government.

What happens next? It is unlikely that Gerry Adams is going to be held up by Homeland Security officials at JFK airport the next time he visits the USA. But what exactly is the US government’s position on close ally Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s subtle dealings with the Taliban in that benighted country? What would happen if the US military found it expedient to open a dialogue with the Taliban itself? It strikes me that the US Supreme Court has painted itself into a very sticky legal corner.

Other links: Guardian, Swisster,

Expatch, the Swiss (mis)adventures of a CH-ophile writer & photographer from Hawai’i

I’ve been doing a lot of driving recently, and am happy to say that I am no longer terrified of causing an international fender-bender incident because I didn’t know whether a certain sign meant I was going the wrong way on a dead-end street, which, if you think about it, is impossible anyway, even though I’m pretty sure I was doing exactly that the other day on a street with alarming red and blue signs apparently telling me not to proceed and not to go the opposite direction.

Negotiating Swiss streets requires speed-reading. There are signs over the road and beside the road, and even signs written right on the road. It’s kind of like playing 3-D chess. Fighter pilots are required to have superb “3-dimensional situational awareness.” Ditto for European drivers, for whom the next piece of life-saving information could be written virtually anywhere, including on that window-box of tulips outside the neighborhood bordello.

My favorite European traffic device is the ubiquitous rond-point. This is a circle of roadway that appears at many intersections. Instead of having to hit the brakes at a stop sign even if you can see that there’s not another vehicle within hundreds of meters, drivers decide for themselves whether or not they can safely glide into the circle and proceed to their chosen connecting street without infringing upon the grillwork of another driver. Even better, a rond-point is often covered with a mound of beautiful flowers or an interesting mosaic of bricks or stonework, allowing traffic to freely flow around it like chi around a lovely mandala.

Indeed, in the USA we sometimes call the rond-point a “traffic-calming circle,” or a “roundabout.” But mostly we don’t call it anything because it mostly doesn’t exist in our country.

In Hawai‘i, my previous home, there is little that is calming about such circles. When the county government announced plans to put in only the second roundabout in the state, certain concerned citizens all but mounted an insurrection, sending out a public letter calling on their neighbors to resist this crazy foreign idea, and instead “order up four stop signs … and tell the mayor and the Neighborhood Board to go away.”

But why do Americans have such antipathy towards this obviously efficient and graceful traffic device?

One day a few years ago, after considerable rond-point traffic observation from the vantage point of a Parisian sidewalk café table eventually festooned with carefully arranged empty wine glasses standing in for traffic cones, I figured out why Europeans love the roundabout and Americans loathe it. Europeans love it because they get to make their own Existential choice whether to brake or play poulet with that tilting Heineken truck heading around toward them. It’s that liberté thing. In the U.S. of A., we prefer a good sturdy stop sign because it’s completely clear what we’re supposed to do. Plus, it gives us excellent supporting evidence for our personal injury lawsuit.

In Peseux, the village just downhill from my house, there’s a place where two rond-points nearly touch each other. Together they form a sort of figure-eight. Or an infinity sign. I have to admit that this arrangement is rather too deep for me to comprehend yet. So tomorrow I plan to drive around both of them until things clarify — or until I’m chased down by a cop. But I’m sure that won’t be a problem. Certainly we’ll both be very calm.

Jared Bloch

Visions du Réel Film Festival

Peter Kerekes’ film, “Cooking History,” opens with an elderly German baker and World War II veteran proclaiming, “German bread is the best in the world.”

The film then cuts to the baker and three other war veterans trekking through the forest and singing battle hymns.

The “history” as it turns out, is a series of staged monologues by and interviews with army veterans of various nationalities, relating their experiences through the lens of food and eating. The characters Kerekes has selected range from the German baker in the first scene, to a cook from the Soviet Army who offers her opinion that “bread is bread, regardless of nationality,” to an active duty Croatian officer who proclaims he would only cook with a Serbian “over my dead body.”

Writer and Director Peter Kerekes

In between, we are introduced to a French gourmand who spent part of the Algerian war in prison as a conscientious objector, a veteran paratrooper from the same conflict, a Hungarian sausage maker, two women who cooked for Serbian armed forces, and a Russian mushroom picker sent to quell the 1968 uprising in the Czech Republic.

The film uses bracingly graphic imagery such as the butchering of live animals and closeups of meat grinding, to illustrate the morbidity of the subject matter, while portraying the mundane reality of soldiers carrying out often nonsensical orders.

The formulations might seem forced in the hands of another storyteller, but writer and director Kerekes leavens the enterprise throughout using theatrical staging of individuals and dramatic musical accompaniment.

Festival Audience

Kerekes’ ability to draw out the humor inherent in these otherwise dark accounts shines throughout the film, as when we listen to a personal aide and taster for General Tito describing a cook off between the Tito and Tudjman regimes. The two camps were involved in a series of dialogues on national sovreignity, each ending in banquets with increasingly nationalistic themed menus foisted on their counterparts; the cook off ended in the separation of the respective republics.

Each of the vignettes is punctuated by screen text providing recipes ranging from ingredients for sustaining an army platoon, to one for poisoning 300 SS Officers.

Fittingly, the epilogue to this finely balanced movie transcends the narrative of conflict between warring parties, and points to the more general relationship between food and survival itself. In the final and maybe most tender vignette, a cooking instructor for the German Navy describes his near miraculous survival of the sinking of a Submarine in the North Sea. As the instructor recounts this experience for the camera, he prepares pork chops on a makeshift grill set in a rapidly filling tidal bay.  Waist deep in surf, and watching his pork chops float away, he proclaims, “There is no recipe against fear, everyone has to deal with it in their own way.”

Further information on the film: Visions du Réel Film Festival

photo courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

The very essence of waiting and wanting seep through the screen in Bettina Haasen’s, “Hotel Sahara.” Heart-stopping cinematography coupled with a haunting soundtrack made this a film to remember. Haasen gives a voice to the dreams and desires of Africans in the westernmost point in Mauritania where they wait to attempt an illegal crossing to Spain by sea.

The film exposes the desires of people who, by merely following their dreams, feel they can never go home. As they speak of their reasons for wanting to find a way into Europe we see sadness in their eyes for having left behind everyone that they know and love. They exist in a sort of purgatory where the laws of the land won’t allow them to go forward and their sense of pride and responsibility for their family won’t allow them to go back.

They are the forgotten people on the outside quietly looking in. They are waiting for their chance to live the life that everyone seems to be allowed, except them. The film seems to subtly pose the question: “What makes their dreams and ambitions worth less than everyone else’s?”

see Visions du réel

Jared Bloch

The sound of dogs barking throughout sets the tone for this bleak film by Mathias Montavon and Marianne Thivillier.  A bombed out or otherwise disintegrated Georgian infrastructure in a nameless city, serves as backdrop for the poetic text provided by Thivillier via a narrative voice.

Amazingly, according to Thivillier, the text was largely the product of spontaneous musings on the themes of war and destruction and was not written specifically as a counterpart to the imagery in the film, which is at least as bleak as the text. The dog howls add perfectly to the narrative depicting human regression to a feral state.

The video footage for the film is based almost entirely on images of live mannequins, petrified humans arranged or captured amidst the rubble of destroyed factories and urban landscape. The images depicting the breakdown of civilization are all the more unnerving juxtaposed with the beautiful human forms, frozen as if in death. The one exception is a shot of three wildamen at rest outside, one delousing another, when suddenly they are frightened and run off.

This paradox sat heavy on my mind long after viewing. As a viewer, I expected to see the dead and deathlike images in these apocalyptic surroundings, not animals living amidst the debris, much-less human animals.  “Most of the inhabitants have left, but a handful of us will stay. . .wild like the dogs who will take over the town,” intones the narrator.

To the audience,  the fact of living, not of dying in these conditions, may be the more disturbing.

For more information see the Visions du Réel Film Festival website.

photo, courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

“Spaghetti alle Vongole” was an excellent first attempt for director Lila Ribi.  The camera captures her father’s severe depression and his difficulty in communicating with his daughter. Ribi manages to convey her feelings of disappointment and sadness at the lack of a father during her childhood as well as her desperation to establish a relationship with him now.

The sadness and the frustration are palpable in the intimate scenes in her father’s kitchen where it’s just a girl asking her father to let her in to his life. It was a very brave move for Ribi to take on a project that hit so close to home. If her father had been willing she could have taken the story even further.

The only downside of the film is the composition of the scenes. The camera is often oddly placed, framing the scene almost uncomfortably. The shots are unstable which adds an air of home video, but at the same time it creates a feeling of sea sickness that detracts from the strength of the dialogue.

If this film is a taste of what’s to come I am looking forward to seeing Lila Ribi’s next project.

see Visions du réel

photo, courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

Yu Guangyi’s documentary “Survival Song” is a shockingly candid view into the lives of a Chinese working class family who has been forced to live in poverty and misery in the name of a new and modern China.

The main character, Liao Han, is a 47-year-old man with a college education who lost his job as a forest warden, his home, and his land when the government decided to create a reservoir in place of the forest. He received no compensation for these losses and moved into an abandoned shed in the mountainous region of Changbai. This highly skilled forestry expert spends his days herding goats and poaching boars in order to survive and to provide for his family.

The film is a very honest portrayal of the family’s struggle to make the best of a hopeless situation. The characters are not made out to be heroic and the situation is far from poetic. There is little optimism for a brighter future and a great deal of resentment towards the government oozes between the lines. The viewer really feels the quiet drudgery of the day-to-day lives of these people who live on the fringes of society.

There is comic relief in this rather dark and desperate film in the form of Liao’s brother Xiao. Xiao loves to sing and dance in the filth of his shed behind his brother’s home and to spy on his brother’s wife while she uses the outhouse. He’s not a happy character, but he is full of odd behavior and random outbursts of joy.

Overall I found “Survival Song” to be a successful look into the intimacy of a family forgotten by its country and grasping to remain human in an inhumane world.

Visions du réel, Nyon documentary film festival, web site

photo provided by Visions du Reel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

“Cash and Marry” is the humorous portrayal of a man’s search for an EU (European Union) bride at all costs. Director and main character Georgiev Atanas calls upon his Bosnian friend Marko who is currently living in Vienna, Austria to help him find a bride who will give him papers to live and work in the EU.

The overall style of the film is witty and charming which keeps the tone light and easy even while discussing the serious subject of a paper or “white marriage.” This is largely thanks to the charisma of Marko and his straightforward approach to finding a suitable and willing woman to marry his friend. The camera crew follows the two men around town as they hand out fliers to potential brides until they find one who is willing to cooperate with them. There is also the underlying thread of love and the discussion of the different reasons why anybody gets married, let alone illegal immigrants.

This is a social study of the differences between the east and the west of Europe and the lengths people will go to in order to change the course of their lives, definitely worth the audience’s time.

Visions du réel, Nyon documentary film festival, web site

Flickr.com, CCL, Mr. Kris

This post appeared on brandingthroughpeople. Author Ago Cluytens has previously shared posts from his marketing blog with GenevaLunch.com

“Oh Father, I have sinned. It has been several weeks since my latest post.”

Lately, I have been experiencing a severe case of writers’ block, which has caused me to interrupt my usually steady flow of blog posts. For those of you that are regular followers of this blog, I sincerely apologize. I guess I could tell you that a lot has been happening in my life lately, but that does not justify not posting for such a length of time.

Still, sometime good came out of it: this morning, I started reflecting on the importance of being trustworthy and dependable in business (and personal) relationships. Recently, I have experienced several moments where people have been extremely reliable, but unfortunately also a few where they turned out to be completely the opposite.

As I was sharing some of my experiences, a friend of mine told me she deliberately picks the people she spends time with, and refuses to be associated with people that she feels are not worthy of her time and efforts.

However you define “being worth it”, I cannot help but feel there is something to be said for that statement. I have often found that I invest time and effort into someone, only to get nothing in return. Where I strongly believe in the concept of “giving before receiving”, and most of the time even in just plainly giving without expecting anything back, I have come to realize that perhaps I spend too much time investing in relationships that do not add anything to my life – often at the expense of others where I could spend more time.

Maybe it is useful for everyone to spend some time thinking about those relationships that we routinely spend time and effort on, and asking ourselves the following questions:

• What am I contributing to this person’s life ? Can I contribute more, or in a more meaningful way ?
• What am I receiving in return ? Do I get satisfaction from this relationship, or is it causing me to feel negative or frustrated ?
• What relationships do I have where I feel I could add more to the other party ? What can I do for them so they get more out of it ?
• What relationships do I have where I can make a big difference for the other party, with minimal investment from my own side ?
• Where can I make an even bigger impact on someone’s life ? What people seem most in need of my assistance right now ?

I have often found answering these questions is extremely valuable in both business and personal relationships. Being generous and giving your time, brain power or money to others can be a great and intensely rewarding experience – providing you get something back. “Something” can often be defined as much more than tangible things; often times, it is the reward of making a meaningful contribution to someone’s life, seeing someone happy or just helping them transition into another phase of life.

In business relationships, those that I have built the strongest and most enduring bonds with, those that I have assigned deals to and also those that have sent deals my way are often the kinds of people that give before they ask, and consistently add value to the relationship over a longer amount of time.

I hope this blog adds value to your life, by helping you reflect on things or bringing you a new point of view to consider. Whatever the case, just let me know if I can help you in any way, any time, anywhere.

by Ago Cluytens, on brandingthroughpeople.com

Ago Cluytens is the global head of marketing for a major international financial institution. His current responsibilities span across marketing, internal and external communications, branding and PR.

On brandingthroughpeople.com, Ago shares insights into how companies can create brand engagement through motivated and engaged employees – where marketing meets human resources.

flickr.com CCL dev null

I had an interesting conversation last week, during which I was forced to spend about ten minutes explaining why I did not agree with the statement that the finance industry was full of corrupt and money-grabbing nihilists that felt no sense of remorse about “what they did”.

It got me to thinking: why is it that the actions of an isolated few taint the perception of so many ? Even in Geneva, formerly known as the “Mecca of Private Banking”, the phrase “I work in finance” seems to have lost much of its previous lustre.

In their defence, most people I know that work in the finance industry are honest, hard-working individuals with a very healthy sense of personal responsibility and accountability.

A more than significant proportion of them have families, mortgages, drive modest cars, do yoga and try to make ends meet at the end of every month – just like the rest of the world. In current times, some of them may even fear for their own livelihood.

They try to act decisively in order to navigate through the crisis, but with respect for the assets that so many others have entrusted them with.  They are accountants, auditors and desk clerks. They are not the evil army of the Antichrist, attempting to bring down the world economy.

I remember when I was back in college taking classes about media bias, i.e. how popular media distort their audience’s worldview by self-selecting stories that respond to a specific set of criteria, like reinforcing already existing views, featuring high-profile personalities, exhibiting elements of drama. Ever since, I have learnt to distrust the picture they paint of the world – “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”, as Neo so elegantly put it in The Matrix.

Still, as branding through people goes, the lesson is this: the actions of the few can – and in some cases, will – have a disproportionate effect on the image of the many. For all of us working in finance, it is now our shared responsibility to show the world that:

1. Those that carry responsibility acknowledge their role in past events and say mea culpa
2. We are all working hard very hard to ensure the current crisis is over as soon as possible, and are responsible in the actions we take, always taking into account their effects on the many that have entrusted us with their money
3. We are open to measures that will prevent this from happening in the future, and will work with governments and lawmakers to ensure appropriate measures are taken and implemented

The good news is this: if it happened one way, perhaps it can also happen in the other. Recently, I have seen a very senior UBS-board member make a very apologetic stand in front of a room full of people. The result ? Applause, a lot of well-deserved respect and a sensible change in the mood in the room.

Until that happens, those of us that work in finance can take solace in the following statistic. Google “banker jokes”, and you get 522.000 results. Doing the same with “lawyer jokes” yields around 896.000 hits, or still a whopping 72% more ! Just to show you can prove anything with statistics …

Banker Vs. Lawyer Jokes