From her new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Fiona Apple - 'I Want You To Love Me' (Audio)
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Artist
Album
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18/04/2020
'I Want You To Love Me'
17/04/2020
The Quarantini Podcast
Dear friends,
here is the latest from Bristol!
Bristol, 17 April 2020
The Quarantini Podcast
Dear friends and journalist colleagues,
We hope this press release will find you safe and well.
Our news today is that we’re launching a podcast! From Bristol! Well, at least from our homes in Bristol.
The Quarantini podcast is a cocktail of creative responses to Coronavirus, a generous mix of ingenuity and creativity together with a dash of the unexpected.
Hosts: Melissa Chemam & Pommy Harmar
Producer: Pommy Harmar
Producer: Pommy Harmar
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The Quarantini Podcast
A new cocktail for viral times
New weekly podcast out Monday 20th April 2020
Trailer features:
Tintin Quarantino
Coronavirus Song, by Bobi Wine ft Nubian Lee.
Hosts: Melissa Chemam & Pommy Harmar
Producer: Pommy Harmar
Opening music: Hot Flu, The Old Bones Collective
Links:
Contact us at: thequarantinipodcast@gmail.com
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The Quarantini Podcast
Team
Pommy Harmar
Pommy is a freelance broadcast journalist, radio and podcast host and producer. She lives in UK.
Melissa Chemam
Journalist, reporter and writer for online/magazines/radio (BBC, CBC, DW), writer in residence at the Arnolfini gallery, Melissa also worked on films as a researcher and is a journalism lecturer. She has been based in Prague, Miami, London, Paris, Nairobi and Bristol, UK, travelled from Italy to Haiti, via Tunisia, Liberia, South Africa, India, Mexico, Niger, Turkey, Iraq... She has been working in radio since 2008 and in podcasting since 2018.
16/04/2020
13/04/2020
Plea for Refugee Children
I published this article on Medium:
The cruelty of the UK Home Office is beyond limit.
By Melissa Chemam
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When the so-called “refugee crisis” started in Europe in 2015, I was in Paris, about to start a series of radio reportage in England. During mysix years as a reporter on African affairs, I visited a few refugee camps, notably Dadaab in Kenya at the border with Somalia, and covered the plight of, for instance, South Sudanese refugees in Nairobi. Almost half a million refugees live in Kenya; they have since the civil war started in Somalia in 1991, as well as other conflicts in the DR Congo, Burundi and Sudan.
So I was the first surprised to hear our French and British governments reject demands for asylum from a few thousands people, fleeing some of the worst conflicts in the world, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan…
A year later I was working for a charity and was monitoring the communication about refugee camps in Greece and Sicily, watching the rest of Europe letting them down. I edited texts and reports along photographs of camps like Moria, in Greece, and later travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan to interview medical staff helping internally displaced people who had fled the violence of ISIS.
The most shocking to me, who lived years between the UK and France, especially in London and Paris, was to see the UK refuse to accept any refugees, while the country could have been the most protective place for them to settle in. Some asylum seekers I met already had family in England, others spoke perfect English, they had contact there, could hope to find jobs, etc.
(More in this piece: https://www.publicpressure.org/refugees-in-the-uk-safe-haven-or-hostile-environment/ )
Soon after, I reported in Calais, at the Italian border and in some parts of Paris, where informal refugee camps had spread (see that one: https://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/europe/article/show/refugees-welcome-1887/ ), full of people hoping to make it to England…
I now live in England again and I’m here to witness that once more, and despite governing through the worse health crisis in the world since the Second World War, the UK Home Office has rejected the bid to help secure a temporary home for refugee children at risk in overwhelmed camps in Greece.
The charity Médecins Sans Frontières reported having written to the British Home Secretary Priti Patel on 13 March, asking her to “significantly increase” the number of child refugees transferred to the UK and specifically to “facilitate the urgent evacuation” of those with chronic and complex health conditions.
But the Home Secretary has refused these pleas to accept more unaccompanied children from the notoriously overcrowded refugee camps on the Greek islands, despite dire warnings of a coming humanitarian disaster.
Priti Patel did not respond herself and instead the Foreign Office replied on 31 March, to say that the UK “would continue to support the implementation of the EU-Turkey deal.” For the past four years, this deal has ensured that most refugees from the Middle East trying to reach Europe would remain on the Turkish soil, preventing asylum seekers from travelling further to our shores.
The executive director of MSF UK, Vickie Hawkins, described the response as “shameful”: “This cynical deal traps thousands of people — many of them children or deeply vulnerable — in squalid conditions on the Greek islands,” she said. “The UK government must stop sacrificing basic refugee rights for the sake of its migration agenda.”
According to the NGO, a number of EU countries including Germany, France, Luxembourg, Finland, Belgium and Bulgaria had volunteered to help transfer 2,000 children from the islands. But the UK government have refused to offer assistance. Aurélie Ponthieu, MSF’s team coordinator on forced migration, said: “The UK has so far not volunteered to help the children. These measures are symbolic; if these camps get the virus it’s going to be a disaster. Access to healthcare is very limited.”
Last week, the legal charity Safe Passage also sent the Home Office a list of unaccompanied children and vulnerable adult refugees who have been legally accepted for transfer to join family in the UK, but who are now trapped on the Greek islands because of the coronavirus travel chaos. Beth Gardiner-Smith, chief executive of Safe Passage International, said: “The government cannot now sit on its hands. We have a small window of opportunity to evacuate all those unaccompanied children and vulnerable adults who have families here in the UK waiting to receive them now at grave risk in overcrowded and unsanitary camps and settlements. We know children will be leaving on charter flights to the EU next week, why not to the UK too?” she asked.
The moral or economic justifications for these refusals are nowhere to be found. The Leave campaign notoriously used lies about the numbers of foreigners and refugees in Britain and potential invasion from Turkey to influence the Brexit referendum. And now the same politicians, in power, are transforming these lies into a basis for a foreign policy that is inhumane and unjustifiable.
In this time of unprecedented health threat, the decision to take on refugee children for a temporary relocation should not be left to this cruel government. Some MPs are already calling for a reopening of the British Parliament. Hopefully, a vote on the issue could soon be put into place and open a door to solidarity with these little children in need.
Freelance journalist/writer, I’ve reported in 30 countries for the BBC, CBC, DW, magazines, on African-European relations, social change, arts, music & politics
12/04/2020
The US is on the verge of a breakdown; Europe can and must avoid it at all costs
I published this column on Medu
The US is on the verge of a breakdown; we must avoid it in Europe at all costs
by Melissa Chemam
On Friday, I woke up early, read the news and come across this surprising headline:
“California governor Gavin Newsom Declares It a ‘Nation-State’ — basically Declares Independence From Trump’s Coronavirus Plans”
States seceding from the great American nation. That’s what I had imagined in a novel I was writing in 2010, while based in Nairobi.
(read here https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-09/california-declares-independence-from-trump-s-coronavirus-plans).
I was then posted in East Africa as a freelance reporter for the BBC World Service, but the poverty I had previously seen in the US shocked me in a very different way. It was — or at least it was supposed to be — the richest nation the world had ever seen emerge…
I had moved to the United States early in 2008 to cover part of the presidential election, and I had chosen to settle in Miami, thanks to one of my primary collaborators, the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (since 2006, I had worked for him as a researcher on his Karl Marx and James Baldwin film projects).
Florida is a state that often had troubles with presidential polls and it’s closer to the Caribbean, so it made it possible to cover Cuba and Haiti as well. From there, I worked mainly on migration issues, with migrant communities from Latin America and Haiti. As I was not driving, I was forced to take public transports regularly, with what I soon discovered was the poorest members of society, from any of the local communities. I came back from the US in December 2008, not thrilled by Barack Obama’s victory, but shocked by the depth of inequalities and the state of abandonment some people were living in. They couldn’t afford healthcare, and sometimes not even a proper home.
It was also the year of the “hunger strikes” all over the world, and the financial crisis, the “subprime” crisis had begun. But at that time Miami saw multi-storey buildings mushroom all over town… A classic result of money influx from Latin America, and a stark irony in this time of crisis. While so many citizens were losing their homes.
This was what decades of lack of public services did to a community. And this is why the USA is suffering more than other countries in the current crisis.
12 years later we see the US hit even harder, while governed by a leader in denial.
We cannot afford to let Europe and the UK follow that example.
Here in the UK, divisions are rife. And the past 10 years have led the country in the same direction: with reduced healthcare, less access to free education, privatisation of public transports, etc.
The British government, like the American government, is not active enough, nor are city councils. They have no plan to support health workers or homeless people, no extra budget for hospitals. For ten years, the authorities have privatised healthcare and now the NHS is paying the price big time.
Instead of coming up with emergency budgets, British MPs have been given an extra £10,000 to work from home… Money that comes on top of the existing £26,000 MPs can claim each year to cover the costs of their offices. Some city councils have also increased their mayor’s, deputy mayors’ and councillors’ pay in March. Meanwhile, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Sunday 7 April that “the time was not right to discuss salary and conditions of living of the health workers.”
But what we urgently need to rethink are public services. Here in the UK, and inside a European solidarity project.
This week, the British government even encouraged its citizens to denounce their neighbours if they’re seen going out for no reason. Here in Bristol people have received notes saying they’ve been seen driving without their NHS or driver’s uniforms… See this tweet: https://twitter.com/wood5y/status/1248488262852685829
How insane, antisocial and incredibly risky is it to ask people to randomly denounce others? This government is irresponsible; it doesn’t want to be in charge of police and other services that require civil servants. It lets the private sector and charities run the show. But if this crisis lasts for a few more months, this will only fuel futher the mismanagement of hospitals, the food supply chain and other vitally needed sectors.
In Brussels however, on 8 April, the European Commission and the High Representative set out plans for a “robust and targeted EU response” to support partner countries’ efforts in tackling the coronavirus pandemic. And the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, apologised to Italy, for not stepping in soon enough. The overall package is of €15.6 billion, and €3.25 billion will be channelled to help affected African countries, including €1.19 billion for neighbouring Northern Africa.
For now, the Covid-19 has killed about 100,000 people worldwide. Almost 8,000 in the UK; and in the whole of Europe around 50,000.
In Europe, this is still fewer deaths than, for instance, the 2003 heat wave that led to the hottest summer on record since at least 1540, with a death toll of more than 70,000 people. But Covid-19 has already halted the world’s economy, put millions on unemployment and hijacked the news 24/7.
And a study showed that the UK is about to the become the most affected country in Europe (link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/uk-will-be-europes-worst-hit-by-coronavirus-study-predicts ). The public response is just inadequate. We cannot let people in a Western country rely on themselves in such a level of panic and turmoil. Unlike African and Asian countries, in the past 70 years, they have not been used to deal with crises; they have been used to stability and safety.
This is what my 2010/11 unpublished novel predicted for the US: poverty matching racism and “colour lines”, a complete meltdown, states breaking away from central power and, in the end, a new civil war.
With Brexit, the UK is more divided than ever. The Prime Minister is still in “power” from his hospital bed. And the responses are not strong enough, not inclusive enough, not protective enough for the most vulnerable people.
We cannot keep on begging billionaires for donations. We must rethink altogether an economy that allows some to become super-rich and others — workers we know see as “key” — to be given a few dollars a day or a week!
Solidarity in between classes, and above all a public government-led response is the only way out of this crisis. This is why the governor of California is breaking away from Trump’s leadership. In what is treated as the worst social crisis since 1945, we must avoid becoming the US at any cost. Let’s not watch this happen, helpless, on our continent.
10/04/2020
Tigran Hamasyan's quarantined concert
I met and interviewed the Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan in 2013 for RFI. One of my favourite pianists in this world.
Tigran gave a live stream concert on Armenian Government's facebook page while under quarantine in Los Angeles, due to the coronavirus.
Gift from me to you: "Non official" concert
Link to RFI: https://musique.rfi.fr/emission/info/bande-passante/20150216-tigran-hamasyan-et-francois-atlas-mountains
08/04/2020
PJ Harvey and the world as the right form of inspiration
PJ Harvey after winning her second Mercury Prize in 2011 for 'Let England Shake', on writing an album on the wars in Iraq / Afghanistan and the worse in the world...
And remaining optimistic and inspiring.
Obviously such an example of talent, creativity, poetry, authenticity and humility.
#UtterLove
Watch PJ Harvey win the Mercury Prize 2011
PJ Harvey performs 'The Last Living Rose'
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