integrity?

www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/world/africa/25safrica.html?_r=1&ref=asia

Peace Conference in South Africa Is Canceled

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By CELIA W. DUGGER

Published: March 24, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — Organizers of a peace conference that was to have been attended by five Nobel Peace Prize winners in Johannesburg said Tuesday that they had canceled the conference after the South African government denied entry to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader and one of the Nobel laureates.

Michael Nagle/Getty Images

Desmond Tutu, who refused to attend the conference.

Two of South Africa’s Nobel winners,Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop, and former President F. W. de Klerk, condemned the government for giving in to pressure from China to block the Dalai Lama’s entry and said they would refuse to participate in the conference this Friday if he was not there. The executive director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, also said he would stay away.

The government said Monday that the Dalai Lama would not be allowed to come to South Africa to attend the conference, meant to promote the 2010 World Cup, because his presence would have distracted attention from South Africa and drawn it instead to the contentious debate over the status of Tibet.

Thabo Masebe, a government spokesman, said that the Tibetan leader’s presence “would not be in South Africa’s best interests.”

A statement by the organizers on Tuesday said the participants had been told that “the only purpose of their visit to South Africa would be for the purposes of participation in the conference and not any other public engagements, as these could take away from the purpose for which the conference was intended.”

sidebar...

who is mad at peace? clearly china is...

Check It: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/dalai-lama-south-africa-world-cup-ban

News
World news
Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama's South Africa conference ban causes uproar
Nobel winners Desmond Tutu and FW de Clerk to boycott anti-racism conference in World Cup run-up after Chinese pressure forces ban on Tibetan spiritual leader
Chris McGreal in Johannesburg  

Monday 23 March 2009 18.33 GMT
Article history
Two of South Africa's Nobel peace prize winners, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and FW de Klerk, have pulled out of a Johannesburg conference to fight racism after what they branded as Pretoria's "disgraceful" decision to ban the Dalai Lama from attending following Chinese pressure.

The Nobel peace prize committee also said it would boycott this Friday's conference, which is dedicated to tackling racism ahead of the 2010 World Cup.

The row threatens to draw in Nelson Mandela, who, with his fellow South African laureates, invited the Tibetan spiritual leader, and further embarrasses South Africa, which has been accused of squandering its moral authority since ending apartheid by blocking UN security council moves to pressure rogue governments in Burma and Zimbabwe.

Tutu, who won the prize for his resistance to white rule, told Johannesburg's Sunday Independent newspaper he will not attend the conference to discuss how to use the World Cup preparations to combat racism and xenophobia if the Tibetan spiritual leader is not present.

"If His Holiness's visa is refused, then I won't take part in the coming 2010 World Cup-related peace conference. I will condemn [the] government's behaviour as disgraceful, in line with our country's abysmal record at the United Nations security council, a total betrayal of our struggle's history," he said.

"We are shamelessly succumbing to Chinese pressure. I feel deeply distressed and ashamed."

The FW de Klerk Foundation, established by South Africa's last white president, said it would also pull out of the conference, albeit reluctantly.

"South Africa is a sovereign constitutional democracy and should not allow other countries to dictate to it regarding who it should and should not admit to its territory," the foundation said in a statement.

"Mr De Klerk has been in touch with Archbishop Tutu and identifies himself with the views that he has expressed with regard to the refusal of the South African government to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama."

The Norwegian Nobel peace prize committee also condemned the South African decision.

"It is impossible for us to be part of an event where one of the main participants is not able to enter the country," said Geir Lundestad, the committee's secretary.

The Tibetan government in exile in India today blamed "intense pressure" from China, which has become one of South Africa's largest trading partners. The claim was apparently confirmed by the Chinese embassy in Pretoria, where the minister counsellor, Dai Bing, was quoted as telling the South African media that his government had warned that allowing the Tibetan spiritual leader to attend the conference would damage bilateral relations.

But the South African government denied its decision had anything to do with Beijing. It said the Dalai Lama had been refused a visa because his presence would draw attention away from the World Cup preparations.

Thabo Masebe, the spokesman for the president, Kgalema Motlanthe, said the conference organisers had not consulted the government before inviting the Tibetan leader.

"We in the South African government have not invited the Dalai Lama to visit South Africa, because it would not be in the interests of South Africa," he said. "The attention of the world is on South Africa because of it being the host country for the 2010 World Cup, and we wouldn't want anything to distract from that."

Pretoria has shied away from the Tibetan leader before. Ten years ago, South Africa's then president, Thabo Mbeki, said he was too busy for a one-to-one meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The actors Morgan Freeman, who is to play Mandela in a new film, and Charlize Theron, a South African, are also due to attend the conference.

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Through a series of self-portraits taken during the last seven
years, the Japanese photographer Kimiko Yoshida embodies
the brides of the world.
Rejecting the stereotypes of communautarism and
segregation, she challenges the search of narcissism :
she wants to erase the origins.
She borrows the precept of Descartes “Larvatus Prodeo”
(`I come forward masked’), and she turns into an African, an
Indian, an Egyptian, a Russian, a Tibetan… Pointing to the
fact that we live the globalization of goods and images, she
exceeds the identity feeling by mixing cultures, religions,
rituals and references. She crossbreeds, she hybrids, she
metamorphoses.
Her approach is a search of the truth: what is true, is what
is real. In accordance with Rimbaud, to her the individual
is multiple : “I is another”. The identity does not exist, the
identifications only are tangible.
Kimiko Yoshida changes and she wants to disappear into
some almost monochromic representations.
The face melts into the unit of color and the tribal object she
borrowed, a treasure from the past that is now preserved in a
museum, is revealed.
This technique evokes the Japanese tradition of the doran, a
white painting used by the geishas and the maïkos to erase
any characteristic of their face. On the contrary, in Occident,
the make-up is used to beautify, to call attention to oneself,
to hide the defects. The artist hopes to approach the concept
of the woman instead of the female ideal.
Everything is in the obliteration, the minimalism, the
detachment. Contrary to her contemporaries, she does not
look for appealing to pathos.
Changing mask infinitely, without geographical or temporal
consideration, she oscillates between figuration and
abstraction, showing the plurality of being as much aesthetic
as philosophical. I am not the one I show. I have to take the
risk to stand aside.
This purification which worries Kimiko Yoshida turns
meaningful when she entrusts “all that’s not me, that’s what
interest me”.

Maude Michali

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Check It: Kristoffer Ragnstam on Fearless TV! 

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