[New-imc] Re: IMC Cairo and IMC Beirut

[blue.pi]

Hi, 

as you know, noone from Beirut is on this list anymore, so sorry for staying 
so silent on the issue of IMC Cairo. 

First, concerning our website (I think boud asked about it). It is right now 
at beirut.indymedia.de but will hopefully be at beirut.indymedia.org and 
fully functioning tonight or tomorrow, if everything works out. 

beirut is running on MIR, palestine is running on sf-active. Beirut is going 
to be hosted on the imc-phill server, I think there is still space. 

We are really busy right now ourselves, so I don’t really see how we could 
help IMC Cairo. One possibility would be though to simply give them a page 
on our page, as long as they don’t have their own site up. IMC Qolasuyu is 
doing that on Imc Bolivia, don’t know exactly how that works though. 

Some background about the so called foreign “visitors”. The Middle East is 
not Latin America where lots of activists travel through. Most foreigners 
who are here (in Beirut as well as in Cairo) are so for a longer period of 
time and they have usually undertaken the effort to learn Arabic, which is 
as you can imagine not even comparable with learning Spanish. Most 
foreigners I knew in Cairo and those who I know here have lived here for 
many years, many don’t plan to go back home. 

When I was in Germany, we had at a certain time in the group in berlin one 
person from Italy, one from Canada and one from Ireland. We thought that was 
a great enrichment. Here in Beirut, we had one from Spain, one from the US 
and me (we HAD because I believe one of us may have left the group because 
of certain allegations she was subject to). Most people here believed this 
to be an enrichment as well, but not all. 

The question is what is the political ideology behind questioning the number 
of foreigners in a group. Are we just making sure the group is sustainable 
and locally based? Or do we think in nationalist terms? Those are just the 
two extremes of a scale. Of course I know there are many good reasons in 
between those two. But I would like to ask people to keep this in mind and 
also to be aware that there are strong nationalist currents in the Left in 
certain countries that I think we as indymedia should not neccesarily 
support. 

And don’t take me wrong, I would strongly oppose it as well, if a bunch of 
western year exchange students would try to launch an indymedia here. But I 
think it is really important to ask the right questions here and to be clear 
about the objectives. 

blue 

P.S. please do me one favor, if you don't want to destroy the imc beirut 
group completely, don't take discussions there - I just raised the issue 
because it seems to concern Cairo. We are really exhausted and busy with the 
war, we know we have to talk about it, but we don't  want discussions on 
"foreign visitors" right now. (We had prepared a statement concerning the 
issue that we decided not to send because of the war) 


Rosa writes: 

> Hi again, 
> 
> I think my message has been misunderstood, maybe because of my English,
> maybe because I tried to be too synthetic. As I had pointed out, my previous
> message was sent one week ago - before Jay's postings - but it hasn't been
> delivered yet, due to the list server problems, so I sent a copy of it
> today. I only wanted to fully support the creation of a provisional IMC
> Cairo, because I think that an IMC Cairo, an IMC Beirut, and ANY other
> source of independent and reliable information from the Middle East are
> extremely important and useful during these difficult times. 
> 
> As for IMC Beirut, all the volunteers in this list must have noticed that,
> after its approval, there was a heated debate here, and then everything got
> silent. Many people are looking forward to seeing the IMC Beirut web site,
> and I would appreciate if someone could provide us with a feedback on its
> present situation. 
> 
> I'd like also to remind all of you that IMC Brazil has a brand new server
> now, which is intended to host most of the Latin American sites. However, if
> there is any other site throughout the world needing a host, our server may
> host them too - and this applies to IMC Cairo and IMC Beirut - you may count
> on us to anything we can help. 
> 
> Saudacoes a todos 
> 
> Rosa. 
>