Last Monday, three judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague delivered their verdict on Ali Abdelrahman Kushayb: guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed in Darfur, Sudan, during 2003 and 2004. It was an exemplary case, meticulously prepared and presented. It took three and a half years from the opening session to the verdict. Seventy-eight witnesses gave evidence in court. Stacks of documents were presented and pored over. I was the first witness, summoned in April 2022 by both the prosecution and the defence – an unusual arrangement in a tribunal based on the adversarial system – to help the court establish agreed facts about the background to the case and the conflict in Darfur.
John Heartfield’s cover designs for ‘Erotik und Spionage in der Etappe Gent’ by Heinrich Wandt (1928)
John Heartfield was forced to leave Germany in 1933. Even before the Nazis put him on their hit list, his art had caused controversy. In 1928 he designed the cover for a book about the mores of the German top brass (Erotik und Spionage in der Etappe Gent by Heinrich Wandt). When it was banned, Heartfield produced another, turning the censor’s scissors against the censor.
At sunset on a clear day you can see thirty miles across the Rio de la Plata from Colonia de Sacramento to the skyscrapers of Buenos Aires as the sky behind them turns orange. Julio Cortázar once wrote: ‘I speak of Uruguay and Argentina as one country because they are, despite the nationalists.’ When Argentina’s economy collapsed at the end of 2001, Uruguay’s soon followed. It happened again with the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Argentina has 45 million people, Uruguay three million; the Buenos Aires metro area is more than seven times the size of Montevideo, where two-thirds of the country lives.
Israel has assassinated a record number of Palestinian journalists, refused to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, imposed internet blackouts during its most bloody assaults, asked Meta to take down more than thirty million social media posts, and allocated $150 million for its 2025 hasbara (propaganda) budget, a twenty-fold increase on previous years. And yet, despite all these efforts, global public opinion is turning against it.
If there’s anything ironic about being so scared of telling the wrong joke that you run straight into the arms of the House of Saud, it seems lost on the Riyadh Comedy Festival performers, who have, on the whole, described their experiences in Riyadh as positive – or at least positive enough to clear their consciences.
By endorsing the Trump plan, Keir Starmer continues the long-standing British position of denying the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination. The UK’s recognition of Palestine at the UN last month will go no further than its symbolic function. The Trump-Blair plan for Gaza is colonialism by another name.
The 77th Emmy Awards were over and I was heading home in the back of a self-driving car. I texted a friend, as I watched the wheel turning by itself: ‘I feel like I am being driven by a ghost.’ And of course, I was: the ghost of the cab driver whose livelihood has been taken away by a tech giant. I listened to music, encouraged by a disembodied voice to sing along as loudly as I wanted to: ‘We can’t hear you.’