Sunday 29 July 2018

The Real Life Exorcist: Good vs Evil, Or A Search for Meaning?


The other night I made the mistake of watching The Devil and Father Amorth alone and just before going to bed. The documentary, made by The Exorcist director William Friedkin, follows a real-life exorcism that took place just outside of Rome in the summer of 2016. The film itself, whilst interesting, leaned towards embellishment and shock tactics and should certainly be taken with a pinch of salt. However, Friedkin’s interviews with neuroscientists and psychiatric professionals regarding the tape of the real exorcism warrant discussion, particularly in the light of the recent increasing demand for exorcisms across the western world.

At the beginning of the documentary, Friedkin makes the claim that 500,000 exorcisms are carried out every year in Italy. This is supported by reports that the Vatican is now training exorcists at a greater rate than ever before. In the last decade, the number of trained exorcists in the US has quadrupled from 12 to 50 in an attempt to keep up with demand. In the UK, claims of enforced exorcisms have left people traumatised. This all sounds like Middle Ages witchcraft, but these incidents have all occurred since 2015. The devil is getting busier.

A fascinating book by Jennifer Percy, Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism details a Christian camp in Georgia that ‘rehabilitates’ US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through exorcising their demons from them. Many claim that the priests worked miracles. The subject of the book, Caleb, was suicidal and suffering with severe PTSD upon his return from Afghanistan, but it was a dark presence that he felt following his every move that eventually led him to an exorcism. In a bid to rid himself of the ‘Black Thing’, he turned to the priests, and from them he received some respite.

The parallels between demonic possession and mental illness are numerous (consider Caleb’s ‘Black Thing’ and it’s similarity to Winston Churchill’s description of his depression as the ‘Black Dog’ that followed him). Many of the symptoms of demonic possession are also associated with PTSD; watching Cristina’s (the subject of Father Amorth’s exorcism attempt) violent reactions to her exorcism could be compared to the panicked responses to trigger events in sufferers of PTSD – the soldier who hits the ground when a firework explodes behind them – and her claim to not remember the ritual also shares similarities with the experience of PTSD episodes. In Friedkin’s film, a psychiatrist compares Cristina’s reactions to those of patients suffering with delirium and hallucinations.

As someone with an interest in psychology it is easy to reduce stories of demonic possession to something I better understand; mental illness. However, as Friedkin’s interviews with neuroscientists and psychiatrists highlight, it is not always possible for science to explain an individual’s behaviour. There are things in the mind that we simply do not understand. The problem with people, though, is that we do not like what we cannot explain.  Humans are hardwired to find meaning in everything, regardless of whether it is there or not. That is why we might lay awake at night overthinking a single sentence that someone said to us in passing that day – what did they mean, why would they say it like that? It is why we find patterns and pictures in the clouds that pass overhead. Everything has a reason. That much we believe.

But sometimes we cannot find that reason, and that scares the hell out of us. Friedkin introduces Father Amorth by stating that his first fight against evil came as a young man, when he joined the resistance against Mussolini’s fascist regime. As soldiers, revolutionaries, and Hollywood movies will tell you, having something to fight for, or against, will give life meaning. It makes what you are doing worthwhile. Where we stumble is where we do not know what it is that we are fighting. As poor, possessed Cristina put it when describing her desire to take part in her ninth exorcism (as the previous eight had been unsuccessful): “Father Amorth was funny and ironic. He didn’t scare me. He helped me to understand what was happening to me.” Her ‘spiritual illness’ that had resulted in her being unable to keep a job and struggling to maintain relationships now had a diagnosis, and the exorcisms were her treatment. So far they had not worked, but now she had a potential cure she could try.

In the room where the exorcism took place, surrounded by her family and friends, listening to the authoritative words of Father Amorth and feeling the effects of the Rite on the demon inside her, Cristina was fighting her affliction. Her family were fighting it with her. As one psychiatrist interviewed after watching the video put it, together they created a ‘shared meaning’ of the events that unfolded. It gave both Cristina and her family hope that she would be cured. They believed in its effectiveness. Even in psychiatric therapy, before treatment can work the patient must want help, and then they must believe that it will be effective. The patient must be open to the suggestions of the therapist and willing to engage with the process in order for progress to be made. If you believe in it, it will work.

For individuals like Cristina who are suffering and have no diagnosis an exorcism provides context for their affliction. For soldiers like Caleb, who have experienced the most horrific things and are struggling to deal with the psychological consequences of that, a demon makes a good scapegoat. If you know what the problem is you can fight against it, even if that problem is the devil. In an uncertain and unstable world, at a time where we are only just beginning to understand the myriad reasons why we think, act, and feel the way we do, exorcism, as scary as it might be, can be a comfort to some people who need answers. Or maybe that is just what I’m telling myself so I can sleep at night...

Saturday 28 July 2018

The Future of Climate Conflict


The current UK heat wave has left many of us hot, bothered, and ready for the weather to return to business as usual. The Brits are not known for their capacity to deal with prolonged hot weather, but it looks like it might be something we need to start getting used to. According to a recent report by the Met Office and Environmental Audit Committee, UK summer temperatures could regularly reach 38.5°C by the 2040s. Grimly, they warn that this could result in 7,000 heat-related deaths every year by 2050 if the government does not act on improving climate resilience.

Unusual weather patterns such as the current heat wave that has been affecting much of Europe this summer unfortunately have a much wider impact than simply raising ice cream sales. In the UK, just the last few weeks of hot weather have limited crop yields, with fruit and vegetable prices rising across the country due to limited supply. Farmers are often the worst-affected by droughts and heat waves, and whilst life may be a bit more difficult for those in the UK, in other parts of the world the effects of climate change and environmental degradation are having much more serious consequences.

A recent International Crisis Group report highlights the rapidly accelerating violence breaking out between herders and farmers in northern Nigeria. What began as a series of spontaneous attacks and land-grabs between the two groups, who compete for increasingly limited areas of fertile, arable land in the country, has now developed into systematic planned violence that has resulted in 1,300 deaths this year alone. This worsening conflict has already claimed six times more lives than the campaign against terrorist group Boko Haram, who made global headlines by kidnapping over 270 schoolgirls in 2014, and continue to engage in similar acts of violence across Nigeria. The fact that Boko Haram continues to steal headlines whilst this unchecked climate-related violence deteriorates across the country demonstrates the major issue that now faces us globally.

The Overseas Development Institute recently held an event that discussed the issue of disaster risk reduction (DRR) in fragile and conflict-affected states. One of the key issues raised by this discussion was the fact that currently the Sendai Framework, the UN framework for DRR makes no mention of conflict or violence. Natural disasters are considered to be non-political because they are not directly caused by people, and yet it has become clear that resilience to events such as droughts, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes is in fact heavily influenced by politics. No event takes place in a vacuum, and we must consider the way that people will respond when they are forced to compete for increasingly limited resources. The violence in Nigeria paints a picture of what might be to come.

Droughts across Africa have cost millions of lives for decades now, but with global temperatures steadily rising the threat of them becoming longer and more severe is very real. This is already having huge geopolitical consequences across the continent. For example, although the River Nile is so often associated with Egypt, it actually runs through nine countries. The Blue Nile, the larger of its two tributaries, runs from Ethiopia through Sudan where it joins the White Nile to continue on into Egypt. However, Ethiopia, racked by drought and in need of hydroelectric power for its 102 million inhabitants, has begun construction of what will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Ethiopia Renaissance Dam. The project has been met with stiff resistance in Egypt, who fear it will cut their supply to the Nile and make their already precarious situation more dire. The fear of a “water war” between the countries is beginning to seem less and less like the plot of a dystopian sci-fi novel and more like something that should be seriously considered. On July 26th 2018, two days prior to the writing of this blog, the project manager of the dam project, Semegnew Bekele, was found dead with a bullet wound to the head. Although there is no evidence of Egyptian involvement (and such an act would be extremely unlikely), the immediate reaction has prompted conspiracy theories from anti-Egyptian movements in Ethiopia, and will likely further strain the already-tense relationship between governments.

Whilst we rarely think of wars in the form of being about control of resources – they are usually discussed in terms of ethnic or religious differences, or ideological power struggles – the fact remains that often this is a leading cause of conflict. The European colonial campaigns of the 18th and 19th centuries were not about “civilising local peoples” or “spreading Western values” but about plundering resources from other parts of the world. Hitler’s advancement through Europe, though heavily couched in the terminology of race, was at-least in part focused on securing economic prosperity for Germany through the “Lebensraum” policy. Even the Cold War – that most ideological of ideological battles – largely concerned securing spheres of economic and political influence for the rival superpowers.

There has been much discussion about whether Syria is, or at least started as, a climate conflict. The argument was that heavy droughts in the years running up to 2011 led to a mass migration of people from rural areas, where they could no longer live off the land, into the cities. This migration exacerbated the difficult living conditions of the cities and led to the 2011 uprising. Whilst this linear, causal explanation is being challenged (and rightly so – there are many factors contributing to the development and severity of the Syrian conflict, as with all wars), it starts to demonstrate the complex interaction between people and the environment. As our environment changes, so will our behaviour.

The Global Footprint Network has named August 1st as Earth Overshoot Day for 2018, the earliest the date has ever been set. This marks the point of the year where we have used up more natural resources globally than the planet can replace. In effect, as of this date we are working at a net loss to our global biocapacity. We are using resources that will not be replaced. As our pool of means for food, water, fuel, and other necessities dwindles, competition for those essentials will increase. If we want to prevent further violence like we are now seeing in Nigeria, we must reduce our environmental footprint, globally.

Acting sustainably and educating ourselves about our own environmental impact is more important now than ever. Combating climate change is an act of peacebuilding.

Wednesday 4 July 2018

Remembering the Past in Sarajevo: Why Remember?


One of the images in Pierre Courtin’s excellent Sarajevo Storage exhibition depicts a packet of king-size Drina cigarettes with a unique warning label: “To forget kills.” Amongst many other powerful images, this stood out. The 2018 WARM Festival, held in Sarajevo and part-organised by the Post-Conflict Research Center, dedicated much of its time to tackling the issue of remembrance in a post-conflict society. Whilst interning with PCRC this was a topic that I also attempted to grapple with.

History weighs heavy on the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 20 years after the Dayton Agreement bought an end to the most brutal fighting seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War the ramifications of that conflict continue to influence daily life in Sarajevo and beyond. The young people of BiH are the first generation that do not remember the fighting, but still they live with the burden. As Srđan Šarenac’s film Two Schools Under One Roof demonstrates, today’s youth continue to live in a society divided by ethnicity and religion. The 1995 Dayton Peace Accords are often criticised for reinforcing the ethnic division that led to war in the first place, and the fact that in many parts of BiH students still largely attend different schools based on their ethnicity, studying entirely separate curriculums, shows that not much has changed since the fighting officially stopped on the 14th December 1995. Even the children of the war generation are not immune to the repercussions of violence.

As artist Aida Šehović puts it, the young people of BiH are the generation that inherited the trauma of the 1990s. Though they do not remember living through the conflict, the memory of violence continues to haunt them. People of my age, 2-3 at the time at the time of the Dayton ceasefire, continue to experience the violence through shared memory. Their parents are often still scarred by the barbarity. Some were victims, some were perpetrators, many were both. Inevitably, they pass that tension on to the next generation. In that circumstance it is surely better to put the past behind us and to forget the horrors of war in a bid to make a go at peace. If remembrance leaves us with the bitter aftertaste of post-conflict divisions, why do we continue to dwell on the past?

Why should we remember conflict?

Aida Šehović’s Što Te Nema art project is a global roving monument to the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. As Šehović explained at the insightful panel discussion on “The Role of Visual Art and Aesthetics in (Re)building Post-Conflict Societies” at WARM, the idea behind Što Te Nema was to provide a safe space for people to talk about Srebrenica and its effect on their own lives, no matter how big or small. The project is taken to cities around the globe, where 8,373 cups of Bosnian coffee are prepared and laid out on the street, one for each victim of Mladić’s soldiers on 11/7/1995. The concept for the project was developed through conversations with the wives and mothers of the Srebrenica victims, who said that they missed their husbands and sons the most when they made coffee and had nobody to drink it with. Što Te Nema allows those affected by the massacre to talk about their feelings (and as Aida explained, once they start talking about it they often cannot stop) and lets those with no direct connection learn about what happened.

Art alone cannot change the past or affect the future. But, when done well, it can provoke a response and hopefully it can inspire others to make change. The incredibly powerful film that closed the festival – Silent War, directed by Manon Loizeau and detailing the systematic use of rape by the Syrian regime to destroy the morale of the resistance following the 2011 revolution – features a particularly moving scene near to the end where one of the courageous victims of torture and rape addresses the director, and the audience, directly. She states that people will watch the film, be shocked and saddened by what they have seen, and then leave the theatre and get on with their lives. In the discussion that followed an audience member asked exactly what it was that we, as individuals who are not directly affected or involved in the horrors we had just witnessed, could in fact do. Short of picking up arms and taking on Bashar al-Assad’s forces ourselves, it seemed like a hopeless situation.

Tanya Domi, Professor at Columbia University and President of the Board at PCRC, went some way to answering this question in a debate that occurred earlier in the festival. The closing of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) last year sparked debate over whether or not justice had in fact been served to the perpetrators of so much human suffering over the course of the conflicts that tore the Western Balkans apart. As Tanya put it, even when the judgement laid down by the courts on perpetrators of crimes against humanity is seen as sufficient (and in many cases it is not) then even that is only the beginning of real justice and reconciliation. The victims of conflict live with the trauma forever, and even when the law and politics fail to bring them the justice they deserve, seeing people around the world remembering their suffering and acknowledging their humanity can be extremely cathartic.

I started my trip back to Sarajevo in the Jewish Museum, where I learned about the individual stories of those targeted by the Nazi regime on Kristallnacht and later throughout the Western Balkans as the occupiers spread their brutality around Europe. After WARM, I found myself returning to the quote that stuck with me on that first day, “’Never Again?’ Hardly. The world has stood by and done nothing countless times since 1938, and will doubtless do so again.” It is very easy to say that there is nothing that we, as ordinary people, can do to tackle those who are willing to commit genocide. But accepting that is equal to standing by and doing nothing. What we can do, whoever we are, is challenge the rhetoric of hate and violence when we come across it. What we can do is listen to the stories of survivors and learn from them. What we can do is recognise the warning signs that people are being targeted in everyday life, long before it gets to the point of violence experienced in Srebrenica and being seen today in Syria, and speak out against them. What we can do is acknowledge others’ suffering and stand beside them. What we can do is recognise the basic humanity in those who others do not.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to return to Sarajevo and I am inspired by the amazing people who put together the WARM festival and continue to work in such difficult situations around the world in order to shed light on the stories of those we might otherwise forget. Whether those stories inspire us to act right now on a particular issue, or whether they just encourage us to think differently about the news as it continues to unravel from warzones around the world, what matters is that we pay attention, and we remember them. To forget kills.