Of hospital floors and odd busses

One tends to notice the oddest things during a crisis. Not necessarily because the things themselves are odd; no, it really is the act of noticing that surprises.

Pause for thought?

Unfortunately, you find it hard to ignore them afterwards. They may be little things, an unfortunate use of language, for example. The sort of thing that would usually just brush past you, ignored, abandoned to the well-deserved dustbin of history.
So – recently, I have had the dubious pleasure of spending time at Malta’s brand new hospital, Mater Dei. Yes, it is a more welcoming building than St Luke’s was. And yes, the architects and planners really did care deeply about people not getting enough exercise: you clock up a mile of stiff walking between the entrance and the wards.
It is the lifts that first introduce a note of alarm. You get out of your car down in the bowels of the earth, walk across to the lifts, get it. You press “0” for the ground floor and the exit. The doors close (it sometimes takes two attempts). You rise.
So far so good. All normal, you assume – until the mechanized voice comes on with a warning: “Zero floor”. You panic: what will happen when you step out of the lift? Is there a deep pit there, waiting for unwary visitors?
Then the doors open; to your relief, the ground is solidly in place, even coated with reasonably attractive marble flooring.
Now you have got your bearings back, you feel safe. Surely that was the worst the hospital could throw at you (other than medically, of course). You would be mistaken.
You follow the long corridor leading to the reception area. It’s easy to do: there are signs all over the place pointing you in the right direction. Then, the final turn approaches. You look up at the sign, just to make sure, and you read (after the wards and so on) “Way Out Bus”.
With the best will in the world, you cannot just ignore this. What is a “Way Out Bus”? you wonder. And why on earth is everyone just drifting on past, ignoring it?
I have yet to see this “Way Out Bus”. I had initially assumed that at least one person must at some point in his life actually seen it, maybe even ridden on it. I have not been able to find him (ok, let’s not be sexist – or her). In fact, I am beginning to think it may be a wholly mythological machine.
This view is supported by further signage along the lengths of corridor at the hospital. There, you find just “Way Out”. The “Bus” has disappeared.
Your departure from the hospital is a little less dramatic. You pass gently under the sign to the mysterious “Way Out Bus”, you reach the lifts. You pay your dues, and get into a lift – yes, the very same one that announced to you earlier that there was no floor on the other side of its doors. Again, the lift seems a bit hesitant: the doors slide shut but, before beginning its short downward trip, they open again. So be it.
Eventually you get to the lower fourth floor, where you had innocently left your car. Because, of course, you were not expecting the lift to announce to you, before opening its doors and in a faintly tinny, feminine voice, that before you there is “Minus four floor”.

Syria’s tragedy

Today’s news from Syria demonstrates what to my probably rather limited understanding of the country, is a serious deterioration. It is also disappointing, almost a betrayal of the hopes so many people had for the country. That clearly includes the Syrians themselves.

Today, and over the past few weeks, the Syrian Ba’ath party regime led by Bashar al-Assad has besieged and attacked towns that had the temerity to stand up and ask for reform. The irony of this all is that when current president Bashar al-Assad began his rule after his father Hafez’s death, it seemed that he was pushing for these very reforms the demonstrators are calling for in their thousands.

Syria is not Libya. It is a cultivated, civilised place. This is no slur on the Libyans, but just an observation of the different histories of the two countries.

Syria has been a focal point for most of the great developments of Euro-Mediterranean culture: semitic peoples, indo-europeans – all passed through this patch of land, partly in that magic region Mesopotamia. The Hellenistic world left its mark, as did the Roman and the Persian. It hosts some of the earliest Christian monuments; the Semitic language Syriac was the medium through which much of the Bible (and, of course, of Greek classics) survived and reached us. Under Islam, Damascus became the seat of the Abbassid Caliphate, a flowering of culture and science.

Through this, Syria has developed a dazzling diversity of peoples and religions. Under the Ottoman Empire, it experienced great tolerance. While a Muslim country, it has been and still is a secular state with little time for extremism, fundamentalism or any other of this particular set of “isms”. Not so, unfortunately, of authoritarianism.

The Ba’ath Party under Hafez al-Assad, ruled with an iron fist. Protest were put down with violence, people died in bloody crackdowns. So when, 10 years ago now, Bashar al-Assad took over the presidency from his father, young, fresh from a career as an opthamologist in the UK, and with fresh new ideals, many saw in him a reformer in the making, battling established elites to introduce greater civil liberties, greater political pluralism, even greater democracy.

We have been cured of that now. The Syrian regime’s reaction to initially limited demonstrations calling for reform to the existing system have been transformed, by the heavy handed response itself, into much more widespread protests calling for the end of the regime. It is ironic that the means chosen to contain should have been the catalyst for the very development al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party feared the most.

The deed, now, has been done. The transformation has happened. The protests are spreading. And each time a town is cut off and invaded by tanks , each time leading protesters have been arrested in their hundreds (including, reportedly, 14-year old boys), the movement is strengthened. However authoritarian a regime is, it cannot survive with ever-decreasing public support, other than through the imposition of terror.

Thus Syria has, against all odds, gone down the path of Libya. The difference is, it seems to me to be highly unlikely that there will be any response from the rest of the world on the same scale or lines as that organised for the North African country. Syria has a much more capable military; the powers with the wherewithal to carry it out are already overstretched, there are not the same economic imperatives (that is, no oil); it is unlikely that the regional powers will want disturbance on their doorstep for a million reasons, not all complimentary.

The sanctions announced yesterday  are, of course, a step in the right direction. How effective they will be is another matter altogether. Even if more robust measures are taken (now that is a euphemism if ever there was one), the effectiveness is also doubtful. In Libya, it is proving difficult not only to protect civilians from the air and to enforce a no-fly zone (Ghaddafi’s forces have reportedly dropped mines into Misrata harbour, dropped bombs and destroyed a fuel dump from small aircraft, according to both Al Jazeera and the BBC).

The Syrians deserve our support. How this can be delivered effectively is a different question, but one which needs to be answered. The Syrians, like the Libyans and the Yemenis, should be disappointed that Bashar al-Assad, apart from failing to live up to his promise, has also resisted the honourable path taken by the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia and left before too many people got hurt and too much damage was done.

Related articles

• Syria: the west can shorten Syrian regime’s deadly campaign (syrianetf.wordpress.com)

Don’t let your attention wander!

Osama Bin Laden, from one of his video releases in 2004. Image via Wikipedia

So the Americans have caught up with Osama bin Laden. No one will grieve too much about that, even if most of the world will not have the public celebrations that started across the US.
It is unlikely that the death of bin Laden will do much in itself to hamper terrorists; it is unclear how deeply involved he has been in planning the various attacks attributed to al-Qaeda. However, while the world’s media attention shifts to his fate, the real danger is that events in Libya, Yemen and now Syria may be ignored, even if only for a while.
The popular calls for a democratic transformation in these Arab nations have met with violent suppression; one has the feeling that the degree of repression would have been all the greater if the eyes of the world were not on events there.
In fact, I seem to remember that when the troubles in Syria began – at a much lower intensity – Col. Ghaddafi to the opportunity afforded him by the media shift of attention to the fledgling Syrian protests to launch an attack on his opponents.
It would be sad if the same thing were to happen again. These “revolutions” are long overdue: the Arab peoples have a long and proud history, and share much of their cultural heritage with Europe (and therefore also with the US and so many other countries around the world).
This means that there is no propensity for the Arabs to revert to despotism, any more than there is that propensity for any average European country. What these revolutions are about (I know, I am going t repeat myself here) is the reclaiming of the public sphere, of the possibility of civil society, political debate and thus influence on the social and political (and also – why not? – economic) direction of their countries. These are things that many of us take for granted.
What shape the new Arab democracies will take is not for us to decide. It is up to us, however, to give all the support we can. At its most basic, this is a simple matter: it does not involve much other than attention. But this is essential.
The rest – involving greater cost and risk, admittedly, is predicated upon this bare essential. Whether it be the use of the military to provide physical protection as in Libya, or the use of diplomatic and economic effort to pressure recalcitrant regimes, or even the care for refugees displaced by the troubles and the provision of resources to interim authorities, any further measures depend totally upon this essential fact of attention.
So this is an appeal: however good having Osama bin Laden out of the way may feel, please please please do not let that distract you from the really important things happening now. And that means the reclamation of public space and debate by Arabs across the Middle East.
Specifically, this means support the fledgling democratic movements in Tunisia and Egypt; keep watching developments in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. The West has let the Middle East down too often in the recent past to afford to do so again!

Payments on the go

Advertising the M-PESA service in Tanzania. Photo from sociate on Flickr

Some time ago I had looked into the development of mobile money for a Maltese news magazine. It was, then, a hot topic. At least, I thought so and with luck, you may agree with me.
Now the European Union is drawing close to a rework of its eMoney Directive. In place since 2000, this was a prescient piece of regulation. It aimed to put so-called “e-money institutions” on to a firm footing, hopefully thereby getting the services off to a flying start.
In that, it failed. The idea did, in fact, catch on. The problem was, it did not use the provisions of the e-money directive. In Malta, for example, there were exactly ZERO registered e-money institutions; across the EU I believe the number did not top 30.
Yet services doing some if not all the things an e-money provider was supposed to, sprang up and became extremely popular. Just look at PayPal. What went wrong?
That was, it turned out, a relatively simple question to answer. The market developed in a very different direction to that imagined by the Directive. This, I suppose, will always be a problem when trying to anticipate needs.
One of the main problems was that, despite the very different types of organisation that could be offering e-money, and the relatively low values when compared to traditional financial services, e-money institutions were to be required to adhere to solvency and capital rules more suited to traditional banks.
The new incarnation of the Directive, which is set to come into effect over the next couple of months, deals with this; it should therefore succeed.
This is a very exciting development. E-money is a pretty broad, ill-defined term. But the promise it holds is enormous. The most exciting end of it is the way mobile telephony operators have adopted it, talking about “mobile money”, a subset of the broader e-money.
As it happens there is now experience of what this sort of service can mean. I do not want to go into the discussions of the variety of technologies that are being proposed – compatibility with NFC (near field communication) sim cards is one. This, because in fact the technology is secondary. Effective mobile money services have and are being run on nothing more complex than SMS.
What is important is what this sort of service allows people to do, and how it can empower them. Safiricom (in which Vodafone has a 40% stake) has been running its M-Pesa service for years now. It has extended simple banking services to rural areas that no traditional, bricks and mortar bank could service cost-effectively. By doing so, it is allowing poor farmers to manage their cash flows more effectively, allowing them to invest in new equipment and seeds. It is thus proving a powerful force for development, a lot more effective at getting people out of the poverty cycle than many other development initiatives.
The M-Pesa service has evolved since 2007 and continues to develop (read this news story, and this one as well). It has spread beyond Kenya, as Vodafone has taken this service to Afghanistan and Tanzania, and since 2008 has been running regular screening on its millions of clients according to anti-money laundering regulations.
This is what good technology should do. It is not, ever, about the technology itself. That is contingent. What it is all about is the things it allows people to do. I personally look forward to seeing this develop.

Related Articles

• A Mobile Banking Powerhouse Born From Bus Fare Theft (fastcompany.com)
• Mobile Payments Try to Take Root in Afghanistan (textually.org)
• O2 seeks e-money licence as Everything Everywhere partners with Barclaycard (uktelecomlaw.wordpress.com)

Worth a read

For anyone following developments across the Arab world, al-bab.com has some good background at http://www.al-bab.com/arab/background/reform.htm. The early hope, after the way events developed in Egypt and Tunisia, has not continued in Libya, Syria,Yemen or indeed Bahrain. This is disappointing, but there is still hope Arabs across the region will manage to claim back their public space.

Ramping up the pressure?

I would hate to be the commander of the NATO forces providing protection to Libya‘s citizens. The task is close to impossible: bombs, missiles and planes may be very powerful weapons, but if your brief is to use them to protect without killing people, they have their limitations.

The death of Saif al Arab Ghaddafi along with three children yesterday may be counted as an attempt by NATO forces to increase pressure on Col. Ghaddafi. I do not think it was – it raises too many other issues, risking the loss of the broad support for the action being taken and undermining the justification and moral motivation for the what is being done.

That buildings connected to Ghaddafi’s hold on power are being hit does count as ramping up the pressure. It sends a simple message: we are getting closer to you, we can hit things just beside you. We can, if we want to, hit you directly. This threat, however, loses its potency if the “target” is actually hit; Ghaddafi’s son and grandchildren count as close enough for that.

I can only hope that the fall-out on this will not undermine the efforts to help the anti-Ghaddafi revolution, or the relief of Misrata and other beleaguered rebel areas in Western Libya.