by
MC MasterChef
on Thu 09 Dec 2004 09:19 PM EST
It's perhaps a little early to start the nostalgia-for-college-days-of-yore process just yet, but yesterday was the final screening that I'll have a chance to enjoy here at BU of the annual fall IR Film Festival (hosted by Prof. Bacevich), of which I have been a loyal attendee for the past four years.
The first year I got here they were showing Cold War movies, and I got a chance to see such classics as
Them!,
Strategic Air Command, and of course
Doctor Strangelove. Subsequent years brought themes of "Dirty Wars" and "Elvis In Arabia", the latter of which's schedule is still up there on the
film series web site (I think the department events coordinator is new this year, so promotion efforts have been somewhat scattered. I am not infrequently the only one there... yet another reason to disparage the tastes of my college peers). The Elvis movie last year
was sublimely bad, but for my money the best was the vastly underrated
Ishtar; I really cannot believe that movie bombed at the box office, because it was hilarious.
Well in any case, this year the theme was "Foreign Correspondents", international relations through the eyes of journalists reporting from abroad and the final movie was
Welcome To Sarajevo, which I'm assuming no one else has heard of either.
Although a little heavy-handed narratively at points, it was a suprisingly well done (cept for maybe some weird soundtrack choices) advocacy piece for the suffering of the Bosnians during the siege of that city, as seen firsthand by a British reporter. He becomes wrapped up in publicizing the plight of an orphanage (and one orphan in particular) unable to evacuate its young charges from the ruined city. It's based on a true story, I gather, and was much more powerful than I expected, but I don't know very much at all about the Balkans and lacked a lot of the context that might've helped me appreciate it better.
Fortunately, Prof. Haqqani dropped by early on (his office is upstairs from the screening room) and stayed to watch the whole thing. Naturally enough, he had visited there during the siege while working as an assistant to Benazir Bhutto. One point he suggested at the end, perhaps vaguely apropos praktike's post
below, was that the general Muslim reaction to Bosnia was: it doesn't matter how Westernized, how secularized, how moderately you practice Islam, when it comes right down to it the West is not going to intervene to help out Muslims. Bin Laden in particular has apparently made this point, and Woody Harrelson's character in the movie makes it explicitly with a quote to effect of (paraphrasing from memory) "I can't help but thinking if this had been Muslims attacking Christians we would've done something by now".
Whether this is true or not (and sadly, there may be something to it), the
perception as such is a dangerous one. Haqqani made the point that the reaction among a lot of British and European Muslims in particular to this episode has been greater estrangement from the local cultures. This would seem to reinforce the point that
Marc Sageman makes about alienation among Muslim immigres being a large factor in the rise of militant Islamism on the Continent.
I don't have an answer to any of this (particularly since, like I said, I know essentially nothing about the Bosnian situation beyond this), but thought it was worth sharing. It really is stuff like this that makes me appreciate college.
JC has a