November 24, 2015 edition

In that embattled territory, children were watching the Charlie Chaplin film, The Kid. They laughed uproariously. Their parents or older siblings were probably keeping watch on the border with their rifles cocked, but in Rojava, in the area of North Syria occupied by the Kurds, there was a pause in war, and people were building hope.
Who knows for how long?

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More Sidelines articles in other editions

November 17, 2015 edition

A, B, C. Folders containing papers with lists of dozens of names lying on a table in a detention center in Jakarta, with classifications that will determine the fate of the detainees. A: to be killed. B: to be exiled to Nusakambangan. C: to be detained at the nearest city. Or for action unspecified.
'Unspecified' is the manifestation of sovereignty in its most extreme form: power acting with the assumption that it will not be challenged to provide reasons. Including when it is determining the life and death of thousands of people. Including when it is wrong.

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November 10, 2015 edition

1965: What is frightening in remembering?
I was walking around in Berlin that day, crossing to the part of the city that used to be called East Berlin. I was with Pipit.

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November 3, 2015 edition

Father Jacques was abducted early in the third week of May 2015. He was sitting in his narrow room in the Mar Elian monastery on the outskirts of the town of Qaryatain in Syria when some armed men from ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah arrived. Islamic State took him hostage. Not many people knew about it.
But the well-known German writer, Navid Kermani, who received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at Frankfurt on October 8 last, did not forget him. He gave special mention to Father Jacques in a splendid speech at the ceremony in Paul Kirche that Sunday.

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October 27, 2015 edition

Every October 28th I am reminded of soto. On that day in 1928, when the youths made their pledge for "one country, one nation, and one language", there was no general acclaim for "one soto, Indonesian soto" to be heard.
And so it is that we can still taste Bandung soto, Banjar soto, Betawi soto, Kudus soto, Pekalongan soto, Madura soto and so forth, all those sotos side by side from west to eastthis is what Indonesia is.

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October 20, 2015 edition

Nations are born and grow with a kind of forgetting. Nations are born and endure with a store of memories.
Ernest Rnan, in a public lecture he gave in Paris in 1882, concluded that "forgetting...is an essential factor in the creation of a nation." People of different origins, who perhaps even killed each other in the past, shed those memories; the strength of the desire to come together as one drives them to forget.

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October 13, 2015 edition

Before violence, there is no zero point. Before violence, there is other violence that we do not always acknowledge, and probably do not always recognize.
I am fortunate to have been born more than 70 years ago and am still here today to tell storiesI can remember my father who was shot, my uncle who was shot, my neighbors who were shot, the village head who was kidnapped by guerilla fighters and stabbed through the heart, the woman who had been a Dutchman's unofficial wife who was robbed and then buried alive under the kapok tree, the former leader of the revolutionary struggle who was invited outside by two visitors to his house, and then shot through the head, right beside the bamboo grove.

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