'French no longer a la mode' say Algerians
Algerians have spoken out against the widespread use of the French language in public life, demanding that people take more pride in the country's official language: Arabic.
Algerians have taken to social media this week in an attempt to promote the use of Arabic and discourage speaking the "language of the colonisers".
French has been widely spoken and studied in schools and universities in Algeria since the French colonisation of the country in 1827, which lasted over 100 years.
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Longing for no return
Handala (which literally means “bitterness” in Arabic) is the name of a 10-year-old boy: sad, barefooted and always with his face turned away. He is one of millions of children displaced from Palestine, and the signature of Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al Ali, who was assassinated in London in 1987. At first, Handala was like any Palestinian child, writes Naji Al Ali, “but his consciousness developed to have a national and then global and human horizon”. When I was a kid, in the Palestinian camps in Syria we were taught that Handala will not turn and show his face unless Palestine is liberated, and that we will all be Handalas until the day we return.
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Tunisian activists are fighting for greater LGBT rights
Abdelbraki Mezin asked me over coffee last week if homophobia was dead in the United States.
“I mean, you’ve had marriage equality for almost a year, surely that’s enough time,” the Tunisian human rights defender said. His partner, Bouhdid Belhedi, laughed, adding, “Yes, much like winning the Nobel Peace Prize solved all of Tunisia’s human rights issues.”
Mezin and Belhedi are LGBT rights defenders in Tunisia. As members of Tunisia’s first organization working openly for LGBT rights, they have suffered attacks, death threats, and lost family relationships.
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