There are a variety of reasons why people choose to be tattooed. It is often a creative way of expressing our identity and holds cultural significance. However, the stigma surrounding the practice is an overarching reality in today’s society.
Moale James, Motuan/Australian Storyteller Joe Carter, QUT unit coordinator Liela O’Rose, Grassfed team member Wes, tattoo artist Danika Peets, interviewer
Frank Lamy voted this year for the first time. Originally from France, but having lived in Australia for the past 36 years, he first came after his military service for a holiday and never left. “One thing led to another and I found myself getting married and having kids,” he said. The first 30 years he was in Australia, he did not want to get in touch with the French community. “It’s part of the reason why I left”, he says, “because I had a very bad experience in the army”. The last time he visited France was in 1995, a trip he said he’d regretted since the expensive holiday he took “would have been much better” had he stayed in Australia.
The constant link that kept Frank connected with his home country was his mother. When she passed away, he found there was a void he needed to fill. He found himself missing the possibility to speak French, so he got closer to the French community of Brisbane.
Frank became president of the French Army Veterans of Australia and more recently decided to be a volunteer assessor for the 2022 elections.
French election polling station officials (l-r) Frank Lamy, assessor, Alain Etchegaray, station president, and Jocelyne Poirier, assessor, prepare for duty at Tingalpa State School on June 19.
“I’m very happy to have reconnected with French people and I try to get involved in several things now.
“I have a daughter who was born here, […] and I would like her to have this heritage, that there would be French people around [her],” he says.
His 22-year-old daughter is part of his organisation, but while she “never shows up to meetings”, she “receives the emails and knows it exists”. Her French heritage is not solely something on the other side of the planet that they never talk about.
Frank Lamy in front of the Tingalpa State School on Sunday June 19th 2022.
There are a lot of people like Frank was for many years, who are French citizens living in Australia but don’t want to get involved in French politics or even in the community. The first indicator of that lack of interest in politics is the percentage of those registered to vote through the consulate to the overall French population in the country.
As of 2018, there were more than 24,810 French citizens residing in Australia who registered at the embassy while it is estimated there would be in between 50 000 to 70 000 French people residing in the country as a whole.
The representation of voters is very low with only 28?34% of those registered as voters in 2022 in the 11th constituency comprising Australia, Fidji, Kiribati, Papouasie-New-Guinea, Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu to have been at the polls for the legislative elections.
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Head of Queensland Operations & National Head of Events for the French Australian Chamber of Commerce (FACCI) Claire Dupré explains the basic procedure to stay connected with France while residing abroad is to register on the consulate list to receive information about important events concerning French citizens such as the terms and conditions of the elections.
Mrs Dupré says since a large proportion of French citizens aren’t registered, the question would be more of a communication nature, whether French people would get properly informed on the perks of registering at the consulate.
Geneviève Evin, a French citizen who has lived in Melbourne for 35 years said she has aways felt the desire to fulfill her duty to vote.
“We keep family and cultural links with France and are very interested with what happens there. We think it is important for us to be able to elect our representants.
“It is less motivating to vote for the legislatives because our 11th constituency is very diverse and represents French people scattered across three different continents,” she said.
For those like Genevieve who do vote, it is sometimes difficult to access the consulate network.
This was the case of Celine Dro, a Franco-Australian who has lived in Australia for seven years and who knew she would be visiting France at the time of the elections.
To vote by proxy, she had to register her request by a French citizen representant of the consulate, yet those representants don’t necessarily live full time in one location but rather visit different cities in Australia throughout the year.
As a result, she and the person she was giving power of attorney to would have had to go to the consulate in Sydney since no one was visiting Brisbane at the right time. The appointment had to be during a week day from Monday to Thursday and it was impossible for them with work, so she simply decided not to vote.
…
Polling stations for the French elections are only located in Australia’s major cities, which makes it difficult for anyone residing in a regional area to be able to vote.
Mrs Dupré said the possibility for people to vote online for the legislative elections this year was an improvement as it opened the possibility for every French citizen residing abroad to access the vote without leaving home as long as they were registered on the consulate list.
However, this new element deemed to facilitate participation in elections has seen a number of issues arising, with certain email addresses not working or certain providers considering the message coming from the French government to be a spam.
By Estelle Sanchez and Teagan Laszlo / First published in June 2021
Australia’s Refugee Week, organised by the Refugee Council of Australia, is the annual opportunity to educate the public about refugees and celebrate the positive contributions they make to Australian society.
Brisbane locals are commemorating the annual 2021 International Refugee Week from Saturday June 20 to Saturday June 26.
Welcoming Australia’s Campaigns and Communication Manager Kate Leaney said Refugee Week is an opportunity to inform everyone about the challenges and experiences refugees face all over the world.
“We’re in a time where more people than ever are being forcibly displaced from their homes, and it is a global responsibility to respond to people seeking safety,” said Ms Leaney.
Department of Multicultural Affairs spokesperson Kelly Daniels said the Queensland Government is committed to supporting refugees as they integrate into Queensland society.
“Under the Queensland Multicultural Policy: Our Story, Our Future, the Queensland Government has made a specific commitment to support refugees and people seeking asylum, including by reducing barriers and creating opportunities for them to participate and contribute to all aspects of life,” said Ms Daniels.
Ms Daniels said the Queensland Government helps fund Communify Queensland’s Asylum Seeker and Refugee Assistance program, which delivers financial and material aid, case management and coordination support to refugees in Queensland.
“Since 2017 the Queensland Government has provided $4.688 million to the ASRA program, with a further commitment from July 2021 of $8.3 million over four years.
“This approach is providing the critical foundational support required so that individuals can move from merely surviving, towards greater independence,” said Ms Daniels.
Brisbane resident Gema came to Australia from Rwanda under humanitarian aid, and with help from Brisbane refugee support organisation Refugee Connect, she settled into Brisbane.
She is now exercising as a social worker with the organisation so she can assist other refugees who experience similar circumstances.
She explains Refugee Connect understood that a refugee is not only looking for a place to settle because of insecurity. It is as important to be able to go out and work and to have this friend who can help them understand the system.
As Gema said, settling into the Brisbane community takes more than just a house, and that’s where local organisations like Refugee Connect are playing a key role.
Refugee Connect founder Ken Myers said the organisation currently supports twelve refugees navigate their new life in Brisbane, whether it is helping them find a job, a home, or book doctor appointments.
He also pioneered the ‘friendship model,’ which encourages volunteers to walk alongside and be a friend to refugees while they integrate into Brisbane society.
Ken Myers founded small Christian based not-for-profit organisation Refugee Connect with his wife Ros in 2008.
As Refugee Connect is a volunteer-based organisation, Mr Myers is adamant their volunteers do not need to be trauma counsellors, social workers or experts but only need to have an open heart.
Emma Gomez, who fled Venezuela with her husband after being persecuted by the nation’s government, understands exactly how challenging and isolating fleeing a country is.
Emma Gomez arrived in Brisbane in 2019 from Venezuela
Ms Gomez and her husband arrived in Australia two years ago and with help from Red Cross Australia and Refugee Connect, have integrated into their local community.
“[Refugee Connect] helped me to find a place to live and a job. We met very, very, very special people that are now part of our family,” Ms Gomez said.
“So now we feel settled, and we feel part of this country and we are giving our best to contribute to society,”
Ms Leaney said despite the “divisive and negative” rhetoric surrounding refugees in Australian media and politics, Australians are typically accepting of refugees when they meet them.
“We find that when people are able to connect and see people who are refugees for the common humanity, it changes the game.
“You can have rhetoric and media that says one thing, but when you’re in a community with someone you can see that actually we are all just people trying to call this place home and build community together,”
Dim is looking at the jump ahead of him. Just a few meters away, there is a platform where two trees are planted, nearly touching. It creates the illusion of a small circle made out of the twisted trunks. The young man intents to jump while flipping through the small interstice on to the other side of the platform. If he’s not precise enough, he could hit the tree in full swing and end up with a concussion or worse. Concentrated, he’s calculating. His friends cheer him up. He flips his hair on the side, wipes the bottom of both his feet, makes sure no one is coming his way as he starts running. Everything goes fast. He takes a run-up, flips in between the trunks. His shoulder brush past one of the trees, but he makes it to the other side only slightly shaken.
“That one was scary”, he said.
If you go out on the street in Brisbane, near Jacobs Ladder at the corner of Turbot Street and Edward Street, you’re likely to find the parkour jam, a group of young people, mainly all males training towards the benches or the stairs in the square, attempting jumps. If you’re lucky, you might see one going all in for a precision jump of several meters combined with a flip, to then climb a wall, and disappear. Impressive but scary. But why are these individuals so intently risking their safety or even their lives to rise up to a challenge?
Dim practising parkour at Jacobs Ladder in Brisbane on September 22 2021
During childhood, everything was an adventure. Everything around us a pretext to discover, climb, jump, and play. We were not scared of anything. Of course, we would only jump from a foot-tall step or bench. But our imagination would do the rest and we would envision our jump to be a few meters taller and that we just escaped out of a burning building. As we grew up, we learned how to act “normally” in a public setting. We became more scared of what could turn out wrong, of how we could hurt ourselves. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where you stand, it’s not the case for everyone. Dim, others in Brisbane and around the world are still doing what everyone loved to do as kids after having reached adulthood. They decided that their way of hanging out together will involve attempting tricks and jumps in the streets. Except this time around, the stakes are higher, the jumps aren’t necessarily close to the ground and all movement is permitted and explored.
From the perspective of someone who sees only a few seconds of a big jump, these guys seem to be daredevils who could fall and break their neck any second, but keep on asking for more. Others, maybe more like me, might get intrigued, remember what it was like as a kid to play with everything around you and could even wonder what would happen if they attempted it. There’s something compelling in seeing athletes perform crazy movements and jumps in the middle of the street, where everyone walks. Their space is accessible, it’s looking at us, daring us to wonder: why not me ?
On a Thursday night, about ten people gathered at sunset in a corner of West End, right next to the rowing club. No gear, not a lot of light on the street. Josh, the teacher, suggested exercises to the group and they would execute. First, using the barriers on the bikeway, he would ask his students to go through the bars without touching them, adopting a sort of cat walk that would help them have fluidity in their movements. Once a few people have had a chance to try it, he would show different movements they could do: climbing the barrier to cross it, using the lower bar to help you if needed, or if you could, jumping feet first on the higher bar.
Parkour training on Thursday night in West End in September 2021
The idea of their warm-up was to start with simple movements and test that they would feel completely comfortable with it, that they would be in complete control of their body while doing it. Some people were coming for the first time like George, curious to try parkour after one of his friends told him about it. Others, like Alex, were more advanced and confident in their abilities.
Parkour practitioners on a Thursday night in West End in September 2021. We see them train either on their own or together, each at their own pace.
There was no rush to finish a movement. Whether it was on a post, on a barrier, on a wall. Alex had a perfect control over what he decided to do. It wasn’t necessarily about the difficulty of what he was attempting, but rather, a precision in his movements. He radiated such confidence that he would have made anyone question how much they knew their own bodies.
As the night became darker, they started to move along their environment, stopping whenever a new opportunity came to someone’s vision. Walking on polls and crossing them, attempting it in synchronisation with one of their friends. Everyone spread out, finding their own thing to work on. Mini groups were created whenever people wanted to work on the same challenge
Really quickly, I felt like my camera was preventing me from completely embracing what was taking place in front of me. I decided to put it down and give it a go myself. The nighttime set a particular atmosphere to the scene. It felt like I’ll be able to do more, I didn’t have the same vision of the obstacles as I would have had in daylight. The movements everyone was doing weren’t spectacular, there wasn’t an inhuman aspect to it and I quickly realised the discipline might not be only about attempting the biggest jump. I ended up asking one of the girls how she was able to climb a wall and attempted it myself. She explained the technique, I got it pretty fast but the strength was missing. I really wanted to make it and we started to jump alternatively for a substantial amount of time. While I didn’t make it to the top of that wall, I understood the drive to try again and again on a movement, to want something so badly that you could stay there for hours on end until you got it right.
Parkour as a vocation
Ansel Kunert, 23, discovered parkour in 2013 via a YouTube video. He instantly loved it and attempted it right after. Since then, he has never stopped practicing with his friends. From the beginning, he considered it as a definite, an activity he wouldn’t have to constantly question whether he wanted to keep doing it. It was just a foregone conclusion. “Parkour is one of those things that just gives me infinite energy. If everything else in my life changes, I’ll still always do parkour. Like I’ll be homeless and I’ll still be doing jumps, yeah.” Parkour allows him to have fun with his friends whilst testing his own limits and getting to know himself better.
“For me it’s like, I can show who I am through my movements. It’s an expression of yourself. You can create a course and the tricks you put in it, they’re made by your mind.”
Ansel Kunert
What Ansel enjoys the most about the discipline is the freedom people benefit from in their movements and the creativity that comes out of it. People can take ideas and movements from other disciplines such as martial arts, skating, gymnastics or breakdance and incorporate it into parkour. “People do such strange tricks. Some people would say: ‘that is so dumb’. But other people would be like: ‘No one’s done that before’.”
Every week, a new trick is invented, practitioners push the boundaries of what it considered possible and it is a thrilling experience. “Tricks that were crazy in 2014 are just not crazy anymore. We are all raising as a sport. Everyone’s skill levels come up altogether”, Ansel said.
Brisbane Parkour Association at the Redcliffe Kitefest on Saturday 8 September 2021. Dion and Kier are performing a chase tag to showcase their skills.
Brisbane has a strong community of practitioners within parkour, an association dedicated to providing lessons to those curious about it and athletes that either choose to stay on their own in the jam community or join the association.
Vice president of the Brisbane Parkour Association and parkour teacher, Josh Wit, has trained with the founders of parkour in Europe during a few months and considers parkour as a way to develop one’s ability to overcome obstacles, both physical and mental. For him, it involves movement that will help if one is in an emergency situation.
Josh Wit, parkour practitioner, and teacher.
“There is no set defined delineation of: ‘you’re capable of this, therefore you’re at this level.’ […] It’s all about simply progressing from where you are,” he said.
Josh Wit
Josh prefers measuring challenges by sight. It’s not about considering how far he can go based on what he did last week. It’s having done it so many times and being so comfortable with his own body, that he knows, whether he can do it or not by looking.
“I was looking at a jump, which some people had done, precision jump, which is jumping from one wall to another. It was about one meter high.
“One of the founders said he was prepared to spot me. He was standing there encouraging me, but I was […] looking at it: “Mmm not too sure!” And then he told me: ‘Don’t do it if you can’t do it because I can’t catch you.’ “
“So did you do the jump ?,” I asked.
“No, I backed out because I didn’t feel it.”
Josh explains people from outside only get that one instant of a stunt. They would imagine themselves in that scenario, realise how little they could do in that position and automatically would consider it as dangerous.
“If a seven-year-old was looking at jumping off that bench there, you’d think: ‘No, they’re going to hurt themselves, they really shouldn’t be doing that’. But if I jump off something which is higher to account for my height, something that’s equally difficult, you wouldn’t blink. […] It’s only because I’ve done it before, because I’ve trained. But to the toddler, it’s like they’re going to die.”
Josh Wit
This way of seeing parkour aligns with how the discipline started in the beginning.
Founder of the Parkour Generations organisation, Dan Edwardes, has witnessed the emergence of parkour, spent some time in France with the founders and brought the discipline back to England where it grew exponentially from there. “This is how it began. It was a way of training yourself, your body, and your mind to be as capable as competent and as resilient as possible in any scenario. ‘Be strong to be useful’ was their motto’.” Dan explains all the members put their input into creating parkour. They were young men, predominantly, with one or two women and they were influenced by ideas of superheroes and martial arts, anime and ninjas, or soldiers in action. “They drew from all these elements to try to find their own way to become a version of those heroic ideals and models,” he said.
A split between old and new generation
As parkour grew worldwide, a split started to appear as omnipresent in the community of practitioners between those who practiced parkour for what it was in the beginning and those who discovered it through its performative aspect. For Dan Edwardes, the spread of the discipline through social media and platforms like YouTube transformed the vision of the discipline, by making it look like something that necessarily had to be a performance.
“People don’t want to watch hard physical training, or people climbing mountains, it’s not so interesting right?
“But you do want to watch some guy doing a crazy flip over a wall and landing in the water twenty meters away.”
Dan Edwardes
“So that became the thing to do because there was an audience for that. Obviously more people are going to start on seeing that, training that, and copying that,” he said.
By only looking at the community in Brisbane, the split is already obvious between some practitioners that are part of the association and those who started to train on their own through the jam. The “daunting lessons” Ansel, Dim and his friends all took at the Brisbane Parkour Association, where you crawl on the ground, repeat the same movements a lot and do conditioning, did not align with what they wanted to do. “People can get stuck in those sort of lessons. Learning the same thing every week. We got bored of them and we just wanted to train normally”. Parkour has to remain a fun activity first and foremost for them. It has to be about the movements they want to try, not necessarily about discipline. “The reason we get the skills that we do, is because we do what we want to do” said Ansel.
Sean Harrison and Alexis Evans have practised parkour for several years with the BPA association, and on the opposite, they don’t need to go for big stunts, but rather consider that they challenge themselves physically enough to be able to feel more confident in how they use their environment and bodies.
For Dan Edwardes, that older version of parkour that aims to use training as personal development would be a smarter way to look at things because it would help people become better humans. If training has a positive impact on people, they’re more than likely to be of benefit to society.
“Showing off with big stunts, it’s fun for a 30 seconds YouTube video, but what does it really do for the development of the human race?
“So, you have to decide as an individual, what do you want ?”, Dan asked.
D. Edwardes
It seems there are as many ways to consider parkour as there are practitioners. Some consider there are major splits in the community: people who do the right thing and others who don’t practice correctly. Isn’t it funny to realise when comparing what people do on a training session, when it all comes down to the movements, all those differences aren’t that noticeable.
People are gathering in a group in the streets and have challenges in mind on how to use their environment: it’s what brought them together. They give each other advice, train for long hours and at the end go have dinner together.
Parkour is freedom of movement, creativity in perpetual evolution. It is more of a large principle of life than it is a set theory as a discipline. It is what people make of it.
Jacques Maudy was born to a French mother and a father of Spanish origin. As he’s part of the 1968 generation, he explained he has always been interested in understanding the world and how to make it better. He came to Australia in 1995, when he was about forty after he decided to sell his advertising agency in Paris. He started his career as a photographer reporter afterwards, and has based his reporting work on Myanmar, also known as Burma, for the past 10 years. He wrote a book about colonial architecture in Yangon, as well as several articles that were published in The Irrawaddy, Mizzima, and the Myanmar Times. Jacques developed a very strong bond with Myanmar during his time there, as he witnessed widespread solidarity and desire for change among the people, which was unlike any other place.
During one of his travels in 2012 in the Mergui islands, a territory forbidden for foreigners since 1947, he recalled the incomparable help he received from the Burmese people in his team. Jacques was reporting on the Myanmar navy and the collusion with fishermen from Thailand, who were fishing with dynamite, and the army was trying to arrest him. “For two weeks, we played hide and seek with them and they couldn’t get me. I was protected by my team [that] was getting information from islanders.” On his way back from the island to the mainland, Jacques had to take the boat for a seven hours trip. He recalls being on the tarmac with 100 Burmese people looking at him, who could tell he was a Westerner with a camera and wasn’t allowed to be there. The army was coming to patrol the boat and look for them.
“Suddenly, – I was with my partner – they (their team) put us on the ground, they [bend us], they put [something on] top of us and they sit on us”. The army arrived on the boat and started searching but couldn’t find them.
When they left, ten minutes later, the people on the boat were applauding.
“No one dobbed us. They were risking their freedom. No one dobbed us.”
Jacques Maudy
“It wouldn’t happen in Australia. There would be a dickhead saying: ‘Hey, the guy you’re looking for is here’.” Jacques said this was the spirit of resistance in Myanmar and he became fuelled with passion to support the people’s quest for independence from the army.
Known as the Tatmadaw, the Myanmar army staged a coup, a “junta”, at the beginning of February this year, seizing the power from the democratic government party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). In the next days, the Myanmar people started to resist the oppression of the coup. “The CDM is a Civil Disobedience Movement of people who are refusing to work for the junta, which means that they have no income at the moment. And the challenge is to channel the money to these people so [that] they can pursue their resistance on the ground”, he explained.
Jacques Maudy met Nay Myo Steven Han, a Burmese who moved to Australia ten years ago, through an interview they did together to raise Australians’ awareness of the situation in Myanmar.
As the communication officer for QUT Myanmar society, Steven is part of the Myanmar Student Association Australia coalition, created by students to raise money to the protests for freedom in the country. One of their fundraisers on GoFundMe, obtained over $50,000 of donations, which Steven qualifies as getting “momentum”. They were able to distribute some of the funds raised already to several organisations in Myanmar.
“The way that we move the funds, I would like to keep it confidential. I don’t want it to give away how we are doing it, because they could become targets in Myanmar and also in here as well. But we have our people on the ground, who are doing a lot of work there to get the funds out”, Steven explained.
Jacques and Steven are both optimists the situation could turn in the people’s favour. They both agreed the main goal of the army is to gain wealth through this coup, to protect their financial interests. “But when people stop working, when they stop this mechanism, [the Tatmadaw] cannot create money and wealth out of the whole country. So they are losing money. They cannot do more investments. They can only have power,” Steven said.
Gerhard Hoffstaedter, a UQ researcher specialising in South-East Asian politics, explained the behaviour of the army during the coup didn’t seem to be a united front but rather a disorganised movement likely to stay at the limit of what is accepted by the international community. “Often you see one or two people shooting and other people just standing by. It’s not an all-out war where the police and army [would be] strategically deployed,” he said. That’s why the army would not go as hard as it could, Jacques added to the researcher’s comment. “700 dead in 70 days, that’s 10 per day. Compared to what Pinochet did [in 1973] in Chile in one week, when he killed 10,000 people, it’s a joke. So they’re going on the fine line here. They want to do business with the West”, he said.
The CDM has seen a lot of young people leading the movement, and Professor Hoffstaedter explains this phenomenon is a consequence of the past few years in a country where people have been able to taste democracy. Steven described these young people as more passionate with a completely different mindset because they grew up in the age of information.
“It’s not just the school books that they’re reading. They have social media, they can talk to other people or see what’s happening in these free countries like Australia. It’s ingrained in them,” he said.
Steven
Min Hnaing, 34, whom her family and friends call Nana, is from Myanmar, lives in Yangon, and has been involved in the protests for the past few weeks. She said she has never experienced anything similar. “My mom and my brother, they didn’t allow me to go out to do the protests, because they’ve been worried that, maybe some sniper will be there shooting”. But she replied to them: “It’s okay, I have to go. If I don’t go, and people like me are scared then, who is going in my place to get this democracy?” When COVID-19 cases were rising in Myanmar, she wanted to go volunteer in the hospitals. Her mother and brother didn’t allow her to go and at the time she agreed to listen to them. This time, the decision was too important and she joined the protests.
Even if the youth is leading the movement, it doesn’t mean the older generations are not involved. Jacques explains these older generations have rebellion in their blood too, as they have been through a first coup in 1988. Therefore, they know what it’s like to be subjugated by an invading force and now want to avoid it for their children. “This is a transgenerational resistance”, he affirmed.
While people are ready to suffer or even die for this cause, Professor Hoffstaedter says unifying Myanmar remains one of the key aspects that need to be resolved, as a large number of different ethnic groups are living together in the country.
“There is so much conflictual history between the different ethnicities in Myanmar and so many different interests, that there’s still a long way to go to show a unified front against the junta”, he added.
Professor Hoffstaedter
Jacques says he’s confident the current attack of the army against all the ethnic groups, even on the majority Bamar (main ethnicity), is an opportunity for the country to come together. They would now recognise a common enemy and a common goal to achieve, which is a federation. “There is a big bully in the schoolyard and the big bully in the schoolyard has made people who weren’t friends become friends”, he summarised. And in fact, some of the ethnic groups/armies have already said publicly they were in favour of the CDM. “It’s a defining moment. It’s like the end of World War II in Europe. If there is a common victory against the dictatorship, it’s going to create a solidarity”, Jacques said. “If the outcome of the struggle is a federal constitution, there is no way anything’s going to break it. Now the challenge is to get there.”
But to get there, the people of Myanmar need the support of the international community that has for now been reluctant in doing so. Myanmar has been calling for the United Nations to come in with a military force, and Jacques and Steven explain it is not likely to happen as long as countries focus on their financial interests that depend on the army. “Why a country like Australia is not forefront, [having a] leading role in condemning this?”, Steven asked. According to Jacques, Australia would be complicit of the actions of the Tatmadaw, if it decided not to impose targeted sanctions like freezing bank accounts or seizing their real estate in the country. He explains, however, that the advantage could turn in the people’s favour if they can show that the countries aren’t going to get any financial advantages from supporting the army. “Countries are competing for financial power everywhere. So that means that, at one stage, they’re pragmatic. ‘Is the game we are playing, serving us or not serving us? And what the CDM is doing is demonstrating that whoever is betting on [the army], they’ll lose the bet. This is our job here.”
For Jacques, the conflict would not only be about Myanmar itself but rather a universal issue, as its resolution would depend on whether countries put financial interests before human rights and democracy. “And we’re not going to let it happen, because when you see someone in the schoolyard, who’s beating up a guy who’s half his size, if you do nothing, it’s like you beat him up yourself !”
Steven said people could think because he is the one who is Burmese, he would have that passion to defend Myanmar. But “you can hear it from Jacques [too]”, he said. “Why do I feel so strongly about Myanmar when I’m not Burmese?”, Jacques asked. “It’s nothing to do with being Burmese […], it’s about being a human being”,
