[LINK] "Worth the Risk?"

Ljubica Grozdanovska's Transitions Online article "Worth the Risk?" is interesting reading for its description of how the lack of economic opportunity in the Republic of Macedonia is encouraging many thousands of Macedonians to risk their lives in decidedly dicey contracts in world conflict zones.

Each year, more than 10,000 Macedonians travel to work in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other high-risk areas, according to sources at the companies who contract the workers. Thousands of other citizens also seek employment in Europe, North America, and Australia. Macedonia has an overall population of just more than 2 million.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is unable to confirm the number of Macedonian crisis-zone workers, or the total number of citizens working outside the country. According to the International Monetary Fund, "Official figures for the number of Macedonians living abroad are outdated, dropped from the 2002 census as politically sensitive after the 2001 security crisis," when government forces fought ethnic Albanian rebels. Based on numbers obtained from countries receiving migrants, however, it is possible that roughly 20 percent to 25 percent of Macedonians live abroad.

With the government exerting weak control over who leaves the country and under what terms, crisis-zone hiring is being conducted with little regard for Macedonian laws about mediating employment. Government officials have said there isn’t much they can do about the situation.

The majority of workers hired are between 35 and 55 years old and who are willing to trade the risks and separation from families to have jobs in a country with a 36-percent jobless rate. The contractors offer good money and steady employment.

Statistics on the number of Macedonians working abroad varies significantly, but Malgorzata Markiewicz's brief study "Migration and Remittances in Macedonia" at the Center for Economic Analyses suggests that at least 15% of Macedonians living abroad, while Joanne van Selm's June 2007 country profile "Macedonia: At a Quiet Crossroads " quotes a figure of 25%. Given Macedonia's relatively low wage levels and high unemployment rates, it's not very surprising that so many expatriates live beyond their country's borders to work and funnel remittances back to their dependents at home. The effects on the wider Macedonian economy, as with the effects on Macedonian society, of this remittance-producing worker diaspora are less known but seem to be overlooked in the crush for survival.

[LINK] "1 in 4 Canadians on Facebook"

From The Toronto Star:

Despite the recent flurry of bad press over the popular social networking site's privacy practices, nearly 8 million Canadians--more than one in four-- have a Facebook profile page, according to an upcoming study by Toronto-based Solutions Research Group, highlights of which were obtained by the Star.

That makes Canada among the most plugged-in Facebook places in the world, boasting the most users of any country outside the United States and a nearly 15 per cent share of Facebook's total subscriber base of 57 million.

The survey of 1,000 Internet users, completed in November, also found that about 85 per cent of Canadian Facebook accounts were added in the past year as the popularity of social networking has exploded on the Web.

And it's not just Canadian teens and so-called "tweens" that are using Facebook to keep tabs on their online "friends."

Kaan Yigit, the president of Solutions Research Group, said roughly half of all Canadian Facebook users are over the age of 30.

"It's wonderfully Canadian because I bet that if I ask you where your family is, you'll say: `They're all over the place'," Yigit said. "And Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with friends and family."

Like online other social networking tools, Facebook allows people to connect with each other through a system of profile pages, friend networks and shared-interest groups.

Toronto alone has nearly 990,000 Facebook users, according to site data, and earlier this year the city was ranked as the site's largest network, although it has since been overtaken by other cities such as London.

Initially created as a way for college students to stay in touch, Facebook's meteoric rise in Canada has come largely at the expense of rival MySpace, another social networking site that was bought two years ago by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million (U.S.).

MySpace only has about a quarter as many members as Facebook in Canada, and adoption already appears to have plateaued, according to Yigit.

In the U.S., by contrast, MySpace remains king with some 72 million subscribers, although Facebook is growing at a faster rate.

Yigit said Canadians' fondness for Facebook probably has something to with specific cultural traits and the "tipping point" effect that occurs as people naturally follow their friends' footsteps online.

He said Facebook's main selling points are its ability to connect users with people they already know and its focus on offering subscribers privacy controls – features that appeal to Canadian sensibilities.

MySpace, by contrast, places more emphasis on giving users a platform to express themselves to a wide audience, which is why several musicians, for example, use the site to distribute their music.

"It's so stereotypical of Canadian versus American character," said Yigit. "Canadians are flocking to social media that's all about staying connected with people you already know, whereas MySpace is about the adventure of meeting new people."

[BRIEF NOTE] Honour killings in the world

One comment that I deleted in yesterday's honour killing of Aqsa Parvez began as an address to "all those who are turning a blind eye to this vicious religion creeped in as a snake in this country.This country use to be called judeo christian today we are a multi racial country,and who ever said that multiculturism works look in the mirror one more time and crie." It went on in that kind of vein, the writer eventually concluding that "I think our troops have some work to do here at home and not just in afganistan."

The conclusion of the commenter can be easily dismissed: I very much doubt that the War Measures Act can be used to justify waging anything close to a war against hundreds of thousands of peaceful people living on Canadian soil, many of whom are Canadian citizens. Still more to the main thrust of the commenter's argument, honour killings are hardly unique to Islamic societies, as explained at National Geographic.

Most honor killings occur in countries where the concept of women as a vessel of the family reputation predominates, said Marsha Freemen, director of International Women's Rights Action Watch at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.

But while honor killings have elicited considerable attention and outrage, human rights activists argue that they should be regarded as part of a much larger problem of violence against women.

In India, for example, more than 5,000 brides die annually because their dowries are considered insufficient, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Crimes of passion, which are treated extremely leniently in Latin America, are the same thing with a different name, some rights advocates say.

"In countries where Islam is practiced, they're called honor killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable," said Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The practice, she said, "goes across cultures and across religions."

More to the point, even in the developed West people who commit crimes of passion have often enjoyed a certain degree of leniency, as Ruth Buddell's post-graduate dissertation "Crimes of Passion: Should they be distinguished from the offence of murder in England and Wales?" outlines, with Mediterranean Europe being particularly prominent.

The conclusion of Danilo Dolci in his A Passion for Sicilians (pages 128 to 129), that crimes of passion are produced by atomized societies where violence is accepted as a legitimate way to settle disputes, seems sound. Dolci's interlocutor further observed that honour killings rarely happened among Sicilian emigrants. Similarly, it's worth noting that this was the first honour killing recorded in Canada.

Leaving these extreme examples of outright murder of women aside, it's not as if Canadians can claim that Canada's component cultures have never sanctioned abuse against uppity women, or uppity members of other groups for that matter. Though the socially-acceptable limits of the particular discriminatory social dysfunction of misogyny take different forms in different contexts and in different societies, the overall justification remains sadly the same.