Palestinian brings music to refugees

Hamas denies tunnels under UN schools

JERUSALEM, June 10, (AFP): As a boy, Ramzi Aburedwan found himself caught up in the first Palestinian uprising, a well-known photo at the time showing him holding stones to throw at Israeli soldiers.

He has since become a respected musician and composer, who gives back to children from Palestinian refugee camps, like himself.

Today, he provides musical training to around 2,000 of them through his project called Al-Kamandjati, or The Violinist, in Arabic.

Aburedwan, now 38 and who grew up in Al-Amari camp in the occupied West Bank’s Ramallah area, says he hopes to create a “strong future generation capable of expressing itself” through such projects.

Expensive

He launched Al-Kamandjati in 2002, wanting to offer youngsters from the camps and other poor children access to expensive musical instruments and music theory classes.

The violinist, who studied music in Angers in western France, began by collecting instruments donated by various institutions across Europe.

On his return to Ramallah, he extended the project in 2008 to Beirut’s Shatila refugee camp as well as the Bourj elBarajneh camp in Lebanon.

Aburedwan’s project now counts eight music schools and more than 2,000 students aged between five and 18. In March, Palestinian officials named him cultural figure of the year.

The composer, with a neatly trimmed beard, thinks back with pride to the old photo of himself as a child in a red jacket with stones in hand, taken in 1988.

At the time, “we had to protect our camp from the soldiers”, he said of AlAmari, one of the refugee camps set up to house Palestinians displaced by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

With another mass exodus caused by the Six-Day War of 1967, almost eight million Palestinians are considered refugees, with most of them living in camps across the Middle East.

The future is bleak for many who grow up in poverty, and that could have been the case for Aburedwan had fortune

Mouhcine Fikri, 31, was crushed to death in a rubbish truck in October as he tried to prevent the destruction of swordfish which had been confiscated because it was caught not smiled upon him.

As a teenager, he worked odd jobs to earn money where he could, hawking newspapers and doing gardening work for families in Ramallah.

One of the women who hired him “heard something about a scholarship to learn music in France”, he said.

“She proposed my name and I landed in France, where I learned music before starting Al-Kamandjati,” said Aburedwan.

Recently, a group of music students from the Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem, were training along with musicians teaching violin and cello as part of Aburedwan’s programme. “I started to learn music in the Qalandia camp with the Kamandjati group when I was seven,” said Tayib al-Hamouz, 16.

Teacher Montasser Jibreen, 25, started to learn music in 2005 with Kamandjati.

“I played clarinet and after I finished school I got a grant for music at Angers University and was the conductor in the orchestra,” he said.

Beyond teaching music, Aburedwan decided to spend this year inviting musicians from abroad to perform for Palestinians.

Performances have been planned for camps, auditoriums, the ruins of ancient palaces in the West Bank, the blockaded Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.

Dozens of performances were held over 18 days at the ruins of Hisham’s Palace in the West Bank city of Jericho, including Rajasthan gypsy dancers with their colourful dresses.

Dervish

At the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem holy site that includes the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and the Dome of the Rock, whirling dervish dancers performed.

However, Sufi music and dance did not please everyone: Aburedwan and other artists were escorted away from the site by offended worshippers.

But it takes more than that to discourage the kid from the refugee camp.

A few hours later, dozens of people applauded the Turkish dancers at another location on the outskirts of Jerusalem’s Old City.

out of season.

Calls for justice in Morocco’s neglected Rif region have since snowballed into a grassroots movement demanding jobs and

Protesters stand off before police during a demonstration against corruption, repression and unemployment in Al Hoseima, Morocco on June 10. The neglected Rif region has been rocked by social unrest since the death in October of a fishmonger. Mouhcine Fikri 31, was crushed in a rubbish truck as he protested against the seizure of swordfish caught out of season and his death ha sparked fury and triggered nationwide protests. The demonstrations have snowballed,

giving way to a wider protest movement. (AFP)

Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has denied that it or any other militant group built a tunnel under two UN schools in Gaza after its discovery drew a strong UN protest.

Over the years, Gaza’s Hamas rulers have built a labyrinth of tunnels, some passing under the border into Israel which they used to launch attacks during their last conflict in 2014.

On June 1, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) found “part of a tunnel that passes under two adjacent agency schools in the Maghazi camp” during construction work, spokesman Christopher Gunness said on Friday.

Hamas “strongly condemned” the UNRWA statement, saying it would be exploited by Israel to “justify its crimes”.

Hamas had clarified the issue “with all factions and resistance forces, who clearly stated they had no actions related to the resistance in the said location,” the movement said, adding that it respected UNRWA’s work.

Isolated

“The discovery of this terror tunnel operating directly under the classrooms of young children is not an isolated incident, but rather the latest of deeply concerning attempts by Hamas terrorists to systematically exploit the organs of the UN,” he said.

“The latest finding verifies once again that the Hamas cruelty knows no limits including endangering centres of education and using children as human shields,” Danon said.

A Palestinian was killed by Israeli gunfire during clashes in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, said the health ministry of the Islamist movement Hamas which runs the territory.

“Aeid Jumaa, 35, was killed and six other Palestinians were wounded during clashes along the Gaza border (with Israel) north of Jabalia,” ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.

The radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in Gaza issued a statement saying that Jumaa was one of its members and was in fact aged 22.

an end to corruption, dubbed Al-Hirak Al-Shaabi, or Popular Movement. Protesters have rallied nightly in Al-Hoceima since the arrest on May 29 of Al-Hirak leader Nasser Zefzafi and the subsequent detention of dozens of other activists.

Late Friday, more than 1,000 demonstrators — mostly young men and women, some with children — gathered in Al-Hoceima under a heavy police presence to call for Zefzafi and fellow activists to be freed.

Participants cleaned the streets as the protest came to an end shortly before midnight (2400 GMT). (AFP)

Gay Pride in Israel:

Tens of thousands of revellers from Israel and abroad packed the streets of Tel Aviv on Friday for the city’s annual Gay Pride march, billed as the Middle East’s biggest.

Police said they were expecting around 100,000 people, while organisers put the figure at closer to 200,000, with an estimated 30,000 of them from overseas.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that security forces would be keeping a close eye on the event.

“Hundreds of police have closed off the area and are carrying out security measures,” he told AFP. “Police units and border police units and undercover units are in the area.”

A 2015 Gay Pride parade in conservative Jerusalem ended in tragedy when an ultraOrthodox Jewish man got among the marchers, stabbing a 16-year-old girl to death and wounding five others. (AFP)