Millennial Letters

These anti-government protesters in Egypt are really something. Gathering in Tahrir Square to overthrow the government might seem so two years ago, but activists there are at it again with the opposition’s “Rebel” campaign, set to kick off in Cairo on Friday. Amid all the ruckus over the planned million-man rally, in which protesters are expected to demand a vote of no-confidence in the nation’s young presidency amid calls for snap elections, 20-something Egyptian journalist and award-winning activist Nora Younis explains why Egyptians refuse to be silenced.

All eyes are on Washington as lawmakers revisit the events leading up to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi last fall, but how about hearing from an actual … Libyan?

Amid all the brouhaha over the Obama administration’s response to the attacks, witnesses told lawmakers on Wednesday how Libyans put their lives on the line to help Americans during the September 2011 attack in Benghazi that killed the US ambassador and three others.

A 25-year-old Libyan living in Egypt, who asked to use the common name Mohamed due to political ties in his homeland, told Millennial Letters that that kind of bravery speaks to his nation’s future.

“The uprising against Qaddafi was overwhelming, in the good way,” he wrote, referring to the overthrow of longtime leader Muammar Qaddafi in a popular revolution two years ago. “More or less, it was an eye-opener on the vast potential that’s still in the Libyan youth, I hope that the youth can put the same energy they have put into the revolution into the country’s prosperity in all senses.”

Farea al-Muslimi, the hotshot Yemeni youth activist whose heartfelt testimony before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee immediately went viral, says the United States doesn’t even need drones to accomplish their anti-militant aims.

Arguments to the contrary are nothing short of “lying,” he told me as he ran to catch a New York train early Monday.

Ah yes, drones and their discontents—the subject of much debate in Washington recently, not to mention an epic 13-hour filibuster by lawmaker Rand Paul.

A 23-year-old Yemeni activist who spent time in the US, Muslimi was one of six testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and human rights last Tuesday, April 23rd.

Watch out—your Facebook or Twitter profile could be overrun by the Syrian opposition (if your friends so choose), thanks to the new “Syria Updater” program launched by 25-year-old Syrian-American activist Kenan Rahmani.

Here’s how it works—say a Facebook friend of yours, concerned about the situation in Syria, signs up for Syria Updater (official website here). Instead of seeing your friend’s latest “liked” articles, music videos, or pictures float down your mini-feed (for non-Facebookers, a mini-feed is a sort of information highway of all your friends’ Facebook activity), you’d start to hear about battles raging between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the armed opposition seeking his demise. Ditto on Twitter.

Pretty intense, right? It’s certainly an innovative activist approach for interested parties on the sidelines of the Syrian conflict. The project is similar to applications created by marketers eager to access intimate social media networks, but what makes Syria Updater different is that it posts Syria-related statuses directly under participants’ name.

By Jessica Weiss

As she made tea for a Catholic youth group in Buenos Aires five years ago, 21-year-old Agustina Blanco little suspected her lowly mate would grace the lips of a future pope.

On March 13th, when Habemus Papum (“We have a pope”) sounded on TV screens around the world, revealing Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the 266th pope of the Catholic Church, the young Catholic youth leader was shocked.

She ran out of her house toward the city’s cathedral, downtown, where she had heard Bergoglio speak many times. Though one of the first to arrive, she watched the crowd in the plaza swell throughout the late-summer evening. Many who celebrated alongside her were also youth.

“My reaction was of total joy for all that this would signify for Argentina and for Latin America,” she says. “Since March 13th, the pope is a figure who is close to us, who speaks our language, who rides the bus and who walks our streets. That totally demolishes the idea that the church is remote and far.”

With Bill Gates visiting Ghana this week as part of his philanthropic work, technology is in the spotlight.

Social media consultant Mac-Jordan Degadjor, a young Ghanaian blogger who recently briefed the United Nations’ rights council on government freedom and the Internet, told World Affairs that Twitter is becoming a hotbed of activity on the subject.

Here’s a glimpse of current discussion among leading Ghanaians active on the popular microblogging website:

Photo Credit: SandisterTei

Youth in Ghana are pressing for political reform from their cell phones, according to 27-year-old Mac-Jordan Degadjor. He says the rapid rise of a mobile phone culture has been revolutionary for Ghana—so much so that Internet cafes have become downright passé.

Speaking to World Affairs from the Ghanaian capital of Accra on Wednesday, Degadjor explained:

We have a youth culture of mobile Internet users. Also, the youth is actually accessing information on their phone. They no longer need to go to [an] Internet café to check their e-mail or check their news because … they are able to, like, check Internet on their phones. That is why we are using social media to reach out to the youth more, because if you look at the demographics, a lot of the youth have access to mobile phones or the Internet and they are able to access all of this information on Twitter, and on Facebook, and on blogs, on everything, right from their homes. They don’t need to go to an Internet café anymore.

On International Women’s Day, there’s often a lot of talk about women’s rights, glass ceilings, female politicians, feminist literature, patriarchy, and so on. Less often do you hear from the demographic watching all this perhaps most closely: teen girls.

I know this because I have an eagle-eyed 14-year-old sister. She watches me like a hawk. Who are girls like her around the world watching? What inspires them? How do they see their future? I decided to sound out young women from various countries. Here’s what they said: 

Syria: Bana, 18

Q: What do you want to do with your life?

A: I’d like to do something [I] am potentially good at … something I have the talent for … but in my country, there’s no such thing as embracing and taking care of [one’s] talents or creativity and that’s why I don’t even know what I might actually excel at.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to achieving that?

By Courtney Brooks
Guest Blogger

North Korean refugee Dong-hyuk Shin was born a prisoner. He lived in the notoriously brutal gulag Camp 14 for more than 20 years, and is the only known escapee of what’s known as one of the regime’s “total control zones.” He told the United Nations’ Geneva Summit For Human Rights and Democracy on Tuesday that he was so brainwashed he even informed authorities of his family members’ escape plans, leading to their death—and then was forced to watch their executions.

Read full article here.

Like many men in predominantly Muslim Egypt, Mohamed Abdelfattah was named after Islam’s most famous prophet. But he thinks the faith represented by his namesake is being challenged like never before in modern Egyptian society. While the world warily watches the country’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, also named Mohamed, this young journalist thinks everyone’s missing the real story: Egypt’s seismic search for meaning.

Abdelfattah makes his case by way of a recent debate headlined “Atheism and how atheists think” that was held—of all places—at an old Cairo mosque.

During the event, one 18-year-old Egyptian high school student proclaimed: “As an atheist, I believe that faith is against our very humanity and the source of warfare and bloodshed.” That’s a bold statement in Egypt, and certainly a bold thing to say to a mostly Muslim audience. Indeed, Abdelfattah said it was the first time he’d seen a public meeting on the subject of atheism, which had been considered, he said, “sensitive and taboo” before the opening up of society heralded by the ousting of longtime authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak two years ago.

What happens when a revolutionary film opens in a revolutionary nation? I decided to sound out some politically active young Egyptians to find out. Here’s what they said after seeing Les Misérables, which opened in Cairo a few weeks ago amid ongoing political protests. The film was set to show at the opera house in the capital last night, hours after hundreds of people took to the streets in central Cairo calling for an end to sexual harassment.

With all the to-do over the US military’s decision to allow women in combat, it’s worth noting that women of other nations are already on the front lines in the Middle East and elsewhere—even if they’re not in uniform.

No, this is not where I defer to sexy media photos of young female protesters courageously defying government tanks in recent Arab unrest, despite the bravery on display.

This is about a far more undercover conflict: the fight over female identity in Arab and Muslim societies. What does that mean? That means family dinner conversations about mom’s participation in political protests, for example; it means little girls starting to tell little boys it’s not okay to hit them; it means young ladies asking why they’re still making their brothers’ beds for them.

I’ve got a few questions for the New Yorker’s “overcaffeinated earth child,” as writer Nathan Heller describes himself on Twitter. In the magazine’s January 14th edition, Heller makes a rather uncomprehending case that “twentysomethings are all right,” as part of a critical review of several books on America’s young generation, in which he basically says they aren’t that special. Meaning, they aren’t contributing anything particularly monumental to society—which doesn’t sound all right at all. It sounds kind of lame, actually. He says the generation’s touted differences—extended years of child-free adult independence, for example—are changes best credited to the older generations that really fought for them.

The ghost of a 23-year-old female Indian gang-rape victim who died December 28th still haunts Sindhu, a young Indian woman.*

For her, the phantom lurking behind the tragedy contains the uneasy contours of her own culture. Changing social norms, demographic differences, and technological advances have changed the face of India—for better or for worse. Sindhu believes rapid modernization created such a sense of moral confusion in India that sexual repression has been allowed to fester—with disastrous consequences, as seen by the recent gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi, a horrific event that prompted a national conversation about sexual abuse in India.

But the 19-year-old’s immediate response to the incident was terror. “It scares the hell out of everyone to think what she might have gone through,” she wrote to Millennial Letters from Bangalore, adding:

Millennials had a pretty productive 2012 and are still going strong. The world’s rising generation of 18- to 29-year-olds stands at the forefront of seismic changes in the Middle East and beyond—the latest instance being India, where a 23-year-old rape victim’s death triggered national soul-searching on sexual violence.