A World of Pain and Abuse

How a UNICEF Photo Makes the West's Heart Ache

40-year-old groom sitting beside his 11-year-old future bride in Afghanistan, brought Stephanie Sinclair top honors in the annual Photo of the Year contest sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

At Der Spiegle, Leon de Winter writes:

An 11-year-old child bride sits next to her 40-year-old fiance. For UNICEF, this was the Photo of the Year. Dutch writer Leon de Winter laments the perversity of this wedding picture and the frightening relativism of the West.

There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual -- without disgust, nausea and rage. We are beholding the fiercest barbarism imaginable. But a carefree cultural relativism -- which this age has donned as its outward manifestation of decadent indifference -- allows many to simply look away. They turn away from the sight of an 11-year-old girl, who is about to be raped by the man sitting next to her.

The girl was sold by her parents, even if they probably wouldn't use that word. The caption that came with the photo quoted the parents as saying that they "needed the money."

The girl's soon-to-be husband promised to send his 11-year-old bride to school, but the women living there in the village of Damarda in Afghanistan's Ghor province don't believe this fairytale. They predict that the girl will bear children soon. "Our men don't need educated women," they point out.

A dowry was paid for the girl. The dowry is part of the cultural fabric of the clan-based society. As producers of newborns, women are valuable possessions. A woman can bear sons and fighters, who will defend the family and its honor. Men are only charged with protecting them against kidnappers and thieves, and women need only accept the power of the male members of the family -- "for their own benefit."
Love Is a Word from the Decadent West

It is likely that all of the female forebears of the girl in the photograph were likewise sold -- and the girl, no doubt, saw it as her fate. At the same time, she realizes that what is happening to her is not right. She might think it is "natural" for a young girl to be sold, but she also knows that it's neither good nor legitimate for her to spend the rest of her life as this man's slave. It is a type of knowledge that has little to do with experience. Rather, it is knowledge that is rooted in humanity, and in the hopes and dreams of a little girl.

The man in the image is oblivious of his wrongdoing. He's only doing what his forefathers did. Sticking to traditions increases the chances of survival. His seed will create a new person and strengthen the clan. He will impregnate this girl without love and without regret, since love is a word from far-off stories and songs, a word from the decadent West, where people have no comprehension of the harshness of life in the desert and of war without end, which is the essence of life in this part of the world.

What we witness in this photograph is an unadorned view of humanity's collective past, of the horror of our brutal nature. Love, tenderness, beauty, individuality and respect are all phenomena that we have imposed upon our nature. Since time immemorial, this nature has allowed only the strongest to survive. In our Western consciousness, we have suppressed this nature with conviction and success. This image shows a small, everyday moment that wouldn't surprise anyone in the Taliban -- but looks quite different to our eyes.

A Bold Statement in the Era of Political Correctness

Our eyes behold an abomination. Our eyes have learned to see the world from the perspective of a slowly acquired sense for humanity. And although more and more voices tell us that we -- the former colonialists and imperialists -- have lost the right to judge other cultures, we know just as well as this girl that this marriage is wrong.

I believe that there are regressive cultures. In an era of political correctness, this is a tricky statement. But there is no other statement that can be made about this image. We behold a regressive man, who is taking what he has purchased.
Many of us in the West are convinced that our presence in Afghanistan cannot be justified, that our troops should withdraw and that Afghanistan should be left to the Afghans. They ask themselves: Who are we to believe that it is inhumane to sell an 11-year-old girl? Who are we to impose our values so vehemently on the Afghans, on this man and on this girl?

I don't have a clue who we are. But I know that this universe is not only a universe of iPods, Disneylands, CO2 penalties, tax write-offs, and New Year's sales in our department stores. No, I know that this is also a universe of human rights. I know that this universe is deeply shaken -- right down to its core -- by the suffering of this lonely, lonely little girl.

Second-place honors went to GMB Akash, of Bangladesh, whose winning photo shows a 12-year-old boy toiling in a Bangladeshi brickyard. UNICEF studies conclude that 4.7 million children between five and 14 years of age are involved in child labor in that country.

"A Mother's Journey": The American photographer Renee C. Byer took this picture as part of a series about a single mother with five children and a son suffering from terminal cancer. He died in 2006.

Finbarr O'Reilly recieved an honorable mention for his photo "A House of Hope," an image of Lopez Vidal, right, and Aron Masahuka, both afflicted with polio, languishing in an ill-equipped hospital in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Wolfram Hahn made a series of photos titled "A Disenchanted Playroom" to accompany a study about the television-viewing habits of German children.

The third-place photograph was taken by German photographer Hartmut Schwarzbach. His picture depicts a nine-year-old girl jumping in glee on her birthday in the midst of a smoldering garbage dump outside of Manila.

Hatem Moussa won an honorable mention for "Life in Gaza": Palestinian children were rushed from a car into a hospital after their homes were hit by Israeli shelling in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya in April, 2006. An eight-year-old child was killed in the attack and 13 other children were injured.

Musa Sadulayew made this photo as a part of a series called "Chechnya's Forgotten Children."

Boys hang from a bar for five minutes as part of a physical training exercise at the Gymnastics Hall of the Shanghai University of Sports. The photo was part of Nir Elias's series "Pain Threshold -- Sports Education in China."

"Sumo Boys in Japan": Steven Achiam took a series of pictures depicting life in the Hiragaya sumo club, where boys train until they have beaten a strong opponent 10 times.

Joseline Ingabire, 37, an HIV-positive Rwandan woman, is pictured with her daughter Leah Batamuliza, 11. This photo by Jonathon Torgovnik accompanied a story in Newsweek magazine about women who were raped during the Rwandan civil war and their children today.

When The World's Stocks of Tuna Gets Low, What Do You Make Into Sushi?

Chunks of raw tuna at Tsukiji, the famed fish market in Tokyo. The growing demand for sushi in countries like Russia and China and depleting tuna stocks are raising prices, and causing chefs to try other ingredients.
_{[photo by Ko Sasaki]}

The NYTimes reports:

Sushi made with deer meat, anyone? How about a slice of raw horse on that rice?

These are some of the most extreme alternatives being considered by Japanese chefs as shortages of tuna threaten to remove it from Japan’s sushi menus — something as unthinkable here as baseball without hot dogs or Texas without barbecue.

In this seafood-crazed country, tuna is king. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese. So when global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the world’s rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.

Nightly news programs ran in-depth reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores. At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi variations like avocado rolls.

“It’s like America running out of steak,” said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan’s national union of sushi chefs. “Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi.”

The problem is the growing appetite for sushi and sashimi outside Japan, not only in the United States but also in countries with new wealth, like Russia, South Korea and China. And the problem will not go away. Fishing experts say that the shortages and rising prices will only become more severe as the population of bluefin tuna — the big, slow-maturing type most favored in sushi — fails to keep up with worldwide demand.

Last year, dozens of nations responded by agreeing to reduce annual tuna catches in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans by 20 percent in an effort to stabilize populations. But the decision only seemed to crystallize growing fears in Japan about tuna shortages, helping to push up prices of the three species of bluefin — northern, Pacific and southern — that are considered the best tuna to eat raw.

Since the start of last year, the average price of imported frozen northern and Pacific bluefin has risen more than a third, to $13 a pound, according to Japan’s Fisheries Agency.

Wholesalers say that competition from foreign fishing fleets and buyers has made the top-quality tuna increasingly hard to come by here. Tadashi Oono, who sells big red slabs of tuna from a stall in the sprawling Tsukiji fish market of Tokyo, said that three years ago, he routinely sold two or three top-grade bluefin every day. This year, he said, he sometimes finds only two or three tuna of that quality to sell in a month.

Some culinary enthusiasts say the anguish over tuna shortages may also reflect deeper anxieties in Japan about its recent economic decline, especially when compared with neighboring China.

After World War II, tuna became a symbol of the economic might that allowed Japan to dominate the buying of tuna on world markets from Boston to Cape Town. Japan now consumes about 60,000 tons a year of the three bluefin species, or more than three-quarters of the world’s annual catch, according to the Fisheries Agency.

But as more top-grade tuna ends up in other countries, there are concerns that Japan could one day lose its status as global tuna superpower.

“Fish that would have gone to Tokyo are now ending up in New York or Shanghai,” said Sasha Issenberg, the author of “The Sushi Economy” (Gotham, 2007). “This has been devastating to Japan’s national esteem.”

The tuna shortage is also having a more concrete effect on menus at Japanese sushi bars. Fukuzushi, a midpriced restaurant in a residential neighborhood in Tokyo, is having a tougher time finding high-quality fish at reasonable prices.

The restaurant’s owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, said the current situation reminded him of the last time he had no tuna to sell — in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans when customers refused to buy it. At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked deer meat and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan.

“We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good,” he recalled. “It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell.”

If worse comes to worst, he said, he could always try horse and deer again. The only drawback he remembered was customers objecting to red meat in the glass display case on the counter of his sushi bar.

“One customer pointed and said: ‘You have something four-legged in your fish case? That’s eerie!’ ”

So far, top sushi restaurants have avoided the shortages by paying top yen for premium bluefin caught off domestic ports like Ouma in northern Japan.

“The prices of top-name tuna like Ouma are already as high as they can go,” said Yosuke Imada, owner of Kyubey in the upscale Ginza district of Tokyo. “What will happen is that the prices of lower grades of tuna will rise to catch up.”

That prospect worries Mr. Yamagata of the union of sushi chefs.

Mr. Yamagata, 59, has been experimenting with more creative tuna alternatives at Miyakozushi, a restaurant catering to the business lunch crowd that has been in his family for four generations. He said his most successful substitutes were ideas he “reverse imported” from the United States, like smoked duck with mayonnaise and crushed daikon with sea urchin. He said he now made annual visits to sushi restaurants in New York and Washington for inspiration.

“We can learn from American sushi chefs,” Mr. Yamagata said. “Sushi has to evolve to keep up with the times.”