Jonathan W. Rosen

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

The police firing water cannons and tear gas at protesters in Bujumbura on Sunday. Credit Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

When Faustin Kobagaya fled his northern Burundi home in March, sneaking through the night to the Rwandan border, he was running from what could soon become another violent chapter in his country’s fratricidal history.

As a 10-year-old in 1993, Mr. Kobagaya, a member of Burundi’s Tutsi minority, lost most of his extended family in a wave of ethnic violence that followed the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye. The murder of Ndadaye, a Hutu, unleashed a 12-year civil war in which an estimated 300,000 Burundians were killed. It also helped embolden anti-Tutsi extremists in Rwanda, who, only six months later, would begin to carry out Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.…  Seguir leyendo »

Late last month, Israel announced that it had named the hoopoe as its national bird. The long-billed hoopoe, which has a punky orange crest tipped black, is barely mentioned in the Bible (as an unclean animal that may not be eaten) but it plays a role in rabbinic literature and in Islamic lore as well. It is celebrated, among other things, as the messenger that shuttles between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is in other words well suited to the symbolic burden the country has placed on it.

The idea that birds can be emissaries to a battered world — like the dove and raven sent out by Noah — motivated Israel’s decision to adopt a national bird as part of its commemoration of 60 years of statehood.…  Seguir leyendo »