Ula Ahmed

[Ula Ahmed @LuaAhmed]

@EhJu @Ro_oya Looks like a stained glass window. So beautiful.

[Ula Ahmed @LuaAhmed]

This was my plan too. Love this lady 😂😂😂

[Mariyath Mohamed @EhJu]

When my grandma was 90-something, she wouldn't respond for hours and all our relatives gathered to pay their respects, and once everyone came, maama opened her eyes and said she just wanted to see what people would do when she actually died. 😭

[sav @reverendtollerr]

whenever discussions about suicide come up i always return to this video. it’s the most poignant and empathetic thing i have ever heard someone say on the matter.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Guri Gashi @E_GuriGashi]

Never mind, I found it

[Laila Al-Arian @LailaAlarian]

If she was from any other country, she would have become a global icon

[Mental Health Support Group MV @MhsgMv]

The beginning of the week can be hard for many. We hope you enjoy this photo of two fur-babies cuddling.

Photo: Gizem Gokce on Pexels

[Noah 🔶 @st_noah_of_arc]

A disabled man exhibited symptoms of his uncontrollable disability and it hurt some millionaires' feelings so he's no longer allowed to exist in public spaces. I hope you're all proud of yourselves 👍

[Prapthi @prapthi_m]

When I was being cross-examined by my stalker's defence lawyer in court, he pulled out a dictionary, pointed to the word "harassment" and asked me to read its meaning aloud. I refused.

He then picked one of the dozens of messages my stalker had sent me and asked what exactly was abusive about it. When I asked, "Isn't that abusive language?", the judge reprimanded me for asking questions back. The lawyer, I was told, was merely doing his job.

At one point, the defence lawyer read aloud one of my stalker's disgusting messages. The judge remarked, "oh, our accused is a budding poet," and proceeded to laugh, along with the defence lawyer and a few others in the courtroom.

Procedure is punishment. If a survivor even musters the courage to fight back, the system will make sure she regrets it, questions herself and second-guesses her decision to seek justice every step of the way.

She is made to relive her trauma, defend her dignity, justify her fear and prove, over and over again, that what happened to her was wrong.

The perpetrator gets a defence. The survivor gets put on trial.

Men enable men. And patriarchy has ensured that men occupy most of the positions from which women's experiences are questioned, minimised and dismissed.

We keep getting asked why women don't report sexual violence and harassment. Why we don't fight back. Why we withdraw complaints. Why we choose silence. They are in denial about what we are put through when we do.

[metaphysical lamb @meta_lamb]

if “chances are slim” and “fat chance” both mean the odds are stacked against you, what is the ideal BMI of fate

[އަޅި އަލީ @shaari]

23 years ago today, Evan Naseem was beaten to death by Maafushi prison guards, followed by shootings that killed 3 more inmates. The most significant turning point in the country's modern history.
https://t.co/4F0GhM1vrV

[Maashie 🇵🇸 @Maashie]

Nan vaany bulhaa 🤡🤡🤡

[Aimina @Aamina2u]

You only have to pay 2000 MVR for a single child and 1000 for each additional child, as child support. This not enough as half of medical, school, accommodation, transport etc. That’s $88 per month and $44 for additional children. I know these laws were made by men.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

His own family inherited a home in Palestine that had belonged to a Palestinian family forced out in 1948.

As a child, Bachar found wooden toys belonging to Palestinian children who had lived there.His mother told him “they had fled when soldiers came”
Nice way of saying, we killed them.

[އަޅި އަލީ @shaari]

This is disgusting and seems to be a pattern. Please address it immediately. @MTCCPlc @CEOMTCC

[Ula Ahmed @LuaAhmed]

ކެއިންބުއިމާ ބޯހިޔާވަހިކަމާ ބޭސްފަރުވާއަށް ފުދޭވަރަށް ފައިސާ ނުލިބޭއިރު ދަރިން ހޯދާނީ ކިހިނެއްތަ؟ ރައްޔިތުންގެ ފައިސާ ހުސްވަނީ މަޖްލިސް މެމްބަރުނާ ވެރިކަން ކުރާ އެންމެނަށް އުމުރަށް ހަރަދުކުރަން. އެމީހުންގެ އިނާޔައްތަށް ކަނޑާ ރައްޔިތުން އަތާ އަނގަޔާ ދިމާވީމަ ދަރިން ހޯދާނެ.

[Ismail Shafiu @shaafiuismail]

Population collapse will be far worse than an economic crisis.

The issue with population collapse is that we cannot fix it in a few years, but it would take decades to return to normal.

If the current youth population chooses to have 1-2 kids or none, when they become older there won’t be enough people to run economic activities, and the cost of managing an aging population will burden government expenditure.

Population growth is a must; such policies should be implemented in the Maldives too to have more kids. 🇲🇻👶

[Ula Ahmed @LuaAhmed]

@Mamdooh_Yoonus For those who have not seen this petition to cut the unfair health insuarance majlis members get while the rest of us have to beg for scraps, you can login to efaas and sign it :) https://t.co/n4xvBJChzj

[Ula Ahmed @LuaAhmed]

@dash8x Have you seen this petition to cut the special health insuarance to majlis members. Please share and sign usung efaas :) https://t.co/n4xvBJChzj

[Arushad Ahmed @dash8x]

This MP is saying that Aasandha should be good enough for our treatments. Then why do they need an extra million rufiyaa Health Insurance plan with multiple countries coverage for themselves and their family?

[🧜🏽‍♀️ @Strawbereim]

@Mamdooh_Yoonus Hello Mamdhooh. IGMH refused to take my endo case because it was too complicated for them. BUT AASANDHA REFUSED TO FUND MY SURGERY ABROAD.
So what are you talking about? This girl needs specialist care now. Are you advocating to refuse that for her?