May 3, 2011 - AllAfrica - Human Rights Watch (Washington, DC)
New York --- The decision to give the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders to a Ugandan lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocate highlights the difficulty and danger advocates for LGBT rights face in many countries of Africa, Human Rights Watch said today.
The award, announced on May 3, 2011, will go to Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, founder and executive director of Freedom and Roam Uganda, an LGBT rights organization. In issuing the announcement, the award organization noted that Nabagesera has had the courage to appear on national television and radio stations in Uganda and has issued news statements on behalf of the gay community. In 2007 she was harassed at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, and on many occasions afterward, was hackled, threatened, and even attacked. Since then she has moved from house to house, afraid to stay long in the same place. Her name was on a "gay list" published by the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone on January 26, after which, another colleague on the list, David Kato, was murdered.
"This is a fitting tribute to the courage of one woman, Kasha Nabagesera, and to all activists working under conditions of extreme threat," said Dipika Nath, LGBT researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The award ceremony will be in the Victoria Hall of Geneva late in the year, the award organization said.
The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders is a collaboration among 10 of the world's leading human rights organizations to give protection to human rights defenders worldwide. The Jury consists of: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, International Federation for Human Rights, World Organisation Against Torture, Front Line, International Commission of Jurists, German Diakonie, International Service for Human Rights, and HURIDOCS.
How Osama's death will affect the al-Qaeda name
By Brian Braiker - AdWeek - May 3, 2011
Had al-Qaeda paid better attention, it might have learned a lesson or two from Florida orange juice.
In 1977 the Florida Citrus Commission's long-term spokeswoman--a young Anita Bryant at the peak of her popularity--spearheaded a highly publicized campaign to repeal a Dade County, Fla., gay rights ordinance. Bryant's strident and religious anti-gay crusading triggered a strong backlash in the gay and left-leaning communities nationwide, culminating in a boycott on Florida orange juice that was supported by other leading celebrities of the day.
The Citrus Commission was so stung by the negative publicity and the boycott that they fired their rogue pitchwoman in 1979. (Bryant's career never fully recovered.)
The moral of the story: It's never a great idea to have your brand identified with just one person.
"Florida orange juice took it hard. This is a classic branding case study," said brand consultant Rob Frankel. "Whenever you tie your entire brand to a human being, things can happen. If they personify the brand, they can take the whole thing down."
The Brand is the Brand
To be sure, al-Qaeda is by definition a fringe group--a brand aligned with extremism and out of touch with the rest of the world. But insofar as it is a brand, to what extent does the death of its founder affect its prospects going forward?
While Frankel suspects it will never fully recover, even if it doesn't disappear entirely, others--including President Obama--are more cautious. "There is no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us," Obama said in his address to the country. "We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad."
That may sound like boilerplate political speech, but al-Qaeda and its offshoots have carried out smaller-scale attacks since 9/11, including the 2004 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid and the July 2005 bombings in London. These attacks may have occurred during Bin Laden's lifetime, but their nature suggest the organization has, as Mohamad Bazzi of the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations writes, "transformed itself from a centralized group to a brand name used by assorted jihadist movements across the globe. The organization founded by Bin Laden in the 1980s has morphed into small, localized cells and affiliated groups that do not necessarily take orders from the old leadership."
In short, the degree to which a post-Bin Laden al-Qaeda continues to achieve its mission (wreak terror on the West in general and the U.S. in particular) is the degree to which the brand will survive going forward. Its leader's big mistake was conflating the brand with himself.
"You're not the brand; the brand is the brand," said Frankel. "You have to make it so that if you retire, go away or get killed, the brand keeps going." GE survived Jack Welch's retirement, after all, and Apple will survive Steve Jobs. Probably. Nazis still exist, Frankel points out, but without Hitler--the personification of the brand--they're irrelevant.
Some Advice for al-Qaeda
Adweek asked Brad VanAuken, chief brand strategist at the Blake Project, how he would (hypothetically) consult al-Qaeda going forward. "To live on past Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda must successfully launch attacks of at least the scale and shock value of the attacks of 9/11," he wrote--reluctantly, he said--in an email. "If this does not occur, al-Qaeda will eventually lose its cache."
Of course, al-Qaeda is on the wrong side of history. "Terrorism is a last-ditch effort to strike out in great frustration and anger when one's ideas have failed or been superceded by better ones," added VanAuken. Indeed, the current uprisings sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa reflect a much more attractive alternative to al-Qaeda's vision, and speak to the universal human cry for freedom. Perhaps the question to be asking is what impact the demise of Bin Laden will have on the brand of Islam.
"No one has done more damage to the brand of that religion than Osama Bin Laden, hijacking the religion, manipulating its meaning to support a cause far from its intended purpose," Derrick Daye, publisher of the Blake Project's Branding Strategy Insider, told Adweek.
Something for the surviving members of al-Qaeda to ponder over a delicious glass of Florida orange juice.
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