Hi all,

This has been a hard month. Due to the circumstances, I shall concentrate this report today on the human aspect of the Zone.

In February I had forwarded the announcement of the festival in Jajouka on Friday April 26th & Saturday the
27th. Here is a mail received yesterday infirming the information :

" We have just been requested by the by the Governor of Larache (the area surrounding Jajouka), to postpone The Baraka Festival out of respect for the events going on in the Middle East. As I am sure you are aware, there is a lot of death and suffering happening in Palestine & Israel.. Out of respect for the lives lost and the ongoing mourning, we must agree that it has become an inappropriate time to host a musical celebration in Morocco. In solidarity with Palestine the King of Morocco has also indefinitely postponed his wedding. So, we must likewise postpone the Baraka Festival out of respect for Jajouka's Arab Brothers, and out of concern for the safety of our guests, which we are being told cannot presently be guaranteed by the local government officials."

As an international human group, we undergo the consequences of absurdity of some rulers of this world, to their tendency to put up unlivable systems, to create conflicts and problems which lead to human disasters, and to their irresponsibility, I mean their inability to confront themselves to the consequences of their acts, and to give counts to the people they are responsible for.

As a psychiatric nurse, I am sorry to state that in some services where I have worked, some of them would not behave as they do more than 24 hours without being locked in an isolation cell and sent directly to a hospital for dangerous patients, for , well, you know when you come in, but never when you go out...

And I find extremely irresponsible for rulers not to apply to themselves the laws and rules they impose to mankind, a mankind they have, in a democratic society of people who have elected them, the duty to protect, the resources of whom they are in charge of, and whom they are at the service of:

Article I : Men are born and remain free and equal in right. The social distinctions can be founded only on the common utility.

Article II : The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and unprescriptible rights of the man. These rights are freedom, property, safety and resistance to oppression.

This text is the base of the constitution of my country. It's not a eutopic writing, it's the official model which is supposed to structure peoples ' lives, it's the symbol of democracy, as well as the three words : "Freedom, equality , brotherhood". What is a symbol ? "A symbol is a sign which stands for something." Alfred Korzybski. If this text is applied, I mean if its articles are at the base of the laws, of the institutions, then the country which applies this model can be called a democratic one. Now if it is not applied, this text does not represent anymore democracy, it becomes deprived from the meaning it was supposed to have, a fake.

Now what is the highest value of democracy ? The highest value of democracy is human value, which means that there is no other value over it, no theory, no system, no model, no symbol, no word, etc, worth enslaving people. And certainly not the model of democracy, which cannot be imposed to anybody by anybody, but the application of which depends on our own will.

And this to get back to the problems we are confronted to in the Zone, which are human problems. If the Zone really is the Zone, if the Johnsons really are the Johnsons, then we have to make the level of our acts similar to the one of our words :

So the most appropriate aim of the Zone to me is at the moment to concentrate the energies on solving the human problems in its frame. If European countries really consider human value as the highest one, treat people (not only their own citizens, humans, the whole human specie) according to their constitutions, and give them livable conditions of life, then they are democratic countries. If they don't , then they do not deserve to be called democratic anymore, and very frankly, I do not feel comfortable at all in my privileged situation of European, nor proud of it in the circumstance. I am not interested in being the citizen of countries which exclude people in the name of democracy, nor limits humanity to nationality. Not only it is an insult and treachery to those people, but also to their citizens, who have elected them on the base of their promises, and to the authors of the Declaration of 1789, their ancestors.

Now what does solving the human problems in the frame of the Zone means ? I'd say provide ourselves what we basically need in the present, and work at a solution for future, in applying to the human level the same techniques we have been using at the artistic one.

We know that we create reality: in the Zone, the reports are the account of the reality we create each month since1997, which depends on us. So rather than letting the reality created by others upset us, we create our own, which we decide together, in gathering our means, abilities and energies. Which program are we interested in ?

As a mater of fact, here is the reality we created this month, at our scale :

1. We gather the Zone writings , including mines and the English anthology "The Time of the Naguals" with illustrations and texts, on a CD, and sell it in the frame of the Zone (as an association of fact, we can make it legally, it remains in a private frame), and send the benefits to Koulin, Vasha and Vadimas.
2. We can scan your writings and books, print them for you and put them on CD. So this makes them accessible without the brainstorm of the publishing house, they keep remaining your property, and you can give them to whom you want, when you want.
3. For the CD, to avoid the problem of posting them, which leads to custom fees out of Europe, we can put the files once made in a club, where they are accessible to the whole group. There is a new club, Interzone Agents Only, where we can do that. Then you pick up the files, and record them on your CD burner yourself, which will take 5 minutes. :)
4. We can also make translation works : some books like Dutch ones are not accessible as long as they have not been translated in English. We can get connected with alternative groups as Ruigoord and propose them to translate their work in English. Same with other languages. Vasha, Vadimas and Koulin can make it with their own languages and the ones they know.

• Post cards :

I have made about 100 different post cards with the Zone's illustrations. You can order them for 50 cents each (1/2 euro).

 Zone's sites :