Saturday, June 28, 2008

No Visa for You!

What a shame... it happened again! Great artists have been denied a Schengen visa and are forced to cancel their European tour. Konono nr 1, headliners of the Couleur Café Festival, will stay in Kinshasa and no one in Brussels will have the chance to hear their great music. What an irony when you know what values Couleur Café stands for! A Belga article in La Libre explains that their new passports not being ready (thank you oh bureaucray!), they've been allocated diplomatic passports so they could ask for visas to travel... but even with that, they've been refused entry to the oh so magnificient European soil! As if it weren't enough that people get humiliated waiting in front of unwelcoming consulates so proudly treating people like shit. Sharing my life with a non EU citizen, we now choose our leisure/holiday destinations according to visa requirements. That's how we will prefer to spend our summer in Andalucia, Spain rather than Scotland, UK. And that's how one great friend of mine living in Sarajevo, also an artist by the way (what could happen if artists were invading Europe?!), cannot come and visit me whenever she likes -she's been denied a visa twice despite the fact that she lived in Belgium and Japan for many years. Go on like that dear EU states, but don't forget that the world does not belong to you!

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