Baghdad

"Don't think black, don't think white, but in the colour of you heart" , is a line from a lyric sung by Frank Boeijen. In order to do something against the dreadful black-and-white thinking in the media and the dichotomy between 'the good' and 'the bad' which arose in the world, in september 2002 part of ®chestra - not everyone went along because of the risk of war - travelled to Baghdad to perform there on the Babylon Festival.

Johnny Rahaket: "First to Amman in Jordan, then by bus a trip of 800 km through the desert, all this to perform in a fully deserted caravanserai, at a school with wildly enthusiastic children and at the Babylon Festival itself, which naturally was abused as one big media circus for the benefit of 'number one'.

It was a good thing to observe that, which we of course already assumed, the 'axis of evil' is inhabited by a lot of very kind people."

Photography Henk Braam

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