Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
If you found yourself stuck in a war zone, how much support would you expect from your government to get you out?
Swiss foreign ministry in Sudan: coordinating, but not evacuating.
Swiss embassy staff have been safely evacuated from Sudan, but the foreign ministry is still working on regular citizens stuck in the country. On Monday, it said around 30 had indicated a desire to leave, i.e. around a quarter of all Swiss registered in Sudan. Last night, four managed to get out on planes organised by Germany and the Netherlands. It’s unclear what the situation is for the others; the foreign ministry says dual Sudanese-Swiss citizens are particularly complicated, since they need an exit visa.
And is the foreign ministry doing enough? One of the escapees told the Tages-Anzeiger today that he felt Bern was “relatively absent in this crisis”. The Swiss-Belgian and his wife had bunkered down in their Khartoum apartment for a week (eating fondue to relax) before flying out on a German plane. During this time he only had sporadic contact with Swiss authorities, he said. Another citizen, backpacking in northern Sudan, told RTS he had plenty of contact with the foreign ministry, but “it didn’t help much”. He since managed to leave on his own.
But do people also expect too much from their government during a crisis abroad? Especially if the country is a small (albeit rich) one like Switzerland? For its part, the foreign ministry told the Tages-Anzeiger that the “means and legal frameworks of each country in crisis situations is different, and can’t be compared”. Indeed, the reliance on friends to organise flights out is not just based on foreign ministry inaction, but on politics – various parliamentary motions in favour of buying a Swiss military plane for evacuations have been rejected in the past years, SRF reports.
- “We had to leave everything behind, including friends”External link – Tages-Anzeiger (paywall)
- The testimony of a Swiss backpacker in SudanExternal link – RTS television
- Link to the foreign ministry’s helplineExternal link
Pixelated painting: Swiss project to make world’s biggest digital artwork.
It might not sound revolutionary: a project plans to digitise the huge “Battle of Murten” painting (100×10 metres), resulting in “the biggest digital image of a single object ever created”, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) said yesterday.
But it’s more than just taking a photo of a big object. The 1893 work by German artist Louis Braun, depicting the 1476 battle near Bern, will be scanned by a specially mounted mobile camera, which will take 127,000 images of the work over two months. The resulting data will be fed into an “interactive and immersive” digital experience enabling “unparalleled viewing, notably with the capability of zooming in beyond what the eye can even see”, the Le Courrier newspaper writes today.
And why is all this happening? Mainly for historical reasons, an EPFL expert told the paper. The painting is an important part of Swiss cultural heritage, and one of only around a dozen 19th-century historical panoramas in the world. As the 550th anniversary of the battle nears, the digital version will make the painting available across the world.
Two months of conservation work preceded the current digital work, which will finish in 2024: interestingly, this means the whole process will take roughly the same amount of time it took Braun and his team to paint it – 10 months. So much for progress!
- Digitising a 100m wide panoramic paintingExternal link – EPFL video
- The Battle of Murten, in four minutesExternal link – SRF radio
- Behind the scenes of a “historic digitisation”External link – Le Courrier
Boring boarding: short-staffed and long queues at Zurich airport.
Before Covid-19, Zurich airport – Switzerland’s biggest – was in the limited experience of this journalist a very pleasant place: quiet, clean, and even sometimes over-staffed, to the point of queues lasting only a few minutes before the security gates. It’s no accident that the airport was named the best in Europe for 18(!) consecutive years.
This seems to have changed, and the situation is not improving, 20 Minuten writes today. According to photos sent by a “reader-reporter”, the airport was again yesterday the scene of queues reaching almost to the exit. “I’ve never experienced such a situation, and I fly a lot,” the citizen reporter complained. The bottleneck came during the morning rush hour, 06:30-07:30. The recent Easter holiday period was also difficult, the newspaper writes.
As for why it’s happening, the paper mentions a lack of staff – there’s just not enough airport and police to deal with organisation and security. Indeed, the spectre of staff shortages is a hot topic in Switzerland, with various sectors affected, including restaurants and hospitality. Earlier this week, the employer’s federation even released an eight-point plan of how to counter the trend, with the headline measure being the rather unimaginative “work more”! In the case of Zurich airport, could it also be an option to “fly less”?
- Photos of long queues at Zurich airportExternal link – 20 Minuten
- The employer’s federation planExternal link – NZZ (paywall)
- Our 2022 report on airline emissions post-pandemicExternal link – SWI swissinfo.ch
Swiss Abroad-backed memorial for Nazi victims to be erected in Bern.
After years of campaigning by various groups – including the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA) – the government today confirmed it would help pay for a national memorial to honour the six million Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. The memorial will be erected at a “central location” in Bern, and will “keep alive the memory of the consequences of National Socialism”, the government said. It is contributing CHF2.5 million.
The idea for the official national memorial was raised in 2018 at the conference of the Swiss Abroad in Visp, and has since made its way slowly through parliament before receiving the final approval of government. The OSA welcomed the decision today, saying it would help preserve the memory of the “1,000 people with Swiss links who experienced the horrors of the concentration camps, among them many Swiss Abroad”.
Jewish groups said the memorial would also honour “the thousands of refugees repelled at the [Swiss] borders or deported, and also the many courageous helpers in this country”.
- Memorial for Nazi victims to be built in Bern – SWI swissinfo.ch news
- From 2021: the OSA’s connections to the memorial – SWI swissinfo.ch
- Swiss make slow progress on holocaust remembrance – SWI swissinfo.ch
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