Political shoes

In Berlin, several hundred protesters demanded the departure of the German President Christian Wulff with shoes, boots and other footwear in their hands. Wulff is discredited because he tried to stop a newspaper publishing an article about a controversial loan. This shoe protest refers to similar protests in the Arab world.




On December 14 2008 the journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi broadcast journalist. Al-Zaidi shouted ‘This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog’ and shook his shoes at the head of the former U.S.President George W. Bush constantly during a Baghdad press conference. There were calls throughout the Middle East to place the shoes in an Iraqi museum, but the shoes were later destroyed by U.S. and Iraqi security forces to prevent this. Al-Zaidi’s shoe incident inspired similar incidents or political protests around the world.

This January slippers (thongs) were used in Indonesia as a symbol of injustice. This protest was called ‘One thousand slippers for the National Police Commander’. All across the country Indonesian citizens offered their old worn slippers to police stations to protest against the arrest of an 15 year old boy, who had taken a pair of slippers from a police officer in Sulawesi. In this way the people expressed their frustrations about the boys extremely high punishment because he was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for this offence.

Photo: AP/Markus Schreiber, AP/Achmad Ibrahim, Associated Press.