As a kid, I always bubbled with energy too. I talk at triple speed, and people often have to tell me to slow down. My childhood neighborhood, the Abanotubani district, lies beneath a great gorge in Tbilisi. A huge, ruined fortress overlooks our neighborhood —- for centuries, it served as a stronghold for Tbilisi, protecting it against invaders.

Now, views of the fortress are obscured by an even bigger mansion, built by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in our country. His wealth is about a third of our gross domestic product. Construction on his house began when I was a toddler: a great sea of glass and metal dominating the gorge. I remember looking up and thinking it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. 

Ivanishvili became the biggest philanthropist in Georgia, supporting arts and culture, fixing schools, houses and hospitals. But even as a young kid, I was doubtful that some billionaire was truly going to help our country. 

Protests were the backdrop of my childhood in Georgia. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders during the Rose Revolution. I was three. It was a peaceful uprising to oust the then-President Eduard Shevardnadze, ending his reign of chaos that had lasted more than a decade. A man called Mikheil Saakashvili was elected after him and set about trying to rid the country of the corruption that had plagued it for so long. 

While there were problems during Saakashvili’s rule, there was also a huge shift in the country towards democracy and reform. For a while, things felt hopeful. 

Of course, we always lived below our powerful billionaire neighbor — the oligarch Ivanishvili in his spy villain-worthy lair. But I also grew up being aware of another big neighbor, one that sat right above Georgia. On a clear day in the hills above my house in Tbilisi, you could see the Greater Caucasus mountain mange — the natural border with Russia.

I was on vacation in those hills above Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. I remember the warplanes buzzing overhead and how my mom went into a panicked frenzy. During that war, Russia occupied South Ossetia, a region to the northwest of Tbilisi. I guess that was when I started to absorb the idea that Russia was not our friend. 

When I was 12, a party called Georgian Dream came to power, backed by Ivanishvili, the billionaire who lived above us. Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs from the former Soviet space, has close ties to Putin. My parents felt uneasy about it all and moved the family to Paris, where I spent my teenage years. 

We lived in the bougie 6th arrondissement. Kids at my school had no idea where Georgia was — I was constantly having to explain that I was from the country, not the U.S. state. The country by the black sea — “la mere noire,” I would intone, again and again. It was Georgia for dummies. People would nod, not quite knowing. One girl literally thought Georgia was a place in the Arctic region of Lapland. If I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, I guess she was thinking of the island of South Georgia in Antarctica. Wrong again. I realized it was often easier to just pretend I was French like everyone else. 

As I grew older, though, I became prouder of my roots. I found a group of friends who came from all over. They introduced me to an important part of French life: going to protests. At those protests, I learned a lesson — my voice matters. 

The French really put the “pro” in protests — they do not mess around. While I was in high school, the cops killed a French activist with a police grenade during a protest. It caused uproar across the country, so I tagged along with older kids to blockade our school, barricading it with trash cans for two weeks to push for justice for the guy who was killed. 

I started to learn that protest actually works in a democracy. I would go between Paris and Tbilisi, taking lessons from my French friends and bringing them to Georgia. “You guys go home too soon when you protest. You stand there and think stuff is going to fall out of the sky,” I would tell my Georgian friends. Last year, though, a new law was proposed in Georgia, and things went full chaos-mode. 

It’s called the foreign agents law. It’s a copycat of the same regulation in Russia. It dictates that any institution getting 20% of its money from abroad has to register with a statewide system as an agent of foreign influence. 

In practice, it makes it easier for the state to crush opposition, get rid of foreign-aided projects that make our life better and stamp out free expression by creating scapegoats. It gives the government arbitrary reasons to arrest anyone they deem a “foreign influence operation.” 

Loads of my friends in Tbilisi work on projects that would be deemed a “foreign agent” by this new law. Whether they work in plastic recycling programs, as independent journalists or as human rights lawyers, they now face extra interrogation by the state. It’s basically a tool for political repression. 

The law’s proposal last year lit a flame under us in Tbilisi. We organized big protests and for a while, it worked — the government didn’t press ahead. But this year, they tried again. 

On April 3, the Georgian Dream party announced plans to bring back the bill. I felt a mixture of anger and hopelessness when I heard. Here we go again, I thought. Here’s undeniable proof of our government blindly trying to follow Russia's lead. I got ready to fight. 

Maybe if you had the privilege of growing up in a first-world country, you don’t understand, but for us this law means the difference between having a functioning democracy and existing as a puppet for Russia. It means losing our freedom of speech. 

On the morning of April 15, the protests began. 

My friends and I have joined the demonstrations every day, trying to put the lessons I’d learned in France into practice. I believe that if we can inspire enough people to get out on the streets, we can overwhelm the brutality we are fighting against. For now, the state is fighting back hard, with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and by simply beating protesters to a pulp. I’m worried things are going to descend into even more violence, though I hope we can avoid it.

On the night of April 30, I put on a gas mask and assigned myself a task: deactivate as many tear gas canisters as I could. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can put a plastic cup over the canister before it starts to smoke, which snuffs it out. Or, if it’s smoking already, you can dunk the canister in a bucket of water.

Things escalated fast that night. Protesters surged onto Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and as they did, police unleashed a torrent of tear gas canisters onto us from the side streets, scattering the crowd. I ran forwards into the impact zone, grabbing the canisters and submerging them into bottles of water that I had previously set out. It was a race to get to the canisters before they started spinning out of control. 

The police began advancing from the side streets and blasting everyone in the area with water cannon, throwing them to the ground. They didn’t care if they hit protesters or journalists — and they hit both. Officers also beat up anyone they could get their hands on. A no man's land emerged between the protesters and the police. In the buffer zone were journalists — and me. Along with dealing with the tear gas, I was also taking pictures — using loads of flash to annoy the officers — just for my own personal project. I managed to capture several instances of how police laid into the protestors. 

It was time to build barricades, French style, and invoke the lessons I had learned in Paris. I started dragging metal barrier fences together and getting people to help. I then told people to gather up trash cans, just like we did in high school. Five guys started to help me. From that moment on, I was standing in the buffer zone in front of the barricades, directing people like an orchestra conductor. I got them to add umbrellas to the structure — a tactic inspired not by the French, but by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — to protect from the water cannon. 

The crowd of police just watched as I directed the resistance. They recorded everything, sussing me out. Then, they mobilized the arresting squad. The police surged forward, grabbing anyone they could — journalists, protesters, they didn’t care. I started to run, but my fashion-victim status let me down, badly. I was wearing my cute new purple Adidas Sambas. But those shoes have no grip, as anyone who owns a pair knows. I slipped on the wet ground. 

A bunch of masked police jumped on me and began beating me mercilessly. At one point I nearly scrambled away, but again my sartorial choices screwed me over. My blazer was tied around my waist and they grabbed it and pulled me back.

By law in Georgia, all police officers have to wear a visible badge number. But during the protests, police hide their badges and mask up with balaclavas, so it’s difficult to prosecute them for brutality down the line.  

They started hitting the back of my head hard, and all I could do was protect my eyes and curl into the fetal position. They dragged me behind the police line and continued laying into me. Then they surrounded me, taunting me, telling me to hit myself and say that I was a little bitch. My legs were like jelly and I could barely stand. I did whatever they ordered, desperate, until they threw me into a van. Already, there was a lump the size of a bar of soap on the back of my head, with deep blue panda rings forming around my eyes. 

They hauled me to prison, but it took them six hours to get me inside. There was already a queue of other protesters they’d caught. My captors waited in the van with me, watching Russian TikToks for hours on end. Honestly, that was almost worse than the beating.  

The atmosphere inside the cells was desperate. People were silently pacing up and down, their spirits hitting rock bottom. Police were bringing in more protesters all the time, their radios crackling. I was in a cell with three other guys. “They beat me like a dog,” one of them said, showing me a bootprint-shaped bruise on his back. I realized we had to get the morale up, fast — and show the guards they couldn’t break us. 

We sang all the songs we could think of — “Bella Ciao,” the European anthem, a bunch of Georgian songs. At one point I even sang the Marseillaise. The police told us to shut up. We kept singing, and cracked terrible jokes that this was a five-star digital detox. 

I got out of jail because a lawyer helped me, pro bono. She works for the Human Rights Center, a group of lawyers here in Georgia that under the new law would be at the top of the state’s list of “foreign agents.” That lawyer, she probably weighs 120 pounds, isn’t much more than 5 feet tall, and she’s formidable. When she goes into the police station, you see the fear in their eyes. She’s the best. If it wasn’t for her and her organization, I would still be in jail. This Russian law wants to take away our access to human rights lawyers like her. 

Two weeks on, and my concussion is getting better, day by day. The nausea has eased and the daily headaches are becoming less intense. 

I’m back on the streets. At these protests, the energy feels different. There’s a crazy electricity in the air. Everyone is singing, fighting, determined not to lose their country. A lot of the protesters are my age — Gen Z. We don’t remember the chaos and corruption of the 1990s. We’re not worn down, like older people, by decades of protesting. We’re also more savvy than our parents’ generation about fact-checking. We don’t just swallow the stream of propaganda that’s fed to us. We’re ready to fight. I spoke with my uncle on the phone about it yesterday morning, just before the law was passed — he told me “my hopes are in Gen Z and a miracle.” 

By Luka Gviniashvili as told to Isobel Cockerell

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the lawyer's association that advised Gviniashvili. It was the Human Rights Center, not the Young Lawyer's Association.

The post I’m protesting Georgia’s ‘Russian law.’ The police beat me up mercilessly appeared first on Coda Story.

The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.

The woman’s shock registered a new reality that is coalescing in Germany. What happens when basic rights seem to conflict with Germany’s vaunted culture of “coming to terms with the past”  — often interpreted as a call for anti-antisemitism? Recent events have raised troubling questions about who is considered part of the nation and what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history.

Following the October 7 assault in which Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his condolences for the victims, condemned the attacks and proclaimed his solidarity with Israel. He reasserted the 2008 proclamation of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that the protection of Israel is part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” or part of the country’s reason for existence. The German government has remained steadfast in its support, even as Israel's bombing campaign on Gaza has injured and killed high numbers of civilians — the latest death toll sits at 10,022 people, more than 4,000 of them children.

There has been little official sympathy for the plight of Gazans. But Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe — an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people — and people across the country have come together in solidarity with Palestine for both spontaneous and registered protests since the beginning of the conflict. In response, cities across Germany have tried to clamp down on these demonstrations, though the courts have overturned several of these attempts as illegal. In Berlin, bans have been issued against protests with titles such as  “Peace in the Middle East”; “Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East,” a rally organized by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, a Jewish organization; and “Youth Against Racism,” which was called after a high school teacher hit a student who had brought a Palestinian flag to school. Throughout, there have been shocking scenes of police brutalizing protestors.

Those who advocate for the bans point to incidents of people gathering on Sonnenallee, a central avenue in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, in support of the Hamas attack on October 7. One especially notorious event involved about 50 men who responded to the call of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network “to celebrate the victory of resistance” by sharing baklava on the street. Berlin’s police treated it as a potentially criminal matter, noting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they would “carry out the necessary measures.” Newspapers reported that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, called the men who had gathered “barbarians.”

Beyond these incidents, German politicians have seemingly competed among themselves to see who can promote anti-antisemitism the loudest — and who can be the harshest on the Muslim minority. Nancy Faeser, a government cabinet minister, urged that the government “use all legal means to deport Hamas supporters.” The leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz declared, “Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough antisemitic men in this country.” Scholz, the chancellor, piled on: “Too many are coming,” he said. “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”

These are not wholly new tendencies in Germany. Last year, authorities in Berlin banned all public commemorations of the Nakba, the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel. Earlier this year, German police admitted in court that when they were enforcing the ban, they had simply targeted people who “looked Palestinian.” However, Berlin schools’ decision to forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh and other Palestinian symbols is an escalation that led even a member of Scholz’s own party to question if it could possibly be legal.

Since reunification in 1990, Germany’s national identity has been founded upon “coming to terms with the past.” That is, taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust and taking steps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Central to this protection of Jews has been the enforcement of anti-antisemitism at home, and, internationally, the support of Israel: Germany’s “Staatsraison.”

This culture of remembrance, however, holds little room for non-ethnic Germans. Coming to terms with the past requires that everyone shares the same past. The Muslim minority, for instance — most of whom arrived after 1945 — have found themselves freighted with the accusation of antisemitism for failing to identify with German guilt for the Holocaust. This is not to say that there is no antisemitism within the Muslim minority, but when the center-left Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck insisted in a recent speech that Muslims must distance themselves from antisemitism — or, in some cases, face deportation — he reinscribed the idea of the Muslim minority overall as antisemitic until proven otherwise. Muslims, and particularly Palestinians, have to prove that they deserve to be part of Germany.

The German press has inflamed the situation. Der Spiegel has peddled base stereotypes about Germany’s Muslims, and Bild has published a manifesto declaring that “we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country — against our values, democracy, and against Germany.” But it isn’t just conservative publications pushing these narratives — the left-leaning Die Zeit recently published a piece that questioned whether Muslim immigrants could ever become “civilized.” And the leftist newspaper Taz has published editorials that purport to connect Palestinians with hate and Nazism. When during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pleaded for the ethical imperative to think about both Israelis and Palestinians, he was accused of defending Hamas’ crimes.

Highly publicized antisemitic incidents — a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Berlin synagogue and Stars of David painted on homes — has further roiled Germany. Some Jews have said they are afraid to visit their temples. “Germany is a safe country for Jews,” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, recently affirmed, noting his approval of Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures. “In my eyes, the security forces are doing everything to make sure that doesn’t change. Even if the threat in Germany currently comes more from the Arabic side than from the extreme right.”

However, other Jews in Germany have argued that Schuster misrepresents the real threat. A recent open letter from more than 100 Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany — full disclosure: I am a signatory — cited the government’s own statistics, which paint a different picture about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests: “the perceived threat of such assemblies grossly inverts the actual threat to Jewish life in Germany, where, according to the federal police, the ‘vast majority’ of anti-Semitic crimes — around 84 percent — are committed by the German far right.”

For Palestinians, cultural institutions have largely shut their doors. An award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was indefinitely postponed. In Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater called off upcoming performances of its long-running and much celebrated “The Situation,” which gave voice to the experiences of Arabs, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. A letter about the decision described how “war demands a simple division into friend and enemy.” Berlin’s Haus für Poesie canceled an upcoming launch party for “The Arabic Europe,” a collection of poetry edited by the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun.

A Palestinian doctor and activist told me that the situation of Palestinians in Germany is one of “collective loneliness.” He asked to be called Nazir — there is a risk of professional repercussions for showing support for Palestinians. “The feeling is not only that we are losing family,” Nazir explained, “not only that a genocide is being done, not only that we have so much to fight with our own losses and pain, but we are not even allowed to mourn publicly. We are not allowed to speak up. We are not allowed to make demonstrations for the ones who are being killed in silence. And this is a whole different level of oppression, this state of oppression in Germany.”

The center of Arabic-speaking life in Berlin is Neukoelln’s Sonnenallee, sometimes known to Germans as the “Arab Street.” The district has long been demonized — along with its neighboring Kreuzberg — by the German right. Recently, some have spoken of the district as a “little Gaza.” It was in Kreuzberg where a group of men handed out pastries to celebrate the Hamas attack. And the neighborhood since has been the site of various gatherings to show support for the people of Gaza under bombardment — and several confrontations with police. On October 18, an officer in riot gear stamped out tea lights at a vigil for those killed in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Later that night, parts of the street were on fire — in what Bild called a riot.

Since October 7, police have arrived most nights in riot gear, patrolling in force. On October 23, in just the two blocks between the restaurants Risa Chicken and Konditorei Damascus, I counted more than two dozen officers in full suits of riot armor and eight police vans. At the corner of Pannierstrasse, I spotted a group of six police who had detained eight people. “They tried to cross the street when it was red,” a man said to me, smiling in disbelief, pointing to two of the men in custody, who could be described as vaguely Middle Eastern, standing against the wall. “Can you believe it?” a woman with a gray hair covering exclaimed, nearly leaping with indignation. “How can you hold them for that?”

As a crowd gathered, a pair of teenagers walked past, one wearing a puffer jacket, the other in a Puma sweatshirt. As the signal turned green and they stepped onto the crosswalk, I heard one of them say to the other, “Artikel 8: Grundgesetz.” Article 8 of the Basic Law.

I had just heard that phrase for the first time earlier that evening. A protester in Hermannplatz, the square that lies at the mouth of Sonnenallee, had been reading out that very section of the Grundgesetz, which is the German constitution. Article 8 says, “All Germans have the right — without having to register or receive permission — to assemble peacefully, without weapons.”

The teenagers might have misread the situation. After all, the police were not detaining these men because they were protesting, but rather were arbitrarily detaining them for the minor infraction of jaywalking.

“Why is everyone speaking now about Article 8?” Clemens Arzt, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, repeated my question before answering. “Because every half-educated person knows that Article 8 protects the freedom of assembly.”

Germany, he explained to me, recognizes assembly and speech as two distinct rights, as opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution where they are intertwined. In Germany, Article 5 deals with freedom of speech and Article 8 with freedom of assembly. The practice of shutting down protests before they even begin really began with the pandemic, said Arzt, “when we preemptively implemented bans on gatherings at a mass scale.”

I mentioned to Arzt how I have repeatedly seen police demand that protesters put away their Palestinian flags. Is this legal? Arzt said that the police are given broad latitude to make these decisions, but only in the case of “imminent danger” to public safety — something that October’s demonstrations did not often entail. But he suggested that making these decisions on the spot can be so difficult for the police, that one reason for the bans might have been that it was simply easier for them to pull the plug completely despite questions about legality. 

The second reason for the bans, he said, has to do with Germany’s relationship with Israel. These protests are being broken up in the name of “Staatsraison.” While recognizing Germany’s important relationship with Israel, Arzt sees this current application as a problem. “It appears to me,” he said, “that, partially, the basic idea of the protection of Israel — this Staatsraison — results in taking priority over gatherings that cannot, actually, from a sober legal perspective be disbanded or forbidden.”

“If you meet 20 people or if you meet 10,000, the empowerment you feel after a big demonstration is a whole different level,” the Palestinian doctor Nazir told me with a grimace. “And Germany knows exactly that. And that is why Germany is banning the protests.”

“They fear the growing rise of solidarity happening in Berlin.”

Nazir has been in Berlin for most of his adult life, where he has cared for the sick, paid his taxes and participated in Palestine Speaks, an antiracist advocacy group dedicated to Palestinian rights. Since October 7, he has lost 19 members of his extended family to Israeli bombs. He wakes up every day, he told me, hoping that his parents and sister in Gaza remain unharmed. “This is the question with which I wake up every day,” he said, “and hope that answer is still ‘yes, they are alive.’”

“It's one of the most schizophrenic situations I have found myself in,” he said. “I am good enough to pay taxes and to work in a hospital, to do intensive care and to hold the hand of grieving people and to give hope and optimism to parents and their children that we are going to overcome their health crises.” All of this, he said, “while you are dehumanized and while you are expecting every minute to get a note that your family does not exist.”

When we spoke, Palestine Speaks had begun to register their protests with more generic names like “Global South United”; that particular demonstration ended up drawing around 11,000 participants, one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies in German history. Still, even when the protests happen, the police seek to disrupt them, Nazir said. He told me about a protest the previous weekend at Oranienplatz called “Decolonize. Against Oppression Globally.” There, he said the police had removed their speakers after the police translator misinterpreted a statement. Still, he said, it was a relief to feel the support of so many people during a time when the environment in Germany has become so deeply anti-Muslim.

“They are making house raids,” Nazir said of the German police, an assertion echoed by other activists with whom I spoke, who noted that referring to the events of October 7 as “resistance” online could result in a visit from the police. He emphasized how Germany’s treatment of Palestinians is only one part of the nation’s rightward shift, and how the current wave of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discourse is a symptom of Germany’s failure to learn from its past. “The most important question is not what's happening toward Palestinians alone.”

“Germany needs Israel as a replacement nationality,” he said, referring to the idea of German identification with Israel as a nationality that Germany can feel unrestrainedly proud of. He cautioned that Germany also needs Israel to be “rehabilitated in the international community.” “Israel is the so-called proof that Germany learned a lesson from its history and that the denazification was a successful process.”

“But let’s be honest and point out the elephant in the room,” said Nazir. “The second biggest party in Germany is the AfD.”

The Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party notorious for its Islamophobia and xenophobia, has consistently received 20% of German support in polls, second only to the right-drifting Christian Democratic Union.  

“It seems like everyone is really just trying to compete with the AfD at the moment,” said Wieland Hoban, a noted composer and chairman of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. He described the situation in Germany as having turned starkly to the right.

“The biggest warriors against antisemitism,” Hoban told me, “are conservatives and right-wingers who are doing that because they're using antisemitism just to live out their anti-migrant racism by saying ‘OK, all these Muslims and Arabs are antisemites so let's deport them all in order to fight antisemitism.’”

German society’s hypocrisy is exposed, suggested Hoban, in its tolerance of antisemitism among those who are already recognized as Germans. Hoban cited Hubert Aiwanger, a far-right politician and former schoolteacher in Bavaria, who was found to have distributed antisemitic and pro-Nazi pamphlets in his youth and only became more popular because of it, which he spun as a victory over “cancel culture.”

Hoban, disclosing the many instances of “police thuggery” he has witnessed while on the streets in recent weeks, argues that the presence of Palestinians is an inconvenient truth for German memory culture. “It’s just kind of obvious that any human, depending on their situation, can be a victim or a perpetrator,” said Hoban. “But it’s unbearable for some Germans, this idea that the Jews could have been their victims. But then in another context,” he said, referring to Jews, “we’re perpetrators.”

Esra Ozyurek, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, understands the difficulty people have in dealing with the mutability of roles when it comes to the highly emotive topic of memory culture, with “coming to terms with the past.” She described how the issue of memory politics often devolves into a competition, “a little bit like supporting teams in a soccer match.”

“I was at a talk,” she told me, “and then a young woman came to me and said, ‘I read your work, but I’m on team Israel.’ I said, ‘Wow, I’m not on any team.’”

Rather than thinking tribally, the broader ethical question is, she emphasized, “how we can live in a plural society, how we can deal with difference.”

Germany, she said, is hardly alone in its marginalization and repression of its minorities — even if its pretext for doing so is unique. This is typical of “big nationalist projects,” she said. “It is always their fear that the minorities find comfort in each other, and then they unite. So this big nationalist project is always about dividing the minorities and making them enemies of each other. This is not the first time this is happening. It is just so sad that is happening in the name of fighting a form of racism.”

Ozyurek described how German society sees Muslims as the carriers of German antisemitism— a view that draws its support from German scholarship that claims antisemitism was exported to the Muslim world first by 19th-century missionaries and then by the Nazis in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Germany, by accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust, has become a modern, tolerant democratic nation. “It’s a very Christian narrative,” she said. “You start with your guilt and then you come to terms with it. You accept it, and then you're liberated.”

Germans expect the Turkish and Arab minority to relate to the history of the Holocaust by identifying with the German majority and thus work through the guilt of what is called “the perpetrator society.” Like Germans, they are supposed to find ancestors to atone for — like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator — in order to be accepted as full members of German society.

But, of course, the Muslim minority does not follow the German script. “Everyone relates to the story from where they are standing,” said Ozyurek. “They relate to it as minorities.”

Palestinians are not only a minority in Germany, but many of them came to Germany stateless as refugees. In the eyes of mainstream Germany, however, these conditions are disregarded as "self-victimization" — which places Palestinians in competition with Jews for the status of victim. “What is interesting,” Ozyurek said, referencing how Germans for many years believed themselves to be the real victim of World War II, “is that the qualities that are attributed to them are also qualities Germans have gotten over.”

“It's just a Catch-22 situation,” said Ozyurek. “If you don't have the Nazi ancestors, then how are you going to apologize for their crimes?” She added, “if they cannot join the national conversation, how can they feel they belong?”

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“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

The post Belarusian exiles are running out of hope appeared first on Coda Story.

In the course of a 90-minute address, laden with emotion, exhortation and self-congratulation, Modi dwelled in passing on the continuing violence in Manipur, a state in the northeast of India. The “nation stands with the people of Manipur,” he said. A resolution to the problems, he added, could only be achieved through peace, a goal toward which the federal and state governments were working.

If the sentiments seem boilerplate compared to Modi’s usual mode of rhetorical excess, it is because the Indian prime minister has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid talking about Manipur. The small state, bordering Myanmar, has been in tumult since May, with at least 200 people killed during riots, over 60,000 displaced and with houses, churches and whole villages set ablaze.

As the leaders of the world’s largest economies arrive in India on September 9 for the two-day G20 summit, the culmination of India's presidency of the intergovernmental group, Modi is expecting to put on a show. Delhi, or at least its most prominent areas, is being given a hasty and glitzy makeover. But the gleam might be tarnished by deepening sectarian rifts Modi’s government cannot appear to get under control and might indeed have helped unleash.

Even the Indian army, sent in to quell the violence in Manipur, has struggled to cope. The fighting has taken place  between the largely Hindu Meitei people of the valley and the largely Christian Kuki tribes from the hills. It began over a high court order that granted Meitei people certain affirmative action rights, despite their existing political and financial muscle in Manipur. The complexity of the conflict is exacerbated by certain land laws intended to protect tribal lands in the hills,which the Meiteis say unfairly confine them to the valley. 

It is true that animosity between the Kuki tribes and the Meiteis in Manipur dates back over a decade, but the inability of the authorities to calm the current violence is due to the perceived biases of the Meitei-led state government of Manipur. Its chief minister, Biren Singh, a Meitei, has as recently as July 1 — nearly two months after the violence began splitting his state apart — been taunting Kukis on social media. “Are you from India or Myanmar,” he responded to a critic on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, before deleting his post. 

Meiteis allege that an influx of illegal immigrants from Myanmar, mostly ethnic Kukis, are upsetting the demographic balance of Manipur and claim that the newcomers are cultivating poppy fields in the hills as part of a rampant drug trade.

During India’s recent parliamentary session, between July 20 and August 11, the opposition brought a motion of no confidence against the Modi government. It was, as expected, easily defeated. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, holds a large majority and faced down a no-confidence motion in 2021 with similar ease.

Still, the motion provided an opportunity for the opposition  to criticize the government’s lack of response to violence in Manipur and to force both the prime minister and the home minister, Amit Shah, to address the issue. Shah, who continues to back Manipur’s chief minister Singh, parroted the line that Kukis, whose ranks were allegedly being bolstered by illegal immigrants from Myanmar, were largely responsible for the clashes. 

A mainstream Kuki group described Shah's explanation as “extremely unfortunate as it is largely speculative with no valid proof or evidence.” It went on to say that Shah, by making his "abhorrent, nonsensical and disastrous" remarks, had chosen to “sacrifice the Kukis at the altar of Biren Singh.”

Meanwhile, on August 10, Modi responded in parliament to the no-confidence motion. He spoke for over two hours. It took more than 90 minutes for him to even broach the topic of Manipur, by which time the opposition had walked out in protest.

Modi blamed the Congress party, the main opposition faction, for having mismanaged the northeastern region of India since the country’s independence from the British Empire was won in 1947. The Congress has governed for about 50 of India’s 76 years as an independent country and has been caricatured by Modi as a party grown rotten on power and assumed privilege. 

Despite being prime minister for nearly a decade, Modi scarcely speaks without blaming the Congress and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, for holding India back from its rightful status as a global superpower. In May, while Manipur quite literally burned, Modi was on a triumphant global tour, including trips to Australia and the United States where much was made of India's emerging power status.

“Blaming the Congress for everything that is happening in Manipur,” said Kham Khan Suan Hausing, a political science professor at Hyderabad University,  “is a bit far-fetched.” The “culpability and complicity of the BJP government,” he told us, “has to be called out.” Last week, Hausing was granted protection from arrest by India’s Supreme Court on charges that he had defamed the Meitei community in an interview with the Indian news website The Wire. 

According to Hausing, Shah has revealed his “gross incompetence and apparent lack of intelligence on the ground” by blaming the Kukis alone for the riots in Manipur. And Modi, he told us, “appears more interested in media management than in the structural causes of the violence.” These forthright views have made Hausing a target of what he calls a “smear campaign by vigilante trolls,” who have questioned his legal status as an Indian. It is a typical line of attack used against Kukis like him, Hausing says, who are derided as immigrants from Myanmar. “The smears smack of how ignorant and ill-informed public discourse is about citizenship.” 

Writing in the New York Times this month, the author Debasish Roy Chowdhury argues that “it’s a signature tactic of modern day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who belongs to the polity and ostracizing others.” Any perceived slight against Modi is treated by his supporters, and often by Modi himself, as a slight against India. 

During his long speech decrying the no-confidence motion last week,  Modi said, in Hindi, that the motion had little to do with violence in Manipur but was instead an attempt to “defame India.” They “have no faith in the people of India,” Modi said of the opposition, “in the abilities of India. They have tried in vain to break the self-confidence of Indians with this no-confidence vote.” 

In his Independence Day address on August 15, Modi took a similarly proprietorial tone, referring to Indian voters as his family and offering personal guarantees of Indian success. It was, said the longtime Congress politician and leader Jairam Ramesh, a “crass election speech filled with distortions, lies, exaggerations and vague promises.” He added that Modi had made an annual address to the nation by its prime minister “all about himself and his image.”

Sharad Pawar, another longtime politician and major opposition figure, told the audience at a public rally on August 14 that the “Modi government has been a mute spectator to what has been happening in Manipur.” Modi was initially jolted out of that studied silence by a video that made global headlines last month of two Kuki women in Manipur being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a Meitei mob. Even then, he did not address the conflict directly, only condemning the assault as “shameful.”

The BJP then asked X to take the video down because it was fomenting further violence. In fact, the BJP-led government in Manipur has imposed a shutdown of mobile internet services in the state, which has been in effect since May 3. At the time of writing, services have still not been fully restored, causing untold economic damage with little evidence that the shutdown has served its purpose of lessening violence due to misinformation and rumor-mongering. 

If it seems surprising that the leader of a democracy can get away with saying so little about a sectarian war breaking out in a state, it is in keeping with Modi’s tried and tested strategy. Sectarian identity is increasingly contested in the BJP’s majoritarian, Hindu nationalist conception of India. While Modi talks about democracy and pluralism as formative parts of India’s identity on foreign visits, at home, nerves are fraying.

On July 31, even as the opposition was insisting that the prime minister address violence in Manipur before the parliament, sectarian riots were breaking out in the state of Haryana, which borders the Indian capital Delhi. A procession organized by a notorious Hindu nationalist organization devolved into street fights as it passed through the district of Nuh. Just as outsiders, particularly illegal Kuki immigrants from Myanmar, were blamed by the BJP for fanning the flames in Manipur, Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar were promptly blamed for the violence in Haryana.

Modi is fond of referring to “double engine” governments — his dream of BJP governments at both federal and state levels, working together to foster more development. Both Manipur and Haryana are run by BJP governments at the state level. The double engine seems to work, then, to reinforce the BJP’s political majoritarianism, its instinctive support for Hindus in any sectarian conflict. 

Peace and resolution in Manipur can only return, says Gaurav Gogoi, a Congress member of parliament, “when you can win people’s trust.” And that trust, he told us, speaking in Hindi, “can only be won when the BJP takes responsibility.” According to Gogoi, Manipur is still a tinderbox, despite Modi’s claims that peace is returning. He alleges that “6,000 weapons have been looted from police stations and not ordinary weapons but AK47s and bombs.” Gogoi, who led the no-confidence motion in parliament, told us that it is the BJP’s politics at both state and federal levels that has “split Manipur into two.” It is a pattern of division, he notes, that is evident in communal violence across India, including most recently in Haryana.

In his August 15 address to the nation, Modi said his time as prime minister had led to a “new trust, a new hope and a new attraction” toward India around the world. But if Modi is stoking hope abroad, there is evidence enough to say that he is stoking division at home.

The post Sectarian violence in Manipur is a mirror for Modi’s India appeared first on Coda Story.

The authorities had made a similar decision in June after a Senegalese court handed Sonko a two-year prison sentence in absentia, a decision his supporters believed was a politically motivated attempt to prevent Sonko from running for president in 2024. At least 16 people died when Sonko’s supporters and Senegalese police clashed on the streets of the capital Dakar. The subsequent July protests left at least two people dead.

Last week, Sonko was hospitalized after going on a hunger strike to protest his arrest.  

“We fear the government,” Mohammed Diouf, a Dakar school teacher told me. “The government does not want the world to know what is happening in our country.” He said the internet shutdown left him unable to communicate with other protesters. “There is brutal oppression, and many young demonstrators have been killed and injured. The security forces use live fire, that is the situation,” said Diouf, who opted to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal.

On August 2, the day before Diouf and I spoke, the Senegalese government announced an indefinite ban on TikTok, the app that young people have been using to document violent encounters between demonstrators and the security apparatus.

Fueling public anger is a widely held fear that Senegalese President Macky Sall, currently serving his second term in office, may try to run for president again in 2024. In 2016, a public referendum on presidential term limits reset the period a president can stay in power to a maximum of two five-year terms. Sall, who had, at the time, begun serving his second term, argued that the constitutional amendment “reset the clock to zero,” making him eligible to run again. 

In an address to the nation after the June protests, Sall vowed he would not run for a third term. But experts say he is to blame for the ambiguity that has fueled unrest.

“This problem has to be put at the feet of Macky Sall. For a long time, he made the potential of him running for a third time ambiguous,” said Ibrahim Anoba, an African affairs analyst and a fellow at the Center for African Prosperity. “You can imagine what the populace will feel,” Anoba told me. “More so, if the president becomes intolerant of opposition leaders.” 

Current political anxieties have been compounded by the economic downturn resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and the food shortages triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Senegal’s poverty rate was 36.3% in 2022, according to the World Bank, and the economy has also been hampered by rising debt.. 

The future looked much brighter in 2014, when newly discovered oil reserves appeared to set the stage for Senegal to become a major oil producer. But this oil, too, is now a source of public anxiety: Senegalese citizens fear that Sall will cede these riches to European companies.

Protesters, galvanized by Sonko amid concerns that Sall might indeed pursue a third term,  worried that Sall, a geological engineer before he became president, wanted to preside over the anticipated oil boom. It tipped public discontent into violent unrest, particularly among the country’s youth, who decried massive corruption, the overbearing influence of France and the slowdown of the economy. 

“We are fighting that the country retains the sovereignty of its wealth and natural resources which the government wants to sell off to oil firms. And for that, we will go until the end because it is our future that is at stake,” Diouf, the Dakar school teacher, told me. It is to Sonko that voters like Diouf look to reform Senegal’s system.

Sonko’s PASTEF party started in 2014 as a fringe party composed of political newcomers. Sonko, a young former tax inspector had shot to national recognition when he became a whistleblower in 2016, exposing the use of offshore tax havens by foreign companies to avoid paying taxes in Senegal. He became a member of the national assembly in 2017 and ran for president in 2019, trailing third behind Sall and Idrissa Seck Rewmi.

His criticism of Sall and his larger-than-life internet presence have endeared Sonko to young voters. He rapidly became the main threat to the ruling party. And it is that threat, say Sonko’s supporters, that is driving the criminal charges Sonko now faces, including rape (for which he was acquitted), formenting insurrection, creating political unrest, terrorism and theft.

State measures to control protests led by Sonko supporters have been violent and draconian. The internet shutdowns also pose a threat to Senegal’s already floundering economy. In the first quarter of 2023, Senegal’s unemployment rate stood at 21.5%, and Net Blocks estimates that each day without access to mobile internet costs the country nearly $8 million.

Financial and cryptocurrency trades, as well as ride hailing and e-commerce businesses, are all seeing losses due to the network shutdowns. “With the restriction of the internet that is becoming recurrent these days, we no longer have the opportunity to sell or buy USDT,” said Mady Dia, referring to Tether, a cryptocurrency “stablecoin” pegged to the U.S. dollar. “That is an abysmal shortfall,” Dia, who works with a cryptocurrency exchange, told me.

Dia and Diouf both said they’d withdrawn money when the protests began, expecting that the banks would likely close and that financial services would be crippled were the authorities to impose an internet shutdown. 

The political situation, Dia said, and the internet shutdowns have left him contemplating options for leaving Senegal altogether. 

“Many young people are ready to abandon their country if Sall remains in power in 2024,” he told me. In the past decade, thousands of young Senegalese have sought to move to Europe in search of better fortunes, often on small boats. These perilous journeys have claimed hundreds of lives. Last month, at least 15 people drowned after a boat carrying migrants and refugees capsized off the coast of Dakar.

In a West Africa beset by political instability – the most recent example being the coup in Niger – Senegal has been cited as a model of democracy. That reputation is starting to wear off. 

“This is really bad for the region itself,” said Anoba, the analyst at the Center for African Prosperity. “As you know, Macky Sall is one of the leading figures in West Africa, and right now [as] we are trying to quench the fires of coups that are changing the political terrain, this is the last thing we want.”

Threats against Senegalese media represent another sign of democratic backsliding in the country. In June, a television channel offering live coverage of the protests was suspended for 30 days. And Papa Ale Niang, a journalist with the prominent daily newspaper Dakarmatin, was charged on August 1, like Sonko, with “inciting insurrection.”

Internet shutdowns are also a sign of faltering democratic values. “Cutting off the internet is tantamount to denying the right to information, which is a constitutional principle, not to mention international laws,” said Emmanuel Diokh, the Senegal lead at Internet Sans Frontières, an international organization that defends access to the internet. 

Since 2017, internet shutdowns have become an increasingly common tactic of information and social control in Africa. Cameroon’s long-serving president, Paul Biya, imposed an internet ban in the English-speaking region of the country in 2017 that lasted three months. In 2019, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa also imposed an internet shutdown in response to protests. Governments in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea have also imposed strict internet regulations in the past five years.

All of these countries have used the same rationale: The actions were intended to curb hate speech or to avoid the breakdown of order. Sall has shown one thing to the Senegalese people — the internet is not safe from government control. Instead of curbing hate speech, shutting down the internet is a sign that he is prepared to use any means necessary to decimate the opposition before the elections in February. Still, protesters like Diouf say they will not relent.

The post Senegal is stifling its democracy in the dark appeared first on Coda Story.

About a mile away, as the wrestlers were being violently restrained by the police, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was opening the country’s new parliament building, estimated to have cost  $120 million, in a controversial ceremony that was boycotted by at least 19 opposition parties. The wrestlers were marching toward the building to draw attention to their cause when they were stopped. They had already been protesting for weeks at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, a site designated for protests. But permission to protest outside the new parliament building, said the police, had been denied. 

For a little over a month, the wrestlers camped out at Jantar Mantar. They have alleged that Brij Bhushan Singh, arguably the single most powerful official in Indian wrestling over the last decade, has been sexually harassing young female wrestlers for years. The protesters include some of Indian wrestling’s biggest names — Sakshi Malik,the bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Vinesh Phogat, a medalist at the World Wrestling Championship in both 2019 and 2022, and Bajrang Punia, the bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Since it became an independent nation in 1947, India has won 30 Olympic medals, seven of them in wrestling. Medal-winning athletes are celebrated with fervor largely because there are so few of them in India.  

Brij Bhushan Singh, the man the wrestlers accuse of systematic sexual abuse, is a six-time member of parliament. He is an influential figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling party.. Singh has the reputation of being a strongman who wields considerable political muscle in Uttar Pradesh, a vast northern state that is electorally crucial for keeping the BJP in power. In addition to his parliamentary duties, Singh has been the president of the Wrestling Federation of India since 2011. Though he was asked to temporarily step aside from his role at the Federation after the allegations came to light, he is still listed as its president on its website.

Since April 23, Indian wrestlers, including the sport’s biggest stars, have been living in a makeshift plastic tent and sleeping on mattresses laid out on the pavement. They have called for Singh’s dismissal from the Federation and for his arrest. “We have been sitting here asking for justice,” Vinesh Phogat told me. Their supporters point to the lack of action by the police, including delays in just registering a complaint, as evidence that the BJP is shielding Singh.

He has, the wrestlers say, been harassing young athletes, including at least one minor, for over a decade with impunity. When Sakshi Malik joined a training camp in the city of Lucknow in 2012, she told me, older wrestlers warned her that Singh “was not a good man, that he sexually harassed girls.” She described his predatory behavior as an open secret in the wrestling community. “The parents, the women’s coaches, the men’s coaches, everyone knew this was happening.” But, she added, he was so powerful that “no one had the courage to speak out against him.”

Phogat also told me that Singh would “harass almost every girl.” And that if the young women wrestlers resisted, Singh “would ruin their game” and subject them to “mental torture.” Many young women, Phogat said, “have left wrestling because of him.”

Paramjeet Malik, a former official physiotherapist of the Wrestling Federation of India, said he was aware that Singh harassed women. He told me that in 2014, three young wrestlers had confided in him that they had been sexually harassed by Singh. Malik lived with the athletes at the training camp in Lucknow that year. He told me that, on several occasions, he had noticed a car that he knew belonged to Singh stop at the camp to pick up women wrestlers. “I saw them leaving the camp at night, after eleven, or sometimes at midnight,” he told me. When he asked the girls what was going on, he said, some of them broke down and told him that they were being called to Singh’s residence in the city.

If they refused to go, Malik told me, they were told that Singh “would have their names removed from the camp’s list, that they would be declared unfit, that their careers would be ruined.” Some of these girls, he said, were under 18 and came from low-income backgrounds. Sport, to them and their families, was a way out of poverty. Malik said he made a written complaint to a senior coach at the camp but no action was taken. Malik alleges that when he spoke to the media about Singh’s behavior, he was fired. According to Malik, the coach who fired him admitted that he had been receiving calls from Singh himself. The coach warned Malik that Singh was a powerful man and that Malik’s life could be in danger if he persisted. “That very night,” Malik told me, “we had to flee the camp.”

The three star wrestlers leading the current protests — Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia — said they believed they had reached a level of recognition that finally empowered them to take on Singh and stop the abuse. The trigger, Malik told me, was when she heard that 10 women had been harassed by Singh after a recent junior world championship. A few of the young women spoke directly to Malik. She said she had to speak up. “Enough was enough,” Malik told me, “we didn’t want coming generations of women to have to face the same thing.” 

On April 21, seven women wrestlers, including a minor, filed police complaints against Singh at a Delhi police station. Their identities have not been publicly revealed. The women listed specific incidents of harassment between 2012 and 2022 and said they occurred at Singh’s official parliamentary residence in Delhi and during tournaments in India and abroad. The Indian Express newspaper reported that, in at least two complaints, the women described in detail how Singh touched them inappropriately on the pretext of checking their breath.

However, the Delhi police did not immediately register a case against Singh. The police in the Indian capital operate under the authority of India’s Home Ministry — as part of the federal, rather than local, government. India’s current home minister is Amit Shah, and he is effectively second only to Modi in the hierarchy of both the government and the BJP. 

When the police failed to take note of their complaint, the wrestlers filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking for a police probe. Only after the court intervened did the Delhi police register two complaints against Singh. One of these complaints was from a minor and filed under India’s stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act — a guilty verdict under the act results in, at minimum, a five-year sentence.

Singh denies all allegations and says he is willing “to be hanged” if found guilty. He has called the wrestlers’ protests “politically motivated.” Over the last month, several leaders from India’s opposition parties have visited the wrestlers’ sit-in to extend solidarity. Singh has since described the athletes as “toys” in the hands of opposition parties.

“Sexual harassment is not a political issue,” Phogat told me. She said it was Singh who was trying to make their complaints about politics in a bid to “save himself.” The wrestlers, Phogat said, have put their careers on the line for their cause. “We have some respect, some standing in the country,” she told me. “Something must have happened for us to be here.”

Phogat pointed to the U.S. gymnast Simone Biles, who testified against the U.S. national gymnastics team’s doctor Larry Nassar — accused of sexual abuse by more than 100 women. “When Simone Biles spoke up against sexual harassment,” Phogat said, “did they call her political?” She described Singh as India’s Larry Nassar. “There are many Larry Nassars here,” she told me, “not just one, but at least we are taking on one now.”

Kavita Krishnan, a feminist activist and writer, says that the BJP is “backing their leader” in a “brazen and shameless” way. “The ruling party has not distanced itself from this man,” she told me. “I cannot remember so blatant a case of political protection.” She said Singh’s “political power” in Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in the Indian parliament, more than any other state, is “the basis of very cynical calculations this government is making about keeping this guy around.”

Krishnan added that in a normal, healthy democracy, the wrestlers’ complaints would have caused huge political embarrassment. One of the primary reasons for the absence of pressure on the BJP, she said, was the lack of serious and sustained mainstream media coverage of the scandal. The BJP exercises its control, she said, not only through government bodies but also through one of its “main propaganda arms” — the media. “The control of the propaganda media over public opinion,” Krishnan said, is what “the government relies on” to shape public conversation. Most mainstream media, she said, are either neglecting the story or suppressing it. “The most influential media with the greatest reach, especially in non-English Indian languages,” Krishnan told me, “are, for the large part, totally batting for the BJP and Brij Bhushan Singh.” Vinesh Phogat told me that “national TV is making Singh the hero and us the villains.”

The wrestlers first held a public protest in Delhi in January 2023. At the time, the government persuaded them to call it off by forming an oversight committee to examine the allegations and by asking Singh to “step aside” from his role at the Wrestling Federation. By late April, though, the wrestlers felt they had no choice but to resume protests after they saw no serious action being taken against Singh. The oversight committee’s report wasn’t made public, and the athletes expressed a lack of faith in its functioning. 

Sakshi Malik told me that she believed the committee had given Singh “a clean chit,” which means effectively clearing him of all charges. The wrestlers claimed that Singh had also resumed overseeing tournaments in his area and was still calling the shots in the Federation, a sign of his political power.

To further show off his political clout, Singh has called for a mass rally on June 5 in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, a place sacred to Hindus. “On the appeal of the nation’s revered saints, a grand rally for public awareness,” reads a poster for the event, complete with an image of a Hindu god. Krishnan described the rally as an attempt by a BJP politician at “invoking Hindu identity” and “Hindu supremacist politics” to imply that he is innocent and deserves the support of all Hindus. Singh has claimed that over one million Hindu seers will attend. “Under the leadership of seers, we will force the government to change the law,” he declared, referring to India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act. 

The wrestlers say that Singh has tried to intimidate the athletes who complained to the police. Malik told me that the minor in particular has been targeted. “Phone calls have been made to her parents,” Malik said. Strange cars have been spotted around her house at night.

Even as Singh has attempted grandstanding and deploying strong-arm tactics, the wrestlers have stood their ground. On May 28, the police detained the wrestlers for the day and arrested at least 700 others across the capital. With the wrestlers and their supporters held at different police stations, the authorities took the opportunity to clear their protest site and said they would no longer allow the month-long sit-in to continue. Delhi police also charged the wrestlers with “rioting” and “obstructing a public servant.” The wrestlers have since announced that they will begin an indefinite hunger strike. 

In the past few weeks, as the protests have intensified, the wrestlers have received support from student unions, women’s groups, labor unions, farmers’ collectives and even the International Olympic Committee. On the evening of May 23, nearly 500 people marched to India Gate, a war memorial in the heart of Delhi, as part of a candlelight protest in support of the wrestlers. Sakshi Malik stood on the edge of a police barricade and lit a candle, as hundreds gathered before her waving Indian flags. “This is a fight for India’s daughters,” she told the crowd. “We have to win this. And we will.”

The post Indian wrestlers say ‘me too’ but the BJP is not listening appeared first on Coda Story.

Imran Khan is famous in Pakistan for his savvy use of social media. It was instrumental in shaping his political image in the early 2000s and in building the campaign that brought him to power in August 2018. Throughout his premiership, social media was a key tool for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. But today, with Khan at the center of a conflict between political and military powers in Pakistan, social media too has become a space of bitter contention.  

Earlier this month, Khan was arrested on corruption charges by the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force, while he was at the Islamabad High Court for a hearing. His arrest, on May 9, triggered nationwide protests and violent clashes between his supporters and the police resulting in at least eight deaths and dozens of injuries. Khan’s supporters had launched an arguably unprecedented attack on the Pakistani army and its institutions. In the city of Lahore, supporters set a mansion belonging to a senior military officer on fire. Since its formation as an independent state in 1947, Pakistan has spent over three decades, at various times, under military rule. Even when civilian governments have been in charge, the military has loomed in the background. Open defiance of the military’s hold on Pakistan is exceedingly rare.

In his latest Twitter Space event, Khan urged his supporters, whom he described as his “social media heroes,” to continue to stay strong in the face of an ongoing crackdown against him and workers from his political party, thousands of whom have faced arrests, been detained or are on the run. Pakistan, Khan said, is being governed by the “law of the jungle.”

Technology has been central to Khan’s emergence as a leading politician. A decade after his PTI party formed in 1996, a group of tech-forward supporters built the party’s website — a first for any political party in Pakistan. At the time, PTI was derisively referred to as the “social media party,” and its leader was dubbed “Facebook Khan,” implying that the party lacked any real influence in a country dominated by the military and by warring political dynasties.

Strategic online campaigning, though, helped Khan’s PTI reach young people eager for change and for relief from the corrupt ruling elite. “Tabdeeli,” or change, trended on social media platforms across Pakistan. Inspired by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the PTI’s social media team were brimming with fresh, inventive ideas for how to leverage technology to market Khan. Soon, he was being referred to as Pakistan’s “Kaptaan,” Urdu for “captain,” a pointed reference to his glorious career as a cricket player.

By 2018, Khan’s social media machine was credited with delivering the party’s first victory in national elections. PTI’s digital politics marked a significant shift from the antiquated way in which Pakistan’s biggest parties conducted elections, from both the pre-poll targeting of voters to on-the-day mobilization of supporters.

It’s not only PTI that benefited from its strong online presence. The military strongly supported Khan. In fact, until Khan was removed from office in 2022, it was hard to distinguish between the online networks of the PTI and the Pakistani military. These digital warriors were easily distinguished by their use of the Pakistani flag to show their patriotism and by the manner in which they organized to promote positive news about Pakistan, highlight criticisms of India and counter Pakistanis they characterized as “traitors” because they dared to dissent from the state’s narrative.

Members of Imran Khan’s digital media team became participants in national security meetings with military advisers. Digital strategy was a key component of foreign policy discussions.

In a study published in August 2022, researchers found that the interests of PTI supporters and the Pakistani army converged. “Patterns of Twitter retweets and analysis of Facebook data provide important evidence,” the researchers wrote, “of a de facto coalition between the networks of the military and PTI.” Dissidents, they pointed out, “were largely drowned out by the mainstream political parties and military.”

Now, with the PTI in direct opposition to the Pakistani military, conflict between these institutions and their supporters is playing out actively online. When authorities blocked internet access amid protests earlier this month, it was an admission that it could not contain the outrage of PTI supporters.

After Khan’s arrest on May 9, the Pakistani government blocked access to broadband services and social media platforms for four days. Though the state regularly applies an internet kill switch to ostensibly quell unrest, this was the longest such shutdown in a country of 128 million internet users. The intent was to contain the outrage and perhaps to silence groups critical of the military’s role in Pakistani politics, which it entirely failed to do. 

While criticism of the military’s role in politics is not unprecedented, the scale of the recent wave of anti-military sentiment sparked by Khan’s arrest was extraordinary. And it was generated mostly through social media. After Khan was ousted from office last year, anti-army hashtags began to trend on social media platforms. The growing criticism and anger over the army’s role in removing Khan from office culminated in the violence earlier this month. The Pakistani civilian government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has already declared that protestors who attacked military properties will be tried under army law — draconian legislation that is typically used to try enemies of the state.

The pressure on Khan’s supporters and particularly on members of his political party is taking its toll. In a high-profile departure, Khan’s former human rights minister Shireen Mazari quit the party on May 23. She had been arrested and then arrested again, even after she had been granted bail, an “ordeal,” she said, that “had an impact on my health.”

But silencing PTI is particularly challenging due to its global reach. Regardless of whether coverage of Khan’s public speeches and rallies are censored on mainstream media in Pakistan, PTI posts hourly updates and testimonials from PTI workers with English subtitles across social media platforms, often with the hashtag #ThisWasNotOnTV.

“The whole world is watching, politics is no longer restricted to streets,” said Jibran Ilyas, PTI’s social media lead and a cybersecurity expert based in Chicago. When mobile internet networks were down in Pakistan, Ilyas organized an online campaign to request that residents based in protest areas make their Wi-Fis public to help PTI members upload footage on social media and share updates with the rest of the team.

Though, according to Khan, 10,000 party workers and most of the PTI leadership are under arrest or on the run, PTI’s digital team is still online. Fearing imminent arrest and speaking from an undisclosed location, a PTI worker told me they didn’t sleep for several days after Khan was arrested. “One of our team members was shot in the leg during protests and underwent a six-hour surgery. Even then, they were still posting updates on social media,” said another member of the PTI social media team. On TikTok, in the four days between Khan’s arrest and bail hearing, the PTI’s official account reached over 100 million people and the team put out 164 videos, revealed a recent report.

With its digital support and global reach, can PTI’s online coalition be dismantled? “It is possible PTI can sustain its social media mobilization in the face of censorship, calibrated shutdowns and a general crackdown, which may intensify,” said Asfandyar Mir, an academic who published the 2022 paper noting the existence of  the “de facto coalition” between the army and PTI that led to Khan becoming prime minister. 

As for the military, the country is once again papered with pro-army posters. They have also been successful in coercing some PTI leaders to quit the party and pressuring supporters to issue forced apologies online. The Pakistan defense minister revealed that the government is considering banning the PTI because it has “attacked the very basis of the state.” And there is evidence that the state is shutting down internet services within a five-kilometer radius of Khan’s house in the city of Lahore to make it difficult for him to address his supporters online. “We are in uncharted territory for Pakistani politics and its intersection with digital mobilization,” Mir told me.

The future of Khan and his party is in the balance. But whether he, or his party, withstand the pressure, a key question remains unanswered: The people may be fearful of the state, but are they still respectful of its institutions?

The post Imran Khan is fighting Pakistan’s army with Twitter appeared first on Coda Story.

“My heart started beating faster,” Yusuf Beg, the caretaker, told me, as he described a phone call he had received that morning. For much of the previous month, the city authorities had been asking Beg to raze parts of the shrine. On March 15, he received a letter from the Delhi Public Works Department that claimed the shrine was encroaching on the pavement. He removed some of the construction with his own hands, but it wasn’t enough. “We want the whole pavement cleared,” Beg says the public works department officials told him. On the morning of April 1, Beg received a call to inform him that the bulldozers were on their way.

Sheba Khan, a singer, was among those gathered around the debris where a prayer room once stood. “There are so many illegal constructions in the city,” she told me. Did the authorities really  have to come here? What hazard did this particular shrine represent? “It was such a peaceful place,” she said.

Beg was astonished that the bulldozers had been deployed even when he had attempted to cooperate with the authorities. “Tell me,” Beg said, welling up, “did the footpath come first or this 400-year-old shrine?”

Over the past year, the bulldozer has emerged as a symbol of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oft-invoked “New India.” The bulldozer is most closely associated not with Modi but with the promise of strong and effective governance offered by Yogi Adityanath. A hard-line Hindu monk clad in saffron robes, Adityanath is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. With 236 million people, an independent Uttar Pradesh would be about the fifth most populated country in the world. It would also be one of the poorest.

Adityanath became the chief minister of the northern Indian state in 2017 when the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, came to power in local elections with an unprecedented mandate. He led the BJP to another landslide victory last year. For many, Adityanath is the biggest star in the BJP after Modi himself. Some even argue that Adityanath is the likeliest candidate to succeed Modi as prime minister. When Adityanath campaigns in states where the BJP contests elections, he draws huge crowds.

On the campaign trail for the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2022, Adityanath held the bulldozer up as an exemplar of stern action and swift justice in the face of a slow legal system. In his stump speeches, Adityanath declared that if he were voted back into office, he would use the bulldozer against “criminals,” “mafias” and “rioters.” His government had first used a bulldozer in 2020 to knock down the house of a notorious gangster, who was alleged to have killed eight policemen. The gangster himself was later killed in a “police encounter,” an Indian euphemism for what is effectively an extrajudicial execution. 

The bulldozer was, supposedly, the evidence of Adityanath’s zero-tolerance approach to crime. It struck a chord with the people in Uttar Pradesh, and they hailed him as the “Bulldozer Baba.”  In March 2022, with the election handily won, Adityanath’s ecstatic supporters waved BJP flags as they rolled down the streets across the state in bulldozers.

But the bulldozer is not simply a neutral symbol of a strong state reclaiming land from encroachers or taking on hardened criminals. Adityanath’s election speeches were replete with anti-Muslim rhetoric, with the Muslim community associated with “rioters” and referred to as “Taliban” supporters. As the bulldozer emerged as an unofficial election mascot for BJP-style tough governance, the subtext was clear: The criminals Adityanath wanted to go after would primarily be found outside the middle-class Hindu majority.

Since Adityanath’s reelection as the Uttar Pradesh chief minister in 2022, he has deployed  bulldozers in the aftermath of protests, razing homes of those who have only been accused, not convicted, of rioting. “Mere alleged involvement in criminal activity cannot ever be grounds for demolition of property,” said AP Shah, a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. No due process is being followed, he told me. The bulldozer has become “a symbol of repression and oppression of the poor and marginalized and has ruined entire families.” 

Critics have pointed out that Adityanath has used bulldozers disproportionately to demolish the homes of Muslims, a pattern that has been repeated in BJP-administered states such as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The pretext most often used is the clearing of illegal encroachments and construction. Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International’s India board, said that home demolitions are used to “inflict punishment on the community for raising their voices.” Several human rights experts told me this amounts to an abuse of the law. The bulldozer, they say, is being used to silence, and “instill fear” in, Muslim communities following protests or communal violence in an India that has been perceived as stridently sectarian since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. The Uttar Pradesh government denies this reading. Rakesh Tripathi, a BJP spokesman in Uttar Pradesh, told me that the government goes after all criminals and encroachments, not just Muslims.

Angshuman Choudhury, an associate fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, described Adityanath’s use of the bulldozer as a “primordial form of justice delivery.” It was, he said, a “leaf right out of the textbook of populism.” The bulldozer gives the majority a sense of safety, a belief that the government is taking quick action against purported criminals, even if that definition is extended to include anyone the state deems an enemy. “Just give the majority what it wants,” he told me, that is what Adityanath’s use of bulldozers amounted to. “And what the majority wants is quick justice.”

So popular has the bulldozer become in the growing iconography of Hindu nationalism that young men have been lining up to get bulldozers inked onto their skin. Abhinav Kumar, the owner of BlackJack Tattoo Studio in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, told me that several people had come to him asking for bulldozer tattoos during a time when the tattoo was “trending.” This was in the aftermath of Adityanath’s election victory and during periods when there were a series of high-profile demolitions in the news. Bulldozers have also featured on packets of local snacks and in several Hindu nationalist pop songs.

In Modi’s India, the bulldozer is evolving as a new cultural symbol, normalized as part of India’s political and Hindu nationalist lexicon. It is a shorthand for the Modi regime’s carefully crafted muscular identity, its suppression of minorities and its narrative of a formidable, resurgent Hindu India under his leadership. The bulldozer has transcended politics, Choudhury said, to become an “element of pop culture” that the public could consume.

The bulldozer as a calling card of a confident Hindu nationalism has made its way, inevitably, to countries with large Indian diasporas. In an Indian Independence Day parade in Edison, New Jersey in August 2022, a vehicle that resembled a bulldozer was among the floats. Sambit Patra, a BJP national spokesman in India, attended as a guest of honor. The parade was organized by a local organization of diaspora businessmen called the Indian Business Association.

“It was shocking,” Ria Chakrabarty, the policy director for Hindus for Human Rights, a progressive nonprofit in the U.S., told me about the bulldozer’s inclusion in the parade. It was well known, she said, that there was sympathy for Hindu nationalism within the Indian diaspora, “but I don’t think I expected such fervent support.” Chakraborty said Hindus for Human Rights was engaged in “educating U.S. lawmakers” on why the bulldozer “has become a harmful symbol” for Muslims in India. “We view it as a symbol of hate,” she said, adding that “all the toxicity of Indian politics was now seeping into Indian-American politics.” 

Eventually, the organizers of the parade were forced to apologize. In a letter on August 30, the Indian Business Association acknowledged that the bulldozer was a “divisive image” and that its inclusion in the parade had “offended Indian American minority groups, especially Muslims.” Shortly after, on September 2, Cory Booker and Bob Menendez, U.S. senators from New Jersey, released a joint statement describing the bulldozer as “a symbol of intimidation against Muslims and other religious minorities in India.”

Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University, told me that “Muslims are increasingly treated as second-class citizens in India's autocracy.” By “using bulldozers to illegally destroy Muslim homes,” she said, “the BJP sends a clear message to this religious minority: Be afraid.” Outside India, Truschke’s interpretation of Adityanath’s bulldozer justice is widely accepted as accurate. 

In June 2022, three United Nations special rapporteurs wrote to the Indian federal government, expressing “serious concern” about the “forced evictions and arbitrary home demolitions carried out against Muslim communities and other low-income groups in India.” The letter referred to demolitions in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi as having a “distinct ‘punitive’ nature,” and said that they appeared “to have been carried out as collective punishment against the minority Muslim community.” The letter also described the act as a “violation of international human rights standards.” The language is strikingly reminiscent of language the U.N. has used to describe the “punitive demolitions” inflicted by Israeli authorities on Palestinians in the occupied territories. “In short,” a U.N. special rapporteur said back in 2014, “punitive home demolitions are an act of collective punishment that contravenes international law.”

Angshuman Choudhury, at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi, told me that there was an “uncanny similarity between the modus operandi of the Hindu nationalist Modi government and how the Israeli state has been conducting itself in Palestine.” Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, demolitions of Palestinian homes have risen sharply. Last month, the U.N. noted the demolition of nearly double the number of structures in East Jerusalem since Netanyahu returned to power in late December than during the equivalent period the previous year.     

While he notes the different political context in Israel and that state’s use of demolitions as part of a “territorial expansion,” Choudhury argues that just as Israel has used bulldozers as retribution against individual Palestinians, so India uses them to “create a chilling effect and punish Muslims who dare to protest.” 

Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropologist and professor of South Asian studies at Stanford University, told me that the Hindu nationalist movement “has long been admiring Israel and the Zionist movement that makes Israel into a privileged home for all Jews in the world.” He says he’s heard personally from many Hindu nationalists who “have conveyed that sense of admiration to me and have told me that they thought India should be a home to Hindus only.”

This explains the popular embrace and the cultural celebration — at least in the country’s largely Hindi-speaking heartland — of the bulldozer as a symbol of the BJP’s might and its belligerence. 

Hansen told me that the bulldozer represents “a new phase in the Hindu nationalist project.” The celebration of the bulldozer, he says, is “a form of payback, a revenge fantasy” for perceived injustices suffered by Hindus under the Muslim Mughal empire that controlled much of India for hundreds of years until the British took over in the mid-19th century. Demolitions, he argues, provide “great entertainment and collective satisfaction,” comparing it to the “jeering and cheering crowds at lynchings in the American South, or all those ordinary people who celebrated antisemitic pogroms in Europe.”

Adityanath and the BJP’s claim that the bulldozer is a means to deter criminals and reclaim government land is largely disingenuous. In June 2022, India’s Supreme Court told the Yogi Adityanath government that demolitions “cannot be retaliatory” but the judges still refused to step in and stop the use of bulldozers. To avoid serious judicial scrutiny, the government justifies the demolitions by claiming that the properties being destroyed are illegal constructions. 

Hansen, the Stanford professor, told me that the “BJP more or less exercises its power with complete impunity, that it is beyond the accountability of the law.” The “potency” of the bulldozer as a symbol, he said, lies in the fact that it supposedly upholds the law and is an “enforcement of order.” Bulldozers have traditionally been used in India in the “name of urban development and disciplining the poor.” There is “strong support for such punitive measures against the poor and social and religious minorities among the middle classes,” who enjoy the benefits of more regularized and formal housing. Given the extent of unauthorized building in Indian cities, though, a vast number of buildings are vulnerable to being declared illegal. “Nothing is easier,” Hansen told me, than to “find formal problems with most buildings if the authors so desire,” making the discretionary powers of the state “wide open to abuse and the blatant harassment of certain individuals and communities.”

Much of this abuse was evident when the Adityanath government lashed out at protesters last summer. On the morning of June 12, 2022, Afreen Fatima, a former student at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, saw her family home being torn down. “I watched it live on YouTube,” she told me. As Fatima witnessed the demolition of the home she had lived in for 20 years, her mother prayed on a mat nearby.

With police in riot gear stationed outside, three bulldozers were put to work destroying Fatima’s house. The media, present in droves, broadcast the demolition across the country. Fatima and her father had been vocal critics of the Modi government. “It was an act of vendetta,” Fatima told me about the Adityanath government’s actions. Her father had been picked out as a protest “ringleader” after two BJP members, one a party spokesperson, made offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad on television, leading to days of unrest in India and a sharp diplomatic backlash, especially from the Gulf countries where many Indian migrants work. The demonstrations turned violent in some places, with incidents of stone-pelting and arson. Fatima denied that her father had led the protests, but it made no difference.

Fatima believes the bulldozer sends a message to the Hindus that the BJP government is “showing Muslims their place” and a message to the Muslims to “stay in line.” She told me she believes the bulldozer demolitions have had their desired effect. “The way the Muslim community earlier asserted its presence in public spaces,” she said, “has changed. Now, it’s like let’s just survive one day at a time.”After the demolition, Fatima’s family found it hard to find a place to live. Landlords did not want to rent to them. They were afraid, Fatima said. “Our entire family was criminalized,” she told me, “to the extent that people were scared to talk to us on the phone.”

Despite criticism at home and abroad, the BJP appears to be expanding its punitive use of the bulldozer. In February, a mother and daughter were killed in a village in Uttar Pradesh during an anti-encroachment drive, the widely used term in India for clearing illegal buildings and developments. The family said that officials showed up, bulldozer in tow, and ended up setting fire to the family’s hut. The authorities claimed that the mother and daughter locked themselves in the hut and set fire to it. 

Also in February, the government launched an anti-encroachment drive in the disputed Indian state of Kashmir, a site of territorial conflict with Pakistan and a decades-long insurgency. Kashmir is currently heavily controlled, with little independent reporting permitted and with journalists and critics frequently jailed even as the BJP insists that peace has been established in the Valley. The government reclaimed 50,000 acres of land during the demolition drive before the bulldozers were temporarily called off as people in India’s only Muslim-majority state became increasingly panicked and angered. 

On April 1, in Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighborhood, after the bulldozers moved in and tore down most of the old Muslim shrine, the tombs of the saint and his family lay in the open air, covered only by a thin, lime-green sheet and surrounded by stone debris. The March 15 letter from the public works department specifically mentioned removing the encroachments as soon as possible with the upcoming G-20 summit in mind. World leaders will arrive in India’s capital in September 2023 for a meeting that will mark the end of the country’s year-long G-20 presidency. It is an opportunity, says the BJP, to showcase Indian democracy and development. To that end, a project is ongoing to “beautify” the city of Delhi. 

But on that Saturday afternoon, the street looked more disfigured than it had before the bulldozers arrived.

The post The demolition of dissent in India appeared first on Coda Story.

Violent clashes in December and January, including two mass killings, left 46 people dead. But “security forces were not to blame” for these incidents, she said. Instead, it was one group of protesters that fatally attacked another, with firearms smuggled over the southeastern border from Bolivia.

At a January 24 press conference, Boluarte cited only “unofficial” sources when she told reporters that most of the people killed in a recent confrontation in Puno, a predominantly Indigenous region that borders Bolivia, died after being shot with “a homemade weapon known as dum-dum,” in an apparent reference to expanding bullets that explode inside victims’ bodies. “The police do not use this type of lethal weapon,” she said.

“This is not peaceful protest,” she continued. “It’s a violent action by a group of radicals with a political and economic agenda driven by drug trafficking, mining, and contraband.”

But there is no evidence to support this story, as Boluarte herself appeared to acknowledge in her remarks to the media.

Extensive cell phone footage from the two mass killings — one in Ayacucho that left 10 dead and the other in Puno, which killed 18 — shows the National Police of Peru and the Peruvian armed forces opening fire on civilians. In both cases, people were killed by gunfire, according to Peru’s official human rights agency.

In the week following Boluarte’s press conference, Peru’s two leading investigative journalism outlets, OjoPublico and IDLReporteros, came out with exposes clearly laying out evidence that pointed to the national police and the army. The former published details of the autopsies, which found police munitions in the bodies of many of the dead protesters. The latter painstakingly reconstructed the Ayacucho deaths to show how the military used live rounds against civilians.

A few days later, Amnesty International published its own investigation, in which it accused the national police of “unlawfully” and “indiscriminately” using lethal force against “mostly peaceful” protests. The human rights group also warned that the killings had been motivated by “systemic racism ingrained in Peruvian society.”

This is all hard to take for many Peruvians, who have endured almost continual political chaos since 2018 — with six different presidents in five years. The current unrest is the result of the ousting of Pedro Castillo, whose 17 months in power were dominated by graft scandals and infighting on the far left. Castillo was removed from office by Peru’s Congress, after he attempted to dissolve the legislative body, overhaul the courts and rule by decree, just as anti-corruption prosecutors were closing in on him. Boluarte shared a self-declared Marxist-Leninist ticket with Castillo in the 2021 elections but allied herself with the far-right majority in the Congress as soon as she was sworn in as president, possibly to head off her own ideologically-driven impeachment.

The protests, which have no clear leader, initially called for Castillo’s reinstatement. But now demonstrators are targeting Boluarte and the Congress and demanding new elections. The president’s popularity has dipped to 15% and Congress’ to just 6%, according to one poll. The same study found that three-quarters of Peruvians want Boluarte to resign.

It is no coincidence that in a society divided by race, class and geography, where half of the population is food insecure, most of those protesting are the have-nots who have been largely excluded from Peru’s economic boom of the last two decades. Southern Peru, the epicenter of the turmoil, is the country’s poorest region, where many rural families have no running water or electricity. 

Although Boluarte has claimed to want “dialogue” and to never have authorized the use of deadly force against demonstrators, she has also repeatedly defended the national police, calling their handling of the protests “immaculate.” Compounding this are racist dog whistles from the military and far-right government leaders dismissing the protestors. Boluarte’s first head of military intelligence, Juan Carlos Liendo, insists that the left has sought to use Castillo’s ouster to divide Peruvians by income and ethnicity.

But in an interview, Liendo,  now a frequent analyst on Peruvian TV, appeared to do exactly that by blaming the unrest on the “Andean man,” a reference to Peruvians from mountain communities of Indigenous origin.

“The Andean man is very prone to violence. If you look at the history of Latin America, Peru is the most violent country. The societies that are most violent are those that live in the mountains, not in the jungle, unless it is jungles with mountains, like Vietnam.”

Ultimately, Liendo’s views proved too extreme even for Boluarte, who forced him out just a week after appointing him. But her broader views do not seem to have changed.

Lawmakers, most of Peru’s heavily-concentrated media and Boluarte herself also frequently conflate the unrest, which has included vandalism and rioting, with “terrorism.”

Falsely accusing one’s political opponents of terrorism — known in Peru as “terruqueo” — has a very particular and painful meaning for Peruvians. A well-established practice of the Peruvian far right, it is a reminder of the traumas triggered by the Shining Path guerilla insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s. The armed Maoist rebels launched a conflict that, according to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, took the lives of an estimated 69,000 Peruvians, most of them civilians.

Today, the last remnants of the Shining Path, which formally laid down its arms in 1994, have given up their revolutionary agenda and instead are providing protection to the cocaine trade in a remote, densely-forested area of the eastern Andean foothills.

On February 11, the group ambushed a police patrol deep in the cloud forest, killing seven officers. Yet no serious expert believes that the group still has the capacity to influence events beyond the immediate region, much less mobilize national anti-government protests. 

“The narrative doesn’t have to be logical. It just needs to be emotive,” said Eduardo González, a sociologist who advised the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “The government needs a monster, to create moral panic. This just shows that memory is a battle. It’s not reflexive or easy.” 

Antonio Zapata, a historian at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, pointed to the moral panic over communism in the 1930s. 

“Terruqueo is just the latest way in which the elites see the country,” said Zapata. “They always need an external agent. Now it’s Evo [Morales, the former socialist president of Bolivia], before it was Fidel and before that it was Stalin. Like all efficient lies, it has to be woven together with elements of the truth.”

This scare tactic has allowed the government to declare states of emergency in several of the protest hotspots, restricting the right to assembly and allowing warrantless searches of homes. Separately, it has introduced a bill to toughen already-steep penalties for public order offenses with fast track trials that violate basic due process norms.

Prosecutors even set up a terrorism hotline for citizens to report supposed “revolutionaries.” Chief prosecutor Patricia Benavides has converted several offices specializing in human rights abuses, including those committed by the state, into counter-terrorism units. 

At Lima’s San Marcos University, the oldest university in the Americas, riot police and anti-terrorism officers arrested 193 students and protestors, before being forced to free all but one of them for lack of evidence. The ultra-conservative mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, has also banned protests downtown in an obvious breach of the national constitution.

Meanwhile, an extreme-right group, which calls itself the Resistance and has ties to the mayor, has harassed and intimidated journalists and officials perceived to be progressive for months without prosecutors or the national police  lifting a finger. On February 21, the Resistance staged a rowdy picket outside the home of Gustavo Gorriti, a prominent journalist who heads IDL Reporteros, chanting antisemitic slogans. Police officers refused to intervene.

In many ways, Peru’s current turmoil feels like deja vu. Nearly 30% of those killed when the Shining Path was at its most powerful — some 20,000 people — died at the hands of the military and the police, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a fact that Peru’s authoritarian right still refuses to acknowledge. That grim story is laid out at the Place of Memory, a gray concrete museum overlooking the Pacific in Lima that memorializes the internal conflict. Lima’s mayor López Aliaga wants to hand over the control of the museum to the military, which would likely erase any mention of its own atrocities.

“It’s not that we don’t remember,” said Zapata, the historian. “It’s what we remember. On one side, there is this memory of being marginalized, excluded, of always being defeated. On the other, there is this memory of how to exclude and marginalize and how to defend privileges.”

That struggle for memory over the bloodletting of the 1980s and 1990s has never been far from the surface in Peru. But it has now detonated into a new, critical confrontation over Peru’s present.

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Increasingly, many in Western countries are oblivious when this happens, compounding the isolation endured by people taken offline. Here are some internet blackouts you probably don’t know about:

1) In January, Kazakhstan made headlines because of its mass anti-government protests and the total internet blackout that followed. The Kazakh government has been in the habit of throttling the internet for a while though. For example, on May 9, 2019, the presidential election day, authorities cut off internet access coinciding with detentions of activists and journalists participating in the demonstrations at the time. In 2012, Kazakhstan's parliament amended a national security law allowing the government to shut down internet and mobile connections during riots or anti-terrorist operations.

2) In April 2019, London police shut down Wi-fi in London’s tube stations to halt the actions of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental activist group whose civil disobedience protests in the UK had caused disruptions on roads, bridges and railways and resulted in hundreds of protesters being detained. “In the interests of safety and to prevent and deter serious disruption to the London Underground network, British Transport Police has taken the decision to restrict passenger Wi-Fi connectivity at Tube stations,” a police spokesperson told The Verge in 2019.

3) One popular tool to combat exam cheating has become the shutting down of the internet. Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and India have been regularly cutting off the Internet during annual nationwide exams to prevent cheating and the leaking of test questions. Forcing large numbers of people into internet blackouts was not as productive as they wished, however, as questions still got leaked. Uzbekistan cut off internet and messaging services during several hours of exams as far back as early 2010s.

4) In 2020, India shut down the internet 109 times, according to a report by the digital rights organization Access Now. Indian authorities cut off internet access during protests, elections, and religious holidays, like for Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi celebrations in Madhya Pradesh state in 2019. Internet cut-offs during religious holidays are not exclusive to India. In 2018, authorities in Bali asked mobile operators to cut off the internet during Nyepi, a Hindu celebration of the New Year, characterized by observing different prohibitions. Gadgets are getting in the way of introspection, Hinduism Society head Gusti Ngurah Sudiana told the BBC.

5) Over 18 months, residents of a village called Aberhosan in Wales would mysteriously lose their internet connection every morning because of the Good Morning Britain morning TV show, or rather a couple who loved watching it. In September, 2020, after months of exhaustive investigations, a dedicated group of engineers discovered Alun and Elaine Rees accidentally cut off the internet in the whole village when they switched off their old TV to watch the show by hijacking the village-wide network. After the revelation, the accidental culprits decided to not use their old TV again.

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But 34 years ago, there was another seismic protest in Almaty. In December 1986, Almaty — then called Alma-Ata — was the site of some of the first large demonstrations protesting communist rule. When Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, installed an ethnic Russian with no connection to or knowledge of Kazakhstan to head the Kazakh Soviet Republic, students took to the streets.

Moscow sent in armed forces to violently suppress the crowds. Estimates range widely from 10 to 170 casualties. Over 2,000 people were wounded. The tragedy came to be known as Zheltoksan, which means December in Kazakh.

Then the whole thing was swept under the rug.

For years, Zheltoksan was not talked about — in Kazakhstan or anywhere in the former Soviet Union. Like scores of other rebel acts and repressive countermeasures in the Soviet Union, Zheltoksan pixelated into visual fragments, shards of aging memory hidden from history.

But amid the current unrest, the 1986 protests have been mentioned over and over on social media. Coda Story spoke to historians, sociologists and local journalists to understand Zheltoksan’s significance, how the trauma of suppressed historical memory impacts the thinking of protestors battling Kazakh and imported Russian police on the street’s of Kazakhstan’s far-flung, freezing cities.

In 1986 Kazakhstan was one of the first places where anti-Soviet protests started. Why there? What does it tell us about the political climate in Kazakhstan at that moment in history?

In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made a big mistake, explained Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg. He replaced the ethnic-Kazakh leader of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan with Gennady Kolbin, an ethnic Russian, who knew nothing about the country. This triggered the youth and intelligentsia.

“Kolbin didn't spend a day in Kazakhstan, didn't know Kazakh language, and he wasn’t familiar with Kazakh culture and politics. Ergo, his appointment was perceived as an insult by many Kazakhstanis. For by 1986 this country played an important role in the Soviet Union: it was the second republic by size, fourth by population, and its industrial and agricultural input was enormous,” said Shelekpayev.

One of the reasons anti-Soviet protests first erupted in Kazakhstan comes as a surprise to many is the false stereotype that Kazakhs are political conformists reluctant to upset the status quo.

“Kazakhs protested many times during the 20th century. They protested before the communists — let me remind you about the Central Asian revolt of 1916, which anticipated the 1917 Revolution, and they also protested after 1991. There were many worker’s protests in the 1990s, for example,” Shelekpayev said, pointing to a dearth of media coverage. 

Back then the protests were violently put down. The country’s independence followed just five years later. What significant impact did they have? 

For many people in Kazakhstan, the protests in 1986 are considered the first blow to the Soviet Union’s hold over the republics, said Aitolkyn Kourmanova, the senior editor of Central Asia Analytical Network at George Washington University. “That was the first display of the fact that the Soviet Union was not so uniform and the fact that the republics really wanted independence, which they achieved in five years.” 

The legacy of the 1986 protests has continued to shape political protests in Kazakhstan to this day. “In one way or another, they all go back to December 1986. It was a very defining moment in our history,” said Diana Kudaibergenova, who researches nationalism and political art in Central Asia at the University of Cambridge. 

She points to the civil rights movement Wake Up, Kazakhstan, which invoked December 1986 in their own protests. In 2019, when the group first emerged, activists gathered at Republic Square, formerly called Brezhnev Square, where the 1986 protests took place. They raised hands wrapped in red cloth to symbolize the blood they said was on the regime’s hands.

But the memory of the 1986 Zheltoksan protests is severely fractured.  

“We never know what to call these things,” said Kudaibergenova. “We still call the 1986 protests as events. Or in Russian, uprisings sometimes. But in Kazakh or in English, every time we write it, it’s always events because we don’t know what kind of vocabulary to use. It’s a traumatic event, but also it’s one that people are still trying to make sense of.” 

Zheltoksan is tremendously important yet never discussed. Why? 

Zheltoksan is omitted from Kazakhstan’s history books. It’s not by mistake, said Kudaibergenova.

With the power of the Soviet Union waning and the cracks in the relationship between Moscow and the republics starting to show, Gorbachev tried to keep the protests in Kazakhstan from spiraling. 

“They tried to silence it. They tried to forget about it. That erasure is very important,” Kudaibergenova said.

The protests were kept under wraps. Students were branded as hooligans, drunks and drug users. People who participated in the protests and survivors of the violent crackdown were silenced.

The Soviet leadership in Moscow also tried to pass off the protests as a provincial issue. “They tried to localize this conflict so that it wouldn’t grow further to some bigger conflictual situation.”

It worked. Many people across Central Asia don’t remember 1986, when in fact it was a defining moment in the  Soviet Union’s crack-up. Kudaibergenova is unsure how much fault lies with Soviet historical suppression and now much to blame Kazakhstan’s failure to recapitulate its own history. 

“It’s very much telling that we’re still trying to formulate that particular history and that particular discourse. For me, it’s still very unfinished business.” 

How has the Kazakh regime framed the protests of 1986?

The 1986 protests bolstered the power and influence of Kazakhstan’s founding dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a towering figure in Kazakhstan’s politics, who in 1986 held the position of prime minister of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. He became the first president of Kazakhstan in 1990 and ruled until 2019 when he was replaced by his handpicked successor, the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

Nazarbayev attempted to fit Zheltoksan into a self-serving narrative, while ignoring his own role in the events that precipitated the protests and what he could have done to prevent the violent response directed by Moscow. It’s a tricky line to walk. 

“For the political system at this moment, which is a continuity of Nazarbayev rule from the 1990s, it's inconvenient to discuss Zheltoksan as it was because some current or past leaders of the country were either part of the government in 1986 or participated in the repression against the protesters after the events,” said Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg.

From the outside, it appears as if these latest protests came out of nowhere. The official cause is the rising liquid gas prices, but very quickly people demanded the government resign. What are these protests really about? 

“To be honest, I understand why many people had the impression that it was sudden because there has never been anything like that in the history of modern Kazakhstan,” said Assem Zhapisheva, a journalist based in Almaty and founder of Masa Media, a digital newsroom.

In reality, tension has been building amid pandemic mismanagement, rampant corruption, wealth disparity and social stratification. 

The rising gas prices were not just an economic reason behind the uprising, but also a political one, said Aigerim Toleukhanova, a journalist from Kazakhstan and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Kazakhstan is so rich in oil and natural gas, but clearly people do not benefit from these things. So I think it just shows that it reached this point where people would say that enough is enough.”

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