Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska documents war crimes testimonies for The Reckoning Project, which comprises a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and legal experts established in 2022 to record, collect, and conserve witness testimonies of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. She spent a day with one of the local war crimes prosecutors who investigates the Russian army’s misdeeds in the south of Ukraine. 

One woman among the bombardments

In the city of Mykolaiv in July of 2022, Viktoriia Shapovalova drove to work as usual, parked, got out of the car, and immediately realized there was complete silence all around her. It is said that you don’t hear anything when you are in the epicenter of an air strike. And that was exactly what was happening. A missile hit a building some 150 meters away from her. The houses that stood between Shapovalova and the explosion attack saved her life. Remembering the feeling she had when a shell exploded nearby, she said it is “like your soul is being turned inside out”. 

Shapovalova witnessed most of the bombardments and missile attacks on Mykolaiv, a city that, before 2022, had a population of 470,000. She was there during the hardest days the city experienced during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

In the spring of 2022, the Russian army struggled to capture Mykolaiv, a regional capital located between Odesa and Kherson. Failing to seize the city, it started attacking its residential quarters with artillery and missiles. 

There was a period when artillery shelling occurred every two or three hours. Residents who stayed in the city adapted to this routine. Shapovalova spent nights in a shelter; a basement of a nine-storey block, with her teenage daughter. But life had to go on, so after the morning shelling attacks–which usually happened around six or seven in the morning– she prepared breakfast, walked her dog, and hurried to work. She knew there would be two or three quiet hours before the next shelling and, during that time, she could work.

In the spring of 2022, at age 37, Shapovalova was appointed chief of the war crimes department at the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor’s office. Before that, as was the case with most of the Ukrainian prosecutors, her work was not connected with war issues. After her appointment, she, like thousands of her colleagues, had to re-train as a war crimes investigator, diving into the topic of international humanitarian law. As part of the war crimes prosecutors training, Shapovalova had a chance to visit the Hague and the International Criminal Court. 

During the first two years of the full-scale invasion, Russia conducted more than 2,500 civilian infrastructure attacks in the city of Mykolaiv and the surrounding region, according to The Tribunal for Putin initiative. After an attack, the prosecutors team, together with the war crimes investigators from the Ukrainian security service and the police, as well as the emergency services, all go to the site to document what happened. The attacks often take place at night, which means Shapovalova would often work without sleep for the 24 hours after an attack. She must stay at the site of an attack until the last body is taken from under the rubble. 

Shelling of residential neighborhoods and other civilian infrastructure of Mykolaiv comprises about 70% of the 2,500 war crimes Shapovalova and her team is now investigating in the region. She says her experience of living in the city during all the attacks helps in her job: “I was there, I remember a lot.” But nearly every week, she spends at least one or two full working days out of her office, in the field. 

Witnesses are both eager and afraid to talk

The east and south of the Mykolaiv region were occupied in the spring of 2022 and liberated after eight months, in November of the same year, together with the right bank of the Dnipro and the city of Kherson. Since then, Shapovalova’s team of 10 war crimes prosecutors investigates atrocities in the once-occupied towns and villages.  

On the day I joined Shapovalova and her two colleagues, they met at an agreed-upon spot at 9am and headed to the north of Mykolaiv, to a small village that was occupied during the first half of March in 2022. The plan is to collect and document as many witness statements as possible. A team of lawyers from the not-for-profit Global Rights Compliance accompanies the prosecutors on this trip. GRC is specialized in international humanitarian law, and Ukrainian prosecutors need support to deal with thousands of war crimes cases. The lawyers are present during the interviews with witnesses, they read interrogation protocols, and advise Shapovalova’s team of war crimes prosecutors where exactly violations of international humanitarian law lie and what evidence has to be collected. In Shapovalova’s words: “They help us with the quality of justice.”  

In the front seat of the car, Shapovalova makes several calls to invite colleagues to a training session about OSINT investigations. “Good morning, how are you doing?” she starts every conversation with these simple words. In the context of possible night attacks, the question and the answers become meaningful. 

The cars turn from the motorway onto a dirt road. A herd of sheep with a shepherd crosses the road. We drive slowly between empty fields. “We’re going to meet the village's head first. He and his family were abducted by the Russians.” Shapovalova explains the plan for the day, adding that such field trips are often unpredictable. 

And she is not wrong. The car suddenly stops having come upon an  impassable stretch of road. The driver must walk around to find a detour. It’s a cloudy day, several degrees above zero, and we see no other cars on this village road. Finally, the driver finds a bypass across a forest strip nearby, but before we go, he has to uproot several small trees. 

But we are fortunate. Such an off-road maneuver wouldn’t have been possible in the southeast of the region, which was under occupation for eight months and where Russians left mines all over the fields. In the first weeks after liberation, the war crimes prosecutors started visiting towns and villages. “We called the mine clearance service, asked them to clear, for instance, a police building,” Shapovalova explained. “And after that, we went there to collect evidence.” Humanitarian mine clearance teams are working every day, but still, many fields and forests are surrounded by red signs that read “Stop! Mines.”

The village head is a thin man of around 50. The skin on his face suggests he works a lot in the open air. Shapovalova starts with some informal questions about realities under the Russian occupation. She already knows that this man had been abducted by the Russians and beaten, but he did not report this incident to the police after the village was liberated. 

“What for? We’re alive, and that’s enough,” he replies to Shapovalova’s argument that this was a violation of laws and customs of war. “Are you going to investigate this?” the man goes on in a skeptical tone. “That’s why we’ve come here.” Shapovalova is patient. She understands the man needs more time to trust her. She is also aware many people don’t want to discuss publicly what happened to them because they are afraid Russia may occupy the region again. 

Thus, Shapovalova changes the topic to the situation in the village in general. Several houses were destroyed by shelling, their owners have no ownership documents on those buildings, and that’s why they have trouble getting aid to rebuild them. Shapovalova promises she will look into it and see how she can help.   

Finally she comes back to the reason for our visit. “We have to document these crimes even if you don’t believe we will investigate them,” she says.  The village head goes outside to smoke a cigarette, when he returns he agrees to give a formal interview. One of the prosecutors stays to record his testimony on video, and Shapovalova goes on to meet the next witness–a woman whose son was shot by the Russian soldiers. 

The woman starts talking almost as soon as we step over the threshold. “They came to the house, tied him up, took him away, and abused him for two days. Then they took him to a forest, tied his hands with a wire, and shot him. He survived and crawled to a nearby village.” Her words show that she shares the confidence of many Ukrainians who lived through the occupation: that the perpetrators must be identified and punished. “Of course, I’ll testify. Why not when this happened?”

The array of Russia’s war crimes

What happened to the village head and the woman’s son is not unique but  common during the Russian occupation. 

According to international humanitarian law civilians are under the protection of the occupying force. But while talking to the people from the occupied territories, Shapovalova routinely recorded incidents of abductions, arbitrary detentions, and tortures. 

In one village, a local man was killed and his wife was abducted. A bag was thrown over her face, and she was brought to a trench where soldiers harassed and taunted her, at some point even pouring liquid on the 50 year old woman saying: “We’ll burn you and we will be looking at how Ukrop's mother is burning.” Ukrop is a derogatory term for Ukrainians and the soldiers used it to refer to her son who fought in the Ukrainian army. She spent five days in detention. During the first days, interrogations took place every hour. The same questions were repeated again and again, asking her about things she had shared on her social media pages and about her son. And then, as suddenly as she was detained, she was released. No one provided any reason for her detention. 

In another village of the region, a local mayor was abducted when he was trying to deliver 300 loaves of bread to people in the village. He was tortured with electric jolts and beaten. He spent three months of unlawful detention in several detention centers. 

And in another village, the Russians murdered an elderly local school teacher. Soldiers took him from his house. The teacher's wife looked for him everywhere in the village and nearby, riding a bicycle from one building where the Russian military were stationed to another. Finally, his mutilated body was found. It lay covered with a mattress in a shallow pit near one of the buildings known to the villagers as occupiers’ headquarters.

These are just some accounts recorded by The Reckoning Project team in the Mykolaiv region. Its researchers documented hundreds of similar cases in various parts of Ukraine that were under Russian occupation. Male and female village heads, volunteers and activists, former soldiers, or anyone who owned a weapons even just for hunting were often the first victims of arbitrary detentions, torture, and murder. 

“The occupying Russian forces neglected their obligations to safeguard the Ukrainian populace. Instead, they viewed Ukrainians under occupation solely through a security lens,” says Raji Abdul Salam, The Reckoning Project’s chief legal data archivist. They categorized, he explains further, civil and humanitarian actions, such as the right to access information, freedom of movement, and adequate housing, as potential security threats. This approach of prioritizing security-based measures over humanitarian considerations deprived Ukrainians of their fundamental human rights and exacerbated the suffering caused by the conflict. 

Justice is slow, and the prosecutors must work fast

To determine who was responsible for any given bombardment isn’t easy as it’s necessary to prove who gave an order. Investigating tortures and arbitrary detentions is difficult for another reason: survivors often don’t know a lot about the identity of their abductors and torturers. 

In most of the incidents documented by the researchers of The Reckoning Project, the Russian soldiers tried to conceal who they were: they did not provide their names, wore no insignia, and covered their faces with masks. They tied blindfolds around the eyes of their captives or put bags on their heads so that people would not be able to recognise who was torturing them. 

“The soldiers deliberately obscure their identities to evade accountability for their actions, including looting, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful detentions”, says Abdul Salam, adding that in over 90% of testimonies the researchers of The Reckoning Project collected state that the Russian soldiers were hiding their identity. 

“This underscores the complicity of the Russian military leadership, as their failure to take disciplinary measures on the ground condoned and facilitated these grave breaches of international law,” Salam explained. “The consequence of this unchecked misconduct was a relentless onslaught on the Ukrainian populace, inflicting untold suffering and trauma.”

On our way back, Shapovalova reflects on the mistrust many people have on perspectives of justice and punishment for Russian war criminals: “I understand this. Justice is a long process, and the victims want it right now. But the main task for the prosecutors is to collect the highest quality evidence.”

It’s almost 6pm when we come back to her office. Shapovalova is planning to stay at work for several more hours. She says 10 minutes of rest was enough to continue with a lot of paperwork after a day in the field. 

There is a large map of Mykolaiv on the wall of her office, with a small piece of paper pinned to it. A date is printed on it, “October 13th, 2022”. On this day, Russia allegedly attacked Mykolaiv with S-300 missiles that hit a residential block. Seven people died in that attack, one of them a child. The attack happened at night, when people were in their beds. When I Google this incident, I find images of a five-storey residential building. Its destroyed upper middle part looks like it was bitten away by some monster. 

This case is already in the courts. The investigators found a man, a resident of Mykolaiv, who passed information about this civilian building with no military objects nearby to the Russians. Besides this there are several other incidents of war crimes Shapovalova’s department has now passed to the court. They are about the inhuman treatment of civilians: imitation of shooting to death, and about the organizers of a detention center in one village of the region, where people were kept for several days in horrible conditions. The trials are ongoing. 

According to Shapovalova, those incidents have enough evidence for prosecutors to charge the Russian combatants with committing war crimes. Investigations of all the crimes, Shapovalova explains, will take years. This understanding, she continues, along with the fact that tomorrow may simply not come, motivates her to accelerate her work. 

Besides that, she adds, important online evidence, like Russian channels on Telegram, are deleted since they understand those posts and videos could one day also be used as evidence. 

Most of the trials for Russian war criminals in Ukraine are now conducted in absentia. The victims may not be satisfied with this result, but the prosecutor explains that it is not only important a particular soldier would be punished. “By proving a particular crime, we prove the guilt of the main perpetrator. For proving his guilt at the Tribunal, not only our verdicts would be taken into account, but also our evidence base,” says Shapovalova.  

The day after I left Mykolaiv I read the news about another Russian attack on the city and in the region. I go to the page of the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor and see the photos of war crimes prosecutors working on the site of the attack, Shapovalova among them.

The post A Day In The Life Of A Russian War Crimes Prosecutor In Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

One of my last stories before I left Russia was an exploration of how the state had weaponized Big Tech to persecute Navalny’s followers, ordinary Russians who had registered their personal details on his website because they were fed up with the status quo. Among the dozens of people I spoke to were Liza, Dmitry, Kirill and Magda, whose compelling stories I wanted to tell.

I was reporting for Coda’s podcast series, “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” which featured the experiences of individuals around the world who had been caught up in the struggle between tech, democracy and dictatorship. In Russia, Navalny used social media to build a following. Many Navalny supporters gravitated towards him on Big Tech platforms — for instance, following his investigations into Kremlin corruption on his YouTube channel. 

Inspired by Navalny, Russians took to the streets to protest and donated to his Anti-Corruption Foundation,  or FBK in Russian. They signed up to use his “smart voting” app intended to consolidate protest votes around candidates in all of Russia’s electoral districts who could take on the ruling party. But both Apple and Google, caving to pressure from the Kremlin, removed the app from stores shortly before the 2021 election. Russia had completed the transition from authoritarian state to digitally savvy dictatorship.  

The police used Navalny’s database to knock on doors, to seek out people who had registered on the “Free Navalny” website. On the podcast, I found myself breaking the news to Liza, an old friend from school, that her name was on a list, including details such as her tax ID number, home address and employment status. It explained, Liza told me, why the police had come looking for her, asking her parents questions “as if I were a terrorist.”

I reached out to Liza again, as I did to other people I interviewed for the podcast, in the days after Navalny’s death. “Navalny’s death became for me the death of all hope that the Russia I remember could be saved,” she told me. A Ukrainian-born citizen of Russia, Liza now lives in Uzbekistan. Navalny, she said, was “like a key that you hide under a stone near your old house, just in case you have a chance to go back. Now there is no key, there is no stone, and there is no house.”

The police, Liza told me, still visit her parents in Moscow. The Kremlin, she said, “is still investigating the people who donated to FBK.” Five months pregnant now, Liza has lost hope that Russia will change. She is expecting a girl; her daughter, she told me, will be a citizen of Uzbekistan, not Russia.

I also followed up with Dmitry. He was a musician who registered on Navalny’s website and then suddenly found himself out of work, no longer welcome to perform at concerts. When he was not playing music, he drove around the city rescuing stray cats. He had, I said on the podcast, a “sweet round face and blond, hipster haircut.” Dmitry is still in Moscow, still singing in a choir and still rescuing stray cats. But like Liza, he too has lost hope that change is possible. “The feeling that you get living in Russia is that people are keeping a low profile,” he said. “They just wait.” 

The people I interviewed on the podcast were among thousands, if not millions, of Russians who genuinely believed Navalny offered a democratic alternative to Putin’s increasingly Stalinist regime. That belief has been stamped out. Kirill, a train driver for the Moscow metro, told me he had registered on the “Free Navalny” website out of curiosity. At the time, he had begun to date Magda, a liberal with little patience for the Russian establishment. His curiosity cost Kirill his job. “You fucking registered on his website,” his boss shouted at him, denouncing Navalny as an enemy of the state. Kirill was sacked for being “insufficiently loyal to President Putin.” 

Now in Sochi, a town on the Black Sea about a thousand miles from Moscow, Kirill and Magda await visas that will enable them to leave Russia. “I can’t speak freely right now, I’m in a public place” Kirill told me when I called him after Navalny’s death. Magda said she “had a feeling of deja vu.” The shock of Navalny’s death echoed the shock she felt when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Two years ago, on February 24, she told me, “I received a message from a friend: ‘Are you awake? The war started.’” On February 16 of this year, the same friend sent Magda another message: “Are you awake? Navalny was killed.” Both events strengthened Putin’s regime, representing a decisive turn away from the country that Magda still hoped Russia could be. 

For a quarter of a century, Putin has controlled Russia. This weekend, he will extend his reign, with any serious opposition either dead or imprisoned. “The future is no longer frightening,” Liza told me, “because the worst is happening in the present.”

The post In Russia, the ‘worst is happening in the present’  appeared first on Coda Story.

As thousands of people continue to arrive in the U.K., the British authorities are scrambling for new ways to monitor and control them. Under the government’s new rules, Britain has a legal duty to detain and deport anyone who arrives on its shores via truck or boat regardless of whether they wish to seek asylum. Passed in July 2023, the Illegal Migration Act has already been described by the United Nations Human Rights Office as “exposing refugees to grave risks in breach of international law.”

More than 20,000 people have come to the U.K. on small boats so far in 2023, and some 175,000 people are already waiting for an asylum decision. But officials say the U.K. does not have the physical space to detain people under the new law. And a public inquiry published this week argued that the U.K. should not detain migrants for more than 28 days. The report found evidence of abusive, degrading and racist treatment of migrants held in a detention center near London’s Gatwick Airport.

With detention centers at capacity and under scrutiny for mistreating migrants, and with the Rwanda scheme facing court challenges, those awaiting deportation or asylum proceedings are increasingly being monitored using technology instead, such as GPS-enabled ankle trackers that allow officials to follow the wearer’s every move. The ankle tracker program, which launched as a pilot in June 2022, was initially scheduled to last 12 months. But this summer, without fanfare, the government quietly uploaded a document to its website with the news that it was continuing the pilot to the end of 2023.

A Home Office spokesperson told me that “the GPS tracking pilot helps to deter absconding.” But absconding rates among migrants coming to the U.K. are low: The Home Office itself reported that they stood at 3% in 2019 and 1% in 2020, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the advocacy group Migrants Organize. In other official statements, the Home Office has expressed concern that the Rwanda policy may lead to “an increased risk of absconding and less incentive to comply with any conditions of immigration bail.” So authorities are fitting asylum seekers with GPS tags to ensure they don’t disappear before they can be deported.

Privacy advocates say the policy is invasive, ineffective and detrimental to the mental and physical health of the wearers. 

“Forging ahead, and massively expanding, such a harmful scheme with no evidence to back up its usefulness is simply vindictive,” said Lucie Audibert, a legal officer at the digital rights group Privacy International, which launched a legal challenge against the pilot program last year, arguing there were not adequate safeguards in place to protect people’s basic rights. 

Migrants who have been tagged under the scheme say the experience is dehumanizing. “It feels like an outside prison,” said Sam, a man in his thirties who fled a civil war with his family when he was a small child and has lived in the U.K. ever since. Sam, whose name has been changed, was told by the Home Office at the end of last year that he would need to wear a tag while the government considered whether to deport him after he had served a criminal sentence.

The Home Office has also outsourced the implementation of the GPS tracking system to Capita PLC, a private security company. Capita has been tasked with fitting tags and monitoring the movements and other relevant data collected on each and every person wearing a device. For migrants like Sam, that means dealing with anonymous Capita staff — rather than the government — whenever his tag was being fitted, checked or replaced.

After a month of wearing the tag, Sam felt depression beginning to set in. He was worried about leaving the house, for fear of accidentally bumping the strap. He was afraid that if too many problems arose with the tracker, the Home Office might use it as an excuse to deport him. Another constant anxiety weighed on him too: keeping the device charged. Capita staff told him its battery could last 24 hours. But he soon found out that wasn’t true — and it would lose charge without warning when he was out, vibrating loudly and flashing with a red light.

“Being around people and getting the charger out so you can charge your ankle — it’s so embarrassing,” Sam said. He never told his child that he had been tagged. “I always hid it under tracksuits or jeans,” he said, not wanting to burden his child with the constant physical reminder that he could be deported.

The mental health problems Sam experienced are not unusual for people who have to wear tracking devices. In the U.S., border authorities first deployed ankle monitors in 2014, in response to an influx of migrants from Central America. According to a 2021 study surveying 150 migrants forced to wear the devices, 12% said wearing the tags led to thoughts of suicide, while 40% said they believed they had been psychologically scarred by the experience.

Capita staff regularly showed up at Sam’s home to check on the tag, and they often came at different times than the Home Office told Sam they would come. Sometimes, they would show up without any warning at all. 

Sam remembered an occasion when Capita officers told him that “the system was saying the strap had been tampered with.” The agents examined his ankle and found nothing wrong with the device. This became a routine: The team showed up randomly to tell him there was a problem or that his location wasn’t registering. “It was all these little things that seemed to make out I was doing something wrong. In the end, I realized it wasn’t me, it was the tag that was the problem. I felt harassed,” Sam told me. 

At one point, Sam said he received a letter from the Home Office saying he had breached his bail conditions because he had not been home when the Capita people came calling. According to Home Office documents, breaching bail conditions is a good enough reason for the government to have access to a migrant’s “trail data”: a live inventory of a person’s precise location every minute of the day and night. He’s worried that this tracking data might be used against him as the government deliberates on whether or not to deport him. 

Sam is not alone in dealing with glitches with the tag. In a study of 19 migrants tagged under the British scheme, 15 participants had practical issues with the devices, such as the devices failing or chargers not working. 

When I asked Capita to comment on these findings, the company redirected me to the Home Office, which denied that there were any concerns. “Device issues are rare and service users are provided with a 24-hour helpline to report any problems,” a government spokesperson said. They then added: “Capita’s field and monitoring staff receive safeguarding training and are able to signpost tag wearers to support organizations where appropriate.”

Migration campaigners say contracts like the one Home Office has with Capita serve to line the pockets of big private security companies at the taxpayers’ expense while helping the government push out the message that they’re being tough on immigration.

“Under this government, we have seen a steep rise in the asylum backlog,” said Monish Bhatia, a lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, who studies the effects of GPS tagging. “Instead of directing resources to resolving this backlog,” he told me, “they have come up with rather expensive and wasteful gimmicks.” 

The ankle monitor scheme forms part of Britain’s so-called “hostile environment” policy, introduced more than a decade ago by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, who described it as an effort to “create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” It has seen the government pour billions of pounds into deterring and detaining migrants — from building a high-tech network of surveillance along the English channel in an attempt to thwart small boat crossings to the 120 million pound ($147 million) deal to deport migrants to Rwanda. 

The Home Office estimates it will have to spend between 3 and 6 billion pounds (between $3.68 and $7.36 billion) on detaining, accommodating and removing migrants over the next two years. But the option to tag people, while cheaper than keeping them locked up, also costs the government significant amounts of money. The U.K. currently has two contracts with security companies for electronically tagging both migrants and those in the criminal justice system. One with G4S, which provides the tag hardware, worth 22 million pounds ($27.5 million) and another with Capita, which runs electronic tagging services for 114 million pounds ($142 million), fitting and troubleshooting the tags.

The Home Office said the GPS tagging scheme would help streamline the asylum process and that it was “determined to break the business model of the criminal people smugglers and prevent people from making dangerous journeys across the Channel.” 

For his part, Sam eventually got his tag removed — he was granted an exception due to the tag’s effects on his mental health. After the tag was gone, he described how he felt like it was still there for weeks. He still put his clothes and shoes on as if the tag was still strapped to his ankle. 

“It took me a while to realize I was actually free from their eyes,” he said. But his status remains uncertain: He is still facing the threat of deportation.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Monish Bhatia's affiliation. As of April 2023, he is a lecturer at the University of York, not Birkbeck, University of London.

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For 40 years, Dragos Olaru has been paying his respects to the great Romanian cultural figures buried in his home city of Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine. With its decorative tombstones and earthy paths, the cemetery on Zelena Street is the resting place of ethnic Romanian artists, activists and intellectuals who defined their culture and defended it when outside powers encroached upon it. Although he met none of these figures — his “friends,” as he calls them — before they passed, Olaru feels he knows them intimately in death. He tells me that he is continuing their work.

He is also trying to protect these Romanian graves from actual destruction. Local Ukrainian authorities have decided to exhume the remains lying beneath some 200 of the tombstones on Zelena Street — which they say are unidentifiable — and then auction the plots. But Olaru sees the campaign as a way to “Ukrainize” the cemetery.

“They are doing this to remove the traces of us,” he told me, as we passed the grave of Romanian philologist and revolutionary Aron Pumnul, who advocated for the Romanian language to be written using the Latin alphabet, instead of Cyrillic, in the mid-19th century.

The fate of the Zelena Street cemetery is just one incarnation of wartime tensions between Ukrainians and ethnic Romanians, the country’s second-largest linguistic minority after Russian speakers. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, respect for the rights and interests of Western ethnic minorities waxed and waned as the new country struggled to fortify its self-image in the face of ever-present Russian influence. But the 2014 Maidan Revolution marked a turning point, providing a new impetus to protect the Ukrainian language and establish it as the country’s lingua franca. The subsequent ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war between the Ukrainian government and Russian proxies in the eastern Donbas region left Ukrainians with an urgent need to define their day-to-day relationship with Russia and Russianness, and in turn, to define what it means to be Ukrainian.

The full-scale invasion in February 2022 brought a fierce embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. Yet while this hardening of Ukrainianness is clearly intended as a way to distinguish the country from its aggressor, minority communities in western Ukraine have become collateral damage. Linguistic policies aimed at strengthening Ukrainian are edging Romanian out of the public lives of many native speakers. And other moves, ranging from the exhumation of remains in the Zelena Street cemetery to political allegations against Romanian religious leaders, have left some ethnic Romanians unsure of their position in Ukrainian society.

Although Dragos Olaru was aggrieved by the events in the graveyard, which he sees as a mean-spirited move against Romanian culture, he still supports the Ukrainian state. “Putin is the biggest enemy of the world,” he said. I later learned that his nephew was serving on the front line in Bakhmut, more than 700 miles away on the other side of the country.

Ukraine has been home to ethnic Romanian, Hungarian and Polish communities since territorial lines were redrawn following World War I and World War II. Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, some 400,000 Romanian speakers became Ukrainian citizens, becoming a part of the nascent state’s heterogeneous social fabric. Through much of the 1990s, Ukraine was also consumed by economic turmoil, the result of hyperinflation coupled with rampant cronyism. Conversations about national identity were often relegated to the back burner as Ukrainians worked to keep bread on the table. When the economy stabilized in the early 2000s, the trickle-down effect was limited, and the country’s oligarchs continued to grow their power and wealth. Russia was ever watchful, supporting the campaigns of Russia-friendly politicians who would prevent the country from swaying too far west, toward the European Union and NATO. Whenever identity questions did arise, these lawmakers were eager to frame Ukraine in the context of Russia by highlighting the historical bond between the two countries. 

In Ukraine’s west, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian minority communities lived their lives largely in their own languages, often benefiting from the policies of Russia-backed politicians who, at Moscow’s behest, sought to protect the Russian language with moves that tended to benefit other minority languages at the same time. When pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych passed a language law in 2012 that gave minority languages, namely Russian, the status of a “regional language” in areas where 10% or more of the population did not speak Ukrainian, it was seen by opponents as an attempt to undermine Ukrainian. But the measure found support among minority language speakers in the west of the country.

Following the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s language issue took on a new urgency, and policymakers passed a series of laws to formally establish the use of the Ukrainian language in various aspects of public life, ranging from media to education to the legal system. In sum, these laws effectively dismantled Yanukovych’s 2012 language law. Its fate was finally sealed in 2018 when the Ukrainian Constitutional Court deemed the law unconstitutional. People who supported these changes argued that they would create a more cohesive Ukrainian society and lead to necessary improvements in the country’s struggling education system. 

But the wave of legislation set off alarm bells for Ukraine’s Polish, Hungarian and Romanian minorities. These communities largely understood the motivations for the changes but also saw them chipping away at their own languages and traditions and at the practical bridge that their languages offered to living and working in the EU. Warsaw, Bucharest and Budapest stepped in, routinely chiding the Ukrainian government for not doing enough to protect minority rights. Supporting their pleas for a more considerate approach to the Ukrainian question was a report from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, that said that a 2019 language law passed in Ukraine “failed to strike a fair balance” between promoting the Ukrainian language and “safeguarding minorities.” 

Ukrainian authorities repeatedly argued that the changes were not an attempt to erode minority languages but rather an effort to buttress Ukrainian identity and introduce a sense of cohesiveness to everyday affairs across the country. And much of day-to-day life continued to play out in languages other than Ukrainian, including in Russian. Even today, while Ukrainian is the official state language according to the constitution, Russian is still the first language of approximately 20% of Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. 

But Russia’s incursions continued. In a 2021 speech that foreshadowed the invasion of Ukraine months later, Putin denounced the Ukrainian language laws and promoted the false claim that Russian proxies in the Donbas “took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives.” The speech highlighted the extent to which Putin sees respect for the Russian language as a key component in the bond between Ukraine and Russia — and as a pillar in Russia’s political strategy toward Ukraine.

Months after the first Russian tank crossed into Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the Kremlin used Ukraine’s language policies as part of a robust disinformation campaign to justify carrying out what has become the greatest land invasion in Europe since World War II. “The Russian language is banned in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the BBC in April 2022.

When it comes to Ukraine’s language battles, the most sensitive issue for Romanians is education. The village of Petrashivka lies an hour south of Chernivtsi, a stone’s throw from the Romanian border. There I met Gheorghe and Mihaela Lupu, a middle-aged married couple who have dedicated their careers to running the Petrashivka Secondary School. Nearly all classes for the school’s 314 students are taught in Romanian.

“We speak Romanian, but we are Ukrainian,” Gheorghe, the school’s director, told me. The presence of both languages and nations is evident at Petrashivka. As we walked through the school corridors with their lace curtains and reddish-brown wooden floors, the couple told me about Ukrainian and Romanian government support for their work. A grant from Bucharest allowed them to buy new tables for the Romanian history classroom. Next door, in the Ukrainian language classroom, a TV, chairs and other materials were brought in with support from Kyiv. When we stuck our heads into the classroom, the students greeted us eagerly. The teacher prompted a 12-year-old girl, Anastasia, to recite a poem she had written about the war. “I pray in my thoughts,” she said with zeal. “Bring peace on the earth, God! Have mercy on us, God! Save us from this war.”

Gheorghe said that parents were happy that their children could speak both languages fluently, as it opened up more opportunities for future studies in Ukraine and Romania.

This transition has been in the works since Ukraine’s 2017 adoption of an education law that set the country on a path for public secondary schooling to be conducted in Ukrainian. Heralded as a move to align Ukraine’s school system more closely with European standards, the law gives space for EU minority languages like Romanian to be taught as a second language. But for the students of the Petrashivka Secondary School, nearly all of whom speak Romanian at home, the implementation of the education law will be a significant change.

When I asked how they felt about the language change, the teachers were hesitant to share their thoughts. Gheorghe offered only this: “If the change is state law, we will do it. We live under Ukrainian law.”

Their acquaintance, Iurie Levcic, was much more forthright. Back in central Chernivtsi, sitting in the Bucovina Art Centre for the Conservation and Promotion of Romanian Traditional Culture, which the 54-year-old man runs, Levcic described what he sees as the quiet dissolution of Romanian culture in Ukraine. 

“They want to assimilate us, they try a total assimilation, starting with the schools,” he said. He excoriated the Zelenskyy government, arguing that officials were unwilling to meaningfully engage in dialogue with the Romanian community.

Levcic is not alone in his distrust of the Zelenskyy government. The current situation has also angered politicians in Romania, who feel slighted by Kyiv’s position on the minority issue despite Romania’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing war. Tempers flared in December 2022: The Ukrainian parliament adopted a law on national minorities to fulfill one of the conditions necessary to start negotiations for EU membership but did not take on board fully recommendations from the Venice Commission on the protection of minorities. Condemnation from Bucharest was swift and cemented the idea that, although Romanian speakers were not necessarily being targeted by Kyiv, they had become an afterthought in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Adding insult to injury, the move came months after Zelenskyy made a speech before the Romanian parliament, in April 2022, in which he promised to “start a dialogue” on a “new comprehensive agreement that guarantees the absolute protection and development of our national minorities” — a reference to the approximately 46,000 ethnic Ukrainians living in Romania. He reiterated this position to the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in January 2023, after the two heads of state had a call on the issue. A read out from the call said Zelenskyy “expressed his full openness to identifying solutions, so that the Romanian community in Ukraine benefits from the same rights enjoyed by the Ukrainian community in Romania.”

Back in Chernivtsi’s City Hall, Iryna Tkachuk, the head of the city's education department, took a more political stance. She defended the upcoming implementation of the education language law, arguing that it would ensure “minority speakers could have full access to university level education in Ukraine.”

The affinities of ethnic Romanian religious leaders have also come under scrutiny as Ukraine strives to shed its cultural ties with Russia. In Chernivtsi, many Romanians still worship in the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although the Church claims it broke off communications with Moscow in May 2022, months after the invasion, and denies being influenced by Russia, Ukrainian political leaders have trained their focus on church figures, keen to identify and sever any remaining ties to the Kremlin.

Sitting inside the Ascension Church on the outskirts of Chernivtsi, clad in black robes and a matching puffer coat, Father Pavel Paulencu told me he feels a crisis setting in. He worries it is only a matter of time before the authorities arrive at his door. 

“I’ve had people ask already why I’m doing a mass in Romanian in Ukraine,” he said. Ethnic Romanians make up 60% of his congregation, and Romanian is the language of priority for services. “I told them to go and read the history,” he said with a heavy sigh. “In church, it should not be politics, just God.”

Anxiety in Kyiv about ties between the Romanian religious community and Russia have been brewing for some time, but they reached a boiling point in late 2022, when Ukrainian Security Services (known as the SBU) raided the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as part of a series of searches across the country. The SBU Telegram account reported that law enforcement officers found Russian passports and pro-Kremlin literature among the belongings of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina clergy. Soon after, citizenships of 13 representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — including from the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese — were suspended by presidential decree. In response, a Romanian cleric threatened to sue President Zelenskyy. The U.N.’s human rights office said that the nationwide SBU searches could “undermine the right to freedom of religion.”

In April 2023, a resident of the Chernivtsi region was arrested on suspicion of burning down a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the village of Milieve. In early May, prosecutors in Chernivtsi submitted to a court an indictment against the local Banchen Monastery, claiming that an assistant abbot helped men of draft age illegally cross the border. Ukraine’s wartime rules prohibit men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

The anxieties behind these actions by law enforcement have been exacerbated by the war. But they are not new. In 2019, politically-driven tensions within the Church led to a schism and to the establishment of the similarly-named Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which today has the full support of the Zelenskyy government. The schism was a blow for Putin, who sees the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates as the centerpiece of his notion of a “Russkiy mir,” or Russian world, the idea that all Russian and Russian-identifying people should be united. But for Ukraine, establishing a church independent of Moscow was seen as a move to not only distinguish the country from Russia but also to stymie the Kremlin’s ability to influence certain clergy. 

In the eyes of the Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church harbors a threat. But for the average ethnic Romanians, what’s happening to the Church is yet another way in which Kyiv is imposing upon their lives.

In a country traumatized by Russian war crimes, where people are struggling to survive each day, the space for debate on issues such as language and national identity is limited at best.

On the streets of Chernivtsi, one hears a steady mix of Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian languages, with most Russian speakers skewing older and Ukrainian ones younger. Although the war has hardened attitudes toward Russian speakers, there is no outward animosity toward the lyrical sounds of Romanian in daily life. 

And while the language issue has riled up politicians and activists, most Romanians I spoke to seemed more focused on ensuring that their families survive the war. Chernivtsi has been spared from Russian rockets, but the war remains ever-present. Ukrainian flags dot almost every door. Every morning, the city takes a brief moment of silence to honor the men and women on the frontline. And in a new graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the groundskeepers can be seen digging graves for the bodies of soldiers, returning home from the frontlines for the last time.

The post As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind? appeared first on Coda Story.

Suddenly, we are Australians at war on the Western Front in 1918: Shells fly overhead with flashing lights, while the room shakes with the kaboom of bombs and machine guns. Actors shout and fall across the screens, their blood flying out in cartoonish spatters. The surround screens position us in the center of the action, a soldier in the trenches. Over on the right, a man fires off his prop machine gun, his face contorted like a boy playing soldiers.

A booming voice comes over the speaker, warning us about the unequaled horror of gas attacks. Darkness — then a fixture opens up on the floor, filling the room with smoke. It rapidly clears, and soon we are watching the brave Australian soldiers defeat the Germans, guided throughout by the military genius of the handsome Australian general John Monash. After an upswell in the music, the French prime minister is congratulating those brave Aussies for turning the tide of the war. We knew that you would fight a real fight, the heavily-costumed Georges Clemenceau declares, but we did not know that, from the very beginning, you would astonish the whole continent. The lights come back on and the doors slide open. The Aussies have won the war, saving the whole of Europe, and perhaps the world, from tyranny.

The Monash Centre is more than just a vivid historical fantasy. It is the culmination of a decades-long, state-sponsored conservative campaign to reorient Australian national identity — one aimed at shifting Australian public memory towards a triumphant set of narratives about war. 

The Centre isn’t a popular destination. It’s hard to get to. Almost all professional historians have disavowed it. And it cost the Australian government a fortune to build. Naturally, I decided I would have to go and see it.

Buying history

When the renowned military historian Bruce Scates was invited to advise on the Monash Centre, he was cautiously hopeful. Scates had published widely on WWI and advised the Australian government on numerous projects. The government at the time had been dedicating increasing sums of money to the commemoration of WWI, loosely timed around the centenaries of Australia's involvement in battles at Gallipoli (now in Turkey) and on the Western Front — particularly at the French town of Villers-Bretonneux.

Villers-Bretonneux is important to Australians. In April 1918, all five Australian divisions — alongside forces from Britain and the French Empire, most notably Morocco — successfully recaptured the town in order to help slow Germany’s spring offensive. In the years following the war, an Australian connection remained in Villers-Bretonneux. Australian school children donated money to the rebuilding of the war-damaged town, while family members of deceased Australian soldiers — many of whom were buried in nearby cemeteries — came to pay their respects. Villers-Bretonneux became Australia’s European war commemoration hub. An Australian National Memorial was erected there in 1938 and expanded in 2014 with a massive budget and a crack team of advisors — Scates plus six other top historians.

“I thought the possibilities were enormous,” Scates told me. “Firstly, this was the most literate fighting force in the world: These men and women have left behind an extraordinary testimony. And I hoped, given the amount of money that was spent on the Centre, we’re talking about 100 million Australian dollars [roughly $67 million], we could do a lot with those stories throughout the exhibition and make a really powerful statement about the human cost of war. But that didn’t happen.”

Gradually, Scates realized that the parts of the Australian government responsible for designing the Monash Centre were uninterested in presenting a realistic version of Australia’s involvement on the Western Front. “They were working to manufacture a certain view of the war, one that was seen as politically desirable and had nothing to do with the actual telling of history,” he said. Suggested material about the causes or costs of war was continually edited down or removed. In meeting after meeting, Scates watched government officials steer the museum towards jingoism. “The assumption was: ‘We’re paying for this museum, so we will buy the kind of history that we want to hear,’” Scates said.

Scates and three other historians resigned in protest, but the Centre carried on, eventually opening in 2018 to great fanfare, boasting that it uses extensive “immersive and emotive elements” to “deliver a compelling visitor experience.” This appears to be accurate. According to one of the Centre’s contracted designers, Russell Magee, “We’ve observed people walking out crying on a daily basis and that’s what we wanted to achieve.” 

The Monash Centre may have missed its projected visitor targets by around 50% in the first year, but it has become a touchstone for conservative cultural politics in Australia. And it remains a monumental presence in the cold, rainy countryside of northern France. It is a lasting tribute to the chauvinism and steady militarization of Australian public memory over the last two decades and a clear articulation of the right-wing project — driven, above all, by the Australian Liberal Party and Australia’s Department of Veteran Affairs — to reshape Australian memory politics and national identity.

Celebrating war

I came to Villers-Bretonneux on a rainy spring day to see for myself this monument to the memory culture that has dominated Australian public life since I was a child. That culture has tended to center on Anzac Day, the national public holiday on April 25 that takes its name from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac), which, despite both nations having recently acquired independence from Britain, supported the British army in WWI. 

The date was chosen to reflect the anniversary of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey, when Anzac soldiers joined British and French Imperial forces in a combined attack on the Ottoman Empire. Although the campaign was a disaster in military terms, with the Anzacs withdrawing after months of terrible suffering, the bravery and togetherness shown in defeat inspired Australians in the latter half of the 20th century to claim Gallipoli as an emblem of the young nation’s identity. Since the 2000s, state-sponsored commemoration has been moving away from the losses at Gallipoli and toward Australian victories on the Western Front, including the battle at Villers-Bretonneux that also happened to occur on April 25.

The Monash Centre is located about a mile and a half outside Villers-Bretonneux, a quiet town that still wears its Australian connection with pride. The town hall has kangaroo decals on its facade and an Australian flag alongside the French tricolor. 

I walk north among stony green fields until the Australian National Memorial looms into view. The Monash Centre has been dug into the hillside so as not to disturb the view of everything else. There are hardly any other visitors, but the grounds are crowded with half-erected marquees, portable toilets and half-unpacked tables and chairs. Workers shout to each other as they prepare for a massive Anzac Day ceremony, which will be broadcast live to Australia in 10 days.

During the interwar period and after World War II, Anzac Day was a relatively somber affair, primarily aimed at people who lost loved ones in the conflicts. As the 20th century proceeded, WWI commemorations shrank as ever fewer veterans were alive to participate. But it also retreated on account of the cultural shifts, beginning in the 1960s, that saw progressive Australians looking to distance themselves from a military history with Britain and instead to rally more around multiculturalism.

This cultural shift, however, began to reverse course in the late 1990s, when the incoming conservative prime minister, John Howard, made WWI commemoration the focus of his cultural program. Opposed to recognizing Australia’s history of colonial violence and dispossession, Howard rejected what he called the “self-laceration” and “guilt” of prior governments. “In the Anzacs can be found the model and inspiration for the nation’s own self-esteem,” boasted an editorial in the conservative newspaper The Australian on Howard’s first Anzac Day. The federal government initiated a wave of massive state funding for education and memorialization programs, all of which focused not on independent Australia's successful defense against fascist Japan in WWII but on the country's achievements while fighting for the British Empire in a distant war that is widely considered avoidable and wasteful.

Howard also injected a celebratory tone into WWI commemorations, which had previously prioritized sober mournfulness. The idea that Anzacs had been fighting to defend democracy and freedom became commonplace in political speeches, in the media and in classrooms. “It is about the celebration of some wonderful values of courage, of valor, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost,” Howard said on Anzac Day in 2003, two months after Australia had joined the Iraq War. “They went in our name, in a just cause, to do good things to liberate a people.”

Anzac Day is now Australia’s de-facto national day. Politicians of both major parties, the right-wing Liberals and the center-left Labor, give speeches — often at the sites of overseas battles like Villers-Bretonneux — about how Anzac values of courage, camaraderie and sacrifice helped “forge” the young Australian nation. Anzac-themed football games draw large crowds. Pubs host parties involving the wartime betting game “two-up.” Throughout, the word Anzac has come to mean not just Australians who served in WWI but also, by association, that wartime generation and Aussie soldiering generally. And a specific set of images and stories about WWI — those battlefield values, red poppies and muddy trenches, the melancholy silhouette of a lone mourning infantryman — have coalesced into a quasi-mythological national narrative that Australians refer to as “the Anzac legend.”

Any critical voices are accused of disrespecting the suffering soldiers and, by extension, Australia itself. The sports journalist Scott McIntyre was fired from his public broadcaster job after tweeting critically about Anzac’s role in public life. The Sudanese-Australian media presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia after being harassed by right-wing media and politicians for making a Facebook post one Anzac Day that referred — using the standard Anzac commemorative phrase “lest we forget” — to armed conflicts in Syria and Palestine and to Australia’s scandal-ridden offshore refugee detention centers.

According to Frank Bongiorno, the president of the Australian Historical Association, the 21st century resurgence of interest in WWI history was not a revival of earlier Anzac narratives but rather a total reinvention of them. By the 1960s, Bongiorno explained, Anzac had come to seem “irredeemably identified with conservative values of the old imperial white Australia” but has, in recent decades, been reinvigorated to emphasize the involvement in WWI of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians. To Bongiorno, however, this newfound inclusiveness is only superficial, eliding the real diversity of Australian wartime experience while insisting on the privileged status of British (and occasionally Irish) Australians.

The new variation on Anzac has become a robust point of political consensus. Successive Liberal and Labor governments have continued to bolster Anzac’s profile by committing huge sums to commemoration activities. By 2015, it was estimated that over 500 million Australian dollars (about $336 million) of taxpayer money had gone towards the centenary, including over $67 million for the Monash Centre. “It’s said that Australia’s spending on the WWI centenary was greater than all the other countries combined,” Bongiorno said. “And since then, we’ve seen further spending.”

All in the family

I walk across the cemetery toward the Australian National Memorial, which lists the names of roughly 10,700 graveless Australian soldiers who died in France. My phone buzzes with a notification from the Monash Centre app, which I was instructed to download upon arrival. Brief stories about dead soldiers have been loaded into the app and geotagged, with an actor’s reading designed to begin as users approach the relevant grave. The app invites me to try looking up a name on the walls, perhaps that of an ancestor. I decline.

At the entrance to the memorial, I encounter a series of wreaths and one laminated card:

In loving memory

Of my great great great uncle

Gone but never forgotten

I thank you all for that you

Sacrificed for my freedom

The geographer Shanti Sumartojo, who has researched Australian commemoration sites in Western Europe, describes Villers-Bretonneux as the “jewel in the crown” of a curated set of experiences marketed together as the Australian Remembrance Trail. To her, the emotional impact of the memorial lies in how it combines personal and collective elements, making individual visitors feel physically humbled by the monumental architecture and the massive accumulation of soldiers’ names. It is no coincidence that Villers-Bretonneux and other Remembrance Trail sites are advertised using explicitly Christian language: Visitors are called “pilgrims,” cemeteries are referred to as “hallowed ground” and “sacred sites.”

The memorial also serves in the construction of a national narrative. Above all, according to Sumartojo, the emphasis on family names — coupled with the language of inheritance and the close focus on WWI — reinforces a national identity based not in civics and democracy but in ethnic kinship. This national kinship is, of course, slanted in favor of those whose family histories in Australia go back past 1918. “As an immigrant to Australia, and as a biracial person myself, that's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Anzac: It's this really powerful narrative, but I don’t think it actually holds space for contemporary Australia very well, because it's so masculine and settler-colonial and white,” Sumartojo said.

At Villers-Bretonneux, memory follows the logic of inherited valor. I happen to have my own family connection here, although it’s not listed on the wall. My great-grandfather served Australia as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, where he was injured — so the family story goes — by a shell explosion that buried him, rendering him mostly amnesiac, left for dead and wandering lost. Eventually, he found his way to a company of Canadians who, recognizing his accent, passed him on to Australian forces in Belgium. From there, he was sent home to Australia where, gradually working off his trauma, he became gainfully employed and started a family — our family.

For most of my life, my family’s wartime history did not interest me at all. (My grandfather was in the army, too, having served in the Pacific against Japan.) Growing up in Australia of the 2000s, being descended from Anzacs meant occupying a privileged position in the national narrative — but I never felt comfortable accepting it. For one thing, this badge of honor felt like something I had done nothing to earn. For another, the way Anzac was discussed under the Howard government did not at all match the diverse Australia I knew.

Only recently did I discover the urge to learn more about my great-grandfather and his life. I had only ever known two things about him. He had been anti-war, hence his decision to enlist as a stretcher-bearer rather than a soldier, and he had been blown up on the Western Front. It suddenly struck me as a terrible irony that this man, who hated war so much that he cried when his son enlisted for WWII, would be remembered by his descendants only for being a soldier. Peppering my mother with questions, I learned that my great-grandfather was a man of remarkable gentleness. He loved birds, especially magpies. He was a whiz at fixing radios. And he was a committed pacifist.

My previous incuriosity is nobody’s fault but my own. Still, I cannot help but think that the Anzac legend offered me no viable narratives for thinking about my ancestors except the one that centered war. My pacifist great-grandfather, who never participated in Anzac Day, didn’t fit into the narrative, so I scarcely thought about him. 

What happens to a society when war stories — even gruesome and sad ones — dominate its self-image? I wonder this as I follow the signs out of the National Memorial and toward its 21st century extension, the Monash Centre. These signs lead me down into a series of trench-like walkways, where bits of retro Aussie slang (cobbers, diggers, mates) are carved into the walls and speakers blaze with noises of gunfire and shells. This place, it seems, is at once a cemetery, a museum, a monument and a reenactment experience — a reflection, perhaps, of the Anzac legend's own crossed purposes.

Entering the Centre, I am greeted by a friendly Australian docent. She recommends hurrying so I have time for The Experience, which, she assures me, is very immersive and very moving. The interactive app guides viewers through the exhibits, triggering massive screens that show historical photographs and ultra-high-definition reels of actors who, dressed in WWI garb, either reenact key moments from the war or deliver quotes taken from soldiers’ letters and published testimonies. These screens, interspersed with boxes of objects, tell a version of the Anzac experience that heavily emphasizes Western Front victories. Hardly any space is dedicated to Australia’s decision to enter the war. No space at all is allotted to the vigorous peace movement — or, indeed, the two tremendously divisive conscription referenda that were voted down during the war. One follows the Anzacs’ narrative arc from excitement and confusion through the shock of gory early battles to the Aussies’ triumphant mastery of trench warfare. When it is suggested that Anzacs were defending the democracy and freedom of Australia and its allies, I begin to wonder if the Centre’s organizers have got their world wars mixed up.

Bongiorno has described how images of Anzac changed during the postwar decades, from the celebration of successful warriors toward the increasingly funereal tones of the 1980s and 1990s, when Anzacs started being represented primarily as sufferers. This mournful tone — and the accompanying gruesome portrayals of war — has been offered as a defense against accusations that Anzac’s prominent role in Australian memory culture is essentially militaristic. Yet, at the Monash Centre, battles are referred to as being among “the greatest” on the Western Front, with John Monash branded the “greatest” general. War is where nations are forged, where men are made and where a community’s heroic status can be secured for eternity. As William James once wrote: “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” If all the focus is on how the war was “won,” not on why it was fought — and who tried to stop it — then military engagement becomes the only viable form of courage.

As I enter the Centre’s middle chamber, and the video-game jingoism of The Experience gets underway, it becomes clear how easily the ostensibly anti-war strains of earlier Anzac memory culture can slip into the full-on glorification of violence. The French-Australian military historian Romain Faithi has been an outspoken critic of the Centre’s lurch toward national chauvinism. “Sometimes I just wonder what the men who are under would think about it,” he told me. “Would they be touched that thousands of people remember them, or would they be like, ‘You are so wrong. Fighting this war served no purpose except killing millions of people.’”

The Monash Centre reflects the broader imbalance of war and peace in Australian public memory. Throughout the 2010s, former Prime Minister Howard’s opposition to historians and the arts was taken up by successive Liberal governments, which inflicted crippling austerity on national cultural institutions and the main public arts funding bodies. To the academic and journalist Ben Eltham, this represents a kind of “implicit cultural policy” whereby arts budgets are cut while comparatively massive waves of funding are directed towards Anzac-style war commemoration.

Eltham also emphasized the war memorial’s enthusiastic courting of corporate sponsorships from defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (The ex-Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, who ran the National Memorial from 2012-2019, was chosen as the president of Boeing Australia in 2020.) I asked Eltham if it was surprising that military contractors were eager to contribute to a cultural mythology that still emphasized the goriness of wartime suffering. “I think it makes perfect sense,” he said. “In every nation, there seems to be a pretty direct relationship between the veneration of these old dead young soldiers and the glorification of future conflicts.”

The Monash Centre, and Australian memory culture more broadly, offers a warning for the United States. The U.S. author and former Marine Phil Klay has written eloquently on the limitations of a culture that offers veterans showy rituals of gratitude but remains essentially indifferent to the soldiers themselves and to the emotional and physical costs of war. James Fallows has noted in The Atlantic that politicians and the press typically discuss the military with “overblown, limitless praise,” while pop culture emphasizes the “suffering and stoicism” of the troops without ever venturing to learn about them. Outsiders, Fallows concluded, view the military “both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions.” One example of the funereal turn in American military memory culture came in the debates over Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests. When commentators accused Kaepernick of “disrespecting the troops,” they typically pointed not to U.S. military successes but to the immensity of the veterans’ sacrifice and suffering. His then-teammate Alex Boone said that Kaepernick "should have some fucking respect for people who served, especially people that lost their life to protect our freedom.”

A national soldier cult, it seems, serves nobody — not even the soldiers. And an iconography of suffering offers no protection against militarism. Leaving the Monash Centre, I remember the story Romain Faithi told me about Alec Campbell, the last living Anzac who experienced the battle at Gallipoli. Campbell was a socialist and trade unionist. He warned against the glorification of Gallipoli and was bemused by the frenzied media attention he received in old age. “When he was the only one left,” Faithi said, “the government approached him for a national funeral and he said, ‘Heck no, I used that part of my life. Don’t go to war!’ But of course it was bigger than him. So when he died, the government used him anyway.” Alec Campbell’s state funeral took place in 2002. His casket was placed on a two-piece gun carriage and led by a military Dodge truck, preceded by four riders on horseback wearing WWI uniforms.

The post Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of WWI appeared first on Coda Story.

A slender man of 54, with piercing blue eyes and a gentle manner, Andrii knew that if anything happened to him on the battlefield, Yurii, his partner of nearly 25 years, would not be able to make medical decisions on his behalf. If Andrii died, Yurii would not be allowed to pick up his body from the morgue or arrange a funeral. Under Ukrainian law, the love of Andrii’s life would be little more than a stranger.

Following the 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew a pro-Kremlin leader and installed a president dedicated to pursuing integration with the West, Ukraine took a handful of steps toward protecting its LGBTQ population, including an amendment to Ukraine’s labor code that made it illegal to fire a person on the basis of their sexuality. “The Ukrainian LGBTQ movement never had any support from our authorities until around 2015,” Andrii told me. 

But past gay pride parades in Kyiv have been marred by violence, and the country of 43 million people has stopped well short of offering the full civil rights of citizenship to gay people. This could all change if those pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to protect the civil rights of LGBTQ people achieve their aims. LGBTQ soldiers have been particularly influential in changing public opinion. An estimated 200 people who openly identify as gay serve in the Ukrainian military, upending existing ideas of what constitutes a national hero.

So far, the country has taken fitful steps toward protecting gay rights. After the invasion, a petition for Ukraine to amend Article 51 of its 1996 constitution — which states that “marriage is based on the free consent of a woman and a man” — gathered 25,000 signatures, enough to necessitate a presidential review. Zelenskyy’s office replied that Ukraine’s constitution “cannot be changed during a state of war or emergency.” The response did say that the government would look into the legalization of civil partnerships, which would extend certain financial benefits to LGBTQ couples, but exclude others, such as adoption rights. 

For Ukraine, the fate of proposed LGBTQ protections during the war with Russia carries special significance. Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed Russia’s invasion as an existential holy war that pits Russia’s blood-and-soil religious, political and social values against Ukrainians who support a jaded, morally corrupt West. He has called LGBTQ people vessels of Western amorality, targeting them for violence and censure inside Russia, and enacted a law that banned children from accessing any media that positively portrays LGBTQ identities. Any legislative protection extended to LGBTQ people in Ukraine now would be cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

It’s not only in the war between Russia and Ukraine that LGBTQ rights have become a singular litmus test for whether a country has decided to evolve toward a more tolerant vision of society or to join the wave of emerging authoritarian states around the world. A crucial legal battle is currently underway at India’s Supreme Court, in what could be a landmark moment for LGBTQ communities in the country. The increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi is pushing back against the legalization of same-sex marriage, calling it an “urban elitist concept.” The hearing is expected to go on for at least two weeks. A favorable verdict would be historic and would make India only the second country in Asia, after Taiwan, to legalize same-sex marriage. 

In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has vowed to defend a law that bans the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. A case before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state, has the potential for a clash with Hungary, where Orban’s insistence on preserving the law has reinforced Budapest’s increasingly authoritarian bent. 

Andrii, the man called up to fight, did what he could to mitigate his lack of civil rights. He went to a notary and drafted his will to ensure that his partner Yurii could at least inherit the apartment they owned together in Kyiv — the city that the couple has called home since fleeing Luhansk in 2014, when fighting erupted there between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian military. Yurii would not be entitled to death benefits should Andrii pass away.

“I don’t refuse to protect my country, it’s my duty. But I don’t have my ordinary rights,” Andrii told me recently when we met in central Kyiv. After following his military’s summons, he received a temporary deferral. This allowed him to continue his work with Nash Svit, one of Ukraine’s oldest LGBTQ rights organizations. Andrii co-founded the organization in 1997, just six years after the fall of the Soviet Union, at a time when the gay rights movement in the region was only beginning to stir.

Since then, progress on equality has been blocked by Ukraine’s religious institutions and ultra-conservative groups. Same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are not recognized by the state. But the Russian invasion has changed minds. Some Ukrainians, who were previously unsure of their personal views on LGBTQ rights, are taking a pro-gay rights position simply because it is contrary to Moscow’s. While around 41% of Ukrainians do not support “the introduction of a registered partnership for same-sex couples similar to ordinary marriage,” a growing number are uncomfortable with the rights of soldiers in wartime being undermined because of their sexual identity.

Ukraine follows a global trend in which negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people can be deeply entrenched in the country’s armed forces. It’s a situation that has been exacerbated by disinformation pumped out by Russia. Detector Media, a media research group, has tracked the rise of false pro-Russian social media narratives about Ukrainian troops having AIDS “because they are gay.” This has made some members of the Ukrainian military sensitive to any steps taken to encourage the acceptance of gay soldiers. When LGBTQ Military, an NGO fighting for equality in Ukraine, promoted the establishment of a gay-fiendly unit in the armed forces in 2021, the head of PR for Ukraine’s army told local media that reports of a so-called “Ukrainian LGBTQ battalion” were false and accused LGBTQ Military of having Russian origins. LGBTQ Military continue to deny this allegation.

For many LGBTQ soldiers, the flurry of talk around equal rights has sparked hope over the past year. Vlad, a cadet from the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, told me that official recognition of same-sex partnerships would mean real freedom for him. Currently based in Odesa, the 18-year-old endured years of bullying. When he joined LGBTQ Military, he found power in numbers. “I took an example from the guys who have already come out,” he told me in a Telegram message.

Among Ukrainian lawmakers, the leading voice on equal rights for LGBTQ people is Inna Sovsun, a 38-year-old opposition member of parliament from the eastern city of Kharkiv. We met last month at a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv. A few days before, she had proposed a law on same-sex partnerships that received bipartisan co-sponsorship. The bill would offer an alternative path to official same-sex partnerships, as Zelenskyy’s government drags its feet on the legislation it promised in its 2021 National Human Rights Strategy.

“For a while we were thinking that we should introduce a bill which would give the right to same-sex partnerships only to those where one person was in the military as that would have a greater chance of getting through parliament,” she told me. “But we decided against it because that would be discriminatory.”

And it’s good timing. Her new bill could help mitigate a wave of negative publicity that is expected to follow a pending judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, in Maymulakhin and Markiv v. Ukraine. The case, filed in 2014, was brought against Ukraine by a gay couple who claimed the state discriminated against them by refusing to legally recognize same-sex family partnerships.

“The argument I am going to use is: We are going to have to use this legislation to pre-empt this negative decision against us,” Sovsun told me. Depending on where things land, Sovsun’s bill could give policymakers a way to demonstrate a concrete commitment to equal rights straight away. 

But support for LGBTQ equality legislation will not come easy on the floor of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where the Ukrainian Council of Churches wields considerable influence. In a statement issued in late March, the organization said it was “outraged” by Sovsun’s bill, alleging that it threatens “both the institution of the family and the value foundations of Ukrainian society as a whole.” Ultra-conservatives will also coalesce against the law. The mayor of the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk declared that “a gay cannot be a patriot.”

Recognizing the long odds of receiving legal recognition of same-sex marriage, some of Ukraine’s soldiers have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their wishes are respected in death.

Last November, Leda Kosmachevska, a 33-year-old woman from Crimea, received a call from a childhood friend. Would she marry him? The man on the other end of the phone had been in a committed relationship with another man for 15 years.

She thought it through and agreed. 

Leda wasn’t surprised when she got the call, she said. Her friend had been in the army since March 2022, and she was well aware of the kinds of pressures and discrimination that gay people face in Ukraine.

“He doesn’t have any close relatives and was raised by his grandmother,” she told me. “We’ve known each other since we were eight. He told me he was gay when we were 18.”

The two friends talked through the logistics. They laid out the terms around his medical care, what to do if he went missing, funeral arrangements. As their conversations continued, Leda grew more comfortable with the idea of being a liaison between her friend’s actual partner and the state. But she was also nervous. The stakes were incredibly high.

Leda wrote about what she was doing on Facebook. She posted her story with a high-quality photograph of herself, sitting on a sofa, wrapped in a white sheet. She explained to me that her public name, Kosmachevska, is different from what appears on her official documents. This was done, she said, to protect her friend, and herself, from hostile actors.

When the post went viral, her story ricocheted around Ukrainian media and became another example of the extraordinary measures some Ukrainians have taken to protect each other in wartime. It also triggered a torrent of abuse from Facebook users who tried to shame her. Still, she left the post up.

“There are people who will use those details to apply to the courts and say the marriage is fictional,” she said, but “my friend is still on the frontline fighting for our country.”

Tusha Mittal contributed additional reporting to this article. 

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In early March, Ugandan lawmakers approved the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill that brings back life imprisonment for same-sex relationships and imposes a slate of new penalties for related offenses. This extends as far as restricting Ugandans from saying that they’re gay and speaking about LGBTQ topics. It even prohibits land owners from renting or selling to LGBTQ people. The bill also dictates that “aggravated homosexuality,” which includes sexual assault, but also sex with a person under 18 years of age, is punishable by death.

The bill is now waiting for approval from Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has never been shy about his homophobia. During his State of the Nation address on March 16, Museveni called gay people “deviants.” In 2013, when the country’s original anti-gay law passed, local opposition, international outrage and a ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court defanged the policy. But the sentiments behind it appear to be driving legislative action once again.

But this is not the only law in progress that seeks to curtail gay people’s rights in Uganda. Another bill has come to the surface recently that would further cement state power over the private lives of LGBTQ people, as well as those of unmarried women. 

Proponents of the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, an effort to regulate infertility treatment, say it would protect people seeking these services and healthcare professionals that provide them. But the bill also requires anyone seeking fertility treatment to be married under Ugandan law. As such, it discriminates against all unmarried Ugandans who might want to have children, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.

First proposed in December 2021, the bill had flown under the radar until a former Ministry of Justice attorney, Samantha Mwesigye, called attention to it on Twitter last month.

“That the Ugandan parliament is even considering tabling this is a travesty not only because of the unconstitutionality of the bill but because Uganda is and should be a progressive society,” Mwesigye told me. She also noted that Ugandan women are increasingly deciding to take the parenting journey on their own.

Rose Wakikona, an expert on reproductive health rights at the Center for Health, Human Rights and Development in Kampala, sees links between this bill and the anti-homosexuality bill. 

“The purpose of this bill is to pass a law that expressly kicks out sexual and gender minorities from having children,” she said.

In its current form, the assisted reproductive technology bill would heavily constrain the reproductive rights of unmarried women and LGBTQ people who want to have children of their own. Ugandan law does not recognize same-sex marriage. 

As the bill acknowledges in the introduction, infertility takes a toll on people who want children. And childlessness, and the decision not to have a child, are both heavily stigmatized in Uganda. It should come as no surprise that those who seek fertility treatment prefer to go on with it privately. 

The bill could also threaten people’s privacy — and thereby potentially run afoul of Uganda’s constitution. If the bill were to pass, married couples would be required to present proof of marriage prior to accessing in-vitro fertilization or surrogacy services. They would also be subject to a medical examination “to ascertain that the married couple suffers from infertility or other health challenges” and compelled to prove that they have been having unprotected sex for one year but have failed to conceive a child. The bill does not indicate how, exactly, state officials expect couples to provide such proof.

Healthcare providers who work in this area declined to speak with me about the bill. “This is a very sensitive topic,” said a worker at one fertility clinic. Their silence was not surprising, given increasing threats to the freedom of expression in Uganda.

Both the assisted reproductive technology and the anti-homosexuality bills speak to a broader push among legislators to align Ugandan laws with notions of “morality” rooted in Christianity. 

Dr. Sarah Opendi, the country’s health minister who is now a member of parliament, is the bill’s main sponsor. Opendi has a history of promoting policies tied to “family values” and traditional notions of morality and is a co-sponsor of the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill. She also caught the attention of young, progressive Ugandans last year, when she pushed forward a motion to ban Nyege Nyege, an annual electronic music festival that attracts thousands of people from around the country and beyond. Calling for the festival to be canceled, Opendi argued that it “breeds immorality” and “recruits” young people into the LGBT community.

Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, one of only two parliamentarians who voted against the anti-homosexuality bill, told openDemocracy that support for the bill was “fueled by Christian fundamentalism.” In 2020, openDemocracy reported that U.S.-based Christian right groups, many with close links to the Trump administration, spent at least $50 million on campaigns that sought to undermine the rights of women and LGBTQ people across Africa. The Fellowship Foundation, a group with strong ties to David Bahati, the parliamentarian who wrote Uganda’s original anti-gay law in 2009, gave the Ugandan government $20 million between 2008 and 2018.

Mwesigye also expressed concern that Christian fundamentalists might have had a hand in promoting the assisted reproductive technology bill. “Lawmakers need to stop moralizing legislation,” she said. “There must be a separation of the church and the state, because the state knows that it is bound to protect the constitutional rights of Ugandans. We cannot have members of parliament citing the Bible and the Quran on the floor of parliament.”

It remains to be seen whether the bill will pass the test of constitutionality. Bills of a similar nature have been tabled and passed in the Ugandan parliament but rejected by the Constitutional Court.

If the anti-homosexuality bill should pass, LGBTQ people in Uganda will be barred by law from seeking out some of the most fundamental components of a healthy and fulfilling life. It will become a crime to seek love and speak about your identity. Even finding a place to live can lead to criminal penalties for your landlord. And if Opendi’s bill should pass, an important avenue for having a child will be outlawed too.

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Enter CPAC México.

Held on November 18 and 19 at a Westin Hotel in Santa Fe, a upscale skyscraper-studded neighborhood in Mexico City, the gathering of cultural warriors, ideological true-believers, Catholic nationalists and cross-border election-deniers drew attention to imported right-wing influencers, politicians and microcelebrities from the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Many had gone on the road with CPAC before, in Brazil, Israel and Hungary. Panels about “bioconservatism vs. transhumanism” were held alongside more traditional speeches against communism. 

The speaker line-up included: 

• Former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, who beamed into CPAC México via video link from Arizona where he was contesting that state’s midterm election. He discussed the “globalist threat” to national sovereignty. 

• American anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who falsely suggested López Obrador stole the Mexican presidential election in 2018, an allegation surprising even to the Mexicans in the audience. 

• Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the recently defeated Brazilian president, who pushed his way through fans and the press on his way to give a speech about the burgeoning global conservative movement. 

• Argentinian presidential candidate Javier Milei, with a Beatles haircut and iconic lamb chops, who unspooled an economic vision of “anarcho-capitalist” libertarianism.

• Defeated conservative presidential candidate José Antonio Kast of Chile who has family ties to the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and is the son of a Nazi Party member.  

• President of the Mexican Republicans, Juan Iván Peña Neder, who had spent two years in a maximum security Matamoros prison on gang rape charges — which he contests. 

At the beginning of the conference, a group of anti-fascist protesters showed up at the hotel adorned in Che Guevara shirts waving red hammer and sickle flags, while jumping up and down. They looked like activists in communist cosplay. Matt Schlapp, the American chair of CPAC, went outside to greet them on video, which he shared on Twitter, dubbing it “CPAC Derangement Syndrome,” by which he meant a stalkerish obsession with protesting conservatives.  

CPAC México packed the carnivalesque energy of the much larger CPAC event held each year in the U.S. minus the kitschy Americana costumes and day drinking. There was a Catholic presence. Nuns in habits applauded speeches warning about the perils of youth transgender surgery. The international press in Mexico City covered CPAC México, but it was a small event: roughly 700 attendees and 75 speakers. There were 140 registered journalists. 

At first, one person was conspicuously missing. 

Before the last hour of CPAC México, the only sign of Donald Trump was the tricolor “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hats among attendees. He was not on the agenda. That changed when Trump appeared in a surprise pre-recorded video message, congratulating the CPAC México organizer Eduardo Verástegui on his leadership in pulling off the inaugural event. 

The crowd lavished applause on Verástegui. A woman began to shout, “Eduardo Presidente!” 

A handsome former telenovela star and boy band singer, more recently Verástegui has placed his faith center-stage, reciting the rosary online during the pandemic and campaigning against abortion and gay marriage. The Catholic social organization he founded in 2019, Movimiento Viva México, co-sponsored CPAC México, and he has been called a future Mexican Donald Trump and a potentially potent opposition leader in Mexico.

Verástegui recently raised his profile in the U.S. He announced CPAC México at the CPAC held in Texas. Earlier this year he also stumped for losing Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona, an intensely popular figure among Trump supporters. 

One week after CPAC México, the other side will show up. The Summit of the Pacific Alliance, attended by populist progressive leaders who have come to power in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Chile will convene in Oaxaca. The nearly coinciding conferences pose something of a stand-off: can CPAC conservatives offer el pueblo, the people, a reason for voters to turn away from the ascendant Mexican left? 

As a scholar of conservative populist influencers, I have studied their effective tactics of garnering attention — and therefore political power — through networked storytelling, media stunts and tabloid rhetoric. Controversy is a strategy. Conservative spaces are no stranger to showmanship and celebrity, to tabloid, film and television stars, Trump being the most notable recent example. A product of the American Conservative Union, CPAC has a long history of uniting media spectacle with activism and ideas as a means of reconstituting the Right through moments of struggle. The inaugural CPAC in 1974 was headlined by Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, and set the stage for the “New Right” ascendancy that lifted the Republican party to national power after the Watergate scandal. 

CPAC México takes a page from this U.S. conservative playbook.

As in the American CPAC, the CPAC México speakers were accustomed to tabloid attention, adversarial relationships with the press and contentious political histories. Verástegui was a frequent tabloid target, claiming he had a romantic relationship with Ricky Martin before a subsequent religious turn towards celibacy. 

CPAC in the U.S. has traditionally been a tryout for future leadership and its Mexican iteration was no exception. A “Young Conservatives” panel featured speeches by millennial Mexicans, many involved in the anti-abortion movement. But the biggest expectations for future leadership rested on Verástegui and Karina Yapor, a photogenic Emmy award winning host at Voz Media who interviewed all the speakers in her booth on the micro-sized CPAC México “radio row.” 

Yapor is familiar with the tabloid gaze. She had written a heart wrenching memoir of her experience being sex trafficked as a child in the “star academy” of pop singers Sergio Andrade and Gloria Trevi. It put her on the radar of countless international tabloids.

Sex trafficking is a significant Mexican political issue. Verástegui showed a trailer of his newly produced action thriller “Sound of Freedom,” based on the anti-sex trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad. Its leader, Tim Ballard, was a speaker at CPAC México. “Storytellers are the heroes, always,” Ballard said, explaining how abolitionists defeated American slavery through story and Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad provided inspiration. He explained that Verástegui had reached out to him several years ago after seeing a CBS news clip of one of their videotaped operations in Colombia. Now they do films together. 

Mexico has the third highest national rate of child trafficking. But narratives of elites trafficking children are also central to QAnon conspiracies. “QAnon did a great disservice to this cause,” Ballard bemoaned, “I wouldn't be surprised, frankly, if traffickers are behind it. Because if you take something true that needs attention and you fill it with crap, you make it unbelievable.” 

Displays of piety were everywhere at CPAC México: tables selling religious pendants, nuns hosting 8am mass, cheers of “Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Virgin Guadalupe! Y Viva México!” Conservative American political operative and internet performer Jack Posobiec, known for a livestream “investigating” a child sex trafficking rumor, rallied a standing ovation with a cry of “Archangel Michael, Adi-yame!” ostensibly mispronouncing the Spanish for “help me.”  

López Obrador, Mexico’s left-wing president, has instituted policies that have alarmed liberals along with conservatives. He has invoked the specter of government militarization by, among other decisions, slashing police budgets in favor of enabling the military to fight narcotraffickers. He has botched state-owned transport and energy infrastructure projects, and he has proposed overhauling the National Electoral Institute, which critics claim would favor López Obrador and his party. The latter move brought tens of thousands of protestors into the capital’s streets. 

“There are two axes that control Mexico’s political battle: the one pro-López Obrador and the one against López Obrador,” Peña Neder, president of the Mexican Republicans, said. “And there’s a third axis in the conservative right that is still too far away from building any power.” 

In recent years under the leadership of Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, CPAC has developed a roadshow of conservative political microcelebrities trying to bring together a global right wing in Hungary, Brazil, Australia, Israel and now Mexico — to varying degrees of success.   

In his keynote address Eduardo Bolsonaro said: “This isn’t an ideology; this is a movement.” This suggests that policy alone was not enough to win an election. CPAC México is part of a larger strategy to build a recognizable and insurgent right-wing movement in Mexico allied with similar parties globally. Verástegui’s building of Movimiento Viva México is part of creating a brand ambassador for a fractured right. One organizer of the conference, Renee Bolio, noted that “center-right parties or candidates are very lukewarm.” To confront this, they mobilize social service organizations, particularly faith-based ones, for policy change around issues like abortion. 

For instance, many speakers including Verástegui, Bolsonaro and Schlapp were signatories of the Madrid Charter — a document drafted by the Disenso Foundation, a think tank associated with Spain’s populist, right-wing Vox party — that seeks to create a conservative world for “700 million people” in the “Iberosphere,” or countries with Spanish and Portuguese colonial heritage. It calls out “totalitarian regimes inspired by communism, supported by drug trafficking” and Cuba’s influence over them.

The Charter affirmed basic democratic values of rule of law, separation of powers, pluralism and human rights. But the far-right Vox party has often faced criticism for evoking symbols and slogans from Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, and for opposing historical memory laws that would exhume unmarked graves currently in the Valley of the Fallen and give victims of his regime a proper burial. When Mexico’s conservative National Action Party signed the declaration, they were met with backlash for associating with Vox. Their backtracking caused some Mexican conservatives to feel abandoned. As Verástegui said in his opening speech, “The right, the true right, has been orphaned.”  

And Mexican conservatives feel they face more headwinds still. Bolio remarked on the lack of a strong right-wing media in Mexico, aside from a few influencers or religious outlets, which meant organizers had a hard time fundraising to put on the conference. But Bolio was optimistic: “Since yesterday, we have received calls saying ‘Wow we love what you are doing.’ It’s not hundreds, but maybe five or six good calls.” 

“The Mexican Right needs to leave the elite so it can reach the pueblo, the people,” Pedro Cobo, a director of research at the Mexican Republican Party, said.

“It’s hard to care about transhumanism when someone is being beheaded in your town,” Miguel Del Valle, 27, said. An enthusiastic conservative, Del Valle is a financial analyst who came to hear Steve Bannon and the losing candidate for French prime minister, Eric Zemmour, who both addressed the crowd via video.   

The CPAC roadshow may not get conservatives closer to the pueblo in Mexico but it can garner attention from the media, donors and bastions of Mexican conservative power. Whether Verástegui will be Mexico’s Trump remains to be seen. 

At the end of the conference, Verástegui greeted the crowd to the 1980s rock anthem “Eye of the Tiger” while adjusting the iPad that held his prepared speech. Despite being a seasoned actor, Verástegui opted not to memorize his speech or deliver off-the-cuff remarks like Eduardo Bolsonaro had the night before. He held onto the podium and spoke methodically as red, white and blue lights — not the Mexican national colors of green, white and red — shimmered across the ceiling. 

Reporting assistance by Vita Dadoo

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The conference was a political lightning rod. As it began, protestors swept through the streets of Verona while conference attendees gave interviews outside the event hall. “Homosexuals must be treated, otherwise hell is waiting for them,” one woman told journalists outside the conference. 

Also at the conference, Giorgia Meloni, who was elected last month to be the new prime minister of Italy, gave a rousing speech to a standing ovation, railing against surrogacy for gay couples. “A puppy rightly cannot be ripped from the mother’s womb as soon as it’s born. So two rich men should not be able to buy a son from a desperate mother,” she told the enraptured crowd. 

Meloni’s election victory also swept in Fontana, 42, who was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament — the third most powerful position in Italian politics. But despite their history of overlapping values and a shared conference podium, the appointment came as a shock to people who have been watching Meloni’s rise to the pinnacle of government. 

“I was surprised,” said Marianna Griffini, a lecturer in European and international studies at King’s College London. She described how Fontana’s election as speaker is at odds with Meloni’s newfound moderation strategy. “As soon as she stepped into Parliament, into government, she basically went through a makeover of her discourse and image. The style was much less aggressive, much less emotional, much more moderate in tone.” 

In contrast to Meloni’s trajectory toward the middle, Fontana doesn’t mince his words, eschews compromise and calls for the complete repeal of Italy’s abortion law. This positions him as Meloni’s ideological standard-bearer, allowing her to sidestep political purity tests. In being her choice for parliamentary speaker, said Griffini, Fontana represents the new government’s core ideology, while Meloni wears a mask of moderation: “We have to see that she’s walking a tightrope between mainstreaming and radicalization.” 

Fontana, meanwhile, stakes out a hardline defense of “traditional family values,” a movement at the core of Meloni’s rise to power, which has been promoted and financed by a coalition of pan-European, U.S., and Russia-backed individuals and institutions for nearly a decade. A year before the Verona conference, Fontana, at the time Italy’s minister for families, made headlines when said he believed LGBTQ families “don’t exist.” Key figures in the traditional family values movement have coalesced in support of Fontana.

The multi-country campaign to roll back LGBTQ, immigrant and reproductive rights across Europe was galvanized five years ago by Vladimir Putin’s repressions against many public expressions of gay life in Russia — notably a ban on the promotion of "LGBT propaganda" among children that last month was expanded to include people of all ages. “The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world,” said Larry Jacobs, the Congress of Families’ late managing director. In 2016, Fontana said that “with gay marriage and and immigration they want to dominate us and wipe out our people,” adding that the example to follow was Russia. 

Fontana joined the hard-right League party when he was 16 years old. He drove a forklift before becoming a politician. “Never has a politician from the city of Juliet risen to such heights,” the Italian newspaper La Repubblica wrote of him.

Intensely religious, Fontana has called Vilmar Pavesi, a priest in Verona with virulently anti-LGBTQ views, his spiritual father. “Gays are a creation of the devil,” Pavesi told Espresso magazine in 2018, before saying that he and Fontana think the same way. “If we thought differently, our paths would divide.” Fontana says 50 Hail Marys a day, and his social media channels are peppered with images of Christ and the Madonna. 

Fontana’s fast rise in Italian politics is often linked to his ability to cultivate connections with the larger constellation of right-wing, Catholic associations in Europe. In addition to the Congress of Families, Fontana has called members of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement his “friends.” He has links to CitizenGo, the ultra-conservative Madrid campaigning platform that sends bright orange “freedom planes” and “freedom buses” around Europe with slogans like “boys have penises, girls have vulvas, don’t be fooled.” Fontana has also campaigned alongside Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the renegade, anti-vaccine, conspiracy-theory-promoting former Vatican envoy, who recently blamed the war in Ukraine on the American deep state, U.S. bioweapons labs and Zelensky’s “LGTBQ ideology.” 

Fontana admires Vladimir Putin. He once called him “a light for us Westerners, who live in a great crisis of values.” Alongside Matteo Salvini, a right-wing Italian politician known for his hostility toward immigrants, Fontana wore a “no to Russian sanctions” T-shirt in the Italian Parliament during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Later that year, the Kremlin invited Fontana to Crimea, alongside other members of pro-independence and anti-immigration parties, to act as international observers in a sham independence referendum.

Meloni has vowed to maintain unflinching support for Western sanctions against Russia no matter the energy implications on Italy this winter. Fontana, meanwhile, has expressed concern that sanctions against Putin could “boomerang” and that allowing Ukraine to enter the European Union “would risk exacerbating the already bad climate with Moscow.” 

Space between Meloni and Fontana is largely confined to foreign policy, while positions concerning LGBTQ people and women are more in lockstep. “I think they will try to make us like Poland. Keep out the possibility of abortion. The possibility to get a divorce, to get contraception. They will try — and I think they will succeed also,” said Silvana Agatone, a gynaecologist in Rome who leads an association protecting the rights of women to receive an abortion in Italy.

While Meloni has said she will not repeal Law 194, Italy’s version of Roe v. Wade which protects the rights of women to an abortion, Fontana has made no such promise. Instead, he is a member of a group called Committee No To 194, which works explicitly to overturn the 1978 law.

“We are concerned that they might create obstacles — financially, organizationally, institutionally  — so they might not touch the law, but they might physically make implementation impossible,” said Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It’s already incredibly hard, for poorer women, from southern Italy, from outside the big cities to actually access abortion,” she said. Doctors in Italy are allowed to invoke conscientious objection to performing an abortion, a law she worries will be taken advantage of by the new government. 

Since the new government was elected, Agatone, the Roman gynaecologist, has been receiving new, strange messages from people asking about her views on abortion after 22 weeks and abusive notes accusing her of “wanting to kill babies.” She said that her colleagues from other associations have received similar messages. “It’s almost like they are trying to catch me out in some way. Like my answers are under observation. So I think we will be attacked in some way.”

In espousing ideas about population decline, demographic implosion and an immigrant invasion, Fontana echoes white nationalists in the U.S. and in Northern Europe who embrace the Great Replacement — a conspiracy theory that holds that nonwhite people are being allowed and encouraged to come to the U.S. and Europe to "replace" white voters and achieve a leftist political agenda. In 2018, Fontana wrote a book called “The Empty Cradle of Civilization” where he argues Italians risk “extinction.” The legality of abortion forms part of this concern — in his view, the problem partly stems from births being terminated. “If every year we lose a city the size of Padua, the demographic decline is comparable to that caused between 1918 and 1920 by the Spanish flu,” said Fontana. 

In fact, Italy is currently facing population loss, a brain drain of young and talented people leaving the country in the hundreds of thousands every year. Fontana claims mass immigration  — alongside same-sex marriage and gender fluidity — will “wipe out our community and traditions.”

Outlawing abortion as a way of addressing demographic challenge is a tactic deeply rooted in the history of European fascism, said Neil Datta, executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive rights. “It puts women and their procreative role in some sort of nationalist objective, producing more babies for the glory of the nation,” Datta said. 

When Fontana was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament, protesters took to the Piazza Dante in Naples dressed in the dystopian red robes of the Handmaid's Tale. “We dressed up as handmaids to recall the novel and TV series in which women are subjected to constant violence, so that their only role is to be a reproducer,” one protester told journalists. Members of parliament also staged a protest at the appointment, holding up a banner saying “No to a homophobic, pro-Putin president.” 

Others celebrated. On the World Congress of Family’s official news site, an article enthusiastically praised Fontana’s rise to high political office. “Lorenzo Fontana is the Parliament Speaker,” the article read. “One of us.”

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Mir went directly to the paper’s website and typed the headline in its search field. A message saying “No results found” popped up on the page. He then looked for his own author page, but it, too, had disappeared. In 2014, Mir was hired as the editor of the Kashmir Reader and had held the position until 2018, so was puzzled to find four years’ worth of his written work missing from the website. 

Growing increasingly curious, he looked for the author pages of former colleagues, but could not find them, either. Then, searching for the bylines of people who continue to work for the paper, he discovered that, while their latest articles were available, nothing dated back further than October 2019. He began to wonder whether it was a glitch in the system, or something more sinister.

It turns out that Mir, 46, is just one of dozens of reporters in Kashmir whose work has disappeared from the websites of local newspapers. Many reporters and editors now tell stories of publications deliberately erasing their work or removing it from public display, following what they believe to be mounting pressure from the Indian government to limit coverage critical of its actions in the territory. 

Kashmir is a disputed Himalayan region nestled between India, Pakistan and China. While both India and Pakistan have claimed the territory in full since Partition in 1947, all three countries hold portions of it. The major part, however, is under Indian administration, as the union territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. A popular rebellion against New Delhi’s rule has been underway for the past 74 years, during which time India and Pakistan have fought three wars of ownership. Among the long-discussed options for Kashmir’s future, merging with Pakistan and independence are the two most popular choices with people who live there, both of which the Indian government continues to resist vehemently.

For visiting journalists, Kashmir, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and filled with scenic lakes, has long provided a story of loss, pain and dangerously escalating tensions between hawkish nuclear powers. Local reporters like Mir, however, have spent years documenting the struggles of daily life there, from ground zero and with unmatched depth. Their work forms a vital record of wide-ranging human rights violations linked to the Indian armed forces, including rape, torture and the killing and disappearance of hundreds of political activists and civilians — one that many believe the government is attempting to to expunge.

Rising Kashmir is one of the region’s most popular English-language dailies. Established in 2008, its office is located, along with most other Srinagar-based publications, in the crimson-painted government apartments of the city’s press enclave. 

According to Riz — a former editor, who asked to be referred to under a pseudonym, citing security concerns — one winter afternoon in 2019, an office manager at the paper demanded login details for its website and social media accounts from technical staff. The next day, the IT manager complained to Riz about the “unprofessional manner” in which the website had been tampered with. Riz was astonished to find that all of his previous articles had disappeared. 

That evening, as staff filled the newsroom for the next day's edition, Riz and a number of his colleagues took up the issue with the paper’s editor-in-chief, Hafiz Ayaz Gani. 

“He told us that we were updating from our old website to a new one, which would be more interactive and user-friendly,” Riz recalled. He and his colleagues were relieved to be told that all of the deleted pieces would be back online in a few days. 

The website was, indeed, updated. Boasting a fresh masthead design and font, its homepage had a whole new look. But, according to Sub, another Rising Kashmir staffer, “weeks passed, and then months, but the missing data did not get updated.”

“We reached out to technical staff,” Sub said. “The answer was worrying: ‘I can’t do anything. Ask the boss.’”

At least seven former and current employees at Rising Kashmir have confirmed that, upon raising the matter again, they were told by Gani to focus on bringing in “stories of youth and positivity,” not the hard news that “used to happen in the past.”

“Now the newspaper has no data before 2019,” Sub told me.

Gani became the editor-in-chief of Rising Kashmir after his predecessor, the veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, was assassinated by gunmen, along with his two bodyguards, outside the office in June 2018. India’s government blamed the killing on the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Kashmir has long been India’s greatest flashpoint: part of the wider nation, yet separate, and riven with fear and suspicion on both sides. To India’s government —  led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party — it is widely viewed as a restive, predominantly Muslim anomaly, at odds with the values and identity of a majority-Hindu nation. Meanwhile, many Kashmiris have for years believed that New Delhi wishes to bring the region to heel by changing its demographic character.

In August 2019, those fears became more real. India’s government imposed harsh restrictions on Jammu and Kashmir, unilaterally revoking the constitutional autonomy held by the region since 1954 and dividing it into two federally controlled territories. In addition to overturning a number of long-standing laws — including one prohibiting the sale of land to non-Kashmiris — hundreds of people were detained. Communication lines, including the internet and mobile networks, were also severed. 

The crackdown, which was meant to quell dissent, lasted for 17 months and became the longest-ever internet shutdown in a democratic nation. News organizations were paralyzed until the government set up a media centre in Srinagar, equipped with four computers (later increased to seven) and a working mobile phone. It was the only place for reporters with over a hundred international, national and local newspapers to access the internet. 

Along with those of prominent regional publications, such as Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir and the Kashmir Reader, the pre-2019 digital archives of many other Urdu and English-language papers also began to be either partially or completely erased. While editors and members of senior management I spoke to cited a variety of different reasons for the disappearance of content, many journalists find the timing suspicious.

During a telephone conversation in September, Ashiq Ahmed, who manages the Kashmir Reader’s website, told me that a large number of articles were lost from the publication’s archive in August 2019, because the organization could not pay its annual website fees without internet access. 

Speaking by telephone, Hafiz Ayaz Gani told me that pieces have gone missing from Rising Kashmir’s digital archive because the “website is under construction.” When asked about questions raised by his own reporters, he simply said, “I have no idea.” 

To Riz, the deletion of historic articles from newspaper websites is a clear attempt to control narratives inside Kashmir. “The idea is to write-off facts and truth about the situation in Kashmir,” he said. 

“The authorities in the region have often made attempts to silence the victims of violence and harassment,” he added. “Anything that challenges that is being erased.” 

It also appears to have started before August 2019. In September 2017, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested the photojournalist Kamran Yousuf, a regular contributor to local news outlets, including Greater Kashmir. 

While Greater Kashmir did carry news of his arrest, it did not say that Yousuf was a journalist, and certainly not one it was associated with. Some of his work, including stories on civilians killed by government forces, also mysteriously disappeared from the publication’s website. 

Yousuf was accused of “pelting stones'' at Indian security forces. An NIA charge sheet against him also stated that he had “neglected his moral duty of covering the government's developmental programs, such as skill-building workshops and blood donation drives.” International media watchdogs condemned Yousuf’s arrests and described the charges against him as bizarre. He was released on bail after spending six months in jail and is yet to be tried. 

In 2018, journalist Auqib Javeed, who writes for the daily Kashmir Observer and a number of other titles, was summoned by the NIA and asked about his stories — particularly an interview he had done with the separatist leader Asiya Andrabi for Kashmir Ink, a tabloid published by the Greater Kashmir group. Not only did Javeed’s articles disappear, the entire Kashmir Ink website was taken offline.

Then, in July 2019, Fayaz Kaloo, the owner and editor-in-chief of Greater Kashmir, was questioned about articles that had appeared in the newspaper three years earlier, following the 2016 killing by the Indian army of a popular and charismatic rebel commander, named Burhan Wani. 

Wani’s death led to an uprising that left over 100 civilians dead and thousands more injured. The world's attention temporarily shifted towards Kashmir after security forces deployed birdshot against hundreds of protesters. Many, most of them young men, were shot in the face, in what was later described as the world's first mass blinding. 

According to four staffers, it was shortly after the questioning of Kaloo that the publication’s website began to be altered, with large numbers of articles and digital editions of the paper disappearing from view.

“It started showing changes. Most of the tags, which help in searches, and many author pages went missing,” said Yas, an editor speaking under a pseudonym. “A number of articles were no longer available.” 

One senior journalist, who asked not to be named, said that Kaloo had described being threatened with legal action by NIA agents and told that Greater Kashmir’s past reporting would be used against him. 

Kaloo did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Speaking to me in Srinagar in September, a senior official at the Department of Information & Public Relations said that the attention paid to Kashmiri news organizations sharply increased after the 2016 protests.

“The department always does the monitoring of newspaper content, but we were told to do it more rigorously,” they said. “Anything written against the government would be recorded and sent to the higher authorities on a daily basis.” 

Some editors of publications from which online articles have disappeared insist that they played no part in deleting the content themselves. Instead, they say, their publications have fallen victim to hackers. 

“Our website was hacked multiple times in past years and, because of that, we would lose some of our previous data,” said Sajad Haider, editor of the Kashmir Observer.  

Haider went on to say that the attacks tend to take place when tensions rise in Kashmir and that he believes that “those in power” are behind them. 

“When there was an uprising in 2016, our website got hacked and when our technical team finally managed to recover it, after a few days, some of our recent coverage, critical of the government, was missing,” he said. 

Anuradha Bhasin, editor of Kashmir Times — one of the region’s oldest English-language newspapers — says that archive material now inaccessible on the paper’s website, including coverage of the 2016 uprising, vanished as a result of “technical issues.” Still, she does acknowledge the deletion of articles “from almost all newspapers in Kashmir.” 

“These archives are records of history,” Bhasin told me. “It is very frightening to see this kind of erasure.”  

Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) agrees. For the past two decades, the organization has relied heavily on the work of Kashmiri news outlets to document human rights violations in the region. In its 2018 annual report, more than 65% of citations came from the local media. Only a handful of those links work today.

“The issue of the missing newspaper archives is not only making our job difficult,” said a representative of JKCCS, sitting in a rundown office in the heart of Srinagar, it is also hindering "researchers and rights organizations who would rely on our work.” 

The organization sees a clear connection between Kashmir’s hundreds of missing people and the deletion of newspaper archives. “Enforced disappearances happen to erase evidence of crimes. Similarly, the newspaper reports are being disappeared to erase the memory of a particular time,” the representative added.

Since its founding in 2000, JKCCS has maintained an extensive hard-copy archive of journalism from the region. However, much of it is now gone. In October 2020, the organization’s office and the homes of some of its members were raided by the NIA, on the pretext that the group was using charitable funds raised in India and abroad to carry out “secessionist and separatist activities.”

Unable to find years worth of his written work online, Hilal Mir had consoled himself with the fact that he had managed to keep some of the articles stored on his laptop. In September, though, the police raided his home and those of three other journalists. Computers and mobile phones belonging to Mir and his family members were seized, along with books and paper copies of his published work. 

Now, that small record of his two-decade career has vanished too. 

“I feel as if I wasn't there, haven't lived and didn't work for all those years,” he said.

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The post Kashmir’s vanishing newspaper archives appeared first on Coda Story.

Being hauled into a police van and roughed up or asked for “chai pani” (bribe money) are everyday hazards when you don’t have a CNIC. Not that Ahmad has much cash to part with these days. Like his father, he used to make a living fishing on the open sea but, for the past five years, he has not been able to set foot on a trawler. Given Pakistan’s disputed maritime boundary with neighboring India, he is not allowed to sail without a valid ID. 

Ahmad says that his card — one of millions issued to Pakistani citizens by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) — was suspended a decade or so ago. According to him, the country’s Intelligence Bureau decided that his CNIC and supporting documents, including a ration card dating back to the 1970s, were all fake. He has been fighting the decision ever since. 

To fully understand Ahmad’s case, it is necessary to grasp how NADRA makes such decisions. Every CNIC blocked by the organization falls into one of two categories. If an individual’s card is suspended because of irregularities in their family tree, they must appear before a regional board and present their documents for reverification. This is referred to  as a “routine” case.

The majority of blocked CNICs, however, are “complex” cases, in which cardholders are suspected of not being Pakistani in the first place. In these instances, district committees of bureaucrats, police and intelligence agents interrogate and investigate the individual in question, then deliver a verdict on their citizenship. According to NADRA, the process should not take more than 40 days, but some people have been waiting for years. 

Like many others in Machhar Colony, which is home to at least half a million people, Ahmad is an of Bengali ancestry. His Urdu is stilted, but when speaking his mother tongue, his words become swift and fluid. He was born in Pakistan, he says, but doesn’t have the paperwork to prove it. The documents he does have — once sufficient for him to be given an identity card — are now considered suspect. Still, he carries them everywhere, creased and dog-eared, but carefully wrapped in plastic.   

“Look, if you tell me my documents are fake, I’ll believe you,” he said plainly. “I’m not educated. I can’t read or write. But, if I was issued fake papers without my knowledge, then how is this my fault?” 

Ethnic Bengalis in Pakistan have long lived in legal limbo, subject to the whims of a paranoid state. Many lack the full set of documents required to apply for a CNIC. Others, like Ahmad, have had their cards retroactively cancelled or told they cannot be renewed. (Regular CNICs expire after five or 10 years.) Part of the reason is prejudice.

“In the authorities’ imagination, there are no Bengali-speaking Pakistanis,” said Hiba Thobani, a lawyer with Imkaan, an organization that represents undocumented communities in Karachi. “If you speak Bengali, you’re immediately deemed Bangladeshi.”    

In 1971, after the eastern wing of Pakistan broke away to become the newly independent nation of Bangladesh, the number of Bengalis remaining in Pakistan had dwindled to between 10,000 and 25,000. But, by the late 1990s, that figure had shot up to 1.5 million. Many migrated for economic reasons. In the 1980s, Pakistan’s economy was faring considerably better than that of Bangladesh. Some Bengali migrants crossed into Pakistan through India, either on foot or by boat. According to a number of testimonies, the only question asked to many of them by Pakistani border guards was whether they were Muslim. 

At the same time, however, the rising number of migrants alarmed Pakistani authorities, which feared that Bengalis could become the second-largest ethnic group in Karachi, upending the already delicate political equilibrium of Pakistan’s most populous city. 

In 1996, Afzal Ali Shigri, then head of a federal paramilitary force called the Frontier Constabulary, conducted a survey of undocumented migrants within the country. The Shigri Report, as it came to be known, warned of the supposed criminal tendencies of “new” immigrants from Bangladesh. To counter that perceived threat, the National Alien Registration Authority (NARA) was formed alongside NADRA in 2000, tasked with registering foreigners in Pakistan. 

NARA was subsumed by NADRA in 2015, but its actions continue to haunt the Bengali community. Under current policy, if an individual was ever issued a NARA card, they are ineligible for a CNIC. Many people who might otherwise have qualified for Pakistani citizenship — especially ethnic Bengalis and Pashtuns — report having been forcibly registered as foreigners under NARA. Ethnic profiling of minority groups continues in other forms, too. 

“Today, when Bengali speakers go to NADRA, it’s often forcibly written on their forms that they were born in Bangladesh, even if they have documents proving otherwise,” said Thobani. In her experience, NADRA’s data operators make little effort to communicate with her clients.

Like Ahmad, many of them speak heavily accented Urdu, and translators are rarely at hand. Often, applicants cannot read or write and can unwittingly sign off on forms containing inaccurate or false information. Bengalis also have an additional obstacle to clear. Once their data acquisition form has been filled at a NADRA center, it must be attested by a senior bureaucrat, usually the deputy commissioner. This decision is made at the discretion of the official in question and can take years.

As a result, bureaucracy — particularly that pertaining to identity documents — can be especially complicated and confusing for Bengalis. One young resident of Machhar Colony described how he and his friends visited NADRA as one big group. It felt momentous and fraught with risk, like crossing a border. Another described taking gifts of fish to the deputy commissioner’s office in the hope of persuading officials to sign off on her papers. 

Capitalizing on this desperation, brokers and middlemen dot the streets of Machhar Colony, promising to ease the pain of the process. Across Pakistan, in fact, there is a large underground market for NADRA data: forged documents and counterfeit family trees, using information leaked, according to one report, by low-level officials at banks that use NADRA-provided verification software.

 In Machhar Colony, according to one person I spoke to, the current rate for getting a CNIC made is between 10,000 and 12,000 rupees ($58-70). In more complicated cases, or if documents are missing, individuals may pay up to 20 times that amount.

Bribery and fraud are not the only ways people lacking the required documents are able to obtain authentic ID cards. For all of NADRA’s  notorious inflexibility, decisions at its service centers are also often made on an ad-hoc basis. 

“Some people manage to get their CNICs made just with their father’s CNIC; others with just their mother’s. Women have been told to get their husbands’ CNICs made first,” even if they are eligible through their parents, said Thobani. “But the problem is, these come under scrutiny later. Applicants say, well you gave us a CNIC under these conditions but NADRA says it must be fraud, because we’d never have done that. It brings their own processes into question.”

It is often forgotten that there is another way of obtaining an identity card in Pakistan — one that doesn’t involve a desperate search for lost documents belonging to long-dead ancestors. Pakistani law grants birthright citizenship, meaning that if you can prove you were born in the country, the legal status of your parents should have no bearing on your right to a Pakistani identity.

The existing system doesn’t make it easy to apply for a CNIC on the basis of birthright, but there is a precedent. In 2017, 20-year-old Saeed Abdi Mehmood — born in Islamabad to Somali refugees — sued NADRA for refusing him an ID card on the grounds that his parents were not Pakistani. Even after winning his case, Mehmood first had to obtain approval from the Interior Ministry; a process so labyrinthine that, according to his lawyer, it appears that he still doesn’t have a CNIC. 

The hurdles aren’t just administrative, they are deeply political. Facilitating birthright citizenship has profound implications not just for the Bengali community but also for the nearly three million people of Afghan origin living in the country, many of whom were born in Pakistan. In fact, Mehmood’s lawyer, Umer Gilani, said that he first intended to fight the suit with an Afghan-origin plaintiff but decided against it, opting for a less politically divisive test case. 

At some point, Thobani believes, the Pakistani state will have to decide the fate of the generations of stateless people within its borders. 

“We often ask this question at hearings. You can’t deport them to Bangladesh because, for one, we don’t have extradition agreements with Bangladesh and, for another, they’re not Bangladeshi citizens, so Bangladesh won’t accept them anyway,” she said. “There’s no answer. This question is ignored.”

When he isn’t following up on his court appeal, Ahmad stays at home. No one in his family has a valid ID card. His sons work as day laborers, one of a dwindling number of jobs that don’t always require you to supply your CNIC. In encounters with the state  — a bored policeman on the street, a clerk in a government office — he is often asked, “When did you come here?” He may not be able to prove it, but he’s never known any other home.

Sohail Ahmad is a pseudonym.

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The post Marooned: Karachi’s stateless fishermen appeared first on Coda Story.

“We have let down old people. We didn’t smile at our newborns because women gave birth wearing masks,” she exclaimed. “This is the society that we don’t want anymore. We want to re-establish human connection.” 

Until 2018, when she stepped down for personal reasons, Alexandra Henrion-Caude had enjoyed a successful career as a geneticist at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. She was already known to be a conservative Roman Catholic, with links to groups that oppose gay marriage, but during the coronavirus crisis, has emerged as an influential figure within the country’s anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine movements, telling her 60,000 Twitter followers that the mRNA technology used in some coronavirus vaccines can modify human DNA and railing against Covid-19 restrictions. 

Henrion-Caude is just one of a significant number of prominent French medical professionals with such views. France exhibited high levels of resistance to vaccines long before the coronavirus ripped through the world. According to a June 2019 study, conducted by Gallup World Poll for the medical charity Wellcome, one in three French people believed all vaccines to be unsafe. That same year, the virologist Luc Montagnier — winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine, in honor of his discovery of the HIV virus — made public statements linking childhood immunizations to instances of sudden infant death syndrome.  

The movement against the French government’s pandemic response first rocked cities across the country in autumn 2020, with the Yellow Vest anti-lockdown protests. Its momentum has not diminished. Since July, more than 200,000 people from across the political spectrum have taken to the streets every Saturday, from Paris to Marseille, chanting for the restoration of “liberté” and demanding that “Macron, get out.” 

France has now recorded more than 116,000 Covid-19 deaths. In December 2020, just 40% of people said that they intended to get vaccinated, according to figures from the French health authority Sante Publique. While that number has climbed steadily — 84% declared that they were in favor in July — thousands continue to voice vociferous opposition to health passes and vaccines. 

I recently spoke to a number of French doctors who have publicly criticized Covid-19 vaccines. Michel de Lorgeril, a 70-year-old specialist in cardiology and nutrition at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has written several books in which he has attempted to demonstrate that the science behind all vaccines is flawed. During a telephone conversation, he lectured me at length and declared, “I’m a CNRS researcher and no one has disputed my standing as a scientist.” 

De Lorgeril’s latest book, which disputes that vaccination is a suitable solution to the coronavirus crisis, has been accompanied by a small number of media appearances. One — broadcast by the Russian state-controlled TV channel RT France and viewed more than 99,000 times on YouTube — saw him pitted against experts encouraging people to get their shots. Bombarding the presenter and his fellow guests with purported evidence of his ideas, he appeared worryingly convincing. 

“The main question, the one that towers over all the others and has been entirely dodged by health authorities and the media, is whether we have demonstrated that these vaccines are safe, and therefore, useful,” he told me. “If you go back in history, the idea that vaccines have helped eradicate diseases is indefensible.”

As in many other countries, French suspicions about Covid-19 and the measures necessary to slow its spread can be traced back to a series of political blunders. In March 2020, Health Minister Olivier Véran, stated that wearing a mask in public was not necessary for the general public and failed to provide health workers with sufficient personal protective equipment. On September 10, Agnès Buzyn, who ran the ministry when the pandemic first hit, was indicted by a special court of ministerial accountability for “endangering the life of others” during her response to the pandemic. 

Thomas C. Durand is a biologist who runs La Tronche en biais, a website and YouTube channel dedicated to encouraging critical thinking. He and his colleagues have done a great deal to debunk false information about coronavirus and the vaccines designed to combat it. He explained that many medical professionals are angry at the government’s mishandling of the crisis, which may have made some of them less willing to believe its health messaging.

“Macron said, during lockdown, that medals would be given to doctors. Who gives a damn? There was also a clap for carers at 8 p.m. Great,” Durand said. “The current government has carried out policies that undo the French health system, and suddenly we should trust them?”

Some have other grievances. Violaine Guérin, a 61-year-old endocrinologist and gynecologist who works as a private practitioner in an affluent area of Paris, remains aggrieved that she was not allowed to treat patients in person during the height of the pandemic. She also told me that she began to notice a series of “anomalies” after the crisis started. 

“One was to tell people to stay at home,” she said. “Usually, when a person gets sick, they get an appointment with their general practitioner. Changing this process wasn’t normal. Some patients saw their condition deteriorate and died at home.”

Guérin added that, in conversations with other doctors abroad, she and her colleagues got the sense that healthcare workers around the world “had all received the same instructions” and that “something abnormal was taking place.”

For French coronavirus and vaccine skeptics, pronouncements made by the prominent microbiologist Didier Raoult proved a major turning point. In March 2020, Raoult, who is the founder and head of the Marseille-based Institute of Infectious Diseases (IHU), said that he had successfully treated patients displaying Covid-19 symptoms with hydroxychloroquine, a cheap anti-malarial drug, and the commonly prescribed antibiotic azithromycin. 

Raoult, 69, built a huge audience, posting videos on the IHU’s YouTube channel and making frequent TV appearances. He now has more than 800,000 followers on Twitter. His ideas spread across the globe. Embraced by Donald Trump in the United States and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, they confused millions of people desperate for solutions and eroded faith in vaccines on a massive scale. 

In May 2020, the nation’s health ministry banned the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus patients. In December of that year, Raoult was one of six doctors against whom the country’s general medical council filed complaints related to their statements on the treatment of Covid-19. He was also accused of various breaches of medical ethics. Raoult has since retired from his teaching job at Aix-Marseille University, but remains as head of the IHU. 

Yet, Guérin and some of her colleagues are convinced that he was treated unfairly and still believe his supposed cure to be effective. In response, they launched an organization known as Laissons les médecins prescrire (Let doctors prescribe). The movement was supported by Martine Wonner, a 57-year-old psychiatrist and member of parliament, who has described masks as “absolutely useless” and was expelled from Macron’s centrist La République En Marche party in May 2021 for voting against the government’s lockdown plans. 

“We were reacting to the ban on prescribing hydroxychloroquine, but keen to defend the freedom to prescribe in general,” Guérin told me.

Despite his other problematic positions, De Lorgeril is scathing about the idea of allowing doctors to prescribe whatever they like.

“This idea is all very nice but, in practice, it’s catastrophic. You have all sorts of examples, from statins to opiates in the U.S., which have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world in the space of a few decades, and were prescribed by doctors,” he said. “Given how mediocre doctors’ training is, one should really not let them do what they want to do.”

While Raoult falls short of being an outright anti-vaxxer, his support for immunization against coronavirus has been muted. In July, he posted on Twitter, encouraging healthcare professionals to get their shots. Other than that, he appears ambivalent, stating that people who have recovered from the disease are better protected against the virus than those who have been vaccinated. In early September, he cut short a TV interview when he was asked whether he recommended that people get vaccinated. 

“He’s only done one tweet encouraging vaccination,” said Durand. “Why doesn’t he say that the vaccine works? I think he wants to boost his personal image, and avoid hurting the anti-vaxxers’ feelings.” 

Christian Perronne — a 66-year-old doctor, who, until December 2020, headed the department of infectious diseases at Raymond-Poincaré University Hospital in the Parisian suburb of Garches — is another well-known vaccine skeptic. Since the pandemic began, he has published two books, including a best-seller titled “Is There A Mistake They Haven’t Made?” He was dismissed as a department head for his claims about coronavirus, but still works at the hospital as a doctor and teaches at Versailles Saint-Quentin University. 

Speaking by telephone, Perronne said, “These products that are called vaccines should never have received the authorization to be sold, given that we have several products which work very well against Covid-19 and cure 100% of patients if they are treated sufficiently early. There are hundreds of publications proving this, and all of this has been ignored by manufacturers and by the authorities because, if they acknowledge that a drug is effective, they will lose the right to commercialize the vaccine.”

He then alleged that a number of his personal acquaintances had suffered devastating side-effects after receiving coronavirus vaccines. 

“Around me, four people I know well have died after being vaccinated, some had very serious accidents, malignant hypertension, thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, paralysis, loss of vision,” he said. He also described how others had “become zombies, who are not like before and have lost all their energy.”

Henrion-Caude, Perronne and Wonner were all interviewed in Hold-up (2020), a French film that puts forward the idea that the coronavirus crisis sits at the center of an elaborate international conspiracy. Despite having been removed from several video-sharing platforms, it has been viewed more than two million times. 

Slowly, French people are getting vaccinated. According to a health ministry press release, published in September, 69% are now fully vaccinated. But all of the vaccine-skeptic doctors I interviewed told me that they had not and were proud to openly express their resistance.

“I hope the French people will not submit and will say, 'Enough,'" Perrone said. 

The post The French doctors railing against vaccines and Covid-19 restrictions appeared first on Coda Story.

Along with 400 others, Vezzoli headed to the historic center of the city to demonstrate against Italy’s latest update to the EU Covid-19 passport, also known as the Green Pass. The document, which is set to last until the end of the year, makes Italy the first European country to make coronavirus health passes mandatory for both public and private-sector workers, starting October 15.

The Green Pass, which is required to access public spaces like indoor restaurants, gyms and cinemas, does not make vaccination mandatory. Residents have the option to take a rapid test every 48 hours, instead, but many complain they can cost up to 50 euros each and often require advance booking, making the process complex and expensive. 

In response, thousands of vaccine and Covid-19 skeptics gathered in cities across Italy — including Rome, Milan and Trieste. In Bergamo, protest organizers took turns railing against the Green Pass and the government’s immunization program. “Truth, truth, truth,” they chanted. “Keep your hands off our children.” 

In Bergamo, such demonstrations carry a particularly grim significance. As an early epicenter of the pandemic, residents saw military trucks ferrying corpses out of the town. The wider province of Bergamo had experienced an estimated 500% increase in deaths in March 2020, largely attributed to Covid-19. Between March and May 2020, almost 9,000 people died there, over 6,000 more than in 2019. During the second wave, between October 2020 and January 2021, Lombardy — the region within which Bergamo sits —  recorded more than 30% of all national coronavirus deaths.

“For us doctors, the past year-and-a-half has been incredibly tough, not only physically, but also emotionally,” said Dr. Paola Pedrini, secretary of the Bergamo province medical association. “Now that more people are getting vaccinated, we can breathe, at last.”

Those harrowing memories appear to mean little for people like Paolo Candellero, one of the protest organizers. “The vast majority of people who decided to inject this drug are having a hard time,” he said to the crowd at the protest. “They die more, they infect other people more. You can find documents proving this everywhere.”

Demonstrations against Covid-19 vaccines and the Green Pass have rocked Italian cities since July, when the government first mandated it. Crowds have gathered across Italy every Saturday, demanding freedom from regulations that they consider infringe upon their civil liberties. Similar demonstrations have also been held across Europe. In France, large numbers have taken to streets across the country for eight consecutive weeks. In Germany and the Netherlands, thousands of demonstrators have marched against what they describe as “medical apartheid.”

On messaging platforms such as Telegram, groups such as Basta Dittatura (Stop the Dictatorship), which has 50,000 followers across Italy, have been railing against the national pandemic response for months.

Conspiracy theories about a health dictatorship, or “dittatura sanitaria,” are commonplace on social media. Critics also share wild ideas about the origin of the virus, reports of alleged vaccine-related deaths and unproven “alternative” cures, such as the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and vitamin D.

The gathering in Bergamo was one of the smaller nationwide protests, but in Rome and Milan, numbers reportedly ranged between 2,000 and 4,000 people. In both of the latter cities, demonstrations ended in clashes with police.

According to healthcare professionals, the current mistrust of national pandemic measures can be attributed to misinformation and overall fatigue with restrictions. “People have forgotten a lot of things about the past year,” said Dr. Guido Marinoni, head of the Bergamo medical association. “Those events are carved in history. It was a tragedy. That situation can only be compared to a war.” 

Doctors agree that vaccination rates are high enough to feel hopeful for the upcoming winter, with over 75% of the eligible Italian population having received a full course of shots. But skeptics could still hinder the gains made in the past 18 months. 

“People who don’t want to get vaccinated are still in the millions,” Marinoni said. “In Bergamo, people constantly claim they are exempt from the vaccine for the most bizarre reasons, and sometimes it’s stressful.”

In Bergamo, opponents recently devised a document mocking the Green Pass. The so-called Free Pass was reportedly devised by a law firm set up during the pandemic, named Comicost — short for Committee for Constitutional Freedom. It states that EU regulations discriminate against individuals who refuse to be vaccinated, and that people have the constitutional right to access any venue and move freely around the country, without having to comply with Green Pass requirements. 

Comicost’s Telegram group now counts over 20,000 members. In mid-September, the head of Bergamo’s bar association stated that the document would be investigated for possible violations of its code of conduct. 

The “Free Pass” has appeared on several other Telegram channels, including one called “Bergamo University Students against the Green Pass,” run by 21-year-old Federico Di Ceglie, who studies law at the University of Bergamo. When the Green Pass was announced in August, he joined a countrywide effort among students to oppose the mandate. The national movement, he says, counts between 20,000 and 30,000 members. 

Though Di Ceglie does not believe that his movement is powerful enough to influence government decisions, he is convinced that opposing state-mandated pandemic restrictions is important. “I don’t think the Green Pass is only meant as a Covid passport,” he said. “It’s not a short-term measure, but a long-term one, and I believe the government will keep enforcing it in different ways, even after the pandemic is over. That’s unacceptable.”

The post Have Italy’s Covid pass protesters forgotten the carnage caused by the pandemic? appeared first on Coda Story.

But Höcke — head of a radical faction within the AfD known simply as “the Wing” and a man who once described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument to shame” — did not stop there. Not only should the faithful cast their ballots for the party, he said, they should make sure to do it in person and not by mail, which, he alleged, is vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. “Anyone who has an interest in fair elections and secret elections should go to their polling place,” he explained. 

Germany heads to the polls on Sunday, September 26, in an unusually open and unpredictable general election that could determine the country’s direction for decades to follow. For the first time in 16 years, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has helmed the country since 2005, is not standing again. 

The three candidates — Armin Laschet, from Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, Olaf Scholz from the center-left Social Democrats and Annalena Baerbock of the Greens — are locked in a volatile race for the nation’s highest office. In the final days of the campaign, Scholz’s SPD is in the lead with 25%, followed closely by Laschet’s CDU. The Greens, however, have recently fallen behind.

Parties that advocate for postal voting, Höcke continued — including the Greens and the SPD — were essentially condoning voter fraud. He then brought up the example of an unproven story making the rounds this year about a young Green supporter allegedly casting their grandmother’s vote for the party without her knowledge. 

If wide-scale election manipulation could occur in the United States, he said, drawing on the dizzying number of false claims made by Donald Trump during his 2020 presidential campaign, “then I know that it’s possible in the most important country in Europe.” 

“Stay alert, my friends,” he added. “This is about our democracy.”

As up to 60 million Germans prepare to vote, Höcke is just one of many reactionary figures alleging that the election has already been fixed. Less than a year after Donald Trump flooded the U.S. presidential elections with conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud in the United States — leading to five deaths during the January 6 assault on the Capitol in Washington D.C. — German far-right parties have picked up the narrative and run with it.

The allegations of voter fraud in Germany have come from a cast of extreme groups and individuals, including AfD leaders and politicians, radical right-wing organizations like Ein Prozent, and conspiracist movements including QAnon and the anti-lockdown Querdenken group. 

While the AfD remains a small force in German politics — it is currently polling at around 11% nationally, slightly below the 12.6% it achieved in 2017 — the party’s supporters, primarily communicating through Telegram, claim that postal ballots will be used to steal the election. Others subscribe to a false belief, which also circulated in the U.S., that the election will be hijacked by rigged voting machines. 

While calling foul after an election loss is not a new tactic, disinformation experts say Trump’s unrelenting declarations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election have inspired like-minded movements in Germany to resort to similar tactics. 

“Donald Trump isn’t the reason we have voter fraud narratives, we already had those before,” said Karolin Schwarz, a Berlin-based author and journalist who tracks far-right disinformation online. “But he contributed to the existing narratives and maybe even created some more that hadn’t been around before.” 

In November 2020, AfD leaders released a tepid statement acknowledging Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s U.S election victory: “We accept the democratic decision of the American citizens and are confident that possible irregularities in the vote counts will be resolved quickly through the rule of law,” it read.

Yet some party members disagreed. “No congratulations for the globalist electoral fraudster Joe Biden,” Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD member of parliament, wrote on Twitter, claiming that there had been “massive irregularities.” Deputy party leader Beatrix von Storch also contradicted the statement and posted about “massive evidence of election fraud.” 

German officials have prepared for the possibility that, due to the ongoing pandemic, up to half of the country’s voters will cast mail-in ballots in the general election — up from almost 29% in 2017. For a number of conspiracy theorists and right-wing figures, such statistics lend credence to their notions of rampant manipulation and deception.

The first preview of what might happen after Sunday’s elections came in June, during regional polls in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won more than 20% of the vote. When the party’s support failed to match its polling numbers and the Christian Democrats performed significantly better than expected — the AfD ended up trailing the CDU by 16 points — far-right politicians and commentators immediately began to cite election fraud, many posting a now-debunked report that some poll workers were invalidating AfD votes. 

While the Saxony-Anhalt allegations were spread primarily by individuals on the fringes of the AfD, the party has now embraced these ideas. In late August, AfD social media accounts began to feature campaign ads that echoed Höcke’s speech: “A mailbox isn’t a polling place,” they read. 

Nora Mathelemuse, a Berlin-based analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, believes that the AfD’s focus on election fraud is part of an effort to seize the spotlight at a time when voters are looking to mainstream politicians to steer Germany out of the coronavirus pandemic.

The party’s followers are clearly on board. I spoke to a handful at Höcke’s rally. None were willing to vote by mail and all believed the election results would be compromised.

“I can’t really imagine voting by mail because I think postal voting is prone to fraud — you can manipulate a lot with postal votes,” said Peter Kunadt, a 58-year-old man from Burgstädt. He brought up both the U.S. election and the Saxony-Anhalt election, saying that he couldn’t see how late-breaking shifts in votes in both cases were possible without some kind of tampering along the way. 

Thomas, 53, who declined to give his last name, agreed that mail-in ballots could not be trusted. “It’s going to be manipulated, I’m 100% sure,” he said. “With postal voting, it’s easy to cheat.”

In the long term, the danger of such beliefs are clear: “The underlying core of this narrative is that it’s trying to destabilize the democratic process within Germany,” said Mathelemuse. “Because if the election doesn't properly work, then what is our democracy?”

If nothing else, widespread rumors of voter fraud will almost certainly make the lives of poll workers and election officials significantly more difficult. In his speech, Höcke urged AfD supporters to visit polling centers to serve as informal observers. He asked them to write down the number of votes for each party and compare their figures with the official results. The AfD has a page on its website dedicated to such reports. Its headline reads: “Trust is good — control is better.” 

The post As Germany prepares for a historic election, far-right leaders are embracing Trump’s Big Lie appeared first on Coda Story.

Otarbay, 47, secured a visa from the British Embassy in Kazakhstan, and prepared to go to London in September. He told only a few close friends. But, before long, the phone calls started.

Two or three times a day, a man calling himself “Bakhyt” from Kazakhstan’s state security service began calling him, warning him not to go to attend. “If you go, it might affect your family, your future,” the man told him. “You should think of your family members in Kazakhstan, and in China.” He continually asked Otarbay if he would come and meet him in a coffee shop or a restaurant to “talk, face to face.” 

When the day came to fly to London, Otarbay went to Almaty airport. There was a very long pause as the border official looked at his documents, before refusing to let him board his flight. “I was shaking. I was so scared that they would arrest me,” Otarbay said. 

Along with two friends, who were also set to give evidence at the tribunal, he left the airport and took a taxi back to the city, as if going home. The three men then got into another car, turned their phones off, and drove at high speed across the border to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, completing the four-hour journey in three. From Bishkek, they managed to fly to Istanbul, Dubai, and finally, London. The relief was immense. But Otarbay, who has two children in Kazakhstan and two more in Xinjiang, felt anxious about leaving his family behind, and afraid of any punishment that might be meted out to them by the authorities once he told the truth about his experiences to the tribunal.  

In Altay, Xinjiang, where Otarbay’s parents and two of his children live, the Chinese authorities were visiting his parents at their house and threatening them about the consequences if their son gave evidence. His sister, who lives in Shanghai, called Otarbay and begged him not to testify. 

On the day of the tribunal, Otarbay told the panel of judges how he was starved, beaten, brainwashed and forced to work in Xinjiang’s network of camps and prisons. “Since there were cameras in other places, they would take us to a separate washroom where a camera wasn’t installed, and they would beat us with electric batons,” he said, via an interpreter.

The pressure exerted on Otarbay to stop him from testifying is part of a wide-ranging campaign by the Chinese and — by proxy — the Kazakh governments to undermine the Uyghur Tribunal in London, and denounce any international attempt to establish the truth about the crushing system of detention and surveillance inflicted on Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities. To date, as many as one million Uyghurs have been held in so-called “re-education” camps. 

The Uyghur Tribunal’s second hearing took place between 10 and 13 September, at Church House in Westminster, moments away from the Houses of Parliament. It was held to investigate allegations of genocide by the Chinese state against Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations in Xinjiang. The trial was formally requested by the World Uyghur Congress, but acts as an independent people’s tribunal, chaired by QC Sir Geoffrey Nice, who previously led the prosecution of the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. It has no powers of sanction or enforcement, but has, nonetheless, been targeted by the Chinese government throughout its first hearings in June and again this month. 

The People’s Republic of China did not respond to the tribunal’s requests to take part in the proceedings. Instead, it imposed sanctions against the tribunal and its organizers. 

During a press conference this week, Zheng Zeguang, China’s ambassador to the U.K. said: “The so-called witnesses the organizers have put together are merely actors who have been making up the so-called persecution that never happened at all.” 

Zheng added that he asked the U.K. government “to stop the organizers from continuing such malicious behaviour.” The U.K. Foreign Office did not respond to requests for comment about whether it had sought to reassure the ambassador over the tribunal. Zheng was told he was banned from visiting the U.K. parliament on September 15, while sanctions remain against several MPs and peers. 

Organizers of the tribunal have said the hearings were marked by condemnation from China and other covert attempts to undermine the proceedings. 

“China continued its attack to harass the witnesses who agreed to give evidence,” said Hamid Sabi, the tribunal’s counsel, during closing remarks on Monday. He described how, following pressure by the Chinese government, two witnesses withdrew their statements.

Organizers of the tribunal also told me that the host venue, Church House, had been put under pressure not to hold the event. “I think there was some effort to actually try to hire out another part of the building by people who were connected to the Chinese Embassy, so it gives you an idea of how deep this thing went,” said Luke de Pulford, an advisor for the tribunal and co-founder of rights group the Coalition for Genocide Response. 

Church House declined to comment on the matter. 

Tribunal staff also experienced a number of suspicious attempts to hack into their digital security. “We did receive a high number of fake bookings in the build-up to the hearings,” said Frankie Vetch, a project assistant at the tribunal. He described how the organizers received several suspicious emails and login attempts. This led them to take measures to safeguard the data of their witnesses, including ensuring that there was no public Wi-Fi connection within the venue, in order to prevent outsiders from hacking into the system. 

The Embassy of the People's Republic of China in London did not respond to requests for comment. 

Muetter Iliqud, a project researcher at the Uyghur Transitional Justice database, which registers disappeared and imprisoned Uyghurs in Xinjiang, presented her report at both the tribunal’s June and September sessions. In the days leading up to both hearings, her Telegram app notified her of numerous login attempts on her account. The same thing happened on Facebook and WhatsApp. Her colleagues also experienced similar activity. She showed me her phone and scrolled back through dozens of login alerts. Iliqud and her mother, both based in Norway, also received phone calls from unknown numbers in the lead up to the hearing. “I’m not just risking myself, but also everyone I’m working with, and I’m very worried about it,” she said. 

Another expert witness, Julie Millsap, director of public affairs and advocacy at the Campaign for Uyghurs, was harassed by anonymous accounts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, which posted old photographs of her pole dancing, along with out-of-focus, fake images of a woman kissing a man in a dance studio. “The messages said, “We’ll show this to your husband,” she said. He then received similar messages. During her testimony, trolls spammed the Uyghur Congress YouTube page with comments denouncing her. 

During the June hearings, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs held a press conference featuring family members disputing evidence given by witnesses. “They tried to undermine my testimony,” said Qelbinur Sidik, a witness who, in June, recounted being forcibly sterilized in Xinjiang. The day before her testimony, she watched a video of her husband on the official foreign ministry’s Twitter page, who described her story as “nonsense.” 

“They were clearly forced to denounce their own family members as liars,” said de Pulford. “The cruelty of this government knows no bounds. They'll stoop to any low in order to support their narrative, which is to deny there's any problem to make out like it's all being made up.” 

Erbakit Otarbay has now decided it’s too dangerous to return to his home country and will try to seek asylum in the U.K. “I feel very safe here,” he said. “Bakhyt” last called him on September 9, when Otarbay was already in London. Since then, he has changed his phone number, and the calls have stopped. 

The post Hacks, threats and propaganda: how China tried to discredit the Uyghur Tribunal appeared first on Coda Story.

Tertishnik’s village was once a backwater, best known for smuggling petrol and cigarettes across the poorly guarded border. But, in 2018, a tall barbed wire fence was erected by Russia along a street named Friendship of Nations, splitting the community into two: Milove in Ukraine and Chertkovo on Russian territory. The smuggling has stopped, and now relatives and neighbors on opposite sides of the street have to travel to border checkpoints to visit each other. 

The divisions in the village, and the country, have imposed a heavy economic and social cost on Milove, but when asked how his life has changed, the first thing Tertishnik mentions is the coronavirus — and vaccination in particular. The 73-year-old is angry because Ukraine does not use Russia’s Sputnik V shot, so he has to receive one of the several Western formulas registered for use in Ukraine.    

“I think Sputnik is better, because it’s been through so many tests and is being used in lots of countries,” he said. “These others, their quality is questionable. Even the media often says so.”  

The pandemic has created a tidal wave of disinformation in nations across the world. But in Ukraine, the conflict over lockdowns and vaccinations has been deepened by the fault lines of a war between government forces and Russia-controlled separatists in the east of the country since 2014. So far, the conflict has claimed 14,000 lives. It has also entrenched divisive narratives over whether Ukraine should look west towards Europe or east to Russia, that have led people like Tertishnik to favor an unobtainable Russian vaccine over the ones freely available at their local hospital. 

Tertishnik’s preference for Sputnik V is strongly linked to nostalgia for the Soviet era, which he remembers as a time of order, certainty and harmony. Economic hardship, the new borders separating him from neighbors and family, and conflicting media messaging — he says he watches both Russian and Ukrainian TV — have exacerbated his sense of grievance. Conversations with him are peppered with assertions that Russians and Ukrainians were friends for centuries before the West interfered, and that Ukraine is little more than a Western puppet state. 

To date, less than 10% percent of the population have had one or two coronavirus shots. Pandemic conspiracies and vaccine hesitancy can be found across the nation’s social and political spectrum. A survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in April found that 53% are not willing to be vaccinated, mainly because they fear that the shots have not been sufficiently tested. 

However, the biggest numbers of those uncertain or unwilling to be vaccinated were in the eastern and southern regions which are traditionally more Russia-oriented. A March survey by the independent research organization Rating Group Ukraine found consistently more vaccine hesitancy and refusal among supporters of the three main pro-Russian opposition parties in Ukraine. Those respondents were also more likely to trust Sputnik V than other vaccines.  

Ukrainian politicians don’t have to be pro-Russian to criticize the government’s pandemic response and vaccine policy. But research published in April by the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service, has detailed how Russia’s “vaccine diplomacy” drive has used state-controlled and proxy news outlets, along with social media, to undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions and vaccination strategies. A report from the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre identifies how this disinformation campaign in Ukraine aligns with broader attempts to divide society and turn the country’s vector from west to east.

In February this year, the Ukrainian government announced it would not register Russian Sputnik V. Most of the EU, including France, Germany and Italy, had also not approved it, citing missing clinical trial data. But the Ukrainian government ruling explicitly bans Covid-19 vaccines developed or produced in an “aggressor state.”  

The ban provided a prime opportunity for Russian media, and pro-Kremlin media in Ukraine, to accuse the government of committing “genocide” of its people for political purposes. It also tied neatly into the long-term disinformation narratives that divide the country, accusing the West of pushing Ukraine into war in 2014 and, now, of experimenting on Ukrainians with vaccines, to the benefit of big business. 

While Ukraine negotiated for vaccines from the EU and the World Health Organization’s Covax program, Russia scored a propaganda goal by providing Sputnik V to separatist territories in east Ukraine.

The pandemic had already damaged increasingly tenuous ties between Ukraine and the eastern and Crimean territories it lost to Russia in 2014. Pre-Covid-19, more than a million people, mostly residents of separatist territory, crossed the de facto border in east Ukraine every month. When politicized quarantine restrictions restricted crossings, those people were largely deprived of family contact, jobs, Ukrainian pensions and other benefits, in addition to a shared information space.   

Ukraine initially closed all the de-facto borders with what it refers to as its “temporarily occupied territories” in March 2021, as part of a strict nationwide Covid lockdown. The government was keen to emphasize the alleged disastrous level of coronavirus infections in Russian-controlled territories, although real figures were impossible to come by. Restrictions were lifted after three months, but immediately imposed by separatists in the east and Russian-annexed Crimea, who cite Ukraine’s inability to cope with the coronavirus crisis. 

The separatist-imposed restrictions have remained in place ever since. Currently people must provide numerous documents to justify their trip over the de-facto border in order to obtain permission to cross at a set date and time. Just one crossing there and back is allowed a month. 

Konstantin Reutsky, who heads the Ukrainian NGO Vostok-SOS providing assistance to residents on both sides of the frontline, believes there is no epidemiological justification for the separatist-imposed restrictions. Instead, he says, they are just another tactic in the information war. Ukrainian media is blocked on separatist-controlled territory — and even in some adjoining Ukraine-controlled areas — and Russian and separatist media portray Ukraine as on the verge of economic and social collapse. With access closed, people have no opportunity to see that in fact Ukraine is rebuilding and developing areas close to the frontline. 

Russia and separatist authorities “don’t want people to see that things are better on this side,” said Reutsky. “Covid was an excuse.” 

Crossing points and vaccines

After a peak in spring this year, when coronavirus infections were reaching 15,000 per day, it is hard to see how Ukraine’s currently low rates of less than 1,000 new cases a day can justify the ongoing restrictions. Ukraine’s extensive building program in the east includes a whole new crossing point on the de facto border, with banking and postal services and a center for processing Ukrainian documents and benefits. This crossing, however, has never been opened due to disagreements for which each side blames the other. 

Meanwhile, Stanitsia Luhanska in Ukraine is one of only two crossing points with separatist territories now open. Queuing to navigate the jumble of fences and kiosks on the Ukrainian-controlled side, travelers have to contend with a number of coronavirus-related complications on Ukraine-controlled territory too. A free bus service to the Ukrainian checkpoint stopped when the crossing temporarily closed last year, and has not been reinstated. Until recently, Ukrainian authorities required that inhabitants of the separatist territories take a Covid test on arrival, but took months to provide free tests.  

In June, Ukraine hit back in the Covid vaccine propaganda war. It began a long-promised government program of free vaccination for inhabitants of annexed Crimea and the separatist “republics,”, describing the move as a response to “medical genocide” against Ukrainians living under Russian occupation. 

People can book an appointment by registering online or calling a hotline, and can choose locations near the front in east Ukraine and Crimea. Those who have registered for vaccination are allowed to skip the queue at the Ukrainian checkpoint. By mid-July, 393 people had registered for the program, according to the Ukrainian Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories. 

In Stanitsia Luhanska, vaccination with the Chinese CoronoVac is available for people from the separatist “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LPR) twice weekly in the primary medical center. Located in Stanitsia Luhanska hospital, the center is an island of bright new renovation in a building otherwise much in need of repair. On a recent swelteringly hot day, a family had traveled over 100 km from Alchevsk in the LPR, to renew their Ukrainian bank cards and for their 28-year-old daughter, Yelena, to be vaccinated.

“I’ve been waiting for this program,” Yelena said. The announced supplies of Sputnik V to the LPR ran out in April, she said, when priority groups such as medics and police were vaccinated. Since then, the only option was to travel to Ukrainian government-controlled territory, or, for Russian passport holders, to Russia. 

“I don’t like the propaganda around it,” she added. “But there’s propaganda on both sides.” 

Yelena found out about the Ukrainian program from the social media page of a Ukrainian NGO. “Those who want to find information discover ways of finding it,” she said. “And those who are okay with Russian propaganda don’t need alternative sources of information.”

Yelena said that there was a good deal of anti-vaccine sentiment in Alchevsk, as well as theories that the virus was artificially created or doesn’t exist, and distrust of the Ukraine program. 

“None of my relatives, except my parents, think it’s a good idea to come here,” she said. “Even my father was, like, ‘How do you know they’ll give you a vaccine? There’s a shortage of vaccines in Ukraine’. He’s skeptical, he doesn’t trust the government.”

Yelena’s experience at the clinic did not change her father’s mind, but by the end of their visit her mother, trembling with nerves, also got her first shot. 

While people like Yelena make the complicated journey west over the frontline to get a vaccine in Ukraine, Natalia Kravchenko, a doctor administering the program in Stanitsia Luhanska, would prefer to look east. She yearns for Soviet-era health care and research which she considers to still be effective and strong in Russia.

“I, personally, would like to be vaccinated with Sputnik V. I was born in Russia and have a Russian mentality,” said Kravchenko, who is in her 50s. “But we inject with what they give us. It’s all politics. We were friends and now we’re enemies. What can you do?”       

One village, two vaccine drives

Back in Milove the local hospital, which is being renovated as part of a $235 million European Investment Bank program for east Ukraine, had vaccinated just 410 people by mid-July from a population of 5,800. A mobile brigade from a nearby town is also providing shots.

“Everyone reads on the internet,” said Iryna Smyrnova, the hospital’s head of secondary medicine. “They all call now and ask, ‘What vaccine is it?”

The majority who do get vaccinated in Milove are keen to get Pfizer or AstraZeneca shots manufactured in the U.K. or Europe, according to Smirnova. Not because they think those vaccines are any more trustworthy than others, but because the vaccination certificate will allow them to leave both government and separatist Ukraine and travel abroad. 

Even Tertishnik has registered to get a Western vaccine. “I don’t think it’s better, I think Sputnik is better, but those up top decided,” he said. 

When asked for the reasons behind his decision, he replied, “I want to live a bit longer, and see my grandchildren.”  

The post Russian vaccine propaganda is deepening divisions in conflict-riven Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

Created by a private company, Advantal Technologies in Madhya Pradesh, the Shield 360 app is intended to monitor and update daily work targets for ASHA workers, but the app also tracks the movements of the ASHAs in real time via GPS and monitors their use of other apps and the internet. Shield 360 further allows health department officials to link the app with the computer systems in the government-run rural healthcare facilities and remotely add, delete or update any information or mobile applications on these work phones.

“We all installed it because at that time we did not know anything about the app,” recalls Sarbjeet, 40, a secretary with an ASHA workers union in Haryana which has 22,000 members. “My friend noticed that the location was automatically getting switched on and every detail of her movement was showing up,” says Sarbjeet. “It felt like giving the remote control of our phone in their hands.”

Sarbjeet, who asked not to use her second name, has been an ASHA for a decade. She was among 600 out of more than 900 female workers from Kaithal to have installed the app without being informed of its tracking capabilities. Some 11,000 ASHAs — or half of the workforce in Haryana — were also called to their local primary health centers for meetings in May and left with Shield 360 on their phones. 

In the last few years, the Indian government has become notorious for using technology to monitor and track the behavior of low-income workers, including healthcare staff, sanitation and rural childcare workers. In March 2020, sanitation workers in the city of Panchkula were asked to wear smartwatches equipped with cameras and microphones so supervisors could hear and watch them work. The wristbands, which ensured the workers stayed within their assigned areas, have also been rolled out to other cities including Chandigarh and Nagpur. 

Last month, the Ministry of Women & Child Development made it mandatory for rural childcare workers across India to download an app named Poshan Tracker, which enables the real time monitoring of food welfare to newborns and their mothers. The government threatened to deduct the pay of the rural childcare workers if they refused to download the app — some have protested against this mandate.  

India’s 900,000 ASHAs are the engines who keep the country’s chaotic rural healthcare system functioning smoothly. They live and work in the local communities they serve and are trusted by populations who are sometimes hostile to outsiders. The coronavirus pandemic, which has officially led to more than 400,000 deaths in India, has brought into sharp focus the extraordinary role of ASHAs, who operate at a grassroots level as intermediaries between the government and locals: from setting up vaccination camps and planning home visits for Covid patients to debunking misinformation about the coronavirus. ASHAs in Haryana are typically paid $55 a month with incentivized payments for additional work. 

Digital rights activists in India believe that low income workers like ASHAs are being put in a situation where they feel pressure to consent to monitoring software being installed on their devices. “It’s just concentrating power in ways that are really problematic especially because these technologies are being introduced into relationships that already have a huge power differential,” says Vidushi Marda, a senior program officer at human rights organization ARTICLE 19, where she leads research on the impact of machine learning on human rights. “There isn't even an illusion of choice. It’s almost like if they want to make money and put food on the table, they have to be subject to surveillance.”

Mobilization and protest

It all began with a demand for smartphones. In April 2020, ASHAs across several states were asked to go door to door and conduct surveys to compile a list of individuals who might be at high risk from Covid-19. The ASHAs were asked to collect the information using an app, rather than keeping their usual manual records. Unable to afford a smartphone, they began demanding the government give them smartphones for work; many even borrowed or purchased second hand devices. 

“They moved all our work online and none of us had the devices for it,” recalls Surekha, another ASHA and the general secretary of ASHA workers union in Haryana. “Once the government made smartphones available to us, we started working online, doing Covid surveys. They created apps for us and we downloaded them.”

ASHAs in states such as Himachal Pradesh were given smartphones a few months later. In Haryana, however, almost a year went by and in May 2021 the government handed out smartphones to all 22,000 ASHAs in the state.   

The healthcare workers initially used the apps Asha Survekshan and ASHAPay to upload Covid-19 surveys and receive their monthly salaries, but next came Shield 360, which thousands of ASHAs across Haryana were forced to install. “This app was blocking other apps, including YouTube and Facebook on our phone, which we didn’t mind. But then the authorities told us that they will be able to make updates on our phone and also delete anything,” said Surekha. 

Alarmed about remote access to the app, Surekha consulted a few local IT professionals to understand what the ASHAs were getting into. The tech experts told her in no uncertain terms that Shield 360 was a “surveillance” app that would track their every movement. 

As news of the Shield 360 spread, some ASHAs posted comments to a YouTube video complaining about their cameras not working, while many others discussed offline how apps like Facebook were being auto-blocked once Shield 360 was installed. 

This angered Surekha who, along with other union leaders, approached her line managers expressing their concerns about the app. They were informed the app would not violate their privacy and that the ASHAs were obligated to retain it on their work phones. Managers made threats, too. “They said that if ASHAs don’t download the app then we would have to return the phones — which basically meant we wouldn’t be able to work,” says Sarbjeet. “They were also asking for names of the workers who were refusing to have the app on their phone, saying they can face serious repercussions.”

Ashish Thakral, director of sales at Advantal Technologies says that the Shield 360 app, which will be rolled out to other government smartphones, ensures that these devices aren’t misused and helps improve efficiency. “You’re not supposed to use government devices for WhatsApp and Telegram,” said Thakral. “That’s why this app has been installed — so that the devices are used for the purpose they were given.”

The authorities do not deny that Shield 360 gives managers remote access to the phones. “The idea of this app is to track the work of Asha workers,” Chand Singh Madaan, the state coordinator for the National Health Mission, told the Times of India. “These phones were meant for official use. It will help us monitor that workers are not misusing it. Also, it will help us track technical issues they face and update their app or add new features.”

Unconvinced by the response from managers, Surekha and others decided to take matters into their own hands in the beginning of June. Messages started pouring into multiple ASHA WhatsApp groups about a planned protest. Surekha posted details about the protest to a group with 55 state-level union leaders and followed it up with a virtual call on Google Meet. Word about the protest soon got around to other ASHA WhatsApp groups. 

The mobilization culminated in a one-day protest on June 25 — almost a month after Sarbjeet had first installed the app. The multi-location sit down was held by over 15,000 ASHAs across 22 districts in Haryana. Sarbjeet remembers gathering at a park along with 500 of her fellow ASHAs, dressed in their red uniforms and walking for 30 minutes to reach the office of the chief medical officer where they sat down while holding their smartphones up and demanded the authorities take them back.

The sit down worked — managers are no longer demanding the ASHAs keep Shield 360 on their phones and have paused any further installations. 

“Our protest was just for a day but it was successful,” says Sarbjeet. “ASHAs were so angry because it felt like there was a question mark on our privacy and almost all of them were present to show their indignance.”

Yet even though the authorities in Haryana haven’t returned to force more ASHAs to install Shield 360, the problem seems to be far from over. Sarbjeet says that when she recently checked with her district coordinator, she was told the app on her phone continued to show as “active” in computer systems even after it had been uninstalled from her device. “We are all in discussions right now on how to handle this issue,” says Sarbjeet. 

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center

The post How healthcare workers in India fought a surveillance regime and won appeared first on Coda Story.

Wang Leizhan — who spoke under a pseudonym via a video link, with his face covered and voice distorted — said he was one of up to 150,000 police recruits who were sent to the territory to “deal with” the Uyghurs. 

Wang spent several months in the region in 2018, tasked with investigating political and religious suspects, including Islamist groups. He recalled that on arrival he was immediately dispatched on arrest rounds. He added that during his short time in Xinjiang 300,000 Uyghurs were detained, including entire villages. 

He stated that he did not know about the existence of so-called “re-education” or “ideology transformation” camps until he arrived. Later, he learned of a special committee that ruled which Uyghurs would be forcibly detained. According to Wang, arrests were made because people “were showing their cultural identity, or they were somehow considered to have a different ideology” to that of the Communist Party of China.

Wang outlined how all Uyghur residents of Xinjiang had to provide DNA samples and that officers ordered schools and neighborhood committees to give up the names of people believed to have “problems with their thoughts.” 

After an individual’s name was provided to the authorities, Wang explained that “all their activities, including using the telephone and using the internet” were monitored, and that ID cards were used to flag Uyghurs trying to leave the region at train stations and airports. “If you’re a suspect, someone who has this tendency — that you’re against the government — that will be shown on the system,” he said via an interpreter. “Every movement is all completely under surveillance control.”

Among police ranks, Uyghurs were seen and described as “enemies of the people,” “terrorists” and “separatists,” and “were not considered as human beings,” he said.

The tribunal heard allegations that guards tortured prisoners, suffocating them with plastic bags, forcing water into their lungs and electrocuting them. 

“They were forced to sign confessions to admit that they are terrorists and also to denounce and provide a list of their relatives and friends as being terrorists,” Wang said in his witness statement. 

“I realized it was a kind of unwritten rule that the police have the power to torture prisoners,” he told the panel, explaining that while officers were required to video interrogations of Han Chinese inmates, there was no such obligation for Uyghur prisoners.

Officers themselves were sworn to silence. “Everything conducted was secretive. We were not supposed to disclose any information,” he said. “Many Uyghur police were arrested when they spoke about these facilities over the phone.” 

Wang left China in 2020 and is now living in Germany. “My dream was to serve my country and protect people,” he said. “Gradually, from my own experiences with how the system works, I   realized that I wasn't serving the people, I was serving the empire, to protect their power.”

On the tribunal’s final day, the panel heard eight statements from witnesses including Mehmut Tevekkül, 51, a Uyghur who was imprisoned and tortured in Xinjiang before being released in 2010, and Nursiman Abdureshid, 33, a Uyghur woman whose family is detained in Xinjiang’s prisons. Proceedings concluded with new research from Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China Studies of the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He told the panel about his peer-reviewed analysis of birth rates in Xinjiang, looking at how China is “optimizing” its ethnic population structure in the region. Ethnic minority birth quotas have been strictly imposed in Xinjiang since 2017. China has been accused of enforcing birth control and sterilization procedures, separating couples and detaining those who exceed their quota.

Zenz set out how birth control policies could stop between 2.6 and 4.5 million births of minorities in southern Xinjiang alone over the next two decades. He went on to state his belief that a shrinking population “is easier to assimilate and indoctrinate.”

The tribunal has no state backing and any judgement it reaches will not be binding. Beijing has also roundly attacked the proceedings. At a press conference in May, foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian described it as “a special machine producing lies.”

Chaired by human rights barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal was held at the request of the World Uyghur Congress — an international organization of exiled Uyghurs — amid increasing pressure for western countries to investigate whether China’s policies in Xinjiang amount to genocide. The panel and its witnesses will reconvene in September. 

Watch: the story of another police officer in Xinjiang, as recounted by his sister.

The post Former Xinjiang police officer describes torture in Uyghur detention centers appeared first on Coda Story.

While the process is viewed as a sham by Syrians affected by the decade-long civil war, Assad is confident victory will be delivered by the regime, which is pushing ordinary Syrians in government-held territory to vote for him. State employees and civil servants will also be bussed to voting centers on election day in order to cast their ballot for Assad. 

After a decade of grinding civil war — the United Nations stopped counting casualties in 2014, leaving the official death toll at 400,000 — Assad is attempting to use the ballot to show the world that Syria is a free and functioning democracy. The regime has announced a series of incentives to boost support, including an individual grant, equivalent to $16 for up to three million state employees, and $32 for retirees. Assad has also declared the demobilization of soldiers in the military and reserves who have served for more than five years.

Loyalist media outlets have made sure to heavily publicize Syria’s first election since 2014 — in which 51 individuals nominated themselves as presidential candidates. From that list, Syria's constitutional court selected two government approved candidates to run against Assad. 

Syrian social media is more overt in its support for the president, with pro-regime users spreading the hashtag “Sawa” (Together), which was also used in the 2014 presidential election. Assad launched a new campaign slogan on Facebook: “Hope in Work,” which is widely viewed as an attempt to promote work and business. Accounts run by pro-regime militia and security services are posting pictures and videos of people saying they are going to vote for Assad, while maintaining that the election is a win against outside powers trying to bring down Syria. On Tuesday, Twitter temporarily restricted access to Assad’s election account after activists campaigned for its suspension.

When the nation goes to the polls, voters’ ID cards will be scrutinized against electoral rolls and their thumbs stained with violet ink, to show they have cast their ballot. The 5.6 million Syrians who fled the country following Assad’s murderous crackdown on anti-government protests in 2011 and the ensuing war cannot vote, even if they wanted to — let alone run for office. However, many still have a vision of the future Syria that they, one day, hope to be a part of. 

Dima Moussa was brought up in a political family who fled Hafez al-Assad’s Syria in the mid-1990s. She served two consecutive terms, from 2018 to 2020, as vice-president of the Syrian National Coalition — the first umbrella of Syrian opposition groups formed in November 2012 in Qatar. Moussa was also a spokesperson for the Homs Quarters Union, an activist group working in the western city of Homs until 2014, providing media outreach for opposition groups and gathering evidence of human rights violations in Syria.

Now living in Istanbul, Moussa is a member of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, a body formed in 2015 as part of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, tasked with negotiating a new constitution for Syria that would then be voted on in a referendum organized by a transitional government. So far, talks for a transitional government and a new constitution have been stalled by disagreements and continuous delays. 

Moussa said that she believes that the prospect of political transition in Syria is impossible if opposition groups refuse to engage with Assad’s regime. “Who am I going to negotiate with? I have to negotiate with this side that’s actually sitting there and refusing to give up power and to allow that transition to happen,” Moussa said. 

Moussa said the upcoming election mirrors the regime’s tactics over the past decade. “I don't think anything the regime is doing now is any different from any of the propaganda or lies it has used over the last 10 years, or even before that.”

Other prominent Syrian opposition figures say this month’s election is being held to create the illusion of democracy. Mouaz al-Khatib, 60, is a former president of the opposition Syrian National Coalition. In 2012, he was forced to leave Damascus, following a campaign of harassment and repeated arrests by the Assad regime. A social activist with 115,000 Twitter followers and the former imam of the city’s revered Umayyad mosque, he is now a member of the Our Mother Syria Movement, an organization that, according to its website, seeks to “topple tyrannical rule” and “save and rebuild” the country.

Khatib, who now lives in Doha, Qatar, believes that the initial slate of more than 50 opposition candidates was designed to present Assad in a favorable light to the wider world. “It’s so nice for the regime. It shows there’s full democracy,” he said. “For sure, the regime’s security asked some of those people to offer their names.”

Syria’s disenfranchised voters

Besides the obvious obstacles to opposition politicians running for office — including security concerns and fear of arrest — anyone who has lived outside of the country for 10 years or more was blocked from nominating themselves. This excludes a large number of educated and highly skilled Syrians who left the country because of their disapproval of the regime. Many people active in the Syrian opposition also refuse to run against Assad, as they believe that doing so would lend both him and the electoral process legitimacy. 

Following a change in election laws in 2014, the regime has increased the number of ways it can disenfranchise voters. For those outside of the country, one voting requirement is to have a valid Syrian passport with an exit stamp issued by one of the official border crossings. Considering that the majority of Syrians left the country following the outbreak of the civil war, very few qualify. Inside Syria, people living in opposition-held territories are also ineligible. 

Middle East experts say the main push factor for civilians to vote for Assad is fear. “The regime is not at all concerned with anyone voting for anyone else,” said Suhail al-Ghazi, a Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy non-resident fellow living in Istanbul. “The regime is just trying to show that this election is a new page and going to be a good thing for the Syrians.” 

“As the regime will win, Iraq, Lebanon, Oman, and probably also the UAE will call the regime or send a message of congratulations for winning,” he added. 

Ghazi sees parallels between the Syrian polls and the 2018 Egyptian elections, in which President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi allowed a moderate person to run against him and used similar social media tactics ahead of the ballot.

The U.N. has clearly stated that the presidential elections are not part of the political process established under resolution 2254. It has also emphasized the importance of a negotiated political solution in Syria before free and fair elections are held. The U.S. and EU have further opposed the elections and labeled them illegitimate. In contrast, countries such as Russia, Lebanon and, more recently, Denmark, have all asserted that Assad’s Syria is a safe and secure place for refugees to return to.

In order for a political transition to take place, Moussa argues that the international community needs to formulate a workable plan. “It requires Russia and the U.S. to come together and have a common vision, some sort of understanding or agreement,” she said.

Moussa sees the elections as pointless and believes that they will do nothing to alter perceptions of Assad on the international stage. To illustrate, she pointed to the 2014 process, which Assad won, claiming 92% of the vote, and the way that Russia and Iran — the regime’s civil war backers — continued to engage in the U.N.-led negotiations to secure a peaceful transition of power within the country. 

“The work of the political process continued regardless of the elections and the result, so to me it’s not going to make a difference,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is going to say we had elections that are legitimate, so we don’t need a political process now.”

The post Syria’s presidential election is a giant disinformation smokescreen appeared first on Coda Story.

Nouri has worked the surrounding waters since he was 17. He believes that his health problems are caused by pollution from a nearby industrial port. 

“The port has destroyed me, my health and my livelihood,” he said.

Sat on the floor in his living room, Nouri pointed in the direction of a large plant, operated by the state-run chemical company Groupe Chimique Tunisien (GCT). Dedicated to the processing of raw phosphate, its imposing chimneys belch fumes into the air and its drains discharge millions of tons of toxic black sludge into the sea every year. 

Gabès Governorate covers 4,450 square miles and is home to almost 400,000 residents. It is also the only coastal oasis in the Mediterranean. Once a pristine agricultural and maritime community, the region was famed for its abundant marine life and verdant rows of pomegranate trees, henna plants and date palms. 

Locals tell stories of visitors marveling at the land’s natural beauty, but any tourism potential was lost in the 1970s, when the government turned it into the main centre of Tunisia’s phosphate industry. Phosphate rock, mined 100 miles away, in the hills of the Gafsa region, are a vital component in the production of a variety of exportable goods, including fertilizers and food preservatives.

Industrial pollution is devastating coastal communities around the world, from France to India. In Morocco, another phosphate-rich North African nation, chemical plant workers have reported high rates of respiratory disease and cancer, according to the charity SwissAid, and local arable farmers have experienced depleted harvests. 

A similar story is playing out in Tunisia, but the subject of pollution and its effects on the environment and public health has long been ignored in Gabès. Under the Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, people feared the consequences of talking about it and efforts to carry out studies were routinely thwarted by the state. After Ben Ali’s fall in the revolution of 2011, residents hoped for something better. However, while people are now free to protest, little attention is being paid to their concerns and even less action taken. 

Ignoring the problem

In the city of Gabès, the governorate’s capital, an old electronic display board on the side of the road is supposed to show the levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ammonia in the air. According to passersby, it has been broken for years. 

The sign was installed by GCT, the largest manufacturer operating in the port. In addition to three GCT factories, the area contains some 20 plants operated by private companies, including two other highly polluting facilities that produce aluminum fluoride for use in metal foundries, and phosphate salt, which is used in the making of detergents and ceramics. 

Trains deliver up to 3.5 million tons of raw phosphate to the GCT factories each year. It is processed and exported by container ships to dozens of countries abroad. Nearly 5,000 people work in the region’s chemical industry, more than 2,800 for GCT.

While the company brings much-needed jobs to the area, the effects of pollution are clear to see. The stretch of beach between the town of Chott Salem and the industrial zone, less than a mile away, is composed of a thick black layer of phosphogypsum — a waste product created during the production of phosphoric acid. A 2018 European Union report found that GCT dumps around five million tons of it into the Mediterranean each year.

Phosphogypsum is mildly radioactive and contains both uranium and radium. According to a 2012 government study, fish catches near the coast contracted by more than 30% between 1997 and 2006, owing to the effects of chemical waste. The document noted that the marine ecosystem has been “severely damaged and that the situation is now totally irreversible.”

Nouri says local fishermen have suffered a dramatic decline in income. “Since the 1990s there has been nothing here. You used to be able to bring home 150 pounds of squid in one day,” he said, adding that now, a typical haul has fallen to seven pounds. Now, he rents his small boat to a fisherman in another town and pays for his cancer treatment with donations from his neighbors. He misses his old life desperately. “My heart is the sea. I’m heartbroken,” he added. 

According to the conservation group BirdLife TunisiaAir, air pollution has contributed to a fall in bird populations. Rumors persist among locals of falling fertility rates and frequent miscarriages. 

In 2017, the Tunisian government pledged to dismantle the existing GCT factories and move them to a new location, far away from residential areas. It also promised to stop dumping phosphogypsum into the sea. No further plans have been announced.

This week, there were renewed calls from local environmentalists for increased regulation and the removal of the factories, after the death of five workers in an accidental fire at an asphalt factory in the industrial zone. 

“We fear that one day Gabès will be nothing but ashes,” said Haifa Bedoui, an activist with the local campaign group Stop Pollution, to hundreds of people gathered in front of governor of Gabès Mongi Thameur’s office on Wednesday. On a visit following the fire, President Kais Saied, acknowledged the environmental crisis in the region and promised a cancer treatment centre for residents. The Tunisian government has launched an inquiry to determine the cause of the blaze. 

Speaking by telephone, Moez Haddad, GCT’s secretary-general, insisted that there are no proven detrimental consequences of the marine disposal of phosphogypsum. “A few studies show there are small problems — not a big problem,” he said. He did, however, concede that GCT plans to fall in line with international norms and end the practice “as a precaution.”

When questioned further about high rates of cancer and respiratory problems reported by residents in the Gabès region, he added that “there are no official studies that show a causal link between health problems and the effects of Groupe Chimique Tunisien on the environment.” 

“Flagrant lack of information”

The residents of Chott Salem and Ghannouch can see and smell the pollution from the chemical factories in their homes. Traditional houses in the region are built around an open courtyard. This communal space is meant for people to congregate and children to play in. Now, parents tell their sons and daughters to stay in their bedrooms.

In 2017, nine students from a primary school in Bouchema, a town just over a mile away from the plants, were taken to the hospital with symptoms of asphyxiation after gases produced during the processing of sulphuric acid and ammonium nitrate were released into the air. The local governor brushed off residents’ concerns as mere “panic.” 

Local healthcare workers regularly treat patients who appear to be suffering from long-term health issues caused by pollution. Dr. Hamida Kwass, who works on the respiratory ward at Mohammed Ben Sassi regional hospital in Gabès, says that asthma is particularly common among children in the town of Ghannouch. 

“The factory is almost in their houses,” she said. 

Kwass plans to carry out a study on air pollution and its effects on inhabitants. “There are polluting particles from the chemical industry that are known to be associated with an increase in respiratory diseases, whether they cause a disease or are an exacerbating factor,” she added.

Awatef Mansour, 30, lives in Ghannouch and makes around six trips to the regional hospital each month. Her three children, aged three, six and seven all suffer from asthma. 

“When the wind changes direction to come from the port, my children find it hard to breathe,” she said. 

She noted that her children’s health problems cleared up last year, when her family briefly lived in the town of Zarzis, 80 miles down the coast from the factories. “The doctor says it is allergies from the port,” she added.

Samir Aloulou, head of Mohamed Ben Sassi hospital’s cancer ward, says that the incidence of nasopharyngeal cancer is alarmingly high in Chott Salem and Ghannouch. This particular form of the disease, which Nouri is fighting, affects the part of the throat connecting the back of the nose to the mouth. 

Aloulou believes that it is difficult to establish a “100% true link” between its prevalence and the chemical factories. “There is certainly a link between pollution and cancer, but cancer is a multifactorial disease — there is pollution, tobacco, food, obesity,” he said.

“There is a flagrant lack of information and credible data available from the Tunisian authorities,” said Mounir Majdoub, an economist who worked on a report, published by the EU in 2018, on air quality in the Gabès region. It found that elevated levels of particles that can easily pass into the lungs and have been linked to cancer and heart and respiratory infections. “The conclusions are not revealing of the real health situation due to pollution, they reveal the need for a study,” he added. 

However, other illnesses appear far easier to connect to the chemical industry. Rachid Ben Othman used to work as a mechanic for Flourine Chemical Industries (ICF), a private company in the industrial zone that produces aluminum fluoride. When we met, he held out his right arm in front of him, his elbow crooked at somewhere around 140 degrees. It wouldn’t move further. He suffers from fluorosis, caused by overexposure to fluorine. 

“It started in the wrists, and then the elbows. It is the calcification of the ligaments. Sometimes my knee just stops. It is like a car with no petrol,” he said. 

Othman first began to notice a problem in 2000. His joints were stiff to the point that he could neither fully stretch nor bend them. It became harder to work and, eventually, too difficult to put on gloves. But he was not successfully diagnosed until 2011. 

He says that he is one of the few ICF workers to have successfully claimed compensation for his disability — a payment of $135 per month and 40% of his medical bills. Othman suspects some of his colleagues have fluorosis too. “They talk to me about aches in their shoulders, aches here and here, the calcification. I know the symptoms,” he said.

A taboo subject

In addition to state inaction, organizations that should be standing up for the safety and wellbeing of workers are refusing to do anything. Executives at the local branch of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), do not consider it their role to speak out on matters of public health and pollution. 

When I brought up the subject to two members of the regional union’s executive committee in Gabès and a manager from one of the GCT factories, the latter laughed quietly and said, “That’s a taboo subject.” 

One of the union executives said that he didn’t want to talk about pollution because the factories have led to development in the region and provide employment for thousands of people. 

While Tunisia has long been one of the world’s biggest phosphate exporters, the industry has contracted in recent years, owing to political instability and frequent protests by unemployed young people demanding jobs in the phosphate mines. 

In the years since the revolution, Groupe Chimique Tunisien’s annual production has averaged less than a third of what it was in 2010, according to Habib Wahachi, deputy secretary general of the Gabès bureau of the UGTT. Tunisia was forced to import phosphates from neighboring Algeria for the first time last October. 

GCT has not made any new hires in the region since 2017. National unemployment is currently at 17.4%. In Gabès, it stands at 24% overall and more than 50% among young people.

Hundreds of Gabèsian youth blocked the industrial zone in Ghannouch and the GCT administration building in Gabès town center from late November into December last year. Many denounced the pollution yet demanded jobs in the factories. 

“Give me a job so I can survive — we are the ones directly affected by this pollution,” said Youssef Hajej, an unemployed university graduate, from Ghannouch. 

He insisted that the GCT owes local people work as compensation for the destruction the company has wrought on the area and its traditional industries. “They are destroying everything, it is normal that people here are asking to profit at least a little bit from that.”

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When I visited, the brightly lit halls and waiting rooms were empty, but the wards were nearing their 150-bed capacity. According to Johns Hopkins statistics, Colombia has, to date, confirmed over 2.2 million Covid-19 cases and about 58,000 related deaths. That’s more than one fatality for every 1,000 people, a per capita rate only slightly lower than hotspots such as the U.S., Spain and Mexico. 

Medellin, a city of over two million, remains one of the worst-hit areas in Colombia. To date, its three biggest municipalities have recorded over 234,000 cases and over 4,100 dead since the virus first arrived in March 2020.

Like many places, Colombia has been deluged with coronavirus-related misinformation, from both foreign and domestic sources. But experts say that a longstanding tradition of home remedies and folk medicine, plus the widespread off-label use of over-the-counter medications makes it more vulnerable to disinformation than other countries. What is more, many believe that these factors have complicated the official response to the crisis and that they could possibly damage the planned national vaccine rollout. 

Agudelo-Zapata sees the evidence every day. She explained many of the people admitted to the hospital’s coronavirus facility have taken a variety of unproven treatments, believing that they can cure or protect them against Covid-19.

“Most of our patients arrive self-medicated, many having taken hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and antibiotics,” she said, referring to antimalarial and antiparasitic drugs that have been widely discredited as possible treatments for Covid-19. “Some think we are going to harm them, and there are others who still believe that we are inventing the disease.” 

Viruses can’t be treated with antibiotics and the prevailing view among medical professionals is that the off-label use of prescription and over-the-counter medicines is fraught with problems, ranging from the triggering of allergies to organ damage and even death.

Meanwhile, Ana Saavedra, an editor at the fact-checking project ColombiaCheck, told me that many traditional remedies — including steam, eucalyptus, lemon and a traditionally processed form of cane sugar known as panela — are now being widely shared as coronavirus cures on social media.

“The preference for home remedies for a wide range of diseases predates the pandemic,” she said. “But misinformation has multiplied them and given them much more relevance."

One such falsehood involves moringa, a plant renowned across Colombia for its richness in vitamins and antioxidants, but not proven to have any effect against the coronavirus. In August 2020, it became the subject of a Facebook post that spread rapidly across Latin America and even ended up on television news in Colombia and Argentina. 

In April 2020, inmates at a prison in the central Colombian town of Villavicencio, were given a tea made from moringa, supplied by local growers, to treat coronavirus symptoms. While doctors said that some patients would have recovered anyway, the post attributed the improvement in their condition directly to the herbal remedy. 

“More than 1,000 infected inmates and guards say that a moringa drink healed them of Covid-19 and the cure was so effective that they now use it in 10 other prisons across the country," it read.

In 2019, EU regulators raised objections to the sale of moringa in Europe, after researchers in Ethiopia, where moringa is also common, indicated a possible link between frequent consumption of moringa and thyroid problems. Despite this apparent risk and its lack of proven efficacy against Covid-19, demand for moringa has boomed in Colombia. By August, it was reportedly fetching $28 per kilogram, 20 times higher than its pre-pandemic cost.  

Meeting misinformation head on

A winding two-hour bus ride away from Medellin, lies the mountain community of Ebéjico, home to around 14,000 people. As of mid-February, it has recorded fewer than 90 coronavirus cases.

The municipality’s San Rafael Hospital also stands in stark contrast to Medellin General. Upon entering, I saw socially distanced patients waiting in sunny, open courtyards, shaded by the facility’s colonial architecture. Its Covid-19 ward was also empty. 

But that doesn’t mean that the area is immune to misinformation. In her small office, head nurse Victoria Echavarria-Barco shared her own experience. One rumor had scared her mother so much that even when she developed Covid-19 symptoms, she refused to be tested. 

The source was a viral Facebook post from May, which falsely accused Colombian doctors of running a racket in which they received the equivalent of $2,800 for each Covid-19 death.

“"Do not be fooled! ICUs and hospitals are empty. The Covid Cartel passes off healthy people as sick ones and forces cremations to increase the numbers of this false virus,” it read.  

“I told her, ‘Mum, we’re not like that!’” said Echavarria-Barco.

Despite those assurances, her mother rejected any suggestion that she be tested. Fortunately, she recovered without ever visiting a doctor. The conspiracy, however, continues to circulate on Colombian social media to this day. 

One explanation for such ideas is the Colombian public’s catastrophic lack of faith in the state and other social institutions. That suspicion runs so deep that a pre-pandemic survey by USAID found that 56.9% of Colombians totally distrust the national government. The only social institution trusted by the majority of people was family — and in a pandemic that comes with its own problems. 

Almost every doctor and health expert I spoke to said that members of their own families had sent them misinformation via social media. Many added that the volume of messages they receive is exhausting.   

However, María Patricia Agudelo, San Rafael’s chief administrator, explained that although people in rural areas receive the same misinformation as those in the city, via the exact same channels, the effect in Ebejico had been far less grave than in Medellin.  

She attributes this to a team of six public health workers who spent the first months of the pandemic going door-to-door, visiting residents in all 30 of the municipality’s neighborhoods. They not only debunked coronavirus myths face to face, but offered practical instructions such as how to correctly wear a protective mask and wash hands. The effects of this early outreach, she believes, are lasting.

“We were out until 11 at night for weeks and we were able to visit every corner of the municipality, sitting down with people to hear about their fears and get them the correct information,” Agudelo said. “The people in their houses could see the institutional logo of the hospital on our jackets and the credibility that comes with it.”

Now, vaccines have become the latest front in Colombia’s coronavirus misinformation war. Social media teems with fake science and false comparisons of actual immunizations and over-the-counter medicines. 

Vaccinations in Medellin began on February 18. Staff at Medellin General, including Agudelo-Zapata, were among the first to receive the Pfizer vaccine as part of Colombia’s plan to inoculate a million people before the end of March, focusing on health workers and those over the age of 80. 

In a statement issued a few days before the rollout, Health Minister Fernando Ruiz-Gomez said that the biggest challenges for vaccination in Colombia would be securing enough doses for all, coordinating with local government and establishing public trust so that “people go to the vaccination point on their assigned day, without any kind of fear.” 

Jamie Ordoñez, a Colombian epidemiologist and public health consultant, believes that a combination of timing and misinformation will prove pivotal in how quickly the virus is contained in Colombia.  

“The more time the pandemic takes to resolve, there’s going to be more fertile ground for the infodemic,” he said, “As delays cause hopelessness to grow, people will be more willing to believe in anything to avoid getting sick.” 

Back near the nurses station at Medellin General, Agudelo-Zapata washed her face shield in scalding water after a visit to an elderly coronavirus patient. 

The size of Medellin’s population makes the hands-on approach deployed in Ebejico virtually impossible. However, she believes that disinformation can be effectively countered if medical professionals and others with an ability to explain scientific concepts to a mass audience take their fight to social media. She does this with her own family and, when she’s on the clock, often tackles patients’ misconceptions on video calls with the support of psychologists.

“My most tried and true strategy is dialogue. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with families and patients,” she said. "Used well, Facebook and WhatsApp can be powerful weapons, but we as doctors have to get involved in the media that people actually use — If we don’t, then who will?” 

The post Self-medication and disinformation fuel Colombia’s Covid-19 crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Every few minutes, they paused to deliver speeches accusing the scientists inside of deliberately manipulating data in support of the German government’s approach to the global coronavirus pandemic.

The demonstrators present were part of the Berlin chapter of the Querdenken movement. Roughly translating to “lateral thinking,” Querdenken emerged in April, just weeks into Germany’s first lockdown, and has grown rapidly. Its adherents are united in the belief that federal Covid-19 restrictions are wildly disproportionate and part of a broader plan to strip citizens of their basic rights and freedoms.

The Robert Koch Institute is a respected body responsible for the monitoring and control of contagious diseases in Germany. Despite receiving state funding, it maintains fully independent status and its research has formed the foundation of the government’s approach to testing and quarantines during the coronavirus crisis. Some people, however, disagree vehemently with its recommendations.

“This is one of the centers of the policy,” explained Eckhard Schäfer, a regular speaker at the Monday demonstrations. “It’s very dangerous and evil, pushing all these corona measures.”

Schäfer, a 57-year-old psychologist who has lived in Berlin for nearly 30 years, has been skeptical about the risks posed by Covid-19 since the very outset of the pandemic. After a couple of months, he came to the conclusion that the threat was entirely manufactured and that scientists were producing and disseminating a “kind of manipulated information,” designed to prop up an ailing capitalist system. These views quickly led him to Querdenken, which casts the denial of scientific fact and expert opinion as an act of political opposition.

“I felt like this before, but now my ambitions are higher,” Schäfer said. “If I want to overcome this capitalism and its injustices, I really have to do something.”

While the movement’s followers believe themselves to be on a righteous mission, exposing hidden truths to an unaware public, others warn that Querdenken may be setting its followers on a path toward extremism and dragging German politics at large further to the right.

Though it appears to slot within a broader resistance to coronavirus regulations — including January’s anti-lockdown riots in the Netherlands and the persistent protests in the United Kingdom — Querdenken is uniquely positioned for broader political and social impact. Its ties to right-wing parties could enhance their fortunes in Germany’s forthcoming federal elections in September. Some also believe that the embrace of conspiracy theories rooted in antisemitic ideas — including the belief that a secret cabal is prescribing the Covid-19 response — has emboldened neo-Nazi networks that cling on at the country’s political fringes, waiting for a mainstream foothold.

Birth of a movement

The Querdenken movement was founded in April 2020 by a tech entrepreneur named Michael Ballweg, from the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg. Within weeks, thousands of people were turning up at weekly rallies in Stuttgart, the state capital. As followers took to channels such as Facebook and Telegram, chapters began to spring up across the country, numbered according to each area’s telephone code.

It achieved notoriety over the summer, when — alongside an assortment of far-right groups — its followers participated in protests that shut down German cities from Berlin to Leipzig. During an August demonstration in Berlin, protesters stormed the steps of the German Bundestag, displaying the red, white and black flag of Imperial Germany; a symbol that has been adopted by Nazi sympathizers. 

In the outcry that followed, Ballweg insisted that the extremists had nothing to do with his movement. Critics reject that claim, even as they struggle to define exactly what Querdenken stands for.

Querdenken’s organizers claim to be guarding fundamental rights and standing up to government overreach. Involvement in the group appears to cut across class, educational and political lines, with followers banding together in shared frustration at Covid-19 restrictions — particularly the mandate to wear a mask in most public spaces — and a distrust of the experts behind them.

Though largely confined to German-speaking countries, it draws on broader global conspiracy theories, particularly QAnon’s focus on supposed deep-state plots to maintain and increase the power of a ruling elite. It has also welcomed the pseudoscientific positions of existing anti-vaccination and New Age communities.

“This movement gathered around questions about the legitimacy of science, about conspiracy theories,” said Oliver Nachtwey, a sociologist at the University of Basel. “Conspiracy theories are always about the rising complexities of society. Every conspiracy gives you some sort of control back.”

Ideological spread

In its short existence, Querdenken has built a number of highly effective online communication channels on platforms such as Telegram and Facebook. They provide a home for torrents of alternative research and baseless conspiracy theories that have, for a number of people, successfully eroded confidence in scientific consensus on the coronavirus.

They also elevate figures such as the German ear, nose and throat doctor Bodo Schiffmann, who has attracted a massive following by posting YouTube videos that claim Covid-19 is no more dangerous than the flu and may not even exist. He is fiercely against mask wearing, which he believes offers no protection against the virus and has contributed to the deaths of at least three children. Even though such claims have been proven false, creating successful counter narratives is an unenviable task.

“The alternative science that they indulge in is really difficult to argue against,” said Sebastian Koos, a sociologist based at the University of Konstanz. He adds that where scientists, such as those at the Robert Koch Institute, emphasize the uncertainty that surrounds the virus, Schiffmann and others offer purported “solutions that seem so understandable and so convenient to believe in. That’s why their conspiracy beliefs are attractive to so many people.”

The alternative explanations make sense to Barbara Meinel. Aged 50, she lives in Tübingen, a small town southwest of Stuttgart, where she works as a mediator in a law firm. She explained to me that Germany’s lockdown “feels like war to me and I can’t see the reason for it.” She also spoke of the conflicting information she has received about the pandemic. While the newspapers she reads are clear about the danger posed by the virus, her brother, who is an undertaker in Stuttgart, has told her that he has seen no unusual increase in deaths. His anecdotal assertions stand in opposition to government reports of a spike in the number of deaths in 2020, compared to the previous four years.

“It’s done on purpose to make people afraid, so that they do everything they are told to do,” Meinel said. 

To make sense of the situation, she has found herself increasingly turning to Schiffmann and other critics of the scientific community. The fact that their theories have been widely discredited and their content stripped from YouTube and flagged as false on Facebook appears to have had little effect on her decisions.

Meinel does not consider herself a full-blown Querdenken follower. She did, however, attend an October rally organized by the movement in Konstanz, just on the German side of the border with Switzerland. During the gathering, maskless participants formed a human chain along the shores of Lake Constance in protest against the lockdowns. To her, Querdenken’s value is in amplifying alternative readings of the data collected by bodies like the Robert Koch Institute and challenging orthodox views. 

The movement’s online channels provide an accessible forum for sharing exactly the content Meinel finds so convincing. Attempts to refute such positions there are routinely bombarded with insults or volumes of additional information too great to effectively challenge.

Koos believes that exposure to this relentless flow of misinformation can gradually harden the positions of moderately skeptical individuals.

“There is a large group of participants who are not extremists, but risk becoming more and more extremist,” he told me, describing many of the people in question as “out of reach of any type of intervention that might be necessary to get society back on track.” 

Querdenken after Covid

Germany moved quickly to stall its first wave of Covid-19 infections last spring, shutting down shops and schools — and briefly, its borders — while instituting a rigorous testing system. The country consistently had among the lowest rates of new infections per capita in all of Western Europe throughout the spring and summer. However, that early success is being undone by a second wave that spiked at the end of last year, after restrictions were loosened. In December, the nation recorded more than half of its total coronavirus deaths for all of 2020 and entered the New Year in a new lockdown.

Against this backdrop, Querdenken continues to challenge official statistics and foment resentment against regulations designed to protect everyone. The movement is also spreading doubt about the vaccines that began to roll out in Germany in January, sharing numerous stories that claim people have fallen severely ill or died after being immunized.

While the movement has defined itself with such rhetoric, some observers are also beginning to consider its political and social ramifications beyond the pandemic.

The far-right party Alternative for Germany counts hardline nationalists among its leaders and typically distances itself from mainstream positions. But, early in the coronavirus crisis, its parliamentarians in Baden-Württemberg appeared to be falling in line with the government’s response, even pressing to be included in Covid-19 relief discussions.

Their positions began to change alongside Querdenken’s rise. Laura Hammel, a political science researcher at the University of Tübingen registered a rapid shift in the party’s rhetoric around the pandemic in April 2020, when state parliamentarian Christina Baum warned of an emerging “hygiene dictatorship.” That message has since been echoed by its politicians nationwide.

Hammel believes this is comfortable ground for a party that, as it has entered the political mainstream, has lost some of its anti-establishment credibility among supporters. Adopting Covid-19 skepticism “shows that they’re not part of the political establishment,” she said.

Some Querdenken members appear to be responding in kind. According to Nachtwey’s findings from interviews at rallies and surveys of the group’s Telegram channels, 27% of respondents said they would vote for Alternative for Germany, a rise from the 15% who said they did in the 2017 federal election.

Kerstin Kuballa, who works for the organization Mobile Counseling Against Right-Wing Extremism Berlin, sees troubling overlaps between Querdenken and even more extremist positions. In her opinion, what unites them is a shared belief "in an elite secretly pulling the strings in the background to control politics and global affairs.” She went on to point out that such conspiratorial thinking echoes the antisemitic tropes at the heart of most far-right ideologies.

Dietmar Lucas, a 58-year-old member of Querdenken’s Berlin chapter, is frustrated by such associations being made in coverage of the movement. He describes them as “absolutely ridiculous” and propagated solely to discredit the group’s arguments.

Lucas helps organize the Robert Koch Institute pickets and a weekly demonstration in Alexanderplatz, under Berlin’s landmark television tower. Recent gatherings have felt like an outdoor party, with DJs playing to crowds that dance in a roped-off space lit by candles and fairy lights. But the reality of the pandemic is inescapable. Police officers cluster around the makeshift dancefloor. Under their gaze, organizers begrudgingly encourage the dancers to adhere to government regulations and keep their masks on.

The area is also ringed with signs warning off Nazis and other extremists. That such groups still appear at Querdenken events is a testament to the movement’s resonance, Lucas said, not proof of its followers’ susceptibility to far-right influence.

Such associations have certainly damaged the Querdenken movement, particularly after reports emerged that it had been placed under surveillance by authorities in Baden-Württemberg over fears that it had been infiltrated by extremists. Another blow came in December, as questions arose about Ballweg’s potential misuse of Querdenken funds.

Rising Covid-19 infections have also sapped some of its energy. Amid tightening government restrictions, Ballweg called off a major New Year’s Eve rally in Berlin and has announced a moratorium on Querdenken marches until spring.

Despite these developments, many believe that the movement’s influence will be lasting. After all, the deep distrust in which its followers hold the government and the scientific community is not likely to fade and its model for spreading conspiracies and misinformation will remain highly effective for some time.

“I don’t think this movement can live on after Covid, but these people will live on,” Nachtwey said. “They are searching for other opportunities to resist.”

The post Anti-lockdown group Querdenken pulls Germans to the far right appeared first on Coda Story.

Four officers from the National Investigation Agency, India’s counter-terrorism task force, burst into the room — one of them holding a gun. Six more stood outside, and another police vehicle waited about 200 meters away. The officers spoke quietly to Swamy, seized his mobile phone and asked him to pack a bag. 

A colleague asked for an arrest warrant, but none was presented. 

The next morning, Swamy was driven to Ranchi airport and put on a two and half hour commercial flight to Mumbai, where he was remanded into custody by a special NIA court until two weeks later, on October 23. The agency filed a 17,000-page charge sheet on the same day, accusing him of links to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) which the Indian government views as a terrorist organization.

Swamy, who was detained under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), is the oldest person to be accused of terrorism in India. To him, the arrest came as no surprise. Police had raided his residence in 2018 and 2019 and confiscated his laptop, tablet, mobile phone, a hard drive, some thumb drives, CDs and documents. 

As a prominent human rights campaigner, who has spent decades fighting for the rights of marginalized and indigenous people, or Adivasis, Swamy was the latest arrest in a sprawling case from 2018 that has seen 16 human rights activists accused of being in league with the CPI (Maoist).

Maoist fighters and Indian forces have engaged in conflict in central and eastern India for five decades. More than 12,000 people have been killed in the violence in the past 20 years. The rebels say they are fighting for the rights of indigenous people and landless farmers in the mineral-rich region, but the state regards them as outlaws and violent extremists.

Among the individuals arrested in the 2018 case under the UAPA, a broadly worded antiterrorism law that gives the authorities powers of investigation and detention, are a prominent scholar of India’s caste system, a professor of linguistics and an 81-year-old poet. All have one thing in common: they have spent their lives campaigning for the rights of so-called low-caste Hindus, minority Muslims and other vulnerable Indians. All have been repeatedly denied bail and are accused of conspiring with banned Maoist militants to incite unrest. All deny the charges.

A history of violence

The detentions are linked to clashes that broke out on January 1, 2018, in the village of Bhima Koregaon in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Hundreds of thousands of Dalits — lower-caste Hindus, once known as untouchables — gathered to mark the 200th anniversary of the victory of Dalit soldiers in the British Army over an army of the upper-caste Peshwa dynasty. The commemoration was disrupted by a mob waving saffron-colored flags, the symbol of the Hindu nationalists who dominate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The nationalists objected to the Dalits, who commemorate the battle as an important chapter in their ongoing struggle against India’s caste system, celebrating a victory by British colonial forces. At least one person died in the resulting violence and several were injured. 

Police investigations quickly latched onto a complaint that the violence was instigated by Maoists during a public rally attended by 35,000 people in Maharashtra the previous day. Police claimed to have discovered Maoist plots to assassinate Modi and overthrow his government. Police have so far arrested 16 activists, who are accused of being Maoist conspirators and inciting hate which contributed to the violence at the Bhima Koregaon commemoration.

The government’s case against Swamy rests on digital evidence discovered on his electronic devices and the devices of three more of the accused. According to the NIA, investigators discovered letters encouraging an uprising against a “fascist government” purportedly written by Swamy to Maoist leaders.

Swamy is also accused of writing letters to Maoists advocating that they “capture” senior leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in protest against a controversial anti-conversion law introduced in Jharkhand in 2017, with stiff jail sentences and fines for those found guilty of forcing anyone to change their religion. Human rights groups say the law targets Christian, Muslim, and other minority groups, including  Adivasis, in an effort to enshrine Hindu culture and practices. 

Other letters allegedly show that Swamy received $110,000 from an associate to help the Maoists. The priest denies having ever sent any such messages. 

Mihir Desai, Swamy’s lawyer, claims the discovery of the letters points to the possible use of spyware. Eight people connected with the case were previous targets of spyware attacks. One such incident used malware tools from the controversial Israeli surveillance tech firm the NSO Group. 

Surveillance from hacking tools provided by companies like the NSO Group has become a hallmark in crackdowns on minority groups and activists around the world. The NSO has previously been linked with helping numerous governments to zero in on human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, in countries including Mexico, France, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Speaking of Swamy during a telephone conversation, Desai said, “These letters have not been emailed from his computer, neither have they been found in his deleted files. Please understand these are not emails. If it’s an email, you’d find it on the sender’s email or device, as well as the receiver’s.” 

In a video recorded by his colleagues days before his arrest and uploaded to YouTube by Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha, a coalition of progressive human rights organizations, Swamy said officers from the NIA had questioned him over five days in July and August. He said they had produced "some extracts" of letters allegedly taken from his computer that linked him to the CPI (Maoist). Swamy described the letters as "fabrications" that were put onto his computer.  

“We are all aware how prominent intellectuals, lawyers, writers, poets, activists, student leaders — they are all put in jail just because they have expressed their dissent or raised questions about the ruling powers of India,” he added. 

Desai insists that the letters were planted on Swamy’s devices and added that the priest had ample reason not to have written them. 

“Why would he create these files just to keep them on his computer, when he knows he’s been under scrutiny for the last two years?” he asked. “His house was raided twice and he was questioned about his links with Maoists. Why would he still not delete these letters? He wouldn’t do this unless he’s a complete fool.” 

Spear-phishing attacks

Nihalsing Rathod is a junior lawyer who has been working with Surendra Gadling, a human rights lawyer who was also arrested in this case. Rathod said he once received suspicious emails from the poet Varavara Rao and the activist lawyer Arun Ferreira, both of whom were arrested in August 2018 after they were accused of being Maoist conspirators in the Bhima Koregaon violence. The communications arrived before their arrests. 

“These emails looked suspicious and I had the good sense of not opening them. I called the senders instead,” he said. “They told me they had never sent me any email and got worried about a possible hacking.” 

Suspicions of hacking are common in the arrests. In June 2020, the Canada-based Citizen Lab and Amnesty International released a report detailing how nine people, including Rathod, were targeted with malicious emails and messages. The investigation identified 12 spear-phishing emails, messages which looked authentic because they appeared to come from a trusted source, sent between January and October 2019. All came from email accounts masquerading as belonging to journalists, officials from local courts or an activist that may have been known to the targets. 

These spear-phishing emails attempted to use a PDF document to deliver NetWire, a commercially available spyware program capable of compromising Windows computers in order to monitor their actions and communications. Citizen Lab was unable to determine who was behind the attacks. 

Shalini Gera, an Adivasi rights activist and lawyer for one of those accused, also received similar emails. “I’ve been racking my brains over this: ‘Why me?’,” she said. “Look at all the others who have been targeted, the only thing that ties us together is Bhima Koregaon.” 

Eight of the nine people targeted by the spyware are helping defend people arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case. Three of them — Rathod, Gera, and another Adivasi rights activist — were also targeted by another campaign that, according to Citizen Lab, used a program called Pegasus, a surveillance tool used by the NSO Group, to attack their WhatsApp accounts. 

Once installed, Pegasus can copy vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones — including contacts, voice calls, texts, emails, location and any data transmitted over apps including Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype. Pegasus can even turn on a phone’s camera, microphone and GPS to track a target’s location and movements.

Citizen Lab was unable to determine the extent of the breaches in both attacks and WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against the NSO Group in 2019. While the company says it does not operate any technology it provides to governments, the Modi administration has dodged questions on whether it has ever used Pegasus. 

Rathod claims that the evidence against Gadling was fabricated by the government. His suspicions were given some weight in December 2019, when the Indian magazine The Caravan reported that police may have edited files on Gadling’s devices. The publication obtained clone copies of his computers from the police. They also found that the computer of another of the accused contained malware that could be used to plant files remotely. 

For Desai, finding evidence of electronic tampering is proving difficult. He is still trying to press the courts to give him access to clone copies of the devices seized from Swamy. 

“Until the police provide clone copies of the hard disks, it is impossible to find out when and how the planting of evidence happened,” he said. 

“Dubious and manufactured evidence” 

Swamy has campaigned against the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for many years. The legislation has been criticized for erasing presumption of innocence, allowing the state to unilaterally declare anyone arrested a terrorist and incarcerate them without trial or bail. 

In 2019, India had 5,134 active cases under the law and the number of people being detained is rising every year. Critics claim the legislation has often been used to target religious minorities and marginalized communities, including Adivasis. A 2015 research paper by Swamy found that over 3,000 Adivasis have been falsely accused of being Maoists and are imprisoned in Jharkhand under the UAPA, or similar laws. Swamy is currently suing the state of Jharkhand over delays to those trials. 

In the video he posted before his arrest, Swamy linked his pro-Adivasi work to his arrest. “This became a bone of contention with the state and they want to put me out of the way. And one easy way was to implicate me in some serious cases,” he said.  

The historian and writer Ramachandra Guha believes that the Bhima Koregaon case can be characterized by the abuse of power by the state. “The Bhima Koregaon case rests on dubious and manufactured evidence and is an extreme example of the ruling party abusing the power of the state to persecute its critics,” he said, via email.

“It adversely affects the rights of Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims, as well as of independent writers, journalists and civil society activists of all backgrounds.”

Meanwhile, lawyers involved in the case fear they are still being surveilled.

“I assume that my mobile phone is tapped,” said Desai. “With the present government, anybody in my line of work— human rights that is — would assume it.” 

Health and Parkinson’s 

When Adivasi activist Dayamani Barla first met Swamy in Ranchi 20 years ago, she noticed his involuntary tremors. 

“He was holding a glass of water but his hands shook so much that it wouldn’t reach his mouth,” she said.

Those movements are caused by Parkinson’s disease. 

His detention has united thousands of prominent Indians to push for his release. Immediately after Swamy’s arrest, a group of 2,000 scholars and activists signed a statement calling for his release. Recently, several high-profile individuals, including UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, member of parliament Shashi Tharoor and Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren have made similar appeals. 

The courts have rejected bail applications from all of the accused, including Swamy, multiple times. Right-wing Hindu nationalists have described Swamy and his 15 co-accused and their educated supporters as “invisible enemies” of India. 

Desai spoke to Swamy by telephone in mid-November. “Stan said he was doing ok but he didn’t sound very well. Stan is a bold man; he was trying to sound bold.” 

In a handwritten letter to his friends in January to mark 100 days in prison, Swamy expressed gratitude for the public goodwill he has received. “At times, news of such solidarity has given me immense strength and courage, especially when the only thing certain in prison is uncertainty,” he said.

The post Cutting-edge technology detected in government campaign against Indian activists appeared first on Coda Story.

The demonstrations, which have made headlines around the world, began peacefully, with students demanding the resignation of the institution’s new rector Melih Bulu — a former politician with the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), handpicked for the role by the conservative government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Then, in early February, police scattered the crowds using riot shields and pepper spray.

What started as a series of on-campus actions against an undemocratic appointment has now morphed into a protest movement in solidarity with Turkey's increasingly embattled LGBTQ+ community, which has spread to cities including Ankara and Izmir. 

Over the past five weeks, the protests have taken many forms, from mass meditation and yoga sessions in front of the rector’s office to free open-air lectures by professors. They even included the collective singing of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” after students discovered Bulu’s love of the band.

But, at the start of February, an art exhibition held by students shifted the dynamic of the demonstrations. One of the works on show was a digital collage depicting the Kaaba, the Muslim holy site in Mecca. Superimposed upon it was a basilisk or serpent king — a representation of evil in Anatolian folklore. Rainbow flags associated with the LGBTQ+ movement were also pinned in its corners. 

The image caused uproar on social media. After the final day of the exhibition, on January 29, five students were detained by police. Two of them were placed under house arrest and two more taken into custody.

In a Twitter posting now restricted by the platform according to it rules governing hateful conduct, Turkey’s Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu called the detained students “perverts.” His statement prompted calls for the demonstrations to widen their focus in defense of LGBTQ+ rights in the country.

“You can’t just call students perverts. These are students who are fighting for other students’ lives and education, to express themselves freely,” said Willie Ray, who is enrolled at Boğaziçi University’s western languages and literature department.

Speaking by telephone, Willie Ray, who identifies as queer and uses gender-neutral pronouns, said that they now live in fear of leaving home, believing that such rhetoric renders members of the LGBTQ+ community particularly vulnerable to reprisals and discrimination.

A large number of students and university professors have, however, returned to the streets, campus and courthouses. Such shows of defiance have led to an increasingly hardline approach from the state. In the first week of February, snipers were positioned on buildings outside Boğaziçi University’s campus in the Beşiktaş and Sarıyer neighborhoods. The city governor’s office issued a ban on public assemblies in those neighborhoods, but failed to deter the protestors, prompting police to open fire on them with rubber bullets.  

On February 2, the students and their supporters moved the protests to Kadıköy, on the Asian side of the Bosporus Strait. They were greeted with helicopters flying overhead and further police aggression on the ground. The governor’s office then issued a further ban on gatherings there. 

By the end of the week, more than 600 people had been detained across the country since the demonstrations began, the vast majority of which in Istanbul. Most have now been freed, though 11 remain  imprisoned and 25 more under house arrest.

Yaren Bozar, a third-year sociology student who has participated in the demonstrations, believes that Erdogan’s government is worried that the gatherings will grow and spread at a time when its popularity appears to be waning. 

That fear is not unfounded, given the enduring memory of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, which also underwent their own transformation. Beginning in opposition to a development plan for Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a violent police raid ignited nationwide demonstrations calling for freedom of expression and assembly, and highlighting the government’s erosion of Turkey’s secular values.   

“They see that the students are not giving up, and we are resisting the police brutality on our campus — people who are just 20 years old — I think it’s a scary atmosphere for the government now,” Bozar said. 

Alongside fellow faculty members, political science professor Dr. Zeynep Gambetti was part of the campus demonstrations. She believes the LGBTQ+ community is being deliberately leveraged by Erdogan’s administration, in order to stoke anger and resentment against progressive groups. 

“In Turkish society, gay rights or freedom of sexual orientation is still pretty much a taboo,” she explained. “That is one of the fault lines the government can abuse.”

While Turkey has long been a secular and diverse country, the AKP has, over its 18 years in power, asserted an increasingly conservative Islamist vision of the nation.

On February 3, Erdoğan stated that there is “no such thing” as the LGBTQ+ community. He added that: “This country is national and spiritual and walking to the future with these values,” then compared the protesters to terrorists. 

Willie Ray believes that the students had no intention of offending the cultural and religious sensibilities of others.

“Right now we are the target and we always have been the target, because we are minorities. We aren’t privileged and our voices aren’t heard,” they said. “It’s tragic to see the officials don’t see that.”

In common with nations from Eastern Europe to Africa, many religious conservatives in Turkey view the LGBTQ+ movement as a liberal western campaign to undermine traditional values. Recently, Soylu made televised remarks claiming that, until now, no one in Turkey had ever identified as LGBTQ+. "It is something completely marketed and introduced by the West," he said.

The AKP’s current vision of Turkey was not apparent when it first came to power in 2002. Back then, it was still lauding the European Union and trying to gain credibility in the West. As it consolidated power, though, the party’s liberal wing began to fade. 

A failed coup attempt in 2016 and a subsequent state of emergency allowed Erdoğan to tighten his grip on the country. Those steps included giving himself the power to appoint politically sympathetic trustees to universities and dismiss thousands of academics from their positions. 

The first move Bulu made upon his appointment in January was to close Boğaziçi University’s LGBTQ+ club. Willie Ray described the action as “unlawful” under current policies, which stipulate that strict procedures must be followed in order to open and close university societies. They also believe that there should be room in academic institutions for the discussion of controversial artworks. 

“Art has its purpose. You can criticize it, you can like it or not like it, you can be offended by it. So why, instead of creating such a platform for debate and objectively trying to listen to each other’s voices, do people just start targeting, threatening and generalizing?” they said. 

That position has won allies across the student body. Following the crackdown on protestors and the discriminatory language used against LGBTQ+ people, a group of Muslim students put out a statement calling for the immediate release of individuals who had been detained. 

“Even though the artwork is hurtful for Muslims, it is never acceptable to resort to violence, threats, lynching and punishment in the resolution of such disputes,” it read. “In light of both the tolerance taught by Islam and the traditions of Boğaziçi University, we think that such problems should be resolved through communication.”

The post Istanbul student protests are a new frontline for the LGBTQ community appeared first on Coda Story.

Courtesy of a 2017 scheme, introduced by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, first-time mothers in India are eligible for payments totaling $68. The sum is roughly the price of a low-budget smartphone. But, for Kol, whose husband is a construction worker and earns a monthly wage of around $40, that is a significant amount of money. 

The couple plan to use the cash to purchase baby food and clothes for their child. The problem is that Kol, 19, does not have an Aadhaar biometric identity card, which makes the payments impossible to claim. She explained that she has applied for the card three times, assisted by a worker at her local Anganwadi rural childcare center. For undisclosed reasons, each attempt has failed. 

“I’ve gone to the Anganwadi and stood in line for hours several times, but my application keeps getting rejected,” said Kol. “It’s exhausting and I start feeling dizzy due to the long hours.”

Three hundred miles away, in the district of Niwari, Pragya Saur gave birth to a baby girl early last year. Since then, she has faced similar problems. She and her husband are both day laborers and earn a combined monthly wage of around $41. Neither has an Aadhaar card or a bank account. Saur went to the local Anganwadi center a few times but her efforts were futile. 

“I wasn’t successful at applying for it,” said Saur. “We can’t afford to go there multiple times, because that would mean losing our daily earnings.”   

Introduced in 2009, Aadhaar is a wide-ranging national identity scheme that provides citizens with a unique 12-digit number, linked to fingerprints and iris scans. At first, signing up was voluntary, but it quickly became clear that the aim was to bring all of India’s 1.3 billion population under its auspices. By 2017, the government claimed that 85% of people had been enrolled in the program. However, some people have fallen through the cracks, owing to a lack of a birth certificate or similar documentation necessary to process their initial Aadhaar application. As of 2019, an estimated 102 million people did not have an Aadhaar card.  

Aadhaar’s stated purpose was the targeted delivery of welfare services to large sections of India. Its initial remit was to increase transparency and to reduce waste and fraud. Evidence suggests that by 2017 it had helped to save the public purse almost $7.7 billion. Now, Aadhaar cards are vital for anyone who intends to access a vast range of support, from food subsidies to pensions and medical treatment.  

In 2015, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that Aadhaar can be used as a means of access to government benefits, but that people cannot be punished for not registering. However, given how much poorer Indians have to lose by not being part of the scheme, it is compulsory in all but name. 

Aadhaar has played a pivotal role during the current Covid-19 pandemic. Recently, the system was used in the distribution of $27.3 million in coronavirus relief funds to individuals across the country. 

Among those worst affected by Aadhaar are poor and marginalized women, like Kol and Saur. India accounts for 17% of the world’s maternal deaths and ranks in the worst 20 countries for infant mortality. Many of these fatalities are the result of poor postnatal care and nutrition. The idea behind Modi’s maternity benefit program was both simple and important: to provide compensation for lost earnings and guarantee nutrition and medical care for mothers and newborn children. 

The program requires both parents to supply their Aadhaar cards, which automatically rules out many single, unmarried or divorced women. It further filters out applicants who have never had an Aadhaar number, have lost their cards or whose biometric or demographic data needs to be updated. 

The claims procedure is also unwieldy, with the money disbursed in three instalments, requiring mothers to fill in multiple forms registering their pregnancy, an antenatal check-up and the birth of their child. Within three years of the program’s launch, the government claims to have registered 13.7 million women and distributed almost $700 million. However, according to one report, 33% of the Aadhaar-based payments have been credited to the wrong bank accounts.  

Reetika Khera, an associate professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, studied the use of Aadhaar for maternity benefits across six states in 2019. She found that at a time when “women need rest, they were being made to run around to correct Aadhaar details, figure out where their money has gone and so on.” 

Aadhaar is also failing women in other ways. Those seeking abortions — already a stigmatized group in India — are now unable to do so without creating a data trail. When seeking a termination, every pregnant woman's identity is linked to their ultrasound information, leaving them vulnerable to leaks. A fear of exposure has led many to resort to backstreet practitioners. 

“Digital systems seem to have replicated offline challenges and in several cases, added to the complexity,” explained Brindaalakshmi K, an independent researcher working on the areas of human rights, identity and technology. “The offline stigma of getting an abortion has not been broken and, without changing that offline thinking, the government has introduced these digital systems and a digital ID.”

In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for women seeking sonography and other pre-natal tests to share their ID, which inevitably ends up being the Aadhaar number. Historically, Indian society has favored male children and viewed girls as a financial burden. The initial idea behind this measure was to clamp down on sex-selective abortions, but the system has created additional problems. Now such services are inaccessible to all women without suitable identification.

Aadhaar’s grip on healthcare services in Indian society looks set to tighten. In August, Modi announced the launch of a National Health ID, which will further centralize the data of Indian citizens by digitizing their health records and potentially linking them to Aadhaar, though the government says Aadhaar is optional for the creation of an individual Health ID. The idea is to create a digital health ecosystem that will help people to access public and private care by connecting hospitals, diagnostics, telemedicine firms and insurance companies. 

By September 2020, 100,000 such IDs had been issued. The government has said that it will use them in the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccination. Experts, however, believe that the system will replicate the problems encountered by women seeking reproductive services, by linking identity to sensitive medical information.  

Aadhaar data breaches are not uncommon. In 2018, information related to the reproductive health of over two million women in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, along with their Aadhaar numbers, was published online. This information included the details of the women’s pregnancy cycles, along with their telephone numbers and bank names.    

“The state has been collecting details of pregnant women for a long time. The idea behind tracking all this information by the government is to keep a check on the maternal mortality rate, for vaccination programs, birth certificates and to track any deaths due to any viruses,” said digital rights activist Srinivas Kodali. “It’s a legitimate state activity.”

He explained that the problem arises when decentralized databases filled with women’s personal information are linked with centralized ID systems like Aadhaar. It not only poses privacy risks but also adds to the stigma of women wanting to access reproductive healthcare. 

Meanwhile, the system cannot manage a simple task like allocating maternity benefits to women in small-town India. Saur has now given up trying. Kol, however, remains hopeful. She plans to head over to the local Anganwadi in the coming days to apply for her Aadhaar card yet again. “Maybe it will work this time,” she said. 

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Among the passengers was 17-year-old Ahmedou. His story had begun more than a year before in Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country that has, for decades, suffered repeated droughts, famines and military coups. Since 2015, it has also experienced a surge in Islamist violence that has left hundreds of people dead and up to one million more displaced.  

During a telephone call from a Sicilian migrant shelter, Ahmedou described a journey, taking in Niger and Libya, where he was held in what he referred to as “connection houses” used by trafficking gangs and forced to work long hours on a farm to pay for his stay. Then, finally, came a perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea — waters in which more than 575 migrants have died in 2020, according to United Nations statistics.

 “There was a lot of conflict in Libya,” he said. “We didn’t have any money and there wasn’t any work. So it was better to come here, even though I knew it was dangerous. The same day that we got on the boat, there were people who died at sea, but we had to go anyway.”

For Ahmedou and thousands more like him, the voyage to Sicily is a risk worth taking. Historically, the island has been an accepting and open place for migrants, but now that is changing. As they have elsewhere on the Italian mainland, right-wing politicians in Sicily have harnessed the coronavirus crisis to further their anti-immigration agendas, painting all outsiders as vectors of mass infection. 

Five quarantine ships now operate in Italian waters. The use of such vessels began in April, while the country formed the epicenter of Europe’s Covid-19 outbreak. In response to the pandemic, the government banned migrant rescue boats from the nation’s ports. It then ruled that rescued migrants had to undergo a 14-day period of isolation at sea and be given Covid-19 tests prior to boarding and upon reaching Italy. 

Migrants who arrive in southern Italy’s ports are meant to be transferred to reception centers and camps throughout the country, where they undergo further tests. These regulations mean that, far from being a dangerously unmonitored cohort of international super spreaders, migrants form what is probably the most closely observed group on the island in terms of the virus. 

That fact has done nothing to prevent Sicily’s regional president, Nello Musumeci, from mounting a populist campaign of disinformation against them. On August 22, after months of escalating rhetoric, he posted on Twitter that, “Sicily can’t continue to submit to this invasion of migrants.” Then, the night before the ship carrying Ahmedou arrived, Musumeci issued an unprecedented decree, declaring that all migrants must be evacuated from the island and calling for an "immediate clearing of hotspots and migrant welcome centers" by midnight the following day.

The edict was ultimately unsuccessful, but it is a stark example of the inflammatory rhetoric that is now polarizing Sicily.

Words on the street

One hot September afternoon on Piazza Verdi, in the heart of Palermo’s historic centre, a group of activists held a small but vocal protest against the Italian government’s role in the prevention of NGO rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

Around them, ordinary Sicilians went about their daily business. Many were broadly empathetic toward those fleeing conflict and poverty-ravaged nations, proudly referring to the island’s centuries-long history as a centre of international trade and crossroads of cultures. 

“I think Sicily has always welcomed migrants, even if we have our own problems,” explained Ricardo, 24. “In Sicily, if there’s an opportunity to help migrants, then I am in favor of it, because you have to help your neighbours.”  

Others, however, disagree. 

One 59-year-old man, walking outside the Teatro Massimo, Italy’s largest opera house, spoke on condition of anonymity. “Musumeci represents all of Sicily, so, if he says it, for me it’s OK,” he said. “I think we’d all say what he said. He’s an intelligent person.”

Christiana, a 22-year-old law student also believed that migrants should be quarantined, in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19. “I don’t really see how else you could protect Italians,” she said. “If you let them off the ship, even a first contact would go to everyone else and that would be really very worrying.” 

Musemeci’s ratcheting up of anti-migrant sentiment also appears to have had a detrimental effect on the lives of those already on the island. One balmy evening, I met with Ibra, a 20-year-old man from Guinea, living in Palermo. He told me that he and his friends have noticed a distinct change in attitudes.

“Before we were not having these issues.” he said.

He explained that, alongside blame for the virus, deeper prejudices have started to emerge, with people openly telling him that “Blacks come here to steal our work, our women.” 

“People say it’s true, but it’s not,” he added. “Right now I don’t see any future in Sicily.”

Turbulent times

Sicily was largely spared the worst of Italy’s first wave of coronavirus infections. But, now, as the nation battles a resurgence of the disease, the island’s caseload is steadily rising. With a current total of 57,400 confirmed diagnoses and 289 deaths, the figures are worse now than they were during the spring. 

Like the rest of the mainland, Sicily is now under a partial lockdown. In late October, the Italian government announced new restrictions, including the closure of gyms and cinemas, and reduced opening hours for restaurants and bars.  

The announcement of those measures was greeted with unrest across the country. In October demonstrations in Rome turned into full-blown riots between protesters and police. Meanwhile, in Naples, members of the far-right party Forza Nouva chanted about the ongoing “sanitary dictatorship” during violent clashes with law enforcement.

It is within this context of panic that Musumeci’s hardline approach is gaining traction. His sweeping August 23 proclamation declared that the "migrant hotspot” of Lampedusa and other centers in Sicily would be shut down and their occupants transferred to other parts of Italy. All arrivals of migrants by sea to Sicily were also to be banned.

As responsibility for migrants and migration lies with the national government, it was not clear how Musumeci’s plan could be executed. While Sicily is an autonomous region of Italy, the regional government only has responsibility for health and hygiene matters. Accordingly, many viewed his statements as a calculated confrontation with the national government — and, by extension, the EU — over immigration. 

Of the 32,105 sea arrivals in Italy the year, 26,434 have made land in Sicily. While these figures are nowhere near those recorded during the migrant crisis of 2015, they are still significant. What is more, desperate and vulnerable people are still dying at sea. According to the International Organisation for Immigration, there have been at least nine shipwrecks on the Mediterranean since the start of October, the worst of which claimed 74 lives near the coast of Khoms in Libya.

On August  24, The Italian Ministry of the Interior responded to Musumeci with a sharply worded statement on its website, underscoring that migration issues were its concern, not his. “The management of migration does not fall within the remit of regional governments but is regulated by national laws,” it stated. “Given this, it is difficult to understand how Musumeci’s ordinance is meant to work.”

On August 28, Musumeci’s decree was rejected by the Sicilian courts. Despite its failure, the mere attempt to pass such laws sent a powerful and divisive message to the people of Sicily.

The other side

In addition to the courts, Musumeci faces vehement political opposition on the island. Mayor Leoluca Orlando of Palermo is well known for his pro-migrant policies. In 2015, he blamed the European Union for migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, accusing it of presiding over a “genocide.” In February this year, he granted honorary citizenship to the captains and crews of two migrant rescue boats operating in nearby waters.

While left-leaning Sicilian figures have accused Musumeci of attempting to exploit the issue of migration for electoral gain, he has continued to hammer home his message on social media. In August, he posted on Facebook that “Sicily cannot be invaded, while Europe is turning a blind eye and the government is not enacting any pushbacks.” He also framed his plans as a positive intervention that would “stop Sicilians becoming racist.”

Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Liga party and Italy’s former deputy prime minister and interior minister, has praised Musumeci on Twitter, expressing the “utmost solidarity for the Sicilian governor” and describing his failed legislation as “exemplary.”

But, according to some critics, Musumeci may just be trying to cover his own back. The Covid-19 outbreak has placed severe pressure on a local healthcare system that was already suffering from years of underfunding, and people are deeply concerned about the spread of the virus. 

Sitting at home in the bustling, multicultural Palermo neighborhood of Ballaro, local independent left-wing politician Fausto Melluso told me, “I think our president is always speaking about migrants to distract people, so we don’t judge him on what he is doing to protect us during the pandemic.” 

Facts on the ground

After 21 days at sea, Ahmedou was unsure what to expect on arrival in Trapani. When his quarantine ship finally made land, the relative comfort of regular meals and a warm bed in a shared cabin gave way to a new reality. 

“When we got off, everything changed,” he told me. 

Border officials presented Ahmedou with a document known as a “Respingimento differito.” It stated that he had no right to be in Italy and demanded that he exit the country within a week. Failure to do so would render him liable to criminal prosecution and a fine of up to €20,000.

“Nobody told us anything, They gave us a paper and someone explained to me later that it said I had to leave,” he said. “Why did they waste all this time? Why save us and then tell us to leave?”

No one told him that vulnerable migrants have a right under EU law to apply for asylum. Melluso explained that Sicilian border officials routinely present new arrivals with expulsion papers and that the lack of information and guidance appears to be a deliberate strategy. 

“It's against the law, because they are excluding a lot of people from the possibility of applying for asylum,” he said. 

As a minor from an unstable nation, Ahmedou had a solid claim. Instead, he was left stranded on the streets of Trapani, frightened and alone. 

“They left us all there with the paper in our hands. They said they were looking for a place for us to go but they didn’t come back,” he said.

Eventually Ahmedou found out where to get a bus to Palermo. After hours on the road, he got off at Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a picturesque main street in the city’s historic quarter. There, he met Moussa Koulibaly. 

Koulibaly, 27, came to the city from Guinea several years ago and now provides outreach services for migrants. He helped Ahmedou secure a place at a migrant camp run by a Christian mission, on the outskirts of the Sicilian capital. 

More or less as soon as he arrived, the facility and several others across the island were declared “red zones” by the Sicilian authorities. As such, they are subject to a strict, police-controlled lockdown, during which no one is allowed in or out. 

Since his arrival, staff at the camp have provided health advice and information about the coronavirus, but Ahmedou remains confused about what it is. “I still don’t really understand it — like I don’t even know what part of the human body it attacks,” he said. 

Camp authorities have instructed occupants to wash their hands frequently, wear masks and follow social distancing protocols — all unenviable tasks in a cramped environment, filled with hundreds of people. 

“They told us to try to keep our distance and not sleep in the space of someone else. But we’re all in there together. The doors fall off in the bathrooms, so you have to hold the door when you go to piss. Sometimes you can’t even manage to have any privacy,” he said.

Confining large numbers of people at close quarters without proper access to healthcare, sanitation, food and water creates a perfect environment for the coronavirus to spread. According to Ahmedou, conditions in his camp are worse than those he experienced in Libya — a nation with far fewer cases than Italy. 

As the numbers continue to rise in Sicily, migrants are being portrayed as carriers of disease who endanger the health of the island’s inhabitants. Such inaccurate stereotyping protects no one and creates a toxic environment that places vulnerable people at risk. As long as populist politicians like Musumeci continue to misrepresent and scapegoat these new arrivals, it will be they who face the gravest threats. 

Ahmedou spoke under an assumed name, in order to protect his identity

Ismail Einashe and Kate Stanworth are members of the Lost in Europe cross-border journalism project, which investigates the disappearance of child migrants in Europe

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“I can’t go there, it’s impossible,” he said. “You can punish me and send me to another country but you can’t send me back home. I can’t live there. Maybe I’ll lose my life.” 

Mohammad, now 24 years old, asked to be identified by only his first name, owing to safety concerns. He left the countryside of Aleppo, in the west of the country, in 2016. Since then, he has lived in Turkey as a refugee. While he is terrified by the prospect of going back to his village, the Syrian regime, guided by its ally Russia, has declared that it is now time for the 6.6 million people displaced by 10 years of civil war to return to the country.

On November 11, the Russian-organized International Conference on the Return of Syrian Refugees was held in Damascus. It was clear from the invitations sent to allied nations that the main goals of the gathering were to seek money for reconstruction and to show the world that Syria is now stable enough for international sanctions against it to be lifted. 

Despite statements condemning the conference by rights groups and diaspora organizations, 27 countries attended.  

The flags on stage at the opulent Umayyad Conference Palace included those of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — known collectively as the BRICS — and Moscow’s ally Belarus. Neighboring Iraq and Lebanon were also present; the latter being the only attending nation with a significant refugee population. 

Turkey — which hosts more Syrian refugees than anywhere else in the world, with at least 3.6 million registered — was not invited. Ankara backs forces opposed to President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria and has a strong military presence in the northwest of the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. and EU boycotted the event, stressing that, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, there can be no talk of refugee returns without a political settlement to the conflict. UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria Imran Riza attended as an observer. 

Mikhail Mezentsev, head of the Russian National Defense Management Center, opened proceedings, claiming that the Syrian government guarantees the safety of returning refugees. He then turned to the international community, demanding that it “stop the sanctions policy against the regime and unfreeze its bank accounts."

Back in Istanbul, Mohammad claimed that the Assad regime and Russia are simply putting on “a show."

“They want to show the world we are OK, and say, ‘Look we ended the war,’ but it’s not true,” he said. “We’re not safe if we go back. Maybe we get arrested, or we’re killed.”

He added that the conference was a Russian initiative to recoup its losses from the conflict. 

“Russia spent millions of dollars in the war, so they want that money back,” he said.

Addressing the conference, Ali Asghar Khaji, a senior assistant to the Iranian foreign minister, directed blame for the “bloodshed, destruction and migration of millions of Syrians” towards “an influx of terrorists backed by a number of countries.” He then announced a proposal to establish an international fund for reconstruction. 

In a statement released prior to the event, The Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity, a civil-rights grassroots movement, quoted Dr Marwan Nazhan, a trustee of the organization. “Clearly, the purpose of the conference is to try and secure funds from the West under the guise of reconstruction to secure the gains made through indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their forced displacement.”

Emma Beals, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, also believes that the conference had a transactional agenda. 

“If some refugees return, it’s a way of increasing the reconstruction or humanitarian funding amount and, secondly, it helps to push a normalization narrative,” she explained. 

Syria is grappling with an acute economic crisis and civilians living in regime-held areas are forced to line up for daily necessities such as food and fuel.

Ahmad, 31, whose name has been changed for security reasons, has lived in Turkey for three-and-a-half years, after fleeing the violence in his hometown of Deir Ezzor. 

He believes the conference was a waste of time, considering there is nothing in Syria to go back to. 

“The people in Syria, they can’t live because they have no bread, they have no water, they have no electricity, they have nothing,” he said. “How can Assad bring in refugees, if he can’t take care of people living in Syria?” 

While the Syrian regime may like to see some refugees come back,as long as they have money that can be spent within the country, there is more to gain from pushing for reconstruction on humanitarian grounds. 

Fadi, 33, who also asked to be identified under a pseudonym, is originally from the suburbs of Damascus. He has lived in Lebanon for five years and insists that the Syrian regime cares only about its own interests. 

“They will take the reconstruction money for themselves,” he said, referring to Russia, Iran and the Syrian government. 

“We can describe the country as a company today, it’s like a cooperation between the Russians and Iranians. The regime will benefit the least.”

Mohammad laughed when the topic of reconstruction came up. 

“Reconstruction? That’s totally unreal. Russia lies, the regime lies, and their allies lie. Even their supporters don’t believe it,” he said. 

The area outside Aleppo where Mohammad’s family still live currently lies under opposition control. If the regime retakes it, he believes there is no chance that they will see their home again.

“They’re going to burn that house, they’re going to burn our cars, and they’re going to destroy all the street that I lived on.”

Mohammad is certain that if Russia secures reconstruction funding for Syria, only those loyal to the regime will benefit. 

“Maybe they will fix some villages in their own area, but not in ours,” he said. 

Beals explained that people who have fled bombardment of opposition-held areas by regime forces are deemed part of the opposition and stripped of property rights. Even if their towns and villages are slated for reconstruction, they will remain displaced.

“Some of these projects may mean that refugees will never be able to return home, because the area that they fled during the war has been demolished or turned into some other project that benefits regime supporters,” she said.

Beals also pointed to the obstacles that Russia will face in its attempts to raise international support. 

“It’s a very difficult place to put money into, as a private investor or humanitarian organisation trying to provide reconstruction money, because you don’t know where that money is going to go,” she said. 

She said that contracts granted for infrastructure projects are routinely awarded to individuals with close ties to the government and, therefore, continue to feed the war economy. 

Meanwhile, President Michel Aoun of Lebanon — a nation mired in its own overlapping economic and political crises — continues to push for the return of displaced Syrians. 

Ahead of the conference, Aoun told Russian Special Envoy to Syria Alexander Lavrentiev that he is “looking for a quick solution” to the refugee situation. He added that “the refugees have inflicted great losses on Lebanon.”

Even if the participation of Lebanon in the conference solidified an intent to push for refugee returns, the nation’s government remains divided. Some parties support the Assad regime and its drive to send displaced people back, while others recognize the realities on the ground and maintain that Lebanon has a duty to protect them. 

Fadi, who lives in Beirut, said he doesn’t feel pressured to move back, owing to the strong UN presence in the country and the role displaced Syrians now play in the local economy. 

“I doubt forcible returns will happen from Lebanon, plus Lebanon has become reliant on the Syrian workers,” he explained. 

Like three-quarters of displaced Syrians, Fadi hopes to be able to go back one day. However, he will only consider doing so when he feels it is safe. 

The U.N. continues to push for a political settlement in Syria, within which the welfare of returning refugees is a key consideration, but many do not feel comfortable with Assad being part of any such talks. That sentiment was illustrated by a hashtag circulating on Twitter, in both Arabic and English, prior to the conference: #No_Return_With_Assad. 

Mohammad, for one, believes that no one will trust the guarantees made by the regime and will not return until Assad is arrested and faces justice. 

“Even if peacekeepers came in for protection, they would kill you behind their backs,” he said.

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Within days of his arrival, he decided he was not going back home to Hyderabad in newly independent India. Although Naeem, who died in the early 1980s, wasn’t fluent in Arabic, he managed to find work at a small company that catered to pilgrims journeying by sea from South Asia. Three years later, his two older brothers and their wives joined him — also using pilgrimage visas.

Although oil had been discovered in the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia was far from the regional economic and political power it became after revenue from hydrocarbons began to increase in the early 1950s. Immigration laws were also significantly less strict than they are now.

“Citizenship status was not relevant when my grandfather moved here,” said Naeem’s granddaughter, Sundus.

She recalled being told that when her grandfather first moved to the country, Saudi passports and citizenships could be bought for $5. “Mecca has so many people who were like us and had stayed back after a pilgrimage that it didn’t seem like something important,” she added. “And we weren’t unique.”

While Sundus was born in Mecca and has spent her entire life in the city, like the rest of Naeem’s children and grandchildren, she fears such privileges may no longer be possible.

Even though Sundus is married to a Saudi Arabian citizen, she has not been able to acquire nationality through marriage. She continues to live in legal limbo, like the millions of other undocumented residents of Mecca, whose families have resided in the city for generations. 

According to media reports, over five million undocumented people live in Saudi Arabia, a country with an official population of 33 million. Most have roots in South Asia and East Africa. The majority live in the Mecca region and, for years, were unofficially tolerated as immigrant communities who had integrated with the local culture.

But the Mecca Sundus grew up in no longer turns a blind eye to undocumented individuals. The threat of surveillance from new digital apps looms large over the city’s marginalized populations. Saudi Arabia has also drastically increased deportations of migrants in the past decade. In 2017, it began actively seeking to remove undocumented migrants as part of a new agenda of economic reform. The “Nation Without Violators” campaign was launched with the aim of deporting “foreign workers illegally staying in violation of residence, labor, and border regulations of the Kingdom.”

Nearly 38% of all deportations so far have taken place in the holy city, leaving families such as Sundus’s in a state of constant fear and uncertainty.

“I cannot ‘go back’ to India. I wasn’t born there, nor were my parents,” said Sundus, who is in her late 30s, but not entirely sure about her date of birth. “My brother went to the Indian embassy once asking if he could have a passport made, and they asked for some sort of proof but there is none. I belong nowhere but in Mecca, but even that is even uncertain now because a crackdown can happen any time.”

She stated that for the past few years she has been so afraid of deportation that she has stopped leaving the house, except to perform the Umrah pilgrimage or pray at the Grand Mosque of Mecca once a month.

“In the past few years, I just stopped going out almost entirely because of the fear of getting caught. I would only leave to go to the mosque every few weeks.” she said, standing on the balcony of her living room, a string of prayer beads wrapped around her right wrist. The balcony has only a small opening, so men on the street cannot see her.

Now, even visiting the Grand Mosque looks impossible. The site, which can accommodate 900,000 worshippers, gradually reopened in September to smaller congregations after a seven-month-long suspension to contain COVID-19. However, it was announced that anyone who wishes to visit will need to reserve a specific time and date, using a newly launched government app called Eatmarna, created by the Ministry of Haj and Umrah.

As of October 23, the app had recorded more than 2.5 million installations, 1.2 million registrations and issued 650,000 permits. Users are required to upload their citizenship or residence ID before they can request a permit that allows them access to the mosque for a given number of hours on a specified day. This automatically excludes Mecca’s large undocumented community. 

Sundus understands the need to control the number of worshippers, but she is concerned that the app — or a similar technology — might permanently exempt her from entering the mosque even after the pandemic.

“I know it is temporary and the best option there was, but I hope that once everything is back to normal, we don’t continue to use such technology,” she said.

As legal residents, Sundus’s husband and her daughter Safa, 17, have both successfully used Eatmarna and visited the Grand Mosque. Sundus, however, could not join them.

“The Kaaba is all I have in my life,” she said. “I pray that, once life returns to normal, they get rid of the app and I can go pray there again.”

Although the ministry intends to only use the app as long as social distancing measures are necessary, other forms of technology, such as drones and facial recognition are increasingly being deployed to streamline pilgrimages to Mecca, especially during Ramadan and Hajj. 

“We know that Saudi Arabia is investing huge amounts of money in surveillance technology and while we have not ourselves done any research on how this impacts the migrant community, I wouldn't put it past them to use it to identify and deport people,” said Hiba Zayadin a researcher for Human Rights Watch focusing on the Middle East and North Africa Division. “Even if this is not currently the case, it is an area worth keeping an eye on.”

Mecca has been home to a number of efforts to push technology in order to improve services for religious visitors. Hajj pilgrims are required to wear electronic ID bracelets that track their visits using GPS and provide healthcare workers with their personal medical information in case of emergency. The bracelets also provide pilgrims with access to a help desk service, operated in several different languages. Asefny, an app launched by Saudi Arabia's Red Crescent in 2018, aims to help pilgrims request emergency medical attention and is able to locate users via GPS. 

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah declined to comment on the use of Eatmarna.

The Saudi government has also substantially increased its investment in digital technology in order to lessen the spread of Covid-19. These include launching new command and control centers and apps to coordinate public services and security, and deploying CCTV and thermal imaging to monitor people’s temperatures in open spaces. These measures have also coincided with rising use of biometrics for both religious pilgrims, as well as the 12 million foreign citizens living in Saudi Arabia.

Sundus’s daughter Safa, a Saudi citizen, worries that the increasing prevalence of such technology could one day take her mother from her.

“I have been reading about surveillance and privacy a lot, ever since I started understanding that people can just show up and take her away someday if they want,” she said. “I just worry that it is going to make it increasingly difficult for my mom and people like her to live in this constant secrecy, if there is always a new type of technology that makes it difficult to do so.”

Other undocumented residents interviewed for this story expressed the same fears.

“Campaigns focused on Saudization have seen mass deportation and a lot of uncertainty and fear amongst undocumented migrants in the country,” said Zayadin. “There is a huge fear of detention as migrant workers are held in despicable conditions in crowded places.”

Amna, from Pakistan, first entered the country on an Umrah visa in 2013 but overstayed. She is in her thirties and has been working mainly as a domestic worker. Mindful of possible deportation, she leaves her employer’s home only to risk visiting the Grand Mosque.

“It is so busy all the time and there are people from all over the world so I think it is easy to blend in,” she said. “It is not entirely risk-free, of course, but how can you be a Muslim and live so close to the Kaaba and not take that risk?”

The presence of technology in Mecca is only set to grow. In February, the first Saudi Smart Cities Summit and Expo in Jeddah saw the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah launch “Smart Mecca,” an ambitious plan to incorporate digital monitoring through every step of a pilgrim’s journey. 

“I know there are laws in the country, but my grandparents have been here since before the laws. And so have so many other people,” Sundus explained. “Mecca used to belong to everyone but it doesn’t anymore. I don’t understand technology that much, but things like these apps are just making it more difficult for my community to continue living here. Where do we go when they find us?”

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When he arrives in the capital Tbilisi, Pompeo will find a situation eerily similar to the one he may be trying to escape: rising Covid-19 numbers and big street protests over a bitter, disinformation-mired election dispute. And while Pompeo is a lame duck diplomat in much of the world, his visit to the small South Caucasus nation could alter history. 

On October 31, Georgians voted in a highly contested parliamentary election. After eight years on the political sidelines, the opposition thought it stood a chance of at least diluting the power of the ruling Georgian Dream party. 

But according to the opposition, the game was rigged from the start. The election was marred by disinformation and allegations of vote buying. And once the ballots were cast, evidence of fraud began to emerge. In over a hundred polling stations, for example, no one voted for the opposition  — a statistical impossibility in a politically divided Georgia. In some areas, the vote totals cast for the ruling party were greater than the number of people who actually voted. 

The ruling party is run by the Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest man, an oligarch with ties to Russia who, over the years, has successfully managed to keep the opposition weak and fragmented.   

The international community — the usual arbiter between the Georgian government and the opposition — has been distracted by the pandemic and the turmoil in the U.S. While there has been some criticism of the government, overall the response has been muted and government-backed media channels cite Pompeo’s upcoming visit as a validation of the election’s outcome. 

For years Georgia, an ally of the U.S., has been held up as a model for the region. This election further erodes the country democratic stature and is likely to come at a geopolitical cost for the West. 

The “Ivanishvili government has hired lobbying firms in Washington while embracing Russian disinformation narratives and Russian tactics at home,” says Giorgi Kandelaki, an opposition politician. “Retreat of democracy here harms the United States interests and works to Putin’s benefit” 

As America’s top diplomat, Pompeo often urges free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. But his two-day visit to Georgia does not include a meeting with the country’s opposition, and his apparent refusal to accept election results in his own country makes him a deeply compromised interlocutor. 

Upping the stakes is a massive geopolitical tremor in the region. The South Caucasus — which includes Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan — is a key global transit route and a strategic gem that Washington and Moscow have been at loggerheads over for years. This week, its map was redrawn, literally, when Azerbaijan scored a military victory over Armenia in a war over the long-disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

It was a conflict much of the world didn’t even notice, but regional powers Turkey and Russia filled the vacuum created by a distracted America. Over the past six weeks, Ankara provided key military support to Azerbaijan, while Moscow stood back, allowing Azerbaijan to crush Armenia, Russia’s most loyal ally. This week, after Azerbaijan took key territories, the Kremlin stepped in, negotiated a truce and was invited by Azerbaijan to maintain stability. Moscow is sending troops to act as peacekeepers.  

Who the ultimate geopolitical winner of this situation is in dispute. Azerbaijan is the obvious one. But Russia now has boots on the ground and new leverage over both Azerbaijan and Armenia. Turkey, too, has come out ahead.

Losers are much easier to identify. Armenia: a devastated nation now sinking into a political crisis that will take years to overcome. And the United States: for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington is suddenly not even a player in a Great Game that it only recently led. 

As Mike Pompeo leaves the election chaos at home to embark on his foreign tour, the Caucasus provides a striking destination to showcase America’s diminished role on the global stage.

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Surrogacy is legal in Russia but has come under fire from conservative lawmakers and the Orthodox church. Police arrested a number of fertility doctors earlier this year and have accused them of “child trafficking” in an ongoing case.

State news agency TASS recently quoted an unnamed official saying that investigators intend to widen their investigation into surrogacy to include single fathers, whom the official assumed would be gay.

“They are planning to arrest more suspects, including single Russian men who used surrogate mothers to have babies,” the official said, claiming it was illegal for gay men to have children in this way.

The cases are being scrutinized by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.

The anonymous source’s words have not yet been supported by official statements, but their comments appear to be a warning that the authorities are gearing up to investigate some of the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives.

State investigators have jailed seven people and placed three children in state care, following the death by natural causes of a newborn baby in an apartment near Moscow in January. Authorities established that the apartment was home to other babies also conceived by surrogates and several nannies were reportedly looking after them while their intended parents completed paperwork before being able to take them home abroad.

Reports about a "suspicious apartment" appeared on Russian television and the babies were put in a care home, and the inquiry was expanded to include other cases of surrogacy and organized human trafficking resulting in death.

Several people have been arrested and at least ten, including doctors and two nannies, have been charged. Most work for the company Rosjurconsulting, which specializes in reproductive law and medically assisted reproduction, or for the European Surrogacy Center in Russia (ECSM), which provides a number of services, including medical assistance for in vitro fertilization to surrogate mothers.

Lawyer Igor Trunov, who is representing the parents in the case, said authorities are attempting to link parenthood with sexual orientation. “There is no law restricting gay men to be donors and have their kids by surrogacy,” he said. “I know the father who was already questioned by investigators as a witness in this case. But he can easily be turned into an accused one.”

A public petition to stop the criminal investigation of the arrested medical staff has been signed by 7,000 people.

Russian law explicitly allows IVF treatments for couples and single women. Surrogacy legislation in Russia is ambiguous — neither permitting nor prohibiting the practice for single men. However, the principle of single fathers parenting via surrogacy has already been successfully defended hundreds of times in Russian courts.

Gay father Alexander (not his real name), from Moscow, recently told BBC Russian that he fled Russia with his six-month-old son the day after the TASS report was published.

“I don’t know when I will be back,” he said. “In our country, no matter how right you are, to prove your innocence before the state is not even stupid, but dangerous.”

Olga Okhotnikova from the Saint-Petersburg based LGBTQ rights organization Coming Out, which campaigns for equality in Russia and provides families with legal and psychological support, says single fathers have become scapegoats in a long-running campaign to enforce traditional values. State media often present the idea of gay rights as a western import that poses an existential threat to Russia while portraying the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as a defender of “traditional values.”

“When a single father raises a child it is suspicious, whether he is gay or not,” said Okhotnikova. “But if he is gay, or if it is a gay couple, people always equate them to pedophiles. Those stereotypes are alive because people don't understand how LGBTQ families work. If they don’t know something and are afraid of it, they are easy to manipulate. This is how our state advocates traditional values, by manipulation.”

While polling data suggests younger generations are increasingly tolerant towards the LGBTQ community, a controversial bill introduced in 2013 outlawed the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.” In July this year, a change to the constitution defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, further setting back hopes for marriage equality for LGBTQ populations.

Konstantin Svitnev, a Russian lawyer and the CEO of Rosjurconsulting, is the main suspect in the ongoing investigation into surrogacy and organized human trafficking. During a recent telephone conversation, he told me that he is currently based abroad and is too afraid to come back to Russia. “Many people in Russia believe all single men are homosexuals which equates them to pedophiles. I never asked my clients for their sexual orientation, it's not our business. If he wants to have a child my job is to help him.” 

Coda Story has seen a transcript of the interrogation of a doctor arrested in conjunction with the death of the newborn baby in January. Investigators asked pointedly whether the doctor had noticed “signs of homosexuality” in one of his clients.

Rights experts are concerned any case against the surrogate fathers could worsen already rampant discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community. 

“This criminal case can lead to even greater secrecy of LGBTQ-families,” said Max Olenichev, legal adviser to Coming Out.

“The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation uses this homosexuality thing against the fathers on purpose, to gather the support of the homophobic part of society,” he continued. “But I think the desire to become a parent, even in such uncertainty, is much stronger than the fear of government interference.”

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