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How did Chinese propaganda force Hong Kong’s largest teachers union to disband? · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

A screenshot of Wen Wei Po's front page after the HKPTU announced it would disband. The headline stated that the teachers union is responsible for its self-destruction. Via Hong Kong CitizenNews
Hong Kong's largest professional teachers union, The Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union (HKPTU), announced its disbandment on August 10, 2021, after 48 years of service.
The decision came after numerous attacks by Chinese state media. The news shocked the public as the union, with more than 95,000 members, represents at least 90 percent of the city’s educators and is considered one of the most moderate pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong. The incident signals that Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong is not confined to the political sector but extends to professional groups and workers unions — the foundation of Hong Kong’s civil society.
Besides HKPTU, Chinese state media outlets have also attacked the Hong Kong Bar Association, the Law Society of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the Association of Hong Kong Nursing Staff, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and more.
HKPTU was founded in 1972 by activist Szeto Wah had become an influential civic force in Hong Kong after it launched a teachers’ strike in response to a 15 percent salary cut in 1973.
Due to its moderate stand, the Hong Kong government has long considered HKPTU a close partner in developing the city’s education policy. However, the relationship soured after the anti-China extradition protests in 2019 as Beijing blamed the education sector for failing to cultivate patriotism in Hong Kong.
The new wave of attacks emerged last month as Chinese state-run People’s Daily and Xinhua slammed the teachers’ union as a ‘poisonous tumor’ that must be ‘eradicated’. The commentary ran on both state media outlets labeled the union as a political organization that incited students into taking violence act.  The accusations were then echoed by a large number of local pro-establishment media outlets and opinion leaders blaming the teachers’ union as a major source of anti-China, pro-Hong Kong independence sentiment. The next day, the Hong Kong Education Bureau announced that it would cut ties with the union, meaning the government authority would not have any interactions, including meetings, consultations or communication with the HKPTU.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam backed the Education Bureau's decision on August 2 and slammed the teachers’ union for prioritizing politics over professionalism.
To save the union, HKPTU issued a letter to all its members stressing that the group would focus on education professionalism in the future. It also withdrew from the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.
Even though top government advisor Ronny Tong assured citizens that there was no evidence the HKPTU had violated the national security law, the Commissioner of Police told state-run media Phoenix TV on August 5 that the police force would ‘definitely investigate’ any wrongdoings if national security matters were involved when he was asked about the union's status.
On August 10, the 48-year-old teachers’ union announced its disbandment after unofficial representatives from Beijing told them that the group ‘must cease to exist’ or it would face a similar fate as Apple Daily, which was shut down after the national security police froze its assets and arrested seven senior staff members, on charges of conspiring with a foreign force.
Even after the disbandment, state-run media outlets continue to advocate for a full investigation into the teachers’ union about potential national security breaches. One of the accusations presented by the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po is that the union had borrowed venues for polling stations during the 2020 primary elections among democrats. Forty-seven activists have been charged with conspiracy to subvert state power or running the primaries in July 2020 to choose the candidates who would contest the Legislative election in September.
Amnesty International highlighted the level of fear as reflected in HKPTU’s decision to self-dissolve:
The rapid demise of Hong Kong’s biggest teachers’ union in the face of increasing hostility from the Hong Kong and central Chinese governments illustrates the level of fear permeating the city’s education sector and wider civil society amid a relentless crackdown on dissent.
As pointed out by Hong Kong Twitterer Wong Kin Cheong, the crackdown on civil society is mobilized through Chinese state propaganda:
A point to note: The key issue here is NOT related to HKPTU's political stance or what it has done/plans to do.
What requires our attention is that this incident shows nowadays Beijing can make ANY organization disappear by “publishing a commentary” in People's Daily… https://t.co/Pc1bobbN7u
— Kin Cheong Wong (@WONG_Kin_Cheong) August 10, 2021
A commentary written by Ga Choi Tze on CitizenNews shared a similar view:
中共治港方針已進入全面鬥爭狀態，你也不用真的做過甚麼，他說你有罪就是有罪，甚麼依法辦事，不觸碰紅線就沒事，只會影響一小撮人云云，全部是騙小孩，甚至割席都沒用，繼續追殺到你已變成條屍都要挖出來鞭。教協到底觸碰了哪條紅線？10萬會員叫一小撮人？只是新華社《人民日報》出句聲，教育局就做事了，是依了哪條法，還是何時新華社《人民日報》做了法官我們不知道？
The CCP has adopted an all-around struggle policy in Hong Kong. You don’t have to do anything. Once it labels you as guilty, you are guilty. ‘The so-called rule of law, does not touch the baseline, only a small minority will be affected, etc.’ These are just lie for kids. Even cutting ties with other groups is useless. Even if you turn into a corpse, they will dig it out to whip you. Which red line has HKPTU has crossed? Do you call a union with 100,000 members a minority? All it took was a few words uttered by Xinhua and People Daily, then the Education Bureau acted accordingly. What is the legal basis? Since when did Xinhua and the People Daily become judges?
In May, a survey conducted by HKPTU indicated that about 40 percent of Hong Kong teachers want to leave the industry due to political pressure. The Union head Fung Wai Wah pointed out that the Education Bureau had been unfair in processing anonymous complaints targeting pro-democracy teachers, and it had ignored the education sector’s opinion regarding state-mandated curriculum changes. In addition, some pro-establishment legislators even called for surveillance cameras within classrooms. All these measures would generate great pressure for teachers.
Education is not the only professional sector facing political pressure. Since HKPTU announced its disbandment last week, a large number of commentators run by state-run media outlets have called for an investigation on the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) concerning its role in coordinating anti-government activities and alleged overseas funding sources. The commentators also noted strikes organized by the Hong Kong Cabin Crew Federation and Hospital Authority Employees Alliance during the anti-China extradition protests in 2019 and during the initial COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Both professional unions are HKCTU’s members.
Journalists and lawyers are also targeted:
And next target of pro-Beijing papers: @HKJA_Official #Hongkong Journalists Association described as protecting violence and spreading rumours.
Some ExCo called as “Wicked” pic.twitter.com/kH9KLWCX03
— Galileo Cheng (@galileocheng) August 13, 2021
PRC state media weighs in on upcoming HK Law Society elections & fires another shot at Bar Association: “People's Daily on Saturday warned HK's Law Society not to play with politics unless it wants to follow the fate of the HKBA & now-defunct PTU.”https://t.co/VnRVFtt0dy
— Antony Dapiran (@antd) August 15, 2021


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Journalists call for the release of Cheng Lei who has spent a year in detention in China · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Cheng Lei at a Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Web Summit via Sportsfile and the Web Summit's flickr page. (CC BY 2.0)
At least 50 journalists and media groups in Australia have signed a letter urging the Chinese government to release Australian journalist Cheng Lei.
Lei was arrested on August 13, 2020, in China on the “suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets overseas.” Prior to her arrest, she was a business journalist working as a TV presenter for the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN).
She was arrested in a period of escalating diplomatic tensions between China and Australia due to the coronavirus pandemic and human rights concerns.
After a year of detaining Cheng Lei, Chinese authorities have yet to present evidence against the journalist.
This prompted former colleagues of Cheng Lei in Australia to draft an open letter to Beijing calling for the release of the journalist.
We are confident she has done nothing wrong and hold grave concerns for her health, safety and care during her ongoing detention.
We are concerned about the chilling affect her arrest has on the practice of journalism, which has never been more critical.
I signed this letter calling on China to #freechenglei because no evidence has been presented that she’s done anything wrong, there’s no transparency in the system that is holding her & because journalists should not be arrested if they’ve broken no law. Thanks, @annelisenews. ?? https://t.co/WRzb4LuhRy
— Karen Middleton (@KarenMMiddleton) August 13, 2021
Australia’s Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) is among the letter's signatories:
Her arrest, her detention and the accusations against her have never been explained. No evidence has been presented. After 12 months, there has been nothing to suggest she has done anything wrong. MEAA members, and journalists around the world, stand with Cheng Lei.
The National Press Club of Australia linked Cheng Lei’s arrest with rising cases of persecution targeting foreign journalists in China:
This makes her one of many journalists detained in China at the same time the Chinese government expels foreign correspondents or denies them entry to the country, suppressing press freedom.
The National Press Club of the United States also issued a statement of support for Cheng Lei:
China has tried to make Cheng disappear, but the world has not forgotten about her or the several dozen other reporters unjustly jailed in China.
Media groups are urging the public to sign an open letter calling for the release of Australian journalist Cheng Lei. Source: MEAA
Cheng Lei’s friends and former colleagues posted messages of support on Twitter:
It’s a year since my friend and former colleague Cheng Lei was detained by the CCP.
She’s from Melbourne and has 2 kids who haven’t seen or spoken to her in a year. As journalists, we’re concerned about the chilling effect her arrest has on international journalism #freechenglei pic.twitter.com/DSHvSLW9ML
— Emily Angwin (@EmilyCAngwin) August 12, 2021
Cheng Lei’s friends are asking China to have compassion by reuniting the journalist with her two children in Australia. Cheng Lei has had no communication with her family and is not allowed to have visitors except Australian consular officials once a month.
Remembering my friend Cheng Lei on the anniversary of her arrest. Stunning, fun, bright and talented ~ hoping she is reunited and home with her 2 children soon #FreeChengLei https://t.co/aVglK9GlbX
— Hannah Hoexter News (@HannahHoexter) August 13, 2021
If found guilty, Cheng Lei could face a prison term of at least five to ten years.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Mong Palatino


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Supporting witnesses: First step towards ending impunity for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina · Global Voices
Balkan Diskurs

Photo by Pete Muller from the My Body A War Zone Project, used with permission.
This story by Alec Anderson and Chiara Zardoni was originally published on Balkan Diskurs, a project of the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC). An edited version is republished by Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.
“The truth is that victims want to talk about it. They are desperate to get it off of their chests. But there are only a few that are willing to listen to the voices of the victims”  — Presentation of the International PSVI Protocol in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Post-Conflict Research Center
International organizations have time and time again urged Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to “end impunity” for perpetrators of the rampant sexual violence that took place between 1992-1995 during the Bosnian War.
What is often overlooked is the most important precursor to ending impunity: a secure environment in which survivors can testify, free from intimidation, severe retraumatization, and threats of physical harm. Resolute witness protection and high-quality, readily available psychological support are crucial to ending a culture of impunity.
The brave women and men who come forward to identify perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) often do so despite tremendous hurdles. For some survivors in BiH, the horrors they experienced during the war are so stigmatized that they don’t even feel comfortable telling their families what happened. Furthermore, many survivors in BiH live in the same community as those who perpetrated war crimes against them. These factors make identity protection vital for survivors who come forward and testify—to shield them not only from further ostracization but also from immediate physical harm. Marija, a survivor who opted out of witness protection offered by the justice system, was attacked in the road soon after her rapist’s prison sentence ended.
However, while potential physical harm may be the most visible threat faced by testifying survivors, the immense psychological toll that the judicial process takes on these women and men cannot be ignored. Too often in the past, survivors have been questioned “in ways that are humiliating and legally irrelevant,” a degrading process that discourages survivors from coming forward. This is on top of the fact that recounting their own assaults already presents an inherent risk of retraumatization and distress, more reasons why close-at-hand psychological support is so important.
This points to the need for courts to make the process of testifying as safe, secure, and stress-free as possible. Without these guarantees, survivors may be hesitant to expose themselves to potential physical or psychological harm, contributing to a vicious cycle that reinforces impunity for perpetrators and further silences their victims. With that said, the judicial system in BiH has seen tremendous improvements in witness protection and support in recent years.
In 2008, the national government first adopted the National Strategy for War Crimes Processing. Its chief goal was to process all wartime crime cases by 2023, though it also stated that the national courts should aim to have the most “complex” cases completed by 2015. In 2015, when the trying of these “complex” cases was still not completed, a revised strategy was submitted to the national government for approval. After five years, in 2020, this revised strategy was adopted by the country’s Council of Ministers, while its implementation is yet to produce results.
According to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's 2010 report on “Witness Protection and Support in BiH Domestic War Crimes Trials,” protection measures become even more important when dealing with sexual violence cases because of the stigma attached to survivors and the risk of retraumatization. For this reason, the European Court of Human Rights, in Doorson v. The Netherlands, stated that “a fair trial also requires that in appropriate cases the rights of the defence are balanced against those of witnesses or victims called upon to testify.” In conclusion, national laws, the Constitution of BiH, international conventions and Council of Europe recommendations establish BiH’s obligation to ensure the protection of and support to CRSV survivors.
Some measures include relocation and guarded transport, assignment of pseudonyms, testimony behind screens or with voice-image alteration techniques and testimony in closed sessions. Moreover, because of the aforementioned legal provisions, BiH also has the obligation to protect survivors from retraumatization during the criminal justice process and grant them psychological support.
Unfortunately, according to the OSCE’s analysis made in 2010, the Court of BiH was the only institution that provided effective psychological support to survivors, while entity-level courts and prosecutor’s offices lacked the structures to provide such support service at that time. The presence of the Witness Support Section, through which the Court of BiH assists survivors, illustrates the court’s progress. In fact, this unit comprises professional psychologists and social workers who provide services like 24-hour phone assistance, modest financial support to cover necessary expenses, explaining the testimonial process and discussing the possible psychological risks and benefits, and are present in the courtroom to communicate to the judges the witnesses’ stress level.
A report by the OSCE in 2017 highlighted a generally increased sensitivity of judges and prosecutors to the needs of survivors. However, despite several years having passed since the adoption of the strategy, the OSCE Mission detected serious violations of witness protection measures and a lack of dedicated witness support officers in a number of entity prosecutors’ offices and courts. Further, as underlined in another recent OSCE analysis, no improvements have been observed with regards to strengthening the capacity of social welfare centers, which should provide psychological support to victims due to laws on the “Protection of Witnesses under Threat and Vulnerable Witnesses.”
Even if several improvements have occurred, many challenges still undermine the effective and widespread implementation of protection and support measures. Legal professionals’ remaining lack of sensitivity, lack of infrastructures at the entity level and shortcomings in the existing national laws are all factors responsible for the fragmented implementation of support and protection measures. However, despite the issues linked to the BiH judicial system, civil society organizations (CSOs) have always played a key role in providing support to CRSV survivors when authorities’ action is lacking.
The international publicity surrounding violent, sexual war crimes committed against women in Bosnia led to what expert on Central European and gender studies, Elissa Helms, called a “Non-governmental organization (NGO) boom.” While CSOs do not have the ability to protect witnesses in court, the OSCE points out that witnesses and prosecutors often rely on these NGOs to provide psycho-social support, either formally through a memorandum of understanding, or informally and in an unregulated manner. While there are multiple professional organizations trusted by prosecutors’ offices across the country, concerns remain about some smaller organizations that may not employ thoroughly trained psychologists.
Among these trusted organizations are Medica Zenica based in Zenica, Snaga Žene and Viva Žene, both based in Tuzla and Udružene Žene based in Banja Luka. Given the high numbers of survivors of CRSV living in Bosnia, the services provided by these organizations are indispensable. For example, since its inception in 1993, Medica Zenica has provided over 28,000 people with psychological help, assisting survivors of both wartime and peacetime rape. And yet their contributions in supporting witnesses go beyond directly counseling; Medica Zenica also trains police, social workers, and members of the judiciary on how to interact with witnesses in a sensitive manner, and on the importance of protecting these women from physical harm and punitive stigmatization.
The importance of continuing the last decade’s positive arc towards more witness protection and more psychological support for survivors who come forward in Bosnia cannot be understated. A system that allows witnesses to be bullied and retraumatized discourages countless other survivors of CRSV from coming forward and sharing their experiences, allowing for more perpetrators of war crimes to enjoy guaranteed impunity. Further, since for centuries heinous sexual violence during war was excused and overlooked as the “spoils of war,”  it is imperative that local and international authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina set a legal and societal precedent that emboldens rather than silences survivors who come forward to testify against their perpetrators. This is why witness protection and support is the first step towards ending impunity.
This article is part of the series “Progress and Challenges in Addressing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence,” highlighting the experience of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad. The series comprises the following articles:
– Dealing with the legacy of wartime sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina
– Supporting witnesses: First step towards ending impunity for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina
– An investment in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s future: Compensating survivors of wartime sexual violence

author: Balkan Diskurs


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No one to trust? Misinformation about COVID-19 and elections increase in Latin America and the Caribbean · Global Voices
IFEX

Illustration by Pch.vector on Freepik, under Freepik license.
This is an excerpt of a report by IFEX's Americas Editor Paula Martins, “What you need to know now: Trends in freedom of expression and information in Latin America and the Caribbean,” republished and edited by Global Voices.
While Latin America and the Caribbean are moving, albeit slowly, to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, and the prospects of a “return to normality” emerge, economic and political crises are forming on the horizon. In particular, a lack of trust in governments is driving misinformation about COVID-19 in Latin America, according to UNESCO.
This region has seen a decline in its historical progress towards recognizing the right to information — despite an important new regional treaty in the area. A shortage of credible information about critical issues, including the fight against COVID-19, sits in contrast to the abundance of disinformation and misinformation that has submerged the region, not only in relation to the disease and its treatment but also about broader political issues, in particular electoral processes. The use of bots, in particular, has been adopted by numerous political campaigns in the fight for public opinion in the digital space.
That was the case in Venezuela. In December 2020, disinformation concerning electoral issues and the electoral process was widely circulated — even by governmental bodies. The country's National Electoral Council, for example, said via Twitter that the elections were being supervised by international observers, including from the United States, but the U.S. mission to the Organization of American States (OAS) denied this information.
In Mexico, “fake news” about candidates, parties, and institutions circulated abundantly on social networks before the polls. According to researchers, the vacuum of in-depth political debate opened up space for the dissemination of disinformation about candidates and the electoral process. Experts found that disinformation campaigns were complex, as four main actors orchestrated the strategies on social media: the “masters of ceremony,” who introduce the narrative; automated accounts (or bots) that amplify it; “trolls” that attack specific targets; and the “fans,” ordinary people who make the trends, by thoughtlessly replicating content.
In Peru’s June elections, misinformation circulated both online and offline in relation to the electoral procedures; much of it, as seen in other countries, trying to undermine confidence in electoral authorities. In addition to false information, real information was manipulated for political purposes. For example, news circulated about the registry voters lists, indicating that they included the names of deceased individuals, yet omitted information on the timing and procedure to fix and finalize the lists.
In response to Peru's information integrity issues, a new Peruvian fact-checking network was created in January 2021 to combat false information during the electoral campaign. The initiative was called Ama Llulla (“don’t lie” in Quechua), and its goal was to provide translations of checked information in Indigenous languages and to take down barriers impeding the political participation of vulnerable groups.
Press freedom has also taken a hit, hindering access to reliable information. As protests renewed across the region due to dissatisfaction with governments’ performance in combatting the pandemic, as well as with long-standing structural issues that preceded COVID-19, the violence deployed by police forces against protesters has also been observed against media covering these events. According to FLIP, 257 attacks against the press were documented during their coverage of the protests.
Disinformation abounded during these protests as well, such as during the demonstrations in Colombia. Local sources reported that hundreds of videos, audio recordings, and images were circulating online about Colombia's national strike, many with lies or information taken out of context, significantly impacting the narrative about what was actually taking place on the streets.
Violence also takes place outside of the context of public demonstrations. Stigmatizing speech and verbal attacks against the press increasingly come from high public officials. At least four journalists have been murdered since January 2021 in Latin America.
While impunity in cases of violence against journalists has consistently been a characteristic of the region, we have seen some progress, however, in three important cases concerning violence against journalists and human rights defenders: Berta Cáceres (Honduras), Jineth Bedoya (Colombia), and Alex Silveira (Brazil). In a region known for impunity in similar cases, good news must be celebrated.

author: IFEX


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What’s wrong with the political analogy comparing Taiwan to Afghanistan? · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Remix image by Oiwan Lam.
Following the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban's abrupt takeover of Kabul, Chinese commentators rushed online to draw comparisons between Taiwan and Kabul on social media. Many questioned whether the United States could be a reliable ally in withstanding potential Chinese military efforts to ‘unify’ with Taiwan. But as some pointed out online, the analogy is misleading.
Taiwan became an autonomous state after the ruling party of the Republic of China (ROC), the Kuomintang, also known as the China National Party, fled the continent in 1949 upon its defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Despite Taiwan's autonomy, the People's Republic of China (PRC), under the leadership of the Chinese Community Party (CCP), has long upheld a ‘One China Policy’ which asserts that Taiwan and mainland China are inalienable parts of a single ‘China.’ In recent years, China has maintained that it will not rule out military operations to unify with Taiwan.
To withstand Beijing’s political pressure, Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen has reached out to other countries to build diplomatic alliances, citing the United States as a key ally. The United States has adopted a strategically ambiguous policy regarding Taiwan since 1979. However, former President Donald Trump's administration loosened restrictions on the official U.S.-Taiwan relationship. Over the last two years, the U.S. dispatched warships across the Taiwan Straits and recently landed U.S. military aircraft in Taipei, which many viewed as a signal that the U.S. wants to strengthen diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Against such a background, criticisms about the messy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan have stirred anxiety in Taiwan, as many have questioned whether the U.S. is still capable of protecting and supporting its allies.
Pro-China unification politician and the Chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China Jaw Shaw-kong was among the first to use the Taiwan-Afghanistan analogy to question Tsai’s diplomatic alliance with the U.S. on Facebook on August 15:
在台灣，關心阿富汗前途的人不多，在民進黨的麻痹政策之下，大多數人民不知道阿富汗很可能就是台灣的前車之鑑。[…] 老共不可測，老美不可靠，要靠還是要靠自己，兩岸之間應該是「要和不要戰」，如果要戰就要好好準備，問題是台灣做好戰爭的準備了嗎？台灣如果不想成為第二個阿富汗，就要在「和」「戰」之間想清楚，要和還是要戰？和要怎麼和？戰要如何戰？像現在一樣，緊抱美國大腿就以為天下太平，混一天拖一天就以為永遠沒事…
In Taiwan, very few have paid attention to the future of Afghanistan. Under the democratic progressive party’s paralyzing policy, the majority of Taiwanese are not aware that what has happened in Afghanistan may happen in Taiwan. […] The CCP is unpredictable, the U.S. is unreliable, we have to depend on ourselves. The right choice is peace rather than war. If we choose war, we have to get prepared. But is Taiwan well-prepared for the war? If Taiwan doesn't want to become Afghanistan, we have to think hard about the choice between peace and war. How to make peace? How to fight a war? We can’t just hang on to the U.S. for protection and expect we will be safe forever…
If Tsai wants a war, she has to restore the mandatory enlistment for military service […], turn all civilians into soldiers and equip Taiwan with more advanced weapons. Or how could we resist China?  I want to ask Tsai Ing-wen, if you face a scenario like Afghanistan, you would choose to fight until the end or take a flight and flee so that the civilians don't have to face a war?
Jaw’s view spread widely on Facebook and Weibo, and within days many had weighed in on the comparison. For example, Taiwanese politician Lei Chien said, ‘Taiwan is less important than Afghanistan,’ implying the U.S. will abandon Taiwan if China launched a military attack. International relations scholar Huang Jie-jeng also questioned America's determination to back Taiwan in a hypothetical invasion from China.
In response to the discussion, Taiwan Premier Su Tseng-chang rebuked the comparison and slammed Jaw for ‘emboldening the enemies':
國民黨威權統治時，在戒嚴時我們不怕被殺被關，為台灣打開民主大門，今天還有強國以武力要併吞台灣，我們同樣不怕被殺被關，一定守護這個國家，守護這片土地，不像某些人老是長敵人威風，減自己志氣
Taiwan has gone through authoritarian rule under the KMT. During the martial law period, we were not afraid of being imprisoned or slaughtered and we fought our way to democracy. Today, China threatens to annex Taiwan. Likewise, we are not afraid of being imprisoned or slaughtered, we have to protect our country and our land. Unlike those who keep emboldening the enemies and spreading self-defeating sentiments.
In mainland China, state-run news outlet Global Times used Jaw's analogy to warn Taiwan:
China’s Global Times warns Taiwan that the US will abandon it, like it did Aghanistan, “once war breaks out” (not “if”). “The island's defense will collapse in hours and the US military won't come to help.” https://t.co/645lYRBCYm
— Liz Sly (@LizSly) August 16, 2021
The Global Times further discredited U.S. credibility in overseas military interventions:
Many people cannot help but recall how the Vietnam War ended in 1975: The US abandoned its allies in South Vietnam; Saigon was taken over; then the US evacuated almost all its citizens in Saigon. And in 2019, US troops withdrew from northern Syria abruptly and abandoned their allies, the Kurds.
But Wang Hao, a Taiwanese writer on international affairs, invited others to read the news from a different angle:
很多人在討論1949年美國丟掉中國，1975年美國丟掉南越，2021年美國丟掉阿富汗。
可是，1949年，史達林沒想到10年後中蘇分裂；1975年，毛澤東沒想到4年後中越戰爭；2021年，什麼是習近平沒想到的呢？
塔利班會不會變成另一個越共，應該是此刻習近平最擔心的吧？！
Many people are talking about the U.S. abandoning China in 1949, abandoning Vietnam in 1975, and abandoning Afghanistan in 2021. But in 1949, Stalin did not anticipate China splitting up with the USSR 10 years later; in 1975, Mao Zedong did not anticipate the Sino-Vietnamese War 4 years later; what does Xi Jinping not foresee in 2021?
Independent journalist Melissa Chan countered the political analogy with views taken from law professor Donald Clarke and foreign relation expert Andrew Small:
… In my conversation with @ajwsmall (will post soon!), he also points out that Asia powers might even welcome US withdrawal because it means it can refocus on security in the Indo-Pacific.
— Melissa Chan (@melissakchan) August 16, 2021
More importantly, as pointed out by some Taiwanese journalists, the comparison is very misleading as it suggests that the U.S. still has troops based in Taiwan. However, the fact is — the U.S. withdrew all troops from Taiwan back in 1979, yet the country still stands independent today.

author: Oiwan Lam


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After Dutch Literary Prize winner says Suriname ‘needed’ former president Bouterse, organisers cancel her award ceremony · Global Voices
Fausia S. Abdul

Surinamese author Astrid Heli Roemer in 2016. Photo by Raúl Neijhorst via Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Noted Surinamese writer, Astrid Roemer, who this year became the first writer from her country to receive the prestigious Dutch Literary Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren), has made some now-infamous comments that seem set to be ingrained in her legacy.
The uproar concerns Roemer's description of former Suriname president Dési Bouterse as “unforgettably brave.” In 2019, Bouterse was sentenced to a 20-year jail term after a military court found him guilty of murder for the execution of 15 dissidents in 1982, an act that became known as the “December murders.” Bouterse first came to power in 1980 through a coup d'etat which ushered in an era of military rule, during which he was accused of numerous human rights violations.
Roemer's comments prompted both shock and outrage, both in Suriname and abroad. While she will still receive the coveted literary prize, worth about 55,000 United States dollars, the organisers have cancelled the formal award ceremony, which had been carded for October, explaining that it would not be appropriate given “Ms. Roemer’s recent views and statements.” On her Facebook page, Roemer described the cancellation as “een pak van mijn hart,” or “a load off my mind,” and had this to say about Bouterse:
Onze Surinaamse gemeenschap Desi Bouterse hard nodig heeft gehad om zelfbewuster te worden. Merci Man.
Our Surinamese community needed Desi Bouterse the most in order to become more self-aware. Thank you, man.
After Bouterse's 1980 coup came a series of killings that were confirmed by Amnesty International and other human rights organisations, including those that happened between December 7 and 8, 1982, when 15 men—journalists, scientists, and trade union leaders opposing Bouterse's military regime—were shot dead at Fort Zeelandia, a fortress located in the capital, Paramaribo. The lone survivor, who eventually testified at Bouterse's 2019 trial, described him as being in charge, “calm and cold-blooded”.
The interior courtyard of Fort Zeelandia, where the ‘December murders’ were carried out. Photo by Dan Lundberg on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Tried in absentia, Bouterse protested his 20-year sentence, prompting demands that he should receive another 20 years in prison, an issue on which the court will rule come August 30, though Bouterse will be able to appeal.
The judges of the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren commended Roemer's “unconventional, poetic” writing. At 78, she has drawn on a lifetime of existing in a colonial space to produce her highly regarded work. Though she has not relegated herself to solely discussing slavery or the country's tumultuous political legacy, her literary representations of Surinamese history have won her other accolades. In 2016, she was the first Caribbean writer to win the P.C. Hooft-prijs Dutch literary award, at which time the jury noted, “political engagement and literary experiment go hand in hand with Roemer,” an observation which perhaps renders the author's bold statements about Bouterse not completely surprising.
She refused to label him a murderer, explaining:
Ik begrijp dat mensen dat niet prettig vinden, maar ik ben geneigd om Desi Bouterse te geloven als hij zegt: ik heb geen burgermoorden gewild. Ik geloof hem.
I understand that people do not like that, but I tend to believe Desi Bouterse when he says: ‘I didn't want civilian murders.’ I believe him.
The moment she said it, reactions came in left and right. Attorney Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You, a member of the Commemoration Committee for Victims of Suriname and wife of one of the victims of the December murders, said she was “shocked and stunned by Roemer's statements”:
Ik wist eigenlijk niet wat ik zag en hoorde. Ik kijk er vooral van op dat ze zegt dat er geen bewijs is voor de uitspraak dat Bouterse een moordenaar zou zijn. Er is een vonnis, uitvoerig gemotiveerd. Ik was bij die zitting. Het is evident dat hij is veroordeeld voor medeplichtigheid aan moord.
I actually did not know what I saw and heard. I am especially surprised that she says that there is no evidence for the verdict that Bouterse was a murderer. There is a verdict, extensively motivated. I was at that hearing. It is evident that he has been convicted of complicity in murder.
Another lawyer, Gerard Spong, was clipped in his reaction:
Ze niet goed snik.
She is not good in the head.
In response to Spong's plea to deny her the prize entirely, Roemer—in a tweet that now appears to be deleted—quipped:
Well, well Spong…STORM IN A GLASS OF WATER.
This was closely followed by Jan Dijkgraaf writing a satirical letter to Astrid Roemer, questioning Spong:
Een advocaat die de Belgische koning oproept om uw literaire werk niet te belonen met die ereprijs omdat uw (bizarre) mening hem niet aanstaat, vertoont namelijk zelf onvervalst NSB-gedrag. Die uitspraken [prijzen van Bouterse] zíjn natuurlijk totaal gestoord.
A lawyer who calls on the Belgian king not to reward your literary work with that prize because he does not like your (bizarre) opinion, is showing genuine NSB [Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, a Dutch fascist and Nazi-leaning political party] behavior himself. Those statements [praising Bouterse] are of course completely insane.
India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, meets then president of Suriname, Dési Bouterse, at the 6th BRICS Summit in Brasilia, in 2014. Photo by MEAphotogallery on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Comité Herdenking Slachtoffers Suriname (Commemoration Committee for Victims of Suriname) has called upon the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Association) to “openly take a stand” against what it calls the “anti-democratic and anti-rule of law statements” of the Surinamese writer.
Rita Rahman, current chair of the Werkgroep Caraïbische Letteren (Caribbean Letters Working Group), who lost both her husband and brother in the December murders, wrote:
In uw juryrapport wordt Astrid H. Roemer geprezen voor haar vermogen om thema’s uit de recente geschiedenis, zoals corruptie, schuld, kolonisatie en dekolonisatie, te verbinden met de kleine geschiedenis, het verhaal op de mensenmaat. Met haar verwarde geest, wonend in het door haar blijkbaar onbegrepen Suriname, heeft zij de dekolonisatie strijd vanaf de jaren dertig tot en met de jaren zeventig op grote  afstand meegemaakt en beseft blijkbaar niet dat juist die strijd in de jaren 80 door de militaire staatsgreep bloedig […] Zij slaat dus de plank dezer dagen goed mis, en kan daarvoor geen handreiking krijgen.
In your jury report, Astrid H. Roemer is praised for her ability to connect themes from recent history, such as corruption, guilt, colonization and decolonization, with small history, the story on a human scale. With her confused mind, living in Suriname apparently misunderstood by her, she experienced the decolonization struggle from the thirties to the seventies at a great distance and apparently does not realize that precisely that struggle in the eighties was bloody due to the military coup d'état […] So she misses the point badly these days, and can't get any help for that.
Roemer's “storm in a glass” grew exponentially after she responded to columnist Harriet Duurvoort, who has Surinamese roots and had criticised Roemer's attitude towards Bouterse, tweeting on August 7:
In haar boek ‘Lijken op liefde’ wist ze op een gelaagde, literaire manier het grote trauma van de decembermoorden te verwerken. Maar dat ze zich nu zo lovend over Bouterse uitlaat,is echt een klap in het gezicht van Suriname, van Nederlandse en Surinaamse Surinamers.
In her book ‘Looks on Love’ she managed to process the great trauma of the December murders in a layered, literary way. But the fact that she now expresses herself so praising about Bouterse is really a slap in the face of Suriname, of Dutch and Surinamese.
Roemer clapped back on the thread, claiming that Bouterse did a lot for Suriname's awareness of the decolonisation process:
Bijzondere uitspraken pic.twitter.com/nBXiD8yZAj
— Hans Acker (@HansAckerNY) August 10, 2021
Roemer ended by calling Duurvoort “lultrut” or “an asshole bitch,” causing a flood of reactions that ranged from horror to assumptions about the author's mental health. Some social media users even wondered whether Roemer’s Twitter account had been hacked, but thus far, she has firmly stood firmly behind her words.
Surinamese netizens remain divided. While many took offence, not everyone is against Roemer’s statements or sees Bouterse as a villain. Politician Mohamed Amzad Abdoel, who is a member of Suriname's National Democratic Party, lauded Roemer's courage as a Black woman unafraid to use her voice:
[D]e wijze waarop Astrid Roemer is behandeld een duidelijk voorbeeld is hoe democratie in de wereld werkt. Zolang men het liedje niet zingt zoals Het Westen dat wil, wordt men gestraft. Het is deze heerschappij van Het Westen waartegen Bouterse altijd heeft gestreden. Het zal waarschijnlijk ook deze waarheid zijn die Astrid Roemer heeft ingezien.
[T]he way Astrid Roemer was treated is a clear example of how democracy works in the world. As long as people don't sing the song the way the West wants, they will be punished. It is this reign of the West that Bouterse has always fought against. It will probably also be this truth that Astrid Roemer has seen.
Roemer is not new to controversy. Prior to Suriname's elections in May 2020, she said on Facebook—the post appears to have since been taken down—that, as a modern woman, she felt uneasy about “administrative dominance” by Hindus and Muslims. The country's current president, Chan Santokhi, is Hindu. As then police commissioner, he led the investigation into the December murders, even as Bouterse claimed Santokhi wanted to “imprison and kill” him. Roemer has held tightly to her opinion, however, recently telling the Dutch daily, de Volkskrant, that although she is happy President Santokhi is talking about a multireligious and multiethnic society, she is still concerned.
As it stands, however, the lion's share of public concern still seems to be focused on Roemer.

author: Fausia S. Abdul


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An eight-year-old boy is the youngest person ever accused of blasphemy in Pakistan’s history · Global Voices
Rai M Azlan

The Shri Katas Raj Temples, also known as Qila Katas, is a Hindu Temple Complex in Choa Saidan Shah, a small town of Chakwal District in the Punjab Province of Pakistan. Image via Flickr by ClicksByMohammadOmer. CC BY-SA 3.0
An eight-year-old Hindu boy has been charged with violating Pakistan's blasphemy laws in Bhong village of the Rahim Yar Khan District in the Punjab province after urinating in a madrassa (a Muslim religious school) library. According to Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws, violators could face life in prison or death. Critics say these laws have long been used to persecute minority groups in Pakistan.
In late July 2021, a teacher in the madrassa lodged a police complaint that a young non-Muslim boy entered the library and urinated on a carpet. Police arrested the child and charged him with blasphemy. He spent a week in prison until a court granted him bail on August 4. After the announcement, dozens of people protested his release and vandalised a Hindu temple in Bhong.
Numerous videos went viral on social media showing a mob of people desecrating the Siddhi Vinayak Temple in Bhong and also briefly blocking a nearby motorway.
Journalist Veengas tweeted:
Ganesh Temple, village Bhong in Rahim Yar Khan, Punjab has been ravaged.
Another day, another attack on Hindus in Pakistan. pic.twitter.com/grLlT582XL
— Veengas (@VeengasJ) August 4, 2021
The boy’s family went into hiding, and many other Hindu families from the locality have since fled their homes. Paramilitary troops were deployed to the area to diffuse the situation and prevent further unrest. So far, 50 people have been arrested for vandalising the Hindu temple and 100 more are being investigated.
Prime Minister Imran Khan condemned the incident on Twitter:
Strongly condemn attack on Ganesh Mandir in Bhung, RYK yesterday. I have already asked IG Punjab to ensure arrest of all culprits & take action against any police negligence. The govt will also restore the Mandir.
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) August 5, 2021
In a Twitter thread, Parkash Heerani from the Pakistani Hindu community noted that there have been seven attacks on Hindu temples in Pakistan in the past 12 months:
5. Hanuman Temple, Lyari, Sindh on 17 August 2020.
6. Krishna Temple Islamabad ( Which was under construction ) on 4 July 2020.
7. Mata Rani Temple, Chahro Sindh on 26 January 2020.
Justice given:- Arey yeh konsi baat kardi? Ap pakistan mein hain.
— Parkash Heerani ??? (@parkashpakistan) August 4, 2021
On August 9, 2021, Amnesty International asked the Pakistan government to drop the charges against the boy and provide adequate protection for him, his family, and the local Hindu community.
About South Asia, a collective of feminist journalists highlighted a petition by Hindu Samata to protect vulnerable Pakistani Hindus:
An 8 year old Hindu, faces the death penalty in Pakistan on the charges of blasphemy. PLEASE SAVE THIS CHILD. pic.twitter.com/SpmHgZgjlV
— aboutsouthasia (@aboutsouthasia) August 9, 2021
Sufi scholar and TV host Syed Bilal Qutab criticised the anti-Hindu violence on Facebook:
نہایت افسوس ناک، یہ جنونی کس مذہب کے پیروکار ہیں کہ جنہیں دوسروں کی عبادت گاہوں کے تقدس کا خیال نہیں۔ ان سب افراد کے خلاف ایکشن لے کر سخت سزا دی جائے۔ ہندو کمیونٹی کے جذبات اس طرح بہیمانہ انداز میں مجروح کرنے پر ہم ان سے معذرت چاہتے ہیں۔
Sadly, the sort of religion these fanatics are following does not care about the sanctity of other people's places of worship. Action should be taken against all these people and severe punishment should be given. We apologize for hurting the Hindu community in such a senseless manner.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan demanded increased protection for minorities:
On #NationalMinoritiesDay2021, HRCP calls on the state to provide better and more consistent protection for minorities against all forms of violence if it wishes to truly call itself a just state. pic.twitter.com/2BQeTc9NdB
— Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (@HRCP87) August 11, 2021
On August 11, 2021, Hafiz Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, the Special Representative to the Prime Minister on Religious Harmony and the Middle East, claimed that the case registered against the eight-year-old Hindu boy in Rahim Yar Khan was not covered by the country's blasphemy laws. He strongly denied The Guardian's report, saying in a statement that the newspaper had misreported the issue and that “the desecration of seminary case should not have been registered by police as such cases defame the country.”
After media and government pressure over the issue, the police dropped blasphemy charges against the boy. Ashrafi confirmed that “action has been taken against the police officials who registered the case against the boy.” He further added:
The charges against the boy were baseless. Minorities are equal citizens and these are illiterate people attacking worship places. Our Islam does not allow attacking of any other religion’s places of worship.
Kapil Dev, a Pakistani human rights activist belonging to the Hindu community, posted an update noting that the charges had finally been dropped:
Just-in:
FIR against the 8-year-old Hindu boy booked in blasphemy case quashed.
The Hindu temple in Rahim Yar Khan restored after the attack.
Well done #Pakistan #PakistanForAll #PakistanZindabad
— Kapil Dev (@KDSindhi) August 12, 2021
The government repaired the temple and handed it back to the Hindu community in a ceremony on Wednesday, August 11, 2021.
Kapil Dev lauded the government for the swift restoration and solidarity:
The way the nation & the State stood with #Hindu community on recent #RahimaYarKhan #templeattack incident is really unprecedented and deserve huge accolades. This has regained our faith and rejuvenated our hopes in reviving peaceful, progressive & pluralisatic #PakistanForAll.
— Kapil Dev (@KDSindhi) August 12, 2021\
In Pakistan, British colonial rulers first penned the laws relating to religious attacks in 1860. Pakistan inherited these laws when it gained independence in 1947. The military government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988) expanded the laws, adding punishments for crimes such as making derogatory remarks against Islamic dignitaries or intentionally vandalising the Quran. A separate clause was introduced in 1986 that assigned a death sentence or life imprisonment as the penalty for blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H).
According to data from the Centre for Social Justice in Pakistan, between 1987 and 2020, over 1,850 people were charged under Pakistan's blasphemy laws.
Blasphemy laws have often been misused by mobs to enforce extrajudicial justice on minority groups in Pakistan. Since 1990, at least 80 people accused of blasphemy have been killed by mobs in Pakistan.
Moreover, anyone who tries to help people accused of blasphemy is often subjected to threats and violence. Such attacks are also common online toward people criticising the blasphemy laws, particularly journalists, academics and civil society organisations.

author: Rai M Azlan


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France’s regional languages, patois, dialects: what was that again? · Global Voices
Laila Le Guen

Map of the languages spoken in metropolitan France, showing their approximate respective geographical extents. Visual taken from Lexilogos.com with the authorisation of the author and modified by the Wikipedia user Hellotheworld, under licence CC-BY-SA 3.0.
When it comes to languages, and minority languages in particular, the vocabulary employed often arouses debate due to the political positions of and the state of relations between linguistic communities. In France, some linguistic communities have close to two centuries of struggle behind them in their fight to gain forms of acceptance, which include the designation as “language,” rather than “dialect” or “patois,” terms which still exist in current vocabulary, but tend to have acquired a negative connotation.
France considers French to be the national and official language. However, the linguistic reality is far more complex, with 75 languages that are termed officially as “regional languages”, twenty or so of which are in the territory of European France (the majority of these languages are therefore spoken in its overseas départements (provinces) and regions).
Let's take the example of Gallo, a Romance language from Brittany, in the north-west of the country, whose speakers were estimated to number around 200,000 in a socio-linguistic survey conducted in 2018. A victim of the cliché that it is a deformed version of French and considered a variety with low prestige, Gallo is currently taught in public schools and can be taken as a baccalauréat (school leavers’) examination subject. Along with Breton, it was recognized in 2004 as forming part of the “languages of Brittany, besides the French language” by the Regional Council.
Global Voices’ files on the linguistic situation in France employ the term “regional languages,” following the widest current usage. This description is found for example in legislative texts, like that of the act relating to the protection as heritage and the promotion of regional languages (loi Molac), in the media and also in the discourse of those engaged in the defence and development of these languages, such as the  collective «Pour que vivent nos langues» (“So our languages may live”).
The General Delegation on the French Language and the Languages of France, the body tasked with coordinating language policy at the national level, is proposing a definition of the regional languages of metropolitan France “as languages spoken in a part of the national territory for longer than French has been the common language,” thus placing them in a historical perspective which gives precedence to the longevity of a form of speech's presence as a criterion for legitimacy and accords a central place to French as the language of reference.
The 18th century saw a moment of linguistic consolidation, with a strong will on the part of the authorities to “destroy the patois,” [the term patois here is taken in French context and refers to a form of speech used in a very restricted geographical zone] which were seen as an obstacle to the advancement of the nation. This plan of eradication was set in stone at the end of the 19th century, under the aegis of the minister Jules Ferry, who made education compulsory and forbade the use of languages other than French in school under pain of punishment. The newspaper Le Messager published this exhortation on 24 September 1840:
Détruisez, si vous pouvez, les ignobles patois des Limousins, des Périgourdins et des Auvergnats, forcez-les par tous les moyens possibles à l’unité de la langue française comme à l’uniformité des poids et mesures, nous vous approuverons de grand cœur, vous rendrez service à ses populations barbares et au reste de la France qui n’a jamais pu les comprendre.
Destroy, if you can, the ignoble patois of the Limousins, the Périgourdins and the Auvergnats, force them by all means possible into the unity of the French language as into the uniformity of weights and measures, we will give you our full-hearted approval, you will be doing a service to the barbaric populations and to the rest of France which has never been able to understand them.
Inaugurating a timid steer away from the previous highly circumspect policies on multilingualism, perceived as a threat to national unity, the loi Deixonne of 1951 “relating to the teaching of local languages and dialects” concerned only Basque, Breton, Catalan and Occitan. The text made  reference to “local forms of speech” and the transmission of “folklore, literature and the popular arts.” The term “dialects” has since been erased from the official vocabulary.
The linguist Henriette Walter defines  regional languages as “languages of different origins (Latin, Germanic, Celtic or of unknown origin, such as Basque), but historically present on French territory, continuously, in well identified geographical localities,” a binding to territory that notably excludes Romani and Yiddish.
Although the researcher also defends the use of the term “patois” to designate a form of speech used in a very restricted geographical zone, and goes on to say that for linguists a patois is a language, this usage has become very much the minority in the scientific community.
The etymology of the word itself goes back, according to John Orr to the Old French verb ‘patoier,’, which meant “to wave one's hands, gesticulate (to make oneself understood, as of deaf mutes),” then “to go about something, to scheme.” A semantic slippage has shifted the meaning of “patois” from gesticulation to behaviour, then uncouth behaviour, before coming to designate a “private language (eg. infant babble, the repertoire of bird calls, a rustic or uncouth speech).” The definition given by Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie in turn takes up the language/patois opposition, leaning on the idea of a singular purity on the part of French: “Patois. Corrupt speech as is heard in almost all the provinces: each has its own patois […]. The language is spoken only in the capital.”
Thus, the word “patois” is in France freighted with many pejorative connotations, listed by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé in a blog post. He explores in the process the complexity of this concept, showing that “patois” may be made at once the object of deprecation and of a sense of pride for its speakers:
Évidemment, je leur dis ce que je pense au sujet des idées attachées au terme de patois : qu’il est une sous langue ou du français corrompu ; qu’il y a (ou y avait) autant de patois que de villages ; qu’il se sait mais ne s’apprend pas, qu’il ne s’écrit pas, qu’il est différent de l’occitan ; libres à eux de me suivre ou pas.
Of course, I tell them what I think of the ideas conventionally attached to the term ‘patois': that it is a sub-language or corrupt French; that there are (or were) as many patois as there are villages; that it is known rather than learnt, that it is not written, that it is different from Occitan; it is up to them whether or not to follow me.
The negative associations of patois overlap strongly with those of “dialect” in current speech. In linguistics, a dialect is quite simply a variety of a language, with no hierarchy being established. This concept is indeed more complex than it seems, as the YouTuber Linguisticae explains in this explanatory video:
Nonetheless, in its current use, “dialect” is the vehicle for an image of a sub-language, associated with a fragmentation that is judged inferior in comparison to the strong standardisation of a dominant language such as French, and with a territorial, social, and even intellectual, limitation. The supposed absence of a written literature in the case of the patois and, to a lesser extent, the dialects is retained as a criterion for belittlement.
The French linguistic context is characterised by a strong attachment to the French language, which has imposed itself over the entirety of the territory by active national unification policies, notably via compulsory education in French. The “language of the Republic” (article 2 of the Constitution, 1992 amendment) is currently in the large majority and dominant. In that sense, the so-called “regional” languages area also minority languages in terms of their number of speakers, and even ‘minoritised’ by the fact of their historical marginalisation.

author: Laila Le Guen


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Russia blames Azerbaijan for violating ceasefire · Global Voices
Arzu Geybullayeva

Azerbaijani people celebrating victory in Karabakh. CC BY-SA 4.0
Russian authorities blamed Azerbaijan for violating the ceasefire agreement that was signed last November, as tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan continue to rise. This was the first time that Moscow explicitly blamed one side for violating the ceasefire. Previously ceasefire breaches were described in more neutral terms, urging both parties to respect the truce. “The Azerbaijani armed forces carried out two strikes using attack-type quadcopters on the position of the Nagorno-Karabakh armed formations. There were no casualties,” read the statement by Russia's Ministry of Defense on its website referring to clashes that took place on August 11.
Although Armenia and Azerbaijan signed an agreement to end the 44-day war in November 2020, clashes have continued between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces since then.
The most recent and deadliest clashes were reported on July 28, with both sides blaming each other for starting the shoot-out and violating the ceasefire agreement.
Following the clashes, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan proposed that Russia deploy outposts on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. During a government meeting, Pashinyan said, “Given the current situation, I think it makes sense to consider the question of stationing outposts of Russian border guards along the entire length of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.”
So far, Moscow has rejected Pashinyan's request.
Armenia is already growing skeptical of Russia's involvement in the post-conflict relationship. Last month, Armenia expressed its skepticism about its membership within the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) after the latter described clashes reported on July 6 as a “border incident.” CSTO Secretary General Stanislav Zas told reporters in Moscow:
You have to understand that the potential of the CSTO is used only in the event of an aggression, an attack [on one of the member countries]. Here we are dealing, in fact, with a border incident. Thank God, there are no casualties, there are no shooting there. This is a border incident, it must be solved, and we are in favor of solving it peacefully.
But following a visit to Armenia on August 10, Zas did concede that the clashes along the border were a “threat to Armenia” and other CSTO members, according to reporting by OC Media.
The clashes that took place on August 11 were first reported by the Nagorno-Karabakh Defence Army. The next day, the Defence Army reported that Azerbaijani troops had attempted to cross the line of contact east of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In response, the Azerbaijan Ministry of Defense released a statement accusing Armenia of violating the trilateral agreement by “moving its armed forces to the territory of Azerbaijan, where Russian peacekeepers are temporarily deployed.” The Ministry of Defense further accused Armenia of resorting to such actions on purpose, provoking and aggravating the situation.

author: Arzu Geybullayeva


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Russian authorities declare independent election monitor Golos a “foreign agent” · Global Voices
Tanya Lokot

Promotional materials for Golos election monitoring movement – a bottle with the label “The spirit of free elections. Use in times of despair”. Image by Golosinfo.org, used with permission.
The Russian Justice Ministry designated the independent election monitoring group Golos as a “foreign agent” on August 18, 2021. The new restrictions on the movement's election integrity work come a month before the parliamentary elections in Russia.
The designation has been applied to a number of non-profit organisations and media outlets in Russia in recent months, and requires organisations or individuals “involved in political activity” and deemed to be “receiving assistance from abroad” to register with the state or face fines and, potentially, prison sentences. They are also required to regularly report on their activities and indicate their foreign agent status on any materials or content they distribute, including social media posts.
According to Interfax news agency, Golos is the first informal movement to be added to the new “foreign agent” registry created in early 2021 for individuals and organisations that do not have legal entities in Russia. The new registry is run by the Justice Ministry, which also maintains two other “foreign agent” registries — one for registered NGOs and another for media outlets.
The “foreign agent” legislation, updated in December 2020, takes a broad view of what constitutes “political activity” in the interests of “foreign entities” or intermediary organisations “acting in the interests of foreign sources”. As noted by independent media outlet Meduza,
The law’s definition of “political activity” is extremely broad. In particular, it includes election monitoring, social media posts about Russian politics, and taking part in rallies.
Golos joins a long list of entities and citizens dubbed as “foreign agents” in Russia: among them are news websites VTimes, Meduza and US-funded RFE/RL, investigative media projects such as The Insider, as well as individual journalists, human rights defenders and activists. Non-profit organisations such as women’s rights organization Nasiliyu.net and rights group For Human Rights are also on the list.
While media outlets and NGOs with the designation have either shut down their operations, seen their websites blocked or had advertising revenues plummet, Golos’ addition to the list of foreign agents is especially worrying ahead of the September 2021 elections to the Russian State Duma (parliament).
The Golos voters’ rights movement emerged in 2013 after its precursor, the registered non-profit organisation Golos, was blacklisted as a foreign agent by the Justice Ministry after it was awarded the Sakharov Freedom Award by the Helsinki Committee. The legal entity was officially dissolved by courts in 2016, but the unofficial movement has continued to play a central role in observing the elections in Russia and ensuring integrity and transparency of the electoral process.
In a statement on its website, Golos said:
We have no doubt that the current attack on the largest community of independent election observers just a month before election day is an attempt to prevent Russian citizens from exercising that very right of observation, which the Russian Constitutional Court considered to be a guarantee of public recognition of the election results.
The monitor's concerns are far from baseless. In preparation for the September elections, fearing low voter turnout and worried about the dropping ratings of the ruling United Russia party, Russian election officials have restricted video monitoring at polling stations, with only commission officials, candidates and parties granted access to live video feeds. Multiple independent candidates (banking on Alexey Navalny's Smart Voting initiative that promotes running a single opposition candidate in election districts to deprive the United Russia party of votes) have been denied election registration under various pretexts, while others have been prosecuted and jailed.
For the first time since 2008, the OSCE said it would not be able to send an international observation mission to the Duma elections after Russia severely restricted the number of observers, citing COVID-19 concerns.
Golos has vowed to continue its work to train citizens as observers and commissioners at polling stations, and said it believes independent citizen observation is key to ensuring a transparent election:
What is happening now means one thing: the authorities understand that they will not be able to get the desired result in the elections honestly and are afraid of mass independent observation. Therefore, active citizens, in spite of everything, need to take the most active part in the elections of the State Duma deputies.

author: Tanya Lokot


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The Chinese government drives support among ambassadors of Muslim countries for the Uyghur genocide · Global Voices
Shohret Hoshur

The ambassadors of Palestine, Pakistan, and Syria speak at the Chinese CGTN TV program ‘The Point’. Screenshot from CGTN YouTube channel.
China’s propaganda efforts to showcase prosperity rather than gruesome prisons and labour camps in Xinjiang reached a new high recently, as displayed in an interview with three foreign ambassadors aiming to dismiss claims of human rights violations in the region.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that, over recent years, more than 1,200 diplomats, journalists, and religious personnel from over 100 countries have visited Xinjiang.
“They saw the region with their eyes, realizing that what they witnessed was different from some Western media reports,” Hua Chunying, a spokesperson China’s Foreign Ministry, claimed.
In late April 2021, the government published a video interview with the ambassadors of Palestine, Pakistan, and Syria in English on a notorious public relations website. The aim was to spread propaganda to the Western world, and it became clear immediately after the interview started.
“We fully understand because we have the same problem,” the Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha said during the interview, after a guided visit to the region.
Moustapha's reference was to the various adversaries of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who has ruled the country with an iron fist since 2000. Between 2014 and 2019, the Syrian territory was under constant military threat by the Islamic State.
Pakistan's ambassador to China, Moin Ul Haque, described this trip as “an experience of a lifetime,” and praised the infrastructure of the region — including the concentration camps — as “people-centric development.”
No-one, including Uyghur activists, has denied the development of Xinjiang. Yet, progress has moved forward despite a human tragedy.
While China urgently needs the natural resources of Xinjiang, or East Turkistan as Uyghur activists prefer to call the region, to make the Chinese economic dream a reality, Pakistan has received Chinese investment to feed its population and build a strong military against its long-term enemy, India.
Shockingly for Uyghur observers, Fariz Mehdawi, the Palestinian ambassador to China, was also impressed by the “development” he witnessed in the Uyghur region. “One should not believe that diplomats are so naive that they could be maneuvered to take and buy anything,” Mehdawi argued, adding that “the diplomats are not part of a conspiracy that would justify something against what they had seen.”
In this statement, Mehdawi confessed that he accepts China’s narrative without reserves. The Palestinian and Chinese government, in fact, share a similar proxy adversary, the US government. The Chinese government has long argued that the US government's support for the Uyghur's cause is directed to undermining China becoming a global economic superpower. The Palestinian government peddled the Chinese stance on Xinjiang possibly in response to the US support for Israel in the long-lasting conflict in Palestine.
Mehdawi went as far as saying that he believes that the Uyghur problem is not a humanitarian issue but is rather a matter of geopolitics “created by the US,” which aims to hinder China’s global rise.
Using the logic of whataboutism, China and its supporters always refer to the genocides in America, Australia, and Africa carried out decades and centuries ago.
The struggle of the Uyghurs, however, is a real and current one. Satellite imagery proved that there are around 380 camps, detention centers, and jails where people are kept against their will and without a fair trial.
At the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council, 65 countries supported China regarding the Uyghur situation, while 44 Western countries criticized China for human rights violations in the Uyghur region, with some accusing China of committing genocide on Uyghurs.
Ironically, most of the countries that support the Chinese policy in Xinjiang are, like the Uyghurs, Muslim.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman supported China’s targeting of Uyghurs and Muslim people, stating that “China has the right to take anti-terrorism and de-extremism measures to safeguard national security,” when he spoke with Xi Jinping.
Patigul Ghulam, an Uyghur mother, who lost her son in the events of July 5, 2009 in Urumchi, described her plight during the search for her son in an interview with Radio Free Asia.
Syrian mothers are happier than me. They can cry when their child dies. Palestinian mothers are lucky. If they cry, thousands of reporters come to [film and interview] them. If we have thousands of our children abducted and killed, no journalists come to us. Palestinian and Syrian children can throw stones at their enemy, and in the worst case, they will die instantly from a bullet or a bomb, but they will not have their organs taken or be forced to work until they are dead and their bodies can be found.
Prominent Uyghur activist Rabiye Qadeer, a former head of the World Uyghur Congress, said in an interview that China is implementing a “slow-death genocide” through concentration camps, sterilization, and slave labor.
China needs time to achieve this aim. So, they have been constantly denying the existence of concentration camps and then claiming it as a vocational institution, lying by saying: ‘The trainees already graduated.’ This went on for five years.
In the interview, Qadeer asked the international community to “not to expect China’s approval of the investigation or hope to achieve any successful outcomes, instead, make decisions and enact based on the existing facts.”
In a recent article, Nury Turkel, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, said that he believes truth and justice will eventually trump the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Just as the Chinese government officials who kept my mother captive could not prevent her from dreaming of freedom, the CCP’s campaign of lies will not prevail against the power of truth.

author: Shohret Hoshur


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With attacks on Ukrainian activists on the rise, civic pressure is key to ensuring justice · Global Voices
Transitions Online

Image: Protest By Arturo Molina Burgos for Noun Project. Public domain.
On July 16, 2021, an activist’s car was torched for the second time in six months in Rubizhne, a town in Luhansk region. On July 15, in Dnipro, two unknown persons assaulted a local human rights defender. On June 18, a car belonging to the daughter of an Odessa-based activist was burned to the frame. On June 22, something similar happened to an eco-activist in Kyiv.
This is just a small sample of attacks on community activists in the past two months. Since 2019, Ukraine has seen a sharp rise in incidents of harassment of those fighting against corruption, illegal construction, and human rights violators. These numbers continue to rise in 2021, according to a recent report by Zmina Human Rights Center. Zaborona spoke to several of the affected activists to explain why these crimes and attacks will only increase.
At around 3 a.m. on June 22, a car burst into flames near an apartment building in the Kyiv neighborhood of Nova Darnytsia. Two unknown figures had poured some sort of liquid over the car and fled. The fire spread to neighboring cars and then to the cars parked outside in the courtyard. The initial car burned belonged to a Kyiv eco-activist named Oleksandr Silchenko, aka Oleksiy Kot (“cat” in Ukrainian). Since 2016, Kot has been fighting against illegal construction in parks in Darnytsia.
“Our neighbors called us in the middle of the night and said ‘Sasha, your car is in flames!’ I’m on the balcony – it’s definitely burning,” Silchenko recalls the events of that night. “We called firefighters, the police. Though by that time, everything had already burned to the ground.” No suspects have been identified, he says.
Silchenko believes the arson attack is connected to his activism. In his work with the “Parks of Darnytsia” community organization, they’ve had the time to “annoy many,” he says. Not long after the arson, he received a call from an unknown number. The conversation began with the words, “You must understand – if you keep shoving your nose into other people’s business, then you should be ready for problems,” Silchenko recalls. He doesn’t know who called him, as the police have yet to identify the caller.
“They thought to scare me with these methods. But this has all only provoked me. If it’s come to that, then we’re just considered cattle who don’t even have the right to their own voice. That option doesn’t suit me,” Silchenko says. He’s a Kyiv resident who grew up in the Darnytsia district, and over the years has tracked how his district has changed: the spread of apartment buildings, the loss of green spots, the formation of a “concrete ghetto.”
In 2016, Silchenko was far from activism: he bought, repaired and resold damaged cars. But five years ago, his patience snapped. That same year, in the Poznyaki neighborhood not far from Darnytsia, a company called Zhitloinvestbud-UKB began erecting a 27-story building that would contain 1,300 apartments on the site of a small lake, Kachyne. Local residents were incensed and a group of volunteers gathered through social media to protest.
“We were called through Facebook. I came there and ended up [in activism] for the long haul,” Silchenko says. During protests in 2016, he and other opponents of construction sometimes had trouble with titushki (street thugs, typically employed to break up protests or provide intimidation). But they kept the lake from being destroyed, for now.
Later, Silchenko turned his attention to the Park of Partisan Glory, also in Darnytsia and a protected natural area. He and others first wrote letters to the local authorities and convinced them to remove the paid swings that were surrounded by fences from the center of the park. Then, more than 30 coffee kiosks which blocked pedestrian paths were removed. Now they’re trying to get rid of a “self-authorized” restaurant built on park premises. Silchenko approached in turn the ecological inspection service, the Kyiv city administration, and the police. Finally, he says, it was decided on 14 April that the restaurant should be demolished, but it continues to operate for some unknown reason.
This year, Silchenko and others registered Parks of Darnytsia as a community organization in order to make it easier to fight illegal construction. He says that previously, when they were working purely as private citizens, they were “seen as local village idiots, who themselves don’t know what they want.” Now it’s “easier to get to city councils, to regional ones,” and actually exert influence on decisions.
“We don’t engage in protests where [people] run around with signs and yell inarticulately. Our tools are a computer, printer, and visits to official commissions and meetings,” the eco-activist explains. “If we’re trying to build a law-based government and demand justice, then we need to act legally.”
Regardless of his intent to keep fighting, Silchenko admits that he doesn’t feel safe as an activist in Ukraine. Silchenko doesn’t rule out being targeted for further attacks. If previously, threats were limited to “children’s accusations on Facebook of the ‘Let’s meet’” variety, today they’ve escalated to actual harm.
“But I’ll continue doing what I do,” Silchenko insists. “Otherwise, what’s the point of even living in this country?”
In 2019, human rights groups counted 83 instances of harassment of civil activists. This number rose to 101 in 2020, according to the Zmina Human Rights Center. There were 107 incidents of harassment and pressure on civil society workers in the year ending in June 2021, according to the Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law Enforcement. Anti-corruption work, environmentalism, and LGBT rights remain the most dangerous spheres of activism. The hot spots where attacks happen most often are Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv regions.
For example, the Kharkiv-based lesbian-feminist organization Sphere has been attacked 28 times since 2017: their windows were broken and animal livers have been tossed at their building, Kateryna Mitieva, a spokesperson for Amnesty International Ukraine, tells us. The police have only opened three criminal investigations into the attacks, and even those aren’t being properly investigated.
Over the past eight years in Ukraine, it has become easier to hold civic protests, as the police and the authorities compromise and provide security. But these positive trends don’t extend to defending the rights of activists, Mitieva explains. This is mostly due to lack of proper legal norms (e.g., no laws to address hate-based attacks against LGBT activists), she says, also noting that police forces exhibit a “lack of autonomy” from influential elites.
“Cases involving assaults or property damage are better investigated, though not always. Activists working in the anti-corruption area or environmentalists affect the interests of big business and highly-placed politicians. We’re talking about big money, which is why it’s very dangerous.”
Leonid Kolesnichenko has been battling illegal sand mining and garbage disposal in Odesa since 2011. He’s a former soldier and a retired policeman. He says he noticed the problems a decade ago, when sand from Odesa quarries began to disappear by the ton, with garbage trucks regularly visiting the quarry.
“Odesa used to have a lot of filtration fields” where wastewater was purified for irrigation, Kolesnichenko says. “But in the 1970s, these fields gave rise to a cholera epidemic. Odesa was closed for two months and residents were forbidden from using the water from those fields. Now this site contains a sand quarry and several ponds.”
The activist says he’s personally seen how trucks take sand from the quarry day and night, nearly every day. It’s used for building multi-story apartment buildings, as well as preschools and playgrounds. Kolesnichenko suspects Odesa construction company Budova is involved, as well as Odesa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov.
Kolesnichenko estimates the profits from this illegal mining venture may reach $37,000 per day. He’s also worried about the environmental impacts: the sand is soaked in chemicals because a dump has been constructed nearby, filled with household and medical waste as well as animal corpses.
“We sent the sand for analysis at a laboratory. They told us the sand contained the entire periodic table,” the activist recalls.
Kolesnichenko, along with Odesa-based journalist Elena Kravchenko, activist Oleh Mikhailik and others regularly write complaints to the regional and national authorities – all to deafening silence.
Kolesnichenko once counted that he’d called police out to the site 20 times in a single month. Yet his efforts have gone nowhere: though the case was re-qualified as “a violation of the rules for the protection or use of subsoil,” not a single suspect has been found three years later.
His persistence nearly cost Kolesnichenko his life: someone tried to shoot him in 2019 on the filtration fields, and that same year someone threw a grenade at him. That time, he managed to hide behind a car. In 2020, people angry at Kolesnichenko’s work came to his house and set fire to his car. The police opened an investigation, but failed to uncover any suspects. And on June 18 this year, someone torched his daughter’s car in a garage. The investigation has turned up nothing.
“I started digging deeper when the threats against me started,” Kolesnichenko explains. “I’ve passed the scared-intimidated stage of my life. But I have a daughter, a granddaughter, and I want them to live in a country where the laws work.”
Unlike Russia and Belarus, where it’s nearly impossible for people to exercise their rights even during protests, in Ukraine there’s at least a democratic basis for activist work, Amnesty International spokesperson Mitieva believes. But pandemic restrictions, coupled with corruption and the lack of legal literacy make it harder to assert your rights.
Lyudmyla Yankina, who leads the human rights defenders and activists defense at Zmina Human Rights Center, believes Ukrainian civil society should play a key role in pressuring law enforcement to actually investigate crimes and charge suspects, so that those attacking activists know that their actions may have consequences.
As for the activists, Amnesty's Mitieva advises them to see things through and take their cases as far as the European Court of Human Rights  if local law enforcement and courts refuse to consider them. When the country’s reputation is at risk, the higher authorities might start paying attention.
Hanna Belovolchenko is a journalist with Zaborona, an independent news site in Ukraine, where this article first appeared. This version of the article was reprinted from Transitions Online. The article has been shortened and lightly edited to fit the Global Voices style. Reprinted with permission.

author: Transitions Online


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Chinese investments in Nigeria flourish on a Silk Road of corruption · Global Voices
Nwachukwu Egbunike

Two Chinese men arrested for allegedly offering bribes to Nigeria’s anti-corruption agent. Image from the Facebook page of the Economic Financial Crimes Commission
China’s bilateral relationship with Nigeria is usually framed by Chinese and Nigerian government officials as one built on trust, mutual understanding, and respect. However, this diplomatic language fails to capture a very different reality.
The Chinese government sometimes conceals the unethical and illegal efforts it makes to protect and nurture its numerous investments in Africa’s most populous country. This includes and is not limited to problematic practices like bribery by Chinese enterprises operating in Nigeria.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari described, in a letter in February, the fifty-year-old China-Nigeria diplomatic relationship as built on “close coordination and mutual trust.” Chinese diplomats also tend to describe China-Nigeria relations using clichéd phrases such as “mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual support” that is anchored on “multilateralism rather than unilateralism,” leading to “prosperity in solidarity” for both nations.
Nigeria was the first African country to be designated a “strategic partner” by China. “Most of China’s strategic partners (战略伙伴 关系/ Zhànlüè huǒbàn guānxì) are in Asia, where almost all China’s neighbours (with the notable exception of Japan) are designated as partners of some sort,” notes Dr. Steven F. Jackson, a professor of political science at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
The bilateral relationship between Nigeria and China has ramped up trade from $1.9 billion US dollars in 2013 to about $20 billion USD in 2019. Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi and Ufo Okeke Uzodike, two Nigerian political scientists, note that the “trade flows are in China's favour, with China running a trade surplus of about $17.5 billion USD for the years 2015 to 2018.”
Nigeria is also a key location for Chinese manufacturing firms to set up factories, with clusters located in southwestern cities of Lagos and Ogun, and in Benin City, in the oil-rich Niger-Delta region. It is difficult to track the actual number of Chinese firms operating in Nigeria, due to paucity of data.
I spent two months in Nigeria tracking and interviewing Chinese manufacturing firms to understand what brought them there, the challenges they faced, and their potential to promote skills and technology transfer to the local economy. https://t.co/VO5pU3UVcB
— Yunnan Chen 陈韵楠 (@YunnanChen) May 1, 2020
However, a 2020 policy brief by Yunnan Chen, a John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) researcher, states that “China’s Ministry of Commerce, identified 218 Chinese firms registered in Nigeria, with 128 in manufacturing” as of 2015. , In 2017, the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission showed that there were 157 Chinese firms registered in Nigeria, 24 of which are “listed under manufacturing,” according to Chen.
Multiple reports have revealed that these Chinese firms engage in corruption to carry out their business.
In April 2020, the African Development Bank (ADB) blacklisted China Zhonghao Nigeria Limited, a civil engineering company registered in Nigeria, from conducting business with the bank for eighteen months. The Chinese company and their local associates had engaged in “fraudulent practices” while bidding for an ADB financed project in Nigeria.
A year later, on July 30, 2021, two Chinese companies operating in Nigeria were “debarred and thus ineligible to participate in World Bank-financed contracts” for breaching their guidelines relating to fraud and corruption. The two companies are China Railway Construction (International) Nigeria Company Limited — which won a deal of $10 billion USD to construct a railway along the coast of Nigeria, and the China National Electric Engineering Company (CNEEC) Nigeria Limited — which is handling the construction of the 700MW hydroelectric Zungeru project, one of Africa’s biggest hydropower plants located in Kaduna River, Niger State, north central Nigeria, at an estimated cost of $1.3 billion USD.
The allegations of fraud by Chinese companies in Nigeria are not only limited to multinational agencies.
On May 11, 2020 Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), arrested two Chinese staff of China Zhonghao Nigeria Limited, Meng Wei Kun and Xu Koi, in Sokoto in northwestern Nigeria. Kun and Koi had allegedly offered a bribe of fifty million naira (about $100,000 USD) to a local EFCC agent in order to “compromise ongoing investigations” into China Zhonghao Nigeria Limited execution of contracts valued at fifty billion naira (approximately $100 million USD).
Chinese entrepreneurs in Nigeria are willing to give bribes to advance their investments, a practice that is as common in China as it is in Nigeria. “They’ve succeeded because they know how to use cash to get their way….They know how to bribe and are usually really ready, to [bribe] the police or government or anyone,” according to a Nigerian executive with close ties to the Chinese business community in an interview with Matthew T. Page, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Essentially, it is an embrace between local corrupt politicians and equally fraudulent Chinese company officials.
On February 6, 2021, Premium Times, Nigeria’s investigative online newspaper, reported the allegation of laundering about five billion naira ($10 million USD) between Stella Oduah, a former minister and The China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) Nigeria Ltd in 2014.
Neither Oduah nor CCECC are newcomers to allegations of fraud or unethical financial deals.
On February 12, 2014, Oduah was fired as Minister of Aviation by then President Goodluck Jonathan following a corruption scandal over the purchase of armored cars worth 255 million naira ($510,000 USD). It was alleged that Oduah compelled the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), an agency under her supervision, to purchase the cars at inflated prices for her personal use. Oduah denied the allegations, describing them as “inaccurate”.
Similarly, in 2020, Rotimi Amaechi, Nigeria’s transportation minister, announced that CCECC will be building a $50 million USD Transport University in Daura. “This is not a railway contract. This is a gift from them (CCECC),” said Amaechi. Daura, in northwestern Katsina State, is the home town of Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president. The unethical dimension of such a “gift” by CCECC is not lost on any discerning observer.
This is the complicated reality of Chinese/Nigerian relationships: a reality far from the simplistic mutual understanding narrative pushed by Chinese diplomats.
This story is part of a Civic Media Observatory investigation into competing narratives about China’s Belt and Road Initiative and explores how societies and communities hold differing perceptions of potential benefits and harms of Chinese-led development. To learn more about this project and its methods, click here.

author: Nwachukwu Egbunike


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‘I got robbed three times’: Fear of crime discourages university enrollment in El Salvador · Global Voices
Eddie Galdamez

Santa Teresa de Jesús high school in El Salvador. Photo by Melissa Vida (2019), used with permission.
Layla Chávez, a 23-year-old accounting major from a small town in eastern El Salvador, was afraid when she moved to the capital to go to university. Not only was it a financial challenge, but she also takes care of avoiding crime in the capital city of San Salvador, where most colleges are located.
En mis cuatro años en la Universidad de El Salvador, me robaron tres veces. Una vez caminando a casa desde la Universidad, una vez en el autobús público y la última en un cajero automático.
In my four years at the University of El Salvador, I got robbed three times. Once walking home from the University, once while riding the public bus, and the last one at an ATM.
In 2015, San Salvador was known as the “murder capital of the world,” and it is where most colleges and universities are. Although the country is not considered as violent as in previous years, it is still not entirely safe for teenagers to move alone to a new city. In 2021, the number of cases of people going missing increased, many of whom are youth. Also, the number of reported crimes against women has increased in 2021.
Stories of crimes against students around universities are why many parents choose not to send their kids to college far away from their hometowns. If universities were more geographically accessible, parents told Global Voices, more people would have the option to get a higher education closer to home. In El Salvador, even if you are not involved in gangs, you can get in serious trouble just by entering a territory controlled by gangs.
Entrance to Santa Teresa de Jesús high school in El Salvador. Photo by Melissa Vida (2019), used with permission.
According to a January 2021 report by Francisco Gavidia University in El Salvador, “88 out of 100 young people are excluded from Salvadoran higher education.” Fear of crime is not the only reason why only 12 percent of students can pursue a college degree. It is also tied to accessibility to universities and the cost associated with attending.
In 2021, college education became even more centralized in the capital. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the University of El Salvador (UES), the country's main public university, announced the permanent closure of 12 smaller campuses located in smaller cities and impacting thousands of students, sparking protests and roadblocks in July.
#ElSalvador | Según expresan los estudiantes afectados, no les han dado otras alternativa más que volverse a adaptar a las 4 sedes que tiene la UES a nivel nacional, que están en San Salvador, Santa Ana, San Vicente y San Miguel. Foto EDH/ Menly Cortez. pic.twitter.com/GJLNONfGFy
— elsalvador.com (@elsalvadorcom) July 27, 2021
#ElSalvador | According to the affected students, they have not been given any alternative other than to adapt themselves to the 4 UES sites nationwide, which are located in San Salvador, Santa Ana, San Vicente and San Miguel. Photo EDH/ Menly Cortez.
Carmen Ramos, a recent high school graduate from a rural area, explains why smaller campuses near her home would help her.
Yo quiero ir a la universidad y convertirme en doctora; pero mi familia no puede pagar todos los costos. Incluso si puedo conseguir el dinero, tengo miedo de mudarme sola.
I want to go to college and become a doctor; but, my family can't afford all the costs. And even if I can get the money, I am afraid to move there [to a big city] alone.
Universidad José Simeon Cañas (2019). Photo by Melissa Vida, used with permission.
Most private universities in El Salvador have a minimum tuition payment for those students with financial needs which range from $75 to $106 monthly. The tuition at the University of El Salvador is free. But students need to have the required grades and meet other requirements, so not all students are eligible to attend. There are many private and government scholarships available to potential college students, but costs can still add up; scholarships do not include housing, food, or transportation.  To give a perspective, the minimum wage in El Salvador is $365.00.
Chávez, one of the university students, shared that her monthly expenses without tuition are around $350.
Mis gastos mensuales son alrededor de $90 a $125 para comida, $175 a $200 para alquiler y servicios, y $25 a $50 para transporte. Me cuesta entre $300 y $350 al mes asistir a la universidad.
My monthly expenses are about $90 to $125 for food, $175 to $200 for rent and utilities, and $25 to $50 for transportation. It costs me about $300 to $350 a month to attend college.
Between $300 to $350 a month for college expenses might not seem much to parents in many countries; however, in El Salvador, it is a lot of money.
Things are not getting easier for higher education in El Salvador. The COVID-19 pandemic added more challenges. According to Roger Arias, the UES rector, in 2020, at least 7,000 students from the university stopped studying due to a lack of financial resources during the pandemic.

author: Eddie Galdamez


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LIVE on August 25 (in Spanish): How COVID-19 fueled the protests in Cuba, Guatemala and Colombia · Global Voices
Melissa Vida

From Cuba to Colombia to Guatemala—countries with very different political contexts—people have taken to the streets in recent times to demand change. What do these countries have in common?
The common factor that seems to have pushed citizens of these countries to the brink is poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This past July, people in Cuba expressed, in an unprecedented wave of protests, their frustration over the scarcity of food and medication. This was a symptom of growing malaise over the government's handling of the pandemic, in addition to external factors such as US sanctions and demands for more political freedom on the island. What is the state of things in Cuba right now, beyond the ideological divisions?
In Colombia, a national strike has been in effect since May, led by various sectors of society. Protests by an impoverished Colombian citizenry against an increase in taxes soon went viral on social networks thanks to reports of extreme police violence. Today news of the Colombian strike no longer makes international headlines, although it is still ongoing. What is happening in Colombia now?
Guatemala has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the hemisphere, but that's not because people don't want to be vaccinated. Protests led by indigenous groups have shaken the Central American nation whose government has been accused of mismanaging the pandemic and failing to deal with the devastating effects of climate change, amid allegations of corruption. Why aren't we hearing about what's going on in Guatemala?
Join us to gain a better understanding of why people in these countries have risen up in defense of their lives on August 25 at 15:00 GMT, for the next episode of our Global Voices Insights live webinar series. The session will be conducted in Spanish and is free and open to the public. Register below to receive a reminder about the event:
The session will feature the following panelists:
We look forward to having you join us on Wednesday, August 25 at 15h GMT (click here to convert to your local time zone).

author: Melissa Vida