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Could Professional Sports Boost Economic Development in Africa? · Global Voices
Rakotomalala

Luol Deng with the Chicago Bulls. Photo by Keith Allison. CC BY-SA 2.0
Luol Deng is a rich and famous professional basketball player who has played for some of the most well-known NBA teams, such as the Chicago Bulls, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the Miami Heat.
Deng also hails from Wau, South Sudan, a country scarred by poverty and the aftermath of a recent civil war. He has figured prominently in efforts to reduce conflict and advance the peace process in his native country through an NGO called Enough Project. In addition, he has facilitated the construction of 12 basketball courts and locker rooms in South Sudan. He explains:
What I’m most proud of is that my family can look back after my career is over and realize that I was able to make a difference on and off the basketball court. That is something that tells the true story as to who I am as a person, someone who cares about his community and wants to improve the lives of others.
Deng believes that the expansion of his favorite sport may be the key to economic prosperity for his compatriots. However, examples of successful professional high-level athletes are still rare in Africa. So how much impact could professional sports possibly have on the development of the African continent?
The media impact, at least, of high-level sports on African countries is undeniable. Major events like the World Cup or the Olympic Games are watched by a vast majority of the population. Likewise, each win by an African country or athlete is celebrated as an important victory for the entire continent. For example, the performance of Roger Milla and Cameroon's Indomitable Lions at the 1990 World Cup was a real revelation for all Africans.
However, the establishment of high-level sports in Africa has never managed to achieve stability. National competitions do not attract much attention and the best players tend to go abroad. This is especially true in individual sports, like tennis. To this day, the only West African player to have won an ATP tournament is Yahiya Doumbia from Senegal, who won the 1988 Lyon Open and the 1995 Bordeaux Open.
So, for young African athletes, embarking on the path to high-level sports is a risky wager. What role, then, can sports play in African development?
According to the Institut Amadeus, a Moroccan think tank, this role has yet to be defined:
Dans nos états, la dimension éducative du sport n’est pas suffisamment exploitée. Le mouvement sportif international a exploité la dimension monétaire du sport. C’est aux gouvernements d’intervenir pour remplir cette lacune. Par exemple, l’engouement  autour de l’organisation de ‘méga’-évènements sportifs a attiré beaucoup d’attention autour de l’idée selon laquelle le sport constituerait un véritable vecteur de développement. Pourtant, selon le bureau de l’UNESCO pour la Jeunesse, le Sport et l’Education Physique, l’impact développemental de ce genre de manifestations reste à démontrer.
La plupart des bénéfices ne perdurent pas dans la durée. L’effet sur l’emploi, qui revient souvent dans les argumentaires des responsables politiques locaux, n’est que de courte durée, et ne porte que sur des emplois faiblement qualifiés. Accueillir ce genre d’évènements mène à une hausse généralisée des prix, qui affecte en premier lieu les populations les plus défavorisées. De plus, il reste à montrer que les investissements réalisés ne créent pas d’effet d’éviction, en siphonnant des fonds destinés à d’autres secteurs.
Our member states have not sufficiently explored the educational dimension of sports. The international sports movement has exploited the monetary dimension of sports. It is up to governments to intervene and eliminate this gap. For example, the excitement generated by major sporting events has attracted lots of attention to the idea that sports could be a genuine vector for development. However, according to UNESCO's office for youth, sports, and physical education, the developmental impact of such events has yet to be shown.
Most of the benefits do not last. The effects on employment, an issue often cited by local politicians, are short-term and only create low-skilled jobs. Hosting these types of events causes prices to rise, which primarily affects the poorest populations. Plus, such investments may even create a crowding-out effect, siphoning off funds destined for other sectors.
In Burkina Faso, Boukari Ouédraogo, an Ouagadougou blogger, is convinced of the added value of sports for his country's economy.
Le développement du sport au Burkina Faso contribuerait à la création des vastes marchés pour les équipements sportifs (maillots, T-shirts, chaussures, gadgets), la vente des billets, de restauration, de droits télés avec la retransmission des matchs, le sponsoring… Le marché de l’emploi serait plus ouvert, de façon directe et indirecte. Les stades auraient par exemple besoin de personnel pour entretenir et veiller sur eux. Le développement du sport au Burkina Faso pourrait permettre aussi l’essor de la petite unité de construction de ballons de football (et bien d’autres disciplines aussi) situés dans le village de Bourzanga dans la province du Bam.
The development of sports in Burkina Faso will lead to the creation of large markets for athletic equipment (jerseys, T-shirts, shoes, gadgets), ticket sales, restaurants, broadcasting rights, sponsors… The job market would open up, both directly and indirectly. For instance, stadiums will need maintenance and security personnel. The development of sports in Burkina Faso could also encourage growth in the small football manufacturing industry (as well as others) located in the village of Bourzanga in the Bam province.
Richard Attias, Moroccan businessman and former president of Publicis Events Worldwide, also thinks that high-level sports could contribute to development, but only under certain conditions:
La pratique du sport a cette particularité qu'elle surpasse les limites des frontières géographiques et les classes sociales. Le sport est déjà un secteur économique à part entière représentant environ 2% du PIB dans de nombreux pays développés. Néanmoins, le défi est aujourd'hui de faire du sport un facteur du développement économique des pays moins développés afin qu'il profite à tous les citoyens de ces Etats sur le long terme.
Tout le monde est d'accord pour dire que le sport contribue au développement économique en créant des emplois et en dynamisant l'activité commerciale. Cependant, depuis quelques années, on remarque que les effets bénéfiques pour l'économie sont surtout réels sur le court terme. L'organisation d'événements sportifs n'a des effets bénéfiques sur le développement des Etats qui s'il encourage la pratique sportive des citoyens locaux et si ceux-ci peuvent ensuite utiliser les installations construites pour l'événement. Bien sûr, le sport en lui-même ne peut pas sortir un pays de la pauvreté. Par contre, il peut y aider en suscitant un changement social. Le sport n'est pas qu'une industrie, pas qu'une économie. Il doit devenir un formidable vecteur de développement pour tous les Etats du monde.
Sports, in particular, cross geographic borders and social classes. Sports are already a separate economic sector, representing around 2% of the GNP of several developed countries. Nevertheless, the challenge today is to transform sports into an economic development factor in less developed countries so that it may benefit all citizens over the long-term.
Everyone agrees that sports contribute to economic development by creating jobs and energizing commercial activity. However, for the past few years, we have noticed that the economic benefits are short-term. Hosting sporting events could be beneficial if it encourages local citizens to take up sports and if they are given access to the facilities built for the events. Of course, sports alone cannot lift a country out of poverty. But, they can help inspire social change. Sports, after all, are just another industry, another economy. Sports must become a strong vector for development across the globe.
According to François Alla Yoa, the former physical education/sports program director for CONFEJES (the French-speaking World Conference of Ministers for Youth and Sports), a practical solution for reconciling sports and development may lie in taking a bottom-up approach:
Si nous voulons sérieusement faire du sport une partie intégrante du développement social, cela doit démarrer à la base, dans les quartiers. Parmi ses succès, la fréquentation des établissements par 25% de femmes, qui pratiquent le sport de manière quotidienne pour la première fois de leur vie. Avoir un impact sur le quotidien des gens est probablement la manière la plus immédiate, opérationnelle et utile de faire du sport un véritable vecteur de développement social.
If we seriously want to make sports an integral part of social development, we must start at the bottom, at the neighborhood level. Morocco has successfully achieved a participation rate of 25% among women who are practicing a sport on a daily basis for the first time in their lives. Impacting people's daily lives is probably the most immediate, useful, and workable way to make sports a true vector for social development.
It may turn out that Luol Deng's vision of constructing basketball courts and investing locally was an effective way to instigate development through sports after all.

author: Rakotomalala


text:
Dalit Students in India Say Government’s Disappearing Scholarships Amounts to Discrimination · Global Voices
Inji Pennu

The Secretariat Building in New Delhi is where the Cabinet Secretariat is housed, which administers the Government of India. Image by Laurie Jones Via Creative Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0
Dalit students in India are experiencing serious delays in receiving government scholarships or not receiving the money at all, putting their education and prospects for the future at serious risk.
The central government has been “squeezing” funding for these scholarships, especially aimed at underprivileged scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, but states have continued to award them, causing this crisis, a representative of the National Campaign for Dalit & Human Rights told Times of India in February 2017. A recent report suggested that the unpaid bill for scholarships for meritorious Scheduled Caste students under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government stacks up to Indian Rs 80 billion (US $1.24 billion).
Dalit, which means “oppressed,” is the self-chosen political name of castes in India which are considered and treated as “untouchable”. Although they are protected by the Indian constitution from social injustice and all forms of exploitation, prejudice against them is still prevalent in Indian society, especially from right-wing sectors. Last year, India witnessed some of its brightest minds take their own lives in the context of rampant caste-based discrimination of caste at Indian universities.
Some of the students affected by scholarship problems are accusing the government of purposefully withholding funding to discriminate against them. On May 19, 2017, Maya Pramod, a Dalit woman research scholar from Kerala, wrote a Facebook post about her ordeal:
ugc Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship രാജിവ് ഗാന്ധി നാഷണൽ ഫെലോഷിപ്പ്.. വാങ്ങുന്നവർ ഒന്ന് താഴെ വന്ന് വിവരങ്ങൾ ഇടുമോ.കിട്ടാതെയായിട്ട് 5 മാസം.ഭ്രാന്തമായ ഗുരുതര പ്രശ്നങ്ങളിലൂടെയാ കടന്നു പോകുന്നത്. അക്കാദമിക് വിദ്യാഭാസത്തിൽ നിൽക്കുന്ന ഒരോ ദലിതന്റെയും മുന്നോട്ട് പോക്ക് തിരുമാനിക്കുന്നത് ഫെലോഷിപ്പുകൾ ആണ്. അതിൽ വരുന്ന കാലതാമസം ഒരോ ഗവേഷകരെയും കൊണ്ടെത്തിക്കുന്നത് ഗവേഷണ പ്രവർത്തനങ്ങളെയും അതിലൂടെ കടുത്ത മാനസിക സംഘർഷത്തിലും, സാമൂഹ്യ മരണത്തിലും ആണ്…
Can the recipients of the grant UGC Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship please comment? I have not received it for the past five months. I am going through a lot of mental hardships. Each one of us Dalit’s progress in education is determined by these fellowship grants. When we are denied these, we undergo mental harassment and our societal death.
The University Grants Commission website states that the Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship (RGNF) scheme for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes — officially designated groups of indigenous peoples of India who have suffered mistreatment historically — is formulated and funded by Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and the Ministry of Tribal Affairs. Each year after a rigorous selection process, 2,000 slots are awarded to candidates from scheduled castes and 667 slots to candidates scheduled tribes to pursue M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, engineering or technology.
An open thread on the Complaint Board forum suggests that other Dalit students have experienced irregularities in this particular fellowship over the past two years.
@OfficeOfRG
sir, my scholarship is sanction on 2015 by Min. SJ&E but scholarship not release, iam dalit student thatway i am harressment
— Dhananjay kumar (@dhanwon) April 16, 2017
Some of the complaints state they are undergoing distress unable to complete their education:
I am living under quite miserable condition and for want of money it is very difficult for me to sustain.Kindly expedite for early release of my grant so that I can continue my research with full of my enthusiasm.
A complaint from S. Premalatha stated that she has been receiving the fellowship regularly for the past three years and since November 2016, there have been irregularities:
It has been noted during the last three years, I was receiving so far the contingency applicable for Humanities stream. Kindly do the needful to list me under Science stream and sanction contingency arrears due to me.
The fellowship has suffered delays in the release of funds to students before. In 2014, Times of India, a mainstream newspaper, reported that within the 2013-14 batch, 2,500 students were still waiting for their fellowship money.
Since Modi took power in 2014, there have been budgetary cuts to higher education, pushing the Dalit and minority student community into a very urgent crisis. Writing for the news website SabrangIndia.in, which takes a stand against communalism, co-editor Teesta Setalvad broke down some of the numbers:
The last Central Education Budget already saw a jaw dropping budgetary cut of 17%! In the revised estimates for 2014-15, while school education allocation was cut by around Rs. 80,000 crore, that of higher education was slashed by Rs. 4,000 crore. In June 2014, out of 7 lakh candidates who appeared for the [National Eligibility Test] examinations, a total of around 25000 qualified. An analysis prepared by the University of Hyderabad Teachers Association states that clearly, this decision of the [University Grants Commission] is going to leave more than 96% of our students (who were anyway receiving only a meager amount of Rs. 5000 for MPhil and Rs. 8000 for PhD) with no scholarship support to pursue their education.
Denial of scholarships affects disadvantaged communities tremendously because it strips them of an important opportunity to improve their social mobility. As Kunal Sen, professor of development economics and policy at the Global Development Institute, fromUniversity of Manchester, writes:
More disturbingly, we find significant differences in social mobility by social group in India – Dalits (or Scheduled Castes) and Adivasis (or Scheduled Tribes) are the most disadvantaged social groups in India, with high rates of poverty, and these two social groups see very low rates of social mobility as compared to forward castes in India. For instance, only 11 percent of Dalits and 9 percent of Adivasis whose fathers were in the lowest occupational class could achieve the highest two occupational classes, while 25 percent of forward-caste individuals could.  This suggests that barriers to occupational mobility still persist in India’s most disadvantaged social groups in spite of widespread affirmative action programs and intense political mobilization of these groups since independence.
Maya Pramod, mentioned at the start of this story, posted on May 29 on Facebook offering more details about her situation:
Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship for U G C .കിട്ടിയിട്ട് 5 മാസം, ജൂൺ തുടങ്ങിയാൽ 6 മാസവും, വിണ്ടും എഴുതാൻ കാരണം കഠിനമായ മാനസീക പ്രശ്നങ്ങളിലേക്കും വേദനയിലേക്കും കാര്യങ്ങൾ എത്തുന്നു എന്നതാണ്.ജൂൺ വിണ്ടും അദ്യയന വർഷത്തിൽ ഒരു ഫുൾ ടൈം റിസർച്ച് സ്ക്കോളർ ആയതു കൊണ്ടു ദിവസവും പോകേണ്ടതാണ് എന്നാൽ അത് ചോദ്യചിഹ്നമായി നിൽക്കുന്നു. ഈ 5 മാസത്തെ എന്റെ ബാധ്യത എന്നത് 85000 രൂപയാണ്. അതയത് കിട്ടുന്ന (ഇനി കാട്ടിയാലോ അത് കടം തീർക്കാൻ മാത്രമുള്ളതായും മാറുന്നു) കൂടെ യുജിസി ടെ പുതിയ നിയമപ്രകാരം (യുന്നിവേഴ്സിറ്റികൾക്ക് പുതിയ നിയമം) ഇപ്പോഴും ഗൈഡൻഷിപ്പ് ശരിയായിട്ടില്ല എന്നതും വലിയ മാനസിക വ്യഥ തന്നെയാണ്. ഇവിടുത്തെ അധികാരസമൂഹം എന്താണ് ഞങ്ങളോട് ചെയ്യുന്നത്. എന്തിന്റെ പേരിലാണ് ഉന്നത വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ രംഗത്ത് നിൽക്കുന്ന പട്ടികജാതി-പട്ടികവർഗ്ഗ- ന്യുനപക്ഷ സ്കോളർഷിപ്പുകൾ അതും ചിലർക്കെങ്കിലും പാസ്സായി കിടക്കുന്ന തുക കൊടുക്കാതെ ഇരിക്കുന്നു. ഒരു ജനതയേ തച്ചുടക്കുവാൻ പാകത്തിനുള്ള നിയമങ്ങളും, വ്യവസ്ഥകളും ഇറക്കി കൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്ന നിങ്ങൾ സവർണ്ണ – സംഘി ബലമുള്ള നിങ്ങൾ ,മിനിറ്റുകൾ കൂടും തോറും ദലിതരാണ് നിങ്ങൾ ടെ എല്ലാം എന്ന സ്ഥിരം തുറുപ്പുചീട്ടുമായി വരരുത് കാരണം അത്രമേൽ.. സാമുഹികമായും, രാഷ്ട്രീയമായും എന്റെ സമൂഹത്തെ മരണത്തിലേക്ക് നയിക്കുന്നു. ഒരു വിദ്യാർത്ഥിയേ എന്നതിനെക്കാൾ ഉന്നത വിദ്യഭ്യാസ രംഗത്ത് നിൽക്കുന്ന.. ഞാൻ അടക്കമുള്ള ഇന്ത്യയിലെ വിവിധ യുണിവേഴ്സ്റ്റി കളിൽ ഗവേഷണം നടത്തുന്ന വിദ്യാർത്ഥികളെ സാമൂഹിക മരണത്തിലേക്ക് തള്ളി നീക്കുന്നു. എവിടെ ഞങ്ങൾ എത്തണം ഇനി എന്ത് ഞാൻ ചെയ്യണം. എന്റെ അറിവിൽ തന്നെ 15 ഓളോം വിദ്യാർത്ഥികൾ ഫെല്ലോഷിപ്പ് ഇല്ലാതെ ഗവേഷണം.. എവിടെയെന്നില്ലാതെ നിക്കുന്നത്. എന്താണ് ഇതിന് പരിഹാര
It has been five months since I have received my fellowship money and I am moving into complete mental distress. Starting in June, I am supposed to attend classes but It is still a question mark. The total amount pending is Indian Rupees 85,000. Even If I get that now, I would have to spend that towards paying back my immediate loans. [..] Why is the political power behaving like this with us Dalits? On what basis are we denied our higher education rights, especially the fellowships that we have been granted? You and your brahminical [upper caste] power are creating laws and regulations to systematically eradicate us Dalits. We are just a pawns for your political game since all you are doing is killing my Dalit caste socially and politically. Dalit students from different universities across India are going through the same hardships. What should I do now? As far as I know, 15 of my friends are also in the same situation. What can one do to overcome this?
She said she sent a letter to the prime minister of India on May 22, 2017, but has not received any information or communication despite her efforts.
Amidst this crisis in scholarship funding, India slipped down one place from 130 to 131 among the 188 countries ranked in terms of human development, according to the 2016 Human Development Report report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on March 22, 2017.

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Inji Pennu


text:
Ethiopia Imposes Nationwide Internet Blackout · Global Voices
Endalkachew Chala

An October 2016 protest in London by Oromo people over killings and human rights abuses at the hands of the Ethiopia government. Photo by Flickr user David Holt. CC BY 2.0
On May 30 at 3pm local time, Ethiopians found themselves unable to access the Internet. The blackout appears to be country-wide.
It appears that Ethiopian authorities imposed the nationwide Internet blackout in order to prevent “leaking of exam questions on Facebook” ahead of secondary school exams set to be administered over the next two weeks.
24 hours after the total Internet blackout, Ethiopia still refuses to say why it shut down. Via @AFP pic.twitter.com/ZzJcX6Vqe8
— Zelalem Kibret (@zelalemkibret) May 31, 2017
Twenty-four hours after the blackout, Deputy Communication Minister of Ethiopia Zadig Abraha told AFP that mobile data also had been deactivated.
Finally, the Ethiopian government announced that the internet blackout will continue until June 8, 2017, reasoned by fear of ‘exam leaking’.
— Zelalem Kibret (@zelalemkibret) June 1, 2017
Last year, the government was forced to postpone the national university entrance exam after the initial session was marred by a leak spread on Facebook. Activists in the diaspora leaked questions on Facebook ahead of the exam in early June in 2016 after the government refused to re-schedule the exam for students who missed an entire semester of classes due to protests.
But the current blackout is different from previous mobile Internet and social media shutdowns that have been imposed in an effort to prevent exam leaking. This blackout is broader in scope and scale, effectively eliminating Ethiopia from the map of the global Internet.
This is especially easy for the Ethiopian government to do, since all Internet and phone service in the country is provided through through a single government-owned Internet service provider, Ethio Telecom. The blackout thus leaves businesses, banks, Internet cafes in Addis Ababa and social media pages of government media cut off from the rest of the world, making it harder for them to do their day-to-day work.
‘Cos of the blackout: Banks are out of service, Bulk SMS services are not available, GPS services are not accessible …
— Zelalem Kibret (@zelalemkibret) May 31, 2017
The gravity of this move begs the question: Are authorities really just trying to prevent students from cheating on exams, or is there more to it? Indeed, this is just one among various reasons that Ethiopian authorities have used to justify censorship and shutdowns in recent years.
Ethiopia has blocked the Internet on three occasions since huge anti-government protests exploded in November 2015. Mobile and landline phone networks are also crippled in much of the country’s two biggest regions, Oromia and Amhara, where anti-government protesters have become common over the last two years.
When Ethiopian authorities declared a state of emergency in October 2016 they officially blocked access to Facebook, Twitter and popular messaging apps such as Viber and IMO.  Since Internet speeds are already incredibly slow, data-heavy video platforms such as YouTube have been rendered inaccessible even though they are not officially blocked.
Just two weeks ago, activists inside the country reported that they were finally able to access Facebook freely, after many months of using VPNs and other circumvention tools to login to the social network. But with the country now in total blackout, they are now even more isolated from the rest of the world, and even from each other, than before.

author: Endalkachew Chala


text:
Global Voices Seeks New Editor for RuNet Echo · Global Voices
RuNet Echo

Photo: RuNet Echo
Global Voices (GV) seeks a part-time  to oversee our ongoing coverage of Russia. The RuNet Echo project focuses on deep coverage and analysis of the Russian-language Internet, online speech, and social networks.
The project presents comprehensive and deep reporting on and analyses of the Russian-language online community. Much of our work at RuNet Echo breaks down into the following three categories:
The primary focus of our coverage and analysis is Russian-language online writing from and about the Russian Federation. Secondary content may also include Russian-language content from the former Soviet Union, as it relates to the Russian Federation. GV will seek to ensure that the content receives broad recognition and publicity, both on our sites and in other contexts and languages. As with all our projects, we seek publicity, interviews, and re-publication in other media to amplify RuNet Echo’s content.
For the past seven years, RuNet Echo has produced extensive and in-depth stories on the Russian Internet, breaking numerous stories in English on the rise of online influence in Russian political and social life.
The  will direct the project, manage project content on Global Voices sites, and coordinate staff and volunteer contributions, including overseeing the work of the contributing editor. The Project Editor will produce and/or edit a range of editorial products, from in-depth stories to short posts, to research projects,, as well as manage RuNet Echo’s promotion of this content on social media. The work will involve extensive translation, analysis, and further original research and reporting when appropriate, in order to elucidate and identify trends, ideas, and social and political currents within the RuNet. Analysis will also examine how content in on the Russian-language Internet relates to other online communities, languages, and cultures, and offline Russian events, journalism, and social and political movements.
The Project Editor will also:
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Interested candidates, please send your CV, two writing samples (in English), and a cover letter explaining why you’re a good candidate for the job to: jobs AT globalvoices DOT org
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author: RuNet Echo


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Netizen Report: In ‘State of Emergency’, Internet Shutdowns Leave Ethiopians and Venezuelans Struggling to Connect · Global Voices
Netizen Report Team

Students demonstrate in Ethiopia's Oromo region in 2016.
On Tuesday, May 30, Ethiopians woke up to find themselves unable to connect to the Internet in the third nationwide Internet blackout that the country has seen since November 2015, when land rights protests peaked in the Oromo province.
The blackout has left businesses, universities, banks, and even government media cut off from one another and the rest of the world, making day-to-day work extremely difficult. Officials have claimed that the shutdown is part of an effort to prevent students from cheating on upcoming exams. Last year, exam answers were leaked on Facebook, forcing education officials to postpone exams for two weeks, and triggering a shutdown of social media networks including Facebook.
In contrast to last year’s events, this shutdown is broader in scope and scale than previous ones, effectively eliminating Ethiopia from the map of the global Internet.
The current scale of Internet blackout in Ethiopia is unprecedented. It's a TOTAL nationwide blanket outage.
— Zelalem Kibret (@zelalemkibret) May 31, 2017
Exams may not be the sole reason for the shutdown. It comes at a moment when Ethiopians have endured seven months of a “state of emergency,” a legal designation that has allowed authorities to justify mass arrests and the use of violence in efforts to break up protests surrounding the ongoing conflict between the ruling party and dominant opposition groups in the Oromo region, which lies adjacent to the capital, Addis Ababa.
Just last week, two Ethiopian human rights activists were given long-term prison sentences for “incitement” on Facebook. One was punished for posts expressing solidarity with anti-government protesters and pleading for an end to violence.
The experience of Ethiopians in recent months demonstrates how these elements — a state of emergency and human rights violations (from arrests to Internet shutdowns) — too often go hand in hand.
Venezuela has become another prime example of this trend. Internet access has seriously deteriorated since the government extended the country’s state of emergency (which has been in place since May 2016) and officially authorized online content filtering. The Index on Censorship recently published evidence of 41 websites being blocked in the country, though the full extent of the censorship is unknown.
The government has also urged the use of surveillance drones to monitor protests and the collection of biometric data without an explanation of how it will be used. Dozens of protesters have been arrested and jailed during this time, often without charges.
A group of 21 advocacy groups, including Global Voices Advox, signed a letter condemning the conditions of the state of emergency and the restrictions on the free flow of online content that have come as a result.
The letter states:
The sum of this factors, aggravated by the passage of time and the deepening of the social and political crisis, outlines the creation of a state of censorship, control, and surveillance that gravely affects the exercise of human rights.
Four Maldivian bloggers and activists living overseas were issued arrest warrants, some of them sent via Twitter, for unspecified crimes. Authorities have warned that they may face prosecution in absentia if they fail to return to the Maldives to face trial. The arrest warrants lack detail about the nature of the police investigation in which they are said to be implicated. But they follow a call by the ruling party parliamentary leader Ahmed Nihan’s call to arrest all “irreligious” people in the country.
State-run news agency Al-Ahram reported that 21 news websites were banned in Egypt for “supporting terrorism and spreading lies,” according to a high-level security source. These websites include the Arabic-language edition of Huffington Post, the website of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network, and the highly regarded independent news site Mada Masr. Mada Masr is one of the few remaining Egypt-based independent outlets that continues to cover the country’s ongoing crackdown on activists and journalists, attacks on Egypt's Coptic minority and the plight of refugees in Egypt. While websites have been blocked in Egypt before, this marks the first time the government has publicly announced their decision to do so. Reacting to the blocking, Mada Masr's editor in-chief Lina Attalah told Reuters:
Nothing explains this blockade more than a very clear intention from the authorities to crack down on critical media in ways that bypass the law.
Facebook apologized after rejecting a picture frame commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Facebook users in Hong Kong protested the removal of the frame in the days leading up to the 28th anniversary of the massacre, on June 4, out of concern that the site is curbing their freedom of expression in the interest of gaining favor with the lucrative Chinese market. Though Facebook called the rejection a “mistake”, netizens are calling for an explanation.
French data protection authority CNIL hit Facebook with a maximum fine of 150,000 euros for violating data privacy rules around the tracking of user and non-user data. This is the first major regulatory action to be taken by a European government after the European Court of Justice struck down the Safe Harbor provisions that enabled companies like Facebook to avoid EU data transfer rules. Facebook is also under investigation by Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain for similar violations.
Two dozen US technology companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon called on the US Congress to reform US internet surveillance law by increasing privacy protections and transparency requirements under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The NSA documentation leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 demonstrates the far-reaching effects of mass data collection that is currently authorized by this section of the law, allowing intelligence agencies to collect bulk communications data from non-residents without a warrant.
The companies are calling for judicial oversight of data queries involving communications by US persons, as well as more leeway for how they disclose the number of surveillance requests they receive. Currently, companies are only allowed to report the numerical range in which the number of requests fell (i.e. between 0 and 1000, etc).
Although Apple was notably absent from the group of signatories, the company reported a sharp increase in the number of national security requests it received from US government agencies in its transparency report for the second half of 2016, a jump of roughly 3,000 requests compared to the first half of 2016.
Ellery Roberts Biddle, Endalk Chala, Salma Essam, Leila Nachawati and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.

author: Netizen Report Team


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Spare a Thought for the Dissidents Living in Fear of the Azerbaijani State’s Long Arms · Global Voices
Arzu Geybullayeva

Azerbaijan (east) and Georgia (west). Caucasus neighbours and partners in crime?
The insecurity experienced by Azerbaijani activists and journalists living in neighbouring Georgia broadly recalls Agatha Christie's best-selling novel, And Then There Were None, when visitors to a desert island mysteriously begin disappearing one by one.
Like the characters on Christie's island, the dissidents are aware of a growing sense of threat, and speak about it to anyone who will listen. But no-one seems able to protect them from their authoritarian government, which has arms reaching far beyond its own borders, and an enduring habit of seeking vengeance against those it considers enemies of the state.
Unlike in the novel, most of these individuals have known each other for some time. They were once part of a small community of people prepared to stand up against the entrenched, oil-rich and fantastically corrupt regime in their homeland.
At some point, they all left Azerbaijan out of fear of persecution, and found refuge next door in relatively democratic Georgia's elegant, tumbledown capital, Tbilisi. But in the ex-Soviet space, where some of the world's most ruthless security services operate with impunity across borders, you are never truly safe.
The recent abduction of Azerbaijani journalist Afghan Mukhtarli, who moved to Georgia with his wife and daughter in 2015 fearing persecution in his native town of Zaqatala, attests to this.
On May 29, on his way to his Tbilisi home, Mukhtarli was abducted by a group of unidentified men, and taken across the Georgia-Azerbaijan border without his passport, according to his lawyer.
In Azerbaijan he was detained and charged with “illegal border crossing”, “smuggling”, and “resisting law enforcement”. Local police in Azerbaijan claimed to have found 10,000 Euros on Mukhtarli's person.
Leyla Mustafaeva showing passport of her husband, who disappeared in Georgia & miraculously crossed to Azerbaijan. Georgia must investigate! pic.twitter.com/wEROO80rKW
— Giorgi Gogia (@Giorgi_Gogia) May 30, 2017
Mukhtarli had never felt safe. In December 2016, he spoke to the author of this article about his fears that something might one day happen to him. Many other native Azerbaijanis living in Georgia and other countries have complained of being under the surveillance of the Azerbaijani state.
Turncoats have not helped their cause. On May 4, an online platform founded by a former Azerbaijani political prisoner who re-invented himself as a government mouthpiece published a list of Azerbaijanis who have lived or currently live in Georgia: Mukhtarli's name was on it.
#Azerbaijan has an appalling record of prosecuting critics. @hrw is seriously concerned for Afgan Mukhtarli’s safety https://t.co/fwQZ38V7Gl
— Wenzel Michalski (@WenzelMichalski) 31 мая 2017 г.
Exiled Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Mukhtarli abducted from #Georgia at risk of torture in #Azerbaijan @AFP https://t.co/mYyzBSrwei
— Irakli Metreveli (@rustaveliandco) 31 мая 2017 г.
#Georgia should immediately investigate illegal transfer of Azerbaijani journalist to Baku. #Azerbaijan should free #AfganMukhtarli pic.twitter.com/S1al66xsA9
— Giorgi Gogia (@Giorgi_Gogia) 30 мая 2017 г.
The list in the article is long, and also includes the names of activists and journalists who have in recent years traveled to Georgia for work, conferences, meetings, and health treatments.
The authors of the pro-government article claimed that these were just false pretexts to disguise the travellers’ actual goals of securing money and instructions to subvert the Azerbaijani state.
Another name mentioned in the article is that of Gozel Bayramli, a deputy chairman of the marginalized opposition party Popular Front. On May 25, she was detained at the Georgia-Azerbaijan border and placed in pretrial detention for three months following her return from Georgia, where she went for medical treatment.
Similarly to Mukhtarli, Bayramli stands accused of committing smuggling offences, after border police claimed to have found an undeclared $12,000 in her bag.
#Azerbaijan‘s list of political prisoners continues to grow; key opposition figure @GozelBayramli has been detained https://t.co/27RZIpBTGw
— Rebecca Vincent (@rebecca_vincent) 30 мая 2017 г.
New political arrest in #Azerbaijan: #GozelBayramli, Dep. Chairman of PFP has been detained on the border while coming back from #Georgia.
— Anar Mammadli (@anarm2013) 26 мая 2017 г.
On May 23, yet another Azerbaijani native, Farman Jeyranov, was arrested in Georgia following a Tbilisi court order, and sentenced to two months in pretrial detention on charges of surgical fraud and concealing information considered to pose a threat to human life.
A doctor by profession, who helped found clinics in both Baku and Tbilisi, Jeyranov relocated to Georgia several years ago. It is believed his arrest came following pressure on Georgian authorities exerted by the Azerbaijani state. He will hope to avoid extradition.
The cases of Mukhtarli and Agalarli comes after two more opposition members, Gozel Bayramli and Farman Jeyranov, were detained in #Georgia.
— Lamiya Adilgızı (@Lamiya_Adilgizi) 30 мая 2017 г.
The role of Georgia, a country with aspirations to join the European Union and Nato, in Mukhtarli's disappearance, remains something of a Christie-like mystery.
Speaking to a local news outlet two days after Mukhtarli's abduction and under pressure from rights organizations who had rallied in Tbilisi, Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili acknowledged that the “disappearance of a person is a serious challenge to our statehood and sovereignty.”
Minister of Internal Affairs Giorgi Mgebrishvili meanwhile dismissed any wrongdoing and claimed that, “Georgia’s law enforcement agencies have nothing to do with this version of the case, nor can they have any connection with it.”
That seems unlikely, if not completely impossible. But if Mgebrishvili's claim is true, a formal note of diplomatic protest addressed from Tbilisi to Baku might go some way towards assuaging the increasing safety concerns of the other Azerbaijani exiles still living in Georgia.

author: Arzu Geybullayeva


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The Fake News Photos Justifying the Return of Martial Law to the Philippines · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

This photo of a US soldier in a Vietnamese village in 1966 was recently used by a Philippine government news website to report about the status of martial law in Mindanao. Photo from Wikipedia. Public Domain.
The southern Philippine island of Mindanao — the second biggest island in the Philippines — was placed under martial law on May 23, 2017, after a local group suspected of having ties to ISIS attacked various parts of Marawi City. While many supported the government's decision to pursue the militants who attacked the city, there were also critics who think that declaring martial law across the entire island is unnecessary.
Concerns about martial law are related to the country’s bitter experience during the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s, when martial law led to rampant human rights violations and the restriction of the people’s civil liberties.
Perhaps in order to gather public support for martial law, some officials and supporters of the government started sharing photographs from other countries, trying to pass them off as depictions of the situation in Mindanao. Internet users have been busy debunking the images.
Screenshot of an article posted in a Philippine government news website. The photo of the article is taken from a Wikipedia entry discussing the Vietnam War. Source: Facebook page of Tonyo Cruz
The image above shows the website of the Philippines News Agency (PNA), a government news service, which published an article explaining the difficulties encountered by the army in conducting urban warfare in Marawi. The article’s photo, however, comes from the Wikipedia article on the Vietnam War, which PNA conveniently failed to mention.
After receiving a lot of flak for publishing the photo, the PNA acknowledged its mistake and assured the public that it did not intend to spread misinformation:
While there have been lapses in our judgment, it has never been the policy of PNA to tolerate erroneous report, and it has certainly never been our intention to sow misinformation, much less share what is termed nowadays as “fake news.”
We regret that these mistakes have cast doubt on our integrity as a news agency.
On May 28, 2017, Assistant Secretary of the Presidential Communications Operations Office Mocha Uson shared a photo on her popular Facebook page about a group of praying soldiers. Perhaps her aim was to pay tribute to soldiers who are fighting terrorists, but the soldiers in the photo she shared are actually members of the Honduran police force.
.@MochaUson Tell your followers AND yourself that we have enough photos of our soldiers praying. No need to use Honduras police's. SHAME! pic.twitter.com/b83CJtm7Z8
— ALT Team AFP (@AltTeamAFP) May 29, 2017
After being criticized for posting the photo, Ms. Uson claimed that it was merely a symbolism and that she didn’t name the Honduran police as Filipino soldiers. She accused her critics of “lacking common sense.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the president actively shared a Facebook album containing photos of smiling citizens taking selfies with soldiers and tanks to prove that martial law is accepted by Mindanao residents. But the photos are actually from Thailand, recorded when the army grabbed power in 2014.
Global Voices has published several stories about how “coup selfies” informed the world that a junta had taken over Thailand and that some citizens were using selfies to express protest against the military dictatorship. But in the Philippines, these photos were used by the president’s avid supporters to justify martial law in Mindanao.
At the time of this writing, the album containing the Thai coup selfies has more than 33,000 shares..
Facebook user Diwata Luna said this misattribution amounts to an injustice against the real authors of these images:
Why is it a big deal if PNA and Mocha Uson used photos of soldiers from other countries? Because it is an injustice to our OWN soldiers who are fighting. And it is an injustice to journalists who risk their lives to take photos in the middle of a war.
It hasn't all been accusations and acrimony, however. The misuse of famous photos has also encouraged no small amount of humor, such as one journalist's take on PNA's “lapse in judgment.” Some context for the text below: Maute is the group with suspected links to ISIS, and the image is about the clash between Spanish colonists and natives in 1521.
Latest photo from PNA:
Bakbakan ng sundalo ng AFP at mga banyagang elemento ng Maute Group-ISIS pic.twitter.com/Ma4Acsj8q0
— Lourd de Veyra (@lourddv) May 30, 2017
Clash between soldiers of the AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines] and foreign elements of Maute Group-ISIS

author: Mong Palatino


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The Pedicab Project Is Giving Nepal’s Rickshaws a Modern Update · Global Voices
Sanjib Chaudhary

Pedicab Project Team with the pedicab riders. Image from Michael Linke's Facebook page. Used with permission.
Among the sea of traditional rickshaws on the streets of Lumbini, the southern Nepalese birthplace of Lord Buddha, the Pedicab Project‘s modern version of the passenger cart is sure to catch your eye.
Sleek, futuristic and not at all rickety, these pedicabs are built by Catapult Design of Denver, USA, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has provided US$350,000 for the design and production of 60 prototypes.
Launched in April, 28 pedicabs are currently being trialed in Lumbini and another 28 in Kathmandu. After successful completion of the pilot phase, the design for mass production will be finalized based on the feedback from both customers and drivers.
Our pedicab design finally hits the streets of #Kathmandu and Lumbini! Congrats to #ADB, @NoelGaelWilson, and the local design team! #Nepal pic.twitter.com/mTwHPOgCAT
— Catapult_Design (@Catapult_Design) May 3, 2017
Global Voices Nepal author Sanjib Chaudhary spoke with Bradley Schroeder, project manager for the Pedicab Project, about these modernized rickshaws and how they might change the way people look at rickshaws in Nepal. Here are the excerpts of the interview.
Global Voices (GV): What was the inspiration to pursue this project?
Bradley Schroeder (BS): Pedicabs (also known as cycle rickshaws) provide an essential mobility service for much of South Asia. The industry to produce and manage cycle rickshaws likewise is also a major employment and income source for the poorest of the poor. The zero-emission and zero-noise vehicles provide numerous benefits, especially when offsetting motorized trips.
GV: Can you tell us how the pedicabs work? How are they different from normal rickshaws?
BS: The pedicabs are a modernized version of the traditional cycle rickshaw. The traditional cycle rickshaws are antiquated and not utilizing the best technology available; mostly in terms of the appearance, material (weight) and gearing. The project focused on a more modern design with better quality components.
GV: You have launched the first batch of pedicabs in Lumbini. What is the initial feedback from passengers and tourists?
BS: Initial feedback is good. The electrical assist version is definitely more popular than the pedal only. Both the operators (wallahs) and the tourist prefer it. There are some minor things Catapult will suggest changing in future pedicabs. It's important to note that these were prototypes so there are some teething problems but all in all, it's a solid vehicle. I think the best phrase is, “the wheels didn't fall off”.
GV: How does this work? Are you giving away the pedicabs for free? How did you choose the riders who got the pedicabs?
BS: Again these were prototype vehicles so they were given to the operators (wallahs). It would not be ethical to charge for a ‘yet unproven vehicle’. Future pedicab distribution will most likely be through a more sustainable model such as recapitalization or financing.
GV: Isn’t this project too expensive? You’ve been given US$ 350,000 to design 60 pedicabs, whereas you get similar battery-powered rickshaws at a nominal price in the market. Can you share with us the cost-benefit analysis of the project?
BS: Catapult Design has done extensive research on what is available in the current market and none suited the needs of the South Asia market. When you speak about the cost of the vehicle you cannot just divide $ 350,000 by 60; you need to account for the design, evaluation, manufacturing at a low number of units, etc. The current price of the pedicab, if in full production, would be competitive to the cost of a current rickshaw, although a bit higher (est. at 10% depending on the country).
Michael Linke posing with a pedicab. Image from Michael Linke's Facebook page. Used with permission.
GV: What are your future plans? Where next do you want to take these pedicabs?
BS: The final stage of the project is the evaluation. Suggestions will then be made and the design modified if necessary. The design of the pedicab is open-source (as per a requirement by ADB) so any manufacturer can then use it. The Southeast Asian market is huge so if the design proves itself it should be replicated and market forces will drive it from there.
If the project succeeds, perhaps we will see hundreds of new, modern pedicabs operating in countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines in the near future.

author: Sanjib Chaudhary


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‘There Is No Holiness in an Occupied City’: Jewish Activists Protest Israel’s ‘Jerusalem Day’ · Global Voices
Maya Schkolne

Police evacuate Israeli and diaspora Jew activists, as they block Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's old city, to protest against the “flag march,” which celebrates the 50th anniversary of East Jerusalem's “liberation” by Israel. May 24, 2017. Source: ActiveStills.
For many Palestinians, the Israeli national holiday of Jerusalem Day, or Yom Yerushalayim (יום ירושלים) in Hebrew, is a bitter reminder of Israel’s systemic impunity.
Following the capture of East Jerusalem by the Israeli Defence Forces during the 1967 Six Day War, Palestinians residing in East Jerusalem were given permanent residency status rather than citizenship.
Since then, they've been denied equal access to municipal services and live under the threat of the Israeli authorities. As the Israeli human rights NGO B'Tselem says, Palestinians in East Jerusalem are systematically mistreated:
[They're treated] as immigrants who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right… although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city, and have no other home.
No country in the world ever recognized Israel’s effective annexation of Jerusalem, which the UN Security Council condemned in 1980 with Resolution 478, with the United States abstaining.
Nevertheless, the State of Israel annually celebrates what it considers the “liberation” or “reunification” of West and East Jerusalem, focusing on the seizure of the Western Wall and Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.
One of the most notorious spectacles of the day is the March of the Flags, when roughly 50,000 Israeli ultra-nationalists parade through Jerusalem and Damascus Gate to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.
Largely funded by the Jerusalem Municipality, this parade is not simply an exhibition of domination over the city; it is an incitement to harassment and assault.
Holding signs of acclamation for the supremacist and convicted terrorist Meir Kahane, as well as his manifesto titled They Must Go, the crowds draped in flags beat drums to the cadence of their chants, calling for “death to Arabs, the Muslim prophet Mohammed and leftists.”
The Israeli police protect the crowds while restricting Palestinian movement, typically blocking entrances to their neighbourhoods, and spraying “skunk water” malodorant on anyone attempting to exit.
Moreover, the police seal entry to the Muslim Quarter and order Palestinian traders along the route of the march to close shop.
Palestinian activist Suleiman Maswadeh summarized the dread this evokes in an article titled The One Day Jerusalem's Palestinians Fear the Most:
Right-wing extremists provoke us by aggressively banging on our doors… And if anyone dare think of responding, we all know who the police will believe.
Jerusalem Day 2017 marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the Israeli Occupation. According to journalist David Sheen, this year’s march was particularly intense:
Jerusalem Day march today was more racist than ever. Marchers sang “Zachreni Na”, with its lyrics to wipe out Palestinians, dozens of times.
— David Sheen (@davidsheen) 24 May 2017
Members of the Jewish community worldwide have responded to the controversy and hostility surrounding the anniversary, reflecting the widening division into different camps.
In the United Kingdom, more than 70 Jews signed a letter to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks denouncing his participation in a delegation that joined the March of the Flags.
In West Jerusalem, about 50 Jewish owners of shops, bars, and restaurants defended East Jerusalem Palestinians with various acts of solidarity, such as closing their shops before the parade began.
Illuminating the disparity in treatment, one of the Jewish restaurant owners explained to +972 magazine:
I don’t envisage a situation in which the police coerce a business owner in West Jerusalem in the same way, taking the side of the rioters instead of protecting the city’s residents.
As many as 60 local and international Jewish activists also staged a sit-in at Damascus Gate, as part of a coalition of the anti-Occupation groups “IfNotNow,” “All That’s Left,” and “Free Jerusalem.”
Leanne Gale, a 25-year-old Jewish activist living in Washington, DC, and the spokesperson for IfNotNow, explained the sit-in to Global Voices:
This is not an occasion to celebrate. Jews around the world must resist this violence, supposedly perpetrated in our names. As Israeli anti-occupation activists have been saying for a long time, there is no holiness in an occupied city.
Protesters said they hoped to stop the crowds and compel them to take alternate routes, while disrupting the police's plans to clear Palestinians from the Muslim Quarter.
Approximately twenty-five demonstrators came into direct contact with the police. This was after about two dozen interlinked their arms, singing songs in Hebrew and chanting slogans like “Now, now is the time; Jews must stand with Palestine.” It was then when right-wing Israeli activists charged at them.
Activist Rachel Roberts described in a blog post what she saw:
I thought about my great-grandparents, who learned a Judaism before there was Zionism, and how there was no one to protect them when thugs would parade through their Eastern European villages to harass and do violence in the name of religion and nationalism.
Gale told Global Voices that Israeli police ordered demonstrators to disperse, intervening with force. “Some of us were choked. Some were dragged by the neck under police batons, and some were thrown to the ground,” she said.
Held in a headlock by the police, one participant was filmed repeating the phrase, “I can’t breathe.” American-Jewish activist Sarah Brammer-Shlay sustained the worst injuries in the group, breaking her arm when an officer grabbed her. Palestinian medics quickly evacuated her to the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, free of charge.
Cops broke the arm of a Jewish American woman at an anti-occupation demo in Jerusalem. Now she needs a $25K op. https://t.co/yQlV9QrEQf
— Lisa Goldman (@lisang) 28 May 2017
Activists say these efforts are an encouraging sign for the future. Speaking to +972 magazine, IfNotNow organizer Yonah Lieberman said “never before has such a coalition assembled to put together this kind of action on Jerusalem Day.”
IfNotNow's Rachel Roberts said in a blog post that activists should focus on standing up to this nationalism:
The most important thing that we can contribute to their struggle is to declare that the faulty, parochial worldview that informs the nationalism of the right is not our Judaism.
Following the demonstration, the alternative diasporist group ‘Jewdas’ group wrote:
It's probably time to put this Zionism thing to rest now. We won't miss it. pic.twitter.com/gLToa7YD84
— jewdⒶs // יידהודה (@geoffreyjewdas) 24 May 2017
Whatever optimism the recent demonstration in Jerusalem occasions, it's important to note that it was an episode in a much larger nonviolent campaign by Palestinians to reclaim their dignity.
In an opinion piece for the Israeli newspaper +972, Brammer-Shlay wrote, “We hoped to symbolize to our community back home the ways that Israel uses violence against Palestinians in order to protect the interests of occupation and right-wing violence.”

author: Maya Schkolne


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Facebook Bans Racist Word ‘Kalar’ in Myanmar, Triggers Collateral Censorship · Global Voices
Juan Cebu

Burmese word “Kalar pae” means chick pea or split pea. Photo by Sanjay Acharya, Wikipedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
According to Myanmar Facebook users, their posts are being taken down by the popular social media company for containing the word ‘kalar’.
Although the etymology of the word is still debated, it is traditionally used to refer to people of east Indian origin or as an adjective meaning “Indian” in general. Facebook is censoring the word “kalar” or ကုလား (in Burmese script) as part of its initiative to tackle the problem of widespread hate speech on the Burmese language social network.
In recent years, the rise of radical nationalist movements has given the word an extremely derogatory connotation. ‘Kalar’ is used by ultra-nationalists and religious fundamentalists to attack Muslims in Myanmar especially the Rohingya minority in the northwest part of the country.
But in this effort to combat hate speech in Myanmar, the company has censored a good deal of viable content from its platform.
‘Kalar’ may be commonly associated with racism today, but the word on its own does not necessarily constitute hate speech. Context matters — many people have reported that posts in which they discussed the use of the term, or expressed concern about its usage, were censored as well.
Moreover, there are several Burmese words with completely different meanings that contain the same string of characters as ‘kalar’. For instance, chair in Burmese is also written ‘kalar htaing’, which contains the same characters, as well as other words such as ‘kalar pae’ (split pea), ‘kalar oat’ (camel) or ‘kalarkaar’ (curtain).
Aung Kaung Myat, writer, explained on Facebook the different meanings of words that sound like ‘kalar':
A post made by one of my friends was deleted today because there was the word, kalar, in it. However, he was wittily asking his friends if they know where he can cure his lower back pain by using a pun. The phrase, ku la — ‘cure’ (ku) + question word (la) in Burmese language — bears striking resemblance verbatim with the racist term but they are wholly different in context.
There have been various reactions to this initiative of Facebook. Zin Win Htet thinks that it will reduce hate speech posts of radical nationalists, but also stressed that Facebook needs to be more analytical before it removes any post suspected of promoting racism:
ကု@#လား ဆိုတဲ့ word ကို Facebook Team က manually ဖျက်တာမဟုတ်ဘူးလေ.. ဒီတိုင်းစကားလုံးကို တိုက်စစ်ပြီး auto လုပ်သွားတာ.. အဲတာကြောင့် status ကအကြောင်းရာဘာရေးရေး နားလည်မှာမဟုတ်.. ဖြစ်သင့်တာ တိုက်စစ်တဲ့ method (may be Regular Expression) မှာ ကပ်ရပ် စကားလုံးတွေပါ validate လုပ်ထားသင့်တယ် ကု@#လားထိုင်တို့ ကု@#လားပဲတို့ အစရှိသဖြင့်.. ကောင်းတဲ့အချက်ကတော့ မျိုးညစ်အကောင့်တွေ hate speech တွေလျှောက်ဖြန့်နေတာကို ကောင်းကောင်း သမလို့ရသွားတာပဲ.. မဘသ လဲဦးကျိုးသွားပြီ.. ခုချိန်မှာ nationalism ကို စောစောစီးစီးဦးချိုးပစ်သင့်နေဘီ..
Facebook team is not manually deleting the word “Kalar”. It automatically filters the word. That's why it won't understand any status you write. What it should do is that they should carefully analyse post and validate using the words beside it. For instance, “Kalar Htine” (chair) and “Kalar pae” (split peas). The good thing is that these dirty nationalists who are spreading hate-speech will have a pretty good lesson. Now it's time to curtail their nationalism.
While the move may send a strong signal to those spouting hate speech, the efficacy of this strategy might not last long. The experiences of social media platforms in China, such as Sina Weibo and WeChat, have proven that keyword censorship often becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, wherein social media users will simply begin using a new word or alternate spelling of the censored word in order to keep expressing their views.
Writer Aung Kaung Myat described how Facebook started to remove his posts when he simply notified his friends that the word ‘kalar’ is already banned on the social network:
…when I discovered this new policy of Facebook, I made a post telling my Facebook friends the word is banned. Ironically, my post was removed by Facebook and I was banned from liking, posting, and sharing content on Facebook for 24 hours because the post “doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards”.
Facebook has removed numerous posts by people who do not have any negative intentions or who were simply trying to show their opinions against the hate speech used by radical nationalists.
Patrick Murphy wrote that his post not related to hate speech was taken down:
Non-hate speech post removed by Facebook. In the post, the author was sharing his opinion on why extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the country are bad.
Chan Myae Khine believes Facebook should have done more before launching this initiative like consulting the Burmese Internet community:
Facebook might have good intention to minimise racism in Burma through their platform but that's not how it works. Censoring such words will just bring more hatred among different communities. Plus, they seemed to initiate that without proper local context nor tech support hence banning words like “chair” and “pea curry”. Even when they found out that they made mistakes, they don't attempt to rectify wrongly deleted posts. If only they could respect a bit more to 15 million user base that's generating a great revenue for them, it'd be great.
Facebook's automated censorship has made users to mock its approach. Instead of taking it seriously, users are now making fun of Facebook by deliberately writing the word ‘kalar’ in non-hate speech context to see if their posts would be taken down.
Here are some screenshots of Facebook posts that have been removed despite containing nothing resembling hate speech:
Used with permission.
The Burmese text says “I want to sit on a chair and eat split peas curry and watch an Indian movie. Just testing if Facebook will remove the post that contains kalar.” Screenshot, used with permission.
The post reads “So if you are a doctor, do you cure people?” Screenshot, used with permission.
Over the past five years, Myanmar has seen the rise of extreme nationalist ideology and religious fundamentalists who have been using social media to amplify their voices and influence. Hate speech is blamed, among others, for stirring communal violence in Myanmar, especially in the Rakhine state where clashes between Muslims and Buddhists displaced thousands of residents.
Facebook was criticitized for its failure to tackle the rampant hate speech occurring on its Burmese pages. But instead of simply deciding to censor the word ‘kalar’, it should have reviewed and learned from ongoing initiatives that aim to combat online hate speech in Myanmar that focus on context, rather than code.

author: Juan Cebu


text:
Inside Russia’s National Liberation Movement With Pavel Merzlikin · Global Voices
Lincoln Pigman

Image edited by Kevin Rothrock
The following text is a translation by Lincoln Pigman, a Russo-American student of War Studies at King’s College London, and also a freelancer featured in The New York Times and IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review. The original text, written by Pavel Merzlikin, first appeared on April 24, published by the Russian website Bumaga.
Over the past four years, Russia’s largest cities have gotten used to the National Liberation Movement (NOD). Almost daily, its activists organize protests, praising Vladimir Putin and calling for Russia’s liberation from American occupation. According to the movement’s leaders, 160,000 Russian citizens belong to NOD, but little is known about how it is organized.
Who belongs to NOD and why? Are its activists paid to support Putin? What is the movement all about? To answer these questions, a journalist from the Russian online newspaper Bumaga infiltrated NOD and spent a month living as a rank-and-file activist.
On the corner of Lomonosov Street and Fontanka Embankment in Saint Petersburg sits a branch of the Russian Central Bank. Every Friday, from 16:30 to 18:00, NOD activists picket outside the building. They suspect the Central Bank of working for “Russia’s enemies.”
On March 3, there were only three NODovites picketing: a plump 45-year-old woman wearing a baggy fur coat and a hat with a fur flower on the side, and two elderly men in shabby puffy jackets. One looked to be around 60 years old, the second much older and sporting a long gray beard.
They were visible from afar, handing out newspapers with a portrait of Putin on the front page, screaming “For Russia’s sovereignty!” at passersby, and waving black and orange flabs (the colors of Saint George’s ribbon). The people of Saint Petersburg hardly reacted. Students giggled at the newspapers, while adults simply walked past. Most often, it pensioners who approached the activists. On one occasion a group of pensioners walked up the activists and sparked a conversation about Russia’s fate.
“Why are you standing here?” asked an older woman, glancing from activist to activist.
“We’re here for Putin, supporting him.”
“Why? Everyone supports him anyway. My acquaintances, my friends—we all voted for him.”
The activists nodded approvingly. The discussion turned to the latest news, and the activists began talking about [opposition leader Alexei] Navalny’s latest film on corruption at the highest levels of the Russian government, He Is Not Dimon to You. They were sure it was all a lie.
“Navalny was educated in the United States. He’s an American agent, and it’s clear whom he works for. We pay tribute to America as it is. A billion a day, can you believe it?” explained the activists.
“A billion a day? Why?”
“That’s the law.”
After discussing the “tribute to America” and today’s “dead” youth, the pensioner took a copy of the official NOD newspaper, which described Russia is an American colony, and left. I took her place and said that I wanted to join the movement.
With no questions asked, I was handed a worn-out poster that called on the Central Bank to decrease the base lending rate to zero. A minute later, I found myself standing next to Tatiana, another activist. She held a poster stating that [Belarusian President] Alexander Lukashenko is working with “Ukrofascists.”
With all the attention I got, it felt as though the NODovites had gathered there just to meet me: they shook my hand, took turns taking photos with me, and within a few minutes, older members of the group started referring to me as Pashenka—the diminutive of my name.
The rest of the protest was casual: we handed out newspapers and took photos together another dozen times. At 18:00 sharp, the activists, as if on cue, put away their flags and posters and began slowly moving towards the metro. Tatiana told her aged comrades: “See, the youth are turning up. We aren’t standing around for nothing.”
Thus began my month in NOD.
Vladimir had dreamed of the sea since his childhood but never managed to become a sailor. Over the course of his life, he changed professions 10 times, doing everything from overseeing cargo handling to servicing medical equipment. At 70 years old, he became a pensioner just a few years ago. As he admitted himself, he is devoted to only two things in life: getting his grandson to school in the morning and fighting for Russia’s sovereignty as a rank-and-file member of NOD. All that remains to remind him of his dreams of the sea is an anchor tattooed onto his wrist in his youth.
The elderly Saint Petersburg resident joined NOD about a year ago after coming across its website, though he only recently began participating in protests. It took the movement months to contact Vladimir after he filled out a form online.
Now, you can find Vladimir on Lomonosov Street every Thursday, or on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Malaya Sadovaya at NOD’s Sunday gatherings.
I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Vladimir at three separate protests, each of which followed the same script. Around 13:00, we quickly erected a battered multi-meter banner reading “Putin is our national leader,” grabbed a stack of propagandistic newspapers, and began trying to hand them out. If we didn’t feel like distributing newspapers, we could always grab an old and cracked poster from the pile. The ones I held said things like “America, hands off Kievan Rus’” and “How is our Alaska doing,” the latter being accompanied by a photo of Putin in a fur cap. It was an uncomfortable experience.
“Putin is our national faggot” [pidor, which rhymes with lider, which is Russian for leader], yelled out a punk as he was walking by the protest.
“Get out of here, provocateur. Just look at him,” answered the activists.
The punk didn’t want to leave. He began singing a Noize MC song, “Out of a Window,” waving his messy hair right in front of Putin’s portrait.
Other passersby reacted more calmly. Intellectual-looking types would approach us, trying to shame us. We called them “white ribbon-ists” [white ribbons are associated with several earlier protest movements in Russia]. Every hour, no fewer than three tourists from Europe and China took selfies in front of us. Sometimes, policemen came up and took photos of us. We treated them extremely politely, and, once they had left, told one another that they probably supported NOD in their hearts.
Only children and pensioners took our newspapers. Most of the thousands who walked past us on Nevsky Prospekt in the two hours that we protested paid us no mind. Almost all of us at one point or another carried a large flag with the colors of Saint George’s ribbon and a poster about American oppressors. It felt as if there were at least fifty of us.
In practice, between three and six people would join our pickets. Even on our best days, when seemingly all of NOD’s St. Petersburg members showed up, we had no more than 15-20 activists in our ranks. Just under half of them are pensioners with lots of free time and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. There were also a few modestly-dressed Saint Petersburg 40-somethings and a couple of student-patriots.
We also had a few semi-mythical characters join the organization, including “Tolyana,” a 40-year-old man who wore shorts even in 3°C weather, and the famous gay-basher Timur Bulatov, who held [Vkontakte founder] Pavel Durov and LGBT activists responsible for the Saint Petersburg metro bombing. In my month in NOD, however, our paths never crossed.
Though they may appear exciting, NOD protests are in fact extremely boring. The atmosphere mostly brings to mind a gathering of pensioners at a dacha. The activists do not discuss politics, and usually remain silent. If they do speak, it is about back pains and how their grandchildren are doing at school.
“You know, my niece lives in Amsterdam, another relative of mine in the Hague, others in the United States,” Vladimir, the would-be sailor, told me at one Sunday gathering.
“Yes, you told me last time.”
“My niece moved there more than 20 years ago and works as the head programmer at some office,” he continued.
“And what’s it like abroad? Don’t they want to come back and fight for Russia with you?”
“No, they like it there. It’s good there.”
The first NODovites appeared on Russia’s streets in the autumn of 2012, shortly after the Bolotnaya Square case. The ideology of the movement, which Duma deputy Yevgeny Fyodorov created, can be summed up in one sentence: America is to blame for all of Russia’s woes.
America raises tariffs, introduces new taxes, controls the media, forces the Duma to pass laws that are unfavorable to Russians, and gets children to take part in anti-government protests. NODovites believe that Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution and the War in Donbass are products of America’s open war against Russia. NOD activists are convinced that the Saint Petersburg metro bombing is another example of this war. Their sources say the American security services were involved in organizing it.
The theory of Russia’s omnipotent foe accounts for all of Russia’s problems and always follows the Kremlin line. Discontent truckers are labeled as Ukrainian terrorists, student-protestors as Satanists, and anti-corruption crusaders as American agents. For both the government and NOD, Syria has become the war against America’s primary front, and [U.S. president Donald] Trump, once a Russian hero, is becoming viewed as a traitor.
In NOD’s view, America’s broad remit in Russia is in fact supported by law: after the Soviet collapse, Russia accepted a constitution written by “Western advisers” and became an American colony. The Americans control Russia with the help of a vast “fifth column,” the Central Bank, the media, and the opposition.
A number of Russians resist occupation, but their main champion in the fight against the Americans is Putin, according to NOD mythology. In his 16 years in power, he has accomplished much, but is physically incapable of liberating Russia for good. “The Americans would immediately overthrow him. Even the Duma, where a ‘fifth column’ has taken hold, would never let it happen,” explain the NODovites in their propaganda, calling Putin a revolutionary.
NOD sees one way out: holding a referendum on amending the constitution—specifically on eliminating articles referencing the primacy of international law and the absence of a state ideology. Putin must also be granted emergency powers, for instance, to subject officials who refuse to break with the Americans and carry out Putin’s orders to criminal punishment.
Since Trump’s election, the conflict with America has only escalated further, the NODovites believe. Recently, activists claimed to have prevented a “coup driven by Trumpomania.” The main conspirator, they say, was [Kremlin propagandist-in-chief] Dmitry Kiselev.
NOD and its muddled ideology, is the work of Yevgeny Fyodorov, a Duma deputy with the look of a high school computer science teacher.
The United Russia politician was born and raised in Leningrad. He completed military service in Afghanistan and the city of Baikonur, and entered politics in 1989 at the age of 26. Since then, Fyodorov has been elected to five terms in parliament and held several positions in government, among them, deputy atomic energy minister.
In Fyodorov’s words, he has always understood that the Americans control Russia. “Yes, the Duma only accepts laws written in the West. But this has not prevented me from doing my job, just as it has not prevented me from getting up in the morning and shaving,” explains Fyodorov.
It is not Fyodorov’s extensive public service that has made him famous, however, but rather his poor showing in a debate with Navalny, during which the phrase “party of crooks and thieves” made its first appearance; his role in establishing NOD and his active involvement in creating several resonant laws, including the Dima Yakovlev Law [Russia’s ban on the adoption of children from Russia by American citizens, imposed in response to the Magnitsky Act], the foreign agent law, and the ban on “gay propaganda.” Fyodorov calls these laws the fruits of his labor in the “rear of the enemy” and the first steps on the path to Russia’s liberation from the “American yoke.”
Fyodorov attributes most changes in Russia’s situation to himself and his movement. NOD’s leader asserts that the movement’s activists have prevented several conspiracies and revolutions in Russia, overcome the “fifth column,” and even been involved in some media-related scandals, for instance, the reshuffle at RBC last year.
Other than Fyodorov and his faithful helper, Maria Katasonovaya, who is occasionally mentioned in the press, there are no prominent leaders in NOD. A kind of power vertical exists within the movement.
On paper, NOD contains an “ideological committee,” a legal service, a newspaper, and even a (barely active) party, the National Course. But according to NODovites, the committees meet only every few months and the movement is largely driven by its rank-and-file activists.
Every weekday, mixed martial arts expert Vasily Veselov wakes up at six in the morning and leaves for the ironworks where he works. But his main devotion in life is the organization of patriotic protests—a task that is part of his job as deputy head of NOD’s Novosibirsk branch.
Veselov joined NOD after Maidan in Ukraine, seeking to prevent such an uprising in Russia. “It’s important to reduce protest potential in the city. Modern Russia is not independent,” Veselov asserts. “We pay tribute through money, children, scientists, resources. Our media are trying to destroy the people. We have a 50 percent divorce rate, most children suffer from mental disorders, teenagers don’t respect their elders. All in all, our culture is being degraded. That’s why I’m in NOD.”
NOD branches exist in virtually all major Russian cities: activists attend protests in Moscow and Novosibirsk, picket the American consulate in St. Petersburg, and come to opposition protests in Barnaul to argue with participants.
Sometimes such arguments escalate into fights. In the past few years alone, the media have written about NOD attacks on Alexey Navalny, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, the Saint Petersburg-based photographer David Frenkel, and even schoolchildren. NODovites refute any and all accusations, distancing themselves from the attackers. They claim to fight to change Russia using only legal methods.
There are more than 200 NOD branches across Russia, and the overall number of activists exceeds 160,000, say the movement’s leaders. Fyodorov and his supporters argue that the real number of members is even higher. For instance, they count the siloviki and Vladimir Putin—whom they call the movement’s true leader—as allies.
At a glance, NOD appears to unite the most disparate of people. We surveyed activists from eight regions and found out that the movement’s members include a 24-year-old female baker from Nizhny Novgorod, a 28-year-old artist whose sculpture of a gazelle decorates a Krasnoyarsk Krai train station, and a 38-year-old hunter from Voronezh. NOD’s supporters also include hipsters from Moscow, who sometimes receive low-level posts in parliament through Fyodorov, and lonely pensioners from Vladivostok. All consider themselves revolutionaries and “truth-bearers” and are determined to defeat the United States.
It is exceedingly easy to join NOD’s ranks. It is enough to fill out a form online or attend one of NOD’s many protests, of which there are four to five a week in St. Petersburg alone.
But there are no major accomplishments for new activists to look forward to. NOD’s activities are limited to almost-daily protests attended by 3-15 people shouting slogans like Motherland! Freedom! Putin! and Our country, our laws! and to vitriolic political debates on social media.
NOD’s official page has more than 10,000 subscribers, while Yevgeny Fyodorov’s has fewer than 80. There, activists praise Stalin, discuss dark international conspiracies, curse “Navalny’s fighters” and the fall of the Soviet Union, argue about whether Putin has made clones of himself or simply manages without them, and complain that their relatives, at best, do not share their passion for NOD, at worst, consider them thrall to conspiracy theories.
There are also other pages, such as those of the separate branches. There is no limit on how many NOD cells can exist in a single city, and all it takes to make your own is to find three other like-minded people. In St. Petersburg, there are two branches, of which the larger one is run by the 46-year-old businessman Alexey Stepanov.
The head of NOD’s Saint Petersburg branch looks nothing like a NODovite. He runs several book shops, knows John Locke quotes by heart, and compares his life with that of Dostoevsky.
Alexey Stepanov was born in Perm and came from a mining family. In his childhood, he was a Pioneer and a Komsomol member, taking an interest in politics from an early age. “In tenth grade, I led a politinformation group at school. Once a week, I took to the radio to attack capitalism and the American bourgeoisie,” he recalls.
After finishing school, Alexey chose to continue the family business and moved to Saint Petersburg to study engineering at the Gorny Institute. But the Soviet Union collapsed, reducing demand for engineers. Instead of mine shafts, Stepanov opted for books, which he and his children adored.
“In the 1990s, I worked in the book business, specifically, purchasing books. I sent books to acquaintances and relatives in other cities, received 500 dollars a month for it. I rented a one-room apartment and lived quietly. I found myself through entrepreneurship,” he explains.
In the 2000s, Russia began experiencing economic growth and the future NODovite’s family came to do better and better. It was now able to afford vacations to Thailand and Switzerland, a car, an apartment. Stepanov attributes these fortunes and those of Russia during this time exclusively to Putin.
The path to NOD was a long one for Alexey. The first of these involved the autobiography of economist John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Critics attacked it for its factual errors and conspiracy thinking, but Stepanov totally believed its story of how American agents penetrate and destroy foreign economies, shutting down major companies abroad. Today, the activist maintains that the same took place in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
After the book about American agents, Stepanov became enamored with the ideas of Nikolay Starikov. Then, in 2012, Stepanov joined NOD. He now holds that “human stumps” live in the United States, and that his movement is saving Russia.
“NOD is more of an ideology. We are politically active, and help spread good ideas. Our general idea unites half of Russia. I always find time for NOD, and do so not at odds with my family, but for them. My children have to live here, but how can they live normal lives in an occupied country? I don’t want them to be beggars or die under shell fire in Donbass,” he says.
Stepanov admits that in an economic crisis, involvement in pro-government movements like NOD can have material benefits.
“By working with NOD, I improve my prospects. I might be offered some sort of political or public office—I’d be happy to take it. I don’t see anything difficult in politics. I could go into it, but I wouldn’t want to do what today’s Duma deputies do—it’s representative politics. Someone is promised something, elections held. No, of course, if I’m told that the country needs it, I’ll do it all. But I want to do something actually helpful, genuine,” he explained, stressing that he feels equally negatively about all Russian parties. After all, both United Russia and “Navalny”-ists are financed from abroad, Stepanov is convinced.
Valery, a not-too-tall but strong builder of 55 years of age, agrees. He regularly attends protests, despite his health problems and the many months of sick leave that he has taken. He has been a NODovite for more than a year, having joined the organization after a stint in another patriotic movement with a proclivity for conspiracy theories: Nikolay Starikov’s Great Fatherland Party (PVO). He calls the fact that NOD membership costs nearly nothing one of his main reasons for leaving PVO.
“In PVO, I spent almost 50,000 rubles, can you believe it? Here, there are no contributions I have to make, nothing,” he complained when we stood together on Nevsky Prospekt with posters glorifying Putin.
Indeed, I paid only 500 rubles during my month as a NODovite, gifting it to one of the female activists on March 8. During that time, I was given a free flag and a collection of propaganda items—pamphlets and newspapers—weighing a kilogram.
But NOD is not without funding problems. Experienced activists pay for most printing jobs out of their own pockets. As a result, they come out to protest with the same posters time and time again, and hand out old newspapers. In March 2017, we distributed propaganda made the previous year.
“Our principle is a lack of centralized funding. NOD is a bottom-up movement,” explained Yevgeny Fyodorov. The deputy, on the other hand, may have such funding.
At Bumaga’s request, the anti-corruption organization Transparency International analyzed NOD’s finances. Here’s what it found.
Specialists note that NOD-like pro-government movements claiming to have no centralized funding often receive money through a network of non-public non-profit organizations and grants: examples include the Set’ initiative or Officers of Russia. Such a financing scheme permits organizations to conceal the actual sums received and spent.
A number of the organizations to which Yevgeny Fyodorov is connected have received presidential grants, among them, the Institute of Economics and Jurisprudence. It is frequently mentioned on Fyodorov’s official site and has thrice been the recipient of grants: a 6.5 million ruble grant in 2014; more than 6 million rubles in 2015; and 4 million rubles in 2016.
Others—Rus’, a Moscow-based democratic reform-oriented movement, and the Center for Scientific and Legal Support to Subjects of Customs Law—have also received grants. Not a single one has a website of its own or publicly-available information about its activities. Fyodorov claims that NOD does not use these grantees’ resources.
NOD collects donations through two bank accounts, but does not publish any financial statements. According to the movement, NOD receives between 47,000 and 329,000 rubles a month, to be sent as aid to Novorossiya.
Transparency International notes that nothing about this financing scheme is illegal. However, it creates an opportunity to conceal one’s resources.
“When organizations are financed through non-public non-profits, taxpayers are effectively unable to determine how effectively and how exactly resources were used. This points to NOD’s poor transparency. Openness about one’s financing, by the way, always improves the flow of donations from physical and legal entities,” Transparency International explains.
Anti-corruption crusaders point out that NOD does not need more money to sustain its current activities. According to Transparency International, 300,000 to 400,000 rubles a month would suffice.
The head of one NOD branch largely agreed with that assessment, citing the figure of 200,000 rubles a month in conversation with Bumaga.
“NOD’s central branch can only provide us with books, leaflets, posters, and flags. That said, we make most of our own: each item sets us back 50 to 100 rubles. That’s spent on printer cartridges, paper, so on and so forth. No one is paid anything” he stressed.
Indeed, if the movement’s leadership has multimillion ruble grants at its disposal, none of that money reaches rank-and-file NODovites. During my month in the movement, I was never offered any financial assistance.
March 8 differed from the weekend and the holidays before it—for one, NOD’s usual meeting on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Malaya Sadovaya was not held. Instead of brochures featuring portraits of Putin, pamphlets with slogans about the exploitation of women were handed out. Several hundred feminists replaced 15 pro-government activists. Haircuts dyed in poisonous-looking colors, bright clothing, and posters saying things like die, patriarchy abound at the Saint Petersburg intersection.
The feminists never applied for the city’s permission to protest, and so the round-up began almost immediately. The first woman to be put into the avtozak [a van in which detainees are taken to police stations for processing] was a 20-year-old with pink hair and an overcoat with Love written in red on the back. Despite the possibility of arrest and threats from the police, the activists marched down Nevsky Prospekt and even reached Dvortsovaya Square, where they quietly dispersed and left for their homes.
The NODovites made no attempt to disrupt the feminists, whom they commonly refer to as “Satanists.” Instead, the five or six of us—a few pensioners, some forty-somethings, and I—stood quietly on Marsovo Field.
In the cold, we did our best to hand out newspapers while I argued with Andrey, an experienced NODovite and a physics and informatics teacher. Among other things, Andrey condemns rock music and Disney cartoons and thinks the Rothchilds rule the world.
“Listen to me, are people living or dead?” he asked me.
“Living, of course.”
“Do you want me to prove that they’re dead? The human being cannot reproduce itself—only a family can do that. From a biological point of view, therefore, the human being is dead. Only a family is alive.”
“But that’s just a form of reproduction. It doesn’t mean that he’s dead.”
“[EXPLETIVE], I keep telling him, but he doesn’t understand, [EXPLETIVE]. Do you understand that [EXPLETIVE], sometimes, there are people who just won’t get it, even if you explain it. When you piss, is your urine also living?”
Continuing to curse, the physicist began to say that lonely people, feminists, and businessmen are bio-robots and unhappy, that they live pointless lives. He explained this using the examples of internet protocols and motherboards and incorporating lots of jargon.
He was less forthcoming about his involvement in NOD.
“You know why we stand here? So that Russia’s enemies, the opposition, and LGBT people cannot get their own protests approved and stand in this spot. We are standing on guard, for enemies are everywhere,” he told me, as one of the forty-somethings turned on music using a cassette deck. For some reason, we wrapped up our March 8 protest to the sounds of “The Sacred War,” the Russian anthem, and Putin quotes.
Yevgeny Fyodorov has also spoken of NOD’s duty to “occupy the streets.” Moreover, he has credited NOD with “banishing the fifth column” from the streets over the past four years by holding 15,000 protests a year.
In practice, any remotely popular protest held by NOD’s ideological opponents baffles the movement. Such was the case on March 8, when the NODovites stayed away from Malaya Sadovaya, occupied by the feminists, and on March 26, when the largest protests in years broke out across Russia. NOD called the latter the start of Russia’s Maidan, a process that the activists say may culminate in November 2017.
On March 26, anti-corruption protests took place after the release of Navalny’s investigation, He Is Not Dimon to You. In Saint Petersburg, between 3,000 and 10,000 people took part in a demonstration on Marsovo Field. The demonstration did not go unnoticed by NODovites, a surprisingly large number of which—thirty to fifty activists—showed up.
However, their intention was not to criticize the government. Instead, after setting up a stage, the activists began loudly discussing the necessity of Stalinist repression, the accomplishments of Putin, and the stupidity of liberals and of Navalny in particular.
Once the center of the field became packed full of people, the anti-corruption demonstrators came over to meet the NODovites and to ask what they thought of corruption in Russia. Displeased by the unexpected attention they were receiving, the NODovites confusedly but politely argued with their opponents. Cossacks, wearing wet hats and policing the anti-corruption protest, looked on disapprovingly at the spontaneous discussion groups. People with sneakers and rubber ducks around their necks mixed with those sporting Saint George’s ribbon, a bizarre carnival of sorts. In the end, they didn’t appear to agree on anything.
Yet, on social media, the NODovites presented what had happened very differently. Official accounts of the counter-protest held that most of the anti-corruption demonstrators who spoke with the NODovites came around and shortly joined NOD.
NOD has a hard time mobilizing people for its own demonstrations. That was the case on March 18, when Saint Petersburg NODovites tried to celebrate the two-year anniversary of Crimea’s reunification with Russia. But no more than 20 people showed up, and the result was a series of one-man pickets along Nevsky Prospekt. The next day, NOD organized another protest on Malaya Sadovaya, where the speakers casually accused America and its spies of everything and anything, declared the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic holy lands, and demanded the return of Alaska to Russia. Only 15 people attended the protest.
“Why are there so few of them?” asked a 30-year-old activist.
“People don’t come to protests, they sleep at home instead. When was the last time you showed up?” answered one NODovite, who never misses a single demonstration.
“In 2015.”
An explanation for the Crimean protest’s poor showing was quickly found: the Americans were to blame. “They told [Saint Petersburg governor Georgy] Poltavchenko not to allow anything too large,” said one activist to me, adding that spies had penetrated the movement and were sabotaging its efforts to mobilize activists. Fyodorov agrees with NOD’s rank-and-file activists, and believes that only one or two years remain until “NOD’s decisive victory.”
The NODovites remain determined even after the opposition’s successful protests. “They’ll attract ‘Navalny’s fighters,’ gays, Satanists, ‘white ribbon’-ists, and the ‘fifth column.’ Of course, the protests are a victory for the opposition. They have won the battle. But we will win the war. With each protest of ours, Russia comes closer to its sovereignty. Only a year remains. If Putin becomes president in 2018, that’s it for the Americans,” said the aged Valery, who, after complaining about his sore legs and a row with the wife, left for home after yet another protest.
So ended my month as a NODovite.

author: Lincoln Pigman


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The Contested Legacy of a Panamanian Dictator · Global Voices
Ariel Moreno

Sign hanging on Manuel Noriega's abandoned mansion. Photo by user Flickr Jasperdo. Used under the CC 2.0 license.
On May 30, Manuel Antonio Noriega died at the age of 83 after being taken off life support. The former leader, once called the strongman of Panama, had been in a coma since March, following an operation to remove brain tumors.
Talking about Noriega is like prodding the wounds of the Panamanian people, who are still divided between those who consider him the hero who faced down the gringos and defended the country's dignity, and those who consider him a murderous coward, a megalomaniac, and a drug lord.
Roberto Eismann, the editor of the La Prensa newspaper (before it was shut down by the Noriega dictatorship), called Noriega a coward for avoiding a heroic death in 1989 when he fled United States troops intent on toppling his government:
De Noriega, el Pana mas siniestro d nuestra historia-asesino narcodictador-nada bueno! Al sonar los tiros, huyo y evito una muerte heroica!
— Roberto Eisenmann (@RobertoEisen) May 30, 2017
Noriega — the most sinister Panamanian of our time, a murderous narco-dictator — nothing good! Upon hearing shots, he fled and avoided a heroic death!
Nonetheless, there are also those who say that the country was better off in Noriega's time, especially in terms of crime. In November 2016, before Noriega finally died, one Facebook user wrote:
Señores hoy despues de analizarlo bien le pido disculpas a al señor Manuel A. NORIEGA.POR haber partipado en los años 80 .en derrocarlo .y le pido a la justicia panameña, que le den la jefatura de la policia.de cuartel por carcel.y que por favor arregle.los problemas que tenemos con la delincuencia.y asesinatos todos los días. Así que libertad para NORIEGA.
Ladies and gentlemen, after thoroughly analyzing everything, I apologize to Mr. Manuel A. Noriega for having helped overthrow him in the 1980s. I ask Panamanian authorities to grant him the station police leadership instead of a prison cell, and to please fix the issues of crime and murder that we experience every day. So, freedom for Noriega!
Noriega, popularly known as “El cara ‘e piña” or “Pineapple face” (for his acne scars), is an important historical and mythological figure in Panama. His dictatorship, and its abrupt end following the 1989 U.S. invasion, are still too recent and controversial to be discussed or debated in classrooms. As a result, the historical record has been intertwined with mythmaking, and it has become difficult for many in the country to disentangle the puzzle of who Manuel Antonio Noriega really was.
His legacy is bright and meaningful for those who admire him. For those who considered him a tyrant, it is covered in blood and decay.
In his book, “Our Man in Panama,” John Dinges described him as follows:
Creó, definió y fortaleció un círculo de fieles, en la vida civil y militar, pero siempre rehuyó definirse, como si fuera un agujero negro estelar, que absorbe inmensas cantidades de energía sin reflejar la luz.
He created, defined, and strengthened a circle of believers in civil and military life, but he always shied away from defining himself, like a stellar black hole that absorbed immense quantities of energy without reflecting any light.
The former dictator and last general of the Panamanian army (which was disbanded after the U.S. invasion) returned to Panama on December 11, 2011, after serving a 20-year prison sentence in the U.S. and another prison term in France. Noriega remained imprisoned in the Rebirth Rehabilitation Center, located in the Panamanian town of Gamboa, until the operation that caused his death. Some opponents and victims of the dictatorship held out hope that Noriega would blow the whistle on those who collaborated with him during the dictatorship, but he remained silent. Nevertheless, it was revealed that the former general left behind a half-finished book, along with recordings of his memories so that it could be completed.
For some, like current Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela, this closes a chapter in the country's history:
Muerte de Manuel A. Noriega cierra un capítulo de nuestra historia; sus hijas y sus familiares merecen un sepelio en paz.
— Juan Carlos Varela (@JC_Varela) May 30, 2017
The death of Manuel A. Noriega closes a chapter in our history; his daughters and family members deserve to bury him in peace.
For others, so long as what happened during the dictatorship and the invasion remains unclear, the chapter remains open and the wound can't heal. Carmen Brown recalled the death of Hugo Spadafora, a physician and guerrilla fighter who was a vocal critic of the military in Panama. His body was found decapitated in 1985, during Noriega's dictatorship. His head was never found and is today a symbol of those who still await answers regarding what happened during the regime.
Con la muerte de Noriega no se cierra ningun capitulo y menos pasar las paginas cuando aqui todavia no se ha encontrado la cabeza de Hugo.
— Carmen Brown (@CarmenBrown1612) May 30, 2017
Noriega's death does not close any chapters, let alone wipe any slates clean, when we have yet to find Hugo's head.
And then there are also those who, like the comedic website El Gallinazo, consider Noriega a part of the past and believe there are other questionable individuals who are still alive and should be held accountable for their actions:
Bueno, Ya Noriega se fue, y la verdad hace rato sabíamos que eso iba a pasar. Así que para no dejar que se haga largo el asunto, vengo a recordarles cuatro palabras sucias: #ODEBRECHT #MIMITO #VARELA #MARTINELLI chao.
Well, Noriega is gone now, though the truth is that we knew that would happen. So, to be brief, I'm here to remind you of four dirty words: #ODEBRECHT #MIMITO #VARELA #MARTINELLI ciao.

author: Ariel Moreno