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Reorienting Taiwan and Hong Kong: New avenues for building power · Global Voices
Lausan

Thirtieth celebration of the June 4, 1989 massacre on Tiananmen Square, taking place in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei on June 4, 2019, with the presence of Hong Kong activists on stage. Photo by Filip Noubel, used with permission.
This article by Brian Hioe was originally published on Lausan, and is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Editor’s note: “China” in this article, if unspecified, refers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), excluding Hong Kong.
A 2019 concert by symphonic death metal band Chthonic drew 30,000 participants and featured a raucous moshpit in Taipei’s Liberty Plaza. It was also a political rally, with activists, legislators, and political candidates such as Chthonic frontman Freddy Lim and Lai Pin-Yu speaking about resisting the pro-Unification KMT party as a means to protect Hong Kong’s democracy. Many attendees responded with popular protest slogans “Restore Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” (光復香港，時代革命) and “Five Demands, Not One Less” (五大需求，缺一不可).
Such instances of public and creative support between Taiwan and Hong Kong have ramped up in the past year since the beginning of the anti-extradition bill protests. But we can also draw the line further back to understand the way in which Taiwan and Hong Kong are inextricably linked in their political past and future. Indeed, activists from both regions have long seen common cause in one another. Taiwan and Hong Kong both face threats to their democratic freedoms from the Chinese government. For years, activists have traveled between Taiwan and Hong Kong to observe or participate in protests and other significant political events. Extensive links between Taiwan and Hong Kong activists date back to well before the Sunflower and the Umbrella Movements in 2014. At that point in time, many ties developed through student groups that traveled between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the hopes of learning from each other.
Interactions between Hong Kong activists and Taiwanese activists involve the exchange of not just tactics, but also discourses, and conceptual framings of history and politics. Examining these exchanges can shed light upon the political self-understanding of both sides, as well as the prospects for building power between Taiwan and Hong Kong going forward.
Activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong have frequently conceptualized the relation between the two places as temporal. The phrase “Today’s Hong Kong, Tomorrow’s Taiwan” (今日香港，明日台灣) has been a recurrent slogan on protest signs in Taiwan since the 2014 Sunflower Movement. What this phrase suggests is that Hong Kong represents a possible (bleak) future for Taiwan, if Taiwan loses its democratic freedoms. This would indicate that for Taiwanese, Hong Kong serves as a canvas onto which fears and anxieties regarding potential political outcomes for Taiwan are projected.
Political projections between Hong Kong and Taiwan go both ways. Taiwan is sometimes framed by Hongkongers in somewhat utopian terms in juxtaposition to Hong Kong regarding its legalization of gay marriage, functional state apparatus, or progressive politics. That is to say, Taiwan is sometimes posed as a lost historical possibility for Hong Kong, if history had gone differently—something of a desired future. However, the ways in which Hongkongers romanticize Taiwan and Taiwanese romanticize Hong Kong may be something that hinders genuine understanding of each local context.
Let’s consider the term “restore” (光復, guang-fu in Mandarin and gwong-fuk in Cantonese) in one of the most commonly seen—now banned—protest slogans “Restore Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” (光復香港，時代革命). The slogan suggests a temporal notion of “restoring” Hong Kong to a previous state, one that is preferable to the present. More broadly speaking, the term 光復 suggests reclaiming the past, but in a progressive way. Some have taken issue with the slogan’s suggestion that returning to Hong Kong as it was under British colonialism would be desirable. Hong Kong, after all, was hardly democratic under the British.
Yet the term 光復 is also a concept central to the KMT ideology, thus signaling strong Chinese Nationalist Party connotations. An unusually high number of streets and places in Taiwan are named 光復. They were renamed in the process in which the KMT, shortly after it came to Taiwan, renamed many places after its ideological tenets or sanctified party leaders. Here, the term 光復 refers to the ideological aim of the KMT to militarily retake the Chinese mainland from the CCP, as in “restoring” Mainland China (光復大陸).
But the term can also refer to the “restoring” of Taiwan (台灣光復) as a part of the Republic of China (ROC) after the KMT took control of Taiwan following Japan’s defeat in World War II, ending Taiwan’s Japanese colonial period and bringing the ROC government-in-exile to Taiwan. To this extent, the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命) is sometimes referred to as the Xinhai Restoration (辛亥光復), which suggests that the rise of the KMT-controlled ROC government and the fall of the Qing “restored” China, as in taking China back from the Manchus for Han Chinese.
Either way, this notion of “restoration” draws out the strong parallels between Taiwan and Hong Kong. The fact that some demonstrators in Hong Kong persist in waving British colonial flags at demonstrations suggests that they came to see the British colonial period in an overly rosy light after the 1997 Handover. Yet a similar phenomenon can be seen in Taiwan, in which the Japanese colonial period became an object of nostalgia for many Taiwanese after the KMT came to Taiwan.
These examples show that the entrance of a new colonial regime can cause people to romanticize a prior one. People’s discontent with the present conditions drives them to long for a past which, in many ways, never existed. Romanticizing the past can limit our political imagination as it confines our vision of what is possible and desirable now to a previous political order. Transformative possibilities predicated on actively seeking to establish a new political order are restricted by the notion of restoring the conditions of a previous order implied in the term 光復.
The use of the term 光復 in Hong Kong as part of 光復香港 has likely contributed to the appropriation of this KMT-charged term by members of the independence-leaning pan-Green camp in Taiwan. Most recently, the successful recall campaign led by progressive civil society groups against Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu of the KMT used as its slogan, “光復高雄”.
Translated into English as “Reset Kaohsiung” by campaign organizers WeCare Kaohsiung (WeCare 高雄) and the Citizens Mowing Action (公民割草行動), this was a somewhat subversive use of 光復. Rather than seeking a return to an a priori political order, it suggests a notion of wiping the slate entirely and beginning again. Perhaps this can be one way to reinterpret the phrase 光復香港 that does not entail nostalgia for British colonialism. Understood as “Reset Hong Kong” instead of “Restore Hong Kong,” 光復香港 calls for a radical re-imagination of Hong Kong’s future.
The slogan “Today’s Hong Kong, Tomorrow’s Taiwan” suggests that Hong Kong lies somewhere in the temporal future for Taiwan, if Taiwan were to lose its democratic freedom. At the same time, some Hong Kong protesters have positioned the present events in Hong Kong in Taiwan’s temporal past.
There is an increasing use of the term “White Terror” (白色恐怖) in Hong Kong to refer to mass arrests, and reports of disappearances and mysterious suicides of individuals who have participated in demonstrations. But the “whiteness” of political terror is specific to Taiwan. As white is one of the KMT’s party colors, along with blue and gold, the “White Terror” refers to the decades of political repression carried out by the KMT during Taiwan’s martial law period, which was once the longest martial law period in the world.
Some have suggested that the worsening political conditions may lead to a wave of Hongkongers fleeing abroad, just as many Taiwanese activists fled overseas during the White Terror. As a result of this exodus, the Taiwanese diaspora eventually played an important role in Taiwan’s democratization—many speculate and hope the same may be the case for Hong Kong. In this way, these resonances give the “White Terror” of Taiwan’s past emotional resonance for Hongkongers’ in this new climate of terror, post-National Security Law.
However, in some ways, it is somewhat unusual that the term “White Terror” came to be used in Hong Kong. The White Terror carried out by the KMT was justified under the auspices of Cold War anti-communism, in which the KMT claimed that those it imprisoned and executed were Communist spies loyal to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By contrast, the CCP is precisely the political force that protesters in Hong Kong are contending with. Behind the actions of the Hong Kong government are the directives of the CCP from afar. Consequently, there is a certain irony that the term “White Terror” has come to be used instead of, say, “Red Terror”—though many of the individuals who have engaged in physical violence against demonstrators have worn white clothing during the attacks they carried out.
With the analogy to the White Terror in Taiwan, some political groups in Hong Kong have sought to use slogans from the Taiwanese democracy movement in Hong Kong. The recently dissolved Demosisto, for example, had adapted a variation of free speech martyr Deng Nan-jung’s slogan, “100% freedom of speech” (百分之百的言論自由), as “100% 自由”. Deng, the publisher of Freedom Era Weekly (自由時代週刊), self-immolated in April 1989 after a 70-day stand-off with the police while barricaded in the magazine’s offices.
Some protest actions have drawn from Taiwan’s more recent history of protest. During the attempted occupation of the Hong Kong Legislative Council on July 1, the words “Sunflower HK” were written on the wall of the legislative assembly chamber, referencing how the 2014 Sunflower Movement centered around the month-long occupation of the Taiwanese legislature.
Hong Kong has to contend with the direct presence of China in a way that Taiwan did not and does not.
Some in Hong Kong may even be seeking answers as to how to achieve self-determination in Taiwanese history. In an interview with The Reporter, Taiwanese activist Chiang Min-yen (江旻諺), who studied at the University of Hong Kong and has since become a link between Taiwan and Hong Kong social movements, mentions interest from Hongkonger friends in the works of 20th century Taiwanese Marxist revolutionary Su Beng (史明)—the so-called “father of Taiwanese independence”—and his theoretical elaborations of Taiwanese independence from a left-wing perspective. According to Chiang, interest in Su Beng’s work is from individuals advocating for Hong Kong self-determination but who wish to avoid the charge of nativism.
This is a telling anecdote regarding comparisons between Hong Kong and Taiwan. Posing present-day Hong Kong as comparable to Taiwan’s past, Hong Kong activists indicate their hopes that, like Taiwan, Hong Kong could eventually achieve democratization through social movement struggle. At the same time, conditions in present-day Hong Kong are not entirely analogous to Taiwan—primarily because of Hong Kong’s proximity to China.
Hong Kong has to contend with the direct presence of China in a way that Taiwan did not and does not, with regards to issues such as Chinese migration, or even the threat of military intervention. Hong Kong is separated from China by only a river, while Taiwan is separated from China by the Taiwan Strait. As Wu Rwei-ren, the Taiwanese anarchist theorist of national identity, points out in When Formosa Reclaims the World (受困的思想：臺灣重返世界), even if contemporary Taiwanese identity tends toward civic nationalism rather than ethno-nationalism, xenophobia against Chinese and ethno-nationalist sentiment would probably be significantly higher in Taiwan if Taiwan saw a level of Chinese immigration similar to that of Hong Kong.
Efforts to transcend ethno-nationalist views of China in Hong Kong will need to find some way to cope with this and Taiwan may not necessarily offer answers regarding how to avoid nativism—it may only be because of geographic contingency that Taiwan has managed to avoid conditions that lead to the emergence of strong nativism. Moreover, we should remember that civic nationalism can still evolve unpredictably into ethno-nationalism; there is never solely a “pure” form of civic nationalism which does not contain some elements of ethno-nationalism or vice versa.
Yet if activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong have conceptualized their relation to each other in a temporal fashion, it may be spatiality that constitutes the greatest obstacle to building power between activists of the two places at present.
Indeed, the roots of the present movement are deeply tied to contested juridical spatiality between Taiwan and Hong Kong. The controversial extradition bill that originally sparked the movement was proposed after Poon Hiu-wing was murdered in Taipei by her boyfriend Chan Tong-kai—both of whom were from Hong Kong. Chan could not be extradited to face charges because of Hong Kong’s lack of an extradition agreement with Taiwan. The Hong Kong government thus proposed an extradition bill that would have allowed the transfer of fugitives between Hong Kong and other places, including Taiwan and the PRC.
The case is reflective of how relations between Taiwan and Hong Kong are overdetermined by their respective juridical status and sovereignty. But despite these critical differences, both Hong Kong and Taiwan nevertheless share the “China factor,” which greatly shapes their political contexts. That the primary political cleavage in Taiwan is between the independence-leaning pan-Green camp and unification-leaning pan-Blue camp is, unsurprisingly, reminiscent of the split between pro-democracy groups and the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong. This is reflective of how local political issues are deeply tied up with the external question of the relation to China. To try and avoid the fundamental question of how Taiwan and Hong Kong relate to China may, in fact, limit our political imagination and possibilities for political action.
Protests in Hong Kong have seen a number of Taiwanese travel to Hong Kong in order to participate in demonstrations there. The start of the demonstrations in June 2019 and demonstrations around the time of Chinese National Day on October 1, 2019, saw particularly high numbers of Taiwanese activists traveling to Hong Kong to participate in demonstrations. As a result, in October 2019, there were reports of Taiwanese being searched at Hong Kong International Airport to check whether their luggage contained gas masks, helmets, or other protest equipment, with young men, in particular, being profiled.
Likewise, seeing the shortages of gas masks, helmets, and other protest supplies in Hong Kong, civil society and religious organizations in Taiwan undertook the task of sending protest equipment to Hong Kong. Some of these organizations were later involved in assisting or giving shelter to Hongkongers that sought refuge in Taiwan to avoid lengthy protest-related jail sentences.
At present, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has proven difficult for Taiwanese to travel to Hong Kong. Though Hong Kong’s borders remain open, Taiwanese who fly into Hong Kong to participate in protests will have to be quarantined for 14 days in Hong Kong and another 14 days in Taiwan when they return. As such, anyone who wishes to participate in demonstrations must be willing to sacrifice a month of their time in quarantine, something that anyone who needs a job to survive can hardly afford.
And with the passage of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, it is likely that supporters of Taiwanese independence would be targeted for sedition against the Chinese government. Taiwanese who enter Hong Kong could be targeted by the national security law, even Taiwanese who are simply transiting through Hong Kong International Airport. Last year, there was at least one case of a Taiwanese citizen who participated in demonstrations in Hong Kong being arrested after entering the Chinese mainland, and it is thought there could be other cases that have not yet come to light.
With countries already scrambling to attract members of the finance industry seeking to leave Hong Kong because of security concerns, it will be the business elites—who already travel at will between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—that can most easily secure residency in Taiwan through existing means. While movements in both Hong Kong and Taiwan have been accused of being bourgeois pro-capitalist movements, and Hong Kong and Taiwan have been accused of only fearing China because of the desire to protect free-market capitalism, those actually at the forefront of the movements in Hong Kong hardly have any means to escape.
With Taiwan’s borders shut to foreigners, it is not possible at present for Hongkongers to travel to Taiwan to seek asylum. After pressure from former Sunflower Movement activists such as DPP deputy secretary-general Lin Fei-fan, who likely broke with the party establishment to call for stronger measures to assist Hongkongers, the Tsai administration has set up an office to help Hongkongers in Taiwan obtain residency, study, find work, invest, or seek asylum in Taiwan.
Apart from providing assistance to Hongkongers seeking to work, study, or invest in Taiwan, the office will also handle asylum applications from Hongkongers. Survey polling seems to indicate that Taiwan is the top preferred destination for Hongkongers considering leaving Hong Kong. But though the office is based out of Taipei, rather than Hong Kong, there have been fears that there could be reprisals from the Hong Kong government against workers in Taiwan’s representative office in Hong Kong. Despite the opening of the new Taiwan office, however, there are few indications that the Tsai administration intends to pass legislation to set up a process for Hongkongers to have a formal process to apply for asylum in Taiwan, preferring to continue handling asylum seekers on a case-by-case basis.
Indeed, in Taiwan or elsewhere, issues regarding refugees often provoke anxieties regarding borders, and the notion of passing an asylum bill for Hongkongers has led to criticisms that this could allow for Chinese spies to mix in with Hongkongers to enter Taiwan. This is an absurd concern, given that many Chinese already live, work, and study in Taiwan, but this perhaps parallels how some Hongkongers have sought to exclude Chinese from “Yellow Circle” establishments and “Hongkongers only” restaurants.
In observing the exchange of political discourse between Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years, we can see that this has also involved the transfer of some elements of nationalistic discourse. The term “left plastic” (左膠), for example, imported from Hong Kong, has become used as a term to denigrate the political Left in Taiwan. Despite the term being of Hong Kong origin, ironically, the term has been used to denigrate members of the Taiwanese Left for being too concerned with lofty matters such as asylum for Hongkongers, rather than focusing on more practical national security concerns.
We should also note that students from Hong Kong, China, and Macau were only recently allowed to enter Taiwan again. Although foreigners with Alien Resident Certificates (ARCs) were allowed to enter Taiwan, the Republic of China includes Hong Kong, Macau, and the Chinese Mainland as part of its territory, as a result of which individuals from those places are not eligible for ARCs because they are not technically considered foreigners. Consequently, even with the COVID-19 situation under control in Hong Kong and many parts of China, travel from these areas to Taiwan was originally not permitted for months, something that was criticized as a discriminatory form of educational policy.
Regardless, even after the COVID-19 pandemic passes and Taiwan’s borders are reopened once again, the space for exchanges to occur between activists from Taiwan and Hong Kong—not to mention China—will become increasingly restricted.
In his 2012 work, The Third View of China (第三種中國想像), Taiwanese theorist Wu Jieh-min once posed what seems in retrospect a rather utopian vision of activists in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China uniting to combat their shared enemy—the CCP. Yet it has become harder for substantive exchanges to take place between activists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, with travel to China blocked or increasingly dangerous for activists from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The risk level of traveling to Hong Kong has risen sharply in the past year. The National Security Law is likely to severely escalate the level of risk for Taiwanese activists traveling to Hong Kong. And although the Taiwanese government may be willing to allow Chinese or Hongkongers into Taiwan and there remain some legal methods for Chinese activists to enter Taiwan despite the Chinese government’s ban on individual tourism to Taiwan, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments are liable to stop activists from leaving China or Hong Kong at the border.
It may be, then, that solidarity will increasingly have to take place at a distance in the future. Whether this is the case in the next year is yet to be seen. However, just as demonstrations in Hong Kong are expected to continue, political exchanges between Taiwan and Hong Kong are expected to continue to take place as well. But one question remains: How can activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong find ways to provide aid to each other apart from offering emotional support?
Activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong must dig deeper into our history of exchange and be attentive to the challenges in our present and future, to move beyond projection and into building power.
And a more fundamental question remains as to how to re-conceptualize the relation between Taiwan and Hong Kong in such a way that transcends the binary framing by which present-day Hong Kong is seen as resembling Taiwan’s authoritarian past or Hong Kong is viewed as a dystopian possible future faced by Taiwan. Both framings are, to borrow Theodor Adorno’s phrasing, “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.”
In effect, in both framings, the relation between Taiwan and Hong Kong is one in which the other serves as a canvas on which to project political anxieties drawn from one’s own local context. The projection between Taiwan and Hong Kong, which has led to a sense of shared cause, has at its root cause the “Big Other” of China. In other words, the implicit contrast to China often forms the basis for comparing Hong Kong and Taiwan and in effect draws the boundaries around which we can imagine political action altogether. Neither negating the “China factor” nor being contained by that framework will be the great test for writers and activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the years to come.
What we should recognize in this path forward is that the political projection between Hong Kong and Taiwan is unlikely to lend itself to acts of transnational connection that are genuinely effective for building an international left. As the two regions are presented with ever narrower paths to liberation and an increasing certainty of repression, how to deal with the China factor will remain the cloud that looms over efforts to build transnational coalitions between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond. We must, therefore, dig deeper into our history of exchange and be attentive to the challenges in our present and future, to move beyond projection and into building power.

author: Lausan


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Spain’s scandal-hit former king leaves the country · Global Voices
Lourdes Sada

The image of the former King Juan Carlos of Spain on a one euro coin. Photo taken by the author.
The former king of Spain, Juan Carlos de Borbón, left the country in early August 2020 following a recent investigation into alleged money laundering. His departure is seen as an attempt to protect and distance the crown from a series of scandals that have damaged the reputation of the once highly respected king. The institution of the Spanish monarchy has now been plunged into its worst crisis since its restoration in 1975.
After compromising tapes were leaked — in which the monarch's former lover talked about his alleged money-laundering schemes — an investigation was opened on July 27. Although the investigation is currently ongoing, Juan Carlos is not charged with any crime. The Royal Family published a letter from Juan Carlos to his son, King Felipe VI, in which he announced his intention to leave the country. They initially refused to provide any further information on the former king's location; however, it was later revealed that he was in the United Arab Emirates.
The popularity of Juan Carlos I began to deteriorate in 2011 with the Nóos case, a corruption scandal involving his son-in-law who was accused of allegedly embezzling public funds. Then in 2012, the king himself suffered an accident during a luxury elephant-hunting trip in Botswana, where he was accompanied by his lover, Corinna Larsen. The monarch's costly habits sparked anger in Spain which was suffering from one of the worst economic crises in its history. The scandal reached such proportions that Juan Carlos was forced to publicly apologise. In 2014, as public suspicions about his involvement in these scandals was still ongoing, Juan Carlos I decided to abdicate the throne in favour of his son and heir, the current King Felipe VI.
However, in 2017, scandal followed the royal family yet again after leaked recordings between former police inspector Jose Manuel Villarejo and Corinna Larsen implicated the former king in a money-laundering scheme.
Jose Manuel Villarejo was a police commissioner during Francisco Franco‘s regime. The self-acclaimed “problem solver” has been accused of leading a police mafia which helped launder money and provide spying services for a large client network, including many multi-millionaires. For decades, Villarejo secretly recorded his conversations with politicians, judges, and other influential individuals in order to protect himself if the need should arise. One such person was Corinna Larsen, the alleged lover of Juan Carlos I.
In 2017, Spain's Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office and Internal Affairs began an investigation into Villarejo, which led to the former commissioner's preventive detention. Villarejo tried to negotiate his release with the prosecution by promising not to reveal materials that were “sensitive to the foundations of the rule of law”, including tapes and messages that directly concerned members of the Royal Family.
In the summer of 2017, the taped conversations between Larsen and Villarejo were leaked to various media outlets, including El Español. In the recordings, Larsen explains how Juan Carlos registered properties in her name without telling her so that she could subsequently transfer them back to him. Larsen herself described these operations as money laundering and accused Juan Carlos of using her as a front figure, taking advantage of the fact that Larsen was a resident of Monaco. In other tapes, she revealed the names of more people who also served as front figures and who had illegally brought dubiously-earned money into Spain for the former king. She also talked about current accounts in Switzerland and explained how the monarch received a substantial commission for facilitating the construction of the AVE high-speed rail link from Medina to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Larsen claims she did not know she was being recorded during these conversations.
In March 2020, Swiss prosecutor Yves Bertossa launched an investigation into a “donation” from Juan Carlos to Larsen, allegedly made to launder the aforementioned commission from Saudi Arabia. Although the Spanish judiciary had shelved any case opened against the emeritus king, claiming his sovereign immunity as stated in the Spanish Constitution, the Spanish High Court reopened a case based on the conversations between Larsen and Villarejo. The Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office is currently investigating the cash movements that surrounded the Saudi AVE contract.
In mid-March 2020, King Felipe VI stripped his father of the allowance that he received as emeritus king. King Felipe also renounced the inheritance that he was in line to receive from his father.
Observers say that the Spanish judiciary, along with mass media and some political parties, have afforded too a high degree of protection to the Spanish monarchy. Journalist José Antequera explained to Diario16:
La situación empieza a ser esperpéntica y roza el ridículo internacional (…). En medio de la negociación con Bruselas [por las] ayudas y préstamos para la lucha contra el coronavirus (…), la peor noticia que podía llegar es que un inmenso fango de corrupción alcanza hasta la cúpula misma del Estado.
The situation has become absurd and borders on international humiliation (…). In the middle of the negotiations with Brussels [for] aid and loans for the fight against the coronavirus (…), the worst news that we could hear of is the mire of corruption reaching the upper echelons of the State itself.
However, the majority of analysts believe that in spite of this huge crisis rocking the Spanish monarchy, the institution will survive thanks to the support of the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE):
La monarquía española no podría sobrevivir con el apoyo sólo de los partidos de derecha, monárquicos por naturaleza. El apoyo del PSOE es fundamental. Y Sánchez ha salido a decir que eso no cambia.
The Spanish monarchy could not survive with the sole support of the right-wing parties, who are monarchical by nature. The support of the PSOE is essential. And Sánchez has come out and said that that does not change.
Social media, on the other hand, has seen a very different reaction. On the same day that the departure of the former king was announced, the hashtag #RepúblicaYa [Republic Now] was trending on Twitter.
Juan Carlos I, otro cromo en la larga colección de leales servidores a España… que huyen de España. #reyalafuga #RepublicaYa #ReyEmerito pic.twitter.com/MqZF0Kf5rn
— Maika (@maika_rguez) August 3, 2020
Juan Carlos I, another sticker in the large collection of loyal servants of Spain… who fled the country. #reyalafuga [King on the run] #RepublicaYa [Republic Now] #ReyEmerito [Emeritus King]
Royalists tried to counter this with the hashtag #GraciasMajestad [Thank You Your Majesty].
#GraciasMajestad por la democracia que nos ha dado, por su reinado de paz y prosperidad, por su continua promoción de España en el extranjero, por todos los años que ha dedicado a mejorar España. Gracias por todo.
— Sares (@fheras) August 3, 2020
#GraciasMajestad [Thank You Your Majesty] for giving us democracy, for your reign of peace and prosperity, for continuing to promote Spain abroad, for all the years you have dedicated to improving Spain. Thank you for everything.
This hashtag ended up being taken over by tweets that criticised those who continue to show their support for the emeritus king.
-Hijo…
-Dime.
-¿Has visto el hashtag #GraciasMajestad?
-Jaja si.
-Es que son gilipollas ¿eh?
-Ya ves… pic.twitter.com/G1kU6MZBg6
— Mulo ?ﾟﾇﾦ? #TodosConAitor (@AbreCesar23) August 4, 2020
-Son…
-What’s up.
-¿Have you seen the hashtag #GraciasMajestad?
-Haha yes.
-They’re all idiots, right?
-You see…

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Lourdes Sada


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Why women’s rights and digital rights go hand-in-hand on Namibian Twitter · Global Voices
Lisa Ossenbrink

A woman communicates on her smartphone. Photo via MaxPixel / Creative Commons Zero – CC0.
This article is part of UPROAR, a Small Media initiative that is urging governments to address digital rights challenges at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).
In Namibia, amid the fourth wave of feminist uprisings in the technology age, activists flocked to social media platforms like Twitter to organize an online campaign to legalize abortion.
As part of the campaign, feminist activists launched and disseminated an online petition calling for the legalization of abortion, gaining more than 61,000 signatures as of August 14. With about 2.2 million citizens, this is nearly 3 percent of Namibia's population.
The campaign drew waves of attacks against feminist activists, primarily from Christian and conservative communities who believe that women should abstain from sex and serve jail time for abortion. But as a result of the petition, parliament has agreed to discuss Nambia's outdated laws governing abortion.
The petition’s enormous success stems from a long fight, explains Merja Wolf, a feminist and editor-in-chief of the Informanté. “I’m constantly under attack, every day is a fight on Twitter,” said Wolf, who also told Global Voices that feminist activists face online harassment on a daily basis.
Twitter may allow users to block or report perpetrators of online harassment, but these tools are not always sufficient to mitigate harm, and studies have shown that women are more likely to disproportionately suffer from online harassment on Twitter than men.
For Wolf, a personal line was crossed when a troll went after her kids, causing her to want to step away from Twitter. “But trolls and misogynists have to realize one thing,” she continues, “It’s not just me they are facing. If I leave Twitter, there’s still loads of others of us using it. We came in large numbers,” Wolf said.
She decided to stay on Twitter, despite the daily harassment she and other feminists must endure in their fight to legalize abortion in Namibia. However, Wolf recently temporarily deactivated her account for personal reasons unrelated to politics.
Until now, abortion has been regulated under the Abortion and Sterilization Act of South Africa from 1975. It is only legal under the following conditions: When the pregnancy endangers the woman’s life or her physical or mental health; when the child might suffer from disability; when the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest; or when a woman is a person with a disability or a mental health condition that prevents comprehension of what pregnancy entails.
Christian, conservative communities in Nambia strongly opposed the petition, arguing instead to keep Nambia’s abortion laws firmly in place. Members of these communities launched a petition to reject the legalization of abortion in Namibia, as well.
Netizen Bashupi promoted the petition against legalizing abortion in Namibia:
namibia government : Pro-Life Namibia “Rejecting the Legalisation of Abortion in Namibia” https://t.co/EdGbI5iFGD via @UKChange
Please help save the life of the unborn from evil spirits forcing government to legalize abortion. Sign up and save a life.
— Bashupi B Maloboka (@bbmaloboka2) July 30, 2020
The NamibianNamibia's biggest daily newspaper, featured several tweets highlighting the anti-abortion movement in Nambia, and their Twitter account reflects some of the more conservative values regarding abortion held by members Namibian society:
‘NO TO ABORTION’ … Pro-lifers today protested in Windhoek’s city centre against calls to legalise abortion in the country. The group chanted “We choose life” as they held up posters stating that abortion “kills children”, and deeming the act “murder”.
Video: Arlana Shikongo pic.twitter.com/J6tmZrTxBr
— The Namibian (@TheNamibian) July 2, 2020
In response, Abigail Buitumelo posted the petition to legalize abortion:
https://t.co/VKjyn0YSg4
— Abigail Buitumelo (@virovirina) July 2, 2020
But Twitter use D'mbukushu fired back:
Arrest whoever does abortion!!!!
— D'mbukushu (@donfranklin_na) July 2, 2020
And Yvonne tweeted prayers for those who even bring up the idea of abortion:
Almighty hear our prayers don't allow this to succeed my Lord,please forgive those whom bring up this ideas to your Nation in Jesus name,NO to Abortion NO#NoToAbortionInNamibia
— Yvonne????? (@YvonneJosef2) July 2, 2020
Netizen “Refuse2sink95″ made an ironic comment about those who want to legalize abortion:
You legalize ABORTION and keep celebrating your BIRTHDAY… ?
— Refuse2sink95 ♋ (@An_thropologist) July 2, 2020
And netizen Alie Epata had an alternative suggestion to abortion:
Stay away from sex to avoid creating an unwanted life. Use contraceptives if you can’t stay away. Don’t create a life just to kill it because you can.
— Alie Epata ?? (@gracious24_8) July 2, 2020
For Wolf, however, the abortion debate is linked to feminism, and feminism means one thing: “Making society more equal and thereby better for both men AND women,” she told Global Voices. Unfortunately, this concept is highly contested in Namibian society where gender-based violence remains one of the most prevalent issues.
Wolf attributes the power of social media to the petition’s success on social media:
We are becoming more and more aware of feminism as a society and our numbers are growing on social media such as Twitter. It has the advantage over Facebook because, when someone retweets my statements, it allows messages to spread a lot faster through different audience groups.
Expressing feminist ideas online is an act of free speech that should be protected within the realm of digital rights, primarily focusing on access to information, privacy and freedom of expression.
But online gender-based harassment and violence create an unsafe environment for women activists and feminists to freely express their ideas, organize and campaign.
In Namibia, there is no law criminalizing cyber violence or harassment.
A published review of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) by the Namibian Media Trust (NMT) states that Namibia does not have “personal data protection policies let alone enacted statutes.”
In the review, NMT advocates for a rights-based approach to internet regulation, relevant to both freedom of expression as well as the right to access information. Principles provided for in the African Internet Rights Declaration by the African Union include gender equality and the protection of marginalized groups or groups at risk, of which Namibia falls short, according to the NMT.
Additionally, many women live without internet access.
The Internet Society Chapter Namibia launched the Women Rights Online Report 2020 in late July, noting that only 47 percent of Namibian women have access to the internet.
According to the report, there were no national policies put into place to acknowledge ICT regulations as an opportunity to fight against gender inequality.
Further, the report claims 1 gigabyte of data in Namibia costs over 8% of average monthly income and 70 percent of Namibian schools have no access to the internet. This shows that access to information on the internet is still a major problem in Namibia and a challenge in terms of moving feminist activism into the digital sphere.
Improving access is the first step, but online safety must be guaranteed for women to close the online gender gap, too.
The Women Rights Online Report 2020 gives Namibia a low 2/10 score in terms of online safety for women, justified by the lack of a data protection law which means that both sexualized hate speech, as well as non-consensual image-sharing, can go without legal consequences.
While social media has opened up new possibilities for feminism, especially in the Namibian context, women need to know that local authorities will intervene to protect their safety and security.
Overall, the successful petition for the legalization of abortion has shown the power and impact of online activism.
“If anyone wants to dismiss the power of social media — don’t,” Wolf said.

author: Lisa Ossenbrink


text:
Belarusian labour activists pressured as political crisis drags on · Global Voices
Maxim Edwards

On August 26, 20 workers from Grodno Azot chemical plant were detained after walking through the city – the next day, the white-red-white Belarusian flag used by protesters was raised above the enterprise. Image from the NEXTA Telegram channel.
When Dmitry Kudelevich made his escape from the Belarusian security services, it was via the bathroom window in a KGB office in Salihorsk. “They dragged me out of my car, hand-cuffed me, put me in a minivan and took me to the KGB office,” he says in a video circulating on Telegram. Kudelevich, a member of the strike committee at the Belaruskali potash plant, continues with a smirk: “I always called on people to fight, and today you could say I had a unique opportunity to test my strengths.”
Over the past week, labour activists connected to strike committees at Belarusian enterprises have faced a pressure campaign — arrests, informal threats, and fines — from law enforcement agencies as mass protests continue in the country. These come in the wake of highly contested presidential elections on August 9, which are widely seen as fraudulent. Thousands of enraged citizens took to the streets to protest in the days that followed; Belarusian police responded with mass arrests followed by shocking violence and cruel treatment of those they detained.
Workers at state-owned industries have joined the protest movement, staging public meetings, walk-outs, threats of work-to-rule actions, and strikes. Researcher Volodymyr Artiukh points out that there have been reports of protest activity at “at least at least 70 industrial, trade and service companies as well as in the educational, medical, and media sectors” since the election. “Almost all of these are state-owned enterprises and/or publicly-financed organisations,” he says.
The protest mood appears to have worried the Lukashenka regime, given Belarus’ industries employ a majority in this country of ten million. Over the past two weeks, labour unrest has emerged at some of the country’s largest industries, including the Minsk Tractor Factory, the Belaruskali potash plant and the Grodno Azot chemical plant, which employ thousands of workers. Strike committees have circulated demands for fair elections, the release of political prisoners, and investigations into police violence.
“The state always considered workers a base of support,” comments Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst and regular contributor to Tut.By, a prominent Belarusian news website. “And the authorities, with Lukashenka at the top, were disappointed, to put it mildly, when many state factories turned away from them.”
Indeed, president Lukashenka has taken an aggressive stand. When workers at the Minsk Tractor Factory jeered the president during an August 16 visit, he retorted that they would have to “kill him” before he would re-run the election. A week later, Lukashenka called on managers not to “run after” recalcitrant workers at companies such as Belaruskali, as there were more than enough people to replace them. The striking miners at Salihorsk, he continued, could easily be replaced by Ukrainians (Mykhailo Volinets, chairman of the independent union of mineworkers of Ukraine, retorted in a video address that Ukrainian miners would not be strikebreakers).

The authorities have also urged workers not to stop work. Lukashenka himself warned workers of the same Minsk Tractor Factory that if they stopped work, foreign companies would seize Belarus’ market share; advertisements have also appeared on the website of the Ministry of Industry stating that some state enterprises “now require additional production personnel.”
“The biggest and most important enterprises were gripped by a strike and protest mood,” Shraibman continues. “But there has been, of course, a policy of frightening workers with the idea that they won’t be allowed back to work – some have already been fired to demonstrate that the threat is real. And thus, they’ve managed to stop the strike wave for the moment. If the strikes had continued and expanded, it would have been a very serious threat to the authorities – it would have been a threat to the management of the economy, and management of the country itself.”

In recent days, the Belarusian authorities have made good on some of their threats by detaining prominent labour activists. In Minsk, Anatoly Lavrinovich, a member of the strike committee at Minsk Wheel Tractor Factory, which produces military vehicles, was arrested after he attempted to collect signatures in support of a strike. And Sergey Dylevsky, a member of the strike committee at Minsk Tractor Factory and the opposition coordination council, was detained by police the same day. He was later sentenced to 10 days administrative arrest for attempting to organise an unsanctioned rally.
After calling on workers to start a work-to-rule action at Belaruskali on Monday, Anatoly Bokun, co-chairman of the strike committee at the enterprise some 100km south of Minsk, was arrested. In the days before, several members of the strike committee were contacted by local law enforcement for “conversations”, the strike committee reported. Bokun was eventually released the same day after being convicted of participating in an unsanctioned mass event. A crowdfunding project raised the money to pay his US$260 fine. Following Bokun’s detention, a Telegram channel used by the Belaruskali strike committee warned its supporters that they too could be at risk of arrest for their activities:
Дорогие друзья и коллеги! Сегодня был задержан сопредседатель стачечного комитета Бокун Анатолий. На данный момент он находится в застенках РОВД. По имеющейся у нас информации, на всех членов стачкома ОАО “Беларуськалий” будут составлены протоколы и заведены дела за организацию и участие в “несанкционированных массовых мероприятиях”. Также, из достоверных источников, есть информация, что в ближайшее время членов стачкома начнут задерживать и доставлять в РОВД для дальнейших разбирательств. Исходя из текущей ситуации и информации, которой мы владеем, мы обязаны вас предупредить о возможных задержаниях тех, кто в стачке. Будьте осторожны!
Dear friends and colleagues! Today Anatoly Bokun, the deputy chairman of the strike committee, was detained. At present he is in the cellars of the District Department of Internal Affairs. According to information available to us, reports will be drawn up and cases brought against all members of the strike committee of Belarusalkali for organising and participating in “unauthorised mass events”. Furthermore, reliable sources indicate that in the near future, members of the strike committee will be detained and brought to the District Department of Internal Affairs for further proceedings. Based on the current situation and the information we have, we are obliged to warn those of you on strike of the possibility that you will be detained. Be careful!
— Стачком ОАО “Беларусьалькалий”, Telegram, August 24, 2020
“If the authorities and plant management weren’t afraid, and everything really was how they claim it is – that we’re working as normal at the enterprise — then why would they need to do this? With their actions, the authorities emphasise once again that what we’re doing is right,” said Gleb Sandros, press secretary at the Belarusakali strike committee, when asked about the pressure campaign.
At times, pressure on strike committees appears to be more diffuse. Yulia Slivko, a plasterer at a major public construction firm in the city of Grodno, reported to the Salidarnasts newspaper that she received anonymous threats after being elected chairperson of her company’s strike committee. “They called me from an unknown number and said: ‘If you don’t keep your mouth shut, keep in mind: your son’s out and about on the street. Anything could happen.’”
Slivko was later invited for a “conversation” at a local police station, and also received a call from someone who said they were a social worker — who threatened to put her son on a register for socially vulnerable persons.
The campaign against labour activists has also born signs of the now trademark violence of Belarusian law enforcement. When veteran activist Nikolay Zimin, former head of the Belarusian Independent Union (BNP), was arrested and sentenced to 25 days for “participating in an unsanctioned protest” immediately after the elections, he was brutally beaten while in detention, the union reported. Zimin, now released, was not permitted access to medical treatment while in detention. On August 25, Zimin was convicted in Salihorsk of participating in an unsanctioned protest, and presented an administrative fine of $460.
Independent trade unions have faced harassment for many years in Belarus. But regardless of who organises them, it seems that the authorities are not prepared to tolerate political disputes reaching the workplace. As Belarus’ Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko argued in an August 20 interview, the Belarusian constitution only guarantees the right to strike over “labour and social disputes.”
Researcher Volodymyr Artiukh adds that “strikes legally initiated by trade unions cannot have ‘political demands’, as the Belarusian Law on Trade Unions states without further clarification”. That said, Artiukh believes that “even a conventional strike over work-related grievances deemed ‘legitimate’ by Belarusian labour law is already utopian.”
“After a wave of detentions among labour activists and threats to workers, the strategy of emerging labour organisations in Belarus has shifted to so-called ‘work-to-rule’ tactics,” says Artiukh. “It is not clear yet how successful this strategy will be given the ample arsenal of punitive tools that management has — from withholding bonuses to threats of financial and criminal responsibility.”
“Given the slow pace at which strike committees and labour organisations are being set up on the one hand, and their extreme vulnerability to pressure from both enterprise management and state authorities on the other,” Artiukh continues. “I would not expect more significant work disruption at state-owned enterprises in the near future.”
At Belaruskali, Gleb Sandros is realistic about the chances of the strike committee. “If the economic crisis in Belarus, which we can now justifiably talk about, intensifies, then this will motivate more people — and I mean workers — to wake up, take a sober look at the situation and their conscience,” he says.
This article was produced in collaboration with oDR, openDemocracy's section on Russia and the post-Soviet space

author: Maxim Edwards


text:
‘Boca de Rua’: The Brazilian newspaper produced entirely by people living on the street · Global Voices
Talita Fernandes

Marcos Scher selling the paper at traffic lights before the pandemic. Photo: Charlotte Dafol/Used with permission
Nineteen years ago in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, a newspaper made entirely by people living on the streets was created. Boca de Rua (Mouth of the Street, also known as Boca) newspaper was ideated by a group of journalists who wanted to provide this community with the tools to speak for themselves.
The project was conceived in 2000 and a year later, during the first meeting of the World Social Forum, the first edition of Boca was launched. Today, the newspaper is the only member of the International Network of Street Papers (INSP) created entirely by people living on the streets.
The ideas for stories, interviewees and questions are all developed by the community itself. Two journalists, who have been with the project since the beginning, are responsible for designing every new issue. A group of volunteers also helps with support such as recording meetings, guiding the reporters about notetaking, and transcribing notes on the computer.
Published as a quarterly, Boca's coverage ranges from reports of abuses suffered by those on the street to positive stories. Over a period of three months, the group decides on the direction of the coverage, they go out into the field, conduct interviews, take photographs and gather testimonies for the stories. Member turnover is high, but on average, about 50 people work on each edition.
After printing, each member of the group receives a share of copies to sell on the streets of Porto Alegre and all the proceeds go to the journalist/vendors. The publication is also sustained by donations from supporters, many of them anonymous.
Rosina Duarte, one of the creators of Boca de Rua and the NGO ALICE (Free Agency for Information, Citizenship and Education), to which the newspaper is linked, said that the initial aim was “to give a voice to those who don't have one”. In time, however, they realized that this was presumptuous — the voices were always there, society just didn't listen to them, she says.
In a telephone interview with Global Voices, Rosina says:
Quando nós chegamos, a gente tinha ainda aquele discurso bonito, que carrega muito resquício do “preconceito bonzinho”, como eu digo, que é o de querer dar algo a eles, de ajudar. Mas a gente percebeu que nós é que tínhamos que ser alfabetizadas na linguagem da rua. Eles não tinham a alfabetização da linguagem escrita, mas nós éramos analfabetas completas sobre a vida na rua.
When we arrived, we still had those pretty words which hold a lot of undertones of “nice prejudice”, as I call it, which is wanting to give something to them to help. But we realized that it was us who had to become literate in the language of the street. They didn't have literacy in written language, but we were completely illiterate about life on the street.
Catarina and Daniel wearing masks with Boca's logo | Photo: Luiz Abreu/Used with permission
The journalists’ original idea was to create a radio broadcast program using speakers installed on the city's lamp posts. But when they contacted a group of homeless people, they were adamant: “We want a newspaper about us”. Rosina says the idea worried her at first, but it worked:
Quando eles disseram que queriam um jornal, fomos atrás de financiamento, ainda tateando no escuro, sem saber o que fazer. Mas um dia caiu a ficha: ao contar o que acontecia nas ruas, eles faziam notícia. E, se eles tivessem consciência disso, o texto se organizava de uma forma muito clara. Porque a gente faz notícia o tempo inteiro. Tem os que fazem de uma forma mais objetiva, outros menos objetiva, mas a gente faz.
When they said they wanted a newspaper, we went after funding, still feeling our way in the dark, not knowing what to do. But one day the penny dropped: by telling what was happening on the streets, they were breaking news. And if they became aware of this, the paper would organize itself very clearly. Because we make news all the time. Some people do it in a more objective way, others less objective, but we do it.
Over time, the newspaper also became a kind of social movement. The group meets weekly to discuss collective demands and possibilities for supporting the individual issues of its members. It is also linked to initiatives in the field, such as the Movimento Nacional da População de Rua (National Movement of People on the Street) and Amada Massa (Loving Dough), a bakery that aims to generate autonomy for people with a history on the streets in Porto Alegre.
Regarding the content of the stories told by the paper, Rosina recalls:
Parece que é só sofrimento, parece que é só dificuldade. E não é. Descobrimos essa alegria, essa resistência, valorizamos essa imensa, fantástica capacidade de sobreviver, não só de se manter vivo, mas de manter viva a esperança, a alegria, o afeto e todas essas questões.
It seems like it's just suffering, it seems like it's just difficulty. And it's not. We have discovered this joy, this resistance, we appreciate this immense, fantastic capacity to survive, not only to stay alive, but to keep hope, joy, affection and all these things alive.
In a telephone interview with Global Voices, Elisângela Escalante, who joined the group six years ago when she was on the streets, emphasized the importance of the newspaper in her life:
Muita coisa aconteceu comigo através do jornal. Ele me tirou da rua. Porque eu vivi três anos e meio na rua e eu saí depois de uns meses indo pro jornal. Eu fui guardando um dinheiro e comecei a alugar o meu espaço. Antes eu não ganhava o meu dinheiro, dependia do meu companheiro pra tudo. Faz diferença pra mim, eu gosto de ter meu dinheiro.
A lot happened to me through the paper. It got me off the street. Because I lived on the street for three and a half years and I got out after a few months going to the paper. I was saving some money and started to rent my own space. Before I didn't earn my money, I depended on my partner for everything. It makes a difference for me, I like to have my own money.
The cover of the edition which drew attention to the challenges of motherhood on the street. Photo: Agência ALICE/Boca de Rua, used with permission.
Elisângela remembers one edition in particular, where the cover story asked: “Why can't we be mothers?”. The report talked about the challenges that women with street backgrounds face in motherhood.
While producing the report, some women members of the newspaper managed to regain contact with their children who they hadn't seen in years, Elisângela says:
Eu acho que o que a gente fala [no jornal] é a verdade. É o que a gente sente e o que a gente vive dentro da sociedade. Se não fosse o Boca, não teria outra maneira de fazer isso e ser ouvido por tanta gente. Através dele eu consegui muitas coisas e ajudei muitas pessoas também.
I think what we say [in the paper] is the truth. It's what we feel and what we experience within society. If it weren't for Boca, I wouldn't have any other way to do this and be heard by so many people. Through it I got a lot of things and I helped a lot of people too.
For the first time in its history, the newspaper is unable to be sold on the streets due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an effort to alleviate the effects on the reporters’ income, Boca de Rua has been transformed into a digital version.
With a contribution of 20 BRL (around 3.75 US dollars) every three months, readers access the latest edition of Boca, as well as old editions and other material.
For the contributors and reporters, the most important thing is that the voices from the street continue to be heard during the pandemic. When asked in a telephone conversation about his feelings about the newspaper, Marcos Sher, a 13-year veteran of Boca, said:
Pra mim é bom, muito bom. Pra você ver que eu não largo, né? Às vezes eu dou um tempo, mas eu volto de novo. Pra mim o jornal foi uma maneira de sair do tráfico [de drogas] e voltar a trabalhar. É bom porque é alguma coisa pra fazer, pra me tirar de casa. Ter alguma coisa pra fazer é muito importante pra mim.
For me it's good, very good. So you can see I'm not letting go, right? Sometimes I stop for a while, but I come back again. For me, the newspaper was a way to get out of [drug] trafficking and go back to work. It's good because it's something to do, to get me out of the house. Having something to do is very important for me.

author: Talita Fernandes


text:
#JusticeForZaraAlvarez: Filipino activists protest worsening impunity under President Duterte · Global Voices
Karlo Mongaya

A protest action against activist killings at the Bantayog ng Bayani (Heroes’ Shrine) in Quezon City. The streamer reads: “Defeat the butcher Duterte regime's fascist attacks against the people!” Photo by Kodao Productions, a content partner of Global Voices, used with permission.
Human rights advocates have raised the alarm over continued extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.
On the same day that 72-year-old veteran peasant leader and murder victim Randall “Ka Randy” Echanis was laid to rest in Metro Manila, human rights activist Zara Alvarez was shot dead in Bacolod City in the central Philippine island of Negros. Alvarez, 39, was killed by unidentified gunmen at 8 pm on August 17 in a residential area while heading home after buying food.
Seven days before, Echanis was found dead with torture marks and multiple stab wounds in his home in Quezon City. He was chairperson of the left-wing Anakpawis (toiling masses) party and consultant for the now called-off peace negotiations between the communist-led National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and the Philippine government.
Alvarez was not only a paralegal officer for Negros of the Karapatan Human Rights Alliance but also a community health worker with the Negros Island Health Integrated Program. Alvarez's murder has been condemned as another example of the worsening impunity under the government of President Rodrigo Duterte.
After Duterte rose to power in 2016, his government was accused of waging a bloody “war on drugs” that led to thousands of killings.
Saddened by Zara Alvarez's murder in Bacolod. Her daughter is now an orphan. The communities she served as a health worker and human rights advocate are orphaned too.
The heart of Negros bleeds again tonight, this time for a daughter who courageusly served and loved her people. pic.twitter.com/yySmhG43gO
— Tonyo Cruz (@tonyocruz) August 17, 2020
There is now an alarming trend in the killings of activists in the Philippines.
The past few months saw the murders of Kadamay's Carlito Badion in Leyte, Bayan Muna's Jory Proquia in Iloilo, Anakpawis chair Randal Echanis in QC and just last night, Negros activist Zara Alvarez.
— Renato Reyes, Jr. (@natoreyes) August 18, 2020
Jory Porquia was killed in his home in Iloilo City in Panay Island last April, while Carlito Badion was killed in Ormoc City in Leyte Island last May. Porquia was the Iloilo coordinator of the left-wing Bayan Muna (People First) party which currently has three seats in Congress, while Badion was the national secretary-general of the urban poor and homeless association, Kadamay.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque denied government involvement in the killings of Alvarez and other activists. However, Duterte himself and some officials under his office have repeatedly made public statements supporting violence against activists and human rights defenders. Even official Facebook pages of police, military, and government agencies have been used to vilify some civil society organizations, activist leaders, and critics who are labeled as “terrorist-communists”.
Duterte, in an address to army soldiers on December 18, 2018, announced his intention of repeating in the Philippines the late Indonesian dictator Suharto’s bloody anti-communist purges that took place between 1965-1966. Suharto’s campaign led to the killings of at least half a million people. Duterte also signed Executive Order 70 institutionalizing a “whole-of-nation approach” that integrates the government’s civilian functions with the military-led counterinsurgency war against communist rebels and other “enemies of the state.”
The targeted killings and threats against activists are but the most visible expression of the overall constriction of democratic spaces in the Philippines under Duterte. This has also been marked by the passage of an anti-terror law that Duterte officials have threatened to use against critics, the shutdown of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest TV and radio broadcaster, and harassment against independent and alternative news outfits like Rappler. The military is now also pushing for the regulation of social media to thwart the use of online spaces by “terrorist organizations” to “destabilize the government”.
There had been no let-up in harassment and death threats against Alvarez for her human rights work. She had been labeled a “terrorist” along with 656 others in a case filed by the Department of Justice against purported communist personalities in 2018. Alvarez was a political detainee beginning in 2012 and was released in 2014 following the dismissal of all charges against her for lack of evidence. She was appealing a court decision that denied her request for protection when she was killed. Posters accusing her of being a communist rebel were being circulated around Negros at the time of her death.
UPDATE: It’s been almost a year since we filmed with Filipino human rights activist Zara Alvarez in our film ‘Duterte’s New War’. On Monday night she was killed. Watch @AJ101East: https://t.co/SeWnBtOgmJ pic.twitter.com/1jMVCO1pvf
— @aj101east (@AJ101East) August 18, 2020
Zara Alvarez was among the more than 600 people that the DOJ wanted to tag as terrorist in a proscription case filed February 2018. This list has been trimmed down to only 2. @rapplerdotcom https://t.co/mu8EBAUMHC pic.twitter.com/FkJHmB14gU
— Lian Buan (@lianbuan) August 17, 2020
So terrible to hear that WHRD Zara Alvarez of @karapatan was shot & killed in the #Philippines last night. She had been smeared, red-tagged & threatened for years pic.twitter.com/yBn4rJzhch
— Mary Lawlor UN Special Rapporteur HRDs (@MaryLawlorhrds) August 18, 2020
Alvarez's home Negros Island has long been the site of land disputes between landless peasants and sugar workers, and the landed elites that own vast feudal landholdings, called haciendas, where sugarcane has been cultivated for export since the time of Spanish colonialism. The island has a long history of violence reflected in the violent crackdown on farmers calling for agrarian reform as well as land rights groups actively supporting them.
Alvarez’s brutal killing led to an outpouring of grief and outrage on social media.
“I thank the Lord for knowing you, Zara, my dear little child of struggle.”
Tribute of San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alimnaza to murdered human rights activist Zara Alvarez of Negros. pic.twitter.com/tHVEQDzLv2
— nonoy espina (@EspinaNonoy) August 18, 2020
Zara Alvarez was murdered tonight in Bacolod City. She was gunned down.
Zara is a human rights defender, with Karapatan-Negros.
Zara is a health worker. She is the advocacy officer of NIHIP, a community-based health program.
We demand justice.#StopTheKillings#EndImpunity
— doc gene (@genenisperos) August 17, 2020
Justice for Zara Alvarez! Justice for all victims of extrajudicial killings and State terrorism! pic.twitter.com/GGvIVc4opk
— Karapatan (@karapatan) August 18, 2020
I am deeply disturbed by the killing of Zara Alvarez and Randall Echanis in the #Philippines. Civil society spaces in the Philippines are shrinking. I call on the Philippines to investigate all killings and to protect human rights defenders.
— Bärbel Kofler, MdB (@BaerbelKofler) August 20, 2020
Human rights groups join the Global Day of Action for Justice at Bantayog ng mga Bayani to condemn the killings of Negros-based activist Zara Alvarez & peasant leader Randall Echanis. Both were red-tagged, charged, and received threats before they were killed, Karapatan said. pic.twitter.com/0CXcT6QnTP
— AlterMidya (@altermidya) August 19, 2020

author: Karlo Mongaya


text:
Most Taiwanese unfazed by former president’s fearmongering on war with China · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou claimed the current administration is pushing Taiwan to the brink of war. Screen capture from United Daily News / Youtube.
Amid China's current military drills in the Taiwan strait, a speech by former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou blaming the current administration for the PRC's hostility received praise in the mainland — but not so much in Taiwan.
Speaking at a conference in Taipei on August 10, Ma, who is a member of the opposition party Kuomingtang (KMT), claimed Taiwan's military capabilities are no match for China's, as well as questioned the United States’ commitment to come help in the case of full aggression. According to him, once China launches a military operation against Taiwan, “the first battle will be the last.”
Ma's ominous words reverberated among the mainland's commentariat and social media, with state-supported China Central Television (CCTV) appearing to endorse his view.
Meanwhile, a telephone poll conducted by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation on August 17 and 18 found that 58 percent of respondents disagreed with Ma's views and were “not worried about the outbreak of a war between China and Taiwan.”
Since the beginning of August, China has stepped up its live-fire military drills in the South and East China sea, partly in response to the visit of US Health Secretary Alex Azar to Taiwan.
Azar is the most senior official to visit the island in decades, and his presence there has been condemned by Beijing.
Taiwanese Twitter user Otto Huang said that in his speech, Ma ended up providing China with a “propaganda slogan”:
馬英九 提供給 央視 武統台灣的「口號」https://t.co/uiPPT4UhNP pic.twitter.com/CB4XUfbsXq
— Otto Huang (@OttoHuang120) August 19, 2020
Ma Ying-jeou provides CCTV with a propaganda slogan for unification with Taiwan by force.
Pro-Taiwanese independence groups protested outside the KMT’s headquarters on August 13, demanding the party revoke Ma’s membership:
We cannot accept Ma’s talk of capitulation — and that coming from a former president, who is now a propagandist for China and coerces the Taiwanese to surrender to China without a fight.
But Ma has since doubled-down on his views. On August 22, at another conference, he delivered a second speech, again accusing Tsai of rejecting the 1992 Consensus and criticizing the island's deepening ties the US. He added:
If Beijing were to use force against Taiwan as a way to push Washington to make concessions, Taiwan would turn from a chess piece to an “abandoned son” and ultimately a sacrifice.
Once again state and party-affiliated outlets in the mainland gave prominence to Ma’s address.
Taiwan has been a de-facto self-ruling state since 1949, when the KMT, then-ruling party of the Republic of China (ROC), was defeated in the Chinese Civil War and established itself on the island.
In 1992, at a time when cross-strait relations had warmed up, Taipei met with Beijing and jointly announced that both countries agreed that they constituted “one China,” in what has since become known as the 1992 Consensus. What that consensus actually means has been up for dispute since then.
The KMT was voted out of power in 2016, with Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, a traditional advocate of Taiwanese independence, emerging victorious by a large margin.
In January 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China's interpretation of the “1992 Consensus” was that of “One Country, Two Systems,” a principle applied to the governance of Hong Kong and Macau. Tsai immediately rejected this interpretation. In January 2020, she was re-elected president of Taiwan with over 57 percent of the vote.
Despite the spread of propaganda citing views from Ma's speeches, there have been a few mainland netizens expressing suspicion of his sincerity. For example, one popular response to a Global Times’ thread on Weibo said:
八年叶未促成中国统一，有何面目大言不惭，五十步笑百步而已，还真是从未见过如此厚颜无耻之人！
Ma was in power for 8 years without enhancing unification and now he has the gut to speak like this. He is no different from Tsai. I have not seen such a shameless person yet.
On another Weibo thread by People’s Daily columnist Xia Ke Dao, a commenter said:
马孃孃的不独不统不武，核心也是以拖待变，岛内主动追求统一的人士日渐凋零
Ma keeps talking about status quo – no independence, no unification, no military operations, it is all about foot-dragging. Less and less people are pursuing unification now.
Meanwhile, reactions in Taiwan have been more direct. Taiwan's Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang condemned Ma’s speeches:
In the face of China’s oppression, the nation should not relinquish its sovereignty, democracy or freedom, but rise up against an autocracy by uniting its people in soliciting international support.
And YC Jou, a popular Taiwanese cultural critic, argued on a widely-shared Facebook post that Ma and other speakers at the conference fail to understand Taiwan's current sentiment on the unification issue:
他們最嚴重的錯誤，就是他們不了解台灣人民的決心。他們和中共一起恐嚇台灣人民這麼多年，他們不知道台灣人民已經受夠了。
更且台灣人民看到香港的情況。不反抗的結果，就是連反抗的機會都沒有。台灣人民的覺悟之深不是他們這種人能夠想像的。
Their most serious mistake is that they don’t understand Taiwanese people’s determination. They have been threatening Taiwanese people for so many years and they don’t know that we have had enough of that.
Now that Taiwanese people have seen what happened to Hong Kong, we know that if we don’t resist now, we will lose our chance to resist. The awakening of Taiwanese people is beyond their imagination.

author: Oiwan Lam


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President Bolsonaro flooded with questions on social media about unexplained deposits into his wife’s bank account · Global Voices
Fernanda Canofre

Bolsonaro, who tested positive for the new coronavirus in early July, poses for pictures with supporters during a visit to the state of Rio Grande do Norte, in August 21 | Photo: Isac Nóbrega/Presidency of the Republic/CC BY 2.0
On August 23, in the midst of the pandemic which has caused over 114,000 deaths in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro drew crowds at yet another public appearance in the capital, Brasília. While the president was on his way to the city's cathedral, a reporter from O Globo newspaper asked him why 89,000 BRL (approximately 15,900 US dollars) was deposited into his wife's bank account by Fabrício Queiroz, an ex-military policeman and former aide to the president’s eldest son.
Instead of answering the question, Bolsonaro threatened the reporter with the following words: “I want to punch you in the face, OK? You are shameless.”
The president’s response triggered a flood of similar queries from journalists, celebrities and other citizens on his social media accounts: Why indeed had his wife received money from Queiroz?
According to Fábio Malini, a professor at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) who researches social media and politics, by the night of August 23, 1,000 tweets were being published every 40 seconds with the question.
Ao centro, o presidente @jairbolsonaro. Marcado em mais de 1.035.521 de mensagens únicas sobre por qual motivo ele não respondeu sobre os 89 mil depositados por Fabricio Queiroz na conta de Michelle Bolsonaro. pic.twitter.com/TvFrHjrAwO
— Fabio Malini (@fabiomalini) August 24, 2020
At the center, president @jairbolsonaro. Tagged in more than 1,035,521 messages on why he did not respond about the 89,000 deposited by Fabricio Queiroz in Michelle Bolsonaro’s account
Among the celebrities engaging in the campaign was musician Caetano Veloso, whose tweet received more than 100,000 likes. Another tweet by YouTuber Felipe Neto, who is well known for his opposition to Bolsonaro's government, received more than 150,000 likes.
Presidente @jairbolsonaro, por que sua esposa, Michelle, recebeu R$ 89 mil de Fabrício Queiroz?
— Felipe Neto ??? (@felipeneto) August 23, 2020
Presidente @jairbolsonaro, por que sua esposa Michelle recebeu R$ 89 mil de Fabrício Queiroz?
— Caetano Veloso (@caetanoveloso) August 23, 2020
President @jairbolsonaro, why did your wife Michelle receive 89,000 BRL from Fabrício Queiroz?
Deutsche Welle's Brazil columnist, Gerd Wenzel, even questioned the president in German:
Herr Präsident @jairbolsonaro , warum hat Ihre Frau, Michelle, R$ 89 mil vom Queiroz bekommen?
— Gerd Wenzel (@gerdwenzel) August 23, 2020
The name Fabrício Queiroz is not new in Brazilian media. A close friend of President Bolsonaro since the 1980s, Queiroz came to the country's attention in 2018 for his ties to an alleged corruption scheme within the cabinet of Flávio Bolsonaro while the latter was a state representative in Rio de Janeiro. Flávio, the president's eldest son, has since become a Senator. As the BBC reports, Queiroz is “suspected of being part of a scheme to embezzle the salaries of phantom employees.”
In 2018, after an investigation revealed Queiroz had deposited a check in the amount of 24,000 BRL (approximately 4,288 US dollars) into the first lady’s bank account, the president claimed the amount was in repayment for 40,000 BRL (7,146 US dollars) he had loaned Queiroz over a period of time. Bolsonaro said the money was deposited into his wife's account because he himself didn’t have time to go out.
After authorities were given access to details of Queiroz's bank statements in 2019, a story by journalist Fábio Serapião published in Crusoé magazine at the beginning of August 2020 revealed that the deposit amounted to more than double what the president claimed it to be.
According to the Crusoé story, between 2011 and 2016 Queiroz deposited at least 21 checks totaling 72,000 BRL (US$12,853) to Michelle Bolsonaro's account. Stories published by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and news portal G1 reported that Queiroz’s wife also made deposits in the amount of 17,000 BRL (3,040 US dollars), in 2011, to Mrs. Bolsonaro's bank account. The total of these figures, 89,000 BRL, is at the center of current suspicions around a possible connection between the president and the 2018 scandal involving Queiroz.
Queiroz was arrested in June 2020 in connection to the 2018 embezzlement allegations but was released to house arrest shortly after due to coronavirus pandemic measures.
Bolsonaro has a history of outbursts against journalists, as noted in a statement released by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI) and organizations such as Article 19 and Reporters Without Borders.
The statement condemning the president’s threat to physically assault a reporter observes that the episode marks a new level of brutality in an already hostile relationship between Brazil’s top officer and the press. Bolsonaro's example has fuelled at least two attacks against journalists by people identified as his supporters and raised concerns about the safety of reporters covering the presidency.
Um presidente ameaçar ou agredir fisicamente um jornalista é próprio de ditaduras, não de democracias.
(…)
Jornalistas têm sido vítimas de agressões verbais constantes ao cumprir sua obrigação profissional de questionar o presidente sobre ações do governo federal e indícios de corrupção ao longo de sua carreira política.
A president threatening or physically assaulting a journalist is something proper from dictatorships, not democracies.
(…)
Journalists have been victims of constant verbal aggression while fulfilling their professional duty of questioning the president about the federal government actions and signs of corruption throughout his political career.
Human Rights Watch's Brazilian branch echoed this stance, saying Bolsonaro’s attitude was “a clear attempt to intimidate the media, so they wouldn’t ask questions he doesn’t want to answer”.
Ao ser perguntado sobre denúncias de corrupção envolvendo sua família, @jairbolsonaro diz a um repórter que gostaria de “encher tua boca com uma porrada”. Essa atitude é uma clara tentativa de intimidar a mídia para que não faça perguntas que ele não deseja responder. https://t.co/P7G2IMHMJc
— HRW Brasil (@hrw_brasil) August 24, 2020
The president himself only spoke publicly about the episode on the morning of August 24, when he attempted to spin the incident and refocus attention on separate corruption accusations involving the Marinho family, who own O Globo newspaper. A man who was investigated for a money scheme claimed to have sold untaxed dollars to the Marinho family during the 1990s — the Marinhos denied any wrongdoing.
- Há pelo menos 10 anos o sistema Globo me persegue e nada conseguiram provar contra mim.
- Agora aguardo explicações da família Marinho sobre a delação do “doleiro dos doleiros”, onde valores superiores a R$ 1 bilhão teriam sido repassados a eles. pic.twitter.com/ZRS730K5Pg
— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) August 24, 2020
For at least the past 10 years the Globo system persecutes me, without proof of anything against me.
- Now, I’m waiting for explanations from the Marinho family about the plaintiff's claim the amounts larger than 1 billion BRL had been passed to them.
On the morning of August 24, at a public event about Brazil's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro slammed journalists again by complaining about the repercussions of his statement and accusing them of wielding their pens with “malice”:
Aquela história de atleta, né, que o pessoal da imprensa vai pôr deboche, mas quando pega um bundão de vocês, a chance de sobreviver é bem menor. Só sabem fazer maldade, usar a caneta com maldade.
My history of athleticism, the press people mock it, but when one of you fat asses catch it, your chance of survival is way smaller. You only know how to be mean, to wield your pen with malice.

author: Fernanda Canofre


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Disinformation about Belarus spreads in the Balkans via online portals and social media · Global Voices
Metamorphosis Foundation

Protesters in Minsk on August 14, 2020. Photo by Melirius via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
This story is based on reporting by Global Voices’ content partner Meta.mk News Agency, a project of the Metamorphosis Foundation.
The recent political turmoil in Belarus has been accompanied by an increased amount of disinformation about the country, disseminated through the channels which have already been active in spreading propaganda narratives characteristic of pro-Kremlin troll armies.
Meta.mk reported that just prior to the unprecedented August 16 pro-democracy protest, social networks and chat services were flooded with videos of military transports, with claims that Russian troops had either entered or were “about to enter” Belarus—which fact-checkers from Belarus quickly debunked as disinformation.
Franak Viačorka, an analyst from Minsk, and a non-resident fellow of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and a Vice President of DigiKomNet, an international association of professionals from the digital sphere, disputed these claims.
Many telegram channels distributed videos of Russian armored vehicles and buses full of soldiers moving to Belarus or already in Belarus. We fact-checked this information and it is misleading. However, let's be attentive anyway.
— Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 17, 2020
Viačorka's findings were confirmed by his Russian colleagues, i.e. the Conflict Intelligence Team. They analyzed a video alleged to show Russians on the move and found that it was, in fact, of Belarusian paratroopers operating under an order from President Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
Yesterday a video surfaced showing a BTR-80 APC convoy inside Belarus, which some alleged was Russian. We believe these were, in fact, Belarusian paratroopers, moving from Vitebsk to Hrodno under Lukashenka's televised order the day before. pic.twitter.com/UYn0ux3RAv
— CIT (en) (@CITeam_en) August 17, 2020
This disinformation was fueled by the news that Russian President Vladimir Putin had offered military aid to Lukashenka, to help quell the demonstrations against election fraud. Russia claimed that the protests were a result of external pressure against Belarus. It failed to reach its goal as the fear of a Russian invasion didn't suppress the protest in Minsk, said to be the biggest in the history of the country.
The Belarus Freedom march is the largest gathering in Belarus history! pic.twitter.com/2SwS59qfLS
— Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 16, 2020
Meta.mk also reported about another kind of disinformation spread by Serbian online media like Glas-javnosti, Nacionalist and Nacional online, under titles such as “Facts about Belarus you didn't know …” and then widely spread via social media and phone apps like Viber.
These portrayals of Belarus as an economic “paradise,” ruled by Lukashenka (also written as Lukashenko) since 1994, were debunked by the Serbian fact-checking service fakenews.rs.
Creating an image of Belarus as a country of order, peace and prosperity, without citing any sources to support their claims, was similar to past narratives about Libyan people's prosperity under ousted strongman Muammar Gaddafi, spread in the past by Russia-supported troll armies.
Some of the claims were almost poetic, such as that the streets of Minsk are so well maintained that “one can walk on them wearing only white socks which would remain perfectly clean,” or outrageously optimistic, like the claim that life expectancy in the country was 104.5 years.
Fakenews.rs countered with a table of easily obtainable facts about Belarus from credible sources. For instance, the official data indicates that life expectancy in Belarus was 74.5 years in 2018, similar to the rest of Eastern Europe.
A major debunked claim was that in Belarus gasoline is cheaper than water, or that a liter of gasoline costs only 0.14 US dollars. Fakenews.rs found out that the price for one liter of gasoline is 1.78 Belarus rubles, or around 0.72 US dollars. On the contrary, bottled water prices are around one Belarus ruble per bottle, or half the price of gasoline.
Serbian nationalist media falsely claimed that the Belarus state provides newlywed couples with a subsidy of 64,000 US dollars to buy an apartment at an average price of 5.000 Belarus rubles (an equivalent of about 1,915 US dollars). In fact, there's no evidence that couples receive that kind of money as a wedding present from the state at all, and actual real-estate prices in Belarus are far higher than about 2,000 US dollars for an apartment. At best, that's the price for a few square meters on the outskirts of the capital Minsk, or a few more in smaller cities like Homiel.
Without any evidence, Serbian media also claimed that each Belarusian citizen receives an annual state subsidy of 1.000 US dollars.
The list of supposed benefits from Belarus provided by the Lukashenka regime included falsely presenting Belarus GDP per capita as $14,192 while World Bank data shows it was $6,173 in 2019, and misrepresenting salaries of nurses and teachers as several times higher than the 390 or 460 US dollars they receive per month.
Another point of disinformation was about the ease of starting a business in Belarus, claiming that start-up companies receive state grants of 20,000 US dollars. In contrast, the Ministry of  Labor and Social Policy of Belarus states that such subsidies range between 2,800 and 3,800 US dollars, and are only available to several hundred applicants per year.
A major assertion was that education abroad, medicines and electrical energy in Belarus are free of charge, thanks to state subsidies. These claims are untrue. Some students may get scholarships to study abroad, but not all of them; only select kinds of medicines are not paid directly by patients in some pharmacies; and Belarus citizens pay for their electrical energy out of pocket.
In contrast with the demographic decline in the Balkans, there were claims that the population of Belarus tripled during Lukashenka's tenure. However, data by the National Statistics Committee of Belarus showed that in 1994, when he came to power, Belarus had around 10.25 million inhabitants, while preliminary data for 2020 indicates that the current number of inhabitants is around 9.4 million.
Another kind of disinformation linked the political turmoil in Belarus with some sort of conspiracy related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Macedonian fact-checking service Vistinomer (Truthmeter) detected that such claims are spreading via social networks in North Macedonia.
For example, an article in the form of Facebook post, supplemented with a photo of Lukashenka in military uniform, spread unsubstantiated claims that the drive to oust him was instigated by the World Health Organization (WHO) because he had refused their “bribes” ranging from 82 to 110 million euros (an equivalent of 97 and 130 million US dollars), to conduct an “Italian Corona scenario,” without any explanation what that scenario would have entailed.
In the same post, Lukashenka was presented as a leader of integrity for allegedly refusing a “non-repayable investment grant of “500 million US dollars from the World Bank” in return for joining the global campaign about the nonexistent dangers of COVID-19 and unnecessary social distancing.
The WHO was presented as an organization that spreads diseases, not one that tries to prevent or fight disease. Belarus has been a WHO member since its independence from the USSR in the early 1990s, and in fact, in July 2020 Belarus and the WHO concluded a biennial collaborative agreement, and WHO provided humanitarian aid to Minsk at the end of that month.
Belarus has also cooperated with the World Bank for decades. Contrary to claims of refusing aid from this institution, Belarus in fact demanded a higher share of the money slated for fighting COVID-19 consequences—a loan of $900 million US dollars, instead of $500 million dollars offered by the bank. These funds remain unavailable to the country because President Lukashenka was unwilling to accept additional terms to get foreign loans.

author: Metamorphosis Foundation


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Hong Kong police accused of rewriting history to oppress political dissent · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Mobs stormed the Yuen Long Subway station on 21 of July 2019. Screen capture from a viral video on Twitter
A Hong Kong lawmaker, Lam Cheuk-ting was arrested on August 26, along with 12 other individuals, in a case related to a mob incident that took place on July 21 2019 in a suburban subway station of the city.
Police senior superintendent Chan Tin-chu told the reporters in a press briefing on August 26 that the incident was considered to be a “confrontation between evenly matched rivals” of white-clad and black-protesters. This interpretation contradicts a widely shared view that the incident was in fact an attack of subway passengers and people wearing mostly black, the color associated to anti-government protests, by a group of people dressed in white who align themselves with the official views of the government.
The July 2019 Yuen Long mob attack incident is one of the most significant events that rocked the territory as part of the 2019 anti-China extradition protests. The absence of the police during the attacks undermined the credibility of the police authorities, and eventually radicalized the protesters who came to believe that the police were in collusion with the white-clad mob.
While numerous videos and live-stream reports from the attack scene show that over a hundred people wearing white and armed with weapons were attacking indiscriminately both subway passengers and protesters who were returned from a massive protest in Hong Kong Island, the senior superintendent accused such reports of being one-sided and misleading.
Yet, a timeline reconstructed by public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) has shown that Yuen Long police had kept a blind eye to the planned attack:
Citing footage from surveillance cameras as well as witness accounts from a Yuen Long district councilor and various victims of the attack, the RTHK’s report indicated that the police were informed of the attack plan before July 21. Even though over a hundred white-clad men had started gathering outside the Yuen Long subway station as early as at 6:00pm and attacked a restaurant chef at around 9:45pm, the Yuen Long police had not taken any action to disperse the mob.
Only by 11:20pm, 40 riot police arrived at the station, yet by then the white mob had left. At 00:27am, as the police vacated the station, the white mob stormed into the station again and beat up civilians randomly with metal rods. The white-clad men later retreated into a nearby village, but again, the police did not take any action to arrest people.
However, Chan insisted that the police had taken prompt action within 18 minutes upon receiving emergency calls. His claim is in contradiction with previous police reports which clearly stated it took 39 minutes for the police unit to respond to the calls.
Chan also dismissed the allegation over the collusion between the triads and the police concerning the attack:
#HK police now say a riot officer “pushed” a white-shirted man, instead of “patting him on the shoulder”, in Yuen Long in the small hours after the July 21 mob attack. Well, let the image speaks for itself. (Background voice from then Assistant District Commander Yau Nai-keung) pic.twitter.com/5DUkeWuujf
— Jimmy Choi (@jimcyf) August 26, 2020
The police version of the story denies the responsibility of the authorities in the attack incident, and is now used as a weapon to prosecute political dissent, as pointed out by Ray Chan, another pro-democracy lawmaker:
.@hkpoliceforce has now blatantly become the Ministry of Truth in propagating lies to achieve the political aims to smear commuters & legislators involved in #YuenLongDarkNight and to protect their infamous reputation, the #YuenLong mafia & rod-wielding mobs. #HongKongProtests https://t.co/dTQmC15hsy
— Ray Chan (@ray_slowbeat) August 26, 2020
Polie official Chan also accused Lam Cheuk Ting of inciting the conflict in the press briefing. However, he did not explain how.
According to Lam’s video record taken on July 21, when he arrived at Yuen Long subway station at around 10:45pm, a woman had already been injured by white-clad men inside the station. He then walked towards the gates and warned the mob that the police would soon arrive. After that, the white mob  jumped over the gates and stormed into the platform areas.
Another witness captured that moment: Gwyneth Ho, journalist of the Stand News, was filming and broadcasting live when the white-clad men stormed into the subway gated area. She was then beaten by a man in a pink outfit. Instead of condemning the attacker, the police questioned Ho’s presence, accusing her “one-sided” live-broadcasting of escalating the conflicts, and suggesting that “doing a live broadcast is no exemption from criminal offences”:
#HongKong authorities said live feeds of #721YuenLongAttacks were biased & distorted.
See for yourself footage by then @StandNewsHK reporter @KwaiLamHo, who was beaten & injured.
Police also said no indiscriminate attack & both sides were evenly matched. Profanity warning https://t.co/xAYr6VzQwb pic.twitter.com/pl3K9Rz11L
— Frances Sit (@frances_sit) August 26, 2020
At around 11:10pm, 10 minutes before the police arrived at the Yuen Long station, Lam Cheuk Ting was himself beaten and injured as the mob charged into the subway platforms. Even though he is a victim of the attack, he is now being painted as a rioter by the police. Lo Kin-hei, the Vice-Chairman of the Democratic Party highlighted the absurdity of Lam’s arrest:
This is @cheuktinglam on 7.21.
He called police before he headed to Yuen Long.
Police didn't come.
He livestreamed at Yuen Long Stn & was attacked.
Police didn't come.
He reported to police afterwards.
Police brushed him off.
Now the police arrest him for taking part in a riot. pic.twitter.com/S7APQ0rnJ7
— LO Kin-hei 羅健熙 (@lokinhei) August 26, 2020
The pro-democracy sector had hosted a joint press conference condemning the police for rewriting the history of the mob attack incident.
Wu Chi-wai, chair of the @HKDemocrats, has accused police of “rewriting history” of the 7.21 Yuen Long attack.
He said this incident showed that the HK govt & police are “helpless”. He also calls on HK people to wear black clothes tomorrow as a sign of protest. pic.twitter.com/VKgbiEeSXN
— Eric Cheung (@EricCheungwc) August 26, 2020
In a state where the authorities are so obsessed to control the “truth”, people's memory will become the most important place to  seek justice, as pointed out by human right lawyer Sharon Hom:
#Justice will not be extinguished forever in #HK. Our responsibility is to remember, preserve evidence and stand as witness.@KwaiLamHo @lokinhei @hrichina @samuelmchu @annakcheung @antd @benedictrogers https://t.co/97uAmTXq9T
— Sharon Hom (@sharonhom888) August 27, 2020