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The Caribbean Considers the Ripple Effects of Brexit · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

“Brexit—How the vote went in the end”. Photo by Flickr user Mick Baker, CC 2.0.
The startling results of Brexit, the UK's referendum about whether or not to remain part of the European Union, has left not only Britons and their fellow Europeans — but also the rest of the world — in complete shock. The June 23 vote resulted in 51.9 percent of the UK voting to leave, and 48.1 percent voting to remain.
The value of the British pound nosedived after the results were revealed and there are already rumblings in Scotland — which held its own referendum two years ago to determine whether it should be independent from the rest of the United Kingdom — that it will likely stage another referendum, given that many Scots believe they've been removed from the EU against their will.
Indeed, millions in Britain already want a second EU-related referendum, and there is a petition now circulating that essentially calls for a do-over, demanding that the government implement a rule requiring a new vote “if the remain or leave vote is less than 60 percent based on a turnout less than 75 percent”. The British Parliament tables issues for debate once petitions attain more than 100,000 signatures. At the time of this writing, the petition calling for a second referendum has more than 3.2 million signatures.
Caribbean netizens are also concerned about the domino effect of Britain's decision on trade, as well as on revenue streams like remittances. Many of the concessions that the region enjoys with the EU trading bloc are connected to many of its territories’ membership in The British Commonwealth.
Barbados-based blogger BC Pires noted:
The whole world fervently followed yesterday’s referendum that decided whether Britain left or remained in the European Union, because Brexit has truly global ramifications […]
To me, the whole debate really comes down to one thing: do you want to connect with others or go it alone? […] So yesterday’s vote, for me, was a vote on our own development, as a species, and a measurement of our own hope in ourselves. It delights me that Germany, the nation that twice led the world into war in the last century, is leading the global movement towards widespread, cooperative international peace. The same German state that murdered six million Jews barely 71 years ago […] voluntarily made space, last year, for a million refugees.
If that isn’t the best part of us, we’ve got nothing good going for us at all.
In fact, he suggested that if his own region continued to act in a similar manner to the UK, he'd be a candidate for leaving the Caribbean himself:
I know this for sure: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex – what-firetrucking-ever – people are people, human beings with human rights, and they are facing the same hatred that black people have endured from the time they arrived in the New World.
And if my own people – English-speaking West Indians, the bulk of whom have been treated as inhuman for the bulk of our history – cannot recognise the humanity of others, I vote to reject my people as easily as Britain rejected Europe yesterday.
Fellow journalist Ira Mathur wrote on Facebook:
Sad sad day. End of an era of breaking down walls, of globalisation, of multiculturalism, of state backed tolerance. Seriously those of you who voted out of fear and ethnocentrism your world became much smaller and isolated and you ruined it for everyone. For now. In solidarity with my friends who voted in: You are the best of the British and will be instrumental in turning things around. Cameron will go down in history as an idiot.
From St. Kitts, Facebook user Dele Adams commented:
WOW.
#Brexit. When the British Pound is at 3.64 to the lowly Eastern Caribbean Dollar, you KNOW you've screwed up.
Do the English fear brown people that much that they're willing to tank their own economy?
That says a lot.
Diaspora Facebook user Lesley-Ann Noel was also concerned about the message the vote sent:
Hmm, I don't know why I expected better from the UK. Disappointing. Isolation can't be the solution in 2016!
Many Caribbean netizens — some of whom have strong ties to England — couldn't help but feel sidelined by the final results. On Twitter, Trinidadian artist and activist Attillah Springer wrote:
Listen if they doh want me in they place no problem. Europe cold and have no mangoes. #AfricanUnion #CaribbeanUnity #downsouth
— Tillahwillah (@tillahwillah) June 24, 2016
She then went a step further, saying:
Haiti been warning us. Marcus Garvey been warning us. #marronage #downsouth
— Tillahwillah (@tillahwillah) June 24, 2016
To Facebook user Rhoda Bharath, knowing that border control was a key issue in the Brexit debate, the paradox was clear:
Britain afraid of immigrants….the ironies, boy.
Many Internet users throughout the region shared the meme pictured below, also mocking the irony of Britain's fear of immigrants:
For many regional netizens, the Britain-EU divorce brought up painful memories of its own unconsummated union. Back in 1958, an attempt at a Caribbean political federation began, lasting just more than four years. The hope was that islands that were still British colonies would band together for a common goal: to gain independence from the mother country as a single state. But internal political wrangling led to its untimely demise. The revered Trinidadian calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow famously sang about it:
At the time, there was a lot of finger-pointing at both Trinidad and Tobago, the intended headquarters of the federation. Jamaica caught some flak, too. Independent journalist and Facebook user Wesley Gibbings quipped:
Brits vote to leave the EU because: 1. We can do fine all on our own, thank you; 2. All ah dem people from all dem poor country coming in we country free free; 3. What we getting for de money we putting in dis thing? 4. All dem people goods coming in jess so, jess so. Dat cyar be right!
Why does all of this sound so eerily familiar? Eh, T&T? Eh, Jamaica?
“Brits vote to leave the EU because: 1. We can do fine all on our own, thank you; 2. All of those people from all those poor countries are coming into our country freely; 3. What are we getting for the money that we putting into this thing? (meaning the EU) 4. All those people’s goods are coming in [to our country] just like that. That can’t be right!
Why does all of this sound so eerily familiar? Eh, T&T? Eh, Jamaica?”
Writing on Facebook, Rhoda Bharath added:
This must be how not having the Federation felt in 1958?
Im depressed and up in my feels on this.
#Brexit
#EU
With all this happening, the Trinidad-based satirical website The Late O'Clock News couldn't resist taking a fresh stab at Jamaica:
The Jamaican Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte says that Jamaica will soon hold a referendum or whether or not it remains a member state in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
She says that Friday’s ‘Brexit’ victory inspired her to push for this movement.
‘Brexit made me think back to the good old days when Jamaica destroyed Dr Eric Williams’ dream of unified Caribbean integration. And I thought wow. What are we as modern day Jamaicans doing to live up to the standards of our forefathers. I felt so inspired. […] I reminded the Prime Minister that Jamaica has to proudly uphold its proud reputation of being proud. Boycotting T&T products is good; but it’s not enough. So that’s how I decided that the natural next step is to launch Jamaicaway…
Members of the Caribbean diaspora living in the United States were also troubled by the implications of Brexit. The blogger and science fiction author Tobias Buckell explained that one of the reasons he so valued his UK passport was because of the “knowledge that it gave […] the ability to plug into a larger community of 300 million”:
This has been one of the biggest cutting off a nose to spite a face scenarios I think I’ve seen. It’s stunning. I’m still sorting through my reactions.
Basically, when Donald Trump, Iran, Moscow, and right-wing racist groups are all totally psyched, you fucked up.
Buckell wasn't the only diaspora blogger who made connections to Trump. Trini Like Salt, who was not pleased about Britons’ decision, wrote on Tumblr:
‘There is no way Brexit will pass’ = ‘There is no way Trump can win’
Just putting that out there.
#turns out people are stupid everywhere
Facebook user Cherise d'Abadie said:
Watching with apprehension as the West continues its stampede to the far right.
The popular Trinidad-based website Wired 868 also weighed in:
You know that your foreign policy ideas probably were not as well thought out as you hoped when you find US presidential candidate Donald Trump agreeing with you.
‘I think it is a great thing,’ said Trump. ‘Basically, they took their country back.’
That’s one way to look at Britain’s decision, via a referendum, to quit the European Union. Another is that a nation whose empire once stretched across the globe is now so insular and deluded, it prefers to pull down the blinds, take the phone off the hook and pass the time reminiscing about Queen Victoria. […]
Faced with the challenge of learning to get along with its neighbours for the common good in a world that is shrinking by the minute, Britain chose a short-term, knee-jerk reaction. […] It was a very good day for bigotry.
Some Internet users took a more relaxed view of the Brexit developments. In a Facebook post, Laura Beadon, who lives on the outskirts of London, wrote:
We're still going to sell & buy, we're still going to travel, we're still going to live, just on our own terms.
She also noted:
What's done is done and we cannot change it […] This should be the perfect opportunity for the people to come together and put some drive and motivation into the life of this country.
Vernon O'Reilly Ramesar added:
Stop whining, people—It's called democracy.
But Facebook user Natasha Ramnauth disagreed, saying:
This is not about democracy. It is about a successful PR campaign. For the most part, these issues are complex and multi-layered and usually beyond the interest and/or comprehension of the general public. Very few people are willing to wade through all the information.
Like many West Indians who were fans of the dry humour of British television comedies, Ramnauth immediately saw parallels:
This really feels like an episode of Yes Minister…all that's missing is PS Appleby
From Jamaica, UK-born Emma Caroline Lewis soon shared a link from the same show on Facebook — a hilarious, satirical take on why Britain really joined the European Union in the first place:

author: Janine Mendes-Franco


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After Brexit, Timor-Leste Workers Are Worried About Their Future in the UK · Global Voices
Dalia

Through a referendum, the UK has voted to leave the European Union. Photo from the Flickr page of portal gda, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
On June 23, 2016, a majority of United Kingdom voters decided in favor of a proposal to leave the European Union. Known as Brexit, the result of the referendum will have a massive impact not just in Europe but in many parts of the world.
For European citizens living in the UK, one of the principal concerns is their residency and right to work. Will the UK government force them to leave the country?
Among them is a significant number of people from Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste is a former colony of Portugal, which means the Timorese are also recognized as nationals of Portugal, a member of the European Union.
Since 2002, when Timor-Leste achieved independence from Indonesia, many Timorese have come to the UK seeking jobs in the semi-skilled services sector and factories. Pay for similar work in Timor-Leste is low, but in the UK means at least minimum wages of 200 pounds per week (about 270 US dollars). Managed carefully, that's enough to live on as well as send some home to family left behind in Timor-Leste.
Following the Brexit vote, some Timorese residents of the UK are worried about their situation. Will they be asked to abandon their immigration status? This is the concern raised in the Forum Haksesuk Blog of Celso Oliveira, a Timorese living in UK:
Relasiona ho referendum 23/6, mosu preokupasaun hosi governu Timor Leste konaba oinsa futuro ema Timor iha UK post-referendum. Ema Timor tama iha Reino Unido desde Timor Leste hetan liberdadi iha Agostu 1999. To'o ohin loron, Timoroan kontinua sai hosi Timor hodi buka moris iha Reino Unido. Razaun tamba: primieru: ekonomikamente nivel moris iha Timor ema ida sei moris ho dollar ida loron ida.Segundo: Tamba razaun servisu laiha. Populasaun Timor aumenta, numeru dezempregados mos aumenta. Ida ne'e factor principal. Terseiru, ema buka mudansa iha sira ninia moris
Related to the referendum 23/06, there are some concerns the Timor-Leste government should address related to the future of its people living in the UK. Many Timorese have been coming to the UK since the country became a free nation in August 1999 [when a clear majority of Timorese voted for independence in a popular referendum]. Today, there are still Timorese people leaving their own country to live in the UK. The main reason has to do with the need to survive financially since many workers earn just $1 per day. Secondly, unemployment is worsening while population growth remains high. And thirdly, many people want to change their lives.
EU treaties recognizing the free movement of EU workers are still enforced today, but what will happen after Brexit? The fate of Portuguese migrants from Timor-Leste remains uncertain.
Addressing the concerns of Timorese residing in the UK, the Timor-Leste government urged its people not to panic since there will be negotiations between the EU and UK authorities over labour conditions for EU citizens already in the UK.
Timor Leste's Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Roberto Sarmento de Oliveira Soares sought to assuage the concerns of Timorese workers in the UK. Screenshot of Timor Post newspaper.
For its part, the Portuguese government is advising its citizens who are living in the UK to apply for a permanent resident card while securing dual nationality in order to secure their rights.
Meanwhile, Timor-Leste's former president and Nobel Peace laureate Jose Ramos-Horta advised the EU not to panic and instead turn the situation into an opportunity to “reimagine” the regional bloc:
From afar, my best advice to European leaders is…there is no reason to panic; the EU still has Germany, France, Italy, Italy, Poland and Spain whose combined GDP dwarf that of little UK.
European leaders must display serenity and begin to re-imagine a Union that is more peoples-based, reconnecting with the real people, less focused on the stifling Brussels-based bureaucrats, real culprits and cause of disdain and repudiation; instead of overspending on a wasteful Brussels bureaucracy the new EU should double investments on youth and employment for all, education and innovation.

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Dalia


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An Argentinian Animator Reimagines the Game of Thrones Title Sequence for the Real World · Global Voices
Marco Sarmiento

This is how the Argentinian Damián Boso imagined the continent from the aesthetic of the popular series. Screenshot of the video shared by the animator on YouTube.
Game of Thrones, the successful HBO TV series based on the written saga by George R.R. Martin, is at the end of its sixth season now, but hasn't ceased to inspire its fans. With loyal viewers throughout North America and Latin America, the show tells the story of noble families in a medieval fantasy world who do everything possible to be in power and eliminate their enemies. Despite the imaginary setting, it isn't difficult to see parallels between our world and the Game of Thrones world, with its political intrigue and characters both lovable and twisted.
Argentinian 3D animator Damian Bosio was one of those fans who found his imagination sparked by the series, specifically by its animated title sequence, in which the lands of the fictional Game of Thrones world rise up from the ground with clockwork-like machinery. Damian then recreated the sequence for Argentina, then Latin America, and now will be expanding to other areas of our contemporary world.
In a brief conversation, he told Global Voices:
Vi la intro y lo primero que pensé es en hacer una versión ambientada en mi país (Argentina). Arranqué con la ciudad Buenos Aires (ciudad en donde vivo) con la idea de ir expandiéndolo.
I saw the intro and the first thing I thought of was making an adapted version for my country (Argentina). I started with the city of Buenos Aires (the city where I live) with the idea of expanding it.
El segundo fue el del conurbano bonaerense
The second was of Buenos Aires the capital and its metropolitan area.
…y luego el de toda la Argentina.
…and then all of Argentina.
Iba a dar por terminada la serie pero decidí expandirlo más. La cuarta fue la versión de Sudamérica.
I was going finish my series, but I decided to expand it more. I made a fourth version with the whole of South America.
Luego hice la de América del norte.
Then I made one of North America.
Europa occidental (España, Alemania, Italia, Inglaterra, etc)
Western Europe (Spain, Germany, Italy, England, etc.)
…y Europa del este (Polonia, Russia, Ucrania, Etc)
…and Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Etc)
Seeing the title sequence reimagined for the 21st-century shows us that the more times change, the more they really stay the same. Perhaps the castles will disappear, but there will always be an ambitious Lannister Family and an old-school Stark Family ready to fight for honor. There will always be in some from queens fighting against usurpers, spies, traitors, loyal warriors, driven to do what they do by the intoxicating promise of power.
For now, Damian has only animated the Americas and Europe, but he recognizes that his work is just getting started:
Aún me queda bastante mundo por animar pero calculo que terminaré en Dubai. (Amo Dubai)
There is quite a bit of world left for me to animate, but I estimate that I will finish in Dubai. (I love Dubai)
We'll have to wait to see if Damian makes his way to Asia, Africa, and Oceania. After all, some of these real-world locations and their histories loosely correspond to the fictional peoples and places in the series, like the Caucasus and the Dorthraki or the north of Iraq and the Second Sons.

author: Marco Sarmiento


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Macedonian Youth Speak Out About Freedom of Expression Through Mini-Videos · Global Voices
Marko Angelov

Participants in the “Freedom of Expression Through Mini-Video” Competition. Photo: L’Institut français de Skopje, used with permission.
Young video artists from Macedonia tackled the issue of free speech through a series of short videos, which were produced as part of an open competition and screened during the French Film Festival in Skopje. The festival and the competition are part of the long-term cultural cooperation between France and Macedonia.
The two main entries were made in the silent movie tradition, which immediately expanded their reach and relevance with viewers, regardless of language. The video which was finally selected as the winner of the competition is “Shhh…” by Bruno Veljanovski:
The clever short “On and Off”, by Natalija Stanojevikj, copped second place:
Along with freedom of expression, Elion Jashari's English-language video, “Speak louder”, tackled the issue of pollution in Tetovo, a city in northwestern Macedonia:
All seven entries are publicly available via a YouTube playlist.
The competition was organized by the French Institute in Skopje and the Metamorphosis Foundation, which also provided training in video editing for some of the candidates. The winner will participate in the Off-Courts Festival in Trouville in Normandy come September. This annual event, started in 2000, provides a week-long exposition of short films, music, visual arts and new media produced in France and Quebec.

author: Marko Angelov


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One of the World’s Most Welcoming Asylum Countries Is (Wait for It) Uganda · Global Voices
Abdoulaye Bah

Refugees from the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo leave the Nyakabande transit camp in Uganda. CC 2.0.
The 6,000 delegates from the 135 countries that participated in the first World Humanitarian Summit, held in Istanbul last month, could not have been more full of good intentions. The summit was an opportunity to highlight the remarkable work done by certain countries, including in the area of receiving and integrating refugees, which is often ignored in the international mass media. Uganda was one of the stars of the summit for its achievements when it comes to hosting refugees.
Before the summit in Turkey, at a regional preliminary meeting in Kampala, Ugandan Prime Minister Apolo Nsibambi told participants that it is unacceptable that Africa—independent from the colonial European powers for more than 50 years—continues to be the largest generator of refugees and internally displaced people. He also argued that the failure to protect and provide aid effectively, as well as find timely solutions to the problems that created this displacement issue, pose a major threat to Africa's development and serious consequences for peace and stability.
Uganda, whose neighbours have suffered various bouts of instability and war, has admitted roughly 700,000 refugees (from South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Congo) in the year 2016.
Uganda's refugee policy has been an important regional sanctuary. The Nakivale refugee camp, created in 1958 to shelter Tutsi refugees fleeing the Hutu revolution in their country, is a six-hour drive from Kampala, Uganda's capital. It stretches over 184 square kilometers (71 square miles) and covers a lake, hills, many rivers, and rich farmland, according to the NGO Caritas Goma:
Le modèle de l’Ouganda est presque unique en ce qu’il accorde aux réfugiés. Selon les observateurs, ce qui rend l’Ouganda unique, c’est la prise en charge immédiate des réfugiés et l’aide qui leur est apportée. En Ouganda, les réfugiés ont la possibilité de contribuer à l’économie locale.
The Ugandan model is practically unique in what it provides to refugees. According to observers, what makes Uganda unique is the immediate support and aid given to refugees. In Uganda, refugees have the opportunity to contribute to the local economy.
Will Jones, who works as a researcher at the Centre for Refugee Studies at Oxford University, visited the camp three years ago. Writing on the Forced Migration Review webpage, he says the camp isn't what most people would expect:
Il ne s’agit pas du ghetto surpeuplé généralement représenté dans les médias. Nakivale est une confédération de villages autosuffisante grâce à ses activités de culture agricole et d’élevage, qui produisent même un surplus exporté hors de ses limites. Bien que le camp de Nakivale se trouve au milieu de nulle part, il n’est en aucun cas isolé des activités culturelles, sociales et économiques: on y trouve des marchés, plusieurs cinémas et d’innombrables smartphones, qui signalent que la population tire avantage de l’antenne de téléphonie mobile érigée au centre du camp.
This is not the choked ghetto usually evoked by media representations. Nakivale is a confederation of villages and contains enough farming and animal husbandry to feed itself and still produce surplus to export further afield. And though Nakivale is in the middle of nowhere, it is anything but isolated from cultural, social, and economic activity; there are markets, several cinemas, and plenty of smartphones in evidence taking advantage of the new mobile phone mast erected in the centre of the settlement.
In a blog post in early February 2016, Alice Albright, the chief executive officer at the Global Partnership for Education, points out that Uganda has even factored in refugees in its development plan:
Malgré ces difficultés, le gouvernement ougandais reconnaît que le coût de la protection et de l’aide aux 250 réfugiés qui arrivent chaque jour dans le pays est minime comparé à celui de l'inaction. Conscient que le déplacement de populations constitue un problème de développement à long terme, le pays a intégré la question des réfugiés dans son Plan national de développement. Les écoles des camps de réfugiés sont administrées par le Ministère de l’Éducation.
Despite these difficulties, the Ugandan government recognises that the cost of providing protection and assistance to the 250 refugees who arrive into the country each day is dwarfed by the cost of inaction. Because Uganda understands that displacement is a long-term development issue, it has included refugee issues in its National Development Plan. Schools in refugee settlements are administered by the Ministry of Education.
In an article recently published on the website Cairn.info, titled “Spatial and Geopolitical Dimensions of Hosting Refugees—The Agricultural Colonies of Sudanese Exiles in Uganda,” Professor Luc Cambrézy, a geographer and the research director at the Institute of Research Development discovered how Uganda's refugee response differed from common practices elsewhere:
Contrairement au schéma classique qui consiste à endiguer les mouvements de réfugiés en regroupant ces derniers dans des camps, le gouvernement ougandais a fait le choix d’ouvrir des colonies agricoles pour les victimes de la guerre civile au Soudan. Après une analyse de cette expérience dans les deux principales zones d’accueil (Rhino Camp et district d’Adjumani), il apparaît que l’objectif recherché par le gouvernement est avant tout une opération d’aménagement et de développement du territoire avec l’appui et les moyens de l’aide humanitaire internationale.
Contrary to the commonly applied solution of controlling refugee movements by concentrating refugees in camps, the Ugandan government opted for the establishment of “rural settlements” for the population fleeing civil war in Sudan. Following a detailed analysis of this experience in two refugee hosting areas, Rhino Camp and Adjumani district, it appears clearly that the government’s primary objective was a vast land planning and development operation using the means provided by international humanitarian aid.
In another article published in June 2014 on Irinnews.org, Professor Alexander Betts, the director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, along with his team (including researcher Will Jones, quoted above) detailed research on refugees’ livelihood:
Alors, que font les réfugiés pour vivre ? Ils cultivent, bien sûr, et pas seulement dans les localités rurales. Près de la moitié des réfugiés congolais, rwandais et sud-soudanais interrogés par les chercheurs cultivent leurs propres parcelles. D’autres sont ouvriers agricoles. Seuls les Somaliens n’ont montré que très peu d’intérêt, voire aucun, pour l’agriculture.
So what do they do to survive? They farm, certainly, in and around the rural settlements. Around half the Congolese, Rwandan, and South Sudanese refugees whom researchers interviewed said they had plots of their own, and others worked as farm labourers. Only the Somalis showed little or no interest in farming.
Not Just Subsistence Farming
Ugandan crop buyers come regularly to the settlements, and take truckloads of produce from Kyangwali to the market town of Hoima. The researchers spoke to a trader in Hoima who said he bought around 500 tons of maize and beans from the refugee farmers last year—some 60 percent of his stock. He sold the maize on to other parts of Uganda, but also further afield, to Tanzania and South Sudan.
Now the farmers in Kyangwali are trying to cut out the middlemen and sell their crops directly on the market, through a cooperative with more than 500 members, including some Ugandan farmers from local villages. Kyangwali Progressive Farmers is registered as a limited company, and has started getting contracts to supply produce directly to manufacturers.
In the village of Rwamwanja, a savings-and-loans project called “Solo Effort” has emerged to help refugees and nationals raise livestock and create other types of businesses. Initiated two years ago, it now has 139 members. In this video, a woman named Rebecca explains how she managed to lift herself out of poverty, thanks to the project.
There are still difficulties, however, when it comes to implementing Uganda's policy of receiving and integrating refugees. The website Caritasgoma.org, for example, highlights some of the local population's “distrust” of newcomers to the country:
Mais le camp de Nakivale se trouve à proximité des villages ougandais où des paysans pratiquent des cultures de substance. En voyant le gouvernement qui enlève leurs terres pour faire de la place aux réfugiés, les premiers ne sont pas contents de l’aide apportée aux seconds. D’où, une certaine méfiance à l’égard des réfugiés. Le gouvernement soutient que ces terres avaient été prévues pour les demandeurs d’asile. Dans un pays qui a l’une des populations les plus jeunes et les plus dynamiques dans le monde, l’accès la terre est un défi auquel doivent faire face les politiques de réfugiés en Ouganda. Mais pour l’instant, le gouvernement et les populations locales sont déterminés à prendre soin de ceux qui sont dans le besoin et de la meilleure façon possible.
The Nakivale camp is close to Ugandan villages where farmers grow staple crops. Seeing the government take away their land to make room for refugees, the former are not happy with the support given to the latter. Hence, there's a certain distrust of the refugees. The government argues that this land had been specifically set aside for asylum seekers. In a country that has one of the youngest and fastest growing populations in the world, access to land is a challenge that refugee policy in Uganda must face. But for now, the government and locals are determined to take care of those in need and in the best way possible.

author: Abdoulaye Bah


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Tanzanian Prosecuted for ‘Insulting’ the President on WhatsApp · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

Statement of offence shared on Twitter by @samirasawlani.
Tanzanian citizen Leonard Mulokozi was charged on June 22 under Tanzania's Electronic and Postal Communications Act over a WhatsApp message that authorities say is “abusive” to Tanzanias president, John Magufuli. Mulokozi denied the charge at the Kisutu Resident Magistrate's Court and was released on bail. The case will come up for mention on July 18.
It is alleged that on June 2 Mulokozi posted the following message, in Swahili, on WhatsApp:
Hivi huyu Pombe nd'o kwamba hana washauri? Hashauriki? Au ni zuzu? Bwege sana huyu jamaa; he doesn't consider the law in the place before opening his mouth au na yeye anaumwa ugonjwa wa Mnyika?
Does it mean this Pombe Magufuli [Tanzanias president] doesn't have advisers? Is he unadvisable? Or is he just a fool? He's real foolish, this fellow: he doesn't consider the applicable laws before opening his mouth; or does he also suffer from an illness like that of [opposition politician] Mnyika?
Mulokozi is the latest victim of Tanzania's relatively new Cybercrime Law, which the Parliament passed in April 2015 to address issues such as child pornography, cyberbullying, online impersonation, illegal interception of communications, and the publication of false information.
Despite widespread opposition from politicians, social media experts, and human rights activists, the bill was pushed through parliament with relatively little discussion or debate. Former president Jakaya Kikwete signed it into law in May 2015.
Opponents of the Cybercrime Act argue that the law gives too much power — without meaningful oversight — to police, bestowing upon them the ability to search the homes of suspected violators of the law, seize their electronic hardware, and demand their data from online service providers. They have also cautioned that police or the state could use their power to harass online activists or social media users.
Tanzanian citizen Isaac Abakuki Emily was convicted this month of insulting Tanzanian President John Magufuli on his Facebook page by the Arusha Resident Magistrate’s Court.
Emily may serve three years in prison, or alternatively pay a fine of five million shillings (US $2300), a steep sum in Tanzania, where the GDP per capita amounts to just under US $1000 per year. This was reduced from seven million upon appeal by his lawyer, according to local news site The Citizen. He must pay the fine by August 8, or serve the prison term.
In October 2015, two Tanzanians became the first victims of the new law. Benedict Angelo Ngonyani, a 24-year-old student at Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology, was charged for publishing materials which are “false or not verified by relevant authorities.” It is alleged that he posted a Facebook post claiming that Tanzania's Chief of Defence Forces, General Davis Mwamunyange, had been hospitalized after eating poisoned food.
In November 2015, four Tanzanians — Leila Sinare, Godfrey Soka, Deo Soka and Monica Gaspary Soka — were charged under Section 16 of Cybercrime Act 2015 for publishing false, election-related information on the social messaging platform WhatsApp. The four appeared before a Magistrate's court in Dar Es Salaam on November 6, 2015. Public prosecutors alleged that the accused published audio information on a WhatsApp group called the “Soka Group”, that was intended to mislead the public during the October 2015 Tanzanian general elections, which were plagued by accusations of vote-rigging.

author: Ndesanjo Macha


text:
What Consequences Could the UK’s Brexit Have for People in Africa? · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

Campaign poster for both camps in London. Photo released under Creative Commons by Wikipedia user Philip Stevens.
A total of 52% of voters in Britain chose in a dramatic referendum to leave the European Union (EU) on June 23, 2016.
After the results were finalized, people across Africa, where various countries were colonised by Britain and are current members of the Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organisation of member states that were mostly colonies of the former British Empire, wondered if the decision to quit the EU would have any effect on them.
Examining what Brexit, as its been dubbed, means for Africa, Grieve Chelwa noted on the Africa is a Country blog that economic recession in the UK as a result of the referendum is one of the ways in which African economies could be affected. However, he concluded that Africa is more worried about recession in China:
How much trade takes place between the UK and Africa? Not much, it turns out. Combining data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) for 2014, the latest year for which we have comparable data, we calculated that exports from Africa to the UK represent about 5% of Africa’s total exports. Africa is more worried about a slowdown in China, it’s biggest trading partner by far.
He drew a similar conclusion about the importance of UK investments in Africa. Chelwa concluded his assessment by saying:
The UK doesn’t have the same influence on the continent that it did decades ago. And Brexit will be further proof of that. If the UK sneezes Africa will … well Africa will say “bless you” and move on.
Ida Horner disagreed with those who argue that that African farmers stand to gain from the exit as Britain would be a voice in Europe speaking for African farmers:
As regards to African farmers, a question has been asked as to whether Britain would be more effective at fighting for the rights of African farmers if it was no longer part of the European union (EU). I don’t believe that this would be the case. This is because British farmers would have lost their subsidies from the EU under the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP). The implication of this are not clear at this point in time but I would like to assume that Britain would prioritise British farmers over African farmers.
Richard Dowden, the director of the Britain-based Royal African Institute, thought that Britain's role as a voice for Africa in international organisations would diminish:
Many on the continent saw Britain as an important voice for Africa in Brussels and at the UN in New York. But now, England and Wales – outside the EU and led by little Englanders – will see British influence in the world diminish further. Could Britain even find itself squeezed off the UN Security Council?
Brexit would also negatively affect African students, refugees and other types immigrants, he argued:
The exit will also feed racism in Britain. There is little doubt that many of the Leave voters, frightened by immigration, want to stop foreigners coming to Britain. Africans – more visible than Europeans – will no doubt be targeted.
But Ida Horner said how immigration control would change for Africans isn't clear:
This is because, Britain cannot control migration from the EU and therefore in order to reduce overall immigration into Britain, Commonwealth citizens’ access to Britain is restricted. The perception of those calling for an exit, is that if Britain were to leave the EU, this situation would be reversed.
The extent to which this assertion is true with respect to African countries is open to debate and would require an examination of existing data relating to for instance, how many Africans have successfully obtained a two year Commonwealth Youth or Ancestry visa in the past and currently compared to say Canadians, Australians or even white South Africans
Blogging at the web portal of media group Financial Nigeria International, Martins Hile looked at the impact of Brexit on Nigeria, Britain's second largest trading economy in Africa after South Africa:
As a member of the British Commonwealth, Nigeria has strong ties with Britain. After South Africa, Nigeria is Britain's second largest trading partner in Africa, with £6 billion (about N2.4 trillion or $8.52 billion) in bilateral trade volume last year. As of December 2014, the UK Department for International Development had a portfolio of 40 projects in Nigeria with a planned budget of £232 million for 2014/2015, which include grants to non-profits, technical assistance and partnerships with other development agencies. A weaker and smaller UK economy would scale back its investment in development projects in Nigeria, even if temporarily
He warned that Brexit could have a strong influence on secessionist sentiments in Nigeria:
Should Britain, which cobbled Nigeria together begin to unravel in its own union, agitators for independence for some of Nigerian ethnic groups would find the bad example worthy of emulation. In the final analysis, like Britain, the toll of brexit on Nigeria would be less severe on the economic front; its deeper implications would be political.


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5 Accounts From Female Political Prisoners That Recall the Horrific Torture Under Brazil’s Military Dictatorship · Global Voices
Fernanda Canofre

Dilma Rousseff on trial during the military dictatorship. Photo: São Paulo Public Archive
As Brazil grapples with one of the deepest political crises of its history, another controversy has surfaced, this time during the vote on 17 April in the Chamber of Deputies to open an impeachment process against suspended President Dilma Rousseff.
It happened during the 316th vote. One of the deputies, who belonged to a group dedicating their decision to “god, the fatherland, and family”, openly lauded the torturer who directed the DOI-CODI, the entity controlled by the army that was responsible for the repression during Brazil's military dictatorship. Deputy Jair Bolsonaro proudly praised the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who he also referred to as “the terror of Dilma Rousseff”.
His vote caused indignation both among those for and against impeachment. But the deputy — who is proud of his homophobic opinions — also seemed to create an opening for the slice of Brazil’s population that supports or minimizes the crimes committed by the state under the military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.
These are people who believe that, in the name of “saving Brazil from the communists”, the disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and torture were justified. Even in 2016, this group remains vocal – enough for “fans” of Brilhante Ustra’s Facebook page to increase by 3,300% in the week following the vote.
It was this same sentiment that aided the rise of dictatorships in South America during the second half of the 20th century. In Brazil, the regime left 191 dead and 243 disappeared, according to the National Truth Commission’s report, released at the end of 2014.
Brazil was the last of the South American countries to implement a national truth commission to investigate state crimes by their respective dictatorships — Chile, Argentina and Uruguay did this in the 1980s, soon after democratization, and repeated the exercise in the 2000s. And while other countries on the continent have taken important steps to revise amnesty laws, Brazil is still only beginning to discuss the matter. For Lorena Balardini, coordinator of the Centre of Legal and Social Studies, which is pioneering the investigation of historical memory in relation to the region’s dictatorships, Brazil “is the country which has progressed the least” regarding reconciliation with its military past.
Brilhante Ustra was the first of Brazil’s torturers recognized as such by the country's justice system, but he died last year, before he could be judged. The man responsible for directing one of the military dictatorship’s biggest centres of repression — from September 1970 to 1974, 502 cases of torture and more than 40 murders were reported — was brought to trial due to proceedings initiated by three of his victims.
In light of Deputy Bolsonaro's comments, Global Voices has gathered excerpts from five accounts from political prisoners, four of them as told to the National Truth Commission, which leave no doubt: torture was common practice in the military dictatorship. The testimonies have been edited for clarity.
Cristina Moraes de Almeida: she was not an activist, but had acquaintances in political movements. The student was imprisoned three times, and each time she encountered Ustra. During one of her stays, the torturers faked a rebellion in the cell to justify the wounds to her abdomen. In another, she had three fingers of her right hand and her left foot broken during a torture session.
In a session coordinated by Ustra — under the pseudonym Tibiriçá — and Sérgio Fleury, the colonel ordered that she be “punished” for “wearing long trousers in a public office”.
Cristina Moraes de Almeida –O Tibiriçá repetiu: “Tira a calça, esqueceu que não pode vir de calça em uma repartição pública?”, aos berros. Eu não vou tirar calça para nada. Estou quebrada, com dor.
Glenda Mezarobba (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) – Você estava vestida, até aí?
Cristina Moraes de Almeida – Estava vestida até aí, mas a calça bem desabotoada, bem desalinhada, já rasgada. “Com essa calça justa” – ele disse. – “Acaba de tirar a roupa dela!”. Minha calça estava bem desabotoada, bem… a blusa.
Glenda Mezarobba (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) – Ele mandou quem tirar sua roupa?
Cristina Moraes de Almeida – Os encapuzados. Eu comecei a me encolher. Ele puxou a perna, rasgando minha calça, acabando de rasgar a minha calça. Ele pega uma furadeira, e me furou daqui até aqui, com uma furadeira.
Glenda Mezarobba (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) – Com uma furadeira, uma furadeira?
Cristina Moraes de Almeida – Elétrica. Furadeira. Eu não vi mais nada. (…) Aí ligaram [a furadeira], porque o choque elétrico, não estava funcionando. (…) Nove meses sem caminhar. (…) Furaram o osso. Furaram derme, epiderme, o osso.
Cristina Moraes de Almeida: “Tibiriçá repeated, shouting, ‘Remove the trousers, did you forget you can’t wear trousers in a public office?’ I was not going to take off the trousers for anything. I was broken, with pain.”
Glenda Mezarobba (National Truth Commission): “You were clothed, up to that point?”
Cristina Moraes de Almeida: “I was clothed up to that point, but the trousers were unbuttoned, very disheveled, and already ripped. ‘With those tight trousers’, he said, ‘just take off her clothes!’ My trousers were quite unbuttoned, and… the blouse.”
Glenda Mezarobba (National Truth Commission): “Who did he order to remove your clothes?”
Cristina Moraes de Almeida: “The hooded men. I began to shrink back. He pulled my leg, ripping my trousers, finishing ripping my trousers. He took a drill, and stabbed me with it from here to here, with a drill.”
Glenda Mezarobba (National Truth Commission): “With a drill, a drill?”
Cristina Moraes de Almeida: “An electric one. A drill. I didn’t see anymore. […] They started that then [the drill], because the electric shocks were not working. […] Nine months not walking. […] They drilled the bone. They drilled through skin, flesh, bone.
Isabel Fávero: ex-guerrilla from the armed group VAR-Palmares (Revolutionary Armed Vanguard – Palmares). She and her husband were imprisoned on 5 May 1970, when they had already separated from the guerrilla group and were teachers dedicated to adult literacy in Nova Aurora, in Paraná state.
(…) o prazer deles era torturar um frente ao outro e dizer: “olhe, sua vadia, ó ele está apanhando por culpa sua que você não quer colaborar”, entendeu? (…) além de ser torturada física e psicologicamente, a mulher é vadia, a palavra mesmo era “puta”, “menina decente, olha para a sua cara, com essa idade, olha o que tu está fazendo aqui, que educação os teus pais te deram, tu é uma vadia, tu não presta”.
Enfim, eu não me lembro bem se no terceiro, quarto dia, eu entrei em processo de aborto. Eu estava grávida de dois meses, então, eu sangrava muito. Eu não tinha como me proteger, eu usava papel higiênico, e já tinha mal cheiro. Eu estava suja, e eu acho que, eu acho não, eu tenho quase certeza que eu não fui estuprada, porque era constantemente ameaçada, porque eles tinham nojo, tinham nojo de mim.
E eu lembro que no dia em que nós fomos presos, exatamente no dia 4, nós tínhamos estado em Cascavel, e quando a gente saiu da ginecologista, tinha um veículo militar, mas a gente em momento nenhum pensou que eles estivessem vigiando a gente, eles já estavam no encalço da gente, eles seguiram, não é, esse dia eles nos seguiram o dia todo, e o meu marido dizia, “por favor, não façam nada com ela, podem, podem me torturar, mas ela tá grávida”, e eles riam, debochavam, “isso é história, ela é suja, mas não tem nada a ver”, enfim.
Em nenhum momento isso foi algum tipo de preocupação, em relação [pausa, voz embargada]. Eu certamente abortei por conta dos choques que eu tive nos primeiros dias, nos órgãos genitais, nos seios, ponta dos dedos, atrás das orelhas, aquilo provocou obviamente um desequilíbrio, eu lembro que eu tinha, muita, muita, muita dor no pescoço, porque quando a gente, quem sofreu choque, sabe? A gente joga a cabeça pra trás, aí tinha um momento que eu não sabia mais aonde doía, o que, doía em todo lado, mas enfim. Certamente foi isso. E eles ficavam muito irritados de me ver suja e sangrando e cheirando mal, enfim. Eu acho que ficavam até com mais raiva, e me machucavam mais ainda.
[…] they took pleasure in torturing one of us in front of the other, saying, “Look, you bitch, oh, he’s taking the blame for you not wanting to cooperate”, you understand? Besides being tortured physically and psychologically, the woman is called a slut, the word really was “whore”, “decent girl, look at your face, at that age, look what you're doing here, with the education your parents gave you, you’re a slut, you’re worthless”.
In the end, I don’t really remember if it was the third, fourth day, I started to have a miscarriage. I was two months pregnant, then, I bled a lot. I had no way to protect myself, I used toilet paper, and I already smelled bad. I was dirty, and I think, no, I’m almost certain that I wasn’t raped – because I was constantly threatened – because they were repulsed by me.
And I remember that the day we were arrested, on the 4th exactly, we had been in Cascavel and when we left the gynecologist, there was a military vehicle, but no-one at the time thought that they were watching us, they were already tracking people, they followed, isn’t it, that day they followed us the whole day, and my husband said, “Please, don’t do anything to her, you can, you can torture me, but she’s pregnant”, and they laughed, mocked, “That’s bullshit, she is dirty, but that has nothing to do with it”, anyway.
At no moment was this a concern, about [pause, voice stifled]. I certainly aborted because of the beating I had over the first days, to the genital organs, the breasts, fingertips, behind the ears – that obviously provoked a disruption, I remember that I had a lot, a lot, a lot of pain in my neck, because when we suffered beatings, you know? We threw our heads back; there was a moment when I didn’t know where it hurt anymore, that it hurt everywhere, but anyway. It was certainly that. And they were very angry to see me dirty and bleeding and smelling bad, anyway. I think they became even angrier, and hurt me even more.
Dulce Chaves Pandolfi: student and member of the armed guerrilla group ALN (National Liberation Alliance). She was imprisoned on 20 August 1970, at the age of 21.
In testimony at the State Truth Commission of Rio de Janeiro, Dulce recounted, “When I entered, I heard a phrase that still today echoes in my ears: ‘Here there is no God, no fatherland, no family’”.
No dia 20 de outubro, dois meses depois da minha prisão e já dividindo a cela com outras presas, servi de cobaia para uma aula de tortura. O professor, diante dos seus alunos, fazia demonstrações com o meu corpo. Era uma espécie de aula prática, com algumas dicas teóricas. Enquanto eu levava choques elétricos, pendurada no tal do pau de arara, ouvi o professor dizer: “essa é a técnica mais eficaz”. Acho que o professor tinha razão.
Como comecei a passar mal, a aula foi interrompida e fui levada para a cela. Alguns minutos depois, vários oficiais entraram na cela e pediram para o médico medir minha pressão. As meninas gritavam, imploravam, tentando, em vão, impedir que a aula continuasse. A resposta do médico Amílcar Lobo, diante dos torturadores e de todas nós, foi: “ela ainda aguenta”. E, de fato, a aula continuou.
A segunda parte da aula foi no pátio. O mesmo onde os soldados, diariamente, faziam juramento à bandeira, cantavam o Hino Nacional. Ali fiquei um bom tempo amarrada num poste, com o tal do capuz preto na cabeça. Fizeram um pouco de tudo. No final, comunicaram que, como eu era irrecuperável, eles iriam me matar, que eu ia virar “presunto”, termo usado pelo Esquadrão da Morte. Ali simularam meu fuzilamento. Levantaram rapidamente o capuz, me mostraram um revólver, apenas com uma bala, e ficaram brincando de roleta-russa. Imagino que os alunos se revezavam no manejo do revólver porque a “brincadeira” foi repetida várias vezes.
On 20 October, two months after my imprisonment and already sharing the cell with other prisoners, I served as a guinea pig for a torture class. The teacher, in front of his students, did demonstrations with my body. It was a type of practical class, with some theoretical tips. I took electric shocks while hung in the “pau de arara” [torture technique common under the dictatorship] and I heard the teacher say “this is the most efficient technique”. I think the teacher was right.
As I began to feel ill, the class was interrupted and I was taken to the cell. A few minutes later, several officers entered the cell and asked for the doctor to measure my blood pressure. The girls screamed, begged, trying in vain to prevent the class continuing. The doctor Amilcar Lobo’s answer, in front of the torturers and all of us, was, “She can still take it.” And, indeed, the class continued.
The second part of the class was in the yard. The same where the soldiers, every day, pledged allegiance to the flag and sang the national anthem. There I spent a long time tied to a post, with a black hood over my head. They did a bit of everything. In the end, they said since I was irredeemable, they would kill me, I was going to become “presunto” [ham], a term used by the Death Squad. There they staged a mock shooting. They quickly raised the hood, showed me a gun with only one bullet, and were playing Russian roulette. I imagine that the students took turns in handling the gun because the “game” was repeated several times.
Leslie Denise Beloque: ex-militant from the ALN. She was arrested on 29 January 1970, at the age of 21. Her brother, sister-in-law, and a sister were also imprisoned and tortured by the military regime.
A tortura é uma delas visivelmente, as pessoas ainda não conseguem falar dela, honestamente. Inclusive porque não é heroico, ter sido presa e ter sido torturada isso não te faz herói, não te torna heroica, não é uma experiência heroica. Muito pelo contrário: É humilhante, te humilha, é uma questão de extremo sofrimento, não é heróico, você tem medo adoidado, por várias vezes você tem medo quando você fica apavorado quando você ouve o barulho da chave, então não é só uma questão heroico, só bonita e só: “Ai nossa eu fui torturada.” Não, é trazer essas coisas de quantas vezes você teve um medo danado, o pavor em várias situações, você saber que toda a noite o cara te chama para te torturar, ou no plantão do fulano de tal que acabou de entrar. E discutir nessa dimensão, sem esse heroísmo, sem essa… Na forma em que ela é.
Claro que as pessoas que passaram por essa experiência, despojar esse caráter mítico e dizer a coisa como ela é, as sensações que você teve de coragem, de medo, de pavor, de tudo. Porque cada um é isso, foi buscando as suas estratégias de sobrevivência e foi assim, uns conseguiram e outros não. E a mim resta uma pergunta, resta essa questão: Será que os companheiros que provocaram a morte, foi por que perceberam que não iam aguentar? E a morte foi uma forma de garantir que ele não falaria?
Torture is one of those things obviously; people still cannot talk about it, honestly. Partly because it is not heroic; to have been arrested and tortured does not make you a hero, does not make you heroic, it is not a heroic experience. Quite the contrary: It's humiliating, it humiliates you, it is a matter of extreme suffering, it is not heroic, you are maddeningly afraid, often you are afraid when you panic because you hear the noise of a key, so it's not just a heroic matter, just beautiful and lonely, “Oh my goodness, I was tortured.” No, it is to carry these things with you, of how many times you felt a damn fear, a dread in so many situations, you know that all night the guy calls you to torture you, or it’s the turn of such-and-such guard who just entered. And discussing this aspect, without this heroism, without this … The way that torture actually is.
Of course, people who have experienced it strip away this mythical character and describe it as it is, the sensations that you have of courage, fear, dread, everything. Because it’s like that for each person, looking for survival strategies, some manage to do it, others don’t. For me there remains one question, just this issue: for those companions who committed suicide, was it because they thought they couldn’t bear it? And death was a way of guaranteeing that they wouldn’t talk?
Dilma Rousseff: member of the VAR-Palmares and held prisoner for three years. In 2001, Dilma gave testimony to the Human Rights Commission of Minas Gerais, but her account only became public in 2012 in a report by the newspaper Estado de Minas.
“Tinha muito esquema de tortura psicológica, ameaças. Eles interrogavam assim: ‘Me dá o contato da organização com a polícia?’ Eles queriam o concreto. ‘Você fica aqui pensando, daqui a pouco eu volto e vamos começar uma sessão de tortura.’ A pior coisa é esperar por tortura.”
“Depois (vinham) as ameaças: ‘Eu vou esquecer a mão em você. Você vai ficar deformada e ninguém vai te querer. Ninguém vai saber que você está aqui. Você vai virar um ‘presunto’ e ninguém vai saber’. Em São Paulo me ameaçaram de fuzilamento e fizeram a encenação. Em Minas não lembro, pois os lugares se confundem um pouco.”
“Quando eu tinha hemorragia, na primeira vez foi na Oban (…) foi uma hemorragia de útero. Me deram uma injeção e disseram para não bater naquele dia. Em Minas, quando comecei a ter hemorragia, chamaram alguém que me deu comprimido e depois injeção. Mas me davam choque elétrico e depois paravam. Acho que tem registros disso no final da minha prisão, pois fiz um tratamento no Hospital das Clínicas.”
“Fiquei presa três anos. O estresse é feroz, inimaginável. Descobri, pela primeira vez, que estava sozinha. Encarei a morte e a solidão. Lembro-me do medo quando minha pele tremeu. Tem um lado que marca a gente o resto da vida.”
“As marcas da tortura sou eu. Fazem parte de mim.”
I had a routine of psychological torture and threats. They questioned like this: ‘Are you going to give me the organization’s contact with the police?’ They wanted concrete answers. ‘You stay there thinking, soon I'll be back and we'll start a torture session.’ The worst thing is waiting for torture.
Later, the threats. I’m going to lose my hand in you. You’re going to be deformed and no-one will want you. No one will know that you are here. You’re going to become a ‘presunto’ and no-one will know’. In “São Paulo they threatened me with shooting, and staged it. In Minas I don’t remember, as the places get jumbled a bit.
When I had a hemorrhage, the first time was in Oban […] it was a hemorrhage of the uterus. They gave me an injection and said not to beat me that day. In Minas, when I began to bleed, they called someone who gave me a pill and then an injection. But they gave me an electric shock and then stopped. I think that there are records of this at the end of my imprisonment, since I was treated in the Hospital das Clínicas [a medical complex].
I was imprisoned for three years. The stress is ferocious, unimaginable. I discovered, for the first time, that I was alone. I faced death and loneliness. I remember the fear when my skin trembled. It has an aspect that marks people for the rest of their lives.
The marks of torture are me. They are part of me.

author: Fernanda Canofre


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Barbados-Born Author Austin Clarke Remembered as a ‘Pioneering Voice’ · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

Barbadian-Canadian author Austin Clarke reading at a National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS) event in Trinidad. Photo by Andrew Currie, used under a CC BY 2.0 license.
The Caribbean literary world is in mourning after learning of the death of Barbadian-Canadian writer Austin Clarke. The 81-year-old passed away on Sunday, June 26, 2016.
Clarke left Barbados in the mid-1950s to pursue his tertiary education at the University of Toronto; he became involved in the civil rights movement and began writing, publishing his first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing, in 1964. Through its main protagonist, — a canecutter — the story examined the effects of colonialism and slavery on politics and race relations in a pre-independence Barbados, but Clarke was perhaps best known for his novel The Polished Hoe, which won numerous literary accolades, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2002), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Overall and the Trillium Book Award (both in 2003). Five years prior, he was also made a member of the Order of Canada.
Upon news of his death, tributes began to pour out on social media. Facebook user HoneyJam Barbados posted:
RIP to Literary giant Austin Clarke who died today in Toronto. He won many prestigious international awards for his writing. He was brilliant, witty, fearless, an activist, a poet, a humourist, an intellectual, always questioning and challenging the status quo, always holding people to account, sometimes courting controversy but willing to suffer the consequences of his opinions and convictions. He spoke his mind unafraid, he stirred the pot, he wanted us to know our history, to know our country, our culture, to not be ignorant of it, to look at ourselves and to always strive do better. He was widely acclaimed and celebrated but remained himself always. He was a citizen of the world but always belonged to Barbados. He was a proud native son.
Another Facebook user, Rick Halpern, lamented:
A huge loss. An important voice not just for Canada and the Caribbean but for the world
Indeed, Canadian netizens were also proud to claim him:
#AustinClarke wrote his first novel before Frye said “where is here,” before Atwood, before Munro. He is a foundational Canadian author.
— Bougie Brampton (@paul_barrett) June 26, 2016
Can't emphasize enough how significant a presence #AustinClarke was in Canada's literary firmament in the 1970s. A pioneering voice.
— Adrian Harewood (@CBCAdrianH) June 26, 2016
Trinidadian Jonathan Ali shared the effect Clarke's writing had on him:
RIP Austin Clarke. His very funny memoirs Pigtails ‘n’ Breadfruit and Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack are among my favourite volumes of Caribbean biography.
On the heels of the UK's European Union referendum, one Twitter user cheekily recommended the latter of those titles to Britons:
#AustinClarke was an amazing writer, & even penned this guidebook for a whole new post-#Brexit generation in the UK pic.twitter.com/1Xqr7fVJGr
— Matthew Holmes (@semimatte) June 26, 2016
On the Facebook page Black Canadian Veterans Stories of War, the son of a Barbadian war veteran and poet posted a personal photo of a smiling Clarke in a tuxedo, pipe dangling from his mouth, explaining:
My dad's friend, author Austin Clarke passed away today. Both were born in Barbados and both loved poetry. Sentimemtal shot of Mr. Clarke, taken by my dad WWII veteran and Poet…Owen Rowe.
The Bocas Lit Fest — one of the Caribbean's most well regarded literary festivals — also acknowledged his passing:
Austin Clarke, Barbadian-Canadian winner of the @cwwriters, @GillerPrize & numerous other awards, has died at 81. pic.twitter.com/QNktPXjvBq
— Bocas Lit Fest (@bocaslitfest) June 26, 2016
Clarke's 2015 memoir, ′Membering, was longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
On Twitter, Austin was remembered as gracious, generous and an authentic literary talent:
Intelligent. Charming. Fun. Generous with emerging writers. We were lucky to have him. #AustinClarke https://t.co/NXeebVjr7Y
— Aislinn Hunter (@AislinnHunter) June 27, 2016
Austin Clarke: a man of unapologetic wisdom. Thank you for re-shaping & redefining Can lit. #austinclarke #ripaustinclarke
— Sheniz Janmohamed (@ShenizJ) June 26, 2016
Other netizens — prolific writers and avid readers themselves — thought that Clarke's passing required taking a step back. Rhoda Bharath posted a photo of Clarke, saying:
I have to pause for this.
Transition well.
Patricia Worrell, who was weary of all the great losses the region has borne for the year thus far, added:
2016 strikes again.
RIP


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Political Sniping Follows India’s Failure to Win Nuclear Suppliers Group Membership · Global Voices
Sohini Chatterjee

Current member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Image by Lofo7 via Wikimedia Commons.
India was riding high on the hope of joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) when it applied for membership on May 12. However, all hopes seemed to be dashed in NSG’s plenary meetings on 23-24 June in Seoul, where in the face of sturdy opposition from China and others, India’s entry into the NSG could not be confirmed.
The NSG was established in the immediate aftermath of India's first successful nuclear bomb test Pokhran I in 1974, which made India the first state outside of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to conduct nuclear tests. Despite India’s insistence that the nuclear tests were conducted for peaceful purposes, it caused a stir in the international political climate, forcing several states to embark on a mission to curb proliferation with renewed vigor.
NSG today works towards non-proliferation across the globe by controlling nuclear and nuclear-related exports, ensuring that nuclear technology transfer for peaceful purposes do not contribute to proliferation. NSG consists of 48 member states currently, which includes the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting the Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Mr. David Cameron, on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit 2016, in Washington DC on April 01, 2016. Image via Wikimedia Commons. BY-SA 2.0
India as a rising power wants to have a greater say in making the rules of the game that govern international politics and is also eyeing nuclear import benefits that it would derive from an NSG membership. Prime Minister Modi has given the matter priority on his foreign policy agenda, evidenced by his visits to Switzerland and Mexico as it became known that they had reservations about India's induction.
However, even though Mexico could be convinced to favour India's entry, Switzerland refused to budge from its position. Hence, in the face of opposition from the likes of Switzerland and China, India might have to wait a little longer before its NSG dream is realized.
The failure of the incumbent central government to attain NSG membership has invited a barrage of criticism from various opposition parties. Prime Minister Modi particularly has been at the receiving end of the vitriol as many have accused him of failing to demonstrate astute diplomatic skills in garnering support for India's induction.
Rahul Gandhi, the vice president of the main opposition party Indian National Congress  tweeted after it became known that India was not getting an immediate entry into the NSG:
NSG: How to lose a negotiation by Narendra Modi #FailedModiDiplomacy
— Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) June 24, 2016
Aam Aadmi Party leader Ashish Khetan reminded followers of India's procurement of the NSG waiver in 2008 amidst similar opposition from China, blaming Modi squarely for his diplomatic failure:
Even in 2008 China had not publicly opposed India's entry into NSG. Modi ji will go down in history as the worst Indian Prime Minister ever
— Ashish Khetan (@AashishKhetan) 24 June 2016
Delhi's current Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pointed out the futility of Modi's foreign visits:
Sir, I hope u will tell the nation tomo why did u fail so miserably at NSG despite so many foreign visits? https://t.co/cxertqw1Wi
— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) 25 June 2016
Modi's failure to obtain for India a place at the NSG has been compared frequently with the 2008 NSG waiver in which India had got a nuclear trade license after being barred from being able to do so for nearly three decades prior.
2008:Statesmanship & Diplomacy gets NSG Waiver
2016:Showmanship & Circus gets us Humiliation #FailedModiDiplomacy pic.twitter.com/IAV2NbP84G
— Geet Varun (@geetv79) June 25, 2016
However, many have come forward in support of Modi and spoken against the antagonistic politics, such as author and entrepreneur Suhel Seth and CNN-IBN politics editor Pallavi Ghosh:
Well if we didn't get into the NSG, it is pretty graceless to blame @narendramodi : India and not him has been denied a place at that table.
— SUHEL SETH (@suhelseth) June 26, 2016
Those dissing govt becoz india not part of nsg : this is the reason we not respected : letting politics come in way of standing by nation
— pallavi ghosh (@_pallavighosh) June 25, 2016
Others have focused on the significance of India's entry into the NSG, like commentator Brahma Chellaney and India Today editor Shiv Aroor:
NSG-entry fiasco: NSG will invite a nation to join when the costs of keeping it out are clear — e.g., if India starts making nuclear exports
— Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) 24 June 2016
India's #NSG fight is the good fight. It's rightful & important. The nuclear world is less governed without India in the NSG. (1/2)
— Shiv Aroor (@ShivAroor) 24 June 2016
India has identified China as the chief conniver in blocking its NSG membership on the grounds that India is not a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. China’s opinion was echoed by Austria, Brazil, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Turkey.
However, there is still a fighting chance for India to be included in the NSG, media reports suggest. The US seems particularly keen on having India inducted and discussions towards that end could begin towards the end of the year.
At suggestion of Mexico, which had earlier raised process questions, the NSG has agreed to meet again in 2016 to look at Indian membership
— The Wire (@thewire_in) June 26, 2016
To come so close and to get India's NSG application on the table in two months is a big achievement. Now renewed effort before year end 9/n
— Ashok Malik (@MalikAshok) 25 June 2016
NSG is not likely to be the last stop for India since it also covets memberships to the Wassenaar Arrangement and Australian Group — all in an effort to provide itself leverage in nuclear politics of the world. In this context, NSG is of critical importance to India. However, it remains to be seen how India overcomes the China hurdle on its path to NSG inclusion and if Modi succeeds in his diplomatic manoeuvre to get India admitted into NSG — the good peoples’ nuke club.

author: Sohini Chatterjee


text:
The Men Behind Moscow’s Hidden Bathroom Cameras and the Woman Who’s Fighting Back · Global Voices
Kevin Rothrock

The women’s bathroom at the Shokoladnitsa cafe in Moscow near the Oktyabrskaya metro station. Photo: TV Rain. Used with permission.
Yesterday, on June 27, the Russian independent news channel TV Rain (“Dozhd”) published an investigative report on a network of hidden cameras operating in women's restrooms throughout Moscow. The footage circulates worldwide on the Internet, unbeknownst to most of the women who appear in these videos. One small group of women, led by Polina Anisimova and aided by an anonymous informant and his hacker companion, are now fighting back, trying to involve Russia's law enforcement. With the channel's permission, RuNet Echo presents a full translation of TV Rain's report below.
By Sonya Groysman and Ivan Pivsaev
Late in the evening on June 12, an unknown Vkontakte user with a blank profile and an avatar featuring the Russian rapper Pasha Tekhnik sent Polina Anisimova a photograph with her face and asked if it was her in the picture. She didn’t get around to reading the message until the middle of the night. When she finally looked, there she was in the image. There was her sweatshirt, her birthmark, and the mole on her face. But she couldn’t remember when or how the photo had been taken. She’s certainly never uploaded any such picture to the Internet. Now quite alarmed, Polina showed the message to her boyfriend.
At first, they decided it was some kind of bad joke or a new kind of online blackmail, and they started googling ways Vkontakte can be used to extort people.
After Polina confirmed that it really was her in the picture, the anonymous account sent her several more photos with a message telling her that he had “bad news” for her, explaining that she “had become a victim, just like his loved ones.” In the pictures, a young woman was urinating in a bathroom with white and brown tiles. Anisimova became even more confused, refusing to believe that this was her.
The anonymous account didn’t blackmail Polina or threaten her. He only warned that she, like many other young women, were the victims of a hidden-camera operation.
Photo: Facebook / Polina Anisimova. Used with permission.
The strange photographs bore a watermark reading “Hidden Zone.” Searching for this phrase online, Polina and her boyfriend had no trouble finding on a torrent-tracking website hundreds of videos filmed using hidden cameras in women’s bathrooms. Before long, Anisimova recognized herself in one video’s preview image. Now there was no longer any doubt: it was her purse in the video, her blue jeans, and her bare buttocks. The only distinction was her long hair, which she’d cut short a full two years ago.
That’s how Polina learned that a pornographic video has existed on the Internet since at least 2014 featuring her, filmed without her knowledge.
The next day, Polina revealed the whole story on her Facebook page. “If I remained silent about this, this story could become grounds to blackmail me down the road, even though I didn’t do anything, like thousands of other victims,” she wrote.
The news media soon picked up her story. The thing that seemed to shock most people was that Polina, as best she can guess, was filmed in the bathroom at a local Shokoladnitsa, one of Russia’s most popular cafe chains. This, at any rate, is what Polina’s “informant” told her. He’s contacted other women filmed in these videos, as well, and some of them say they’ve been able to work out when and how they were recorded by the hidden cameras.
The anonymous informant says he began investigating the videos after one of his relatives became a victim. Now he says he’s trying to figure out who’s behind the videos, and he’s notifying victims using FindFace (a controversial tool that links photographs of people to their Vkontakte accounts).
So far, he says he’s managed to contact less than a dozen victims. (In many of the videos, the faces are barely visible, or FindFace fails to match the people to the correct Vkontakte accounts.) He says he hopes police reports filed by these victims will be enough to prompt a full investigation.
Polina Anisimova and another four women filmed in the bathroom by hidden cameras are now consulting with a lawyer who will bring their case to court. “What happened is a violation of our rights. And now we’re trying to understand what to do about this, and how to restore our rights,” Anisimova says.
The informant says he’s encouraged his relative to take the matter to court, but she is apparently a low-ranking city official, and she’s evidently afraid of losing her job. “Their unspoken policy,” the informant says, “is that they’ll ‘help’ you resign, if you’re mixed up in any scandal—even if you’re the victim.”
The informant refuses to share his identity, saying he doesn’t want to reveal himself, “considering the resources” at the disposal of the people he’s targeting.
A cursory Internet search is enough to demonstrate the mountains of pornography available that features hidden-camera footage of women using public bathrooms in cafes and shopping malls, women in changing rooms, and other similar videos. The market for this content—voyeurs—are people who experience sexual arousal from spying on others. One subgenre of this voyeuristic pornography is hidden-camera footage of women urinating. Some of the people who enjoy these videos are aroused by anything associated with urination.
One of the anonymous informant’s companions, who’s helping Polina and the other women track down the people who filmed them, is a hacker who managed to break into a closed Internet forum for voyeurs. He says most of the voyeurs are between the ages of 35 and 60, and they operate by the rules of a secret society. On the websites where they communicate and exchange videos, there are various different levels of access to the content, and registering to join the community is extremely difficult. The community itself is clearly built to ensure maximum secrecy. The group has its own legends and heroes, too, dedicated to the “best content” and the “best [camera] angles.”
Before the scandal involving Shokoladnitsa, Russia’s voyeurs were a generally invisible community. Every year, hundreds of women in Russia are targeted by those who install hidden cameras and sell the footage, but there have never been high-profile criminal cases or convictions, as a result.
Moscow’s police department says it couldn’t recall a single report filed by any of the women targeted in the videos discovered in the past several months. Police don’t consider it to be a mass phenomenon, noting just a few isolated cases.
The videos like the one Anisimova found are sold on closed websites for voyeurs with complicated registration systems. Some of them are also available on ordinary porn websites. Registering for the closed sites isn’t free, and it can cost up to hundreds of dollars.
The voyeurs’ forums can be divided into “open” and “closed” groups, depending on the complexity of their registration processes. In these groups, members trade stories about their experiences filming and spying, sharing their own videos and other materials they’ve found online, and advising each other on the best equipment for bugging bathrooms.
Judging by what is written in these forums, many of the people recording these videos use miniature cameras disguised as other objects. The most common camouflage hides the camera under what looks like car keys. In Russia, the purchase, manufacture, or sale of special technical means for obtaining private information (without warning the people you’re recording that they’re being filmed) is prohibited by criminal-code article 138.1, which sets a maximum penalty of four years in prison. The biggest case in recent history involving this crime was launched against the opposition figure Natalia Pelevina, a member of the political party Parnas. She was caught with a pen containing a video camera.
Camera keychain. Photo: TV Rain. Used with permission.
The voyeurs themselves mostly seem to believe that they’re not doing anything wrong, though many of them fear for their own safety, spending much of their time online discussing what threats they face.
One former deputy director at a defense plant, for example, didn’t stop spying on women, even after he was exposed. He spent 15 years spying on his colleagues before he was caught, but now he says he “can’t stop doing it” and he still “comes round for some looks.” In another comment thread, the same man enthusiastically describes the state that overtakes him when he sees women urinating: “When I go to the bathroom and start peeping, sometimes I get such a high that my heart starts to hurt—the emotions are so strong and intense! Bathroom views… they take hold of me completely.”
Voyeurs can get excited without even seeing any nudity—the very fact that a person’s privacy has been violated and the feeling of power over an unsuspecting individual can be enough, says clinical psychologist and addictions specialist Veronika Kashirina. In varying degrees, many people enjoy spying on others, Kashirina says, but in rarer cases individuals feel compelled to spy on others, even when it endangers people’s safety. (The International Classification of Diseases categorizes voyeurism as a “disorder of sexual preference.”)
Kashirina says voyeurism is tied to the violation of the psychological boundaries between people: “In our country, there are often five people living in a studio apartment, changing clothes in front of each other, washing without shutting the door, and parents are having sex while their children sleep nearby. This strongly blurs psychological boundaries distorting people’s attitudes about their own intimacy and others’ intimacy, which can be the basis for desires to spy on others, or, quite the opposite, it can encourage some people to avoid guarding themselves, making them want to expose themselves publicly.”
People like this, Kashirina says, often have low self-esteem, and the feeling of superiority over their victims and the support of others in closed online forums helps artificially raise their sense of self-worth, simultaneously suppressing feelings of guilt, the sense of their own “wrongness,” and the fear of being exposed.
But most of these voyeurs aren’t afraid of criminal prosecution. The prospects of being caught are slim, a forum participant tells the group, pointing out optimistically that it’s hard to find their victims, and the content itself, from the perspective of the law, is no different from ordinary pornography. Generally speaking, community members seem to believe, voyeurs just need to be careful and avoid “drawing attention” to the group’s existence, otherwise “those damned journalists might make a big stink.”
Screenshot of one post on a voyeurs’ forum.
If they come for the voyeurs, it won’t be any time soon. The main thing is not to get cocky and not to circulate your content [openly]. After all, our work is already on social networks. Basically, until they’ve caught all the pedophiles, they’ll only catch us randomly. Of course, the stars of our films mostly don’t know that they’re our stars :-) (except when the recordings are done too obviously, which I’ve always opposed) and there needs to be a plaintiff for any criminal charges. And finding the victims and taking their statements is very problematic and complicated in our situation, and the prospects for such cases are pretty slim. That’s why you can only really get busted if you’re caught red handed, if you’re filming too obviously and they file a complaint against you. For the time being, downloading and distributing our content carries the same administrative penalties as with ordinary pornography. But if you draw attention to our existence, then those damned journalists might make a big stink in search of a scandal, and if they strike a nerve with society, then they could come to make an example of someone… That’s why, yes, we need to clean out our ranks (following Stalin’s legacy :-)) and introduce rules prohibiting the distribution of our content, and ideally stop selling content for money, where they then end up on torrent-trackers and attract attention. One way or another.
The hacker who broke into a voyeurs’ forum and used stolen accounts to study its closed sections says the first such communities (one of which was called “Petrovka, 38”) appeared back in the 1990s, in the era of the VHS camera. The biggest community that exists today, which voyeurs call “The Pen” (a shortened form of its original name, “The Piggy Pen”), was created 12 years ago by a person known by the nickname “Keks.”
Screenshot from a page on “The Pen.”
In connection with this, we’ve now got another admin, HomoDrill. He won’t decide any issue-related matters—this person has been helping us for a long time with the hosting settings, with Apache and PHP, and he needs these rights to do timed tests and bug-squashing. Of course, he’s far better known under a different name and on other resources, but he’s welcome to dilute our oinking crowd with such an original nickname. :-) Almost all the redesign is his work. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!
Membership in “The Pen” is closed, and participants have varying levels of access to the website’s different sections. A member’s status and access levels rise for money or new videos uploaded to the site.
“Many veteran voyeurs got out of the business a long time ago, and they enjoy the influx of fresh videos provided to the forum by newcomers who want to advance in the community’s hierarchy and attain a higher status, which grants them access to the forum’s restricted sections with more extreme content,” the hacker explains.
Open forums also have closed sections, where participants distribute their own “works.” Most of these people, judging by the content published in the forums, aren’t pursuing commercial aims, but there are some “operators” who record videos to sell to websites specializing in such content. They sometimes also advertise their productions in the forums’ commercial sections. Communicating very actively in these forums, these “operators” say almost nothing about themselves, while other forum members sometimes share personal stories from their private lives.
One of the informant’s companions says he spoke to a former member of “The Pen,” who says he became one of the website’s sponsors and in 2008 received access to its closed sections. According to this person, there are several major producers of voyeur videos for sale.
“Videos from the outdoors (nudists on the beach, sex in the bushes, women urinating in the forest, and so on) are filmed primarily by ‘Vadukha’ and to a lesser extent by ‘Jerki.’ Hidden-camera footage of women (usually the brides) urinating at wedding parties is the speciality of ‘Zooom.’ ‘Veg,’ meanwhile, films minors urinating in bathrooms. For many years, ‘Fall’ has sat filming upwards directly from inside septic tanks, wearing a gasmask and covered in some kind of blanket or cape. One of the most dangerous voyeurists is ‘Surokspit,’ who used to be a volunteer author and moderator at ‘The Pen.’ He’s operated in Moscow for the past nine years, secretly filming under the skirts of women riding on escalators,” says the informant’s source.
People with these online nicknames are mentioned frequently on voyeur forums, and torrent-tracker websites host thousands of videos allegedly made by these individuals.
There really is an account named “Surokspit” that uploads to paywalled porn websites “upskirt videos” filmed on escalators in the Moscow metro. The same account sells videos recorded on cameras hidden in bags or attached to the tips of umbrellas to a foreign website that specializes in such content.
An “operator” by the name of “Uchebnik” (“Textbook”) has spent many years recording hidden-camera footage in public restrooms. Until about 2009, he belonged to a website with videos available for pay filmed in the bathrooms of cafeterias and schools. In the voyeur community, “Uchebnik” is a legend. “I’m no Uchebnik—I’m only learning,” one user on a voyeur forum writes in his profile, for instance. Forum members note his “signature style” in various videos uploaded anonymously, which have continued appearing on major voyeur porn websites since 2009.
Another way people create “content” for voyeurs is by infecting victims’ computers with a virus that grants hackers remote access to people’s web-cameras.
The voyeurs themselves are often the ones who develop these viruses, in order to target a narrow group of people, so antivirus software is slow to recognize the threat. There is also legal software, says one of TV Rain’s sources, that provides remote access to computers—software that antivirus programs won’t block—that some programmers install on unsuspecting clients’ machines. Videos capturing intimate acts filmed in this way on hijacked web-cameras are also available for purchase in various commercial sections of “The Pen.”
“Web-camera surveillance has become a large-scale form of cyber-fraud,” says Internet expert Anton Merkurov. “All you have to do is download a suspicious program that infects your computer.” He says the best defense against these attacks is to glue a piece of tape across your web-camera, like Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg does.
Before the video featuring Polina made it to torrent-tracker porn websites, it was sold to the pay site “Hidden Zone,” as evidenced by the watermark on the footage.
Hidden Zone is one of the largest online resources specializing in content for voyeurs. According to rough data from SimilarWeb (a platform that measures and analyzes user-engagement statistics for websites), more than 90,000 people visited Hidden Zone between April and May 2016.
Many fans of voyeur pornography dream of getting access to Hidden Zone, but it’s a complicated process, thanks to the site’s multi-step registration and the frequency with which the website blocks accounts using stolen passwords. On voyeur forums, there are whole comment threads dedicated to gaining access to Hidden Zone. If you try to access it from a Russian IP address, you’re confronted by a notice claiming that the website has been blocked by Russia’s state censor, Roskomnadzor, though the site isn’t listed on the agency’s Internet “blacklist.”
The site is updated daily. As of June 27, the latest video supposedly filmed in a Russian public restroom was uploaded on June 26.
From Hidden Zone and other pay sites, the videos make their way to torrent-trackers and file-sharing services. They’re distributed by the users who paid for access initially, who then want to share their discoveries with others and simultaneously rise within the hierarchy of voyeur forums.
And that’s how the video with Polina Anisimova found its way to the “unconventional porn” section on one torrent-trackers, along with thousands of other similar videos. It was just one episode in a “series” that was being filmed for years in a public restroom (and maybe there’s still a hidden camera there today).
On one page of the torrent-tracker Polina discovered, there were five “seasons” of videos filmed in women’s restrooms, beginning in 2011 and ending in 2015. The “country of production” is listed as Russia. Every “season” features upwards of 200 women of various ages relieving themselves before hidden cameras. The final installment, apparently recorded last year, was uploaded in January 2016. Every video has a designated serial number, and, judging by the last clip, the whole series appears to contain more than 2,000 videos.
“Just one of these cameras hidden in a public restroom captures hundreds of ‘models’ in a day, but there are only dozens of new videos every week,” one forum user complains.
The folder with videos from 2011 contains quite a variety of footage. Some of the videos were filmed from inside the septic tanks of portable toilets, and others show bathrooms decorated with bright tiles. These locations don’t appear in later “seasons.” In the 2011 folder, you’ll find videos recorded in the bathroom that are identical to the one visible in the video with Polina Anisimova and at least one other woman discovered by her anonymous informant. The second woman says this is the bathroom at the Shokoladnitsa cafe in Moscow near the Oktyabrskaya metro station.
The preview of a video filmed on hidden camera.
This bathroom appears in hundreds of videos on the other “seasons.” One of the cameras seems to have been installed in the trashcan near the toilet, and in some videos a black garbage bag partly covers the camera’s lens. Videos filmed in another bathroom, the anonymous informant believes, used a camera disguised as a metal holder for paper towels attached to the door, in place of the coat hook. “I have no idea how they managed to drill holes for the screws during business hours and replace one thing with the other,” the informant says.
The women’s bathroom at the Shokoladnitsa cafe in Moscow near the Oktyabrskaya metro station. Photo: TV Rain. Used with permission.
After Polina’s revelations on Facebook, the users of one popular voyeur forum opened a special thread dedicated to discussing “leaks.” Some of the comments mentioned the Shokoladnitsa chain.
“I can tell you one thing with total certainty: we shouldn’t expect any new videos from Shokoladnitsa anytime soon,” wrote one person on the forum. “But they haven’t found the other Shokoladnitsa,” another user answered.
Another user wondered if the cafe itself might be in on the hidden-camera filming: “…the lazy delusion that the employees or managers have anything to do with this will be dispelled sooner or later, but now—other than these babes themselves—the [cafe’s] security guards will be looking ‘under toilet seats,’ worried about another scandal,” he wrote.
Other than the Shokoladnitsa near the Oktyabrskaya metro station, victims contacted by the anonymous informant have traced hidden-camera videos back to bathrooms at three other Shokoladnitsa locations on Tverskaya Street, Lomonosov Prospekt, and near the Paveletskaya metro station. Searching geolocated photos on Instagram, it’s possible to see that the bathroom interior at the Shokoladnitsa on Tverskaya looked to same two years ago as it does in hidden-camera videos voyeurs say they filmed in 2012, 2013, and early 2014. The bathroom has since been remodeled.
Shokoladnitsa has refused to comment on the information.
The restroom at Shokoladnitsa on Tverskaya Street. Photo: TV Rain. Used with permission.
The preview of a video filmed on hidden camera.
Instagram screenshot.
Instagram screenshot.
In 2014, a user of the website Woman.ru wrote about a hidden camera allegedly discovered in the ladies’ room at a Shokoladnitsa on Lomonosov Prospekt, saying “the cafe’s staff were incredibly rude, and didn’t even apologize.” One of the two Shokoladnitsa cafes on Lomonosov Prospekt told TV Rain that it knew nothing about a hidden-camera incident on its premises. The other Shokoladnitsa cafe said there had been an incident, but it had been at a different cafe. (Staff refused to specify.)
The video collection in question was filmed in at least seven different locations, but they all display identical beige and brown colors, making it impossible to determine where exactly these bathrooms were.
Shokoladnitsa has been reluctant to comment on such incidents. Immediately after Anisimova’s revelations, the cafe chain’s general director, Tamara Shesterina, promised in an interview that the cafes’ security guards would verify the reports about hidden cameras. She said the company’s security cameras operate only in the hallways and work area, and claimed not to have any information about hidden cameras installed in the bathrooms.
Speaking to the radio station Echo of Moscow, a member of Shokoladnitsa’s security team also doubted the presence of such cameras in bathrooms, saying their installation would have been hard not to notice.
Tamara Shesterina promised to forward TV Rain’s questions to Shokoladnitsa’s press service, but two days later she said the company’s representatives would offer a comment only “when it was deemed necessary.” In the end, marketing director Elena Rusanova told TV Rain that Shokoladnitsa is declining to comment on the matter. The company has not contacted Polina Anisimova.
Polina says her potential lawyer believes her case should interest the police, given its scale. Mari Davtyan, another attorney, says the actions of people who film and distribute these videos falls under criminal-code article 137, which bans invasions of personal privacy. “The issue of privacy covers anything intimate in people’s lives—not just sexual content, but anything considered by society to be private. Given that people go to the bathroom alone, this is a private moment in people’s lives that doesn’t concern others,” Davtyan explains.
Davtyan says she’s never worked cases like this one, but she’s familiar with instances where a court recognizes the distribution of a sex tape to be an invasion of privacy. “By this logic, it’s quite possible to assume that the distribution of such [bathroom] videos might also be classified according to article 137,” she says, adding that any use of a person’s image (including in videos) without that individual’s permission is also a violation of administrative-code article 152.1.
According to Davtyan, it’s not possible to say if the videos filmed in bathrooms qualify legally as pornography, until after an expert examination. “Pornography presupposes sexual intercourse or some kind of sexual behavior. But it’s clear that this footage was recorded for the purpose of sexual arousal, as the videos were distributed on websites designed for this reason,” she says.
At the same time, some of the women contacted by the anonymous informant have refused to go to police about the videos. “They’re in a stage of denial, thinking ‘If I don’t say anything, it means it didn’t happen,’” Anisimova says, trying to explain their logic.
“For most people, learning that they were used as a sexual object without their knowledge is quite traumatic,” says psychologist Veronika Kashirina. “This is because violations of personal privacy are tied to violations of our sense of personal safety, and the intimate sphere is interlinked with our biological, social, spiritual, and value spheres. This is the space that a person normally guards from outsiders. So the normal reaction to the violation of such a psychological boundary is anger and the desire to put a stop to it, and protect oneself from similar things in the future.” Kashirina says in some cases these invasions of privacy can cause injuries to victims not unlike what is experienced by victims of rape, for example, who can develop post-traumatic stress disorders. In these cases, she says, people should consult a specialist.
Polina, meanwhile, says taking the matter public was her “natural defense mechanism.” “I was angry, I was upset, and the natural result of my emotions became this [Facebook] post. In this case, I feel like there are parallels to domestic violence. I remembered right away how Anya Zhavnerovich [a Russian journalist who publicly revealed that she’d been the victim of domestic violence] bravely talked about everything that happened to her. And I’m not the first one to be contacted by this anonymous guy. The others either just banned him [on Vkontakte], or they hushed up, after learning the truth,” Anisimova says.

author: Kevin Rothrock