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Kazakhstan’s hunt for supporters of tycoon Ablyazov gets absurd and goes abroad · Global Voices
Arlen Kaulitz

Photo taken from Vadim Boreiko's Facebook page.
“As usual, there were more police on the scene than protesters,” a journalist living in a provincial town recently told Global Voices of one of the freedom of speech pickets that rippled across Kazakhstan but were immediately shut down by authorities.
“It's a sad state of affairs,” said the journalist, who wished to remain anonymous.
On May 10, rallies took place in many cities of Kazakhstan with signs reading “Stop torture!” and “Release political prisoners!” Most of the protesters were arrested and detained almost immediately.
Human Rights Watch reported:
Kazakh police yesterday detained dozens of people in cities across the country who were protesting the use of torture and politically motivated imprisonment.
People appear to have rallied in response to a call by opposition movement Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK), which a Kazakhstan court in March declared “extremist” and banned, a move seen by some simply as a means to repress the opposition group.
Getting information about the protests was more difficult for ordinary Kazakhs.
National media, including private media styling itself as independent, ignored the protests completely.
When interviewed by the Kazakh service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) most lawmakers in the Central Asian country's rubber-stamp parliament claimed they had not heard of the protests taking place.
A photo from Vadim Boreiko's Facebook page
The Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan movement timed the rallies to coincide with the European parliament's mission to Kazakhstan to discuss the fulfilment of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA).
One of the main conditions of the pact is human rights and freedom of speech.
When protests started, police arrived at the scene and began to drag protesters to the bus, while they held each other and tried to resist. As has happened before in Kazakh protests, random passers-by were arrested by mistake.
After the arrests, protesters were taken to police stations. Some were fined and others were detained for up to 10 days.
Public protests are uncommon in Kazakhstan and require permits from the authorities, who in turn rarely grant them.
Photo taken from Vadim Boreiko's Facebook page
The man behind DCK is Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive oligarch accused of fleeing the country and taking several billions of dollars worth of stolen funds with him following a struggle over a local bank in 2009.
He is the sworn enemy of Kazakhstan's long-ruling dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Kazakhstan's efforts to bring Ablyazov back to Kazakhstan to face trial have so far come to nothing. The highest civilian authority in France blocked his extradition last year, deeming embezzlement charges against him politically motivated.
The frustrated authoritarian government is now lashing out at his supporters instead. In March this year, DVK was branded “extremist” by a Kazakh court, giving authorities a blank slate to go after anyone with even a tenuous connection to the group.
One well-known case has seen a young businessman jailed and allegedly beaten in detention over accusations that he laundered money for Ablyazov. His mother says her son has no links to Ablyazov whatsoever, and that authorities are in fact using him to force his sister, who worked with Ablyazov for many years, to return to Kazakhstan and testify against the oligarch.
Weaker still were the links between Ablyazov and ordinary citizens of Kazakhstan who were apprehended by police in the country's capital Astana during the Nowruz national holiday while carrying blue balloons. Apparently the reason for the heavy handed treatment was because blue is the colour of the DVK opposition group, meaning the balloons could be viewed as propaganda.
There is a danger that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Social media users have for a long time reported problems using Facebook, YouTube and Telegram whenever Ablyazov begins online broadcasts. As he has started posting more content online, the blocks — which the government does not admit — have grown more frequent.
There are also alarming signs that the government is prepared to use what leverage it has over other countries to force them to cooperate in the hunt for Ablyazov allies. Last week media in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan reported that Kyrgyz authorities had arrested a close supporter of the dissident and would soon extradite him to Kazakhstan. This is despite the fact that apart from Kazakhstan, no country has so far declared the DVK a “terrorist movement”.
This new, jacked up phase of conflict between Ablyazov and Astana has two obvious victims: freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Both are guaranteed by the Kazakh constitution, but unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be a consideration for authorities.

author: Arlen Kaulitz


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Was Bangkok Post editor Umesh Pandey fired for mismanagement or political pressure? · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Bangkok Post. Photo from Flickr user supercake (CC BY-NC 2.0)
On May 14, 2018, Umesh Pandey wrote on his Facebook page that he is no longer the editor of Bangkok Post, Thailand’s largest English-language daily newspaper.
He claimed that this was because he rejected the demand of the paper’s management to tone down his stance on the military-backed government.
But officials of Bangkok Post told the media that Pandey was merely transferred to another position in the company and was dropped as editor because of poor management skills.
Umesh Pandey. Source: Facebook
Pandey was reportedly asked by management to reconsider the story that the paper was scheduled to publish about the implication of the Malaysian election results on Thai politics.
The Malaysian opposition defeated the ruling party which had ruled the country since the 1950s. Meanwhile, the current government of Thailand is backed by the military which grabbed power only in 2014.
But like Malaysia’s previous dominant party, Thailand’s Junta is hounded by several corruption scandals. Thailand is scheduled to hold its general elections in 2019.
Despite the ‘pleading’ of management, Pandey said he decided to publish the story:
…when asked to ‘tone down’ I did not budge and was blunt in letting those making the decision that I rather lose my position than to bow my head. The axe finally came down on me just 60-days before my 2-year contract ended.
The May 11 front page pictured in the tweet below was cited as the ‘last straw’ and led to the removal of Pandey as editor, he said:
It was most likely this front page in the Bangkok Post last Friday that was the final straw that lost Umesh Pandey his job as editor.
♦ KL poll ‘a lesson’ to NCPO https://t.co/IjvY5rSpJW #Thailand #PressFreedom #Censorship [3/4] pic.twitter.com/aaToN6GzHb
— Richard Barrow in Thailand (@RichardBarrow) May 15, 2018
NCPO stands for National Council for Peace and Order, the name of Thailand's military-backed government
On May 16, the Bangkok Post issued a statement saying that its former editor was removed for another reason:
The transfer of our former editor is the result of several factors and bears no relation to our journalistic autonomy or the content which we have produced proudly for almost 72 years.
It also assured readers that the paper will continue to protect its integrity and editorial independence:
The Bangkok Post would like to assure readers and the public of our editorial independence and reaffirm that our content, whether published in the newspaper or on other platforms, has never been interfered with by either the government or company executives.
At all times we have strived to maintain our integrity, even now in what is a challenging period for Thailand, but this newspaper has never compromised its editorial independence and this is something that will never change.
There were also reports that Pandey is being accused by some staffers of the paper of poor management and ethical offenses. For his part, Pandey said there’s no proof being presented and that his critics are resorting to slander.
Meanwhile, Pandey’s removal as editor is seen by some as a reflection of the difficult situation of the media under a government which has not yet restored civilian rule.
cartoon of the day in support of @Umeshbkk @atiyapost @PravitR @suranand @JeromeTaylor @georgebkk @JeromeTaylor pic.twitter.com/0Xl3ZDC1A3
— stephff cartoonist (@stephffart) May 15, 2018

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Mong Palatino


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Asunción, Paraguay: A city in transformation that is excluding its residents · Global Voices
Kurtural

Asunción is experiencing a housing phenomenon wherein middle-class families are leaving residential districts and those most in need are settling on the riverbanks. (Photo: Juana Barreto, used with permission).
Asunción, the capital of Paraguay and the country's largest city, has undergone enormous development in the last several years at the expense of its more vulnerable residents. The following story by Julio Benegas highlights their resilience and solidarity in the face of these changes. It was originally published on November 13, 2017 by Kultural and is republished on Global Voices with permission.
“They do not want us here. They want an alternative Asunción, one where those in need are not in sight”, says Mirta Chávez calmly and attentively, as though disclosing a fact that has been mulled over a thousand times. Chávez is the customary chairwoman of the San Jorge neighborhood of Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay. She does not need to be appointed to the position officially, as everyone in the flattened alleys of wooden, brick and zinc houses calls her chairwoman. “I do my utmost for my residents and I neither compromise nor negotiate with politicians,” she proudly says about the role.
This neighborhood, which stretches from Avenue Artigas up to the River Paraguay, is home to people who work in factories, meat processing plants and shops, collect recycling, or toil in domestic labor. Those with greater income live on the firmer ground, and those with little or lower income, nearly all of whom make a living by rounding up aluminium and plastic bottles and cans, live in the more vulnerable areas. The closer they are to the river, the greater the poverty.
Mirta Chávez lives on the border of a marshland, which in geographical terms means that this is a flood zone in Asunción. The families who live there are the ones that have built their own neighborhood services, including water, electric lighting, streets and schools.
According to the 2012 Census, one in five people are living in the northern and southern marshlands of Asunción. During the 1980s and 90s the majority of people migrating from the countryside to the city ended up in the southern marshlands. This is not the case for the northern marshlands, which include the old neighborhood of Ricardo Brugada, also known as Chacarita. People have been living there for a very long time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the higher and firmer areas were populated with workers from the meat processing plants, the factories, the ports as well as the train and bus stations, which are no longer in operation there today.
Mirta Chávez is 35 years old and just like her siblings and her parents she has lived on the border of the firmer lands of the northern marshlands all her life.
During the floods of the Paraguay River between 2014 and 2015, everybody in the area was displaced from their homes. As a result of these floods, for several months around 20,000 families had to relocate, which cost the state 20 million dollars in aid, the same amount of money it took to build the first stretch of the Costanera Highway.
However, during this time other things also emerged, like Mirta's heroic side. Mirta brought the residents together to find sheet metal, nails, large pots and emergency boxes. She was also established as the spokesperson for holding talks and dealing with the residents from the high neighborhood who disputed their temporary campsites.
The most latent threat now is one of sand, stone and tarmac: the Costanera Norte, one of the most important projects for Asunción to come out of the Horacio Cartes government. It is a highway that will connect the city centre with the road leading towards the cities of Luque and Mariano Roque Alonso. It is thought that it will ease the absurd congestion in this part of the capital. The huge wall that has already been built for this highway has left the residents of the northern marshlands boxed in.
With the wall finished, water will no longer flow in from the Paraguay River. However, rainwater won't have any place to drain away. The residents haven't experienced this yet, but they can imagine what it will mean to live alongside a type of enormous dam, an artificial pond.
The organised residents have an alternative to this government-led project: they call it Coastal Defence. This is a proposal designed by engineer Ricardo Canese and industrial engineer Mercedes Canese, which involves a canal system and water pumps to return the water back to the river through pipes under the wall, without needing to fill out the land. Although they would be left without a direct view of and direct access to the river, their part of the city would remain intact and there would be no need for them to relocate.
In September 2014, when the Municipality of Asunción was planning industrial estates for the marshlands, residents in the thousands closed off the access to the municipal building. They were greeted with a violent crackdown. Mirta Chávez left with blows to her back as well as other parts of her body. “I am scared that one day of these days you will get shot,” her husband Arnaldo Penayo told her.
In the northern marshlands, those with lower income live closer to the river. Many of whom are involved in collecting aluminium and plastic bottles and cans.  (Photo: Juan Carlos Meza, used with permission).
It is a Sunday tormented by the seasons: a cold morning and a warm afternoon with cumbersome clouds getting ready to rain. Leticia Galeano, a 41-year-old filmmaker, is carrying fertilisers for the garden and a small shovel for digging in Pavetti Park. The sun reveals an intense green in the garden, underpinned by a row of bottles of various colours.
At the entrance to the park there is a “tent of the resistance” with a crumpled Paraguayan flag tied to a stick, just like in the rural settlements of the northeast of the country. The former residents of the neighborhood of Trinidad want to preserve the little that remains of this park.
Today in Pavetti Park there remains just one area of large trees that cover the transition between the brown earth of the Chaco region and the fiery red of the Oriental region. The majority of its last trees were cut down to make room for the street leading out of what will be a project of cement and glass: a luxurious three-towered building, Jade Park. The building is promoted using the phrase “Live the city, breathe nature.” It is being built by the Jiménez Gaona & Lima corporation, owned by the public works minister's family. Its the same ministry that is building the Costanera Norte highway, which will leave Mirta Chávez's neighborhood boxed in.
Jade Park is an endeavour of the Fortune International Group, an American group with powerful shareholders such as Barcos & Rodados and Tierra Buena of the Cartes Group, a group associated with President Horacio Cartes. According to a statement made by the CEO of the investment group, Guillermo Petri, Jade Park will consist of three towers in the middle of a lower neighborhood of Asunción, and represents an investment of 92 million dollars.
The old area of Trinidad, which is in the low-income areas of country houses and small reserves, is struggling under the current pressure on housing. In the surrounding area there are houses that look like bunkers and residential buildings for the upper class, which take up entire blocks, leaving just a handful of insufficient and practically isolated low-income housing.
Roots in the marshlands mean that large families live close together, communities that have worked collectively to access basic rights. (Photo: Juana Barreto, used with permission).
Ana Galeano describes what is happening to the former middle-class and lower-middle-class families of Asunción as follows: “Currently the city of Asunción is excluding the middle-class population and the needy population is settling on the riverbanks.”
She claims that the vulnerable population has increased three-fold and that the middle class was driven out towards other municipalities at the same rate: “On the one hand this is due to the inability to settle down within the production system and on the other it is due to the increased cost of living in the city (property taxes, light and water services, transport, etc.).”
What is happening today in Trinidad has already happened, on different scales, in other neighborhoods such as Las Mercedes, Barrio Jara and Villa Morra. Old low-income blocks were turned into streets with electric fences and high walls as well as deserted streets.

author: Kurtural


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Cuba’s parliament now has three black vice presidents. How come that didn’t make the news? · Global Voices
Sandra Abd'Allah-Alvarez Ramírez

(Left to right) Inés María Chapman Waugh, Beatriz Jhonson Urrutia Image and Salvador Valdés Mesa. Image made by the author with images from EcuRed.
On April 19, 2018, the Republic of Cuba swore in former university professor Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez as its new president and the 9th Congress of the National Assembly of People’s Power—the country’s supreme body of government power—elected a new Council of State. But the euphoria and uncertainty surrounding a supposed “Cuba without Castros” and related matters have eclipsed another major development: the presence of four Black leaders who will be part of the new government through 2023.
Black Cubans make 10% of the population but their representation in circles of power has been very limited, in spite of ideals of equality after the revolution.
Before Bermúdez, the previous Congress had two Black men in senior positions: First Vice President Juan Esteban Lazo Hernández and Salvador Valdés Mesa, President of the National Assembly. With the selection of Inés María Chapman Waugh and Beatriz Jhonson Urrutia as vice presidents, Cuba has, so to speak, “added more color” to the government.
Before I discuss the two women, I want to spend a minute on Valdés Mesa and Lazo Hernández.
Valdés, who previously held the positions of secretary of the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba, Minister of Labor and Social Security, and Secretary of Agricultural Workers, among others, is not from the generation of “los históricos” meaning those who led the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and who have usually ceded power only when they’re ousted or have died. He is from the generation that followed, as is Lazo, who was elected President of the National Assembly in 2013 and will keep the position until 2023, when he will be 79.
Lazo has a long and varied trajectory in Cuban politics. He has been secretary of the Cuba Communist Party for the Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba, and Havana provinces, a member of the Cuban parliament since 1981, and Vice President of the Council of State since 1992.  Lazo has also represented Cuba’s foreign affairs with countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. He was elected President of the National Assembly of People’s Power on February 25, 2013.
The two new women vice presidents are, by parliamentary standards, relatively young if we consider age in the Legislature—only about 13% of members are under 35.
Ines María Chapman Waugh, from Holguín, is an engineer. Currently president of the National Hydraulic Resources Institute, for Cubans she’s a household name. For some time now she’s been the face of the agency she heads, offering the public important information during hurricane season. She was a member of the National Assembly for the preceding Congress and has been a member of the Council of State since 2008. In 2011 she was elected to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.
Beatriz Jhonson Urrutia is also an engineer. In 2011 she was elected vice president of the Provincial Assembly of People’s Power in her native province of Santiago de Cuba. She became President of this body in 2016. In the 7th Congress round a decade ago she was elected to the Central Committee. She became a member of parliament in 2013.
Both Chapman Waugh and Jhonson Urrutia come from the grassroots and developed professional careers prior to or alongside their political ones. As Black women, they’ve had to work hard at getting their degrees and building their careers to this point. And these latest appointments don’t mean they have arrived. Now they enter another crucible, where they’ll be “tested” due to their blackness and subjected to racist scrutiny and the expectation that sooner or later they will undoubtedly mess up.
Why haven’t the Cuban and international press, and people in general, embraced and hailed these developments with enthusiasm? I find it suspicious, considering that in the current political scenario this is a bigger surprise than Díaz-Canel, whose appointment was expected. The media has now turned its attention to the first lady and other superficialities while continuing to ignore this key piece of news.
Making things invisible is one of the ways racism operates. At times silence says more than words ever could. What I think is at work here is a combination of fear of Blackness with the casual neo-racism of everyday life. This includes the official notion, in Cuba, that speaking of Blackness, racism, and racial discrimination divides the nation.
About this last point, I want to add that even among the most committed social and political activists and laypeople, the idea persists that considering racial issues in any way dilutes a vaguely defined “supreme goal”. It’s from this position that notions ranging from the term “Afro-Cuban” to whether there is structural racism in the country are challenged.
While it is fair to assume there’ll be no change to race-related policies, it’s worth pointing out that the arrival of these three Black legislators, especially the two women, speaks favorably of the drive towards inclusion. Or, at the very least, it hints that it has been taken into account in the highest spheres of power on the island.
We can assume that no one holding a seat in the National Assembly has an explicit anti-racism political agenda. As members of the Cuban Parliament, how could they? And I see this as evidence of racism, along with the particularities of the Cuban electoral system and the intricacies of how one becomes “political” in Cuba. This is a country where independent activism falls outside of legitimatized spaces of power—which creates the anomalous situation where people completely lacking in political interests or public recognition can sit, for five years, in the supreme branch of government.
Changing that would require convincing those in the corridors of power that racism is currently Cuba’s most urgent problem. It’s connected to many others, such as poverty. It limits the enjoyment of basic and universal rights such as access to university education.
The fear of tackling the issue is evident in the minimal impact that so many race-related publications, research and theses have had on Cuba’s decision-makers. I wonder what else is needed to prompt an open acknowledgement of this matter and everything it entails—and the ensuing public policy proposals to address racism.
Racial issues are not listed as topic/objective in any of the ten permanent working groups of the National Assembly of People’s Power. I can think of at least three that are relevant to the issue of race: the Commission for the Attention of Childhood, Youth, and Equal Rights for Women; the Commission on Economic Issues; and the Commission of Education, Culture, Science, Technology, and the Environment.
If there’s a subject on which Cubans at opposite ends of the political spectrum agree, it's racial discrimination. Both supporters and opponents of the Cuban government assert wholeheartedly that “in Cuba blacks and whites are the same.” For government supporters on and off the island, the situation looks good enough, including on this issue. For opponents everywhere, things in Cuba are so terrible and everyone is so equally oppressed that racial discrimination is unworthy of special attention. These dynamics hijack the discussion and keep us from moving forward. Among some in the exile community, Cuban-flavored racism has even superseded anti-government animosity.
By now, we should have been implementing solutions, for example, to the problem of the overrepresentation of Black and mixed-race Cubans in the prison population. There should already be progress towards affirmative action on self-employment community projects.
A screenshot from Facebook: “Diaz Canel is not the worst of it all. It’s the “N*****-load” left by [homophobic, racist, and xenophobic Cuban euphemism to refer to] Raúl Castro within inches of Power. The next Cuban government, and formed from exile, has to exclude Black candidates…no ties to the regime, witchcraft, laziness, theft, and mediocrities”
Nevertheless, the fact that there are now more senior politicians representing Black Cubans, even if imperfectly, fills me with optimism. I do not ask anything of our three Black VicePresidents that I wouldn’t ask of other legislators, but tackling racism and discrimination in Cuba requires the participation of all members of the society, within the spaces of power and privilege each of them occupies.
This article appeared originally on the blog Negra cubana tenía que ser.

author: Sandra Abd'Allah-Alvarez Ramírez


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Netizen Report: What do Iran, Pakistan and Russia have in common? They all ban Telegram. · Global Voices
Netizen Report Team

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash. Free to use.
In a concerning development for the future of encrypted mobile apps, Iran and Russia blocked the messaging service Telegram within weeks of each other in April.
A Moscow court announced the ban on April 13 after Telegram’s CEO repeatedly refused to comply with demands to give law enforcement agents access to the app’s encryption keys.
But instituting the ban was easier said than done. After Roskomnadzor, the country’s federal media regulator, ordered Russian ISPs to make Telegram’s IP addresses unavailable to users, the company switched to cloud back-up services.
Roskomnadzor then began banning millions of IP addresses in the attempt to shut down the service — incidentally blocking business sites and other communications platforms including Viber, Slack, and Evernote.
Later that month, the Iranian judiciary issued an order to block Telegram, asking ISPs to ensure it is inaccessible even when using circumvention tools.
Authorities cited national security in their decision to ban the app, which had been temporarily censored during anti-government protests in December 2017 and January 2018.
Since the order went into effect, Iranians have also reported that they’ve experienced the throttling of encrypted traffic and problems when trying to access other platforms like the Apple App store and WhatsApp.
It’s not the first time a country has made Telegram unavailable. Pakistan instituted a block on Telegram across all telecommunications networks in November 2017 following an order by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.
The agency has not yet provided a clear reason for the ban, though some have speculated it may be linked to Telegram’s encryption, which company CEO Pavel Durov said he refuses to compromise.
And Indonesia briefly blocked access to the messaging service in 2017 over concerns that it was being used to spread “terrorist propaganda.” In response, Durov promised at the time to take swifter action to shut down public channels containing “terrorist-related content.”
Concerns are high over the editorial independence of Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Post after it was sold to a Malaysian public relations executive. Editor-in-chief Kay Kimsong was fired after he refused to remove an article about links between the new owner’s PR firm and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Following Kimsong’s termination, several editors and staff reporters also resigned in protest.
Since protests in Gaza began on March 30, journalists on the scene have come under fire by Israeli soldiers. Two Palestinian reporters, Yasser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein, were killed, despite wearing gear that clearly identified them as press. Photojournalist Yaser Qudeih was shot in the stomach and remains in serious condition. Several others have been injured, hit with live ammunition, rubber bullets, or chemical gas. Reporters Without Borders has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate.
In a move celebrated by human rights defenders, Uzbekistan released Bobomurod Abdulloev and Hayot Nasriddinov, two journalists detained in late 2017 for “anti-constitutional activities.” For the first time in the last two decades, there are no journalists imprisoned in Uzbekistan, once known as one of the world’s most despotic regimes.
Activists protesting against Vladimir Putin’s fourth term as Russian president reported that their mobile phone signals were intentionally degraded by telecom operators. Others reported their phone numbers were de-listed on law enforcement authorities’ request. One of the companies, Beeline, denied de-listing phone numbers and blamed the disruptions on network overload.
Mumbai police filed a complaint against filmmaker Ram Subramanian for tweeting comments that they alleged were derogatory about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his mother on Mother’s Day. Subramanian’s account was then temporarily suspended by Twitter shortly afterward for having “violated the Twitter Rules.”
For the first time, Facebook published a transparency report about how it deals with content that violates community standards. According to the report, most of the posts removed by the company in the first three months of 2018 were spam or from fake accounts, while 21 million were taken down for featuring adult nudity and sexual activity, 3.5 million were scrubbed or given a warning label for showing violence, and 2.5 million were deleted for containing hate speech. While the company says it uses automated techniques to flag nudity and graphic content, the technology “still doesn’t work that well” for hate speech.
Documents obtained by Motherboard offer insight into how Instagram polices content, revealing that the Facebook-owned company will disable an account if two or more parts of the profile violate the site’s policies, if over 30 percent of the account’s media violates the site's policies, or if any part of the profile violates Instagram’s policies on drug sales, revenge porn, sexual solicitation, suicide and self-injury, or terrorism. Reviewers are instructed to follow a “progressive review” process by moving from the username, to the profile bio and picture, media, and comments.
More than 3,100 Google employees signed a letter in protest of the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a US Department of Defense-funded initiative to improve drone strike targeting with artificial intelligence. A second letter signed by more than 700 researchers urged Google executives to support an international treaty prohibiting autonomous weapon systems.
Afef Abrougui, Mahsa Alimardani, Eduardo Avila, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Rezwan Islam, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.

author: Netizen Report Team


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Photo essay: Stateless in the former Soviet republic of Georgia · Global Voices
Chaikhana.media

The following is a partner post by Global Voices’ partner Chai-Khana.org. Text by Monica Ellena. All photos by Jacob Borden.
Miguel Mkirtichian’s passport is grey, just as his life has been so far.
“It’s in Georgian. It has my name, my date and place of birth,” says the softly-spoken 22-year-old, pointing to the document.
“I don’t like to show it. It’s not red, like everyone else’s, and next to citizenship it says ‘None.’ I do not belong here or to anywhere else.”
Miguel Mkirtichian’s ID document allows him to travel, but does not show any citizenship. He’s now awaiting the last stage of the process which will grant him full Georgian citizenship.
Mkirtichian is stateless, one of 595 individuals without a nationality registered in Georgia, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s a tiny fraction of the estimated 10 million stateless people worldwide, but the consequences are no less dire.
“Not having an ID makes you a non-citizen,” explains Johannes Van Der Klaauw, the UNHCR representative in Georgia.
“It means no access to health care, education, or job opportunities. You cannot vote, you cannot open a bank account, you cannot marry, you cannot drive.”
It even means no right to an official burial and a death certificate.
Miguel never had an identification document until 2015. When he was granted stateless status, he was 20-years-old.
Mkirtichian does not know when, in the eyes of the law, he became a non-person.  Born in Moscow to a Nigerian father and a Tbilisi-born, ethnic Armenian mother, he had a Russian passport until he was three.
When his mother came to visit her family in Tbilisi, Mkirtichian’s grandfather reportedly destroyed that passport. He didn’t want his grandson to be Russian, the boy was told.
It was a fateful decision. At first, Mkirtichian and his mother lived with her parents. But when a family argument broke out, they had to leave, Mkirtichian recounts.
He runs through his memories while staring at his hands, avoiding eye contact. He has learnt that can be dangerous, as can asking questions.
“I just remember that my mother and I left and started sleeping in the street,” he continues. “I was 11. I stopped going to school and just followed her.”
Mkirtichian’s paper trail, apparently, simply vanished.
Born in Moscow, 22-year-old Miguel Mkirtichian moved to Tbilisi with his mother at the age of three. His father, reportedly a Nigerian national, disappeared before he was born.
A chance encounter in 2015 with an acquaintance, a lawyer working with UNHCR’s statelessness-eradication program, brought him back into official existence.
His case was referred to the Georgian justice ministry’s Public Service Development Agency, and, a year later, Mkirtichian gained an ID card as a stateless person.
The card gives him all the rights of a citizen except the right to vote and work in public service. Now living in a Tbilisi homeless shelter, he is awaiting a final decision on his citizenship in 2019.
For Mkirtichian, a Georgian passport means more than just a document, however.
“It’s written on my face that I’m different,” he says, sitting on the edge of his bunk bed at the shelter.
“I speak Georgian, but I don’t look Georgian. I speak Armenian, but I don’t look Armenian. I speak Russian, but I don’t look Russian. Citizenship is all I need to heal the scar of not belonging.”
Without documents, stateless person Miguel Mkirtichian struggled to find work. In 2017, he got a job as a cleaner in a gym which lets him use the facility free of charge every morning before opening.
He is not alone in that desire. Hundreds of thousands of people in Eurasia became stateless overnight in the 1990s after the Soviet Union disappeared and state boundaries were redrawn.
They became “aliens” because of administrative hitches, territorial conflicts or simply because they could not track down documents from an extinct era.
Over the past several years, Georgia, which contains thousands of Internally Displaced People from separatist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, has tried to help stateless people regain that sense of belonging.
After years spent living in the streets with his mother, Miguel Mkirtichian was accepted into a Tbilisi homeless shelter run by a religious institution. He shares a bedroom with two other people.
It has signed on to United Nations conventions granting stateless people basic rights and protections and pledging to reduce statelessness. It has streamlined the process for people to gain citizenship and, with UNHCR’s help, pinpointed the number of stateless people and trained civil registries to handle requests for stateless-person IDs.
As these individuals have acquired citizenship over the past three years, Georgia’s population of stateless people has dropped by 49 percent, according to official data.
Ultimately, statelessness “is a man-made problem,” comments the UNHCR’s Van Der Klaauw.
“It requires political will to solve it.”
But lack of knowledge remains an obstacle; particularly among ethnic minorities and rural communities.
“[Civic] education is poor,” comments Nato Gagnidze, the founding director of the Innovations and Reforms Centre, a Tbilisi non-profit that promotes access to state services.
“People are not fully aware of where the lack of documents can lead.”
Malika Saidaeva lives in a cabin in the outskirts of Tbilisi and makes a living running a market stall. She discovered her undocumented status when she needed health care and had no proof of identity.
Fifty-nine-year-old Malika Saidaeva is one of these people. Born in the Chechen city of Grozny, in modern-day Russia, she traveled to Georgia in 1980 to work in a factory in Kutaisi. The only document she needed was her internal Soviet passport since “there were no borders.”
In  the 1990s, she moved to Tbilisi, but, today, “[t]here is no trace of her anywhere,” says Nino Rtveladze, a lawyer specializing in citizenship issues for stateless people and refugees.
It was only in late 2016, when a hospital asked for her identification, that Saidaeva realized that her Soviet passport, her only form of ID, was gone. Rummaging at home, she couldn’t find it.
Malika Saidaeva’s case was transferred to Georgia’s Public Registry Office which, alongside UNHCR and the NGO Innovations and Reforms Centre, is trying to establish her legal status.
No ID meant no healthcare.
Saidaeva’s Soviet passport, though no longer a valid ID,  “would make [it] possible to identify her legal status,” elaborates Rtveladze.
“There is no data about her in [the] central archives, no information stored anywhere.”
Through research in state archives and interviews with Saidaeva’s family and others, Rtveladze is now trying to establish her right to a stateless person’s ID; a process that can take months.
Violeta Bjania, 49, left her native village in Abkhazia at the start of the 1992 war between Tbilisi and Abkhaz separatists. She did not expect that she would not return.
The longer-term goal is citizenship. In the case of 49-year-old Violeta Bjania, a Georgian citizen since 2014, that took two years.
An ethnic Abkhaz, Bjania left Abkhazia in 1992, at the start of the separatist war with Tbilisi, after falling out with her family over her loyalty to the Georgian government.
Violeta Bjania, holding a regular Georgian ID card, was granted Georgian citizenship in 2014. She lives in two rooms in a house in Tbilisi’s outskirts.
She knows exactly when she became a non-citizen – not long after Georgia’s 1992 parliamentary elections.
“I left my bag with my documents in a taxi. It was chaos, everywhere. I was unable to track the driver down.”
Like Saidaeva, Bjania, also a Tbilisi market vendor, only tried to sort out an official ID when she needed medical care.
With her red-brick Georgian passport, she now can reenter the world of the documented. But for hundreds of others, the wait to do so goes on.
Two budgies are Violeta Bjania’s only companions. The 49-year-old has had no information about her family since she left her native village of Otkhara in Abkhazia in September 1992.
Disclaimers: Miguel Mkirtichian works sporadically and has received assistance from this Chai Khana reporter in his job search. Monica Ellena has formerly worked as a UNHCR spokesperson in Kosovo.


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Making Japan’s hot springs more friendly for LGBT folks · Global Voices
Nevin Thompson

People who identify as male enjoy a transgender-friendly bath in Beppu, Japan. Screencap from NHK / YouTube.
Japan's “hot spring capital” is trying to find ways to make one of the country's most popular pastimes more inclusive for people who identify as LGBT, when most public baths are segregated according to a binary of either “male” or “female”.
The Rainbow Furoject (‘furoject’ is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for ‘bath’, ofuro, お風呂, and project’) is an initiative of the city of Beppu, located in Oita Prefecture on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu.
On May 1, 2018, forty people, including members of the LGBT community as well as Beppu residents came together at a hot spring resort operated by the municipality to bathe together and brainstorm ideas to make it easier for people who identify as LGBT to enjoy bathing in hot springs in Japan.
昨日深夜の『#テンゴちゃん』で放送していた「#レインボー風呂ジェクト」が良かった。「どうしたら誰もが温泉を楽しめるのか」を考えるため、男女二択だけではない、あらゆる性の人たちが「見た目の湯」「戸籍の湯」「自己申告の湯」という三通りの入浴方法を試すという企画。https://t.co/ju8RKQBIEY pic.twitter.com/m6zogL8aYs
— おなか (@HNamachiri) May 13, 2018
The #RainbowFuroject broadcast late last night on #TenGoChan (NHK Ten5 or Channel 1.5) was great.
To help answer the question “what can we do to make sure anyone can enjoy a dip in a hot spring?”, rather than dividing bathers (by binary gender), instead participants came up with three ways of organizing bathers in order to accommodate every gender: how one looks “on the outside”, how one's sex is recognized in official documents, and by which sexuality one identifies with oneself.
According to organizers of the event, it's difficult for many members of the LGBT community, especially those who identify as transgender, and not always according to the gender binary of male/female, to easily enjoy communal bathing. Hot springs and public baths in Japan are almost always segregated into “male” baths and “female” baths, with no recognition of gender fluidity.
Bathing in hot springs or public baths is a big part of Japanese culture. It's estimated there are at least 27,000 hot springs in use in Japan, and 3,500 of them are in Oita Prefecture, the most of any prefecture. Hot spring towns like Beppu, home to clusters of hotels to suit every taste and every budget, have been popular vacation destinations in Japan for at least a thousand years.
As well, most municipalities will also operate subsidized public hot spring baths for locals to relax and take a dip, typically with family, friends or coworkers.
“Beppu-shi – 別府市” by Flickr user Thomas. Plumes of steam come from various hot spring resort hotels in the town. Image license: CC BY-NC 2.0.
Oita's Beppu, one of the most famous hot spring towns in Japan, has regularly tried out different strategies for appealing to visitors, including creating a bathtub theme park and launching a PR campaign for the resort that featured Olympic synchronized swimmers taking over a hot spring bath.
The May 1 LGBT Furoject was hosted by Kitahama Onsen Termas, a day-use hot spring operated by the city. The event was covered by specialty channel TenGo, which is part of NHK, Japan's national broadcaster; and Oguni Shiro, an NHK producer and columnist who attended and reported the event for Forbes Japan.
During the day, bathing sessions were organized by three themes: how bathers outwardly present, regardless of their gender assigned at birth; according to the sex designated in their official government identification; and according to which sexuality they identify with.
The result was that participants were given the chance to explore and understand how transgender and non-binary people experience hot spring baths in Japan, where bathers must typically choose to bathe on either the “male” or “female” side of the bath. Throughout the day, Beppu locals got a chance to share the bath and develop relationships with members of the LGBT community invited to attend the event.
The goal of the day was for the group to come up with some ways to make group bathing in Japan more inclusive of people of all genders. According to Oguni Shiro, writing in Forbes, some ideas for making baths more LGBT-friendly included, rather than segregating the baths according to the binary “male” versus “female”, dividing bathers according to blood type (an important concept in Japan).
Other ideas included signage indicating a bathing facility as “LGBT friendly”, such as certain establishments in Japan are identified as “pet-friendly” or “tattoo friendly” (people with tattoos are generally barred from public baths in Japan). Another idea is that hot spring resorts should be proactively hiring members of the LGBT community to help to make bathing more inclusive.
Besides providing the opportunity for brainstorming ideas, the Furoject on May 1 also allowed some participants to partake in a quintessential Japanese pastime: taking a bath in public.
Interviewed by NHK, one participant and bather, a man who had undergone gender reassignment surgery, said that he generally could only go for a bath either very early in the morning or late in the evening, when there were fewer people in the bath who could observe him.
Another participant said:
「（体女性、心男性の）トランスジェンダーの自分が男湯にはいっても『違和感ないよ』って言ってくれた。広いお風呂に入ったのは13年ぶり。すごく嬉しかった！」
“(As a man who was assigned female gender at birth), when I had a bath on the men's side (at Furoject in Beppu on May 1), no one felt uncomfortable at all. This is the first time I've entered a communal bath in 13 years. It made me so happy!”
The entire NHK TenGo program about the event can be viewed on YouTube at this link (Japanese-only), while YouTube vlogger Kazue-chan also attended the event and made a video blog (also Japanese-only).

author: Nevin Thompson


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Tunisian journalists say police union attacks are having a chilling effect on press freedom · Global Voices
Afef Abrougui

Tunisian police officer watches over protesters gathered outside the constituent assembly in December 2013. Photo by Amine Ghrabi. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr
In Tunisia, police are obligated to protect journalists not only because they are citizens, but also because attacks against journalists are a crime punishable by jail time. But when coverage has questioned the conduct of security institutions, law enforcement officials and their powerful unions have too often ignored duty and issued direct threats against media workers — both online and off.
These attacks have largely gone unpunished. To further complicate the situation, a controversial draft law promoted by the interior ministry and the police unions would create a new layer of protection for security forces, shielding them from criticism and accountability mechanisms.
“Some of these unions represent a serious threat to the rule of law, as they aim to establish a police supremacy over other citizens: full powers, complete freedom and total impunity,” journalist and radio commentator Haythem El Mekki told Global Voices in an email interview.
El Mekki himself was the target of such abuse. Throughout January, as anti-austerity protesters took to the street, the government responded with a heavy hand, with police detaining and harassing several journalists while they were doing their work. On 29 January 2018, El Mekki and Mosaique FM radio host Boubaker Ben Akecha invited a member of the journalists’ union to discuss the issue.
A day later, Wahid Mabrouk, the secretary-general of the Gafsa region's internal security forces union, called El Mekki and Ben Akecha “media’s bacteria” in Facebook posts. “What you air on Mosaique FM is but poison that you’re spreading in our society,” he wrote. Mabrouk also called on Tunisians to boycott their radio program and declared, “may you [the two journalists] suffer from an incurable disease.”
The posts weren't the only case of law enforcement attacking journalists and media for drawing attention to violations. “We documented [cases of] dangerous speech, statements and positions inciting to violence against journalists and their union. We have been targeted in a way that clearly demonises us,” Mohamed Yousfi, the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) board's assistant secretary-general on press freedom issues, told Global Voices.
Yousfi pointed to one instance involving the branch of the internal security forces’ union in Sfax (270 kilometers south of Tunis). After the SNJT spoke out against the interior ministry's press freedom policies,  the official Facebook page of the regional internal security forces union published a post describing journalists as “traitors.” And the branch's spokesperson, Noureddine Ghattasi, insulted journalists on his personal Facebook page and went as far as to call on police to rape them: ”The men of the interior [ministry] can make you pee blood and can get the male pregnant before the female,” he wrote.
These threats have a chilling effect on press freedom in Tunisia, particularly at a time when human rights groups, journalists and activists continue to raise questions about abuse by security officers. Just recently, in early May 2018, video footage that circulated online showed police officers chasing and assaulting two brothers, after the end of the match of their local basketball team. And on 1 April, the supporter of one of Tunisia’s most popular football teams drowned in a canal as he was chased by police.
Days after the fall of the Ben Ali regime in January 2011, members of the Tunisian security forces began street demonstrations and general strikes all over the country, asking for — among other rights — the right to form unions. Interim authorities accepted their demands, and the Internal Security Forces’ Union (SNFSI) was created in March 2011. In May of the same year, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) statute was amended to allow the police to form unions.
Since then, most of the interior ministry's different services established their own unions. In addition to the SNFSI, there are two other big unions: the Syndicate of Officials of the General Directorate of the Intervention Units (SFDGUI), and the National Union of Syndicates of Tunisian Security Forces (UNSFST). Each of these unions has regional branches.
These unions have proven to be powerful, and have often acted above the law, going so far as to defy the judiciary. On 26 February, 50 members of the Syndicate of Officials of the General Directorate of Public Security (SFDGSP) invaded a court in Ben Arous (southern suburbs of Tunis), to demand the release of five police officers who were on trial for torture. Brandishing their guns, the protesting officers called on its members to protest within the court and not to ensure the security of the trial.
The Ben Arous court incident has further put police conduct and abuse under the spotlight. In a joint open letter, 16 local and international human rights groups described what happened at the court as an ”indicator of the prevailing impunity in Tunisia”, and called on the government to end ”impunity that prevails for human rights violations by the Tunisian security forces.”
“Hate speech and campaigns of demonization and incitement to violence against journalists directly threaten press freedom since they place the professional and physical integrity of journalists at risk and create a culture of self-censorship to the detriment of press freedom and the right to information,” Yousfi said.
He continued: “With [their] militia practices” some security unions “have become the arms of the interior ministry and a few of its leaders, to target the national syndicate of journalists and workers of the media sector.”
It is not hard to see why Yousfi sees a link between the conduct of police unions and the interior ministry’s policies.
After all, the ministry together with police unions has been pushing for a bill “on the protection of the security forces from attacks.” If adopted, the bill would restrict freedom of the press, speech and assembly by criminalizing speech deemed “denigrating” towards the police and banning unauthorized filming or recording inside security and military headquarters and at sites of military and security operations.
Rights groups have also slammed the bill over provisions that would shield police from criminal liability for use of excessive and/or lethal force to repel attacks against their homes, vehicles, police and security headquarters, and the military's arms and ammunition storage facilities.
Although submitted to the parliament more than three years ago, the bill has not been adopted yet, and several members of parliament (MP) expressed concerns that it threatens freedoms. This delay has angered police unions. In November 2017, after a police officer died in a knife attack, they threatened to stop providing personal protection to MPs and political party leaders if the parliament does not approve the bill within two weeks. Those threats are ”tantamount to blackmail,” Sharan Grewal, who researches democratization in the Middle East, wrote in a paper on the need ”to reign in Tunisia's police unions.”
The parliament responded by resuming the bill’s discussion at the legislative commission and inviting human rights groups and security unions to discuss their recommendations. In January 2018, at the parliament’s security and defense commission, interior minister Lotfi Brahem reiterated the ministry’s demand for a legal framework to protect security and armed forces.
At the same time, the authorities have not done enough to address threats against journalists, making it less likely that those responsible are held to account, according to the journalists’ union. The interior ministry “rejected the principle of dialogue” and the current minister “did not bother to address abuses by security forces’ unions,” Yousfi said. “Members of security unions who have been involved in such violations are after all affiliated with the interior ministry as officers and employees, and they should be held to account,” he added.
According to article 14 of the 2011 press code, journalists are considered “public servants”; therefore, anyone who intimidates, attacks or threatens them by any means (including online) could face up to one year of imprisonment and a fine of 120 Tunisian dinars (47 US dollars) in accordance with article 125 of the penal code. Yet, no judicial conviction of a member of the security forces or of their unions has happened, even though several complaints were filed and numerous investigations conducted.
Impunity for security forces
A 2018 study by the SNJT documented 25 complaints submitted to the judiciary by journalists who were victims of attacks.
By the time the findings of the study were published in February, 44% of these complaints were still in the early investigation process, which led 93.4% of polled journalists to believe that the judicial procedure is often slow.
64.4% of the polled journalists who reported that they were attacked by security forces said they did not receive any apology from the police or the ministry of interior. Furthermore, only 4.5% of the perpetrators were administratively punished.
Journalist Haythem El Mekki, who has filed such a complaint, is not confident about the seriousness of the judicial process. “I did not get any response about my complaint, although this does not surprise me,” he told Global Voices.
While the Sfax prosecutor started an investigation against Ghattassi, who threatened journalists with rape, it remains unclear whether it will lead to any conviction. He, along with three other police officers, was expelled from the union representing internal security forces, for “immoral behavior towards others”, the union said in a statement published on 5 February. The statement did not state attacks against journalists as the reason behind this decision.
Impunity for abuses committed by police unions and security forces “is almost becoming a norm that should not be normalised,” Yousfi warned.

author: Afef Abrougui


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What were Global Voices’ readers up to last week? · Global Voices
L. Finch

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash
At Global Voices, our community researches, writes, edits, and translates stories with a mission to support human rights and build bridges of understanding across countries, cultures, and languages.
We don't publish just to grab clicks or follow a news trend. We do, however, like to keep track of the ways in which our hard work has impact around the world.
To that end, one useful metric is how readers respond to our stories and translations. So let's take a look at who our readers were and what caught their attention during the week of May 14-20, 2018.
Last week, our stories and translations attracted readers from 211 countries! The top 20 countries represented across all of Global Voices’ sites were:
1. United States
2. Brazil
3. France
4. Japan
5. Mexico
6. Spain
7. Colombia
8. Argentina
9. Taiwan
10. Peru
11. Bangladesh
12. Italy
13. Germany
14. Ecuador
15. United Kingdom
16. Russia
17. Canada
18. India
19. Chile
20. Indonesia
But that's only a small slice of the diversity of our readership. Let's use the True Random Number Generator from Random.org and take a look at a few other countries on the list:
153. Somalia
109. Gabon
114. Bosnia & Herzegovina
148. Estonia
69. Tunisia
The English-language site is where the majority of original content is first published at Global Voices. The top five most-read stories of last week were:
1. Social media platforms are ablaze as Turks say “enough” to President Erdogan
2. Bangladesh blasts off with their first ever satellite launch into space
3. Interview with Rosaly Lopes, a Brazilian NASA astronomer and the first woman to edit the journal founded by Carl Sagan
4. Hungary’s regime is exporting instability and propaganda to the Balkans
5. Netizen Report: What do Iran, Pakistan and Russia have in common? They all ban Telegram.
Lingua is a project that translates Global Voices stories into languages other than English. There are about 30 active Lingua sites. Below is last week's most-read story or translation on each active language site.

author: L. Finch


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Eight decades later, prejudice between Jordanians and Palestinians persist · Global Voices
Maram Alkayed

Man wearing the Kofeyeh (traditional Palestinian head accessory) talking to a man wearing Shmagh (traditional Jordanian head accessory). Photo released to public domain, Source: Garaa News.
About 70 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin, and they are generally well-integrated into Jordanian society. Jordanians and Palestinians have been living alongside each other since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and Palestinian Nakba, and even long before that.
However, speak with everyday Palestinians and Jordanians and you might turn up stories that speak to underlying tensions between both groups.
Sara Suod, who is from Madaba, Central Jordan, told Global Voices that her parents would not allow her to visit Palestinian friends:
“I come from Madaba, and my family is extremely proud of that [being Jordanian]. So proud that they refused to let my sisters and I visit our Palestinian friends at their houses as children.”
While the time living together has created a sense of peace among the two peoples, complete harmony is still not present. Marriage and sports are two of the domains where we can still see these tensions more clearly.
Out of the 82,000 Jordanian women married to foreigners, almost 53,000 are married to Palestinians. A relatively high figure that could be taken to indicate the normality of Jordanian-Palestinian marriage in Jordan, but that figure can also be misleading.
Stories from Jordanian citizens (whether of Jordanian or Palestinian descent) paint a different picture of Jordanian society regarding these marriages. Even though the marriage is not exactly taboo, it can range –depending on the area and family—from being normal, to frowned upon, to being utterly forbidden.
Starting with stories of families who are at peace with the issue comes the story of Ahmad Khalil, a Palestinian man, and his Jordanian wife. Regarding their marriage as a successful one, he told Global Voices that:
We met at college, and got engaged after we both finished. Her family knew from the beginning, and so did mine. No one objected to anything, and things went quite smoothly throughout the engagement. Aside from normal, pedantic clashes between the in-laws, no major problems arose. Also, the clashes were never race-related. I guess it is because my mom is Jordanian, and her uncles are all married to Palestinians, so you can say our families are both equally used to the situation.
Ahmad and his spouse are lucky, and so are the ones who are born into families that are mixed, as the problem of prejudice or racism is minimised by the fact that each individual claims both identities.
However, not everyone has had the same experience as Ahmad. Speaking of her spouse’s and her own family’s opinion of her marriage to a Palestinian, Sara Majali, a 26-year-old woman from Al-Salt, west central Jordan, tells Global Voices:
Growing up, my family was never particularly strict about my siblings and I marrying a Palestinian, although when I told them that I was, they were not exactly thrilled about it. They would have rather I married my cousin who also comes from Al-Salt, or at least someone else from it. My mom opposed the marriage at first, telling me I could find someone ‘closer to us’, but my dad was not as opinionated.
Her mother eventually agreed to the marriage.
My mom eventually agreed to the marriage after months of convincing, but she still does not wholeheartedly bless the marriage. When my partner and I fight, the first words out of her mouth are always “wouldn’t it have been better if you married…?” and then she mentions the name of any Salt-born man.
She continues:
My partner’s family, although not as aggressively against the marriage as my mom, still gave him a hard time. Afraid of the fact that I come from a large family, a trait that they think I would use against my husband, they also ironically advised him to find someone ‘closer’ to them. After 3 years of marriage, they have gotten to know me better, but I still feel that they put borders around my interactions with them—unlike their relationship with my brother in law’s Palestinian wives, who were immediately accepted and treated as a part of the family.
Sara’s story reflects an underlying opinion that has prevailed in Jordanian society ever since the first Palestinian immigration to Jordan in 1948 — Jordanian families are bigger and tend to have more power, while the Palestinian ones (being immigrants) have “no spine.”
“No spine” is a derogatory way of saying that Palestinian families are not as large and/or as well-connected as the Jordanian ones, implying that a Jordanian man or woman would be more in control of the marriage because they have the family and power to show for it.
That is why many Palestinian families are reluctant about marrying into a Jordanian family, and vice versa.
Al-Faisaly is one of the Jordanian Football League’s most famous teams and has been taken as a symbol for Jordanian citizens of Jordanian heritage.
Al-Wehdat, named after the 2nd largest Palestinian refugee camp in southeast Amman, is just as famous and is instead a symbol for Jordanian citizens of Palestinian heritage.
While fans usually have a go at each other no matter the team, Jordanians of both heritage usually brace themselves when a game between the aforementioned teams is scheduled.
Cases of assault are common, and have once gotten to the point where 250 fans were injured. Shops and cars owned by bystanders are often burned for no obvious reason other than to flare the riots.
The police are usually involved, and the two clubs’ managements usually try to discipline their fans by banning anyone who is trying to start a fight between the two—something that does not happen when either of the two teams plays against any other team.
In 2009, a leaked US diplomatic cable said that:
Anti-Palestinian hooliganism and slogans denigrating the Palestinian origins of both the Queen and the Crown Prince led to the cancellation of a July 17 soccer game between the rival Faisali and Wahdat clubs [sic], who traditionally represent the East Banker and Palestinian communities, respectively.
The conclusion can be drawn that the riots, arson, and misconduct is about more than just soccer, it is about what the teams represent: race. This point is highlighted by Al Wehdat’s own Palestinian President, who has said in one of his interviews with World Soccer:
For Wehdat, 99 per cent of the fans are Palestinian, you won’t find any Jordanian fans of Wehdat.

author: Maram Alkayed


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Lebanon’s historic Anfeh salt marshes threatened by yet another resort · Global Voices
Christophe Maroun

Aerial photo of Anfeh. Photo by ‘Lebanon Untravelled’. Used with permission.
After Beirut's Ramlet el Bayda, Batroun's Kfarabida rocky beach and the ancient port of Adloun, the historic salt marshes of the northern town of Anfeh may become the latest casualty of Lebanon's long history of coastal privatization.
On May 16, 2018, just ten days after the first national elections in nine years, the Higher Commission for Urban Planning opposed a proposed resort as part of so-called ‘Natour Development’ in Anfeh, citing the ecological, environmental, historical and cultural significance of the Deir El Natour Peninsula where the resort is to be constructed.
But serious doubts remain as to whether the government will follow the Higher Commission's recommendations. There are already conflicting reports on the government's position.
Roughly 70,000 square meters of publicly accessible coastal land could be made accessible to private developers for the resort, which would include hotels, chalets, bars and nightclubs, a golf club and a marina as part of a larger 81-hectar project.
Owned and managed by Al Dair Holding, part of Malia Group, ‘Natour Development’ is a project by former members of parliament Mohammad Safadi and (now deceased) Maurice Fadel, as well as industrialist Jacques Sarraf.
As Timour Azhari explained in the anglophone daily ‘The Daily Star’, the project was named after Deir al-Natour, a Greek Catholic monastery that lies on a headland surrounded by salt marshes and endemic vegetation.
Screenshot from the Malia Group Website
Jad Tabet, head of Lebanon's order of engineers, stated that the project would contravene the 2009 government-approved Comprehensive Plan for the Organization of Lebanese Territories, which noted the “unparalleled” biological and cultural significance of the Anfeh area and called for it to be preserved.
Read: Beirut Activists Launch Heritage Watch Day to Defend Threatened Historical Sites
He also stressed the fact that as the project hasn't been approved yet, it can still be effectively opposed. In a comment on the “Diaries of the Ocean” Facebook page, he said:
We can still fight to stop the project. Exert pressure on the Orthodox Church that owns the land!
Located along a 400-meter-long peninsula near the northern city of Tripoli, the archaeological site of Anfeh was an ancient coastal town, once used by Phoenicians as a shipyard.
Anfeh reveals remains of at least 3,000 years of human occupation. Phoenician and Roman walls, wine presses, mosaic floors, and two seventh-century chapels have been found at the site.
In 2015, a team from the University of Balamand, whose Koura campus is not far from Anfeh, released the following video (in English) in the hope of promoting sustainable eco-tourism to the region:
A Greenpeace report from 2010 suggested the inclusion of the Anfeh peninsula in a network of marine reserves in the coastal waters of Lebanon due to its important biodiversity. They proposed that human activities be limited to scientific monitoring, snorkeling and scuba diving.
An endemic natural ecosystem still exists in that area, beside decades-old salt marshes, ancient ruins and cultural artifacts. Along with Gozo Island in Malta, Anfeh has the oldest salt pans in the Mediterranean.
Calls for the protection of Anfeh's shore and its traditional salt-mining industry have been ongoing for decades.
Before the 1970s, Anfeh supplied most of Lebanon’s salt. The Anfeh Municipality estimates that approximately 70 percent of local families made a living from salt.
They built houses and sent their children to school on their earnings. But profit margins have dramatically decreased since the 1990s when the Lebanese government abolished taxes on imported salt and the cost of Lebanese salt became too expensive to compete.
As Azhari reported, one environmental activist tried to do something about it.
Hafez Jreij, an Anfeh environmental activist and former salt marsh worker, has been trying to preserve the practice since he caught wind of the Natour project in 1999.
Along with a group of other academics and activists he called the “Salt Revolution,” Jreij said that he would file a lawsuit to prevent the project from breaking ground.
Many activists and environmental groups, including T.E.R.R.E Liban, Lebanon Eco Movement and Diaries of the Ocean, are urging the Lebanese government not to approve this project and safeguard the area and its cultural and environmental uniqueness.
Paul Abi Rashed, president of the Lebanon Eco Movement and founder of T.E.R.R.E Liban, said:
هيدا المكان الوحيد يللي بعدو نظيف وفينا ناخد ولادنا يسبحوا فيه … والحكومة بكرا امام تحد تاريخي بعدم المواققة على مشروع استثمارات باطون على ملاحات أنفه #أنقذوا_ملاحات_أنفه pic.twitter.com/SVp0wcpaDj
— Paul Abi Rashed (@paulabirashed) May 20, 2018
This is the last clean place where we can take our kids to swim… And the government has a historic decision to make in refusing to approve covering the salt flats with concrete in the name of development #SaveAnfehSaltFlats.
The group Beirut Heritage Community also urged action to stop the project:
تجمّع تراث بيروت يناشد جميع المعنيين وخاصة الوزراء في الحكومة الى عدم الموافقة على مشروع سياحي فوق #الملاحات التراثية على شاطىء أنفه، الذي سيجرى عرضه في الجلسة الاخيرة من عهد الحكومة المقرر عقدها الاثنين. هذا المشروع رفضه المجلس الأعلى للتنظيم المدني واعترضت عليه الجمعيات المعنية pic.twitter.com/cOYRNbKCE2
— Beirut Heritage (@beirut_heritage) May 20, 2018
The Beirut Heritage Community calls on all concerned, especially cabinet ministers, not to approve a tourist project above the historic #SaltFlats on the shore of Anfeh, which will be presented at the last session of the government scheduled for Monday. This project was rejected by the Higher Commission for Urban Planning and was objected to by all concerned entities.
Some politicians even had their say about the government's latest decision, with member of parliament Walid Joumblatt questioning the motives of such a decision.
وهكذا وبشخطة قلم في مجلس الوزراء تزال الملاحات التاريخية في انفة في شمال لبنان لصالح مشروع استثماري لا يقدر اصحابه لا التاريخ ولا التراث. نفس الشيء يحدث في العمارات القديمة في بيروت وفي كل مكان تقريبا .انه عصر حديثي النعمة ،عصر الطاووسية المجتمعية الفارغة والحاقدة والمدعية pic.twitter.com/IcoifTmtpO
— Walid Joumblatt (@walidjoumblatt) May 18, 2018
Just like that, with the stroke of a pen in the council of ministers, the historic salt flats of Anfeh in North Lebanon are removed for a development project whose owners don't value history nor heritage. The same is happening in heritage buildings in Beirut and almost everywhere.
It should be noted that Joumblatt's tweet assumes that the government has already accepted the project, which is not the case at the time of writing.
Article 2 of Order 144, the law regulating coastal properties in Lebanon since 1925, stipulates that the seashore until the farthest area reached by the waves during winter as well as sand and rocky shores are considered public property.
Read: Beirut's Municipality Deals Another Blow to the City's Green Space
Despite that law however, decree changes and loopholes have allowed more and more development to happen on the Lebanese coast.
In an interview with Azhari, Tabet said that:
Just 20 percent of the coast is free for people to access,” Tabet said – or 45 kilometers of Lebanon’s roughly 225-kilometer shoreline.

author: Christophe Maroun


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Malaysia’s new government urged to implement media reforms · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim greets his supporters during a rally in 2013, a year before his incarceration. He was released on May 16, 2018, a few days after the victory of the opposition party. He is expected to assume a big role in the new government headed by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Photo by Flickr user Firdaus Latif (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Civil society groups are urging Malaysia’s new government to uphold its election campaign pledge of enacting reforms in governance which include the abolition of laws that undermine free speech.
On May 9, 2018, the Pakatan Harapan (PH) party defeated Barisan Nasional (BN) which has dominated Malaysian politics over the past 60 years. BN’s defeat was attributed to the people’s clamor for a change in leadership after former Prime Minister Najib Razak was implicated in several corruption scandals. The Najib government was also accused of using repressive laws to detain opposition leaders, intimidate critics, and censor the media.
During the campaign period, PH released a manifesto which listed some of the immediate reforms it will implement if it succeeds in the polls such as the establishment of a media council made up of media leaders and the revision of all draconian laws.
Now that PH is the head of the new government, various civil society groups are reminding it to fulfill its commitment to reverse the oppressive laws, policies, and programs existing under the previous ruling party.
Amnesty International reiterated its proposed human rights agenda, which includes:
…rights to freedom of expression and association, better protections for refugees and people seeking asylum, respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples, protecting LGBTI individuals, abolishing the death penalty and ending the persecution of human rights defenders.
The Lawyers for Liberty asked the new government to unblock the websites and blogs blocked by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). These websites were blocked by MCMC for reporting about the corruption cases of Najib.
It also joined other groups in calling for the immediate repeal of laws that were often used by authorities to attack human rights advocates and critics of the government such as the Sedition Act 1948, Prevention of Crime Act 1959, Prevention of Terrorism Act 2015, Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, and the recently passed Anti-Fake News Act 2018.
So far, the initial response of the new government has been welcomed by many people.
First, it worked for the release of former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim who had been under hospital arrest on politically motivated charges of corruption and sodomy.
The PH-led government also formed a Committee on Institutional Reforms to accept proposals on reforming the bureaucracy.
Some news websites were also unblocked on May 17 such as the Sarawak Report and Medium.
The travel ban on political cartoonist and activist Zunar, a fierce critic of Najib, was also lifted on May 14.
The new home minister also affirmed that the government will quickly review controversial laws like the Sedition Act.
New Home Minister Muhyiddin Yassin says his ministry will review laws such as the Sedition Act in consultation with activists etc, look at border security, defend the sovereignty of Sabah and Sarawak, resolve stateless Indian issues, talk to UNHCR about Rohingya issues. pic.twitter.com/yOtp1fCyAo
— Sumisha Naidu (@SumishaCNA) May 22, 2018
But a statement by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad that the government will amend the anti-Fake News law by providing a clear definition of what constitutes fake news has alarmed civil society organizations because PH has earlier vowed to abolish the law.
The Sarawak Report explained why the entire law must be scrapped:
Journalists and citizens must be allowed speak freely and even be allowed to get it wrong, if they can show their intentions were to inform about something they genuinely had good reason to believe and are willing to correct and amend if found mistaken (as opposed to intended and malicious lies). These are the principles that have now evolved after much pain and argument in most modern democracies and Malaysia would do well to join them.
Around 20 civil society organizations signed a statement expressing disappointment over the “mixed messages from the ruling coalition on the repeal of the Anti-Fake News Act.” They proposed an alternative:
We believe that the more effective solution to any disinformation and misinformation is the enactment of a Freedom of Information Act at the federal level.
They also reminded PH that legislative reforms are not enough to undo what BN has done to Malaysian bureaucracy:
…legislative reform must go hand-in-hand with the restructuring of national institutions to ensure accountability, independence, and respect for human rights. Moreover, the new government must meaningfully engage civil society in a program of reform that is inclusive and participatory.
Human rights groups also criticized the police for arresting a man who “insulted” Prime Minister Mahathir on Facebook. The police said they merely responded to a complaint lodged against the suspect:
Veteran politician Lim Kit Siang asserted that this behavior of the police should change in the “new” Malaysia:
In the New Malaysia, police response must not depend of “who” lodges police reports, but “what” was in the police report, and actions where civil remedy is available should not be criminalised just because the subject-matter involves the Prime Minister or any Minister for that matter.
Mahathir said he also disagreed with the action taken by the police and said the parliament will prioritize the review of vague laws that criminalize the mere criticism of public officials.
The Centre for Independent Journalism welcomed the statement of Mahathir with regard to this incident and appealed for a moratorium on the use of repressive laws that continue to have a chilling effect in society. The group also summarized the challenge posed by free speech advocates to the new government:
It is critical at this juncture for the Pakatan Harapan coalition government to commit to defending a vibrant space for public discussion as the nation is headed towards transformation, to enable greater public participation in this process. This include clearly and unequivocally defending the right to freedom of expression, whether offline or online.


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Mexico’s new copyright law allows censorship of online content, rights advocates warn · Global Voices
Giovanna Salazar

“The Problem with Censorship is XXXXXXXXX.” Image from Flickr by user Cory Doctorow under license CC BY-SA 2.0.
Legal censorship of online content could be much easier in Mexico due to recently approved changes to the country's copyright laws.
On April 26, the Mexican Senate passed a bill that modified the Federal Copyright Law, enabling judges to order the removal of internet content that allegedly violates copyright law without needing to prove it in court or by sentence.
The bill allows the suspension and removal of public content and includes “precautionary measures” against the equipment that enables the spread of such content. Approval of these changes was given hastily without following legislative procedures.
The announcement was widely circulated under the label #MadrugueteAInternet. “Madurguete” is an expression in Mexican Spanish referring to an attack or an action that has taken place when the other party was distracted, limited or not prepared. The hashtag describes the passing of this law as a legal ambush:
Con 63 votos a favor, el @senadomexicano le hizo un #MadrugueteAInternet y aprobó una reforma a la LFDA que permite la censura en línea por derecho de autor. https://t.co/FcWawOV6mD
— R3D (@R3Dmx) April 27, 2018
With 63 votes in favor, the @senadomexicano made a #MadrugueteAInternet and approved a change to the Federal Copyright Law, which allows censorship online through copyright law.
Organizations, unions, and associations that work on issues related to digital rights and technologies for information and communication have all criticized the changes to this law. They claim this will open a path to preemptive censorship on the internet and is a threat to freedom of expression in the digital world.
The MX Internet Association put out a statement, which reads:
⚠⚠Comunicado⚠⚠@senadomexicano pic.twitter.com/yad5CMagBs
— Asociación de Internet MX (@Asoc_InternetMX) April 26, 2018
The Senate expects to approve a ‘Decree for which an Article 213 Bis and a Second Paragraph to Article 215 of the Federal Copyright Law’ will be added, which will allow the imposition of precautionary measures in judicial proceedings. Those who claim that an alleged violation of the right to commercial exploitation of artistic works has taken place (which may be serious or not) will be able to do so without providing irrefutable proof of the existence of the supposed violation.
The above-mentioned measures include, among others: a) the suspension of public representation, communication, and/or implementation; and b) precautionary measures against instruments, materials, equipment, and supplies used in the public representation, communication, and implementation.
The change has the goal of hindering the spread of information and content without requiring proof that a violation of copyright law took place, which constitutes as a means of preemptive censorship that violates the right to share ideas (expression) and printed materials, as well as the right of access to information and culture.
Additionally, it will allow the preemptive confiscation of instruments, materials, or equipment, and can lead to the seizure of servers, routers, and other equipment used to provide access to telecommunication networks. This will seriously affect the provision of public service vital to the country's economy and society.
The approval of the above-mentioned bill violates fundamental rights such as free expression of thought, printed material, and course of trade and can leave online enterprises in a state of vulnerability, such as internet service providers as well as the content and applications to establish measures that will seriously affect their operation, all without having demonstrated that a violation of copyright law occurred.
According to the reform that is about to be approved by the Senate, they will be able to give these orders without an existing sentence which establishes that, effectively, the right of commercial exploitation of protected intellectual property was violated, and without the existence of a specified amount of material in dispute, which can lead to the imposition of disproportionate methods and which leave the victims in a state of vulnerability, violating the right to due process.
The Mexican chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation warned that the approved changes “criminalize the act of publishing” and “legalize acts of violating the fundamental and constitutional rights of spreading ideas, free expression, free press, personal communication, broadcasting, and information.”
It should be noted that any initiatives or verdicts which are subject to a debate by the Senate must go through a specific legislative process, which, in this case, was not respected.
The said process provides that any initiatives must be subjected to a debate by Committees associated with the bill's issue. They then analyze and discuss matters in alternating turns in order to develop and vote on a draft bill. Once the draft bill is approved by the respective Committees, the President of the Senator's Committee must be notified so that the bill can be presented and voted on in a plenary session.
Users who have been following the issue used social media to criticize the misconduct of the senators that bypassed the bill's submission to the plenary session.
Twitter user Carlos Alvarez worried:
¿Sólo soy yo o alguien más está preocupado porque, sin pasar por comisiones, @JLozanoA impulsó el Senado una reforma a la Ley Federal del Derecho de Autor que censura el internet? ¿Qué está pasando en México que los legisladores hacen lo que quieren sin consultar a la ciudadanía?
— Carlos Álvarez (@CarlosAlvarezMX) April 27, 2018
Is it just me or is anyone else worried because Javier Lozano Alarcón pushed a change to the Federal Copyright Law that censors the internet through the Senate without passing it through commissions? What is happening in Mexico that legislators are doing what they want without consulting the citizens?
Javier Lozano Alarcón is a Mexican attorney and politician. He currently serves as a senator representing the state of Puebla.
Twitter user Erik Gtz noted:
@JLozanoA presentó al @senadomexicano actas sin firmas para aprobar el dictamen de modificación a la ley de propiedad intelectual.
Es una total afrenta a la democracia y una burla al Poder Legislativo pic.twitter.com/WIl1X9oABa
— Erik Gtz (@MausterChief) April 27, 2018
Javier Lozano Alarcón submitted statements without signatures to the @senadomexicano to approve the bill to change the intellectual property law! This is a total slap in the face to democracy and an insult to Legislative Power.
The pictures in his tweet reads:
…the collective management organizations to those who have entrusted their rights to the administration will be able to request that a competent judicial authority allow preventative measures in accordance with this Law.
Transitory Provision
Sole Article- This decree will come into effect on the day after its publication in the Official Journal of the Federation.
Mexico City, December 13th, 2016.
By the Commission of Culture
The only way for the senators to have gotten away with modifying the Senate's agenda would have been with the consent of the Senate's
chairman who, in fact, voted in favor of the bill.
The bill has already been sent to the executive branch. It only needs to be approved by President Enrique Peña Nieto for the changes to go into effect.
Organizations such as the Network in Defense of Digital Rights (R3D) have expressed their interest in disputing the bill not only to declare it unconstitutional but also to demand that the changes not take effect until the Supreme Court of Justice determines their validity. Otherwise, the dispute could be a process that takes years, during which users’ rights to free expression on the internet may be violated.

author: Giovanna Salazar


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While some Iraqis boycott ‘futile’ elections, others vote to shake up parliament · Global Voices
Sali Mahdy

Screenshot of Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters celebrating his election win. Source of screenshot from YouTube video ‘How Iraq election frontrunner Muqtada al-Sadr tapped widespread frustration’ uploaded on May 14, 2018 by PBS NewsHour channel.
An unlikely cross-sectarian alliance won the first Iraqi parliamentary elections since the country defeated ISIS last year.
Voters chose to shake up the political status quo by propelling forward the Sairoun (Marching Toward Reform) Alliance led by influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This coalition, which was made up of Sadr’s Istiqama (Integrity) Party and six other secular groups, including the Iraqi Communist Party, gathered more than 1.3 million votes and will claim 54 seats of a 329-seat parliament, the most of any coalition.
Since Iraq began democratic elections in 2005, politicians have consistently sought votes by appealing to Iraqis’ communal identities. Sairoun’s win is therefore a remarkable moment in Iraqi political history, demonstrating that Iraqis don't have to vote strictly on ethno-sectarian lines and future politicians will need to do more to impress voters.
It also indicates a possible shift away from identity politics in favor of campaigning on the issues afflicting the country.
Sadr stood out from other Iraqi politicians, past and present, by promoting himself as a nationalist and populist, in addition to focusing his campaign on reforming government, eliminating corruption, and bettering public services.
He also supports forming a technocratic government, moving beyond the system of ethno-sectarian communal quotas that have typically installed incompetent and corrupt political elites.
But while Iraq’s political landscape may be be changing for the better, this year’s record low turnout suggests Iraqis are losing faith that voting will lead to positive change.
According to Iraq’s electoral commission, only 44.5 percent of 22 million eligible voters cast their ballots in this year’s election, reflecting a sharp decline from 62 percent in the 2010 and 2014 elections and a peak of 70 percent in 2005.
This decline in voter enthusiasm indicates how disillusioned voters have become with the political process. Iraqis have seen little to no effort by the government to address endemic corruption, economic instability, and deteriorating public services.
Iraqi activists went as far as to start a social media campaign to encourage voters to boycott the elections citing lack of change and laws that unfairly exclude smaller parties in order to maintain the existing political landscape.
In an interview for the Washington Post, Baghdad-based writer Mustafa Sadoon explained why he decided to sit out the elections:
I participated in all the previous elections, yet there was no change. We demonstrated against the electoral system, but no one listened. I didn’t find any other choice to express my rejection except to boycott.
Iraqi blogger Sabaa Subhi shared the same sentiment with Niqash, a multi-lingual Iraqi news website:
We decided to boycott the election because we believe it is futile. There is no real chance for change and we are trapped in a black hole that was dug by the political elites; they used their power to pass laws to ensure that the bigger parties remain in government and get to continue with their corrupt ways. They don’t even give the voters a chance to remove them from power.
Iraqi Hassan Shian, also shared his frustration with Al-Rafidain, an Arabic-language Iraqi news channel:
The same corrupt politicians will always have the ability to return to power. In Iraq nothing is transparent, everything is rigged.
The root of dissatisfaction with the election process is the Webster/Sainte-Laguë for seat allocation. This method is meant to favor smaller parties by providing them with better representation in government; however lawmakers modified it to favor larger parties, which Iraqis believe will serve to keep corrupt forces in power.
While many Iraqis have little faith in the new government, Sadr is reportedly trying to reassure the public that change is coming. In a speech:
Your government will be a caring and inclusive one, we will not exclude anyone. We will work toward reform and prosperity.
Only time will tell if Sadr will achieve his proclaimed vision for a non-sectarian government of technocrats. In the meantime, he is in negotiations with other parties to secure the 165-seat majority necessary to form government.

author: Sali Mahdy


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Macedonians manage to joke about a serious naming dispute with Greece · Global Voices
Filip Stojanovski

“Thump, thump…” – a comic by Darko Markovikj depicting his take on Macedonian nationalist chest-thumping, published by Citizens for European Macedonia in 2011. Used with permission.
While most citizens in the Republic of Macedonia (RM) consider the naming dispute with Greece as a serious matter, some have dealt with it through humor and satire.
Greeks have long accused the RM of confusing nomenclature with the neighboring Greek region of Macedonia and the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon.
The naming dispute is further complicated by the Greek blockade of RM's entry into the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) unless it changes its name to differentiate from its northern administrative regions. This has led to a degree of xenophobia in both countries. Most citizens of RM consider the blockade a humiliating form of blackmail, while many Greek citizens believe their northern neighbors have designs of conquest.
Nationalists from both countries have stoked feelings of humiliation and frustration, exacerbating the problem while gaining political points for ‘patriotism’ in the process. In effect, the continuation of the naming dispute has benefited Russia's strategy to prevent the consolidation of EU and NATO in the Balkans.
The only point of consensus about the naming dispute between Macedonia and Greece is that it's not a laughing matter. Over the last quarter of a century, the presence of satirical or humorous contents about it has been negligible in comparison to grim commentary and hate speech. Purposefully or not, satire was often misinterpreted as hate speech.
The cartoonist Darko Markovikj (also written as Marković, 1940-2016), worked with leading Macedonian independent media outlets until they were co-opted or closed by the nationalist government of VMRO-DPMNE (reigned 2006-2017), headed by strongman Nikola Gruevski.
Nicknamed DarMar (slang for ‘disorder’ or ‘havoc’), Markovikj used caricatures, comics, and animations to comment on daily events and political developments. During his long career, he espoused liberal and pro-democracy positions which were often at odds with mainstream socialism (before independence) and nationalism (after independence).
In 2009, when Gruevski included issues of Macedonian ethnic identity and language into the naming dispute negotiations, DarMar presciently linked it with desire for power:
“I'm for NATO… I'm for the European Union… But I refuse to give up my identity!” – cartoon by Darko Markovikj published by Citizens for European Macedonia. Used with permission.
The prolonging of the naming dispute has had long-term negative consequences on international stability and directly affected the livelihood of Macedonian citizens. The Greek economic embargo (1994-95) and the country's exclusion from the EU severely limited opportunities for economic development.
DarMar contrasted this with the nationalist rhetoric disputing whether contemporary ethnic Macedonians have the right to claim descent from Ancient Macedonians, or only from South Slavs who arrived in the region 1,600 years ago, yet considered as ‘newcomers’ to Greek nationalists:
“I'm no longer Ancient Macedonian… I'm not Macedonian Slav either..!” – “What are you now?” – “Now I'm a Macedonian laid-off worker.” Cartoon by Darko Markovikj published by Citizens for European Macedonia. Used with permission.
More recently, the leading satirical television show “Yesterday's News” (“Fcerasni novosti” in Macedonian) humorously addressed the naming dispute through Monty Python-type sketches.
One sketch refers to the Vardar river which flows through Skopje, the capital of the RM, and then turns south into Greece where it is known as Axios and empties into the Aegean Sea. The two comedians joked that plastic bottles floating in the river are not actually trash but rather ‘messages in a bottle’ as “part of the eco-geo-political pressure put on our southern neighbor.”  They continue:
Seeing that Facebook statuses won’t help us protect our name, citizens decided to put a different type of pressure on Greece. They started sending messages in bottles down the Vardar, which flows down to the abovementioned southern neighbor.
Aco: A flock of plastic bottles…. Jetza, what’s shall I say, a flock or a herd?
Jelena: I don’t have a clue. Just read what’s written. … and don’t call me Jetza.
Aco: Thousands of bottles have been seen floating down the Vardar River, drawn there by the not-so-heavy rain. Malicious environmentalists may call this genocide to Vardar’s flora and fauna and a reflection of our own barbarism. But it is not what it seems.
Although these bottles look like trash thrown out by many uncaring litterers, or by a single uncaring litterer, they are part of the eco-geo-political pressure put on our southern neighbor. Seeing that Facebook statuses won’t help us protect our name, citizens decided to put a different type of pressure on Greece. They started sending messages in bottles down the Vardar, which flows down to the abovementioned southern neighbor.
You can remain calm. Our name, identity and language are secure as long as there are enough concerned citizens like this one.
While the naming dispute rages on, many regular citizens of the RM enjoy heading to Greece as a primary travel destination as the nearest seaside with ample budget and luxury travel options.
A one-day shopping tour is seen as a sign of social status, giving citizens the chance to shop for brands unavailable in the RM while enjoying ‘a coffee by the sea’ in Thessaloniki, just a few hours away by car from Skopje.
This week, as Macedonians looked forward to a four-day long weekend starting May 24 around two major national holidays, opposition parties refused to accept the latest proposal to solve naming dispute proposed by Macedonian and Greek prime ministers. One Twitter user joked about the ‘implications’ of this for holiday travelers:
Во знак на протест, Македонците ќе ја окупираат Грција.
Нападот почнува во четврток, ќе бидат блокирани сите гранични приоди. Операцијата ќе трае до понеделник. Акцијата ќе чини неколку милиони евра.
Грчкото здружение на трговци и хотелиери изјави дека не се плашат: “Ела!”
— Mindрluмbеr (@mindplumber) May 20, 2018
As a sign of protest, Macedonians will occupy Greece.
The attack starts on Thursday, and will result in blocking of all border crossings. The operation will last till Monday. The action's cost will be several million euros.
Greek association of merchants and hotel owners stated that they're not afraid. “Do come!” they shout.
Sure enough, the first day of the long weekend attracted over 10,000 Macedonian citizens who piled into cars bound for Greece, causing major delays at the border crossings.

author: Filip Stojanovski