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In a Greek Refugee Camp: A Volunteer’s Notebook · Global Voices
Guest Contributor

A mural in Ritsona Refugee Camp by Ismail Yazidi, May 3rd 2016. Photo: Ritsona Refugee Camp Facebook page.
By Mai El-Mahdy
Syrian refugees in Greece. By now there are thousands of blog posts, newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts that tell the stories of entire families drowning in the ocean, in desperate hope for a life free of warfare and poverty. I’m sure there are even more on those who eventually survived the ferocious waves, only to move into inhumane, “temporary” camps where they end up spending years. But for better or for worse, I’m not going to talk about the refugees, the lives they left behind in Syria or how they ended up in Greece. I want to talk about the current conditions and the role—or lack thereof—of those of us who try to help them, in bringing an end to this humanitarian crisis.
Recently I spent a couple of weeks at Greece’s Ritsona camp, a hub for five different humanitarian NGOs, alongside the UN operations. Ritsona is an old military base located outside Chalkida, the chief town on the island of Euboea, about an hour’s drive north of the centre of Athens. Its population is roughly two-thirds Syrian, with the remaining third made up of Kurds, Iraqis, and Afghans.
One of the harsh realities about life in the camps that is hard to fathom, let alone survive, is the absence of self-respect—dignity that has dropped so low it’s as if it was eaten up by the fierce waves before sinking to the bottom. It’s the dented sense of dignity that makes a person happy to move out of a tent into some makeshift caravan container box that becomes your “temporary” shelter for months and months. It’s the type of dignity that is all but lost when your entire livelihood is at the mercy of NGO workers who, through their authority and the decisions they make on people’s behalf, teach the refugees to accept the little they get, and be happy. Why do this, when these people are already broken? Do we volunteers always know what’s best for them? Would we allow others to make similar decisions on our behalf?
It’s not about freedom of choice; it’s not about allowing people the space to make their own decisions and mistakes. It’s about self-determination. Refugees take every single imaginable risk, relying on factors way beyond anyone’s control, only to arrive—miraculously—at a camp and submit to someone else’s decision-making, regardless of how good or bad those decisions are.
“Let’s teach English!” Everyone needs and wants to learn English, right? “Let’s buy toys for children,” overlooking the desires of parents, and the children themselves. Queuing up for food or clothes is part of the harsh reality of accepting that, due to circumstances beyond your control, you have become less valuable of a human being.
Refugees don’t want to queue for ages for food or clothes: they want to be treated as human beings, just like a black man in Apartheid South Africa, a Palestinian in the face of the Israeli occupation, or a woman anywhere in the world today. Part of the pain is acknowledging, while you stand in line, that few outside of your war zone would ever have to endure this or even entertain the thought. It is the frustration of being offered the non-choice of either being grateful that you’re in a queue with food at the end of it, or of being featured in a photo shared on social media that makes people feel sorry for you.
Perhaps we should look at the treatment of refugees as a right they have earned for themselves, not as charity that we choose to give to them. Perhaps we should focus our efforts on allowing them to fight for themselves. Perhaps it is simply about paving the way for their self-emancipation, regardless of where it leads them, and especially regardless of where it leaves us. We need to focus on educating them about their rights based on the country they are relocated, caring for their health, providing education for them and their children, etc.
Perhaps we should look at them the way we want them to look at us: with dignity and self-respect.
It’s funny how, as volunteers, we’re expected to arrive on the scene and push, along with everyone else, to get the wheels in motion. As though we’re not part of the story, but instead temporary outsiders brought in to perform a specific mission. But whether we like it or not, we are part of the narrative and influence it, significantly.
As individuals, we struggle with our egos. It’s one thing to recognize that—and in fact, very few volunteers are strong enough to do even that. Suppressing our egos, however, is a totally different story. It’s probably inevitable that volunteers find it easier to feed their egos than feed the needy. And the reward is so tempting that many forget to stop for a minute and ask themselves: are we really helping?
It’s no wonder so many volunteers pay special attention to children, who become quickly attached. But how does that help?
Volunteers can’t help but feel superior. In the camps they stand out like a sore thumb, and that’s not always unintentional. Volunteers often see themselves as providers of a valuable service, as making a great sacrifice of time and expertise. And they expect others to be gracious and remind them what great human beings they are for doing what they do.
But it’s not a service—it’s the refugees’ right. And this shouldn’t be debatable.
Once, at one of the stores where we shopped for the people of Ritsona camp with donated funds, I tried to bargain with the cashier to get more for my donated buck. The cashier, a fellow Egyptian making a living across the Mediterranean, agreed to “hook me up.” But instead of reducing the cost, she offered to write me an invoice for a higher sum. According to her, many volunteers and NGO workers accepted the fake invoices and pocketed the difference, so it was clear to her that I was new to this. And no, she did not budge on the price.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Some volunteers finance their travel out of the donations they receive. In spite of pleas for greater transparency, few NGOs actually publish the details of their finances. And even fewer donors ask for the details. If it’s change we’re after, this is probably a good place to start.
In my opinion, the best way to help refugees is by bypassing the NGOs altogether. It’s not difficult for us to connect directly with refugees. They’re human, just like us, just with different circumstances that suck. Treating them as patients with some disease or disability doesn’t help.
Refugees. Photo: Pixabay, public domain.
A friend of mine has a different take on this. He relates the story of a German doctor, an older gentleman, extremely professional and meticulous about his work. It’s his job to treat patients to the best of his ability given the facilities provided. From morning till night this doctor receives patients, diagnoses them, treats them. He doesn’t speak the language of the country where he works, and is very distant, almost cold. But he treats every single person he comes across, and he sets up and develops the medical facility and trains the workers so that the project can sustain itself after his departure. Many might not know him, care about him, or even remember him, though he is the one who directly helped and advanced the community. No credit. No showiness. No emotion. Just pure problem-solving.
I don’t necessarily disagree. NGOs impose strict rules on volunteers, one of which prohibits staying at the camp past 5pm. I hated this rule, so after a couple of weeks, I moved out of NGO housing and into the camp. I stayed with a refugee friend and her two daughters in their container. I would never argue that I was living their life, but I will say that I was observing it through a sharper lens.
While I agree that being distant and professional may be highly efficient and effective, I think that closeness also helps. Yes, we eventually leave; and sure, we may invest more time and effort in forming emotional bonds with the refugees than in providing tangible deliverables. And I won’t deny that I’ve learned more from the refugees about the Syrian cultural and political context than I’ve shared my own knowledge.
But by establishing close bonds we remind others—and ourselves—that they are human. And we become more human in the process.
The day to-day medical needs of Ritsona camp residents, of which there was an abundance, were left pretty much unattended. In emergencies, however, the Greek National Emergency Medical Services (EKAB, Ethniko Kentro Amesis Voitheias) would transport residents of the camp to and from the nearest hospital.
No one likes to go to the hospital, but when you’re a Syrian in a foreign country, it’s even worse than you imagine. Refugees are immersed in a sea of loneliness and fear of the unknown. You can see it in their eyes. And the harsh conditions of the journey to the camp leaves the majority of children, especially, with severe respiratory problems.
Many of the Greek doctors, however, didn’t even speak English nor did they have translators, and most patients could express themselves only in either Arabic or Kurdish. Often, residents would spend hours awaiting emergency care at the hospital, only to lose hope of ever understanding what they needed to do to get treatment, and leave.
At the camp my Arabic came in handy, as my job was to accompany the patients. Last May one of the NGOs at Ritsona pioneered a unique initiative dubbed “Hospital Runs”; that was the team I worked with. It’s a program organized in collaboration with the Red Cross that operates under the license of the Greek Army. They provide medical transportation, English, Greek and Arabic interpretation, and intercultural and medical assistance. The team also helps with bureaucratic procedures.
I was proud to be a member of that team. Each day we’d hop over to Chalkida or trek all the way to Athens, returning in the evening after having handled whatever problems, cases and complications had been thrown at us.
Sometimes the hospital staff made us feel unwelcome, scolding us about coming in with muddy shoes, indifferent to the fact that the camp is basically built on mud. I remember arriving at the hospital one day to find a young woman, clearly Arab and most probably from the camp, all alone, with nobody attending to her. She had clearly given up on trying to communicate or to save herself from whatever pain had piled on top of everything she had brought over to the continent. She gave me her details and the number of a loved one, so that I could communicate to them in the event she didn’t make it. Thankfully, and against the odds, she survived.
I guess I just can't fathom how borders and bodies of water can ultimately decide who's granted the opportunity to climb to the top, and who will be left to drown, and sink to the bottom.

author: Guest Contributor


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In Kyrgyzstan, Media Facing Pressure from a Fearful President · Global Voices
Akhal-Tech Collective

Screenshot from broadcast of the Oi Ordo talk show on Kyrgyzstan's leading state television channel. Clip shared via the state broadcaster's official YouTube channel.
During a recent episode of the Oi Ordo talk show titled ‘Freedom of Speech or Slander?’, moderator Maxim Poletayev regularly interrupted independent media experts offering their opinion on the situation regarding press freedoms in Kyrgyzstan, while listening dutifully to the government's own representative on the show.
Many social media users commenting on the discussion broadcast on Kyrgyzstan's main state television channel saw the host's behaviour as a telling representation of the government's approach to media freedoms: you can say something for as long as the government doesn't mind what it is you are saying.
Presently three news agencies are being sued by the state prosecutor, simply for carrying quotes attributed to critics of the President Almazbek Atambayev and his Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan. The prosecutor's argument is that the quotes themselves are “slander” and damage the “honour and dignity” of President Almazbek Atambayev. As such, the prosecutor says, the media outlets carry responsibility for relaying them.
The three media outlets, which also happen to be the outlets most critical of the government, are facing fines ranging from $15,000 to $150,000, and two of them have had their bank accounts frozen by authorities ahead of the court cases.
Media experts argue that the Central Asian country's law on media shields journalists from responsibility for the accuracy of information in their reports. In practice however, journalists can be sued under far vaguer libel laws, and the profusion of such cases threatens to increase self-censorship in reporting.
That President Atambayev has regularly slandered journalists and human rights activists throughout his six-year term and has not yet been successfully sued for doing so is an indicator of the kind of judicial bias the media outlets will be up against as the cases reach court.
As noted, in all bar one of the cases, the outlets were simply relaying accusations against the president and his party made by their interviewees.
Among those accusations were:
Like United States President Donald Trump, Atambayev has repeatedly castigated critical media outlets for their reporting, accusing them of spreading misinformation and serving the interests of foreign governments and donors.
Some have pointed in irony to the fact that when Atambayev himself was a repressed opposition figure prior to the second Kyrgyz revolution in 2010, he lauded congress-funded Azattyk as one of the few outlets reporting critically on the authoritarian Bakiyev government.
Now that Atambayev is in control of the government apparatus, a popular news agency that enjoys a reputation for independent reporting inside the country as well as a steady stream of state department funding is far less useful to him.
More curious than his attacks on regularly critical outlets, perhaps, is the recent deportation of the editor of the local branch of the outlet Regnum.ru, a Moscow-headquartered news agency cited by critics as a regular source of propaganda for Atambayev's allies in the Russian government.
Throughout a stormy presidency, Russian backing has been vital for Atambayev in securing legitimacy among a population that is largely Russia-friendly, a fact that makes the decision to deny Grigory Mikhailov re-entry into the country following a minor labour code violation a source of conjecture.
One of the articles Kyrgyz social media users speculated may have contributed to Mikhailov's ban on entering the country cited the opposition's demand that Atambayev undergo psychiatric testing following particularly rude comments he had made about the Ata-Meken party.
Another was a lengthy interview with a wealthy politician that many view as the frontrunner to succeed Atambayev in elections this November, but who is probably not his preferred candidate for the job.
In comparison with the highly authoritarian countries in its ex-Soviet neighbourhood, as well as next-door neighbour China, Kyrgyzstan is only a moderate enemy of the free press.
But as Atambayev contemplates ways of securing his retirement beyond a vote he is constitutionally barred from entering in eight months time, independent media is enduring an extremely bumpy ride.

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Akhal-Tech Collective


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Reporter’s Murder in Mexico Revives Outrage over Violence against Journalists · Global Voices
J. Tadeo

Miroslava Breach Velducea 1962-2017. Photo taken from the public Twitter profile of La Jornada and widely shared throughout the social media outlet.
Bad news again from Mexico, this time from the northern border state of Chihuahua.
Earlier this week journalist Miroslava Breach, who worked for various media outlets, including the national newspaper La Jornada and the local website Norte, was reported as murdered outside her home by an unidentified individual.
The violent act, according to reports from national newspapers El Universal and Excélsior, took place during the morning. As far as is known, a male subject approached Miroslava and shot her with a firearm eight times in the head.
In his column for the newspaper Milenio, Ricardo Aleman wrote:
Miroslava Breach fue asesinada por ejercer su profesión, el periodismo de investigación, crítico e independiente. (…) Dicho de otro modo, mataron a Miroslava por hablar, por hacer pública la información que reclama la sociedad y molesta al poder, en cualquiera de sus formas.
Miroslava Breach was assassinated for exercising her profession as an independent and critical investigative journalist. (…) In other words, they killed Miroslava for talking, for taking information public that society demanded and that annoyed those in power, in all its forms.
The murder of Miroslava follows those of two other journalists this month, as Spanish newspaper El País reported:
El asesinato se ha producido cuatro días después del ataque contra Ricardo Monlui, otro periodista que murió a tiros en el Estado de Veracruz el pasado 19 de marzo. Cecilio Pineda, un periodista del sureño Estado de Guerrero, fue ejecutado el pasado 2 de marzo. Suman ya 30 periodistas asesinados durante el mandato de Enrique Peña Nieto, ha informado la organización Artículo 19.
The murder occurred four days after the attack against Ricardo Monlui, another journalist who was shot dead in the state of Veracruz on March 19. Cecilio Pineda, a journalist from the southern state of Guerrero, was executed on March 2. Some 30 journalists have been killed during Enrique Peña Nieto's term, according to the organization Article 19.
On Twitter, Article 19 shared the following message:
Hoy asesinaron a periodista Miroslava Breach. El 99.75% de los casos sigue impune. Si no hay justicia la violencia continuará #ImpunidadMata pic.twitter.com/BQcBspAvWK
— ARTICLE 19 MX-CA (@article19mex) March 24, 2017
The journalist Miroslava Breach was assassinated today. 99.75% of cases remain unpunished. If there is no justice, violence will continue #ImpunityKills
Epifanio Diaz also condemned the reporter's murder:
Condenamos enérgicamente el asesinato de la periodista #Miroslava #Breach. Exigimos un alto a la ola de asesinatos y violencia.
— Abogado triqui (@EpifanioDiaz) March 24, 2017
We strongly condemn the murder of journalist #Miroslava #Breach. We demand a halt to the wave of murders and violence.
Me dan ganas d llorar, cuando veo lo q pasa en mi Mexico y no poder hacer el cambio(encarcelar a corruptos y delincuentes socios)#Miroslava
— SBorbon (@sborbon) March 24, 2017
I want to cry when I see what happens in my Mexico and cannot make a change (jail corrupt and delinquent members) #Miroslava
Mexico is Latin America's most dangerous country for journalists and the third most dangerous country in the world in general, with levels of violence comparable to Syria and Iraq, according to the Global Criminality Index 2016.
An incredible 95% of crimes in Mexico go unpunished, according to the most recent figures of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness.
President Enrique Peña has spoken seemingly in favour of a free press in the past.
In October 2016, for instance, he said:
Una nación democrática como lo es México, no puede explicarse sin medios de comunicación que ejerzan a plenitud esa libertad (de expresión). Por eso el gobierno de la República defiende la pluralidad de ideas como una conquista democrática y un derecho irrenunciable de los mexicanos.
A democratic nation like Mexico cannot explain itself without methods of communication that fully exercise that freedom (of expression). That is why the government of the Republic defends the plurality of ideas as a democratic conquest and an inalienable right of Mexicans.
But these are only words and impunity for perpetrators of violent crime against media workers and as a whole has long been a fact of life in Mexico. Currently, these frustrations are being aired on social media under the hashtags #ImpunidadMata and #YaBastaDeBalas (#ImpunityKills, #EnoughBulletsAlready).

author: J. Tadeo


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Beijing’s Favorite Carrie Lam Becomes Hong Kong’s First Woman Leader With 777 Votes · Global Voices
Hong Kong Free Press

Newly elected Chief Executive Carrie Lam delivers her victory speech. Image from Hong Kong Free Press.
This post was is a compilation of various stories by Elson Tong, Ellie Ng and Catherine Lai that were originally published on Hong Kong Free Press on March 26, 2017. The version below is published on Global Voices as part of a partnership agreement.
Carrie Lam, former chief secretary for administration, became Hong Kong's first female leader on March 26 after 777 voters from a 1,194-member election committee chose her over rivals Woo Kwok-hing and John Tsang. Tsang received 365 votes, while Woo gained 21 votes.
Reports indicated that Lam was the only candidate that Beijing deemed acceptable and that the China Liaison Office – Beijing’s representative in the special administrative region of Hong Kong – along with some senior Chinese officials had been asking electoral committee members to vote for her.
Lam, 59, was the city’s number two official before joining the chief executive race. She suffered low popularity ratings throughout her campaign, with critics calling her a copy of current Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and warning that she would adopt Leung’s “combative” approach to governance.
In 2014, she promoted a Beijing-backed political reform package, which while allowing Hong Kong people to vote universally in the chief executive election would have restricted the right to nominate the candidates to a 1,200-member nominating committee, leading to two months of massive street protests calling for genuine election reform.
Lam has promised to try to build consensus and “restore faith and hope” in Hong Kong, which enjoys a high degree of autonomy from the mainland, and “strengthen the relationship between Hong Kong and China”.
She stressed in her victory speech:
Hong Kong, our home, is suffering from quite a serious divisiveness and has accumulated a lot of frustration. My priority will be to heal the divide and to ease the frustration – and to unite our society to move forward.
The agenda of healing the divide had been advocated by John Tsang, the more popular candidate, during his election campaign. Picking up the agenda, Carrie Lam stressed:
I also want to stress: in forming my governance team, my principle is to attract talent widely and on merit. Anyone with a sincere wish to serve, the ability, and the commitment, regardless of political affiliation, I shall invite to join my team.
I will tell every member of my team to listen to and work with the people in reaching collective decisions and taking action. Only in this way will we achieve real consensus and gain the widest support from society.
She vowed to safeguard the city’s core values:
Values such as inclusiveness, freedoms of the press and of speech, respect for human rights, and systems which have taken generations to establish, such as the independent judiciary, rule of law, and clean government, are matters that we Hong Kong people find precious and are proud of. As your Chief Executive, I shall do my utmost to uphold “one country, two systems” and to guard our core values.
Questioned about the fear of Beijing intervening in Hong Kong's internal affairs, Lam said she would be brave enough to speak up for Hong Kongers, as long as something is for the good of Hong Kong.
She said she was “deeply honoured” to become the first female chief executive and stressed that gender equality was necessary for stable development.
Pro-democracy political group League of Social Democrats marked the election day by hanging a huge yellow banner with the words “I want genuine universal suffrage” on Hong Kong’s famous Lion Rock mountain peak.
Image by League of Social Democrats via Hong Kong Free Press.
Inside the voting center in Wanchai, a few pro-democracy election committee members cast blank ballots or spoiled their ballots as an act of protest. One of the spoiled ballots was marked with the profanity “f**k” in Chinese and projected on a huge screen during the vote count, creating an uproar inside and outside the center and on social media.
Screen capture from cable TV.
Outside the voting center, pro-Beijing and pro-democracy protesters were locked in a standoff.
Pro-Beijing demonstrators played popular Chinese nationalist tunes, held up China's national flag and Hong Kong's city flag, and called for the election of a “good chief executive”, a reference to Carrie Lam.
Carrie Lam's supporters celebrate the election result. Image from Hong Kong Free Press.
Pro-democracy activists, on the other hand, shouted their criticisms of the small-circle election system and Beijing's meddling in the votes. After the election result was announced, some activists moved to the China Liaison Office and hurled toilet paper at the building — a reference to Lam, who in January received international media attention after disclosing that she took a taxi at midnight from her new luxury apartment to her old government house because she did not know where to fetch toilet paper rolls.
Screenshot from Hong Kong Free Press's video.
As the Cantonese word for “seven” is phonetically similar to an obscene word meaning “penis” and could also mean “stupidity” or a “blunder” when used as a verb or an adjective, the 777 votes Carrie Lam received has inspired puns and jokes.
#HK designer Steve Lee offers his #CarrieLam design to share for free. Blends simplified Lam Cheng characters & #777 https://t.co/i5ULda8b0o pic.twitter.com/crxnAfRzGK
— Yuen Chan (@xinwenxiaojie) March 26, 2017
Of course, the number 777 can also mean jackpot in gambling.
The elected chief executive will tour local districts, as well as visit the incumbent leader Leung Chun-ying, the secretary of justice, the legislature and the three Chinese government offices in Hong Kong as part of protocol. The three offices include: the Central Liaison Office, the city’s the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office, and the local headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army.
Lam joined the government in 1980. Prior to her appointment as chief secretary in 2012, she served in various senior positions such as director of social welfare; permanent secretary for housing, planning and lands; director-general of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London; permanent secretary for home affairs; and secretary for development.
During her tenure, she was heavily criticised for failing to serve the interests of the underprivileged during her office as director of social welfare, and for allegedly committing misconduct in public office in the controversy surrounding the Hong Kong Palace Museum project.

author: Hong Kong Free Press


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For One Somalia-Born UK Citizen, Brexit Is a “Point of No Return” · Global Voices
Leila Nachawati

London, March 3 2017 StoptheSilence Brexit Hate Crimes. PHOTO: David Holt (CC BY 2.0)
“Brexit has changed everything and we still don't know how far that change will go,” says Ismael Einashe, a British journalist and Dart Center Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University Journalism School.
I spoke with Einashe during Idea Camp, a program hosted by the European Cultural Foundation in Madrid in early March. “No one thought about what would come next and there weren't any plans for the impact this decision would have on three million [citizens and residents of Great Britain].”
Einashe is one of the victims of the policies Great Britain has embraced in recent years. These policies have become more and more radical and mistrustful of the segment of the UK population who wish to remain in the EU, which includes a large part of the Muslim community. Seven out of ten Muslims voted against Brexit. Prime Minister Theresa May has, at various points, disparagingly referred to the 48% of anti-Brexit voters as the “metropolitan, capitalist elite,” “crybabies” and “citizens of the world.” Einashe asserts that these declarations have opened the door to a flood of racist incidents and commentary, similar to statements made by Trump in the United States and Le Pen in France.
“With governments and institutions speaking unfiltered against religious and ethnic minorities, or people with certain sexual orientations, many racist people are coming out of the woodwork. There are even judges receiving threats simply for doing their jobs. This is not the England I grew up in, the one I wanted so much to belong to,” Einashe adds, connecting the increase in racist commentary with hate crimes that have even gone as far as murder.
Einashe's path to citizenship was not an easy on. In 1994, when he was nine years old, Einashe arrived in London with his parents, fleeing Somalia's devastating decade-long civil war. He grew up between the boroughs of Camden and Colindale, with Kurdish, Bosnian and Kosovar refugees on one side and working class whites on the other. The only black family in the neighborhood, the Einashes were received with hostility. “There were neighbors who would go as far as to throw garbage in our garden. My mother simply picked it up without saying a word.”
In 2001, the same year as the September 11 attacks, Einashe obtained UK citizenship. By that time he had finished secondary school, and by dint of his high grades, was accepted to one of the best universities in the country. It was around that time that things in the country began to change.
“Until that moment,” Einashe says, “British nationality was a mere bureaucratic detail. You got it and the state forgot about you. After 9/11, they began having the citizenship tests, the emphasis on “shared values,” the ceremonies where you swear loyalty to the monarchy and the Kingdom and the mistrust for Muslim citizens.”
During the 2000s, the United Kingdom, like the United States, placed Muslim citizens under scrutiny, especially those who had been born in other countries or had dual citizenship, making many feel like second-class citizens. The country experienced increasing tension after the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, which many Britons blamed on the Muslim community. Post-9/11 actions presented as temporary measures became permanent, including the ability to revoke a person’s British citizenship without a court order, a practice that has been on the rise since Brexit.
The revoking of citizenships has continued to increase under May's government, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “These are almost arbitrary decisions that ought to deeply alarm people both inside the country and out, but are getting scarcely any attention,” Einashe says. He sees in Brexit a point of no return, a fracture in British society between those who endorse the government's anti-European position and the so-called “anti-patriots” like himself who oppose the UK's exit from the European Union.
“I am not an anti-patriot, but the complete opposite,” he says. “My England is the England of multiculturalism, the England that is open to the world, and that is now in danger.”
Apart from the possibility of being stripped of his hard-won citizenship, Einashe fears the vulnerable position in which Brexit will leave thousands of citizens, now that they no longer have access to the protection mechanisms provided by the European legal framework. “Now we are at the mercy of British policies and we no longer have any other authority to turn to.”

author: Leila Nachawati


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How Memory and Digital Media Can Pave the Way to Peace in Colombia · Global Voices
Andrés Lombana-Bermudez

Red de Gestores Virtuales de Memoria (Virtual Managers of Memory Network). Picture used with permission.
In recent years, building a historical memory that is both pluralistic and inclusive has become one of the main strategies for bringing the long armed conflict in Colombia to a close. Peace building endeavors have tried to promote a new narrative of the conflict that brings the victims of war to the foreground, makes visible their stories, dignifies them, and emphasizes their rights.
One of these efforts is the Alfabetizaciones Digitales initiative, from the Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica (National Center of Historical Memory), which has supported local grassroots organizations across the country in the use of digital media tools for storytelling and online publishing.
Examples of the digital media texts that victims of the armed conflict have been creating and publishing on the Internet with the support of the Alfabetizaciones Digitales initiative include interviews with “alabaoras” (Afro-Colombian women singers) from Pogue, Chocó, who explain the significance of “alabaos” or funeral songs; short essays written by women from Caquetá narrating their stories of displacement; photographs from a community museum created by the survivors of a massacre in Granada and hip hop music videos from youth advocating for participation and children rights in Buenaventura.
As Lucely Rivas, an Afro-Colombian displaced woman and member of the Memorias del Rio Atrato project, told Global Voices during an interview:
I think the website and the content we publish on the Internet make memory. We have made memory with our videos and stories.
The half-century long Colombian civil war is one of the world's oldest, and a commonly-cited estimate puts the death toll at almost a quarter of a million people. Millions more have been displaced by the conflict that bitted the government and right wing paramilitaries against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). A peace deal reached and endorsed by congress in December has raised hopes of a new future for the country but many fear difficulties during the implementation.
Since the 2000s, and parallel to the negotiations with guerillas and paramilitaries, the Colombian government has actively promoted building “historical memory” while trying to give a voice to the victims of war. This is part of a larger effort to implement justice, encourage reconciliation, and create a national dialogue on the rights to truth.
In this particular context, the work of local grassroots organizations that support victims through cultural and community activities has become more relevant. For several years, these organizations have helped minorities and marginalized populations affected by violence to be resilient, build community, and articulate their voices.
According to Mariana Posada Moreno, for instance, the Salón del Nunca Más (The Hall of Never Again) project led since 2008 by Asociación de Víctimas Unidad de Granada (ASOVIDA), has helped the community in Granada, Antioquia, to find hope and unite.
Moreno explained the purpose of The Hall of Never Again:
The purpose of this place is to raise awareness and show to anyone who arrives there, by means of art works, photographs, personal logs, and stories, that the victims of this country are not just a number for the State.
The creation of the Colombian Law of Justice and Peace in 2005 and the Law of Victims and Land Restitution in 2011 directly addressed the need for placing the victims rights and their narratives at the center of the peace-building process, and emphasized the state's duty of remembering the violations committed during the armed conflict.
Besides recognizing victims’ rights and emphasizing the need for reparations, the Law of Victims and Land Restitution created the National Center of Historical Memory, an independent institution in charge of building a historical account of the conflict.
The National Center of Historical Memory has since become key in promoting the construction of historical memory in Colombia through research and applied activities that help to reconstruct the long and convoluted history of the armed conflict.
The Center has created several publications based on thousands of victim testimonies and analyses of the war’s origins, including “¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de guerra y dignidad (2013)” (Enough Already! Colombia: Memories of War and Dignity), the most comprehensive report on the state of the war in Colombia to the day.
By actively supporting participation by the victimized population in the peace process and on the construction of a plural and inclusive historical memory, the National Center of Historical Memory has contributed to dignifying and making visible the experiences of the victims of war, and supporting the right to truth, justice, and security from repetition in practice. Alfabetizaciones Digitales (Digital Alphabetization) is one of the initiatives that emerged from the Center in 2013, which has helped local community organizations to amplify their voice by using digital tools and networks.
Alfabetizaciones Digitales was created in response to the need of highlighting the work that grassroots organizations were already performing across Colombian territories. Concerned about making their voices heard by a national audience and participating in the construction of historical memory, members of these organizations expressed their interest in experimenting with the use of new media technologies and the Internet for storytelling purposes.
As Salomón Echavarría, the coordinator of the initiative told Global Voices during an interview:
The initiative responds to the interest of community members in reaching a wider audience and circulating their stories broadly. We provide training and technical support for the development of digital languages, and facilitate workshops in digital storytelling that are adaptable to the needs and resources of local organizations and communities.
In total, 16 projects have been created across Colombia with support from Alfabetizaciones Digitales since 2013. The projects are led by members of grassroots organizations doing memory and community work like the Salón del Nunca Más in Granada, the Asociación de Trabajadores Campesinos del Carare -ATCC- Vida y Paz in Carare, or Fundación Espacios de Convivencia y Desarrollo Social (FUNDESCODES) in Buenaventura.
Other times the projects are created through a collaboration between several grassroots organizations located in a particular region such as as Memorias del Rio Atrato that includes eight  community councils and one organization, Consejo Comunitario Mayor de la  Asociación Campesina Integral del Atrato (COCOMACIA), from Chocó and Antioquia.
Furthermore, Alfabetizaciones Digitales has also fostered the building of a network of local digital media producers distributed through the different country regions. The youths and adults that participate in the workshops become part of a network of “virtual managers of memory” that shares knowledge and offers mutual support.
These virtual managers are in charge of leading the various projects, coordinating the production of multimedia content, and maintaining the websites. Moreover, they have access to a collaborative virtual platform where they share tutorials, tips, and can discuss different issues related to their local projects and digital media production.
The following is an example of one of the digital stories created by Afro-Colombian youths from FUNDESCODES in Buenaventura. A video called “Soy Capaz” (I am capable) that documents how more than 200 children and youths participated in the re-appropriation of a public park in their community, and shared positive messages (What I am capable of…) of hope and peace.
According to a recent manifesto that the virtual managers of memory published on the National Center of Historical Memory website, they are “a network of voices and also a group that has eyes, ears, and microphones across the country. The voices of memory in favor of building a new visible and peaceful country.”
As virtual managers produce and publish stories online, they articulate identities, raise voices, and make visible their territories and populations. Such communication process allows marginalized communities and victims of war to narrate the world in their own terms, to document the cultural practices they do, and to actively participate in the construction of historical memory in Colombia.
The multimedia content produced and published online by the virtual managers reveals the potential of using digital tools and networks for making memory in Colombia. The Alfabetizaciones Digitales initiative is an opportunity to connect with the voices and perspectives of Colombian citizens who — while trapped in the middle of a war between armies — have resisted violence and become resilient. Their stories show us a glimpse of their everyday lives, their neighborhoods, their dramas, and celebrations. Their narratives help to create a more plural consciousness of the past in Colombia, and contribute to building peace in the present and the future.

author: Andrés Lombana-Bermudez


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Inspired by a Pioneering Nigerian Author, Yorùbá Language Advocate Takes to the Internet · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

Yoruba meme created by Ọmọ Yoòbá for the Mother Language Meme Challenge
In 1938, the late Nigerian professor and author Daniel Olorunfẹmi Fagunwa penned the novel “Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀” (The Forest of a Thousand Daemons), which is considered to be the first novel written in the Yorùbá language. His literary works frequently feature Yorùbá hunters whose fantastic adventures led them face-to-face with kings, gods, spirits, and the world of magic, all of which helps to celebrate the Yorùbá culture.
Photo courtesy Ọmọ Yoòbá and used with permission.
These works have also inspired generations of people who also choose to honor the Yorùbá culture and language in their own way, such as Adéṣínà Oríyọmí Ọlásúnkánmi Ayẹni Àkàndá or Ọmọ Yoòbá (The Yorùbá Child) as he prefers to go by with his online presence. In a short interview with Rising Voices, Ọmọ Yoòbá said that reading these works changed his life:
My life turned a new leaf, so I vowed to do more research into my race. So after high school, the interest grew, and I began improving my writing, reading and speaking skills. And after my Polytechnic education in Mass Communications, I knew I had to propagate the Yorùbá heritage to the world and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is via the international network of computers.
Initially, he tried his hand at a number of platforms, including launching a blog and a channel on YouTube, but ultimately settled on Twitter as his medium of choice. The microblogging platform through his @yobamoodua account provides an outlet to prolifically promote his language and culture, as well as frequently contributing to the #LearnYoruba hashtag. He points to his name as a sign of what he would tweet about:
I am Ọmọ Yoòbá, so what else would I tweet about if not something on Yorùbá? All I tweet 24/7 is info about the culture, from language to tradition, important dates in history, historical events, Yorùbá science; medicine, technology, astronomy, and all about the great race.
Ìrèní = four days (ewúrẹ́ jín sí ọ̀fìn, ó gbé inú ọ̀fìn fún ìrèní ➡ the goat fell into the ditch, it stayed there for four days) #InYoruba
— ỌMỌ YOÒBÁ (@yobamoodua) February 17, 2017
While he says there is progress being made with more and more presence of the language and culture online, he still sees work yet to be done. For one, he indicates that the option to translate to and from Yorùbá on Google Translate still produces some results that may not be grammatically correct. The automatic translation option on Twitter recognizes Yorùbá as Vietnamese.
However, the tools that he has chosen to use provide a unique way to share information about the Yorùbá culture, such as this YouTube video where he illustrates the origin of the Yorùbá people and the story of Oduduwa:
Even though technology can play a role in providing a space for Yorùbá to find its equal place next to other global languages, Ọmọ Yoòbá believes that the responsibility starts at home. However, finding the language on the internet may change a person's perception of the importance of the language:
The big problem is from the first agent of socialization; which is the family. Parents do not speak or encourage their offspring, many disregard the language as one for the uncivilised, so tell me, would such a person be interested in such an uncivilised language if encountered online?
Technology surely can attract interest, but Ọmọ Yoòbá also has plans to organize offline events designed to raise the language’s visibility. In May 2017, a Yorùbá quiz and debate competition will take place in Lagos, where secondary students will face off for prizes with the hope of encouraging youth to become active promoters of their language.
Ọmọ Yoòbá summarizes why he works to make sure his language and culture have a place on the internet:
We have stories to tell, stories the world has never seen before, give us the opportunity to tell it and the world would be a better place for all.

author: Eduardo Avila


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Young Iranian Faces Execution Over ‘Anti-Islamic’ Social Media Posts · Global Voices
Mahsa Alimardani

Sina Dehghan faces execution over his posts critical of Islam that he published in public online channels at the age of 19. Image shared widely on social media.
While governments around the world deploy advanced surveillance tactics to monitor the communications of potential terrorists, the Iranian government goes after those who “terrorize” the sanctity of the Islamic regime on digital communication platforms.
Sina Dehghan, a 21-year-old former soldier, has experienced this firsthand. He was arrested in 2015 for his social media posts. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and is now awaiting his fate.
At the age of 19, Dehghan was completing his mandatory military service in the Tehran army barracks when the Revolutionary Guards, a hardline wing of Iran’s armed forces that is accountable to the office of the Supreme Leader, arrested him over a series of public messages he had posted on the messaging platform LINE. A source told the Center for Human Rights in Iran that his posts were against Islam and the Quran.
He was arrested alongside two others, Sahar Eliasi and Mohammad Nouri, who authorities said collaborated with Dehghan in the posts. All three were found guilty of participating in social media channels that insulted or criticized Islam. Eliasi's sentence was reduced to three years upon appeal and Nouri is still awaiting his sentence. Dehghan's death sentence was confirmed by Iran's Supreme Court in late January 2017.
The case against Dehghan rests on a confession that he was pressured to give under false pretenses. Upon his arrest, the Revolutionary Guards deceived Dehghan by telling him if he confessed to the charge of “insulting” the Prophet Mohammad and signed a letter of repentance, he would be set free.
The Revolutionary Guards deceived Dehghan by telling him if he confessed to the charge of “insulting” the Prophet Mohammad and signed a letter of repentance, he would be set free.
Iran's Islamic Penal Code, which criminalises dissent and criticism, states in Article 262 that insulting the Prophet is a crime punishable by death. However, Article 263 of the code says that the accused can have their sentence reduced to 74 lashings if they tell the court the insults were the result of anger or a mistake.
Neither Dehghan's forced confession nor his lawyer allowed him to take advantage of Article 263. Dehghan's family could not afford proper representation, so he received a court-appointed attorney, who the Center for Human Rights in Iran says failed to defend him properly during his trial.
To further complicate Dehghan's unjust situation, a source who requested anonymity for security reasons told supporters that security and judicial authorities promised his family that if they refrained from publicizing his case, Dehghan would have a better chance of being set free. As of late March, with little hope of the January sentence being overturned, Iranians both inside and out of the country have started calling for authorities to spare his life.
#Sina_Dehghan is sentenced to death for posting “Anti-Islamic” content on Social Media in Iran. We must #SaveSina pic.twitter.com/J9Bmc3OrRc
— Mohsen Tavoli (@MTavoli) March 24, 2017
Dehghan's case is particularly tragic as both he and his family had dedicated much effort to the country's military. His grandfather was a “martyr” (or fallen soldier) of the Iran-Iraq war, while Dehghan had served two years in the Iranian military.
پدربزرگ سینا شهید جنگ هشت ساله بوده. خود سینا دوسال خدمت کرده. سینا بیشترازخیلی ازمسئولین به گردن این کشورحق داره. #SaveSina pic.twitter.com/RV6WzMeXbE
— Mohsen Tavoli (@MTavoli) March 24, 2017
Sina's grandfather was a martyr of the eight-year war. Sina himself served two years. Sina has more rights to this country than most of these authorities.
Dehghan's case is a sobering reminder of the security threats Iranians face online. While keeping private communications safe from the government is often considered a person's main defence, a person's public image and words can also make them vulnerable to the ire of an unjust criminal system.
Even the strongest encryption in the world can't protect an Iranian from being penalized for exercising free speech online.

author: Mahsa Alimardani


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China’s Great Firewall Gives Rise to a Robust Industry of Information Smugglers · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Screen capture of @uktimes’ Weibo.
It is common knowledge that China's so-called Great Firewall bars Chinese netizens from accessing overseas websites. A chief side effect of the firewall that is less commonly known among foreigners are the many social media outlets that “smuggle” news from overseas to mainland China.
Hong Kong investigative news platform The Initium has interviewed a number of media workers or so-called “information smugglers” who run social media accounts to translate or repackage content from overseas news sites to mainland China's domestic network.
These information smugglers depend on circumvention tools to access overseas web content.
One woman interviewed by The Initium works for a media outlet that runs official public accounts on Weibo and WeChat. Ms. Yu described her daily routine to the Initium: She uses circumvention tools to access Buzzfeed, Reddit, and Tumblr, and to search for news that mainland Chinese readers may find interesting. She copies the stories and re-writes them in Chinese, adds attractive headlines for local audiences, and then publishes the stories to the outlets’ official accounts.
Thanks to China's pervasive censorship system, “information smuggling” has become a robust sector. According to Yu:
新聞管制壓住了傳統媒體，防火牆擋住了外媒，我就有工作了。
The news censorship system suppresses conventional media (from covering news), the Great Firewall has blocked overseas media. That’s how my job fills in.
Yu explains that she typically writes three stories for the media outlets every day, spending a few hours on each story. Within a few minutes, the newly published post can attract hundreds of “likes” and comments. Since most of the stories are funny pieces that have nothing to do with China, they are less likely to be censored.
Information smuggling practices like these are increasingly common in countries with robust technical censorship infrastructure. In Iran, a non-profit project called Toosheh (“bundle”, in Persian) allows thousands of tech-savvy consumers download packaged files of censored news and media by way of a TV satellite connection. In Cuba, information that is either censored or hard to access (due to slow connection speeds) regularly circulates on thumb drives. Yu has even compared her work to Cuba's Paquete Semanal or “Weekly Package”, a collection of media that is sold each week on Cuba's informal market:
我所做的事情和他們一模一樣——騎在牆上把外面的果子摘進牆裏。唯一的區別可能就是我還得把果子按照國人口味打成營養液；中國人現在太忙了。
What I am doing is exactly the same [as the weekly package] — I ride on the Wall and pick the fruits from outside the Wall. The only distinction maybe, I have to blend the fruit into juice according to my fellow’s taste. People nowadays are too busy.
One of the most popular social media public accounts that “smuggles” overseas content is called “British News Sister” or @uktimes （＠英國報姐). Launched in late 2013, the news outlet publishes mainly entertainment and sensational stories from overseas. Even official media outlets like Global Times and People Daily’s social media accounts have republished their posts. By early 2017, @uktimes had 13.35 million followers on Weibo and 580 thousand subscribers on WeChat. Its average post garners more than 10 million views.
The person who runs @uktimes studied in both the UK and Hong Kong, where she pursued a PhD. She started the account in an effort to share information and experience about studying abroad, never anticipating that it would evolve into an influential social media outlet. She recently resigned from her teaching position at a mainland Chinese university to manage @uktimes.
Another popular outlet for overseas news content is “Northern America Chinese Student Daily” (@北美留學生日報). Unlike @uktimes, the WeChat account of Northern America Chinese Student Daily publishes mainstream political news and its readers are mostly mainland Chinese students studying in Canada and the US. Its headline story has a average 60 thousand views each day and it has become a major information source for overseas Chinese students.
The chief editor of Northern America Chinese Student Daily Lin Guoyu worked at an accounting firm in California after graduating from University of Miami in 2012. He quit his job in 2014 to build his career by running the WeChat public account.
Within one year, Northern America Chinese Student Daily had received a HKD10 million (approximately US$ 1.25 million) investment from a Chinese overseas student service company.
Most of the editors working for news outlets which select and repackage overseas news and import them to Chinese readers do not have journalistic training. More often than not, they prioritize things like click rates over hard-hitting public interest journalism.
A former editor from Northern America Chinese Student Daily told the Initium:
基本上這個工作誰都可以做，會英文就行，也確實什麼樣的人都在做。…因為翻譯錯誤被要求重翻的可能性很小；編輯擔任的角色不是檢查事實，而是提高文章的『爆點』和可讀性。如果原文是某校學生受到『性侵』，編輯就會把題目改成『強姦』。
Anyone can do this job. You just need to know English. And that’s exactly how the media is run… Very rarely that a person would be asked to re-translate an article; the role of the editors is not to do fact checking but make it more attractive and reader friendly. If the original text is – a school student was “sexually assaulted”, the editor would change it to “raped”.
“Northern America Chinese Student Daily” has made similar mistakes. On 30 August 2016, the public account translated an article by University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, originally titled “Free Speech is the Basis of a True Education” to “Amid escalating political correctness, the President of the University of Chicago stands up against restriction on free speech.”
Netizens soon after pointed out that the translation turned the original article into a sensational piece. Some expressed concern that the headline was altered in an effort to appeal to the anti-political correctness sentiments shared among overseas Chinese students.
Some information smugglers even translate patently false news in an effort to attract clicks. As a Chinese-American journalist observed, this came to light in Chinese social media “reports” published during the US presidential election:
在美國大選期間，英文世界內的許多低質量內容、甚至包括假新聞網站上的內容，都被營銷號不加篩選地包裝成新聞大量進口。像『Spirit Cooking』（『邪教門』）、『希拉里暗殺官員』等消息，在美國只被當做花邊新聞傳播，大媒體大多並沒有報導；而中文世界裏許多營銷號都添油加醋把它當做當天新聞頭條，給很多人留下了『希拉里那邊稀奇古怪的負面新聞很多，不可能全是假的吧』的印象。
During the US election, local quality contents or even fake news were massively imported by the social media public accounts. Fake news like “spirit cooking” and “Hillary Clinton assassination of government officials has been denied by fact checkers and most mainstream media did not even report on the smear. Yet in the Chinese world, many public accounts have placed these fake news on the headlines and left people an impression that “all these negative reports and stories about Hillary Clinton cannot be all fake.”
Despite the spread of fake news and distorted information, the information smuggling sector will continue to grow, thanks to the Great Firewall, the thirst for information outside the wall and capital investors who appear to see the flow of information as a profit-making endeavor rather than a public good.

author: Oiwan Lam


text:
Georgia Really, Really Wanted a Visa-Free Agreement with the EU, and Now It’s Party Time · Global Voices
Akhal-Tech Collective

The Georgian flag. Own work based on ‘File:Brdzanebuleba 31.pdf’ by the author SKopp. Creative commons listed.
Ex-Soviet Georgia began on March 28 a two-day celebration marking the successful conclusion of the country's long-running bid for citizens to enjoy visa-free travel to the countries of the European Union.
Visa-free travel in EU is effect! Congratulations, Georgia is Europe!!! pic.twitter.com/gjonXW0kQL
— Kakha Gargulia (@drgargulia) March 28, 2017
#GeorgiaEUVisaFree: #Tbilisi International #Airport on the 1st day of #EU visa waiver for #Georgia‘s citizens. pic.twitter.com/6arZlSDBz3
— agenda.ge (@agenda_ge) March 28, 2017
As the Georgia-focussed website Democracy and Freedom Watch reported:
There were celebrations in the capital Tbilisi on Monday as Georgian nationals may travel without a visa to Europe’s vast borderless Schengen area from March 28.
Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili was among government officials who attended a two hour long gala concert on Europe Square marking the end of two days of celebrations. The concert included performances by bands, an orchestra and the opera choir and ended with fireworks and the Georgian national anthem.
From Tuesday, Georgian nationals may visit Europe’s vast borderless Schengen area for up to 90 days in any 180 day period. Also Georgian passport holders living in the breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia qualify for the visa waiver system.
Customs personnel have been given special instruction to give advice about procedures and check people’s documents, the interior minister said at a special briefing.
Although negotiations started as far back as 2013 with a so-called visa liberalization action plan (VLAP), it took until March this year until Georgia finally signed the agreement. The document was published in the EU journal on March 8 and enters into force on Tuesday.
The agreement was a long time in coming, as several countries in the EU suffering from “migration fatigue” looked to stall, DFW reported. But the end result is being greeted with jubilation in a society that has become evermore oriented on the West amid political tensions with Russia that peaked during a military conflict over the breakaway regions in 2008.
Former Global Voices Caucasus editor and Tbilisi-based journalist Onnik Krikorian tweeted a much-shared image on social media depicting classic Georgian fare khinkhali (meat dumplings) on a blue plate, echoing the EU flag.
Absolutely brilliant. Image of the moment… :) #EU #Schengen #VisaFree #GeorgiaEUVisaFree #Tbilisi pic.twitter.com/xYBWSIN1b3
— Onnik J. Krikorian (@onewmphoto) March 27, 2017
Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, meanwhile, was keen to bill the new status as representative of a “return” to Europe, rather than a first welcome.
#Georgia is returning to the European family #VisaFree ???? pic.twitter.com/kRWOewbb6x
— Giorgi Kvirikashvili (@KvirikashviliGi) March 27, 2017


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Iranians See Arrests and Intimidation of Telegram Administrators and Journalists Ahead of the Elections · Global Voices
Article 19

Iran's revolutionary guards arrests reformist Telegram channel administrators ahead of the May Presidential elections. Image used under CC 4.0 from here.
A version of this was published on the Article 19 website. This version is republished as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Iranians are witnessing a crackdown against citizens using online platforms just two months before the presidential elections, to be held on 19 May 2017.
On March 14, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards arrested 12 administrators of channels on the messaging app Telegram, all of which had expressed support for the reformist political faction and the moderate President Hassan Rouhani.
Telegram gained notability during the 2016 Parliamentary elections, as a platform that aided significant gains for reformist and moderate members of parliament. Notable events, such as former reformist President Mohammad Khatami's four-minute viral video encouraging Iranians to vote for reformist and moderate candidates part of the coalition of the “list of hope” went viral through Telegram channels (the popular politician is now under a media ban.) The Revolutionary Guards, a hardline wing of Iran’s armed forces, accountable to the office of the Supreme Leader, have previously arrested users for posting immoral or obscene content on Telegram. But this appears to be the first time crackdowns have focused explicitly on political affiliation.
The Telegram channels affected by the crackdown include the reformist, or pro-President Hassan Rouhani channels of Eslahtalaban News, Eslahaat News, Majmeye Eslahtalaban and Haamiyan Dolat, among others.
Online sources indicate that these channels have either been deleted from Telegram and/or have not published anything since the arrests. Two individuals have thus far been identified as the arrested administrators: Saeed Naghdy and Ali Ahmadian, both of whom are associated with reformist media and the administration of reformist channels. Ahmadian is believed to have run the Eslahaat News channel.
Crackdowns on freedom of expression leading up to the May 2017 Presidential elections are also noticeable outside the digital sphere. Reformist journalists such as Ehsan Mazandarani and Hengameh Shahidi have also been arrested for their independent and critical reporting.
Ehsan Mazandarani, who was recently released from prison was re-arrested on March 12 at this home, by the intelligence units of the Revolutionary Guards. Tehran’s public prosecutor said he was re-arrested in order to serve out the remainder of his sentence from previous charges. However his wife and lawyer produced documents that proved Mazandarani had already completed the two years when he was released on 11 February 2017.
Mazandarani told his family that he is on a dry hunger strike. Relatives have reported on social media that his wife Malihe Hosseini was fired from Farikhtegan Newspaper on Wednesday following his arrest.
It is worth noting that these events all took place during the period of the Nowruz holidays, when government is not in session, making it even more difficult to ensure that due process of law is upheld.
These arrests and account closures have already limited the degree to which Iranians can access and share information and ideas about the electoral race without fearing repercussions. If the crackdown continues, it will only further restrict public participation in the political moment.

author: Article 19


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RuPaul on the RuNet: ‘Drag Race’ Catches on in Russia · Global Voices
Ben Cohen

Screenshot from the RuPaul Season Nine Super Trailer. Source: YouTube.
It’s dramatic, it’s campy, it’s gay, and it comes with Russian subtitles: since 2014, a group of volunteer translators on the Russian social media network VKontakte has been working to bring “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” an award-winning American reality show that documents international gender-bending superstar RuPaul Charles’ search for America’s next top drag queen, to the Russian-language internet.
Since forming three years ago, the RuPaul VKontakte group has attracted a dedicated team of 10 translators and has expanded to reach an audience of over 5,000 regular viewers across the former Soviet Union. They’ve translated over 70 episodes of the show (now in its ninth season), in which men assume female personae, dress as women, and compete for the title of “America’s Drag Superstar” through a series of grueling performance challenges.
For Nikita, a gay high school student in Russia who helps translate Drag Race, the show has provided a much-needed reminder that it’s okay to be himself. Nikita, who lives in a country where an “anti-gay propaganda law” and conservative cultural norms marginalize sexual minorities, told RuNet Echo that the show demonstrates that not only is it okay to change one’s gender expression and embrace one’s sexual orientation, but it is a freedom that should be celebrated and even rewarded.
Cover photo for the “Watch RuPaul's Drag Race” VKontakte group.
Presenting the show to a wider audience in Russia is no small task. While it is easy enough to watch online, capturing all the nuances of the show for the Russian-speaking world is a challenge. Much of the dialogue in Drag Race includes slang that is particular to the LGBT and drag communities in the U.S.—a lexicon that is not as developed in Russian.
Though drag culture is less developed in Russia than in the West, it does exist, largely underground. Known as travesti, it’s been around in Russia for decades and persists despite state pressure against LGBT groups and a rise in hate crimes against members of the LGBT community. In 2014, Nightline profiled a Russian drag performer who fled the country for the U.S. after violent attacks at the club in Moscow where he used to perform.
Translating one episode of the show can take anywhere from four days to two and a half weeks. As soon as an episode becomes available, the translators communicate through a group chat and decide amongst themselves who will take which section, usually a 10-20 minute clip of episodes that run up to 45 minutes long. Everyone sends in their translations to a designated editor who then splices together the subtitles. “Everyone does as much as they can,” Nikita said.
Still, sometimes the translators get stuck. Take, for example, the rap challenge in season 6, during which contestant Joslyn Fox (whose real name is Patrick Joslyn) used the word “motherfishin.’” In drag culture, “fishy” describes a drag queen who has such a feminine appearance they could be mistaken for being female in real life. And to a native or near-native English speaker, the play on words with a certain expletive would not be lost. But without such a vocabulary in Russian, the play on words could be lost to foreign viewers. Nikita explained, “The biggest problem with translating RuPaul’s Drag Race is a lack of developed drag culture in Russia, and with that, a lack of vocabulary associated with it.”
“I thought about [motherfishin’] for two months and then I had an epiphany,” Elizabeth Rusakova, one of the group's primary translators, told RuNet Echo. “There is a fish called sterliad’ (sterlet), and it sounds like a combination of the word sterva (witch) and bliat’ (f***)…In my head, something clicked, and I realized that is the perfect word.”
RuPaul Charles by David Shankbone. Source: Flickr.
Sometimes, it’s a little less complicated. When one of the contestants wins a challenge, RuPaul always tells them “Condragulations!” which the team on VKontakte routinely changes to pozdragliayu instead of the usual pozdravliayu (congratulations), thus creating an equivalent vocabulary for Russian viewers.
In order to comply with Russian law, however, the VKontakte group's administrators are forced to maintain tight control over who can access the episodes, most of which are pirated from other sites. “We accept people into the group who are 18 and older. If we can’t see the person’s age on their profile, or they have no photos posted, we ignore the request. If a person doesn’t look their age, we also don’t accept them into the group and sometimes we ask them to confirm their age in a personal message,” Elena, a group administrator, explained to RuNet Echo.
Despite the lengths they have to go to adapt to the challenges of the Russian media space, legally and linguistically, RuPaul’s Russian translation team is in unanimous agreement that their work is vital for fans, LGBT-identifying or otherwise. Another translator, Elizabeth, told RuNet Echo that “Mama Ru is a sip of freedom in a conservative society that constantly surrounds us. The show inspires and allows you to understand that you can be yourself. Mama Ru is a great source of strength.”
Nikita was a blunt about the challenges the group faces, even among the LGBT community. “The gay community in Russia is very intolerant. Masculine or ‘natural’ homosexuals think that all persecution against gays occurs because of the more feminine gays. In turn, they think that because some of them sit in the closet, gays will be targeted by homophobes.” Drag Race’s embrace of femininity takes a stand against those in the gay community who discriminate against people with more feminine identities. The problem often plays out on gay dating sites, where men who identify as more masculine or ‘masc’ often shun those who identify as more feminine by noting “no fems” on their profiles. RuPaul himself has addressed the issue by stating that “the oppressed take on the characteristics of their oppressors.” Nevertheless, Nikita sees the show as a source of hope. “There is even a split in the community and I think that this show can help bring people together.”
Note: translators’ full names were not used in this article to protect their identities because members of Russia's LGBT community are a discriminated-against minority.

author: Ben Cohen


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Russia’s Youngster Uprising · Global Voices
Kevin Rothrock

Image: Pixabay, edited by Kevin Rothrock
Every time Russia’s political opposition manages to hold its act together long enough to stage mass demonstrations, the nation’s pundits and activists announce to their compatriots that they’ve “woken up in a new country.” The thirst for an overnight metamorphosis is powerful, and last Sunday’s nationwide protests have introduced Russia’s latest great hope: the youngsters who make up the first generation to grow up almost entirely under Vladimir Putin.
Alexey Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader and presidential hopeful who spearheaded last Sunday’s movement, has apparently tapped the political reserves of this new generation.
Not only did young people turn out in large numbers at the demonstrations last weekend, but they’ve also invigorated Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign by challenging educators in classrooms and sharing footage of teachers and administrators trying to indoctrinate students against political activism.
On March 28, Sergei Zvezda, writing for the website TJournal, reviewed the most publicized confrontations between students and teachers across Russia in the last month. RuNet Echo summarizes that report below.
On March 28, an activist shared a video recorded in a classroom at Tomsk State University, where lecturer Nikolai Pichkurov berated his students for attending the local anti-corruption protest on Sunday. He called them “freaks” and implied that they only participated in the demonstration to earn some money.
“Find other ways to earn an income,” he begged the classroom, before explaining that corruption is a normal, if not essential, element in every government. “If a state has no corruption, it means that’s a state nobody needs,” Pichkurov reasoned, comparing Sunday’s demonstrations to the protests that helped topple the USSR in 1991.
At a school outside Bryansk, a few days before last Sunday’s protests, police walked into a high school classroom and arrested Maxim Losyev for urging his fellow students to attend the rally. After he was taken away for questioning, the school’s principal sat down with his classmates and lectured them for nine minutes about the dangers of following Alexey Navalny, insulting their grasp of civics and history.
RuNet Echo translated the exchange into English. You can read it here.
On March 16, students at a state university in Komsomolsk-on-Amur (about 700 miles northeast of Vladivostok) and several local people filed for a permit to hold an anti-corruption demonstration on Sunday, March 26. Within a few hours, the students say administrators from their university contacted them, mysteriously aware of their permit request, and threatened to expel them from school.
Sergei Zhilenko told the news site TJournal that he and his two schoolmates later withdrew their application to the city, after all three said they received threatening calls from the university, and after they learned that a city council member had also requested a permit for an anti-corruption protest for the same Sunday.
Zhilenko says he was contacted repeatedly by his school’s deputy dean of academic affairs, who worried initially that the protest was aimed at corruption in their university, he says. Even after he explained that the demonstration was more open-ended, Zhilenko says he was warned that Russia’s Federal Security Service had taken an interest in his apparently suspicious activities.
The university’s provost later denied accusations that the school attempted in any way to pressure students against political activism.
In early March, a lecturer at Siberian Federal University in Krasnoyarsk says he was forced to quit his job because he showed his students Alexey Navalny’s investigative film accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of large-scale corruption — the same video that helped spark last Sunday’s protests and now has more than 14 million views on YouTube.
Konstantinov says he was forced to resign because of specific objections (by a student’s parents, he thinks) to Navalny’s politics. “If I’d spent a lecture telling the students about, let’s say, the animal kingdom of the Siberian taiga — another topic that falls outside [the curriculum] — it’s unlikely that I would have been reprimanded and fired,” he said later in an interview with Dozhd television.
On March 26, the day of Russia’s Sunday protests, several students at universities in the Rostov area shared messages they suddenly began receiving from the local Council of Proctors, urging them not to participate in the anti-corruption demonstrations. Some students say they were even threatened with expulsion, if they attended the protests.
Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s presidential campaign manager, also publicized these reports, tweeting a photograph of a list he said Rostov students were forced to sign, pledging not to attend the anti-corruption rallies:
В колледжах в Ростове-на-Дону учащихся под угрозой отчисления заставляют подписывать бумагу о том, что они не пойдут на митинг завтра pic.twitter.com/b7d0WXRrp0
— Leonid Volkov (@leonidvolkov) March 25, 2017
Roman Koterev, a student at Orenburg State Pedagogical University, ran into trouble with his provost in March, after he started distributing flyers designed to look like banknotes, encouraging people to learn more about Navalny’s investigation into Dmitry Medvedev. He says he was summoned by the school’s provost (a member of the country’s ruling political party, United Russia), who warned him that officials from the Education Ministry had inquired about his activism.
At Sunday’s anti-corruption protest in Vladimir, local students told journalists that teachers at Vladimir State University had lectured classrooms directly about Navalny in advance of the demonstration, calling him a Western agent, and warning that his YouTube video “brainwashes” young, impressionable minds. Teachers also told students about Navalny’s felony conviction in an embezzlement case, which Navalny’s supporters say is the result of a politicized trial.
On March 17, Farida Kulmukhametova, a lecturer at Moscow State Conservatory, forced Daniil Pilchen, a fourth-year student, to read aloud to the class a list of “fifty columnists” and “traitors.” The list included several of Russia’s most prominent contemporary journalists and entertainers. The student, however, made a mockery of the assignment, reading the list ironically with exaggerated affect, drawing laughs from the class.
Kulmukhametova then took back the list and finished reading it herself.
On March 23, Pilchen says Kulmukhametova threatened to get him expelled or maybe pull his funding. A week later, however, it was Kulmukhametova who left the school, resigning suddenly.

author: Kevin Rothrock


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Thai Junta’s Media Regulator Suspends Voice TV for ‘Unreasonable Criticism’ and ‘Biased Content’ · Global Voices
Zashnain Zainal

Voice TV is suspended for seven days in Thailand. Photo from Facebook page of Voice TV
Thailand's media regulator, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC), has ordered the seven-day suspension of Voice TV for allegedly violating rules set by the military-backed National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO).
The army grabbed power in 2014 and it continues to control the bureaucracy through the officials it appointed in the NCPO.
Voice TV is owned by the family of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Some believe the suspension of the TV network is intended to intimidate the ousted leader.
It was the military which petitioned for the suspension of Voice TV by arguing that the TV network produced false reports from March 15 to March 20 about the alleged role of the state in the summary killing of a Lahu activist, abuse of power by some military personnel, and police involvement in a controversial casino located in the Thai-Cambodian disputed zone.
But Prateep Kongsib, the station’s director of content and news, disagrees with the ruling:
The reason we were suspended was due to the NBTC’s claim that we have repeatedly committed violations that affect national security and have presented one-sided reports, of which we beg to differ. This is because we believe opinion is not a threat to national security as long as it is factual.
Voice TV logo
Voice TV also released a statement insisting that its reports adhere to media ethics and that the station cooperated with authorities in response to the complaints against some of its programs:
Voice TV insisted that we have been strictly reporting with media ethics. Even though Voice TV may provide different views, we insist that the contents do not harm national security.
Voice TV has clarified our stance and has continually cooperated with NBTC's programming subcommittee. We have also constantly discussed with media monitor committee and all involved parties to revise the programmes according to their requests.
This is not the first time that NBTC has suspended a media network for “undermining” national security. Since it grabbed power in 2014, the NCPO has ordered the NBTC to strictly monitor and regulate media networks that threaten social harmony and the “happiness” of Thai people.
The suspension order was criticized by various media groups. The Thai Journalist Association and Thai Broadcast Journalists Association signed a joint statement describing the ruling as a violation of press freedom.
The Southeast Asian Press Alliance pointed out that the decision to suspend the whole TV network is extreme:
The NBTC’s suspension of VOICE TV is an extremely disproportionate response — an overkill shutting down the entire station and all its programming — to broadcast content that is well within the station’s prerogative.
Some Twitter users are wondering why the NBTC is focusing on the TV network owned by the country’s former prime minister:
The TV channel owned by Thaksin’s son is targeted (and punished) by authorities and regulators repeatedly for their political commentary. https://t.co/lDneo5Afcc
— Saksith Saiyasombut (@SaksithCNA) March 27, 2017
Funny how one outlet of all #ThaiMedia keeps getting punished for “one-sided” broadcast, or something or other. https://t.co/t8iI2pQ2yv
— Kaewmala (@Thai_Talk) March 27, 2017
The NCPO says it hopes to restore normalcy in the country through political reconciliation and allowing civilian rule, but it's unclear how they plan to realize these goals if they continue to restrict the work of the media sector.

author: Zashnain Zainal


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The UK Is Among the World’s Largest Suppliers of Weapons—and Is Making Arms Boycotts Illegal · Global Voices
Maya Schkolne

Protest against UK arms sales to Israel on November 21, 2014 in London. Source: BDS Movement Website.
The United Kingdom’s arms industry is ranked as one of the largest globally, second only to the United States. It has been implicated in atrocities and abuses in varied contexts, recently evident in the arming of cluster bombs to its primary consumer Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen. The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has taken the UK government to court over these allegations on multiple occasions:
Why we're in court to say UK must #StopArmingSaudi pic.twitter.com/GEtfb7tYYk 3,500 children killed or injured in Yemen https://t.co/Ku6I1wDhKh
— CAAT (@CAATuk) 8 February 2017
Alongside the often-cited examples of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel, weapons made in the UK have also been sold en masse in Mexico, where murders, mass disappearances, and mass displacement of civilians in the ongoing drug war have made the country one of the most violent on earth. The UK's security and military export licenses to Turkey were valued at £466 million from 2013-2016 and have been used in Turkey's widespread, brutal repression of civil society and Kurds.
Through “open” trade conventions such as the Security & Policing (S&P) exhibition and closed events such as the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) fair, the UK allows local and international companies to showcase some of the world’s most lethal weapons. The UK is also home to one of the world's leading suppliers of surveillance software, Gamma Group.
The “Stop The Arms Fair!” network, a group of activists who sought to stop the upcoming DSEI fair in September 2017, recently highlighted the UK's role in routinely selling surveillance gear and weapons to governments notorious for abusing human rights including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Ethiopia, and Venezuela.
“Closed to public” UK arms fair sells surveillance gear and poison gas to torturers. https://t.co/ptMPHgXAhf
— Stop The Arms Fair! (@StopTheArmsFair) 11 March 2017
Journalist Cahal Milmo recently wrote on inews.co.uk how:
The Government has approved more than 152 licences to export non-lethal arms abroad since 2010, including some £182,000 of tear gas or irritant ammunition due to be sent to Saudi Arabia in 2015 and crowd control ammunition worth £6.1m cleared for sale to the United Arab Emirates in 2014.
As the UK negotiates its exit from the European Union, it has its sights set on expanding this arena, according to both the post-Brexit green paper and one of the ministers for Exiting the EU, Member of Parliament David Jones.
In February this year, the UK doubled down on this position when it announced plans to make it unlawful for local councils, National Health Service (NHS) Trusts, public bodies and certain university student unions to boycott, divest from or sanction an industry or state “other than where formal legal sanctions, embargoes and restrictions have been put in place by the Government.”
The UK wants to make it illegal for public bodies with government funding to boycott, divest from or sanction an industry or state.
The boycott law builds on consistent efforts by the Department for Communities and Local Government to bar publicly funded bodies from boycotting countries, or tenders from suppliers based in other countries, on ethical grounds. This affects procurement fund policies for purchasing goods and services, as numerous public bodies have ethical procurement policies preventing them from investing in or buying specific kinds of products. It also affects how these bodies invest in pension pots, where funds are merged into “pooled funds” or “wealth funds”. Government ministers have warned that penalties for breaching this law will be “severe.”
In response to this guidance, one of the largest trade unions in the UK, UNISON, emphasized: “Investment policy should be a matter for the scheme members and their decision makers, not for a government to intervene”. Last year, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association that represents over 1,300 pension schemes also stressed that these rules could hamper the best interests of pension fund members.
‘Stop The Arms Fair’ protest against UK's arming of Israel on September 7, 2015. Source: Facebook.
Many campaigns recognize the historically crucial role of local councils in furthering human rights and in strengthening processes that impact international norms. In the 1960s and 1970s, more than 100 local authorities in the UK opted to ban South African goods, and in 1981, Strathclyde Council ceased its pension fund investments in companies with South African subsidiaries.
More recently, in 2014 Leicester City Council passed a policy to boycott products from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank in an effort to protect Palestinians’ rights. In 2015, Birmingham City Council threatened not to renew its waste disposal contract with the French waste management company Veolia unless it pulled its work from the West Bank. In response to such actions, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid maintained, “We will clamp down on these inappropriate and needless boycotts once and for all.” Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock added that the boycott ban “will help prevent damaging and counter-productive local foreign policies undermining our national security.”
“We will clamp down on these inappropriate and needless boycotts once and for all.”
Ryvka Barnard, a Senior Campaigns Officer at the UK-based ‘War on Want‘ activist organisation, says that the UK government has explicitly targeted theBoycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement — which, among other things, calls for an end to Israel's occupation of Palestinian land — and anti-arms trade movements as part of a general crackdown on human rights and consumer choice.
Ryvka Barnard, @WarOnWant – govt has explicitly targeted #BDS movement and anti-arms trade – part of general govt crackdown on liberties
— Oxford IAW 2017 (@OxfordIAW) 24 February 2016
The regulation on banning boycotts will supposedly follow the World Trade Organisation’s Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), focusing on international market access, to treat suppliers without fear or favour. The agreement has “opened procurement activities worth an estimated US$1.7 trillion annually to international competition (i.e. to suppliers from GPA parties offering goods, services or construction services).” While it may be inconvenient for the UK to recognize, War on Want emphasizes that the GPA “absolutely allows for boycotts/exclusions of companies based on their practices, just not based arbitrarily on their countries of origin.”
The UK regulations currently hone in on fossil fuels, tobacco products, products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and companies involved in the arms trade. Yet Andrew Smith of CAAT maintains these curbs could have serious repercussions on all campaign groups.
The main thrust of the boycott ban in the UK is to eliminate pressures from calls for a two-way arms embargo on Israel by groups such as War on Want and from councils to boycott Israeli settlement products. Hence, the anti-boycott law will force publicly funded institutions to submit to the UK’s foreign policy interests; an illuminating move in light of its arms trade, particularly when it comes to Israel.
The anti-boycott law will force publicly funded institutions to submit to the UK’s foreign policy interests.
UK arms applications for export licenses are supposedly “assessed on a case by case basis against strict criteria,” with prohibitions against arms used for external aggression, internal repression or other criminal behavior. But the terms under which a specific weapon is classified as such are murky.
In practice, it appears that minimal reviews take place. The criteria for assessment are open to broad interpretation, and very few arms export licenses have been disallowed or revoked. Barnard has emphasized that the UK does not adequately regulate arms sales: while it highlighted Israel as a country of concern through its own assessment process, in 2016 it approved over £100 million in arms exports to Israel.
The UK-Israel arms trade is mutually beneficial and extremely profitable to both governments.
With its military sector composed of over 200 private and public companies and advertising that promises weapons that are “combat-proven in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, Israel has become the leading exporter of drones in the world. In 2012 it was ranked as the sixth largest arms exporter; with the value in its exports doubling from US$3.5 billion in 2004-2007 to US$7.1 billion from 2008-2011.
Israel sells arms to the UK valued at millions of pounds, and the IT security firm Elbit Systems assisted in providing the UK with US$110 million of drone technology for its use in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, the Israeli military and Israeli companies rely on specialized UK defense companies for ‘dual use’ weapons that can be used for both military and civilian deployment.
The CAAT, War on Want and Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) documented this relationship in a joint report entitled “Arming Apartheid: UK complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.”
This report includes details on the role of G4S, one of the largest security companies in the world, based in the UK. Accused of complicity in a range of abuses, in 2014 the company terminated some aspects of its work with Israel; however, the campaign against G4S in Israel is far from over.
Protest against G4S by ‘War on Want’ on March 10, 2016. Source: Facebook
In 2005, the Minister of Defence granted a venture contract worth almost £1 billion to the UAV Tactical Systems Ltd (U-TacS), an undertaking by Thales UK and Elbit Systems. This ensured the development of the UK’s Watchkeeper WK450 surveillance drone, which War on Want warns is based on a model that was “field tested” on occupied Palestinians during attacks on Gaza.
The UK also approves licenses for companies that sell components of weapons to Israel, including the Hermes drone. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) uses this drone to both monitor and bombard Palestinians in Gaza. This was especially evident during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 in which approximately 1,460 Palestinians were killed.
Using refined surveillance technology to identify targets and lead missile and smart bomb strikes, the Hermes drone has been described by the Israeli air force as “the backbone of (its) targeting and reconnaissance missions.”
The UK not only provides Israel with drones and drone technology, weapons components, weapons control, targeting equipment and ammunition, but also bulletproof garments, small arms ammunition and armored vehicles, many of which are used to target, kill and repress Palestinians.
It is clear that if the boycott law goes ahead as planned, it will hedge public freedoms. Making the non-violent calls for boycott and divestment a criminal offense will intimidate public bodies and refuse them the chance to disassociate from the deeply rooted and expansive arms trade between the UK and Israel. And as Amnesty International’s UK economic relations program director Peter Frankental asked:
Where’s the incentive for companies to ensure there are no human rights violations…when public bodies cannot hold them to account by refusing to award them contracts?

author: Maya Schkolne


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Uganda’s Assistant Inspector General Is the Third Government Official Murdered in As Many Years · Global Voices
Jinja Jinja

A screenshot of a video of Andrew Felix Kaweesi during a recent press conference.
The Assistant Inspector General of the Uganda Police Force, Andrew Felix Kaweesi, who was also the police spokesperson and head of the Human Resource Development department, was brutally murdered by four gunmen who were riding motorcycles (commonly called boda boda), on March 17, 2017. He was only 48 years old. The shooting took place as he was leaving his home in Kulambiro, a surburb of Kampala, the capital, to go to work. The gunmen also claimed the lives of Kaweesi's driver, Godfrey Mambewa, and his bodyguard, corporal Kenneth Erau.
Kaweesi is the third government official to be killed in this manner within a three-year period. First was senior principal state attorney Joan Kagezi, who was working on several high profile cases. One of these was the July 2010 twin bombings, which took place during a screening of the World Cup finals, killing 74 people and injuring another 70; the militant group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for that attack. Kagezi was supposed to lead a witness in testimony about how the explosives were assembled and brought to Kampala, but she was killed on March 30, 2015 as she stopped by a fruit vendor on her way home. Three of her children were with her at the time; they were not physically harmed.
Next was Mohammed Kiggundu, a former commander of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kiggundu became a government soldier about a decade ago. In November 2016, gunmen ambushed his car and peppered it with more than 40 bullets; Kiggundu and his bodyguard both died at the scene.
The gunmen used motorbikes in all three of the killings. Although suspects were arrested in the aftermath of the first two murders, nothing further has happened in the judicial process. The fact that the cases remain unsolved was not easily forgotten by social media users:
@tufre80 we are a forgetful nation. Joan Kagezi, Robinah Kiyingi, Muslim Clerics,shot with impunity. No convincing arrests/convictions
— She Wolf® (@Shewolfmo) March 17, 2017
Several Muslim clerics have been shot in Uganda over the last ten years; the police have said there is a link to the ADF. The rebel group's leader was arrested more than two years ago and remains in police custody. Many netizens seemed to agree, though, that anyone who fires close to 80 bullets at a car in broad daylight are not just ordinary assailants:
@tufre80 The timing of the murder is worrying. One would be blind to think that these are random boda boda thugs.
— Maggie Nanyonga (@maggienanyonga) March 17, 2017
In footage captured moments after this latest murder, the voices of grieving people are heard in the background, asking why would anyone kill Kaweesi, a family man and calm policeman. Kaweesi had three children and was expecting a fourth.
About 17 suspects have so far been arrested for questioning.
Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, released a statement about the murder on his Facebook page:
As a consequence of these repeated murders in the city and other towns,
I have directed the immediate installation of cameras in all major towns of Uganda and along the highways. We have been planning to do this project for some time but we have been postponing it on account of other priorities like roads and electricity […]
During a vigil held for Kaweesi, the president said that the police force has been infiltrated by thugs and asked the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to clean up the force, especially the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
Members of Parliament and other political leaders also spoke out about Kaweesi's death:
Opposition leader, Retired Colonel Dr. Kizza Besigye, said that Ugandans are living in a mafia state where organized crime is thriving:
One social media user expressed her concern:
The insecurity in this country is so scary. Andrew Felix Kaweesi is gone in a blink of an eye.
— Sarah Biryomumaisho (@BiryomumaishoB) March 17, 2017
Though on the opposite side of the political divide (police would often stop demonstrations by the country's opposition), another Twitter user empathized with the loss Kaweesi's family was experiencing:
Despite it all, I would not wish Andrew Felix Kaweesi dead. He is a father with a family to sustain. #Kaweesishot
— Lydia Ainomugisha (@Lydiapromise) March 17, 2017
Urban Television quoted a bishop speaking at his burial:
Bishop Kaggwa: #Kaweesi has left us a challenge & let us go back challenged to transform our communities#RIPKaweesi #PMLIVE Updates. pic.twitter.com/GC7FUBpvv5
— Urban Television (@UrbanTVUganda) March 21, 2017
Twitter user Bernard Sabiti noted:
Another indicator of #Kaweesi‘s moral fiber: No other ‘widows’ except Annet Kaweesi are showing up. Unusual for an ‘African Man’ #RIPKaweesi
— Bernard Sabiti (@BernardSabiti) March 20, 2017
In Africa, it is quite common for mistresses of the deceased to make their presence known at the funeral.
Sabiti also shared a photo which he felt illustrated Kaweesi's humility:
Footage of #kaweesi calming down a young, drunk erratic FDC supporter in the run up to the 2016 elections showed his humanity. #RIPKaweesi pic.twitter.com/aJmWuBHPXN
— Bernard Sabiti (@BernardSabiti) March 20, 2017
On Facebook, the Daily Monitor newspaper posted the following message, highlighting Kaweesi's integrity:
One time, I was called by a colleague to talk to him to bail him out from a traffic offence but when I called Afande Kaweesi, he openly told me that he couldn’t bend the law to help the journalist. He ordered the journalist to pay a fine.
Andrew Felix Kaweesi was laid to rest on March 21, 2017, at his ancestral home in Lwengo district, Uganda. As at the time of publication, there have been no further developments in the case.

author: Jinja Jinja