text:
Malaria has affected over 5 million people in Burundi so far this year · Global Voices
Liam Anderson

A mother and child recover from malaria in a hospital in Burundi. The Burundi government provides free health care for pregnant women and children under five, Burundi, March 12, 2009. Photo used with permission from UNDP via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In Burundi this year, malaria has already affected 5,738,661 million people — that's about half its population, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By July 21, 1,801 people had died of the virus, according to Burundi's Ministry of Public Health.
Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite, has long afflicted Burundians and the entire East African region, but this is a marked increase since earlier this year and a 97 percent increase compared to the same period in 2018.
Those afflicted experience high fever, body aches and pains, chills, nausea and sometimes dehydration and delirium.
WHO monitors outbreaks regularly. It said the number of malaria cases had reached epidemic proportions in May — then at about 3 million. OCHA reported large parts of the country had reached epidemic status – 34 of 46 health districts – particularly toward the north.
According to the Ministry of Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS’s epidemiological data, five million cases of malaria were recorded in the first six months of the year. This represents a 97 percent increase compared to the same period in 2018. Screenshot from United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Yet, the government is not ready to call the malaria crisis an epidemic:
Authorities in #Burundi must swallow their pride and declare malaria as a national disaster. People are dying and no one seems to care. When will wake up, it will be late. Mark this tweet.
— Ngendakumana J. Patrick (@ngendapatrick) August 6, 2019
Burundian YouTube child star Kacaman drew attention to the plight of thousands suffering from malaria when the 6-year-old succumbed to the disease:
Does it have to take tragedy to drive change? The death of 6 year old YouTube star Kacaman draws attention to #Burundi, where more than 1,800+ people have died from #malaria this year according to #WHO #EndMalaria. https://t.co/ywD3ks1ylj
— Reaching the Last Mile (@RLMglobalhealth) August 12, 2019
Radio France Internationale reported a health worker anonymously saying health centers have been overwhelmed by the demand, and that if the government declared an epidemic it would better facilitate assistance for people with healthcare costs.
Iwacu newspaper described the situation of one clinic in Giheta, Gitega province, in July, struggling to deal with the increased number of cases, with 90 percent of patients suffering from malaria — mostly children. Hundreds of patients per month have been taking up space, sharing beds and waiting in long queues, which puts high pressure on staff.
WHO said among the drivers were low use of preventive measures such as mosquito nets, climatic changes allowing mosquitoes to reach higher altitudes (in a mountainous country), increased rice growing in recent years (with a lot of still water where mosquitos can easily breed), public sanitation problems in urban areas and changes in mosquito behavior. WHO called on all stakeholders for a “robust response.”
Franck Arnaud Ndorukwigira, a Burundian blogger with the Yaga website, reported doctors in the country saying poverty is another factor impeding prevent. He referred to a World Bank statistic that 74.7 percent of Burundians live in poverty, making it difficult to afford healthcare. Malnutrition and weak immune systems make it harder to survive a bout of malaria. Sometimes, mosquito nets are used for fishing instead.
The government has made some efforts to address the issue: They have provided anti-mosquito sprays, some free medicines particularly for children under 5, and mobile clinics to hard-to-reach rural areas. The government intends to distribute mosquito nets widely in 2020. However, OCHA noted a “lack of human, logistical and financial resources for effective response.”
Health Minister Thaddée Ndikumana has avoided declaring an epidemic, though. He countered these reports by comparing the situation to higher numbers recorded in 2017 – when the government declared an emergency situation. Yaga blogger, Honoré Mahoro, and others strongly criticized the delay then. And now, Ndikumana has so far avoided the question of an epidemic.
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) wrote in June that there have been some improvements in the humanitarian situation, but it still remained precarious, with 1.7 million people identified as in need. The situation could also be aggravated by natural disasters, including floods and the Ebola threat from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ebola has persisted for over a year. Other challenges also remain, such as food insecurity, which impacts 44 percent of the population according to UNICEF, and a recent cholera outbreak in Bujumbura.
This health crisis unfolds within the context of upcoming 2020 elections and the government may be averse to a formal declaration of emergency that could portray it negatively. Political security remains fraught since the controversial 2015 elections.
Many citizens have fled as refugees or became internally displaced — including politicians and journalists — while the government has been criticized for its turn toward authoritarianism, facing off with other governments, international organizations such as the United Nations and African Union and coming under investigation by International Criminal Court for potential serious rights abuses.
The malaria crisis has further destabilized and compounded the situation — exacerbating poverty, food insecurity and economic difficulties, such as recurrent shortages of foods and fuel price rises.
Due to restrictions placed on media and nongovernmental organizations, journalists struggle to work, hindering responses to crises and making it difficult to obtain information.

author: Liam Anderson


text:
Who are the presidential candidates in Mozambique’s October elections? · Global Voices
Dércio Tsandzana

Elections in Nampula, 2013. Photo by Txeka, used with permission.
With less than four months until the October 15 general election, Mozambique recently met the candidates who will run for president.
On July 31, Mozambique's Constitutional Council approved four candidates: Filipe Nyusi, Ossufo Momade, Daviz Simango and Mário Albino.
Two potential candidates were excluded from the race: Hélder Mendoça and Alice Mabota.
Mabota is the first woman to ever attempt to run for president in Mozambique. According to the Council, she didn't obtain the minimum number of signatures to support her candidacy.
Many Mozambicans have reacted to her exclusion, as they regretted not having a woman running for the country's highest office. Adriano Nuvunga, University Professor and social activist, said on Twitter:
A rejeição da #candidatura presidencial da Dra #Alice Mabota é manifestação de #exclusao #politica e contrário ao espírito da #paz e #reconciliacao nacional. @basiliomuhate, @fatima_f2m, @zenaidamz, @BayanoValy https://t.co/Lnokuvab7O
— Prof. Adriano Nuvunga (@adriano_nuvunga) July 31, 2019
The rejection of #Alice Mabota's presidential candidate is a manifestation of #exclusion #politics and contrary to the spirit of #peace and #reconciliation.
The 2019 elections will be the first in which Mozambicans will vote for provincial governors. Currently, governors are appointed by the president.
Citizens will also elect the 250 deputies who will make up the next Assembly of the Republic.
This will be the sixth general election since the multiparty constitution was approved in 1992. The campaigning period will officially begin on August 31. Pope Francis will visit Mozambique on September 4.
Filipe Jacinto Nyusi, Mozambique's current president and chairman of the Frelimo party, is running for reelection. After five years of government (2015-2019), Nyusi is again entrusted by the ruling party for a second five-year term. Born in Cabo Delgado, in the north of Mozambique, Filipe Nyusi was Minister of Defense in the former government of Armando Guebuza (2009-2014). All Frelimo presidents before him have run, and won, reelection.
Ossufo Momade was elected president of Renamo, Mozambique's largest opposition party, following the death in 2018 of its former leader Afonso Dhlakama. This will be the first time since Mozambique's first democratic elections (1994) in which Renamo will run without its historic and popular leader. Dhlakama's death has challenged the party to create new leaders. Born in Nampula (northern Mozambique), Ossufo Momade has had various positions in Renamo, and was known to be Dhlakama's right-hand man for military issues.
Born in the central city of Beira, Daviz Simango will be running for president for the third consecutive time. Founded by Simango in 2009, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique is a breakaway of the Renamo party. Daviz has been the mayor of Beira for over a decade. He was last re-elected in October 2018.
Mario Albino is the president of the United Movement for Action and Integral Salvation, based in the northern city of Nampula. In 2018, Albino ran for mayor of Nampula, but lost after obtaining only 4.2 percent of the total votes. The AMUSI party is a breakaway of the MDM.

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Dércio Tsandzana


text:
Beijing says Hong Kong anti-extradition protests show signs of ‘terrorism’ · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

12 August peaceful sit-in at the Hong Kong the international airport. Photo: Kris Cheng/HKFP, Used with permission.
Clashes between protesters and police have reached a fever pitch as the Hong Kong government initiated a city-wide crackdown on anti-extradition protests on 11 August. 54 protesters were sent to the hospital in a single day, one woman was shot with a projectile in her eye and many have reported fractured bones.
On 12 August, Beijing’s Macau and Hong Kong Office held a press conference stating that the protesters’ actions show “signs of terrorism”. This latest move has led protesters to fear the potential escalation of violence in response to the “terrorism” label and is another incident that brings Hong Kong closer to a boiling point.
Riot police launched an aggressive city-wide arrest campaign in several districts across Hong Kong and the police violence was recorded in a video. The incidents documented in the video show a young woman shot with a projectile in her eye in Tsim Sha Tsui, a young man who had lost his front teeth begging riot police not to push him onto the ground during his arrest in Tsim Sha Tsui, and riot police firing tear gas in a subway station and fire projectiles at protesters at a close range in the Taikoo subway.
Medical staff from public hospitals were among the first professional groups to protest against the police brutality. Hundreds of medical staff from more than 12 public hospitals staged a sit-in on August 12 and 13. Since June 9, Hong Kong public hospitals have received 581 injured protesters, and many others have refrained from going to public hospitals for fear of being arrested by stationed police officers.
Medical staff at more than a dozen public hospitals stage a sit-in to protest against police brutality & the HK govt's continued refusal to offer any kind of political solution.
There's no way Carrie Lam can say w a straight face that these medics have “no stake in society.” pic.twitter.com/5oITnakjDm
— Mary Hui (@maryhui) August 13, 2019
Thus far, Beijing has refused to make peace with protesters and stated that Hong Kong’s protests showed “signs of terrorism” in a press conference on 12 August.
Hong Kong’s legal expert Cheung Tatming pointed out that such a definition would empower the police authority to use force against protesters without any constraints or consequences.
Reading into Beijing’s terrorism label, an anonymous mainland Chinese scholar predicted China’s repressive strategy in Hong Kong as a “decentralized” war:
六四幾乎已經在香港開始了。殺戮已經在悄悄蔓延。有沒有界限？有沒有那麼一個標誌性事件讓大家意識到六四來到？不會有。這個時代的武裝鎮壓，採取的不會是坦克上街。他們才不會那麼傻。那一刻永遠不會來。但是他們會放武警、會近距離射催淚彈和布袋單、會無差別不分地點不惜力往死裡打。所以這個時代的六四，是把一個主要鎮壓事件分散成無數個看似更小的事件。實際上，如果六四的模式是常規戰，是主戰場的硬碰硬，那麼當代的鎮壓，模式就是恐怖主義，就是逐漸升級、分散化。它讓你覺得真正的戰爭好像總在後退，總還沒有來，但每一次升級，其實都是戰爭內在的一部分。你永遠找不到那個「底限」，因為那個「底限」根本是不存在的。香港鎮壓的模式，就是化整為零、逐步升級、大陸援軍。而且需要注意的是，用大陸武警和解放軍，走的是帝國鎮壓的老路。用不同地區、不同族群的人來相互鎮壓，如此才可以讓下手者對對方毫不留情。
June 4 is happening in Hong Kong. The bloody crackdown is extending and you cannot see the border or a definitive sign in Hong Kong’s version of June 4. Armed police [from mainland China] will join forces with HK riot police, they will fire tear gas and bean bags at close range, they will beat protesters up without any constraint. The new era of June 4 is to turn a major crackdown into many many small incidents. If we says June 4 is a war with a battlefield, the repression of the current protests is characterized with anti-terrorism strategies, the crackdown will be decentralized ad gradually escalating. It gives people a feeling that the war has not come, but people are already inside the war. You can’t find where’s the borderline of this war because it doesn’t exist. The Hong Kong repression model is a degree zero war, it just keeps escalating and Beijing will bring in more and more soldiers. What’s more armed police and PLA from mainland China are using imperialist iron hand suppression strategy, the legitimacy of such violence is built upon regional and ethnic divides.
From 9 June to 11 August, riot police deployed 1820 canisters of tear gas. On 5 August alone, police deployed 800 canisters of tear gas. Wong Ho Yin from Human Right Observe described the police use of weapons as “war scale”.
Some of the above anticipation can also be observed in the latest airport conflicts where tens of thousands of protesters have been staging a sit-in, causing the international air hub to shutdown.
The peaceful sit-in which had started since July 26 was considered as a great success to exhibit and explain the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests to the world. But two of the incidents took place on August 13 and shifted the track. A group of protesters seized a suspect mainland Chinese cop. A few could not control their rage, beat up the “cop” and attempt to stop the medical staffs to escort him away. Later, airport police stepped in and the chaos almost resulted in gunfire.
The other conflict involves a dozen protesters attacked and tied up a man who took photos of protesters. The man told the protesters he was a police supporter and invited them to beat him up. Then the protesters found the blue t-shirt wore by Beijing loyalists in Tsuen Wan on August 5. Later Global Time chief editor Hu Xijun revealed on Twitter that the man is a Global Time reporter and the incident has gone viral on mainland Chinese social media, igniting a large number of revengeful comments.
The above two incidents have not only resulted in a shift of public opinion against the protesters but also triggered an intense internal debate among protesters. More and more protesters are calling out for a reflection on their campaign strategy as they respond to China’s new repressive model in Hong Kong.
In the meantime, the protests continue with the Civic Human Right Front calling for another mass rally on 18 August.
To read more about the anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong, visit Global Voices’ special coverage page.

author: Oiwan Lam


text:
Oral historians and archivists fill in the record of the 1947 partition of India · Global Voices
Rabiya Jaffery

Screenshot from the 1947 Partition Archive Web page
Nobody knew what the liberation of India from British rule that took place in the summer of 1947 would bring, but few would have expected its legacy to be a violent separation that would displace 14 million people and result in decades of rivalry between what would become two nuclear states.
Every August since, in both India and Pakistan, school children sing anthems, politician make speeches, and the military parades to celebrate not just the two nations’ independence from the British Raj, but also their ‘partition’ from each other on August 14-15, 1947.
The partition took place when the British, already struggling with an expensive, overextended empire after World War II, announced that the region, which was growing increasingly volatile with sectarian tensions, would become independent. Just a year prior, mass sectarian riots had taken place between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims on the streets of Calcutta that killed 4,000 people in a span of 72 hours.
Tasked with the drawing of the new borders was a British lawyer who arrived in India on July 8, 1947, on his first ever trip to the region. He completed the task in a few weeks. The result was the birth of Pakistan, with its eastern and western parts on either side of the newly liberated India.
Map of the partition of India (1947). Click on image for larger version. Image via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0
To the confusion of many historians today, mass violence broke out immediately as an unprecedented population exchange began across the freshly drawn borders. Hindus and Sikhs began relocating to what was now India, and Muslims to the newly created Pakistan.
Anchal Malhotra, an India-based oral historian who has been studying the partition of India since 2013, says:
Many people didn't quite understand what was happening when the partition was happening. They didn't quite understand the reasons they migrated. For example, my own grandmother doesn't quite understand the intricacies of politics but she migrated all the way from the northwestern frontier [in modern-day Pakistan] province to Delhi.
I think it's interesting that an entire population can be forced to migrate to a place where they don't want without quite understanding what was happening.
Anchal Malhotra interviewing her grandmother. Image used with permission.
Malhotra’s grandmother’s story is far from uncommon:
My grandmother said once to me: ask me quickly before I forget. Otherwise it would die with me, she said. As if she was just waiting for me to ask her her story. And I'm glad that there are people that are brave enough to talk about what happened because partition continues to be a wound in so many people's minds and hearts.
Within a span of two months in the summer of 1947, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that nearly 14 million people left their homes. Estimates of the number of people killed  during that time range between 200,000 and 2 million.
Malhotra adds:
You know, people always say in interviews that there was a madness in the end. Nobody understood what was happening. One day you were in India and the next day it was called Pakistan, but you had to leave. I think that the sense of misinformation is quite staggering.
But the scale of the violence was never widely broadcast. According to Faisal Choudhry, a professor of South Asian history from Pakistan, one possible reason for this is that official versions of the events were written by the British:
They wanted to portray independence. . . as a victory for everyone and to show that the British, after 200 years of colonial rule, were departing on a positive note. Highlighting the bloodshed — and the intensity of it — would take away from that.
Overcrowded train transferring refugees during the partition of India, 1947. This was considered to be the largest migration in human history. Image via Wikipedia. Public Domain.
Regionally, it could also be because both India and Pakistan have still not worked out how to discuss those horrors in a way that doesn’t question partition, he adds:
Both countries, as they are today, wouldn’t exist if the partition didn’t take place, which might be why their official history records don’t dwell too much on the horrors that took place. And as for the people who lived through it —and are still living through it — maybe recalling raises questions that nobody has the answers to. Why did madness take over completely suddenly?
Historians such as Malhotra are working on getting the remaining survivors of the partition to recall the events so their stories can be preserved.
Obviously, the academic history or the official histories that we learn in our textbooks are not as inclusive as we would like them to be, and I think at some point what they also do is to put every experience of partition under the blanket.
Archivists, both professional and amateur, are collecting video and oral testimonies of the horrors that capture the depths academic history have missed.
One of the largest ongoing projects is a collection of oral histories that, on completion, will include at least 10,000 oral interviews from surviving witnesses. Over 8,000 interviews have already been conducted and over 30,000 digital documents and photographs collected from survivors of the Partition over the span of seven years.
“A map of the past, a map of happiness, a map that belongs to my generation alone. I close my eyes and I can see it. This was my house, this was my city, this was my state.” From Anchal Malhotra's Instagram post. Used with permission
The interviews—a portion of which can be streamed on Stanford University Library’s Digital repository—are a part of the 1947 Partition Archive’s collection, which gathers crowd-sourced oral histories through an online platform.
Priya Satia,  a historian at Stanford, says:
Preserving this history will help us understand why and how the largest mass migration in history happened, why it was so violent, and what its impact has been on the lives of those who lived through it and for the region as a whole. It also helps us capture the social and cultural world lost as a result of that migration. It helps us understand the formation of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and modern India, and the national and religious identities of those who live in these countries as well as the conflicts within and between them, including the struggle over Kashmir (and its nuclearization).
While it is uncertain whether a more nuanced look at the shared history of Pakistan and India can bring a fresh perspective to future relations between the rivals, archivists are, understandably, in a hurry to record the accounts of the survivors of an incident that took place 72 years ago.

author: Rabiya Jaffery


text:
‘The external world doesn’t know how rich Nepali literature is’: An interview with author Dr. Sangita Swechcha · Global Voices
Qurratulain (Annie) Zaman

‘Gulafsangako Prem’, at the international Nepalese conference in London held on 3-5 August 2019. Photo courtesy of Dr. Sangita Swechcha.
Dr. Sangita Swechcha is a Nepalese literary figure based in England whose poems, stories, and articles have been published in both Nepal and the United Kingdom. A few of her poems have also been aired on Radio Nepal and telecasted on Nepal Television. She has also published a joint collection of stories, ‘Asahamati ka Pailaharu’ and ‘Gulafsangako Prem’  in Nepali.
Her first novel, ‘Pakhalieko Siundo,’ which she wrote at the age of 18 received excellent reviews from literary critics. The novel focuses on the emotional journey of a Nepalese woman, Sandhya, and delves into her pain, suffering, and determination to overcome her past. It also highlights the issue of human trafficking in Nepal. Global Voices talked to her about her work and literary inspirations:
Global Voices: When did you start writing?
Dr. Sangita Swechcha (SS): I do not remember the exact year, but I started writing when I was 12 or 13-years-old. I don’t know whether they used to be poems or not, but I just used to express in writing whatever I felt. I used to be a shy and introverted girl and mostly sitting quietly and listening to others than talking or expressing to others. I felt comfortable expressing in writing than to people and those used to be in the form of poetries initially.
GV:  Who inspired you to write in the Nepali language?
SS: [The] Nepali language is the national language of Nepal and, being a Nepali, I always felt more comfortable writing literature in Nepali than expressing myself in English. I do not remember how I got into writing, but my mom and dad were always supportive of my writings. Initially, I did not use to share with my parents. It took me a few years to tell my parents that I loved writing and that I had been writing for quite some time. While in early teens, I used to hide or tear my writings. I think the nature around my house was an inspiration initially. I was and I am still fascinated by the beauty of nature.
GV: Tell us about your novel ‘Pakhalieko Siundo’.
SS: My novel ‘Pakhalieko Siundo’ is about female tolerance for pain and suffering, and how circumstances make women powerful. It also tells stories of women who are destined to be sold by their relatives or lovers. It is a story of a strong woman who, despite all the hurdles of life, fights to survive and remains strong, carrying on in her life and achieving her dreams.
Dr. Sangita Swechcha. Photo courtesy of Dr. Swechcha.
I published this novel when I was 18-years-old, after completing my I.Sc. [equivalent to grade 12] from St. Xavier’s college in Nepal. While I was waiting for my result, I had nothing to do and thought of writing a few stories. I started writing one story and got so engaged that I kept on writing. It turned into a 265-page novel. I am still amazed at how I managed to write that long a novel at that age. When the writing was completed, my father encouraged me to get this novel published. I feel that my parents’ support during my initial days were very crucial for me to dream of becoming a writer. I was also very fortunate to get appreciation and love from Nepali media, critics, and readers after publication. I was more into literature and actively involved in literary activities in Nepal for quite a few years afterward. One such activity was the publication of a literary monthly magazine ‘Aakash’. I worked as a sub-editor for the magazine then. Publication of my novel also got me into writing for various national daily and weekly newspapers and magazines in Nepal, and I started getting offers to write columns and reporting. My novel is currently on air every week from Capital FM 96.4 MHz and I am very happy that it is going to a larger audience in Nepal and abroad (via live Online radio and YouTube versions). I am also working on the second edition of this novel, and I hope to have a translated version in English in the near future.
GV: How do you look at the state of Nepalese literature in the 21st century?
SS: Literary writing in the Nepali language only began in the 19th century. Before that, Nepali literature was in Sanskrit. The first written literary work in Nepali was Bhanubhakta’s Ramayana (1883). In this sense, Nepali literature has a history of more than a hundred years. Literature from different genres has been published during this period and has grown rapidly in numbers in the 21st century. Not only are these numbers growing, but the quality of literary writing in Nepal is also improving. Moreover, versatile books from different genres which incorporate a variety of innovative styles and approaches are published annually. Since most of these are written in Nepali, the external world doesn't know much about how rich Nepali literature is. In this sense, Nepali literature seems to be a bit isolated from the external world. However, the situation is changing now. Not only is [the number of] Nepali writers who write in English slowly growing but the translation of literary works from Nepali to other languages is gaining momentum too. I believe that with this changing trend people will get acquainted with Nepali literature and Nepali literature will have more exposure to the external world as well.
Moreover, in today’s globalized world, Nepali writers are spread around the globe. In order to bring Nepali writers around the world onto one common platform, institutions like the International Nepali Literature Society (INLS) were established. INLS has chapters in more than 80 countries. A recent INSL conference in London is an example of how more than 100 Nepali writers residing in 12 different countries gathered to show their commitment to the progress of Nepali literature by encouraging both Nepali diasporic writers and writers residing in Nepal. The conference also launched a collection of short stories in English named ‘Silver Cascade’. The book, published by Book Hill publication in Nepal, consists of short stories by notable writers. We hope that Nepali translated literature gets attention and love from readers in the international market, and are looking forward to seeing more of such publications. In the meantime, my story collection book, ‘Gulafsangko Prem’, is also in the process of being translated into English.

author: Qurratulain (Annie) Zaman


text:
Nepal’s only folk musical instrument museum is struggling to save rare instruments · Global Voices
Sanjib Chaudhary

Nepali Folk Musical Instrument Museum at the premises of Tripureshwor Mahadev Temple in Kathmandu. Image by Sanjib Chaudhary. Used with permission.
While the roundabout in Tripureshwor, Nepal sees traffic throughout the day, just a few minutes walk from the bustling road is the quiet and calm Tripureshwor Mahadev Temple, one of the largest temples in the Kathmandu Valley. Within the premises of the temple is a lesser-known museum housing rare Nepali folk musical instruments collected from across Nepal. Despite the cultural significance of the museum's collection, it is currently embroiled in a legal battle to keep its doors open to the public. If the founder of the museum loses the case, he’ll need to move the museum to another place.
Ram Prasad Kadel, founder and curator of Nepali Folk Musical Instrument Museum. Image by Sanjib Chaudhary. Used with permission.
Ram Prasad Kadel, the founder and curator of the museum, has been collecting the musical instruments since 1995 together with his wife Nanda Sharma. His passion has taken him to all 77 districts of Nepal, and of the existing 1350 different types of folk musical instruments, he has collected 650. He either purchases old instruments that are not in use or commissions locals to make new ones. “We never buy the musical instruments that are being used in the villages,” he said talking to Global Voices. “If we take away the instruments in use what will they play and how will the tradition continue?”
Els #dillunsllegim! En aquest llibre de Ram Prasad Kadel hi trobarem més de 360 instruments musicals de #Nepal, explicant el seu origen, com estan fets i com es toquen. pic.twitter.com/PhR3rCcNQV
— Museu de la Música (@museumusicabcn) September 17, 2018
In this book by Ram Prasad Kadel, we find more than 360 musical instruments from #Nepal, explaining their origin, how they are made and how we can play them.
“Our folk musical instruments are very simple,” he added. “They are made from whatever is found in the surroundings, and the music is inspired by the sound of waterfalls, the blowing of the wind, the mooing of cattle and chirping of birds, among others.” And nature influences the shape of instruments as well. For instance, some of the instruments resemble the locally found harro (black myrobalan), Rudraksha seeds (prayer beads), barley grains and even a tail of a cow. Hiti Manga, a musical instrument designed after the water spouts found in Kathmandu, produces music that resembles water being filled in a pot from a spout.
However, all is not well with the museum. The displayed musical instruments are in bad shape and the museum itself receives only a handful of visitors, predominantly researchers on ethnomusicology. Adding to his woes, Kadel has been asked to vacate the premises by the Guthi Sansthan, an independent institution entrusted to take care of and conduct religious, cultural, and social heritage of the country. According to reports, the Sansthan has agreed to lease its property to the Kathmandu University and the latter is planning to house its music department there. Kadel has filed a petition against it with the Kathmandu District Court.
While the legal battle continues, Kadel’s team has been busy documenting and digitizing Nepali folk music. “We’re expecting to hand over the museum, registered as a non-governmental organization (NGO), to either the Government of Nepal or the Tribhuvan University,” he said. Though he will need time and money to move the museum taking care of the delicate instruments, he is hopeful that he will not need to do that.
Here is a look at some of the rare folk musical instruments showcased at the museum:
Murchunga. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Binaayo. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Ek-tare. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Jor murali. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Pungi. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Dharma dandi. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Madal. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Nekku. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Ranasinhaa. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Hiti manga. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.
Tri-taal. Image by Saccha Karki. Used with the museum's permission.

author: Sanjib Chaudhary


text:
On activism and the self · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Activists held a rally during the Independence Day celebration in the Philippines to push for an independent foreign policy. Photo by Obet De Castro. Source: Facebook
The original version of this article was published on Bulatlat, an alternative news website in the Philippines.
Activists are often stereotyped as dogmatic philistines who derive a perverse pleasure from organizing and attending rallies. But while it is true that public participation in a collective exercise is a thrilling experience, especially if it involves the symbolic exorcism of society's villains, it is a mistake to reduce activism to mere attendance in anti-government protests.
Behind the instagrammable image of the fierce-looking individual with a clenched fist is a person who is constantly rationalizing and reaffirming their fidelity to radical politics. Activism is a political stance that aims to change the world and—more realistically but seldom acknowledged—the self. The broader goals of dissent are easily and widely depicted; what's harder to render visible is the almost miraculous transformation of the individual.
Anyone can sample the experience of being an activist by participating in political action with no commitment to the cause besides an ephemeral curiosity and a desire to engage in an unconventional activity. To engage in real activism, however, requires nothing less than a complete rethinking of one's concept of the self vis-à-vis political engagement.
Human rights activists in the Philippines protest against rising cases of enforced disappearances under the government of President Rodrigo Duterte. Source: Kodao Productions, content partner of Global Voices. Used with permission.
Thus, the first essential task of an activist is the remolding of the self. This is a daunting task involving a continuous process of learning and unlearning a particular worldview and a painful rejection of habits and desires necessary to succeed in the modern world. It requires a willful withdrawal from the ‘servicing of goods’ and the immersion of the self in the grassroots.
Intense politicization and the development of social conscience are sometimes mistaken for a lazy succumbing to brainwashing. But behind the façade of the tough and determined young activist is a person constantly grappling with conflicting thoughts and emotions. Can I survive this way of life? Am I really prepared to give up life's comfort and the chance to achieve fame and fortune in mainstream society? Are there no other alternatives that demand less sacrifice?
Even when political education is collectively pursued—through study sessions, community organizing, mass campaigns—it is still the individual who ultimately makes the choice of whether to go forward and embrace the challenges of being a radical. And the ambivalence lingers even after one has made the decision to pursue activism full-time. Imagine the alienation from family, friends, and the majority who thrive and derive enjoyment under the status quo; the always enticing and convenient option to abandon activism, reclaim one's old life, and redirect one's efforts toward working toward status and material riches.
The temptation to abandon radicalism arises every time the activist encounters an obstacle in political life—the failure of a mass campaign, the rapid deterioration of the national situation, state fascism, the demoralizing impact of partisan politics. The test of the true activist, therefore, is the ability not just to articulate a set of doctrines, but to be the person who shows up—and keeps on showing up—against all odds and in spite of detours in the journey, to affirm and reaffirm a commitment to radicalism.
The activist overcomes personal tragedies and stubborn doubts by merging the self with the collective pursuit of a new politics. It is easy to deplore this as a creepy subsuming of the self by an impersonal force (the Party, the Collective, the Masses). But this is not a loss of self so much the reemergence of the self in the context of a mass movement.
There the activist finds the following: a new purpose in life, the philosophical tools needed to see the world as it is and how it ought to be, fellow crusaders and revolutionaries, and a sense of duty to act resolutely. The activist inspiration from the resistance of the masses who have no other claim other than to break free from the bondage of poverty, injustice, and other preventable miseries, with newfound mentors in the form of activist farmers and workers who exemplify what it means to practice what we in the Philippines call “simpleng pamumuhay at puspusang pakikibaka”—simple living and intensive struggle.
Suddenly, the activist's life ceases to be a mere enumeration of daily hardships, as there is now a recognition that enduring these adversities may ease the suffering of others, and more importantly, hasten the emergence of a new world.
Focused on accomplishing a set of political objectives, from the seemingly trivial to the strategic, the activist's sense of fulfillment is anchored not in counting material acquisitions but in the holistic growth of the mass organization, and the notion that personal struggles are best addressed not by escape and isolation, but by taking part in the larger collective struggle to end human oppression in the company of strangers-turned-comrades.
The activist comes to life-affirming awareness that self-care enhances nothing meaningful unless it integrates the ethics of how to be a socially-committed individual. And activism, therefore, becomes a crucial link between the popular mantra of self-improvement and the more urgent task of advancing social transformation.

author: Mong Palatino


text:
Apprehension rises over the abduction of a Nigerian government critic · Global Voices
Nwachukwu Egbunike

Abubakar Idris popularly called Dadiyata. Image used with permission from The SignalNg
Nigerian government critic Abubakar Idris, popularly known as Dadiyata, was abducted from his home in the Barnawa neighbourhood of Kaduna in northwestern Nigeria on August 1.
The Abuja-based online newspaper Premium Times reported that Dadiyata was forcefully taken by abductors at about 1:00 am as he arrived at his home. “As he was about to lock the gate, two men accosted him and took him away in his car,” Dadiyata's wife told the newspaper.
Dadiyata, a lecturer at the Federal University Dutsinma, Katsina State, is a fierce critic of Kano State Governor Umar Ganduje, and a supporter of former governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Dadiyata often spars with Ganduje's supporters on social media.
Once political allies, Ganduje and Kwankwaso became bitter rivals after Ganduje took office in 2015. Ganduje served as deputy governor under Kwankwaso from 2011 to 2015, when both men were members of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC). On assuming office in 2015, however, Ganduje fell out with his former boss. Kwankwaso defected to the opposition party Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). During the 2019 elections Kwankwaso supported Ganduje's rival, Abba Kabir of the PDP.
Since 2015, relations between Ganduje and Kwankwaso have been openly acrimonious, with their supporters pitched on either side of a battle for political supremacy.
Confusion is still raging as to whether Dadiyata was kidnapped or arrested. The police stated on August 2 that they were “making efforts to apprehend the fleeing suspected criminals” and rescue Dadiyata.
The information I am getting from Kaduna, the security agencies are doing their best to locate and rescue our brother @Dadiyata from his abductors. Every little Information of whereabouts is needed ATM, our prayers are still with him, his family and his friends. #PrayForDadiyata pic.twitter.com/qyqQD7eptJ
— Bashir Ahmad (@BashirAhmaad) August 6, 2019
With freedom of expression under threat in the country, some fear that Dadiyata disappearance is linked to his criticisms of the APC government in Kano State.
JUST IN
A car full of APC thumb printed ballot papers arrested by police at Magwan Primary School in Nasarawa LGA.
Kano state Deputy Gov. Nasiru Gawuna was spotted the scene of the incidence. #AbbaGidaGida @inecnigeria #KanoDecides #PDPKowaAgent pic.twitter.com/p3fwVMo2bQ
— Dadiyata? (@dadiyata) March 9, 2019
The opposition PDP described Dadiyata’s abduction as an “apparent desperation to intimidate, suppress and silence public opinion and free speech in Nigeria as well as to further entrench a siege mentality on our citizenry.” The opposition party further accused the Department of State Services (DSS), a unit of Nigeria’s state security service, of being responsible for the abduction, which the DSS has denied.
I have spoken with Peter Afunnaya, the DSS spokesman and Ahmed Koya the Kaduna State Director of DSS. They said they don’t have anybody named Abubakar Idris Dadiyata in their custody.
— Jaafar Jaafar (@JaafarSJaafar) August 4, 2019
Online, Nigerians expressed concern over Dadiyata's disappearance.
Where is our vocal govt critic and Twitter Neighbour @dadiyata? #FreeDadiyata pic.twitter.com/GA8zenQGYQ
— Ebube The Statesman (@akaebube) August 6, 2019
Senator and human rights defender Shehu Sani commented that the “demarcation lines between arrests and abductions is becoming blurred” in Nigeria:
I join the call and demand for the whereabout of the young man,Dadiyata,who has been declared missing some few days ago.These days,the demarcation line between arrests & abductions is becoming blurred.
— Senator Shehu Sani (@ShehuSani) August 10, 2019
Chuba Ugwu, a friend of Dadiyata, tweeted that he is holding the government responsible for the incident:
The primary responsibility of the Nigerian govt (according to the constitution) is the protection of the lives & property of citizens.
For almost a week, @dadiyata has been missing. His wife & kids have not seen him. We, his friends, have not heard from him. #WhereIsDadiyata ? pic.twitter.com/cX3yGdJjOJ
— Chuba Ugwu (@chonsyy) August 7, 2019
Others are praying for Dadiyata and his family:
#whereisdadiyata ?
Some said heavily armed security personnel arrested @dadiyata in his Kaduna residence last week, others say kidnapers abducted him & in a conflicting report ‘it is the handiwork of hoodlums.’
We are hopeful that this young man returns home safe & sound ISA? pic.twitter.com/lczmqmwqeX
— Abubakartsanyawa (@Tsanyawa19) August 10, 2019
Our prayers continue to be with @dadiyata whose whereabouts remain unknown to us but God, Who sees everything, knows. So we pray he is kept safe.
We pray for his wife and two kids also that God will comfort them immensely and until his safe return.#PrayForDadiyata
— Demola Olarewaju (@DemolaRewaju) August 8, 2019
With no news about Dadiyata two weeks after the after abduction, some citizens have staged protests, demanding that the government take action:
Led by @AnthonyEhilebo , the PDP digital media team marched today to demand the whereabouts of our brother @dadiyata , who was abducted from his home in Kaduna 14days ago.
We’ve asked the @USEmbassyAbuja to join us in asking the Buhari admin #WhereIsDadiyata #NoOneLeftBehind pic.twitter.com/cZPILyrysn
— Somto Onuchukwu (@chosensomto) August 15, 2019
Opposition politician Ndi Kato aptly captured the apprehension over Dadiyata's disappearance:
For every big conversation of enforced disappearances on the national level, there are several more at the state and local level who do not have the privilege of social media to speak for them. This trend of enforced disappearances in a government democratically elected in its first term signifies a major downturn for young Nigerians whose lives were headed towards freedom so different from the experience of previous generations. It is a new reality for most of us that is as fearful as it is dawning.

author: Nwachukwu Egbunike


text:
How Hungary-funded news sites helped a false story travel all the way from Slovenia through Greece to North Macedonia · Global Voices
Metamorphosis Foundation

Diagram depicting the multi-country trek by a story claiming the EU bribed the prime ministers of Greece and North Macedonia. Illustration by Meta.mk News Agency, CC-BY.
This story originally appeared on Meta.mk News Agency, a project of Metamorphosis Foundation. An edited version is published below as part of a content-sharing agreement.
In July 2019, Macedonian social media was flooded with links to year-old articles claiming the prime ministers of North Macedonia and Greece, Zoran Zaev and Alexis Tsipras respectively, received billions of euros in bribes to sign the Prespa Agreement.
Reached in June 2018, the Prespa Agreement put an end to a 27-year-old dispute between the two neighbors. Macedonia agreed to change its name to North Macedonia, and in exchange, Greece has pledged not to object North Macedonia's accession to NATO and the European Union (EU). Both Macedonian and Greek nationalists have historically opposed the agreement, which they consider treasonous and contrary to national interests.
Although the EU bribe article was published a year ago, it resurfaced in North Macedonia recently, most probably surfing on tension around a recent political scandal in which public prosecutors allegedly took bribes from officials investigated for corruption.
Fact-checkers in North Macedonia have traced the original source of the EU bribe article and uncovered a complex trail of disinformation spanning at least four countries.
The false claim was first made in a story published by a Slovenian website called Demokracija.si on July 9, 2018, and was then republished by Nova24TV, also a Slovenian outlet. Both are part of a Slovenian media network that received an infusion of capital by businesspersons associated with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Their editorial policies are known to be closely aligned with the views of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party, led by Janez Jansha, who is also an ally of Orbán within the European People’s Party.
The Demokracija.si article, headlined “This is how the Left is doing business: Zaev sold the Macedonians for 30 billion euros” and consisting of only two paragraphs, claims that the EU bribed Zaev and Tsipiras to sign the Prespa Agreement. It cites as a source Proto Thema, a reputable center-right Greek newspaper.
Proto Thema had indeed published a news story on July 6, 2018, in which Greek MP Dimitris Kamenos is quoted as saying that, as an incentive for signing the Prespa Agreement, the EU would provide North Macedonia with 30 billion euros and Greece with one trillion euros worth of projects and investments.
As the story makes it clear, those are potential investments for the countries, not personal bribes for their prime ministers.
Here's what the Demokracija.si article says:
Potem ko sta grški premier Aleksis Cipras in makedonski premier Zoran Zaev dosegla dogovor o novem imenu Makedonije (Republika Severna Makedonija), so se vsi spraševali, kako to, da ste se tako hitro dogovorila o nečem, ki je že 27 let jedro spora. Grški časnik Proto Thema zdaj piše, da sta bila premierja podkupljena.
Cipras in Zaev, oba deklarirana in zadrta levičarja, sta svoj narod prodala za denar. Po pisanju Proto Theme bo Makedonija v obliki projektov in naložb od EU prejela 30 milijard evrov (trije makedonski bruto domači proizvodi), Grčija pa neverjetnen bilijon evrov.
After Greek Prime Minister Aleksis Cipras and Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev reached an agreement on a new name for Macedonia (Republic of North Macedonia), everyone wondered how they could have agreed so quickly on something that has been at the heart of a dispute lasting 27 years. Greek newspaper Proto Thema now writes that the prime ministers were bribed.
Cipras and Zaev, both declared and die-hard leftists, sold their peoples for money. According to Proto Thema, Macedonia will receive 30 billion euros (three times the amount of Macedonian Gross Domestic Product) from the EU in the form of projects and investments, while Greece will receive an incredible trillion of euros.
In North Macedonia, the first outlet that has picked up on that story was the portal Javno.mk, which translated the Demokracija.si article verbatim while adding an unflattering image of Zaev. This article was quoted as a source by several right-wing Macedonian media and social media celebrities in July 2018, and again one year later in July 2019.
Report by GLOBSEC that identified Javno.mk as a purveyor of disinformation. Photo by Meta.mk News Agency, CC-BY.
The research paper “From online battlefield to loss of trust? Perceptions and habits of youth in eight European countries” by Prague-based think-tank GLOBSEC, published in October 2018, identified Javno.mk as an example of a “disinformation website” in the Macedonian online space (pg. 16). The website Javno.mk has no impressum and its ownership is not publicly disclosed.
The Javno.mk article was quoted by other North Macedonia's outlets that are considered to be mouthpieces of the right-wing populist party VMRO-DPMNE, such as Republika and Express.mk. The Republika article has since been removed from their website, but a trace that they had published it remains on the Daily.mk aggregator.
In May 2018, the investigative outlets BIRN and OCCRP uncovered that the Hungarian owners of the mentioned Slovenian websites have also purchased Republika and other similar media in North Macedonia around the same time when they made those investments in Slovenia.
An analysis by CriThink.mk, a fact-checking initiative from North Macedonia, noted that the old bribe story was shared on several Facebook groups. “The posts in these groups, which have several thousand members, received several dozen likes, comments and even more shares each. Many of the comments are very negative, including insults and hate speech,” its report says.
Screenshots of some of the posts on the Facebook group aimed at “patriotic” Macedonian audiences promoting a year-old false claim demonizing Prime Minister Zoran Zaev. Photo by Meta.mk News Agency, CC-BY.
The content of those groups, with names such as Здраво Македонијо! (Hello Macedonia), Makedonski Nacionalni Interesi (Macedonian National Interests), and ГОРДОСТ Е ДА СИ МАКЕДОНЕЦ (Pride “in” being Macedonian, in a loose translation) tends to revolve around hostility to the current government, support for the opposition party VMRO-DPMNE, nationalism. Stories from dubious news sites often circulate on those groups.
Besides the many Facebook users who shared the link via their personal profiles, at least one online outlet, Media24.mk, republished a verbatim copy of the year-old Javno.mk article on July 14, 2019. This site has no Impressum nor disclosed ownership.

author: Metamorphosis Foundation


text:
Indian-administered Kashmir is like an ‘open prison’, says observers · Global Voices
Rezwan

Screenshot from BBC News report on YouTube.
Since 5 August, Srinagar, the main city in Jammu and Kashmir, has been under complete lockdown after the central government of India voted to annul the region's special status. This move scrapped article 370 which guaranteed a certain level of autonomy such as the right to a constitution and the ability to make laws. The new status also splits the region into two federal territories. The central government sent in troops and shut down internet access, essentially isolating Kashmiris from the outside world.
Although the Indian government has been insisting that the region is slowly returning to normalcy, a recently released report criticizes the “occupation” of Kashmir and urges the government to “return democracy to the region”.
The report was produced by a group of Indian activists and members of leftist organizations, including Indian economist and activist Jean Drèze; Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA); Maimoona Mollah from the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA); and Vimal Bhai of the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM). From 9 August to 13 August the activists traveled extensively inside Kashmir and their findings were a stark contrast to the central government's version of the situation:
Situation ‘not normal’ in Jammu and Kashmir, claim activistshttps://t.co/K9sn5ijD1D pic.twitter.com/5iNEBAYynN
— Hindustan Times (@htTweets) August 15, 2019
#KashmirCaged
Jean Dreze, @MaimoonaMollah @vimalbhai11 and I spent 5 days traveling extensively in Kashmir, speaking to people. Kashmir Caged is a short film with some of the voices we spoke to, with English subtitles. @RoadScholarz https://t.co/YMu04HDQmE
— Kavita Krishnan (@kavita_krishnan) August 14, 2019
Jean Drèze said the clampdown had “crippled economic life” there. While Vimal Bhai said, “Kashmir is like an open jail.” Although the 4 million residents of the Kashmir Valley are used to blockades and curfews due to a long period of insurgency and protests, the group called this situation unprecedented.
Earlier this month, the government brought thousands of troops into the valley to help impose restrictions. Thousands of people, including tourists and Hindu pilgrims were asked to leave Indian-administered Kashmir citing a terror threat.
By 5 August 2019, the authorities put hundreds of political leaders and their aides under house arrest and restricted them from speaking to the media. Roadblocks were put on the streets and restrictions on almost all movement were strictly enforced. Mobile, landline and internet facilities have been blocked since then.
The restrictions were relaxed on Monday, 12 August for prayers to mark Eid al-Adha but ended with protests spilling out from mosques into the street.
An Indian Supreme Court refused to pass an order revoking the clampdown in Jammu and Kashmir, including restoring all communication services in the region.
People are debating whether the Indian mainstream media is covering the situation in Kashmir properly. The Indian government and its many supporters have been trying to push back against reporting by foreign news organizations. On August 9, BBC's coverage was questioned for reporting that the police opened fire and used tear gas to disperse the crowd in Soura, Srinagar. The Indian government said that the protest did not take place and there was no open fire, and trolls accused the BBC of spreading fake news.
#Situation in the #valley was #peaceful #today. No untoward incident has been reported so far. @JmuKmrPolice @diprjk
— Kashmir Zone Police (@KashmirPolice) August 15, 2019
Latest Visuals from Srinagar, Situation is quite NORMAL in the valley.
-ANI pic.twitter.com/lpsfsvWjZH
— Jammu-Kashmir Now (@JammuKashmirNow) August 9, 2019
Devjyot Ghoshal, a journalist of Reuters India from Kashmir tweeted:
#Thread
I wasn't inclined to tweet about #Kashmir, but after seeing the amount of disinformation, I am going to.
I'm back in the newsroom today after a week in Srinagar.
Things are NOT normal.
People are seething. Kashmir is likely a tinderbox waiting for a spark.
— Devjyot Ghoshal (@DevjyotGhoshal) August 13, 2019
IT entrepreneur Syed Nazakat tweeted:
Returned from #Kashmir today after 4 days. It was hard to convince parents to leave home in such situation. I have never seen such information blackout. nobody know what is happening. Extremely hard circumstances 4 journalists 2 report. My thoughts with my friends, neighbors. pic.twitter.com/n0hA38Upoy
— Syed Nazakat (@SyedNazakat) August 14, 2019
Kavita Krishnan informed that the Press Club denied screening their video presentation.
This Independence Day, Can We Restore Our Freedom of Expression? asks @RevatiLaul about @PressClubOfI1 denying us permission to screen our video. “What cd the stopping of video do in the end, in the face of these stories they told? Words can make us see.” https://t.co/nUR4jpVDHy
— Kavita Krishnan (@kavita_krishnan) August 15, 2019
Indian politician Shehla Rashid tweeted:
What is happenning in Kashmir is ‘normal’ in the sense that state-backed violence, deceit and lies, gag on civilian voices, and govt propaganda have always been a ‘normal’ in Kashmir.
By the standards of democracy, decency and human rights, this isn't normal. No justification.
— Shehla Rashid شہلا رشید (@Shehla_Rashid) August 12, 2019
This report shows how over a million people are living during the security siege of Srinagar. In a New York Times op-ed, Indian writer Arundhati Roy criticized the Indian government for turning all of Kashmir into a giant prison camp.
The government said the restrictions will gradually be eased, and so far, they have succeeded in silencing dissenting voices. However, according to reports, there is growing fear of a brewing backlash from the people of Kashmir when the restrictions are lifted.
Check out Global Voices’ special coverage of the situation in Kashmir.

author: Rezwan


text:
Indian government asks Twitter to remove accounts ‘spreading rumours’ about Kashmir · Global Voices
Rezwan

An Indian paramilitary soldier stands alert in Srinagar after administration imposed curfew in parts of Kashmir valley. Image published on May 25, 2019. Via Instagram account of Ieshan Wani. Used with permission.
On August 5, India's BJP-led government revoked Article 370 of the Indian constitution that gave special autonomy status to the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir dividing it into two union territories – Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. Fearing unrest, protests, and opposition, the authorities put hundreds of political leaders and their aides under house arrest and suspended access to mobile, landline and internet networks.
Urgent: Severe internet disruption registered in #Srinagar, #Kashmir with backbone access largely severed by India from 18:00 UTC; information blackout poses immediate risk to safety and rights of individuals; incident ongoing #KeepItOn
? https://t.co/ENx1iLc4nQ pic.twitter.com/jv0KMbp3CM
— NetBlocks.org (@netblocks) August 4, 2019
With the communication blackout inside Kashmir, netizens elsewhere resorted to Twitter to share the news. This has prompted the Indian government to go after some Twitter accounts it accused of spreading false news in relation to its controversial Kashmir move.
On August 12, local media reported that the Indian home ministry had asked Twitter to ”suspend” eight  accounts for spreading ”misinformation and rumours to disturb peace and calm” in Kashmir. The government accused the accounts of “engaging in an anti-India campaign on Kashmir and Article 370” in violation of India's Information Technology Act. Section 69A of India's IT Act bans content deemed threatening to ”the security of the State, the sovereignty, integrity or defense of India”.
In fact, the Indian government and its supporters have been denouncing what little information is emerging about the situation in Kashmir as ”false” or as propaganda operations run by Pakistan's Spy Agency or its Army. India has long been accusing Pakistan of aiding militants to infiltrate Kashmir to conduct subversive activities. Pakistan responded to the revocation of Kashmir's autonomous status by suspending trade with India and downgrading ties with India.
For example, the BBC's coverage was questioned after it reported on August 9 that the police opened fire and used tear gas to disperse protesters in Soura, Srinagar. The Indian government said that the protest never took place and trolls took to Twitter to attack the BBC and accused it of spreading ”fake news”. While the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and other security agencies have been warning Indian social media users not to believe in ”fake news” spread on social media.
The list of Twitter accounts targeted for removal includes the accounts of Islamabad based Kashmiri activist Madiha Shakil Khan (@Red4Kashmir), Pakistani journalist, writer and TV news anchorperson Arshad Sharif (@arsched), British freelance journalist Mary Scully (@mscully94), and Voice of Kashmir (@kashmir787), which is one of the accounts of Pakistan based citizen media site Our Voice Matter. In the aftermath of India's revocation of Article 370, these accounts have been tweeting to denounce Indian  policies and practices in Kashmir and in support of the region's autonomy. Twitter took no actions against these accounts, and at the time of publication the four accounts were still accessible from India.
Twitter maintains a “country withheld” policy, under which the company may censor specific tweets or accounts in just one country, in response to a government order proving that the tweets are illegal under its local laws. Indian authorities repeatedly send removal requests to Twitter under this policy. According to the company's Transparency Report, in the second half of 2018, Twitter received 667 removal requests affecting 2,228 accounts from Indian authorities. The platform complied with 2 percent of those requests.
According to media reports, the four other Twitter accounts targeted for removal by the Indian government were @sageelaniii,@sadaf2k19, @RiazKha613 and @RiazKha723. The @sageelaniii  account was tweeting under the name of Syed Ali Geelani, a Kashmiri separatist leader, although it was reported not to be his actual account. The accounts of @sageelaniii and @sadaf2k19 were suspended by Twitter for violating the platform's rules, although it was not clear which rule. A search for the account @RiazKha613 turned no results, while a search for @RiazKha723 showed an account that ”doesn't exist”.
When contacted by Outlook India, a news outlet, Twitter said that they do not comment on the deletion of individual accounts. According to a Twitter spokesperson:
We do not comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons. Legal requests made to Twitter are published bi-annually in our Twitter Transparency Report.
As access to internet and phone networks remains suspended in Kashmir, Kashmiris elsewhere in the world and those supporting their struggle for autonomy, have continued to take to Twitter and other social media platforms to express their solidarity. While the Indian government can request Twitter to censor accounts that violate its laws, it remains to be seen how many of those it will eventually be able to silence.
”There are still many powerful voices speaking out on Twitter & FB against Indian colonialism & occupation & #StandingWithKashmir”, Mary Scully, whose account is among the eight accounts targeted for removal, wrote on Facebook.
Check out Global Voices’ special coverage of the situation in Kashmir.


text:
Refugees in West Java, Indonesia have no access to education so they established their own school · Global Voices
Juke Carolina

Teachers and management team of the Refugee Learning Center (RLC). Source: Facebook page of RLC, used with permission.
In West Java, a group of volunteer refugees established the Refugee Learning Center (RLC) to provide education and empower fellow refugees.
According to UNHCR, there are 14,405  refugees in Indonesia, many of whom spend many years in the country without acquiring permanent settlement status. Refugees have no access to education and work, and their situation is exacerbated by complicated resettlement processes, lack of local government support and inadequate housing facilities in the country.
Indonesia was not among the countries which signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, and it only passed a law protecting refugees in 2016.
The author, Juke Carolina, talked to RLC manager Zakareia Shadkaam about the work they are doing to uplift the conditions of refugees.
Juke Carolina (JC): Can you tell us about the history of RLC?
Zakareia Shadkaam (ZS): RLC was established in September 2015 by refugees to provide education for refugees because refugees do not have the right to get education (going to school or university) in Indonesia. The center is managed by a group of volunteers who work for the benefit of refugees who feel that they have something to offer to the community. Our vision is to raise “a diverse, educated and empowered refugee community.” To reach our vision, we provide education for refugees and prepare them for their future; facilitate communication and cooperation between diverse groups of people and cultures; provide meaningful engagement for the refugee community, and develop the capacities of refugee volunteers.
JC: You mentioned here that the project is managed by volunteers. Care to elaborate?
ZH: The [center's] volunteers are all refugees from different countries. We have volunteers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. We welcome non-refugee volunteers as well. The length of volunteering depends on each individual; we have volunteers who have been volunteering for more than three years already (I joined RLC in June 2016). We currently have more than 30 volunteers (2 futsal coaches, 24 teachers, and 8 board members) who teach 280 students in total: 180 children during the morning shift and 100 adults in the afternoon. English, Mathematics, Science and Social Science subjects are taught in the morning, while English and Bahasa Indonesia for adult pupils are taught in the afternoon.
There are many students here who arrived unaccompanied by their parents due to hardships in countries they are from.
A collage of RLC Futsal teams. Photo courtesy of Refugee Learning center. Used with permission.
Zakareia Shadkaam also mentioned that RLC has student prefects who are voted by their fellow students. One of their duties is to help fellow students at the beginning of the class and during breaks.
Asad Mohsini from Afghanistan is a 28-year-old student at RLC. He dreams of continuing his education and becoming a successful businessman one day. Photo courtesy of RLC, used with permission.
JC: How do you sustain your operations? Do students pay a certain fee? Any support from local government, international institutions like the United Nations perhaps?
ZH: We’re not self-sufficient, we rely on our online crowdfunding campaigns which we do twice a year. We cannot apply for any other type of funding because unfortunately, we cannot be registered officially in Indonesia. We do collect a symbolic amount of money from students which does not even cover half of the building rent. We don’t receive any kind of monetary help from any government body or international organizations.
Refugees have never been at the heart of Indonesia's domestic or foreign policies. In 2018, Yasonna Laoly, Indonesian Minister for Human Rights, claimed that refugees are burdening the government.
Although Indonesia is not a popular destination for refugees, its geographic location makes it a popular temporary destination for those looking to resettle in Australia.
Numerous refugee facilities in the country are overcrowded which has led to various human rights violations and suicide cases among the refugees.

author: Juke Carolina


text:
Vitriolic response to art exhibit tests the limits of freedom of speech in Japan · Global Voices
Nevin Thompson

Statue of a Korean “comfort woman” from the cancelled “After Freedom of Expression?” exhibition at the 2019 Aichi Triennale.  Image captions: “Aichi governor faces off with Nagoya mayor over freedom of expression.” Screencap from ANN YouTube channel.
A controversial and now-canceled art exhibition at an internationally prominent arts festival in central Japan has led to government criticism, threats, at least one arrest, international protests by artists and questions about freedom of expression in Japan.
The canceled exhibition, titled “After Freedom of Expression?”, was just one of the works displayed at the  Aichi Triennale 2019, which takes place from August 1 to October 14, 2019 in Aichi Prefecture and features works from 80 international artists. Among the themes that works in the four festival programs of the Triennale attempt to explore is the power of art in the age of simulation, particularly over women's bodies.
The Aichi Triennale's controversial “After Freedom of Expression?” exhibition was in fact a follow-up to a previous show that explored topics deemed taboo by public cultural institutions in Japan. One of these is the issue of so-called “comfort women” pressed into sexual slavery all over Asia by Japanese government and military forces during World War II.
This year's edition of the “After Freedom of Expression?” exhibition featured a “Statue of a Girl of Peace” by South Korean artists that symbolizes the around 200,000 so-called “comfort women” conscripted, trafficked and enslaved by Japanese authorities. The artwork resembles similarly controversial statues in South Korea and the United States that have provoked heated recriminations from various Japanese commentators, politicians and far-right activists.
【脅迫ファクスで男逮捕　少女像めぐり業務妨害容疑】
愛知県で開催中の国際芸術祭「あいちトリエンナーレ」で、従軍慰安婦を象徴する少女像の撤去を求める脅迫ファクスが送られた事件で、県警は威力業務妨害容疑で59歳の男を逮捕しました。
＜少女像企画展中止　関連情報＞https://t.co/7AGSRNo4qm pic.twitter.com/JzstEuae8o
— 時事ドットコム（時事通信ニュース） (@jijicom) August 7, 2019
“Man who sent threatening fax arrested on suspicion of disrupting business activities”
Aichi police have arrested a man (59) on suspicion of disrupting business activities after a threatening fax was sent to organizers of the Aichi Triennale in Aichi Prefecture.
— From JiJi News Service
This time, the threats began immediately after the “comfort woman” statue was unveiled on the first day of the Triennale on August 1. Besides a flood of hateful emails and phone calls, a Japanese man with a long history of anti-Korean hate speech, since arrested, sent a fax to festival organizers threatening to burn down the venue unless the statue was removed. In light of a recent deadly arson attack on a Kyoto animation studio that killed 35 people, organizers were forced to shutter the exhibit for several days.
However, Triennale organizers received even more criticism about the statue and other perceived anti-Japanese artworks, such as a video of a photograph of Japan's wartime Emperor Hirohito being burned. Kawamura Takashi, the right-wing populist mayor of Nagoya, one of the cities in Aichi Prefecture hosting the Triennale, demanded that the statue of the comfort woman be removed, calling it “factually incorrect” and a “waste of taxpayer's money.”
Omura Hideaki, the governor of Aichi Prefecture, accused Kawamura of censorship, but as chairman of the Triennale organizing committee, Omura announced on August 4 that both the statue and the “After Freedom Expression?” exhibit would be removed from the Triennale program because of safety concerns.
The organizing committee's decision to remove the statue and cancel the exhibition did not go over well with either Japan's arts community or the 80 artists invited to participate in the Triennale. By August 6, a group of artists had called on the Triennale to remove their work from the show.
According to ArtNews:
In an August 6 open letter posted to Facebook, 72 of the over 90 participating artists decried the decision to close that show, deeming it censorship. A week later, nine of the artists have called for the removal of their artworks in the Triennale for as long as “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’ ” remains closed, “as a public gesture of solidarity with the censored artists.”
There are also questions about the manner in which the decision to close the “After Freedom of Expression?” exhibition was made. Triennale artistic director Tsuda Daisuke, a well-known journalist in Japan with 1.6 million followers on Twitter, accepted most of the blame for what happened.
In an August 6 interview, Tsuda expressed regret for having caved in to outside pressure, saying, “I ended up setting a bad example by scrapping a cultural event due to an attack by phone calls […] I have to accept criticism that I should have expected much worse than what I was prepared for.”
But Tsuda's initial apology did not end the recriminations, nor mollify the concerns of the participating artists who wished to withdraw their works from the Triennale. In a long Medium post published on August 15, Tsuda acknowledged that the decision to remove the statue and the controversial exhibition from the Triennale was made unilaterally, and did not take into account nor respect the wishes of the artists involved.
When the controversy first erupted at the start of the exhibition on August 2, Tsuda lamented in a statement on the Triennale site that the pressure to remove the statue and close down the exhibition would:
[…] Demonstrate to our citizens–and to the world–that Japan's current social climate does not allow for discussions about the state of our country, or about the darker aspects of its past. We hope the offending parties will take this into account and consider the gravity of their actions.
Tsuda later argued that he did not think the statue nor the exhibit, which explore Japan's behavior in wartime, are “anti-Japanese”:
ほとんどの国や社会においては、政府や軍隊、あるいは民衆が、自国民や他国民の人権を抑圧した負の歴史を持っています。
しかし、多くの国や社会は、そのような歴史を反省し、繰り返さず、今の自分たちが自国民からそして他国民から尊敬を受けられるように立派に生きていこうとしています。
それは、僕たちの日本社会も同様であると、僕は信じています。
In most countries and societies, the government, the military, or the people themselves have a tragic or negative history of repressing the human rights of their own people and others. However, many countries and societies reflect on their shared history in order to not repeat it, and instead try to live and act soas to be respected by their own people and by other nations.
I believe the same goes for our Japanese society.
The Aichi Triennale continues until October 14.

author: Nevin Thompson


text:
In Pakistan, it’s an uphill battle for women who report sexual harassment · Global Voices
R Umaima Ahmed

Image by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images.
On paper, the Pakistani law that criminalizes sexual harassment is a step towards protecting women’s rights; however, the extent to which that law is enforced can be an entirely different story. If a woman decides to make a formal complaint, she can face an uphill battle in the form of drawn-out legal processes, social stigma, and indifference as some of these behaviors are normalized.
Despite these obstacles, a recent spate of indecent exposure cases has ended in arrests as uploaded social media evidence led the police to the perpetrators.
In August, Tasina Parwaiz from Lahore recorded and posted a video to Twitter of a man sitting on his motorbike and masturbating on the side of the road. The Punjab police were tagged in the post and within hours the accused was arrested under the watch of Superintendent of Police (SP) Ahsan Saifullah. He also tweeted about the arrest:
Aoa @tasinaparwaiz we have managed to arrest the culprit. He is M. Tayyab Ahmad r/o Westwood Colony Raiwind Lahore. @Lahorepoliceops @CcpoLahore @SHABAZGIL @OFFICIALDPRPP pic.twitter.com/msBX3IvdSF
— SP Ahsan Saifullah, PSP (@ahsan_saifullah) August 2, 2019
Some weeks back a similar case was reported on Twitter with photos of the culprit attached:
#MeToo
Area: Etihaad Town, Raiwand road lahore.
Time: 5 PM
Bike # LEP 9992
(pictures) @mahwashajaz_ @NJLahori @tazeen @Shanzaf #MeToo The kind of story I'm posting here is the story of every other girl who chose to go outside for whatever reason.
— K (@Alitaskywalker) July 25, 2019
And He came near us as much as possible and started flashing his dick. All the girls were shivering with fear including me. However, I could no longer keep my gaze lower and I took out my mobile and took photos of him and his dick and number plate. @BajiPlease @iHalalFeminist _
— K (@Alitaskywalker) July 25, 2019
This person was also arrested by SP Ahsan Saifullah:
We ve managed to arrest the accused and have impounded his motorcycle. Now i request @Alitaskywalker to contact me for providing relevant details for registering FIR against the culprit. @NJLahori @tazeen @Shanzaf @mahwashajaz_ #metoo #lahorepolice pic.twitter.com/c2xpudJp3m
— SP Ahsan Saifullah, PSP (@ahsan_saifullah) July 25, 2019
In another incident a CCTV camera in an area of Dera Ghazi Khan caught a man groping a woman walking in the street; the Police also arrested the perpetrator.
Good work done by DG Khan police in identifying and arresting this pervert named Munir Ahmed Kharal. Such a shameful character. ? pic.twitter.com/DYbq91fkiS
— Danyal Gilani (@DanyalGilani) July 24, 2019
In Pakistan, behaviors such as these are often normalized and people are not afraid of being reported due to the lengthy legal issues involved. They are also not concerned with the disgrace attached it. Although Tasina Parwaiz got a lot of support on Twitter, she had to delete her account after receiving hate speech from online trolls for recording the video.
Some even used the phrase, “Mera Jism Meri Merzi” (My Body My Wish), a slogan seen during 2018 Aurat March (Women March), to justify the harasser’s behavior.
Its all about “Mera Jism Meri Marzi”
If the boy was masturbating in public than why the girl was staring at him ?
Not only she watched every bit of it but also recorded it.
Was she enjoyed it ?
Shameless girls like you give sexual suggestives to guys & provoke them for this.
— Muhammad Haris Qureshi (@Haris_Qureshi_) August 3, 2019
According to law, under Section 509 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) “Insulting the modesty of women or sexually harassing them,” is a crime. Perpetrators of this crime may be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or fine up to Rs 500,000 (US$ 3,120) or both.”
In an interview with Global Voices, Superintendent of Police (SP) Ahsan Saifullah, who arrested the perpetrator in the Parwaiz case, said:
This is the first time arrests have been made (in such a case) but that does not mean such incidents have not been happening, unfortunately, street harassment and sexual harassment is part of our society. The only difference is, (this time) it was recorded and reported.
He further said:
The ‘Me Too’ campaign has played a huge role in creating awareness in ladies. Earlier women stayed silent when they were harassed or sexually violated, but today things are changing as there is proof due to cell phone cameras.
After Parwaiz took to Twitter to publically denounce the act of public exposure, many other women shared similar stories about how sexual harassment has affected their lives:
This has become common on Lahore streets and parkseven at DHA phaze 5 . just to avoid such things its been a year i stoped jogging on streets… i am tired of seeing such things…
— SFAK?????? (@FarkhundaKhan) August 2, 2019
This happened with me.. when I was standing outside of my University ?
Ye bht common hota ja raha ha especially near educational institutions
— Kanwal (@Syedakanwal_) August 1, 2019
Sana, a teacher in Lahore, spoke to Global Voices and shared her experience:
A rickshaw driver used to stand at the bus stop where she took her bus and would take out his private part as she went by. This kept happening for weeks and when I complained to my family I was asked to quit the job, as this is the norm in most families.
Jannat Fazal, program manager, and psychologist at Digital Rights Foundation spoke to Global Voices:
These incidents have a lasting effect on victims, as their personal space is violated, they feel vulnerable and helpless, and they usually find no support or redressal against these perverse acts because of how our system is rigged against the victims.
Exhibitionism is a type of mental health disorder where a person feels the urge to expose their genitals to nonconsenting adults, but we cannot attribute this behavior to this mental health condition altogether, many times people indulge in such acts because they derive pleasure from making others uncomfortable and also because of the lack of adequate reporting mechanisms to curb it. Even if anyone is suffering from this condition this act still needs to be reported and individuals need to be taught ways to better cope with their sexual urges instead.
While women in Pakistan are far from reporting or following up on all harassment incidents, these cases are the beginning of a new trend.

author: R Umaima Ahmed


text:
China inspects Hongkongers’ mobile phones for protest photos and chats at border checkpoints · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Photo: Ng Tin Hung/CHRF via HKFP. Use with permission.
Since early July 2019, Hong Kong residents have been reporting on social media that their mobile phones are being checked when they travel to mainland China. The border police officers in particular are looking for anti-extradition photos, videos and group chats. If the traveler is active in protest, s/he would be further interrogated and some are requested to write a letter of reassurance that they won't join the protests in the future.
A journalist from the South China Morning Post (SCMP) talked to 10 travelers who had their photos and videos checked at the Shenzhen and Hong Kong borders by mainland Chinese border police. Among the 10, half of them also had their private messages inspected. In at least one case, the police asked someone whom they had identified as an active protester for a DNA sample.
The inspection of mobile phones at the Shenzhen border started just after protests over the extradition bill — which would allow crime suspects residing in Hong Kong to be brought to trial in mainland China — escalated, and the Chinese government labeled the massive demonstrations as a “Color Revolution” against the communist regime. The biggest protests, which took place on June 16, were attended by two million people.
Of the 700 thousand people who move between the Hong Kong and China borders every day, half of them are Hong Kong residents — and this new border control measure has generated great panic among many of them, who either have businesses or relatives in mainland China.
The majority of the SCMP reporter's interviewees wanted to talk about their experience at the border anonymously, as they could not avoid future travels to mainland China. The exception is 38-year-old technology consultant Ben Crox, who was willing to talk publicly about his experience. On July 24, soon after he passed the checkpoint, he posted on Facebook:
於西九膠鐵﹐過關被要求搜查﹐要打開手機檢查照片和影片﹐一一解釋來源﹐並要求開示在甚麼通訊軟件的甚麼群組收到﹐書本因為關員看不懂而沒收。車程擔誤不賠償。大概五至十個捉一個初檢…
At West Kwoloon Rapid Railway mainland China port area, I was stopped and asked to unlock my mobile phone. They checked on the photos and videos and I had to explain the sources. They also asked me to show them on which software application and chat groups I had obtained those photos. They did not confiscate my books as they did not understand the content. I could not catch my train and had not received any compensation. On average, about 10-20% of the passengers was stopped for the check up.
One of my Facebook connections, who is an IT professional, had a similar experience. He posted in a private update to his friends that he was checked by Chinese border police officers on July 26 at the Futian port area. While there, he observed that most of the travelers who were stopped by border control were young people. Apart from checking his photos and videos, the police asked him to open WeChat so that they could inspect discussions in various group chats.
So what would happen if the border police actually found protest photos and videos on people's phones? On his Facebook page Blogger Chan Kam Shui shared a detailed account of one such case, in which the Hong Konger was brought to a detention room after a border police officer from Lo Wu found protest photos on his phone. He was asked which protests he had attended, who persuaded him to join the protests and why he had decided to protest. Border police then brought him to the Lo Wu police station, where they recorded his name, Hong Kong telephone number and address, and the names of his family members. The whole process took four hours.
In a separate case reported by the Stand News, a member of a product brand business was detained by the Shenzhen police for eight hours after anti-extradition protest photos were found on his mobile. He was photographed and made to provide a DNA sample. The Shenzhen police released him after he wrote a letter of assurance that he would not join any protests in the future.
As more and more individual accounts of border checkpoint experiences circulated online, netizens took to social media to share tactics about how to deal with the situation. These included shifting to a clean mobile phone when traveling to mainland China, setting up a guest login password on mobile, deleting protest-related communication apps such as Telegram and LIHKG or storing their data in a secured cloud server, and power washing their mobiles before crossing the border.
In the past few days, there have been online discussions about Hong Kong protesters who have allegedly gone missing in mainland China. Lawmaker Lam Cheuk Ting has confirmed on Facebook that he was following up two of such cases on August 17. The news has generated so much panic among demonstrators and supporters of the protests that they are using these new tactics to help manage their fears.
To read more about the anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong, visit Global Voices’ special coverage page.


text:
Cinema and new laws bring greater acceptance and visibility for Vietnamese transgenders  · Global Voices
Filip Noubel

Le Anh Phong, the main character of the movie Find Phong. Photo used with permission.
Living as an LGBTQ+ person in a Communist society often means the state determines to what extent one can be visible in public space.
While this identity is purely denied in North Korea, and admitted only in the private sphere in China, Vietnam presents an interesting example of growing tolerance and increased visibility for LGBTQ+ people, including in media.
One telling example is the 2015 documentary movie “Finding Phong“ that portrays the daily life of a Vietnamese transgender woman.
As Le Anh Phong, the main character in the film, and Gerry Herman, the producer of the movie, came to Prague in July 2019 to screen their movie and discuss it with Czech and Czech-Vietnamese audiences (over 80,000 people of Vietnamese origin live permanently in the Czech Republic, close to one percent of the total population,) I interviewed both of them to understand changing attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community in Vietnam today.
The interview with Le Anh Phong was done with the help of a translator.
Le Anh Phong: There is undoubtedly a growing emergence of this community. The first reason is due to the role played by the media that now openly covers LGBTQI+ issues, including inside the country. The second reason is that the Vietnamese National Assembly will review a draft law that would guarantee medical support to citizens requesting sex reassignment. This has created a flow of public and online discussions.
The LGBTQI+ rights movement has also been actively supported by international organizations and several embassies, including those from the United States,  the Netherlands, Germany and Canada. A number of trainings, campaigns, study tours have been organized, and this has changed the general atmosphere. My impression is that Vietnamese authorities do not view LGBTQI+ issues as particularly sensitive or overly political.
In Vietnam, there is a lot of confusion within the public opinion about a set of different laws that affect the transgender community. First, in November 2015, a law was passed that changed provisions in the Civil Code allowing people who had a sex change to register legal documents under their new gender. This became effective as of January 2017. Now we are waiting for the next step: a law guaranteeing access to health care, such as hormonal therapy and psychological support. There is a draft of this law, and the National Assembly has announced it would review it by 2020.
Personally, I haven’t experienced much challenges: I still haven’t changed my legal documents, so very often officials at the bank or at the airport asked me why I still don't have new documents [reflecting my current gender]. In the end, they do provide the services I require from them.
When I started my transition, I had almost no information about the process. I did this movie so that others [the transgender community in Vietnam is estimated to reach nearly 300,000 people] would find out about the issues, the challenges, the solutions. The second reason is that I wanted to have memories of my own journey.
The most difficult part for me in the making of the movie was to introduce the camera in the privacy of my family, and have my family members get used to this intrusion. I wanted the whole thing to be humorous, so people would take it lightly. When we shoot the movie, I was working, so usually the filming happened after work, sometimes as late as 3 a.m. I was very tired, but I wanted the film to capture the authenticity of the moment.
Initially, the movie was shown only in international documentary film festivals outside abroad. But in 2018, it was shown for the first time in commercial cinema theatres in Vietnam. The reception was so positive and got such good reviews in the media and from government officials that the screening was prolonged for a second week. For me, the most positive aspect is that the audience is no longer not limited to LGBTQI+ community. In fact, parents came and stayed during the entire film, which I did not expect.
It was also the first documentary movie played in commercial cinema theaters in Vietnam. Amazingly, the censorship allowed nude scenes which are always taken out in films shown in cinemas in Vietnam. Perhaps because of the topic of the movie, the censors did not intervene, which is a rare precedent.
Gerry Herman: I met Phong at a social gathering, and I heard the following story: “everybody thinks I am a gay boy, but in fact I am a straight girl in a boy’s body.” I became fascinated by the story of a young boy who grew up in central rural Vietnam with no exposure to notions of transgender identity. When Phong told me she had contacted other transgender people telling her about the underground hormone market and contacts with cheap doctors in Bangkok, I proposed a deal: we would make a documentary about her journey provided she would agree to do the transition with appropriate medical support.
I also contacted a transgender filmmaker who alerted me about the pain that most transgender people experience in regard to their past. They usually burn pictures taken before their transition. For Phong, it was the opposite, she wanted the whole story to be captured. In the end, the real challenge was the editing: two years of filming ended with over 250 hours of footage.
Le Anh Phong: I was very happy when I saw the news in Taiwan because it is a place not far away from Vietnam. This means our lawmakers know about this law. Now transgender groups are also advocating for a same-sex marriage law, but the priority remains on the sex reassignment support law. People believe once this law has been passed, the same-sex marriage law will be much easier to adopt. The reality in Vietnam is that a lot of same-sex couples live together, but of course they have no legal protection of their rights currently.
There are two stages to a marriage in Vietnam: a “family marriage” and then a civil, government-registered marriage. Until five years ago, it was illegal to have a gay “family marriage,” the police would disrupt such ceremonies. Now it is not legal, but also no longer illegal, it is tolerated and we witness many gay and lesbian marriages. This indicates growing acceptance, including from the authorities.

author: Filip Noubel


text:
Here are some of Moldovan pop music’s contributions to global meme culture · Global Voices
Filip Stojanovski

Collage made of screenshots from the videos of the “Numa Numa Dance” by Gary Brolsma, “Dragostea Din Tei” by O-Zone, and “Run away” by Sunstroke Project & Olia Tira. Fair use.
Few people would consider Moldova a music industry powerhouse. Tucked into a corner of Eastern Europe, most international news about it center around politics, usually to do with the fact that the country is sandwiched between the EU and the Russian zone of influence.
However, its pop music surprisingly managed to exit the confines of its national boundaries, and two popular memes known around the world are actually Moldovan in origin.
If you were online 15 years ago, you will certainly remember the Numa Numa Dance, a classic viral video of the pre-YouTube era. The grainy footage of the webcams of that time features a chubby young man lip-syncing to the song “Dragostea Din Tei,” by the Moldovan 2000s boyband O-Zone.
According to the video's Wikipedia entry, the man was the American vlogger Gary Brolsma, who uploaded the video on the website Newgrounds under the username gman250 in December 2004. YouTube was founded two months later, in February 2005.
Within months, the video received millions of views. It was taken down in 2016, but not before copies were uploaded elsewhere and inspired dozens of spoofs.
Released in July 2003, “Dragostea Din Tei” became very popular around the world on the following year. Brolsma says he first found heard the song on a Japanese flash animation with cats.
The title “Dragostea Din Tei” in Romanian/Moldovan literally means “Love from the linden [trees].” The intro's words (“Ma-ia-hii…”) are meaningless vocalizations. The lyrics go:
“Vrei să pleci dar nu mă, nu mă iei,
Nu mă, nu mă iei, nu mă, nu mă, nu mă iei.”
And they can be translated as:
You want to leave but don't want to take me,
Don't want to take me, don't want, don't want to take me
Along with the song, the Moldovan pop band released a music video that combined live-action with superhero comics-style graphics. During the following years, several labels around the world acquired the rights to the song, and versions of it were released in dozens of languages, such as English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Indonesian, Afrikaans, and Japanese.
Another world-famous meme inspired by Moldovan pop is the “Epic Sax Guy.” It is a saxophone player swinging his hips to a catchy solo tune, and is based off the performance of the Moldovan entry on the 2010 Eurovision, the 60-year-old song contest that unites the continent every year through TV screens.
The song “Run Away,” by Sunstroke Project & Olia Tira, reached 22nd place in the 2010 competition, out of 39 participants. The official video on Eurovision's YouTube channel has over eight million views. While the whole crew, outfitted in the style of 1980's cyberpunk sci-fi, gave a memorable performance at that time, it was Sergei Stepanov's passionate saxophone solo that stole the show.
An example of use of Epic Sax Guy meme, by KnowYourMeme.com, fair use.
For years after, the “Epic Sax Guy” meme continued with a life of its own on the internet. It inspired countless cartoons and copycats. On YouTube, there are ten-hour videos of the looped sax solo, some of them with millions of views. People have participated in challenges created by influential YouTubers to watch these videos in their entirety.
It seems that the Moldovan music producers were aware of this collateral popularity. In 2017, the Sunstroke Project participated again at the Eurovision with the song “Hey Mamma,” renditioned with many of the elements of the Epic Sax Guy meme, including a new version of the sax solo.
The Sunstroke Project reached third place with their performance in the 2017 competition, the best result Moldova has ever achieved in the contest.
While the world of memes awaits for Moldovan pop music to provide fresh inspiration, let's take a look at what happened with the heroes of this story post-internet-fame.
According to Wikipedia, O-Zone split in 2005. Several of the band members reunited in 2017 for two concerts. The band's official web-page at artists.universal-music.de/ozone has been removed, while their Facebook page has not been updated since 2012.
Gary Brolsma became an internet celebrity. His popularity increased with numerous appearances in US media. He was voted the Number 1 Internet Icon on the “40 Greatest Internet Superstars” by TV channel VH1, with the “Star Wars kid” coming second place. His next big year was 2008, when he published his first solo album and appeared in the South Park episode “Canada on Strike” as one of the internet celebrities waiting for their theoretical payments. YouTubers keep producing references and reactions to his video, which had become an icon of internet nostalgia.
The Sunstroke Project is still active — their official website is functional despite not bring fully up to date, so the best way to get the latest info on their activities is via their Instagram profile.
Olia Tira attempted to represent Moldova at Eurovision once again in 2014, under the stage name FLUX LIGHT, but didn't qualify on the national contest. She continued her career singing in Romanian/Moldavian and Russian, and just around four months ago she released her latest single.

author: Filip Stojanovski