The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.

The woman’s shock registered a new reality that is coalescing in Germany. What happens when basic rights seem to conflict with Germany’s vaunted culture of “coming to terms with the past”  — often interpreted as a call for anti-antisemitism? Recent events have raised troubling questions about who is considered part of the nation and what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history.

Following the October 7 assault in which Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his condolences for the victims, condemned the attacks and proclaimed his solidarity with Israel. He reasserted the 2008 proclamation of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that the protection of Israel is part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” or part of the country’s reason for existence. The German government has remained steadfast in its support, even as Israel’s bombing campaign on Gaza has injured and killed high numbers of civilians — the latest death toll sits at 10,022 people, more than 4,000 of them children.

There has been little official sympathy for the plight of Gazans. But Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe — an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people — and people across the country have come together in solidarity with Palestine for both spontaneous and registered protests since the beginning of the conflict. In response, cities across Germany have tried to clamp down on these demonstrations, though the courts have overturned several of these attempts as illegal. In Berlin, bans have been issued against protests with titles such as  “Peace in the Middle East”; “Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East,” a rally organized by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, a Jewish organization; and “Youth Against Racism,” which was called after a high school teacher hit a student who had brought a Palestinian flag to school. Throughout, there have been shocking scenes of police brutalizing protestors.

Those who advocate for the bans point to incidents of people gathering on Sonnenallee, a central avenue in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, in support of the Hamas attack on October 7. One especially notorious event involved about 50 men who responded to the call of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network “to celebrate the victory of resistance” by sharing baklava on the street. Berlin’s police treated it as a potentially criminal matter, noting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they would “carry out the necessary measures.” Newspapers reported that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, called the men who had gathered “barbarians.”

Beyond these incidents, German politicians have seemingly competed among themselves to see who can promote anti-antisemitism the loudest — and who can be the harshest on the Muslim minority. Nancy Faeser, a government cabinet minister, urged that the government “use all legal means to deport Hamas supporters.” The leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz declared, “Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough antisemitic men in this country.” Scholz, the chancellor, piled on: “Too many are coming,” he said. “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”

These are not wholly new tendencies in Germany. Last year, authorities in Berlin banned all public commemorations of the Nakba, the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel. Earlier this year, German police admitted in court that when they were enforcing the ban, they had simply targeted people who “looked Palestinian.” However, Berlin schools’ decision to forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh and other Palestinian symbols is an escalation that led even a member of Scholz’s own party to question if it could possibly be legal.

Since reunification in 1990, Germany’s national identity has been founded upon “coming to terms with the past.” That is, taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust and taking steps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Central to this protection of Jews has been the enforcement of anti-antisemitism at home, and, internationally, the support of Israel: Germany’s “Staatsraison.”

This culture of remembrance, however, holds little room for non-ethnic Germans. Coming to terms with the past requires that everyone shares the same past. The Muslim minority, for instance — most of whom arrived after 1945 — have found themselves freighted with the accusation of antisemitism for failing to identify with German guilt for the Holocaust. This is not to say that there is no antisemitism within the Muslim minority, but when the center-left Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck insisted in a recent speech that Muslims must distance themselves from antisemitism — or, in some cases, face deportation — he reinscribed the idea of the Muslim minority overall as antisemitic until proven otherwise. Muslims, and particularly Palestinians, have to prove that they deserve to be part of Germany.

The German press has inflamed the situation. Der Spiegel has peddled base stereotypes about Germany’s Muslims, and Bild has published a manifesto declaring that “we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country — against our values, democracy, and against Germany.” But it isn’t just conservative publications pushing these narratives — the left-leaning Die Zeit recently published a piece that questioned whether Muslim immigrants could ever become “civilized.” And the leftist newspaper Taz has published editorials that purport to connect Palestinians with hate and Nazism. When during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pleaded for the ethical imperative to think about both Israelis and Palestinians, he was accused of defending Hamas’ crimes.

Highly publicized antisemitic incidents — a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Berlin synagogue and Stars of David painted on homes — has further roiled Germany. Some Jews have said they are afraid to visit their temples. “Germany is a safe country for Jews,” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, recently affirmed, noting his approval of Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures. “In my eyes, the security forces are doing everything to make sure that doesn’t change. Even if the threat in Germany currently comes more from the Arabic side than from the extreme right.”

However, other Jews in Germany have argued that Schuster misrepresents the real threat. A recent open letter from more than 100 Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany — full disclosure: I am a signatory — cited the government’s own statistics, which paint a different picture about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests: “the perceived threat of such assemblies grossly inverts the actual threat to Jewish life in Germany, where, according to the federal police, the ‘vast majority’ of anti-Semitic crimes — around 84 percent — are committed by the German far right.”

For Palestinians, cultural institutions have largely shut their doors. An award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was indefinitely postponed. In Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater called off upcoming performances of its long-running and much celebrated “The Situation,” which gave voice to the experiences of Arabs, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. A letter about the decision described how “war demands a simple division into friend and enemy.” Berlin’s Haus für Poesie canceled an upcoming launch party for “The Arabic Europe,” a collection of poetry edited by the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun.

A Palestinian doctor and activist told me that the situation of Palestinians in Germany is one of “collective loneliness.” He asked to be called Nazir — there is a risk of professional repercussions for showing support for Palestinians. “The feeling is not only that we are losing family,” Nazir explained, “not only that a genocide is being done, not only that we have so much to fight with our own losses and pain, but we are not even allowed to mourn publicly. We are not allowed to speak up. We are not allowed to make demonstrations for the ones who are being killed in silence. And this is a whole different level of oppression, this state of oppression in Germany.”

The center of Arabic-speaking life in Berlin is Neukoelln’s Sonnenallee, sometimes known to Germans as the “Arab Street.” The district has long been demonized — along with its neighboring Kreuzberg — by the German right. Recently, some have spoken of the district as a “little Gaza.” It was in Kreuzberg where a group of men handed out pastries to celebrate the Hamas attack. And the neighborhood since has been the site of various gatherings to show support for the people of Gaza under bombardment — and several confrontations with police. On October 18, an officer in riot gear stamped out tea lights at a vigil for those killed in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Later that night, parts of the street were on fire — in what Bild called a riot.

Since October 7, police have arrived most nights in riot gear, patrolling in force. On October 23, in just the two blocks between the restaurants Risa Chicken and Konditorei Damascus, I counted more than two dozen officers in full suits of riot armor and eight police vans. At the corner of Pannierstrasse, I spotted a group of six police who had detained eight people. “They tried to cross the street when it was red,” a man said to me, smiling in disbelief, pointing to two of the men in custody, who could be described as vaguely Middle Eastern, standing against the wall. “Can you believe it?” a woman with a gray hair covering exclaimed, nearly leaping with indignation. “How can you hold them for that?”

As a crowd gathered, a pair of teenagers walked past, one wearing a puffer jacket, the other in a Puma sweatshirt. As the signal turned green and they stepped onto the crosswalk, I heard one of them say to the other, “Artikel 8: Grundgesetz.” Article 8 of the Basic Law.

I had just heard that phrase for the first time earlier that evening. A protester in Hermannplatz, the square that lies at the mouth of Sonnenallee, had been reading out that very section of the Grundgesetz, which is the German constitution. Article 8 says, “All Germans have the right — without having to register or receive permission — to assemble peacefully, without weapons.”

The teenagers might have misread the situation. After all, the police were not detaining these men because they were protesting, but rather were arbitrarily detaining them for the minor infraction of jaywalking.

“Why is everyone speaking now about Article 8?” Clemens Arzt, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, repeated my question before answering. “Because every half-educated person knows that Article 8 protects the freedom of assembly.”

Germany, he explained to me, recognizes assembly and speech as two distinct rights, as opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution where they are intertwined. In Germany, Article 5 deals with freedom of speech and Article 8 with freedom of assembly. The practice of shutting down protests before they even begin really began with the pandemic, said Arzt, “when we preemptively implemented bans on gatherings at a mass scale.”

I mentioned to Arzt how I have repeatedly seen police demand that protesters put away their Palestinian flags. Is this legal? Arzt said that the police are given broad latitude to make these decisions, but only in the case of “imminent danger” to public safety — something that October’s demonstrations did not often entail. But he suggested that making these decisions on the spot can be so difficult for the police, that one reason for the bans might have been that it was simply easier for them to pull the plug completely despite questions about legality. 

The second reason for the bans, he said, has to do with Germany’s relationship with Israel. These protests are being broken up in the name of “Staatsraison.” While recognizing Germany’s important relationship with Israel, Arzt sees this current application as a problem. “It appears to me,” he said, “that, partially, the basic idea of the protection of Israel — this Staatsraison — results in taking priority over gatherings that cannot, actually, from a sober legal perspective be disbanded or forbidden.”

“If you meet 20 people or if you meet 10,000, the empowerment you feel after a big demonstration is a whole different level,” the Palestinian doctor Nazir told me with a grimace. “And Germany knows exactly that. And that is why Germany is banning the protests.”

“They fear the growing rise of solidarity happening in Berlin.”

Nazir has been in Berlin for most of his adult life, where he has cared for the sick, paid his taxes and participated in Palestine Speaks, an antiracist advocacy group dedicated to Palestinian rights. Since October 7, he has lost 19 members of his extended family to Israeli bombs. He wakes up every day, he told me, hoping that his parents and sister in Gaza remain unharmed. “This is the question with which I wake up every day,” he said, “and hope that answer is still ‘yes, they are alive.’”

“It’s one of the most schizophrenic situations I have found myself in,” he said. “I am good enough to pay taxes and to work in a hospital, to do intensive care and to hold the hand of grieving people and to give hope and optimism to parents and their children that we are going to overcome their health crises.” All of this, he said, “while you are dehumanized and while you are expecting every minute to get a note that your family does not exist.”

When we spoke, Palestine Speaks had begun to register their protests with more generic names like “Global South United”; that particular demonstration ended up drawing around 11,000 participants, one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies in German history. Still, even when the protests happen, the police seek to disrupt them, Nazir said. He told me about a protest the previous weekend at Oranienplatz called “Decolonize. Against Oppression Globally.” There, he said the police had removed their speakers after the police translator misinterpreted a statement. Still, he said, it was a relief to feel the support of so many people during a time when the environment in Germany has become so deeply anti-Muslim.

“They are making house raids,” Nazir said of the German police, an assertion echoed by other activists with whom I spoke, who noted that referring to the events of October 7 as “resistance” online could result in a visit from the police. He emphasized how Germany’s treatment of Palestinians is only one part of the nation’s rightward shift, and how the current wave of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discourse is a symptom of Germany’s failure to learn from its past. “The most important question is not what’s happening toward Palestinians alone.”

“Germany needs Israel as a replacement nationality,” he said, referring to the idea of German identification with Israel as a nationality that Germany can feel unrestrainedly proud of. He cautioned that Germany also needs Israel to be “rehabilitated in the international community.” “Israel is the so-called proof that Germany learned a lesson from its history and that the denazification was a successful process.”

“But let’s be honest and point out the elephant in the room,” said Nazir. “The second biggest party in Germany is the AfD.”

The Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party notorious for its Islamophobia and xenophobia, has consistently received 20% of German support in polls, second only to the right-drifting Christian Democratic Union.  

“It seems like everyone is really just trying to compete with the AfD at the moment,” said Wieland Hoban, a noted composer and chairman of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. He described the situation in Germany as having turned starkly to the right.

“The biggest warriors against antisemitism,” Hoban told me, “are conservatives and right-wingers who are doing that because they’re using antisemitism just to live out their anti-migrant racism by saying ‘OK, all these Muslims and Arabs are antisemites so let’s deport them all in order to fight antisemitism.’”

German society’s hypocrisy is exposed, suggested Hoban, in its tolerance of antisemitism among those who are already recognized as Germans. Hoban cited Hubert Aiwanger, a far-right politician and former schoolteacher in Bavaria, who was found to have distributed antisemitic and pro-Nazi pamphlets in his youth and only became more popular because of it, which he spun as a victory over “cancel culture.”

Hoban, disclosing the many instances of “police thuggery” he has witnessed while on the streets in recent weeks, argues that the presence of Palestinians is an inconvenient truth for German memory culture. “It’s just kind of obvious that any human, depending on their situation, can be a victim or a perpetrator,” said Hoban. “But it’s unbearable for some Germans, this idea that the Jews could have been their victims. But then in another context,” he said, referring to Jews, “we’re perpetrators.”

Esra Ozyurek, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, understands the difficulty people have in dealing with the mutability of roles when it comes to the highly emotive topic of memory culture, with “coming to terms with the past.” She described how the issue of memory politics often devolves into a competition, “a little bit like supporting teams in a soccer match.”

“I was at a talk,” she told me, “and then a young woman came to me and said, ‘I read your work, but I’m on team Israel.’ I said, ‘Wow, I’m not on any team.’”

Rather than thinking tribally, the broader ethical question is, she emphasized, “how we can live in a plural society, how we can deal with difference.”

Germany, she said, is hardly alone in its marginalization and repression of its minorities — even if its pretext for doing so is unique. This is typical of “big nationalist projects,” she said. “It is always their fear that the minorities find comfort in each other, and then they unite. So this big nationalist project is always about dividing the minorities and making them enemies of each other. This is not the first time this is happening. It is just so sad that is happening in the name of fighting a form of racism.”

Ozyurek described how German society sees Muslims as the carriers of German antisemitism— a view that draws its support from German scholarship that claims antisemitism was exported to the Muslim world first by 19th-century missionaries and then by the Nazis in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Germany, by accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust, has become a modern, tolerant democratic nation. “It’s a very Christian narrative,” she said. “You start with your guilt and then you come to terms with it. You accept it, and then you’re liberated.”

Germans expect the Turkish and Arab minority to relate to the history of the Holocaust by identifying with the German majority and thus work through the guilt of what is called “the perpetrator society.” Like Germans, they are supposed to find ancestors to atone for — like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator — in order to be accepted as full members of German society.

But, of course, the Muslim minority does not follow the German script. “Everyone relates to the story from where they are standing,” said Ozyurek. “They relate to it as minorities.”

Palestinians are not only a minority in Germany, but many of them came to Germany stateless as refugees. In the eyes of mainstream Germany, however, these conditions are disregarded as “self-victimization” — which places Palestinians in competition with Jews for the status of victim. “What is interesting,” Ozyurek said, referencing how Germans for many years believed themselves to be the real victim of World War II, “is that the qualities that are attributed to them are also qualities Germans have gotten over.”

“It’s just a Catch-22 situation,” said Ozyurek. “If you don’t have the Nazi ancestors, then how are you going to apologize for their crimes?” She added, “if they cannot join the national conversation, how can they feel they belong?”

The post The crackdown on pro-Palestinian gatherings in Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

“I was very afraid,” Ashraf said. “My kids were crying.”

Since May 29, there had been unrest in Purola. The local chapter of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, along with several other right wing Hindu nationalist groups, had staged a rally in which they demanded that local Muslims leave town before a major Hindu council meeting scheduled for June 15. On June 5, Ashraf’s clothing shop, like the shops of other Muslim traders, was covered with posters that warned “all Love Jihadis” should leave Purola or face dire consequences. They were signed by a Hindu supremacist group called the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land.

The rally in Purola was the culmination of anti-Muslim anger and agitation that had been building for a month. Earlier in May, two men, one Muslim and one Hindu, were reportedly seen leaving town with a teenage Hindu girl. Local Hindu leaders aided by the local media described it as a case of “love jihad,” a reference to the conspiracy theory popular among India’s Hindu nationalist right wing that Muslim men are seeking to marry and convert Hindu women to Islam. Public outrage began to boil over. The men were soon arrested for “kidnapping” the girl, but her uncle later stated that she had gone willingly with the men and that the charges were a fabrication.

It mattered little. Hindu organizations rallied to protest what they claimed was a spreading of love jihad in the region, whipping up the frenzy that had kept Ashraf’s family up at night, fearing for their safety.

What is happening in Uttarakhand offers a glimpse into the consequences of the systematic hate campaigns directed at Muslims in the nine years since Narendra Modi became prime minister. Hindu nationalists believe that the Hindu-first ideology of the government means they have the support necessary to make the dream of transforming India into a Hindu rather than secular nation a reality. Muslims make up about 14% of the Indian population, with another 5% of the Indian population represented by other religious minorities including Christians. In a majoritarian Hindu India, all of these minorities, well over 250 million people, would live as second-class citizens. But it is Muslims who have the most to fear.

Not long after the events in Purola, Modi would go on a highly publicized state visit to the United States. “Two great nations, two great friends and two great powers,” toasted President Joe Biden at the state dinner. The only discordant note was struck at a press conference — a rarity for Modi who has never answered a direct question at a press conference in India since he became prime minister in 2014. But in Washington, standing alongside Biden, Modi agreed to answer one question from a U.S. journalist. The Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui was picked. “What steps are you and your government willing to take,” she asked Modi, “to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?”

In his answer, Modi insisted that democracy was in the DNA of India, just as it was in the U.S. For daring to ask the question, Siddiqui was trolled for days, the victim of the sort of internet pile-on that has become a familiar tactic of the governing BJP and its Hindu nationalist supporters. In the end, a White House spokesperson, John Kirby, denounced the harassment as “antithetical to the principles of democracy.”

Modi has received warm, enthusiastic welcomes everywhere from Sydney and Paris to Washington. In every country he visits, Modi talks up India as a beacon of democracy, plurality and religious tolerance. But as India prepares for elections in 2024, and Modi expects to return to office for a third consecutive five-year term, the country is teetering between its constitutional commitment to secular democracy and the BJP’s ideological commitment to its vision of India as a Hindu nation.   
In a sharply worded critique of Modi’s state visit to the U.S., author Arundhati Roy, writing in The New York Times, noted that the State Department and the White House “would have known plenty about the man for whom they were rolling out the red carpet.” They might, she wrote, “also have known that at the same time they were feting Mr. Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in northern India.”

Roy was referring to the right wing Hindu rallies in Uttarakhand. On May 29, a thousand people marched across Purola, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” — a phrase once used as a greeting between observant Hindus that has in the recent past become a battle cry for Hindu nationalists. During the rally, the storefronts of Muslim-run shops were defaced and property was damaged. The police, walking alongside the mob, did nothing to stop the destruction. Several local BJP leaders and office-bearers participated in the march. A police official later told us that the rally had been permitted by the local administration and the town’s markets were officially shut down to allow for the demonstrations.

As the marchers advanced through the town’s narrow lanes, Ashraf said they intentionally passed by his home. His family, one of the oldest and most well-established Muslim families in Purola, has run a clothing shop in Purola for generations. Ashraf was born in the town and his father moved to Purola more than 40 years ago. 

“They came to my gate and hurled abuse,” he said. “Drive away the love jihadis,” the crowd screamed. “Drive away the Muslims.” 

Among the slogans was a particularly chilling one: “Muslim mukt Uttarakhand chahiye.” They wanted an Uttarakhand free of Muslims, they said in Hindi. A call, effectively, for ethnic cleansing. 

Ashraf’s three young children watched the demonstration from their window. “My 9-year-old,” he told us, “asked, ‘Papa, have you done something wrong?’”

Forty Muslim families fled Purola, a little under 10% of its population of 2,500 people. Ashraf’s was one of two families who decided to stay. “Why should I leave?” he asked. “Everything I have is here. This is my home. Where will I go?”

The campaign in Purola spread quickly to other parts of the state. On June 3, a large rally took place in Barkot, another small mountain town in Uttarakhand, about an hour’s drive from Purola. Thousands marched through the town’s streets and neighborhoods as a loudspeaker played Hindu nationalist songs. “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega, Ram Rajya Ab Aayega” — Every House Will Fly the Hindu Flag, Lord Ram’s Kingdom Is Coming. 

Muslim shopkeepers in the town’s market, like the Hindu shopkeepers, had pulled their shutters down for the day, anticipating trouble at the rally. As the mob passed by the shops, they marked each Muslim-run shop with a large black X. The town’s Muslim residents estimate that at least 43 shops were singled out with black crosses. Videos taken at the rally, shared with us, showed the mob attacking the marked-up Muslim shops to loud cheers from the crowd. The police stood by and watched. 

One Muslim shopkeeper, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, described arriving at his shop the next day and seeing the large black cross. “My first thought was ‘Heil Hitler,’” he said. “I have read Hitler’s history. That’s how he had marked out Jews. It is the same strategy. That’s how we are being identified.”

We spoke to dozens of people who identify with and are members of Hindu nationalist parties, ranging from Modi’s BJP to fringe, far-right militant groups such as the Bajrang Dal, analogous in some ways to the Proud Boys. Again and again, we were told that just as “Muslims have Mecca and Christians have the Vatican,” Hindus need their own holy land. Uttarakhand, home to a number of important sites of pilgrimage, is, in this narrative, the natural home for such a project —if only, the state could rid itself of Muslims, or at the very least monitor and restrict their movement and forbid future settlement. Nearly 1.5 million Muslims currently live in Uttarakhand, about 14% of the state’s entire population, which exactly reflects the proportion nationally. 

Hindu nationalists told us how they are working to create and propagate this purely Hindu holy land. Their tactics include public rallies with open hate speech, village-level meetings and door-to-door campaigns. WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube are essential parts of their modus operandi. These were tools, they said, to “awaken” and “unite” Hindus. 

Their attempts to portray Muslims as outsiders in Uttarakhand dovetails with a larger national narrative that Hindus alone are the original and rightful inhabitants of India. The BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, argues that India is indisputably a “Hindu rashtra,” a Hindu nation, nevermind what the Indian constitution might say.

With a population of 11.5 million, Uttarakhand stretches across the green Himalayan foothills. It is a prime tourist destination known for its imposing mountains, cascading white rivers and stone-lined creeks. It is home to four key Hindu pilgrimage sites — the sources of two holy rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna; and Kedarnath and Badrinath, two temples dedicated to the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu respectively. Together, these four sites, high up in rugged mountain terrain, form a religious travel circuit known as the Chota Char Dham. According to state government figures, over 4 million pilgrims visited these sites in 2022 alone. Downhill, Haridwar, a town on the banks of the Ganges, is of such spiritual significance that Hinduism’s many seers, sages and priests make it their home. For Hindus in north India, Uttarakhand is the center of 4,000 years of tradition.

The state of Uttarakhand is also one of India’s newest — formed in November 2000, carved out of Uttar Pradesh, a huge, densely populated north Indian state. Its creation was the result of a long socio-political movement demanding a separate hill state with greater autonomy and rights for its many Indigenous peoples, who form just under 3% of the state’s population and are divided into five major tribal groups. These groups are protected by the Indian constitution, and their culture and beliefs are distinct from mainstream Hindu practice. But over the last decade, Uttarakhand has seen its identity shift from a mountain state created to better represent its Indigenous population to one molded and marketed primarily as “Dev Bhoomi,” a sacred land for Hindus. 

Since becoming prime minister, Modi has made at least six trips to the state’s key pilgrimage sites, each time amidst much hype and publicity. In May 2019, in the final stages of the month-long general election, Modi spent a day being photographed meditating in a remote mountain cave, less than a mile from the Kedarnath shrine. Images were beamed around the country of Modi wrapped in a saffron shawl, eyes closed, sitting cross-legged atop a single wooden bed. The symbolism was not lost on Hindus — the mountains and caves of Uttarakhand are believed to be the abode of the powerful, ascetic Shiva, who is often depicted in deep meditation on a mountain peak. 

Like other Muslims in Purola, Zahid Malik, who is a BJP official, was also forced to leave his home. We met him in the plains, in the town of Vikasnagar, to where he had fled. He said Hindus had threatened to set his clothing shop on fire. “If I, the BJP’s district head, face this,” he told us, “imagine what was happening to Muslims without my connections. For Hindus, all of us are jihadis.” 

Malik emphasized that Muslims have lived for generations in the region and participated in the creation of Uttarakhand. “We have been here since before the state was made,” Malik told us. “We have protested. I myself have carried flags and my people have gone on hunger strikes demanding the creation of this state, and today we are being kicked out from here like you shoo away flies from milk.”

For Malik, the irony is that it is members of his own party who want people like him out of Uttarakhand. 

Ajendra Ajay is a BJP leader and the president of the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, an influential post in a state dominated by the pilgrimage economy. “In the mountain regions, locals are migrating out,” he told us, “but the population of a certain community is increasing.” He means Muslims, though he offered no numbers to back his claims. Nationally, while the Muslim birth rate is higher than that of other groups, including Hindus, it is also dropping fast. But the supposed threat of Muslims trying to effect demographic change in India through population growth is a standard Hindu nationalist trope. 

“Uttarakhand is very sacred for Hindus and the purity of this land, its special religious and cultural character, should be maintained,” Ajay said. His solution to maintaining interreligious harmony is to draw stricter boundaries around “our religious sites” and to enforce “some restrictions on the entry of non-Hindus into these areas.”

On our way to Purola, the thin road snaking around sharp mountain bends, we stopped at another hill town by the Yamuna river. Naugaon is a settlement of approximately 5,000 people, many of whom are rice and potato farmers. The town’s center has a small strip of shops that sell clothes, sweets and medicines. In another era, it might have been possible to imagine a tiny, remote spot like this being disconnected from the divisive politics of the cities. But social media and smartphones mean Naugaon is no longer immune. While technology has bridged some divides, it has exacerbated others.

News of the public rallies in Purola in which Hindu supremacists demanded that Muslims either leave or be driven out spread quickly. In Naugaon, a new WhatsApp group was created. The group’s name, translated from Hindi, was “Hinduism is our identity.” By the end of June, it had 849 members. Deepak Rawat, a pharmacist in the Naugaon market, was among the participants. “People are becoming more radicalized,” he said approvingly, as he scrolled through posts on the group.

People we met in Naugaon told us there had already been a campaign in 2018 to drive Muslims away from this tiny rural outpost. “We chased them out of town,” they told us.

Sumit Rawat, a farmer in Nuagaon, described what happened. According to him, a young Hindu girl had been kidnapped by a Muslim waste-picker and was rescued by passersby who heard her cries for help. (We were not able to independently corroborate Rawat’s claims.) He told us that Hindus marched in protest at the attempted abduction. Their numbers were so great, said Rawat, that the rally stretched a mile down the market street. With little reporting of these incidents in the national press, people in cities are largely unaware of the rage that seethes in India’s rural towns and villages. “We want Muslims here to have no rights,” Rawat told us. “How can we trust any of them?”

In Dehradun, the Uttarakhand capital, we met Darshan Bharti, a self-styled Hindu “saint” and founder of the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land. He was dressed in saffron robes and a string of prayer beads. The room in which we sat had swords hung on the orange walls. His organization was behind the posters pasted on shops in Purola owned by Muslims, ordering them to leave town. 

On June 7, with the anti-Muslim demonstrations in Purola still in the news, Bharti posted a picture on his Facebook page with Kumar, the state’s police chief. Even as Bharti spoke of inciting and committing violence, he dropped the names of several politicians and administrators in both the state and national governments with whom he claimed to be on friendly terms. In the room in which we met, there was a photograph of him with the current national security adviser, Ajit Doval, among a handful of figures believed to wield considerable influence over Modi. 

Bharti also claims to have met Pushkar Singh Dhami, the Uttarakhand chief minister, the highest elected official in the state, on several occasions. He has posted at least two pictures of these meetings on his social media accounts. He described Dhami as his disciple, his man. “All our demands, like dealing with love jihad and land jihad, are being met by the Uttarakhand government,” Bharti said. Land jihad is a right wing conspiracy theory that claims Muslims are illegally encroaching on Hindu land to build Muslim places of worship.  

We met Ujjwal Pandit, a former vice president of the BJP’s youth wing and now a state government functionary, at a government housing complex on the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar. It didn’t take long for him to claim that Muslims were part of a conspiracy to take over Uttarakhand through demographic force. In Uttarakhand, he said, guests were welcome but they had to know how to behave.
Pandit claimed, as have BJP leaders at state and national levels, that no Muslims had been forced to leave Purola, that those who left had fled on their own accord. As the red sun set behind us into the Ganges, he said quietly, “This is a holy land of saints. Sinners won’t survive here.”

The post The movement to expel Muslims and create a Hindu holy land appeared first on Coda Story.

Yet, nearly two years later, Memorial has not closed down. Its staff, led by mostly aging, bookish historians, have not just forestalled their demise but steered the organization to the razor’s edge of Russian political dissent.

It has no headquarters and no legal status in Russia. Its bank accounts are frozen and its programming has been pushed to the Moscow sidewalks. Yet, at a time when nearly all independent Russian media are operating in exile and Kremlin critics have been jailed, silenced or left the country, Memorial, in many ways, is roaring: publishing books, monitoring the ongoing trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, offering free consulting to the relatives of people who disappeared during Soviet times on how to search archives for information, advocating for the growing list of political prisoners in Russia, and expanding its offices outside the country.

None of this is happening in the shadows. Memorial organizes regular “Topography of Terror” tours in Moscow, with one route going right up to the doorstep of Butyrka, one of Russia’s most notorious prisons during the Soviet era. The excursion ends with participants sitting down to write letters to the new generation of Russians imprisoned on politically motivated charges and awaiting trial inside the 250-year-old facility. Tickets sell out almost immediately.

“Our work could not stop for a single day,” historian and Memorial founding member Irina Scherbakova said.

Its annual “Returning the Names,” when people line up to read aloud the people killed by the Soviet regime, took place online on October 29 in cities across the world. Set up by the group in 2007, the event used to be held in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, lasting twelve emotional hours but for the last few years, Moscow authorities have denied the group a permit.

While Memorial has worked under Kremlin intimidation for years, the war in Ukraine created an entirely new reality for an organization pursuing a mission to investigate Soviet-era crimes and expose present-day political abuses. In one of the most horrific recent cases highlighted by Memorial, Russian poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was raped with a dumbbell by law enforcement officers in September 2022 during a raid on his home after he posted a video online reciting an anti-war poem.

Memorial has withstood dismantling attempts thanks to a survival strategy put in place by its founders. Memorial is not a single organization, as its members like to remind the public, but a movement. Since its founding in 1987, the group has grown into a sprawling, decentralized network of organizations and individuals resilient against the Kremlin’s targeting.

There are more than 200 Memorial members and volunteers working globally, with just under a hundred left in Russia. With each local branch registered independently, it would take 25 separate court cases to entirely shut down the network inside the country. There are satellite offices in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Earlier this year, two shuttered Russia-based Memorial organizations re-registered outside the country under new names in Switzerland and France.

“From the very beginning we knew we didn’t want a hierarchy,” explained Scherbakova. “We always knew that this was a grassroots story. If there had been a hierarchy, Russia would have destroyed us a long time ago.”

Memorial’s affiliate offices abroad have long been largely made up of local historians studying the Soviet period, but now many branches are absorbing staff that fled Russia.

The Prague office has become in the past 18 months a new headquarters of sorts. Today, the staff is a mix of Czechs and Russians. At the age of 70, the director of Memorial’s library, Boris Belenkin, fled Moscow for Prague last year. Belenkin calls the space a new “place for life” where Memorial workers can once again hold seminars, organize research fellowships and host visiting scholars.

From the Prague office, Memorial is also re-launching one of its most beloved programs: an essay-writing contest in which students in Russia were asked to delve into 20th century history. The contest had been run since 1999 in participating schools across 12 time zones before being called off in 2021. Finalists were flown out to Moscow to present their work at Memorial headquarters. For many students from far-flung regions, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their country’s capital. Over the years, schools dropped the program, caving to pressure from local officials and concerned, “patriotic-minded” parents.

Within Russia, pressure on staff continues to escalate. The director of Memorial’s branch in the Siberian city of Perm was arrested in May for “hooliganism” and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. Offices in Yekaterinburg and other cities face routine harassment and arbitrary fines from local authorities, pushing some to the verge of closing. A prominent Memorial historian, Yuri Dmitriev, is currently serving a 15-year sentence at a prison in what Memorial says is a politically motivated case. Both men are currently being held in facilities that were once part of the Soviet Gulag camp system.

In Moscow, nine Memorial members including Alexandra Polivanova, a programming director who leads the Butyrka prison tour, have become the targets of an ongoing criminal investigation. In May, authorities charged Memorial board member Oleg Orlov with “discrediting” the Russian military, a new crime in Russia that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. In court in September, Orlov was asked to defend his denouncement of the war in Ukraine as well as his career documenting human rights abuses for Memorial in Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. On October 11, the court found Orlov guilty and fined him. The government prosecutor requested that Orlov undergo a mental health evaluation, citing his “heightened sense of justice, lack of self-preservation instincts, and posturing before citizens.”

Memorial believes the criminal cases against Moscow staff are motivated by their ongoing advocacy for political prisoners in Russia. Memorial Center, which is the organization’s human rights branch, runs a database of people imprisoned under politically motivated charges and is often cited by international organizations. It also publishes regular updates on the prisoners and their cases, features interviews with their family members and organizes letter writing campaigns. Today, there are 609 people on Memorial’s list — a number that has tripled in the past five years.

Scherbakova, Memorial’s director and a historian of the Soviet Union, says this number is higher than during the late stages of the Soviet Union.

“In my opinion, today’s situation is much scarier and crueler,” said Scherbakova.

Memorial has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since it condemned Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and other territories in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The government’s most powerful legal tool is the Foreign Agents Act, legislation designed to pressure groups and individuals who receive funding from outside the country. Passed in 2012 and expanded in 2020, the law imposes up to five years of imprisonment for failing to comply with an exhaustive system of tedious financial reporting and bureaucracy.

Russian authorities have also used the foreign agents law to target  individuals. In mid-October, Russian police detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist at Radio Free Europe with dual Russian-American citizenship, for failing to register as a foreign agent when she traveled to Russia for a family emergency. If convicted, Kurmasheva faces up to five years in prison.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have since adopted similar legislation to quash dissent at home.

“Today, being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, a Trotskiest, all of that has been folded into the term ‘foreign agent,’” said Belenkin, the Memorial library director and a founding member of Memorial who was added to the Kremlin’s foreign agents list in 2022.

In 2021, the government brought Memorial before the Supreme Court, alleging that it had violated the law by failing to label a handful of social media posts with boilerplate text disclosing that Memorial is classed as a foreign agent. But by the closing argument, prosecutors dropped any pretense of holding Memorial accountable for a few unlabeled social media posts. Instead, the general prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, took to the floor to dramatically rail against the group.

“Memorial speculates on the topic of political repression, distorts historical memory, including about World War II, and creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” said Zhafyarov, mocking Memorial for “claiming to be the conscience of the nation.”

“Why, instead of being proud of our country, are we being told we must repent for our past?” Zhafyarov asked the courtroom.

Russia’s Supreme Court is led by Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, who began his career sending anti-Soviet dissidents to Gulag camps in the 1980s and managed to stay in power following the collapse of the USSR — one of many Soviet officials who survived the transition to democracy.

Grigory Vaypan, part of Memorial’s defense team, said that ultimately this was an opportunity to expose the government’s real motivation for bringing the group to court and state for the historical record what Memorial’s closing was really about. “Zhafyarov rose, and instead of telling us about those posts on Twitter and Instagram, he said, ‘We should close Memorial because Memorial is pursuing a narrative that is not in the interest of the state,’” said Vaypan. “They needed to close Memorial because Memorial messed with the government’s narrative that ‘we, the Russian state, the state that won the Second World War, are unaccountable to the world.’”

“Re-reading the closing argument now makes much more sense to me than it did back then,” said Vaypan. “What the prosecutor said was a prologue to the war.”

Memorial lost an appeal in the Supreme Court in March 2022 as Russian troops marched to Kyiv. The war has left members asking themselves the same question that is echoing across Russian civil society: How did things go so wrong?

At Memorial, an initiative dedicated to preventing the return of totalitarianism to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has led to a difficult, at times contentious, internal re-examination of its own legacy.

“We’re trying to understand what wasn’t right in our work over the past 35 years: How we didn’t build up cooperation with Russian society, how we failed to see different, more complex forms of discrimination and oppression,” Polivanova, the programming director, said. “We had blind spots in our work to the point where, in a sense, we all allowed this terrible war to happen.”

There was a mixed global reaction last year when the Nobel committee announced that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared among Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate from Belarus. The director of the Ukrainian organization Oleksandra Matviichuk praised Memorial’s work but refused to be interviewed alongside Yan Raczynski, who accepted the award for Memorial in Oslo. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany called the shared recognition “truly devastating” in the context of the ongoing war, launched by Russia in part from Belarusian territory.

Not everyone at Memorial thinks the group should be judged through the lens of Russia’s war and hard turn towards authoritarianism.

“Without question, a medium-sized organization, with limited resources, and even with our network, could not change anything,” said Belenkin, director of Memorial’s library, in regards to the war. “Memorial is not relevant here.”

But Polivanova, who operates the tours and is a generation younger than much of Memorial’s leadership, believes that Memorial must re-examine its own legacy in connection to the war. The ongoing discussion among Memorial members on this topic has been “very difficult,” she said. She has reworked her tour lineup, with one of the new Moscow excursions dedicated to the Ukrainian human rights activist Petro Grigorenko.

Born in a small village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region in what was then the Russian empire, Grigorenko rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become a World War II hero and a major general. At the height of his career in 1968, Grigorenko broke with the Soviet Army by speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. Punishment came swiftly: He was arrested in Moscow, diagnosed as criminally insane and underwent punitive psychiatric treatment, a practice that has re-emerged under President Vladimir Putin. Somehow, Grigorenko managed to continue speaking out for the cause of long-persecuted Crimean Tatars, dared to criticize the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, and founded the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups before being exiled.

“In the past, we didn’t consider this story to be so important,” Polivanova said. “This historical perspective was not stressed at Memorial.”

The updated tour lineup that includes Grigorenko’s life in Moscow has had a surge in popularity since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past year and a half, Polivanova has had to triple the number of weekly walking tours and still isn’t able to keep up with demand. Registration fills up almost immediately after dates are announced.

The tours are one of the rare public forums available to Russians to discuss the war. “People are really engaging,” Polivanova said. In September 2022, she added readings of Ukrainian poetry written by authors killed during Stalin’s purges to a tour of a mass grave site in Russia’s northeast. On many excursions, participants start to take over, she said, drawing direct comparisons between the cruelty of Soviet repression and news of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and other frontlines in Ukraine.

The tours have also attracted a different kind of participant. “Patriotic” activists crashed the organized outings for weeks at a time last fall, threatening those in attendance and publicly denouncing members of Memorial as “traitors.” Since then, Memorial started to require that participants provide links to their social media accounts when registering for a tour.

As people line up for Memorial’s tours, the government’s attempts to reverse many of Memorial’s decades-long efforts to seek accountability for crimes committed under communism remain relentless.

In September, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service debuted in front of their offices a looming statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the infamous Soviet political police apparatus. The statue was almost an exact copy of a Dzerzhinsky monument that stood for decades in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency. In 1991, Russians who had gathered to protest for an end to totalitarian Soviet rule and a transition to democracy tore it down. Today, the spymaster, ally of Lenin and Stalin, architect of the Red Terror, stands again in Moscow.

The post Surviving Russia’s control appeared first on Coda Story.

“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

The post Belarusian exiles are running out of hope appeared first on Coda Story.

In the course of a 90-minute address, laden with emotion, exhortation and self-congratulation, Modi dwelled in passing on the continuing violence in Manipur, a state in the northeast of India. The “nation stands with the people of Manipur,” he said. A resolution to the problems, he added, could only be achieved through peace, a goal toward which the federal and state governments were working.

If the sentiments seem boilerplate compared to Modi’s usual mode of rhetorical excess, it is because the Indian prime minister has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid talking about Manipur. The small state, bordering Myanmar, has been in tumult since May, with at least 200 people killed during riots, over 60,000 displaced and with houses, churches and whole villages set ablaze.

As the leaders of the world’s largest economies arrive in India on September 9 for the two-day G20 summit, the culmination of India’s presidency of the intergovernmental group, Modi is expecting to put on a show. Delhi, or at least its most prominent areas, is being given a hasty and glitzy makeover. But the gleam might be tarnished by deepening sectarian rifts Modi’s government cannot appear to get under control and might indeed have helped unleash.

Even the Indian army, sent in to quell the violence in Manipur, has struggled to cope. The fighting has taken place  between the largely Hindu Meitei people of the valley and the largely Christian Kuki tribes from the hills. It began over a high court order that granted Meitei people certain affirmative action rights, despite their existing political and financial muscle in Manipur. The complexity of the conflict is exacerbated by certain land laws intended to protect tribal lands in the hills,which the Meiteis say unfairly confine them to the valley. 

It is true that animosity between the Kuki tribes and the Meiteis in Manipur dates back over a decade, but the inability of the authorities to calm the current violence is due to the perceived biases of the Meitei-led state government of Manipur. Its chief minister, Biren Singh, a Meitei, has as recently as July 1 — nearly two months after the violence began splitting his state apart — been taunting Kukis on social media. “Are you from India or Myanmar,” he responded to a critic on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, before deleting his post. 

Meiteis allege that an influx of illegal immigrants from Myanmar, mostly ethnic Kukis, are upsetting the demographic balance of Manipur and claim that the newcomers are cultivating poppy fields in the hills as part of a rampant drug trade.

During India’s recent parliamentary session, between July 20 and August 11, the opposition brought a motion of no confidence against the Modi government. It was, as expected, easily defeated. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, holds a large majority and faced down a no-confidence motion in 2021 with similar ease.

Still, the motion provided an opportunity for the opposition  to criticize the government’s lack of response to violence in Manipur and to force both the prime minister and the home minister, Amit Shah, to address the issue. Shah, who continues to back Manipur’s chief minister Singh, parroted the line that Kukis, whose ranks were allegedly being bolstered by illegal immigrants from Myanmar, were largely responsible for the clashes. 

A mainstream Kuki group described Shah’s explanation as “extremely unfortunate as it is largely speculative with no valid proof or evidence.” It went on to say that Shah, by making his “abhorrent, nonsensical and disastrous” remarks, had chosen to “sacrifice the Kukis at the altar of Biren Singh.”

Meanwhile, on August 10, Modi responded in parliament to the no-confidence motion. He spoke for over two hours. It took more than 90 minutes for him to even broach the topic of Manipur, by which time the opposition had walked out in protest.

Modi blamed the Congress party, the main opposition faction, for having mismanaged the northeastern region of India since the country’s independence from the British Empire was won in 1947. The Congress has governed for about 50 of India’s 76 years as an independent country and has been caricatured by Modi as a party grown rotten on power and assumed privilege. 

Despite being prime minister for nearly a decade, Modi scarcely speaks without blaming the Congress and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, for holding India back from its rightful status as a global superpower. In May, while Manipur quite literally burned, Modi was on a triumphant global tour, including trips to Australia and the United States where much was made of India’s emerging power status.

“Blaming the Congress for everything that is happening in Manipur,” said Kham Khan Suan Hausing, a political science professor at Hyderabad University,  “is a bit far-fetched.” The “culpability and complicity of the BJP government,” he told us, “has to be called out.” Last week, Hausing was granted protection from arrest by India’s Supreme Court on charges that he had defamed the Meitei community in an interview with the Indian news website The Wire. 

According to Hausing, Shah has revealed his “gross incompetence and apparent lack of intelligence on the ground” by blaming the Kukis alone for the riots in Manipur. And Modi, he told us, “appears more interested in media management than in the structural causes of the violence.” These forthright views have made Hausing a target of what he calls a “smear campaign by vigilante trolls,” who have questioned his legal status as an Indian. It is a typical line of attack used against Kukis like him, Hausing says, who are derided as immigrants from Myanmar. “The smears smack of how ignorant and ill-informed public discourse is about citizenship.” 

Writing in the New York Times this month, the author Debasish Roy Chowdhury argues that “it’s a signature tactic of modern day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who belongs to the polity and ostracizing others.” Any perceived slight against Modi is treated by his supporters, and often by Modi himself, as a slight against India. 

During his long speech decrying the no-confidence motion last week,  Modi said, in Hindi, that the motion had little to do with violence in Manipur but was instead an attempt to “defame India.” They “have no faith in the people of India,” Modi said of the opposition, “in the abilities of India. They have tried in vain to break the self-confidence of Indians with this no-confidence vote.” 

In his Independence Day address on August 15, Modi took a similarly proprietorial tone, referring to Indian voters as his family and offering personal guarantees of Indian success. It was, said the longtime Congress politician and leader Jairam Ramesh, a “crass election speech filled with distortions, lies, exaggerations and vague promises.” He added that Modi had made an annual address to the nation by its prime minister “all about himself and his image.”

Sharad Pawar, another longtime politician and major opposition figure, told the audience at a public rally on August 14 that the “Modi government has been a mute spectator to what has been happening in Manipur.” Modi was initially jolted out of that studied silence by a video that made global headlines last month of two Kuki women in Manipur being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a Meitei mob. Even then, he did not address the conflict directly, only condemning the assault as “shameful.”

The BJP then asked X to take the video down because it was fomenting further violence. In fact, the BJP-led government in Manipur has imposed a shutdown of mobile internet services in the state, which has been in effect since May 3. At the time of writing, services have still not been fully restored, causing untold economic damage with little evidence that the shutdown has served its purpose of lessening violence due to misinformation and rumor-mongering. 

If it seems surprising that the leader of a democracy can get away with saying so little about a sectarian war breaking out in a state, it is in keeping with Modi’s tried and tested strategy. Sectarian identity is increasingly contested in the BJP’s majoritarian, Hindu nationalist conception of India. While Modi talks about democracy and pluralism as formative parts of India’s identity on foreign visits, at home, nerves are fraying.

On July 31, even as the opposition was insisting that the prime minister address violence in Manipur before the parliament, sectarian riots were breaking out in the state of Haryana, which borders the Indian capital Delhi. A procession organized by a notorious Hindu nationalist organization devolved into street fights as it passed through the district of Nuh. Just as outsiders, particularly illegal Kuki immigrants from Myanmar, were blamed by the BJP for fanning the flames in Manipur, Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar were promptly blamed for the violence in Haryana.

Modi is fond of referring to “double engine” governments — his dream of BJP governments at both federal and state levels, working together to foster more development. Both Manipur and Haryana are run by BJP governments at the state level. The double engine seems to work, then, to reinforce the BJP’s political majoritarianism, its instinctive support for Hindus in any sectarian conflict. 

Peace and resolution in Manipur can only return, says Gaurav Gogoi, a Congress member of parliament, “when you can win people’s trust.” And that trust, he told us, speaking in Hindi, “can only be won when the BJP takes responsibility.” According to Gogoi, Manipur is still a tinderbox, despite Modi’s claims that peace is returning. He alleges that “6,000 weapons have been looted from police stations and not ordinary weapons but AK47s and bombs.” Gogoi, who led the no-confidence motion in parliament, told us that it is the BJP’s politics at both state and federal levels that has “split Manipur into two.” It is a pattern of division, he notes, that is evident in communal violence across India, including most recently in Haryana.

In his August 15 address to the nation, Modi said his time as prime minister had led to a “new trust, a new hope and a new attraction” toward India around the world. But if Modi is stoking hope abroad, there is evidence enough to say that he is stoking division at home.

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It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since it was part of the Soviet Union. For nearly 30 years, teachers have been able to choose from a selection of approved textbooks to use in their classrooms. This year, Russian authorities have issued a single Russian history textbook nationwide for the 11th grade, and they plan to do the same across lower grades next year.

The revised textbook emphasizes continuity between the fight against Nazism in World War II and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The textbook quotes Vladimir Putin speaking about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, and arguing that the country should not exist.

With an estimated number of Russian casualties exceeding 50,000, the Kremlin has continued to characterize the ongoing war as existential for Russia. The high school lesson plans — authored by Kremlin insiders — provide a window into the Kremlin’s thinking on the war and suggest that the Kremlin believes its own propaganda.

“On one hand history is being used as propaganda,” said Alexey Makarov, a member of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. “On the other, the people using history as propaganda — the Russian authorities — actually believe in what they’re saying.”

The newest chapters for students in the 11th grade, which is the final year of high school in Russia, include a section dedicated to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to as a “ultranationalist state,” the U.S. is said to be “prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian standing,” and a positive spin is put on global sanctions against Russia, calling them an “opportunity” for investment. The book’s front cover is dominated by a full-page photo of the bridge built by Russia in 2018 connecting annexed Crimea to mainland Russia.

“Ukraine, history, politics — they are inseparable,” said Jade McGlynn, the author of “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Russia.” “It’s a memory war becoming a real war.”

The lead author of the textbooks is Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has represented Moscow in negotiations with Kyiv. Over the years, Medinsky has held various roles in government and served as a close aide to Putin, advising on history and the humanities. His career started in advertising, said McGlynn. During the 1990s, he co-founded a Moscow advertising firm best known for creating ads for MMM, a Russian company that ran one of the world’s largest-ever Ponzi schemes.

“That’s where he honed his skills in terms of selling narratives to people, playing on their hopes, their needs and sometimes their desperation,” said McGlynn. “He is ultimately an advertiser who aims to manipulate people.”

In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities already began distributing pamphlets to high school teachers across the country with instructions on how to talk about the invasion of Ukraine with students. The pamphlets followed a question-and-answer format:

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are the sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country, it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Alexey Makarov, from Memorial, is a social studies teacher in Moscow and said he was devastated to read through the pages of the new textbook, soon to be taught at his high school.

“This is the same rhetoric that was used in the 1930s ahead of the invasion of Poland, exactly the same,” said Makarov, drawing a comparison between the textbook’s justification for Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s stated rationale for invading Poland at the start of World War II.

There has been a progression in the government’s campaign to rewrite history, starting with the reframing of Russian imperial expansion and the rehabilitation of figures like Ivan the Terrible. While history has long been an important focus for Putin, patriotic education became a top government priority in 2012, which the government declared to be the “year of history.”

“We know how the distortion of national, historical and moral consciousness leads to catastrophe for entire governments. It weakens them, leading to collapse, to the loss of sovereignty and fratricidal war,” Putin said in a meeting in 2012 on the importance of patriotic education in Russian schools.

In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin tightened its grip on institutions involved in documenting the country’s past. As Russian troops marched on Kyiv, the Russian Supreme Court struck down an appeal from Memorial to stay open. For three decades the nonprofit, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been documenting crimes committed under Soviet rule.

Russia is far from the only country where the government has intervened to revise high school history textbooks. The Arab Spring has been distorted in Egyptian textbooks, Indian officials have excised mentions of the 2002 Gujarat riots from national textbooks, and new curriculum standards in Hungary assign the writing of a war criminal and Nazi sympathizer to students. Most recently, officials in the U.S. state of Florida approved classroom material that instructs students that “climate activists are like Nazis.”

The new Russian history textbooks will most likely cross the border into occupied Ukrainian territory. Last August, reports surfaced of Ukrainian teachers being pressured to switch over to a Russia-approved curriculum. Scores of teachers fled, some went into hiding, and others were sent to Crimea or Russia to “re-train” under new teaching standards. In occupied cities like Melitopol, Russian authorities ceremoniously delivered tens of thousands of Russian textbooks. Parents who tried to keep their children at home were threatened with having their kids taken away.

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The series was set to air on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, October 29, when Ataturk became president. Instead, Disney said that the show will be released as two films: one to be shown on the Turkish free television network Fox, which Disney owns, and another to be released in theaters at a later date.

Turkish media and government officials blamed the Disney+ cancellation on Armenian lobby groups in the U.S., encouraging a popular backlash in Turkey against the company. Organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America have expressed concerns that the series would gloss over Ataturk’s purported role in the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman soldiers in 1915 — actions that are widely recognized as a genocide, including by U.S. President Joe Biden.

The clash between the guardians of Ataturk’s historical memory and Disney — which was founded 13 days before Ataturk became president in 1923 — underscores a complex challenge for U.S. entertainment giants. They have to figure out how to produce content for global markets while some governments look to enforce their own views of history. 

In Turkey, Ataturk stands as a singular figure uniting Turkey. His image adorns walls everywhere, from barbershops to offices to fancy hotels. Prominent Turkish artists, journalists and politicians announced they would cancel their Disney+ subscriptions. Singer-songwriter Mustafa Sandal wrote to his one million Twitter followers: “I canceled it. Now it’s your turn! No Atatürk, no us!”

“I suspect that any film, even the most hagiographic film of Ataturk, would end up being dredged over the coals by the Turkish media simply because it could never be hagiographic enough,” said Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University.

When the journalist Can Dundar made a documentary in 2008 depicting Ataturk as a heavy drinker with a fear of the dark, two university professors filed a formal complaint with an Istanbul court requesting an investigation into Dundar for “eroding Ataturk’s respectability.” Publicly insulting Ataturk in Turkey is a crime. Turkey’s top mobile telephone operator, Turkcell, canceled its sponsorship of the film.

Ebubekir Sahin, the chairman of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, a state agency in charge of regulating broadcasting that opened an investigation into Disney, wrote on Twitter that Ataturk is Turkey’s “most important social value.”

Ataturk is widely revered in Turkey, but not always for the same reasons. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has sought to make Turkey a more religious and conservative society, has been selective about Ataturk’s legacy, downplaying his militant secularization of the country while praising his consolidation of the state and his fight against Western colonization in the Islamic world, according to Eissenstat.

There is a long history of U.S. media productions about Turkish history erupting into explosive debates, attacked by the Armenian diaspora or by Turks, according to Nicholas Danforth, a senior non-resident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

In the 1930s, a film about the Armenian genocide was canceled after Turkey applied pressure on the U.S. State Department and MGM Studios, the maker of the movie. In 2002, the director of “Ararat,” a film about the Armenian genocide, was targeted with threats that Armenians in Turkey would be harmed as a reprisal for making his film.

The battle over cinematic portrayals of Turkey’s role in the Armenian genocide played out most prominently in 2016, when a film called “The Promise” was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was only shown to a handful of attendees, but it received tens of thousands of one star ratings on IMDb, the film rating platform, followed by tens of thousands of ten star ratings, as Turkish nationalists and pro-Armenian groups flocked to the site to control the narrative.

No serious academics are willing to give genocide denial the time of day anymore, says Danforth. But, he said, there is frustration among historians about attempts to place all the blame at Ataturk’s feet. “There’s plenty to criticize about Ataturk, but for very specific historical reasons, making him a stand in for all the crimes of Turkish nationalism is misleading as well,” Danforth said.

This is not the first time Disney has been caught between a state and a diaspora over accusations of whitewashing a genocide. Its remake of Mulan in 2020 was subjected to a boycott because it was filmed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where China is committing what the U.S. Department of State and parliaments in the U.K. and Canadia recognize as a genocide against the Uyghur people. In the credits, the movie gives special thanks to multiple Chinese government entities in the region, including to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan where several re-education camps have been identified.

Warner Bros’ blockbuster film “Barbie” caused a stir because, in one scene, Barbie is seen standing in front of a child-like drawing of a map of the world. Next to what is supposed to be China is a dashed line that the Vietnamese government says is a representation of the nine-dash line, a maritime boundary that China claims marks its ownership of the South China Sea. The film was banned in Vietnam as a result. Meanwhile, the same map also depicts England as bordering Asia.

The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China has divided the executive ranks of Hollywood entertainment companies, upended marketing plans and rattled prop masters. In the 2019 trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket, even though they had appeared in the original 1980s film. Fans complained. The flags were reinstated. The movie was banned in China.

The Chinese government has been ramping up pressure on the American film industry since the late 1990s, according to Chris Fenton, a film executive and former president of DMG Entertainment, a global media company headquartered in Beijing. As China’s market leverage grows, the Chinese government has become more forceful in demanding compliance with its views.

The Pentagon has expressed alarm. In July 2023, it announced that it will not share bases, ships and equipment with productions that allow the Chinese state to censor content in a way that advances China’s national interests.

Yet despite a desire behind closed doors to push back, Fenton said there is no coordinated effort within the film industry to counter China’s efforts to control content. 

Conservatives in the U.S., frustrated by the Barbie movie map, which they see as legitimizing China’s position in the South China Sea, have attacked the film for undermining their values. Political commentator Ben Sharpiro began a scathing 40-minute review of the film by setting fire to Barbie dolls. In late June 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dominated the U.S. national news cycle when he accused Disney of putting “sexualized content” in its programming for children.

“The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children is preposterous and inaccurate,” Disney’s CEO Bob Iger responded, adding, “The last thing that I want for the company is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars.”

Disney+ was launched in Turkey last year as part of a global expansion into 42 new countries. Losing access to Turkey, with its population of over 85 million people, would be a blow to those plans. Disney+ has an estimated 50,000 subscribers in Turkey, compared to Netflix’s estimated 2.6 million, according to FlixPatrol.

Turkey is moving away from the West, disentangling itself from decades of alliance structures and huge defense contracts, according to Selim Koru, a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“This is an American entertainment company pretending like these things are more or less as they were maybe 20 years ago,” he told me. “That a founding father of this deeply divided country is sort of an easy or manageable subject for a historical drama produced by a foreign company.”

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“Prime Minister Modi,” declared Albanese, “is the boss!”

In the United States in late June, Modi’s visit was afforded the highest level of ceremony, with President Joe Biden describing the relationship between the two countries as one of “two great powers that can define the course of the 21st Century.” Just last week, Modi was feted at the Bastille Day parade in Paris and was awarded France’s highest national honor. It was, Modi tweeted, evidence of the “deep affection” the French hold for India.  

Beneath the diplomatic platitudes and expressions of abiding friendship, though, were rumblings of discontent with how Western governments are choosing to ignore the facts of Modi’s divisive reign in India.

To wit, public conversation in India and most of the airtime devoted to news is currently dominated by a yet-to-be-drafted law intended to replace India’s diverse, religiously-based personal laws with a set of laws common to all Indians.

The so-called Uniform Civil Code has hung in the background of Indian democracy for decades. It is routinely trotted out, even in the country’s Constitution, as the hypothetical answer to a bedeviling question — can a country of India’s cultural and religious complexity be both pluralist and governed by personal laws applicable to everyone? Rather than trying to legislate on marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance and other matters that fall into the realm of what is sometimes described as “personal” law, British India deferred to particular communities to resolve these issues according to religious custom.

When India became an independent nation, Article 44 of the Indian Constitution expressed the hope that the “State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, brought all Hindus, and by extension Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, under a set of common laws. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsis, and tribal peoples though, continued to govern themselves by their own separate sets of personal laws. 

In the decades since, the notion of a Uniform Civil Code, albeit without specifics, has frequently been invoked by governments as an ideal, a sympathetic means of uniformly applying personal laws to all Indians. Gender equality is frequently brought up as a likely benefit of a Uniform Civil Code. It has nonetheless been resolutely opposed and little progress has been made in conceptualizing an effective common law.   

Speaking in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh last month, Modi chose to reopen the civil code can of worms. He alleged that people, particularly Muslims, were being misled by opposition parties about the nature of a Uniform Civil Code. Comparing India to a family, he asked if a household could effectively be run if different rules applied to each member.

This homespun truism was taken as an endorsement of a common law act. Though the government has offered no confirmation or timeline for a proposed Uniform Civil Code, its eventual application now is being treated as an inevitability. And it is a key principle of the Hindu nationalist ideologues to whom Modi is loyal. The panicked tenor of the subsequent debate shows how skeptical minority groups are of the Modi government’s intentions.

Apoorvanand, a professor in the Department of Hindi at the University of Delhi, told us that the “Hindutva movement has never shied away from saying that the Indian way of life is Hindu and that the culture of all Indians should be Hindu culture, no matter what faith they follow.” It is, he added, natural, that “all religious minorities see it as a threat to their own traditions and customs.”

The prominent Indian Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde, famous for his strong civil rights positions, describes the Uniform Civil Code as it is currently conceived as an “imposition.” Despite the contentious debate over a common code, almost nothing is known about the possible provisions of such a code or how it might be written. “What we are saying,” Hegde told us about the position of the Uniform Civil Code’s critics, “is ‘show us a draft, show us how you would harmonize differences.’”

Hegde is alluding to the suspicion that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is gaslighting minorities. The calls for a Uniform Civil Code — “one nation, one law” as the sloganeers put it — appear reasonable, even egalitarian. But the BJP’s anti-minority rhetoric has sparked fear that this is yet another dog whistle, another round of anti-Muslim posturing disguised as progressive legislation. 

“What the idea of God is to an agnostic,” wrote the Indian scholar GN Devy in the Indian Express, “the proposal of UCC is to India. The idea in itself is absolutely superb. But as soon as one starts placing it in context, it starts looking less so.”

It is an argument that might be extended to India itself, under Modi’s rule. The idea of India, as presented by Modi to receptive leaders across the world, is superb. But in reality it is unraveling. Abroad, Modi argues before crowds of worshipful Indian expatriates and immigrants that India is a beacon of inclusive democracy. At home, his words and actions hew closely to an ideological commitment to aggressive Hindu nationalism, often at the expense of minorities and vulnerable communities, particularly Muslims.

Confronted by a reporter at the White House in June, Modi — who in nine years as prime minister has not given a single press conference in India — insisted that “democracy runs in our veins,” and that India’s democratic values meant there was “absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Shortly afterwards, the reporter was viciously trolled online by Modi supporters who seized upon her perceived ethnic and religious background. The White House condemned the threats as “antithetical to the very principles of democracy.” The Indian government said nothing.

As Modi was showcasing India’s democracy and its potential as a steadfast global power, the northeastern state of Manipur was burning in riots that have led to the deaths of at least 150 people since May and displaced over 50,000. The cause — ethnic and religious violence catalyzed at least in part by the policies of the state’s majority-BJP government.

On July 13, the day before Modi was paraded across Paris on Bastille Day, the European Parliament called on the Indian government to respond to the violence in Manipur “in line with their international human rights obligations.” But Modi has remained largely silent about the civil war-like conflict in Manipur. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-wing French politician who has run unsuccessfully in the last three French presidential elections, said Modi was showing disdain for the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that were celebrated on Bastille Day.

The Uniform Civil Code is being promoted as necessary to consolidate equality and fraternity in India. But with little clarity about the substance of the law, Modi’s calculated references to the code have served only to generate more anxious talk about fault lines. Hegde, the Supreme Court lawyer, says that the common law debate had so far singularly failed to address the essential question: “As a new country, as a constitutional democracy post-1950, what kind of a nation are we building?”

India, Hegde told us, could choose a more harmonious path of seeking to accommodate difference. Or it could go down the path of “forcible integration, like the Han homogenization that happened in China.” He is referring to a systematic erasure of plurality that in effect turns India into a Hindu nation, a stated aim of Modi-supporting Hindu nationalists. 

According to Aakar Patel, the former head of the Indian chapter of Amnesty International — which stopped its operations in India in 2020 because of what Amnesty described as an “incessant witch hunt” against its staff and affiliates — the “BJP itself admits it’s going to exclude large parts of the country from the Uniform Civil Code.” 

Fearing a backlash from communities with special interests, Sushil Modi, a BJP member of parliament and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Law and Justice, has said that tribal groups in the Northeast region and other areas should be exempt from any uniform code. As Patel told us though, “if there’s meant to be ‘one nation, one law’ and then you exclude the Northeast, you’re saying the Northeast is not part of the country.”

Patel insists that the Uniform Civil Code only reflects the BJP’s “negative single point agenda against minorities, particularly Muslims.” Indeed, much of the actual discussion about bringing Indians under a common law, in the absence of a draft bill, has revolved around Muslim polygamy and divorce practices. Sara Ather, a Delhi-based writer and commentator told us that the renewed interest in the Uniform Civil Code among Hindu nationalists was “yet another attempt to make the private realm of the Muslim woman a matter of never-ending public scrutiny and debate.” It has, she argues, “nothing to do with the upliftment of Muslim women but is only a tactic to establish that she needs intervention.”

The Law Commission of India has extended the deadline for public comment on the idea of a Uniform Civil Code to July 28, having already received over five million responses. In its letter to the Law Commission, a prominent Indian Muslim group wrote that the issue of a Uniform Civil Code was being used as a “lightning rod for polarization.” Some BJP governed states, particularly Uttarakhand — a small, mountainous state that is perhaps the earliest adapter of Hindu nationalist initiatives — have already announced their intent to draft a Uniform Civil Code.

It can be argued that without a national draft bill or any basis for a serious discussion in India about the shape of such a code, the polarization that its critics fear has already been achieved. And to Western leaders so eager to embrace Modi, the question will have to be put again, how long can they ignore the Hindu nationalist project to change the constitutional nature of a secular, pluralist India?  

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The messy episode highlighted the Catholic Church’s dwindling influence in the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022, the Vatican has steered clear of condemning Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance similar to the positions of Brazil and China. After a meeting with the Pope in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “any peace proposal must originate from Kyiv, not from the Vatican, China or elsewhere.” 

The Vatican’s limited role as a mediator in the conflict reflects the Pope’s geographical priorities. Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals last week from Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Malaysia. The Pope also promoted Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti, who served as a papal ambassador to Ukraine and Belarus, which could be seen as a nod to the challenges of the war. The headline promotions, however, were bishops based in Hong Kong and Israel, where the Catholic community is small.

While previous pontiffs, such as John Paul II, threw their support behind Western powers in times of crisis, John L. Allen Jr., a journalist with the Catholic news website Crux, has written that the changing demographics of the Catholic Church mean that the concerns of Europeans and North Americans are becoming less pressing on the Vatican’s agenda. The majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live in Latin America, with the African continent seeing the biggest increase in Catholic congregations. And the Pope “gives great importance to relations with other continents such as Asia,” said Massimiliano Valente, an associate professor of contemporary history at the European University of Rome.

The Vatican infuriated the Ukrainian government last summer by suggesting that Russia’s actions might have been driven by “NATO barking at Russia’s gate.” In another interview, soon after, the Pope said the war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow provoked.” 

According to Nona Mikhelidze at the Institute for International Affairs in Italy, the comments present Ukraine “as a mere pawn.” The Ukrainian government has also questioned the Church’s assumptions about Ukraine. Mykhailo Podolyak, Zelenskyy’s advisor, said in June that the Vatican needs to have a “sound understanding of this war.”

Across the region, the influence of the Vatican is being challenged. In Poland, where 91% of people identify as Catholic, the Polish Catholic Church — one of the most powerful institutions in the country— has been at loggerheads with Pope Francis over liberal reforms such as decentralizing power. Next door in Lithuania, Catholics have called for an “inquiry on sexual abuse in the church,” as survivors continue to come forward in the Baltic nation.

The Vatican’s position in Belarus, a nation that acted as a staging ground for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, has also been criticized. In a country where Catholic priests are being jailed or exiled for speaking out against Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Vatican has taken a conciliatory tone. The papal ambassador, Ante Jozic, has celebrated the Belarusian government and parroted a line favored by Lukashenko that Minsk could hold peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

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Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

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In response, India’s national council overseeing the curriculum claimed that the revisions were a routine exercise intended to ensure that material was introduced at the “appropriate stage.” It did not explain how the textbooks were edited or by whom.

Much of the current debate in India is similar to debates that have taken place for over a decade in the United States, over intelligent design for instance — which argues that the world was created with intent and is dubiously presented as an alternative to evolution theory — and how politicians and state legislatures shape what is taught in public schools.

In 2018, a minister in the Indian government said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong” because “nobody, including our ancestors, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.” A year later, the same politician said that he didn’t “want to offend people who believe that we are children of monkeys but according to our culture we are children of rishis.” A rishi is a Hindu sage or saint.

Controversy over textbook revisions in India are mostly about excisions from history, political science and sociology textbooks, as political parties in power seek to influence curriculums at both state and national levels. Science textbooks, however, have generally been spared. Indeed, an amendment to the Indian Constitution made in 1976, lists among the “fundamental duties” of every Indian citizen the obligation to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”  

On June 15, 33 Indian political scientists who have contributed to school textbooks wrote to the director of the national education council to demand that their names be removed as authors because “this creative collective effort is in jeopardy.” The omissions and deletions, they argued, had violated the “core principles of transparency and contestation.”

They had taken their lead from Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palsikar, eminent academics — Yadav is now a politician — who had complained just days earlier that the textbooks they had worked on, “once a source of pride,” were now a “source of embarrassment.”

I spoke to Palsikar on the phone and asked him about the politicization of Indian schooling and the intent behind textbook revisions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Following the spate of recent changes to textbooks, you’ve withdrawn your name as an author. Why did you do that?

When the most recent round of edits began last year, I warned that students wouldn’t benefit from these sorts of selective redactions. The edits subverted what Yogendra [Yadav] and I were trying to do when we contributed to the textbooks. We had to distance ourselves from the whole exercise.

The deletions are specific and seem to fit the governing party’s agenda. Though the official reason for revising textbooks is that the Covid pandemic has forced a reassessment of course loads, would you agree that there is an ideological motivation behind the revisions?

Yes, this is what we’ve been saying in our public expression of protest. If you closely follow the majority of the changes being made to textbooks in sociology, history and political science, they are being made to appease a certain political mindset. The revisions are ideological and partisan. They’re intended to satisfy the agenda of the ruling party. 

We don’t know who the people are who are making the edits, even though the textbooks display the names of prominent academics as authors and editors.

Yes, you’re right. Our names are on the books although we had nothing to do with the revisions. Students who read these books will think we’ve made these changes. That’s a lack of transparency. It appears as if our names are on the books to legitimize the process. We helped prepare these books back in 2006. We faced some objections and protests for political reasons, but no changes were made to our work. Now changes are being made to suit the demands by certain groups, and the national council that produces and monitors the textbooks is not being transparent. 

Do you think that the textbooks are being edited to appease the government’s “Hindu-first” nationalism?

‘Appeased’ is a mild way to put it. The edits are increasingly aggressive. In my view, the next step will be to overhaul the syllabus completely and to rewrite these textbooks under a new education policy. 

When you helped write the textbooks, there were strong passages about anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984 and anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. Studying these riots were a part of the curriculum. But the public conversation about such issues now is so polarized.

Textbook writing and curriculum formation have always been very contentious issues. What we tried to do was remain as objective and factual as possible in our treatments of controversial, hotly disputed topics, such as riots or the suspension of civil liberties. Our thinking was that these are textbooks for 12th grade students. They’re going to be voters. We wanted to introduce them to debates in Indian political history and contemporary Indian life without being partisan. We thought that a model had been created in which you appointed experts and let them treat the subject with autonomy.

In 2006, we were shielded from any direct state interference because there was a monitoring committee between us and the government. There was some discomfort in government circles, but we didn’t face a backlash as long as the facts were accurate. My colleague Yogendra Yadav has written about a meeting we had with the education minister at the time. ‘You do your job,’ he told us, ‘and the government will do its job.’ Nobody asked me to change anything in the text.

Do you think you would have the same autonomy under the Modi government?

It’s a hypothetical question, so my answer is presumptuous. But I would argue that these recent redactions show that the national education council has lost its autonomy. I don’t have any experience of working with this present government, so I’m basing my assessment on my observations of the pressure I believe is being put on the media and on academia. This government is interfering far too much. It is trying to control culture, and I doubt if I would be allowed to work on textbooks now with the autonomy I had in 2006.

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“People here, local people, just don’t take it very seriously,” said Jambey Wangdi as he sipped on some fresh watermelon juice in a hotel in Tawang, a town in the state of Arunachal Pradesh that sits on India’s jagged eastern Himalayan border with China. He punctuated these words with a phlegmatic shrug. I had asked him how Arunachali people feel about being on the frontline of an intense, intractable and very current border dispute between two nuclear powers.

On June 21, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a four-day “state visit” to the United States — an event that is slightly more ceremonial than an “official” visit and an honor typically reserved for close allies. High on the agenda will be both countries’ strategic need to counter China’s economic and military might and its regional assertiveness. India is being talked up by the Biden administration as the “cornerstone of a free, open Indo-Pacific.” But as the U.S. and India grow closer, the latter’s diplomatic relations with China have nosedived. “This is the worst time I’ve seen in my living memory in I-C relations,” tweeted Nirupama Menon Rao, the former Indian ambassador to both China and the United States. “And I’m not exaggerating. It’s serious.” 

On the eve of his visit to the U.S., Modi told the Wall Street Journal in a rare interview, that for “normal bilateral ties with China, peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential.”  Last month, I traveled to  Tawang, which sits 10,000 feet above sea level and about 20 miles from Bum La Pass, the border post between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet. China has long claimed Tawang, a center of Tibetan Buddhism, as rightfully Chinese. I met Wangdi at a ritzy resort on the city’s outskirts. A high-ranking functionary in the Arunachal Pradesh government, he was keen to impress upon me the patriotism of people in the state. “Physically we may look a bit different, the shape of our eyes may be different,” he told me. “But emotionally, mentally, we really consider ourselves to be true Indians.”

According to Wangdi, the Indian government’s focus on improving infrastructure in the northeast of the country means that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang in particular are booming. As I drove up to Tawang from the plains on freshly paved roads, evidence was everywhere. Unfinished construction, scattered outcroppings of concrete mushrooms, marred the mountainscape. 

Even the hotel in which we sat was still only half-built. The yet-to-be-installed picture windows in yet-to-be-finished rooms will look out on a famous 17th century Buddhist monastery. Future guests will also see the 30-foot high gilded Buddha that towers over Tawang, a giant looking down on Lilliput.

It was an overcast day in the middle of May when we spoke, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Wangdi leaned back in his chair, every inch the local grandee, self-assured and hospitable. “As far as tourism potential goes,” he told me, “Tawang is at the very top.”

He says the speed and purpose with which Modi’s government is developing Arunachal Pradesh, gradually making the state accessible by air, rail and road, is guaranteed to create economic opportunities and to match the impressive progress on China’s side of the border. Oken Tayeng, a successful tour operator, told me that Arunachal Pradesh was now “at a crucial threshold.” The state, he said, “can still decide the kind of tourists it wants to attract.” He cites neighboring Bhutan as a model for “how to bring in high-quality tourists with little environmental impact.” 

But Tawang is not there yet. The rampant building spree appears ad hoc and unregulated amidst the coniferous hills and cascading waterfalls. Wandering through the center of Tawang — its shabby streets similar to those in dozens of other small Indian hill towns, with tourists from Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra haggling with vendors in Hindi — it is hard to understand why China believes that most of Arunachal Pradesh, and certainly all of Tawang, is theirs.

India’s traditional neighboring rival has been Pakistan. But it is India’s burgeoning rivalry with China that preoccupies security analysts, as the two Asian behemoths, particularly over the last three years, have become embroiled in a bitter, and at times violent, standoff along their 2,100-mile border. Neither country appears willing to take a step back or disengage. 

Though Tawang has been administered by independent India for 72 years now, China maintains that the town is culturally and historically a part of Tibet and therefore Chinese territory. Since 2020, China is estimated to have occupied almost 1,000 square miles of previously Indian-controlled territory in border regions. Satellite images show Chinese-built bridges, roads and watchtowers stretching several miles into what was commonly considered the Indian side of the so-called “Line of Actual Control.” 

Prime Minister Modi has vociferously denied any concession of territory to China. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh, in the Galwan Valley. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat. They “have been martyred,” said Modi at the time. “But those who dared Bharat Mata (Mother India), they have been taught a lesson.” Such was the current strength of the Indian army, he added, that “no one can eye even one inch of territory.”

China did not officially disclose any casualties. It was the first loss of life for Indian and Chinese troops on the border since 1975. Another brawl broke out in the final weeks of 2022. On December 9, hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops faced off on the border near Tawang. Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told the Indian Parliament that at least 300 Chinese soldiers had tried to cross over into territory held by India. The troops engaged briefly, with their fists and improvised weapons. Six Indian soldiers were reported to have been treated for minor injuries. To prevent fistfights from turning into firefights, India and China have had agreements in place for decades, committing not to use live firearms within a mile or so of the border. But both sides have now deployed arms, and as many as 60,000 troops each, to the border. The situation is “fragile and dangerous,” India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the press.  

Ashok Kantha, a former Indian ambassador to China, says that China has been “pushing the envelope” on border issues with India for over a decade now, seeing what it can get away with. These “gray zone” maneuvers, falling just short of a declaration of war, he told me, are “typical of China’s pressure tactics and intended to make India pay a heavy price for border management.” Kantha, who now directs the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, was referring to the exorbitant costs incurred by India to keep additional troops in harsh and remote terrain all year round and the costs of building the infrastructure to prevent what he called China’s “salami-slicing” method of incrementally expanding its territorial claims.

Writing for The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine, last October, Sushant Singh, a fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, pointed out that “perceived signs of weakness vis-a-vis Pakistan and China are anathema to Modi’s strongman image.” So the Modi government, Singh added, has adopted the “undemocratic domestic strategy of keeping the Indian public in the dark” by restricting “access to journalists and blocking questions and discussions in parliament.” 

Instead, the government and the pliant mainstream media have chosen to hype Modi’s “friendship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2014, when Modi became prime minister, the two famously sat together on a gaudy ceremonial swing in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. 

“Modi’s personalized diplomacy with Xi,” Singh wrote, “has been an abysmal failure.” Over the phone, Singh told me that despite Modi’s posturing about India’s status as a leading global power and Modi’s own status as a charismatic global statesman, the prime minister is fearful of escalating tensions with China.

It is an uncharacteristic diffidence. In February, India’s foreign minister metaphorically hoisted a white flag when questioned about border disputes with China. “As a smaller economy,” Jaishankar said, “what am I going to do, pick a fight with a bigger economy?” It was a discomfiting echo, from a key Indian cabinet minister, of the official Chinese contempt for India’s pretensions. “China,” Ashok Kantha told me, “sees its relationship with India through the prism of its larger rivalry with the United States.” 

Sushant Singh put it more bluntly. “China,” he said, “figures very highly in the Indian imagination. India hardly figures in the Chinese imagination.”

In the Chinese understanding of the global hierarchy, Singh told me, “India is too weak to be granted agency in its own right.” Instead, China thinks of its relations with India as a subplot to the main narrative: China plans to become the world’s preeminent power by 2049. As if to back up this reading, a major security conference held in Singapore in early June was dominated by talk of the rivalry between China and the United States. “A confrontation” between the two superpowers, said the Chinese defense minister, “would be an unbearable disaster for the world.” 

Talk of India, meanwhile, was relegated to a footnote. A Chinese colonel told journalists that India was “unlikely to catch up to China in the coming decades because of its weak industrial infrastructure.” In a dismissive aside, he asked: “When you look at the Indian military’s weapon systems, what types of tanks, aircraft and warships were made and developed by Indians themselves?” The answer is: none.

China’s confidence that it has the upper hand in its relationship with India is bolstered by the numbers. Its economy is nearly six times the size of India’s, and China spends about $225 billion on defense compared to India’s $72 billion.

It is India’s urgency in improving infrastructure in its border areas, in connecting once-isolated states like Arunachal Pradesh to the rest of the country, that accounts in part for China’s increased belligerence, Ashok Kantha told me. Back in Tawang, the construction equipment I saw strewn everywhere, the roads being scoured into the hills and the soldiers who outnumbered the tourists all told the story of India’s attempts to catch up to China.

Sushant Singh traces this development back to 2006, when the influential Indian foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, rejected India’s prevailing strategy of treating its border areas as “buffer zones between China and the Indian heartland.” It was, Singh told me, “an ‘outpost’ outlook inherited from the British.” Instead, Saran argued that India needed to radically upgrade its capacity along the border. It needed to put down hundreds of miles of new roads, lay railway tracks and build bridges and airports. From India’s perspective, this necessary self-assertion in the border regions has revived arguments that had lain dormant for two decades.

While India and China may have been growing further apart for at least 15 years now, the deadly fight in the Galwan valley in 2020 marked the start of what Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar has said is “a very challenging and abnormal phase in our ties with China.” In 2022, China introduced a new border security law, which described the territorial sovereignty of China as “sacred and inviolable.” It also made it official state policy to continue to expand and support the construction of villages and towns along border areas.

India, again belatedly reacting to China’s initiative, announced its own “vibrant villages” scheme to build settlements in long-neglected, often poor and desolate border areas. China has reportedly already built some 600 villages in occupied Tibet. It took until 2023 for India to begin building its first “vibrant village” in Arunachal Pradesh. Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state this April to kickstart the program. “Whenever I come to Arunachal,” said Shah, “my heart is filled with patriotism because no one greets people here by saying, ‘namaste,’ they say, ‘Jai Hind’ (long live India) instead.” 

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded to Shah’s visit by saying it “violated China’s territorial sovereignty.” It was a reminder that China has no intention of relinquishing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh. While China claims the whole state of Arunachal Pradesh as its own, it is mostly Tawang that it prizes. “Tawang is indispensable to China,” a retired colonel in the Chinese army told the BBC in March 2023. In 2017, a former Chinese diplomat described Tawang as “inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction.” He added that the “boundary question was not created by China or India, so we shouldn’t be inheriting it and letting the ghosts of colonialism continue to haunt our bilateral relations.”

It all started, as have many of the world’s present-day territorial disputes, when the British drew a line.

In 1913, negotiations began in Simla, the summer capital of British India, where administrators would retire to escape the heat of the plains. Attending this summit were representatives of British India, Tibet and the new Republic of China — founded after the revolution in 1911 that ended about 275 years of Qing dynasty rule and 1,000 years of Chinese imperial history. Tibet, much to the chagrin of the Chinese representative, was invited as a quasi-independent state. After 1911, the British considered Tibet to be under Chinese “suzerainty,” meaning that Tibet had limited self-rule.

Negotiations played out over several months. When they came to a close, the British representative, Sir Henry McMahon, had determined where the border lines should be drawn between China and Tibet and between Tibet and British India. But China and Tibet could not agree on their border, nor on the extent or nature of China’s so-called suzerainty over a Tibet chafing for independence. 

A document signed by the Tibetans and initialed by Henry McMahon set out the contours of the border line between British India and Tibet, without Chinese agreement — the Chinese delegate walked out of the conference in its final phase. China has since claimed that Tibet, as a Chinese protectorate, had no right to negotiate treaties on its own behalf. The line dividing Tibet and British India, which later became known as the McMahon Line, continues to be the basis of India’s territorial claims. 

The Simla conference ended messily in July 1914, as Europe found itself preparing for World War I. For two decades after the conference, the British authorities did nothing to enforce the McMahon Line. Tibet still saw its writ as extending through what was called the Tawang Tract.

By the mid-1930s though, wrote the journalist and historian Neville Maxwell, a British official named Olaf Caroe tried to “doctor and garble the records of the Simla Conference to make them support the assertion that India’s northeastern borderline lay legitimately just where McMahon had tried unsuccessfully to place it.” Maxwell is a controversial figure in India, largely because he blames India and its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, for forcing China into the month-long Sino-Indian war in 1962 by insisting on the legality of the McMahon Line and refusing to come to an independently negotiated border settlement. 
What Maxwell took at face value, the Indian editor Pradip Phanjoubam has written, was that “Tibet was Chinese territory all throughout history,” regardless of what the “Tibetans themselves think on the matter.”

India and China in fact did not share a border until October 1951, when the People’s Republic of China — itself only established by Mao Zedong in 1949 — officially annexed Tibet. The British, despite drawing the McMahon Line, had largely stayed out of Tawang, leaving it to be controlled by Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. But alert to the implications of Chinese aggression in Tibet, India sent an expedition to Tawang led by Major Ralengnao “Bob” Khathing who quickly and efficiently established Indian rule by February 1951. 

According to the scholar Sonia Trikha Shukla, Bob Khathing won over residents in Tawang, most of whom were part of the Monpa tribe, with his “tact, firmness and discretion.” He showed, Shukla said, the “benign, enlightened” face of the Indian administration some 37 years after Tawang was supposedly ceded to British India in Simla. China, perhaps preoccupied by the Korean War, didn’t object to India’s takeover of Tawang at the time.

But then, in 1959, there was a popular uprising in Tibet against Chinese control. Fearing arrest and possibly death, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism, escaped over the Tibetan border into Tawang. When I visited the monastery in Tawang, I saw photographs in the tiny museum of a lean, young Dalai Lama wearing a hat at a rakish angle that made him look a little like the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. 

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in India for over 60 years now, set up the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in the western Himalayas.

“When the Dalai Lama and his followers fled to India,” wrote historian Jian Chen, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, China became hostile. Two “hitherto friendly countries,” he added, “became bitter adversaries.” According to Chen, when top Chinese leaders discussed Tibet in a Politburo meeting in 1959, Deng Xiaoping — who succeeded Mao in 1976 and transformed China’s economy — said that India was behind the Tibetan rebellion. China believed that the Indian government had allowed the CIA to train Tibetan guerillas on Indian soil, in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong. 

India, Mao argued, despite its non-aligned foreign policy, remained a slave to Western interests. “When the time comes,” Chen quotes Mao as saying, “we certainly will settle accounts with them.”

Those accounts were settled in 1962. While the rest of the world was distracted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the distinct prospect of the Cold War turning hot, a confrontation between India and China over border delimitations was becoming inevitable. Chinese forces crossed into Tawang on October 20, 1962 and overwhelmed the small number of poorly equipped Indian troops on the border. Prime Minister Nehru turned desperately to the United States and Britain for help. But before any international intervention became necessary, China called a unilateral ceasefire. 

After a month of territorial gains, China, perhaps concerned about the harsh Himalayan winter, perhaps fearful of American intervention, moved its troops back behind the McMahon Line. While China voluntarily retreated from Tawang and present-day Arunachal Pradesh, it retained control over Aksai Chin, about 15,000 square miles of barely populated, high-altitude desert, territory that India claims but that is of strategic value to China, connecting Tibet to the Uyghur Muslim heartland of Xinjiang.

During the 1962 war, thousands of Indians of Chinese descent were removed from their homes and held in internment camps just because of the way they looked, much like Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Joy Ma was born in an internment camp in India in 1962. She wrote a book about the 3,000 Chinese-Indians imprisoned in Deoli, in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. I spoke to Ma, who now lives in California, and her co-author Dilip D’Souza on Zoom. Though the war in 1962 lasted only a month, Ma said, many “Chinese-Indians spent up to five years in Deoli Camp.” Some died in the camp. “Some,” she wrote in her book, “were deported to China on ships — a strange and cruel fate to visit on people whose families had been Indian for generations, who spoke only Indian languages and for whom China was a country as foreign as, say, Rwanda might have been.”

Ma told me that she grew up in Calcutta and had lived in India until she went to graduate school in the United States. After the war was over, her family couldn’t bring themselves to speak about what had been done to them. “The government was just so punitive,” Ma said. And, long after the war, even their neighbors would ostracize them. “People didn’t want to know us,” she told me, “didn’t want us to visit.” Ma is among a number of Chinese-Indians, most of whom have emigrated to North America, who are seeking an acknowledgement and an apology from the Indian government. 

It’s unlikely to come anytime soon. The war with China looms large in the Indian imagination — for decades after the war, the national tenor was maudlin, mournful, self-pitying but hardly introspective. India positioned itself as a victim rather than any sort of perpetrator. Apart from Ma and D’Souza’s book, there has been no public discussion of the internment of Chinese-Indians or contrition about the destruction of a once-thriving Chinese-Indian community. Only a few hundred Chinese-Indians are left in Calcutta, for instance. Yet every Chinese New Year the media descends on the city to broadcast pictures of dragon dances and celebrate the delicious, hybrid cuisine while resolutely ignoring the jailing of Chinese-Indians in 1962. Over the last three years, as India’s border quarrel with China rose in pitch and intensity, Ma told me, the small Chinese-Indian community has been reminded of its vulnerability and its perpetually provisional status in India. 

“The border,” Ma said, “is the reason for our misery.”

The aftershocks of the 1962 war continue to reverberate in India in other ways too. The abject defeat is a stick with which the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party, still beats Nehru.  The war is cited as Exhibit A in the BJP-led prosecution of Nehru’s alleged failings as prime minister. A common trope in the BJP’s narrative is that Nehru was too complacent and too weak-willed to effectively defend India’s borders against Chinese incursions. In December 2022, when Indian and Chinese soldiers brawled on the border near Tawang, the BJP chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu, offered some boastful reassurance at a private event. “It’s not 1962 anymore,” he said in Hindi. “It’s 2022 and we’re in the Narendra Modi era.” India could now be relied upon to keep China at bay. And part of how the BJP plans to boost India’s defensive capacities is to invest heavily in Northeast India.

While India prides itself on its linguistic and ethnic diversity, with its pluralism and democratic inclusiveness cited as major weapons in its competition with China, the far less palatable truth is that its union is fractious, riven with conflict and prejudice. In particular, the eight landlocked states of Northeast India, which share borders with China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh, have been frequently at odds with the Indian mainstream.  

Modi himself tweeted, on March 26, that the “Northeast is witnessing all-round development. Once known for blockades and violence, the region is now known for its development strides.”

A little over a month later, on May 3, Manipur, one of the Northeastern states that Modi was referring to, exploded in ethnic and sectarian violence that has resulted in over 100 deaths. After weeks of silence, the Indian government moved 10,000 soldiers into Manipur to keep the peace. Still, deaths and cases of arson continue to be reported. Internet services have also been largely unavailable since the conflict began and, at the time of publication, had yet to be restored.

Manipur is a powder keg of ethnic resentment at least in part because the BJP’s Hindu-centric approach stirs up communal trouble, in this case between the largely Christian tribes in the hills and the Hindu Meitei people in the valley. In Assam, another state in the Northeast, the BJP’s flawed attempt to build a national register of citizens has left two million people, many of them Muslim, facing statelessness. 

Still, in Arunachal Pradesh, it is a common refrain that Modi’s time in power has coincided both with an acceleration in infrastructure building and a renewed commitment to the region. Modi himself has visited Northeast India about 50 times in nine years. The fruits of his personal attention are evident in the recent electoral successes the BJP has enjoyed there: Modi’s party is now the dominant political force in the region.

In the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, I visited Thembang, an ancient Monpa village that is currently waiting to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. On the afternoon I was there, the village was deserted except for some thick-set mountain dogs and a drunk swaying precariously down some stone steps. Despite the poverty of the present-day village, the remnants of massive stone walls and gates betray a more salubrious past. For centuries, Thembang was a “dzong,” a fortified administrative and ecclesiastical hub. Dzongs have been a feature of Buddhist architecture since the 12th century, particularly in Bhutan, which also borders Arunachal Pradesh. They are places of local significance, places of business and bustle, politics and religion. 

Walking out of Thembang, I was stopped by Jambay. He only gave me his first name. Obviously prosperous and educated, he spoke fluent English and was eager for conversation with a passing stranger. His family line in Thembang, Jambay said, goes “as far back as it’s possible to go.” But, given the remoteness and relative lack of opportunity in the area, Jambay had been sent to school in Bangalore. He went on to work in the Indian civil service in Delhi. Now, Jambay told me, he had “turned full circle,” returning to his home village to work on a U.N.-sponsored conservation project. 

I steered our conversation toward his opinion, as an Arunachali in close proximity to the border, on China’s assertion that Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory. Younger people, Jambay said, “know only that they are Indian.” His grandfather’s generation, though, saw themselves as Monpas who were part of a sprawling Tibetan Buddhist land, their cultural totems being the Tawang monastery and the Dalai Lama’s seat in Lhasa. Until 1951, when China annexed Tibet, trade and travel between Lhasa and Tawang — thousands of miles of mountain wilderness traversed on foot and on horseback — was ceaseless, Jambay said.

In 1962, Jambay told me, Chinese troops passed through Thembang on the way to Bomdila, where they battled with the last of the crumbling Indian resistance. The war “was not much discussed” within his family, Jambay said, “because it was so short and most people escaped into Assam before the worst of the fighting.” The few who were “left behind,” Jambay told me, “lived with the Chinese soldiers.” They were “good to the locals,” Jambay said. “Maybe because they wanted to win the people’s hearts.”

But the Chinese soldiers, Jambay said, did not leave a favorable impression. “Indian nationalism flourishes in Arunachal Pradesh,” he told me, “because people resent the Chinese for how they treated the Dalai Lama and are grateful that India gave him refuge.” 

But there is, he added, also a new edge in people’s feelings about Nehru and the Congress party, which ruled India for more than 50 of the country’s 75 years as an independent nation. The Congress is now in opposition, a pastiche of the grand party it once was, pitching Nehru’s great-grandson into a losing battle against Modi, who has effectively styled himself as the destroyer of a complacent, English-speaking Indian elite, which clung fast to their inherited privileges.

Jambay says Congress was reluctant to build infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh because it could also be used by the enemy, whether the Chinese or insurgents from within. “That,” Jambay told me, “is negative thinking, to not want to prepare yourself because you’re so worried about giving your enemy an opportunity.” Some of what Jambay refers to as “step-motherly treatment” is evident in the fact that, until 1972, Arunachal Pradesh was known as the North East Frontier Agency, an unlovely bureaucratic label that suggested that the region only mattered as a buffer between India and China. It took until 1987 for the Indian government to declare Arunachal Pradesh a fully-fledged state.

As for Nehru, Jambay says he “gave up on the Northeast in 1962 when he said, ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam,’ after the Chinese took over Bomdila.” He is repeating, with conviction, the BJP’s main talkingpoints. The implication is that until the rise of Narendra Modi, the Northeastern states were not treated as fully Indian.

Any Indian visitor to Arunachal Pradesh will invariably remark on two things that appear to separate the state from its Northeastern neighbors. Pretty much everyone in the state speaks Hindi. And Arunachalis wear their patriotism on their sleeves.

Jambey Wangdi, the government official I met at the sparkling new hotel in Tawang, told me that people in Arunachal Pradesh are “taught Hindi right from their childhood.” The state, he said, “puts a lot of emphasis on Hindi speaking and Indianness.” Hindi has become a link language in a state with dozens of different tribes that speak in as many dialects. 

The Hindi spoken by Arunachalis, as Wangdi cheerfully admits, is not “grammatically perfect” and is spoken with a distinctive local accent. But it connects the state to the 650 million people in India who speak Hindi as either their first or second language. After the 1962 war with China, the Indian government made language integration a priority, promoting the study of Hindi in schools. Bollywood also hooked Arunachalis onto Hindi. “We love the songs,” Wangdi said, “we sing them all the time.” 

Throughout our conversation, Wangdi kept coming back to themes of Indianness and patriotism. He told me that his father was a junior officer in the intelligence bureau posted at the border in 1962. “You could make a movie about his life,” Wangdi said. Among the stories his father told about the war was one about Chinese soldiers helping farmers in Tawang to work their fields. “In the evenings,” Wangdi said, “the soldiers would gather people together and say, ‘Look at my eyes, look at your eyes. We’re the same. What do you have in common with those Indians with their big eyes, their big noses and their beards?’”

The point, for Wangdi, is that the Chinese soldiers thought external appearances were enough to engender solidarity and kinship. But they underestimated the Nehru government’s efforts to make tribal people, who were culturally Tibetan Buddhists and who were cut adrift in rough, remote terrain, see themselves as part of a vast Indian nation. 

Verrier Elwin, a British-born Indian anthropologist, advised Nehru on how to integrate the North East Frontier Agency and its unruly tribes into India. In Elwin’s slim 1957 book, “A Philosophy for NEFA,” he wrote: “Elsewhere in the world, colonists have gone into tribal areas for what they can get; the Government of India has gone into NEFA for what it can give.”

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian government, so repressive in putting down insurgencies in other parts of the country, including the Northeast, seems to have created genuine national feeling. At the monastery in Tawang one morning, its yolk-yellow roofs glinting in the sun, I watched as the young monks, straight-backed in their robes, sang the Indian national anthem. It seemed to me almost performative. But Tongam Rina, an editor at the Arunachal Times, told me that Arunachalis had been systematically and effectively “Indianized.” 

In school, she said, pupils recited the “National Pledge,” which begins: “India is my country / All Indians are my brothers and sisters / I love my country / and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage.” On WhatsApp, she forwarded me a recent tweet from the Arunachal Pradesh chief minister’s office, featuring a video of local schoolgirls singing a “soul-stirring patriotic song, filling the air with love for our motherland.” A hard-nosed journalist, Tongam told me that displays of patriotism should not mask the structural problems in Arunachal Pradesh — a lack of jobs, for instance, or the Indian government’s desire to mimic Chinese policies in Tibet by pursuing a narrow development agenda while ignoring its effects on the environment or on local people’s lives.

Nehru’s severest critics argue that it was his refusal to negotiate over the dubiously drawn borders bequeathed by the British Raj that pushed India into a disastrous war. The scars of that conflict mean that, despite the bellicose posturings of Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah, the government has little desire to take on a militarily and economically superior China. But for at least three years now, both countries have been staring each other down. And there is little indication of when they will choose to return to the dormant, if unresolved, status that characterized their border relations for half a century after 1962.

Sanjib Baruah, a political studies professor at Bard College, told me that “relations between India and China have deteriorated during the last decade primarily because of global strategic realignments.” As it always has, China sees its relationship to India only in the context of wider Chinese geopolitical ambition. President Xi Jinping, Baruah said, has expressed his belief that the U.S. and its allies are conspiring to contain further Chinese advancement. “This is the context,” Baruah added, “in which China sees India’s growing closeness with the U.S. as a threat.” 

In February, two U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in the Senate “reaffirming the United States’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of the Republic of India.” The resolution noted that the U.S. “recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between the People’s Republic of China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.” China, said Baruah, the Bard professor, “probably sees the resolution as a provocation.”

The history of the McMahon Line, with the haphazard way it came to be an international border between India and China and the renewed fervor with which both nations claim Arunachal Pradesh’s status to be non-negotiable, is evocative of Benedict Anderson’s line in his seminal work, “Imagined Communities.” It is, Anderson wrote, “the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.” To see Tawang as an integral part of either India or China is a willful act of magical thinking.  

Before I left Tawang, I spoke again to Jambey Wangdi. It seemed he too had chance and destiny on his mind. “If the problem of Tibet could be solved,” he said, “whether it’s autonomy or a free Tibet…” He trailed off. Wangdi left the tantalizing prospect of a free Tibet unexplored. He didn’t speculate what that might mean for Tawang, which is closely connected to Tibet through their shared Buddhism. In 1683, the sixth Dalai Lama was born in Tawang, one of only two to have been born outside the precincts of Tibet proper. So even then Tawang’s geographical status, if not its cultural identity, was liminal — a peripheral place between other, bigger, more significant places.

It feels like a place that was designed to provoke arguments. Tawang’s value to both India and China is symbolic: It’s about geopolitics, strategy and national self-image. As a consequence, Wangdi pointed out, “the amount of money spent on the military on the border is enormous.” If you have a good neighbor, he said, “you can spend that money on health and education.” If you have a good neighbor, he laughed, “you can get some sleep at night.”

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Since coming to power in 2015, the conservative-nationalist Law and Justice party has been accused of subverting democracy by stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, seizing control of state media and targeting women’s reproductive rights. But what brought Polish people out to the streets — in the largest demonstration since the 1980s — was a new law that will set up a government commission to investigate alleged Russian influence in Poland between 2007 and 2022.  

The proposed nine-member commission will have the power to investigate individuals suspected of being unduly influenced by the Kremlin, and hold open hearings into their conduct. 

Opponents of the legislation argue that it is intended to punish opposition politicians ahead of pivotal parliamentary elections this fall. The legislation has been compared to McCarthyism, a purge of individuals suspected to be under socialist and communist influence in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s.

It’s not just Poles who are infuriated by the Russian influence law. It has also rattled allies in the United States and the European Union who have relied on Poland, a NATO member, to act as a key transit hub for military aid to Ukraine since early 2022. In a statement, the U.S. State Department said that the law “could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The EU, which was already in a bitter feud with Law and Justice over Poland’s democratic backsliding, took legal action against the Polish government, saying the commission violated EU law.

Perhaps in response to such criticism, Polish President Andrzej Duda proposed significant amendments to the law just days after signing the bill. Following parliamentary approval, current members of parliament will no longer be able to sit on the commission, and the commission will no longer be given the power to ban people from holding public office. An appeal process against the commission’s decisions will also be instituted. Still, opposition politicians argue that while the worst effects of the law have been mitigated, its undemocratic spirit remains intact, with opposition politicians being smeared as Putin’s puppets.   

The proposed commission is an example of how the Polish government has used the fallout from the war in Ukraine to mask its undemocratic maneuverings at home. “We’re seeing two Polands, the good Poland, which is supporting Ukraine, and the bad Poland, which continues to demolish the rule of law,” said Jakub Jaraczewski, a research coordinator at Democracy Reporting International, a think tank in Berlin. “The war in Ukraine has allowed the Polish government to cast themselves as the good guys.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Law and Justice party has increased its standing on the world stage and cemented Poland as a European power. In February, U.S. President Joe Biden visited Warsaw, where he praised Poland for its staunch support for Ukraine and its commitment to democratic values. “Thank you, Poland,” he said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’re doing.”

One reason why Law and Justice continues to appeal to swaths of the Polish electorate is its successful redrafting of history to justify its illiberal agenda. By using the memory of malign Russian influence in Poland, the Polish government is casting itself as the country’s protector. 

While the party evokes history and Russia’s war in Ukraine to justify controversial anti-democratic legislation, it has to tread carefully around another historical memory seared in the national psyche.

On July 11, Law and Justice will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the bloodiest day of the Volhynian massacres. Located in northwest Ukraine, Volhynia was once a part of Poland. Between 1943 and 1945, armed Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered whole villages full of Polish people in a bid to prevent a post-war Poland from asserting sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority regions. Over 50,000 Poles were murdered. In retaliation, Poles killed an estimated 10,000 Ukrainians. 

The Volhynian massacres have hung over Polish-Ukrainian relations since the end of communist rule. While Poland declared Volhynia a genocide in 2016, consecutive Ukrainian governments have stood firm on their position that there is a need for reconciliation and forgiveness on both sides. Ukraine has always rejected the claim that the events in Volhynia were a genocide.

In March 2023, the head of the Ukrainian parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, said during a visit to Warsaw that Ukraine would work with Poland to accept “the truth, no matter how painful it may be.” It appeared to be a way forward for Poland and Ukraine. But, aware of national sensitivities, particularly in an election year, a spokesperson for Poland’s foreign ministry chastised the Ukrainian government soon after for failing to understand “that the issue of Volhynia is very important for Poles.” He went on to demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “should take more responsibility” and apologize for the massacres. Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland described the comments as “unacceptable” in tweets that were later deleted. 

“There is a problem between Polish historical memory and Ukrainian historical memory about Volhynia,” Jan Pisulinski, a professor of history at Rzeszow University in eastern Poland, told me, referencing Ukrainian historians who claim that the massacres were not perpetrated by Ukrainian nationals but were instead peasant killings. “But,” he added, “the Law and Justice party’s so-called historical policy is disappointing because it is manipulative in how it serves the contemporary interests of the government.” 

It is unlikely that the Polish government will soften its position as the anniversary approaches. It’s an occasion that will be watched by Russian propagandists who have previously used Volhynia to try to drive a wedge between Poland and Ukraine. Earlier this month, I met Marta, who was standing outside the Ukrainian embassy in central Warsaw to express solidarity following the June 6 blast that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam. She told me that in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she didn’t believe the Volhynia massacres needed to be commemorated in the same way this year. “My grandfather,” she told me, “hated Ukrainian people because of Volhynia, but now we need to stand against Russia and leave the past in the past.”

The need to stand up to Russia, argue the Polish protestors who gathered in Warsaw in early June, cannot come at the cost of Poland’s hard-won democracy. At the protests, the people I spoke to expressed no fear of Russian influence, only anger toward the Polish government. 

Grzegorz Schetyna, a former leader of Civic Platform, Poland’s main opposition party, told me that it was “key to stand together with other democratic opposition parties at this march.” He was confident that the momentum of the protests could be bottled and used to unify Poland’s traditionally chaotic opposition before the general election, which is expected to be held in October. 

“We are going to these elections to win and to right human wrongs,” former Prime Minister Donald Tusk shouted into the loudspeaker under the searing sun that day. Tusk, critics say, is the primary target of the government’s urgent efforts to investigate “Russian influence” because he is the biggest threat to Law and Justice retaining power.

Despite the impressive turnout on June 4, not all the demonstrators were convinced it would be enough. “Poland is here,” Tusk said. “No one will silence us!” But Paul, a 71-year-old from Warsaw, told me he wasn’t so sure. “Support for the other side is too big,” he said with a shake of his head before disappearing into the crowd.

The post In Poland, a manufactured panic about ‘reds under the bed’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Threlkeld, a history professor at Denison University in Ohio, teaches a seminar for first-year students focused on how American history has been taught through the centuries, parsing textbooks to explain how national narratives evolve. The course dissects some of the country’s most notorious battles in the great culture war over historical memory — from the 1990s-era clashes about how to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the conservative uproar in the mid-2010s over a U.S. history course framework emphasizing the country’s legacy of racism. The last few years of her course have coincided with a new front in America’s culture wars: how this legacy is discussed in public schools.  

Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. In the same period, universities and colleges have become a key battleground for conservative lawmakers intent on codifying an “anti-woke” view of history in the classroom, with nearly two dozen states introducing bills targeting history instruction and diversity training in higher education. 

Threlkeld’s students have been studying these fights in real time and reflecting on the future of a country afraid of its past. I spoke to her about what they make of this fraught political moment and the continuities between history wars of the past and present.

When you started teaching this class nearly a decade ago, what was the dominant history war captivating the public? And do you see any connections between that feud and what people are fighting over today?

Starting around 2010, the College Board decided to revisit the AP U.S. history framework. So they brought in historians and teachers and all the kinds of people you would expect. And it was a multi-year process that was all done by the College Board. And then in 2014, they released the revised framework around which schools could design the AP courses that fit with what they do in those districts. The right-wing reaction was exactly what you would expect, which was, ‘Why are these people listed and not these people?’ 

So for those first few years of teaching this class, I was able to show my students these reactions and to show them the responses from the College Board and the responses from school districts and ordinary teachers who were dealing with this in their classrooms every day. I could tell that students had never really thought about the politics behind all of this because they’re just in class. They’re just learning what they’re being taught. One of the experiences that stays with me most strongly from this class is just seeing students realize how political history is.

Many students can probably study a specific battle over a textbook and not understand that history itself is often contested and politically weaponized. How do you explain this concept of history wars to your students? How do they react? 

It’s a hard thing to do. I’ve tried a lot of different ways over the years. The thing that I have done the last few times that I have taught the course is just to give them one of these bills. The last time I taught this course was the fall of 2022. And in the spring of 2022, the Ohio House of Representatives had proposed one of these ‘divisive concepts’ bills. So we talked through the process of how these bills work, and I just gave them the text and said, ‘Take a look at this and tell me what you think.’ And that was more powerful than anything I had tried before. 

Some of the other things I had done before were giving students two very different textbook excerpts of the same event and talking about why these excerpts would be so different. Even then, getting them to understand the political stakes always took more time. But with these bills, all I have to do is hand them the text of one, and they’re just immediately thinking, ‘What is going on?’

Do students buy lawmakers’ rhetoric that these laws are intended to protect them from harmful and divisive concepts? 

Their first reaction is usually disbelief that anyone thinks that there are topics in U.S. history that high school and college students shouldn’t learn about. They are very thoughtful when it comes to thinking about younger children. But by the time students get to their age — 16, 17, 18 — they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there is something dangerous in learning about slavery or learning about racial discrimination of any kind. And some of them who come through this course and start to understand how little they know about American history, some of them are angry that they weren’t taught the things that they’re learning.

We do have some really interesting discussions about patriotism and what it means to be patriotic. Because they pick up on a lot of that rhetoric, too, that the purpose of public education is to make students patriotic citizens. And so, I do always get a couple of students who ask things like, ‘Well, how can I learn all these terrible things that the United States has done and still be patriotic?’ And I think that’s an incredible question. Where a lot of them come to by the end of the semester is that they need to know these things in order to be patriotic. That being ignorant is not patriotism.

I grew up in California, but I have reported from and lived in the South. And while I was there, I learned that students were taught a very different version of Civil War history — including one that glorified the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ mythology of the Confederacy. For me, learning about the regional and geographic differences in U.S. history education was very eye-opening. Taking this a step further, I wonder what this course is like for students who aren’t from the U.S. Have they drawn comparisons to places they come from?

I love it when international students in this class feel comfortable enough to start talking about their experiences. At Denison, we have a lot of students from Vietnam, a lot of students from China, a lot of students from India. And when they do start to open up and start to reflect on the kind of history they were taught in high school, it’s clear that they do understand how much of what they learn is controlled by the state.

I’m thinking about Vietnam in particular because I had this one really smart, thoughtful student in my class this past fall who was from Vietnam. And he was very conscious of the fact that in Vietnam, history education has been tied very closely to reunifying and rebuilding the country over the last 50 years. 

And so he was actually able to talk in a way that I don’t think most 18-year-olds can about the political uses of history in that nationalist context. And for some of my students who are from the U.S., I could see the wheels turning in their heads, when they start to realize, ‘Oh, this stuff serves a political purpose. And what might be the purpose it’s serving in my state? Let me think about that.’

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The post The politics of teaching US history appeared first on Coda Story.

For 40 years, Dragos Olaru has been paying his respects to the great Romanian cultural figures buried in his home city of Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine. With its decorative tombstones and earthy paths, the cemetery on Zelena Street is the resting place of ethnic Romanian artists, activists and intellectuals who defined their culture and defended it when outside powers encroached upon it. Although he met none of these figures — his “friends,” as he calls them — before they passed, Olaru feels he knows them intimately in death. He tells me that he is continuing their work.

He is also trying to protect these Romanian graves from actual destruction. Local Ukrainian authorities have decided to exhume the remains lying beneath some 200 of the tombstones on Zelena Street — which they say are unidentifiable — and then auction the plots. But Olaru sees the campaign as a way to “Ukrainize” the cemetery.

“They are doing this to remove the traces of us,” he told me, as we passed the grave of Romanian philologist and revolutionary Aron Pumnul, who advocated for the Romanian language to be written using the Latin alphabet, instead of Cyrillic, in the mid-19th century.

The fate of the Zelena Street cemetery is just one incarnation of wartime tensions between Ukrainians and ethnic Romanians, the country’s second-largest linguistic minority after Russian speakers. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, respect for the rights and interests of Western ethnic minorities waxed and waned as the new country struggled to fortify its self-image in the face of ever-present Russian influence. But the 2014 Maidan Revolution marked a turning point, providing a new impetus to protect the Ukrainian language and establish it as the country’s lingua franca. The subsequent ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war between the Ukrainian government and Russian proxies in the eastern Donbas region left Ukrainians with an urgent need to define their day-to-day relationship with Russia and Russianness, and in turn, to define what it means to be Ukrainian.

The full-scale invasion in February 2022 brought a fierce embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. Yet while this hardening of Ukrainianness is clearly intended as a way to distinguish the country from its aggressor, minority communities in western Ukraine have become collateral damage. Linguistic policies aimed at strengthening Ukrainian are edging Romanian out of the public lives of many native speakers. And other moves, ranging from the exhumation of remains in the Zelena Street cemetery to political allegations against Romanian religious leaders, have left some ethnic Romanians unsure of their position in Ukrainian society.

Although Dragos Olaru was aggrieved by the events in the graveyard, which he sees as a mean-spirited move against Romanian culture, he still supports the Ukrainian state. “Putin is the biggest enemy of the world,” he said. I later learned that his nephew was serving on the front line in Bakhmut, more than 700 miles away on the other side of the country.

Ukraine has been home to ethnic Romanian, Hungarian and Polish communities since territorial lines were redrawn following World War I and World War II. Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, some 400,000 Romanian speakers became Ukrainian citizens, becoming a part of the nascent state’s heterogeneous social fabric. Through much of the 1990s, Ukraine was also consumed by economic turmoil, the result of hyperinflation coupled with rampant cronyism. Conversations about national identity were often relegated to the back burner as Ukrainians worked to keep bread on the table. When the economy stabilized in the early 2000s, the trickle-down effect was limited, and the country’s oligarchs continued to grow their power and wealth. Russia was ever watchful, supporting the campaigns of Russia-friendly politicians who would prevent the country from swaying too far west, toward the European Union and NATO. Whenever identity questions did arise, these lawmakers were eager to frame Ukraine in the context of Russia by highlighting the historical bond between the two countries. 

In Ukraine’s west, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian minority communities lived their lives largely in their own languages, often benefiting from the policies of Russia-backed politicians who, at Moscow’s behest, sought to protect the Russian language with moves that tended to benefit other minority languages at the same time. When pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych passed a language law in 2012 that gave minority languages, namely Russian, the status of a “regional language” in areas where 10% or more of the population did not speak Ukrainian, it was seen by opponents as an attempt to undermine Ukrainian. But the measure found support among minority language speakers in the west of the country.

Following the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s language issue took on a new urgency, and policymakers passed a series of laws to formally establish the use of the Ukrainian language in various aspects of public life, ranging from media to education to the legal system. In sum, these laws effectively dismantled Yanukovych’s 2012 language law. Its fate was finally sealed in 2018 when the Ukrainian Constitutional Court deemed the law unconstitutional. People who supported these changes argued that they would create a more cohesive Ukrainian society and lead to necessary improvements in the country’s struggling education system. 

But the wave of legislation set off alarm bells for Ukraine’s Polish, Hungarian and Romanian minorities. These communities largely understood the motivations for the changes but also saw them chipping away at their own languages and traditions and at the practical bridge that their languages offered to living and working in the EU. Warsaw, Bucharest and Budapest stepped in, routinely chiding the Ukrainian government for not doing enough to protect minority rights. Supporting their pleas for a more considerate approach to the Ukrainian question was a report from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, that said that a 2019 language law passed in Ukraine “failed to strike a fair balance” between promoting the Ukrainian language and “safeguarding minorities.” 

Ukrainian authorities repeatedly argued that the changes were not an attempt to erode minority languages but rather an effort to buttress Ukrainian identity and introduce a sense of cohesiveness to everyday affairs across the country. And much of day-to-day life continued to play out in languages other than Ukrainian, including in Russian. Even today, while Ukrainian is the official state language according to the constitution, Russian is still the first language of approximately 20% of Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. 

But Russia’s incursions continued. In a 2021 speech that foreshadowed the invasion of Ukraine months later, Putin denounced the Ukrainian language laws and promoted the false claim that Russian proxies in the Donbas “took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives.” The speech highlighted the extent to which Putin sees respect for the Russian language as a key component in the bond between Ukraine and Russia — and as a pillar in Russia’s political strategy toward Ukraine.

Months after the first Russian tank crossed into Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the Kremlin used Ukraine’s language policies as part of a robust disinformation campaign to justify carrying out what has become the greatest land invasion in Europe since World War II. “The Russian language is banned in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the BBC in April 2022.

When it comes to Ukraine’s language battles, the most sensitive issue for Romanians is education. The village of Petrashivka lies an hour south of Chernivtsi, a stone’s throw from the Romanian border. There I met Gheorghe and Mihaela Lupu, a middle-aged married couple who have dedicated their careers to running the Petrashivka Secondary School. Nearly all classes for the school’s 314 students are taught in Romanian.

“We speak Romanian, but we are Ukrainian,” Gheorghe, the school’s director, told me. The presence of both languages and nations is evident at Petrashivka. As we walked through the school corridors with their lace curtains and reddish-brown wooden floors, the couple told me about Ukrainian and Romanian government support for their work. A grant from Bucharest allowed them to buy new tables for the Romanian history classroom. Next door, in the Ukrainian language classroom, a TV, chairs and other materials were brought in with support from Kyiv. When we stuck our heads into the classroom, the students greeted us eagerly. The teacher prompted a 12-year-old girl, Anastasia, to recite a poem she had written about the war. “I pray in my thoughts,” she said with zeal. “Bring peace on the earth, God! Have mercy on us, God! Save us from this war.”

Gheorghe said that parents were happy that their children could speak both languages fluently, as it opened up more opportunities for future studies in Ukraine and Romania.

This transition has been in the works since Ukraine’s 2017 adoption of an education law that set the country on a path for public secondary schooling to be conducted in Ukrainian. Heralded as a move to align Ukraine’s school system more closely with European standards, the law gives space for EU minority languages like Romanian to be taught as a second language. But for the students of the Petrashivka Secondary School, nearly all of whom speak Romanian at home, the implementation of the education law will be a significant change.

When I asked how they felt about the language change, the teachers were hesitant to share their thoughts. Gheorghe offered only this: “If the change is state law, we will do it. We live under Ukrainian law.”

Their acquaintance, Iurie Levcic, was much more forthright. Back in central Chernivtsi, sitting in the Bucovina Art Centre for the Conservation and Promotion of Romanian Traditional Culture, which the 54-year-old man runs, Levcic described what he sees as the quiet dissolution of Romanian culture in Ukraine. 

“They want to assimilate us, they try a total assimilation, starting with the schools,” he said. He excoriated the Zelenskyy government, arguing that officials were unwilling to meaningfully engage in dialogue with the Romanian community.

Levcic is not alone in his distrust of the Zelenskyy government. The current situation has also angered politicians in Romania, who feel slighted by Kyiv’s position on the minority issue despite Romania’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing war. Tempers flared in December 2022: The Ukrainian parliament adopted a law on national minorities to fulfill one of the conditions necessary to start negotiations for EU membership but did not take on board fully recommendations from the Venice Commission on the protection of minorities. Condemnation from Bucharest was swift and cemented the idea that, although Romanian speakers were not necessarily being targeted by Kyiv, they had become an afterthought in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Adding insult to injury, the move came months after Zelenskyy made a speech before the Romanian parliament, in April 2022, in which he promised to “start a dialogue” on a “new comprehensive agreement that guarantees the absolute protection and development of our national minorities” — a reference to the approximately 46,000 ethnic Ukrainians living in Romania. He reiterated this position to the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in January 2023, after the two heads of state had a call on the issue. A read out from the call said Zelenskyy “expressed his full openness to identifying solutions, so that the Romanian community in Ukraine benefits from the same rights enjoyed by the Ukrainian community in Romania.”

Back in Chernivtsi’s City Hall, Iryna Tkachuk, the head of the city’s education department, took a more political stance. She defended the upcoming implementation of the education language law, arguing that it would ensure “minority speakers could have full access to university level education in Ukraine.”

The affinities of ethnic Romanian religious leaders have also come under scrutiny as Ukraine strives to shed its cultural ties with Russia. In Chernivtsi, many Romanians still worship in the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although the Church claims it broke off communications with Moscow in May 2022, months after the invasion, and denies being influenced by Russia, Ukrainian political leaders have trained their focus on church figures, keen to identify and sever any remaining ties to the Kremlin.

Sitting inside the Ascension Church on the outskirts of Chernivtsi, clad in black robes and a matching puffer coat, Father Pavel Paulencu told me he feels a crisis setting in. He worries it is only a matter of time before the authorities arrive at his door. 

“I’ve had people ask already why I’m doing a mass in Romanian in Ukraine,” he said. Ethnic Romanians make up 60% of his congregation, and Romanian is the language of priority for services. “I told them to go and read the history,” he said with a heavy sigh. “In church, it should not be politics, just God.”

Anxiety in Kyiv about ties between the Romanian religious community and Russia have been brewing for some time, but they reached a boiling point in late 2022, when Ukrainian Security Services (known as the SBU) raided the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as part of a series of searches across the country. The SBU Telegram account reported that law enforcement officers found Russian passports and pro-Kremlin literature among the belongings of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina clergy. Soon after, citizenships of 13 representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — including from the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese — were suspended by presidential decree. In response, a Romanian cleric threatened to sue President Zelenskyy. The U.N.’s human rights office said that the nationwide SBU searches could “undermine the right to freedom of religion.”

In April 2023, a resident of the Chernivtsi region was arrested on suspicion of burning down a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the village of Milieve. In early May, prosecutors in Chernivtsi submitted to a court an indictment against the local Banchen Monastery, claiming that an assistant abbot helped men of draft age illegally cross the border. Ukraine’s wartime rules prohibit men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

The anxieties behind these actions by law enforcement have been exacerbated by the war. But they are not new. In 2019, politically-driven tensions within the Church led to a schism and to the establishment of the similarly-named Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which today has the full support of the Zelenskyy government. The schism was a blow for Putin, who sees the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates as the centerpiece of his notion of a “Russkiy mir,” or Russian world, the idea that all Russian and Russian-identifying people should be united. But for Ukraine, establishing a church independent of Moscow was seen as a move to not only distinguish the country from Russia but also to stymie the Kremlin’s ability to influence certain clergy. 

In the eyes of the Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church harbors a threat. But for the average ethnic Romanians, what’s happening to the Church is yet another way in which Kyiv is imposing upon their lives.

In a country traumatized by Russian war crimes, where people are struggling to survive each day, the space for debate on issues such as language and national identity is limited at best.

On the streets of Chernivtsi, one hears a steady mix of Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian languages, with most Russian speakers skewing older and Ukrainian ones younger. Although the war has hardened attitudes toward Russian speakers, there is no outward animosity toward the lyrical sounds of Romanian in daily life. 

And while the language issue has riled up politicians and activists, most Romanians I spoke to seemed more focused on ensuring that their families survive the war. Chernivtsi has been spared from Russian rockets, but the war remains ever-present. Ukrainian flags dot almost every door. Every morning, the city takes a brief moment of silence to honor the men and women on the frontline. And in a new graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the groundskeepers can be seen digging graves for the bodies of soldiers, returning home from the frontlines for the last time.

The post As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind? appeared first on Coda Story.

Joined by the presidents of Poland and Israel, it was the first time a German head of state took part in a commemoration of the uprising. Tensions between Poland and Germany, however, fermented on the sidelines. 

Before the ceremony, the Polish culture minister, Piotr Glinski, who is also the deputy prime minister, circulated a report tabulating Polish wartime losses to President Steinmeier. Poland has demanded $1.3 trillion in World War II reparations from Germany. For Glinski’s Law and Justice party, it was an opportune moment to press its claims that Germany is disrespecting Poland by refusing to engage with its call for reparations and to appeal to an electorate struggling with inflation and fearful of the war in Ukraine next door. For the government’s detractors, it was a schoolboy gesture staged to draw votes ahead of Poland’s parliamentary election this fall.

 The Polish government’s willingness to stress test the country’s public relationship with Germany may be part of an election strategy, but, behind the scenes, the real relationship between Poland and Germany continues to grow stronger. This throws into question the effectiveness of Poland’s efforts to muddy Germany’s reputation as a model for successfully reckoning with its past.

The two countries are becoming more economically intertwined. Poland is Germany’s fifth-largest trading partner, and bilateral trade is reported to have grown by 14% in the last 12 months. Germany makes up around 20% of foreign direct investment in Poland.

It’s an economic closeness that is light-years away from the stark rebuke of German-Polish business dealings often seen in Poland’s state-controlled media. “On the governmental level, we see a real cold era, but, at the same time, German investors are coming to Poland, and more Polish companies are based in Germany,” said Agnieszka Lada-Konefal, an expert in Polish-German relations. In December 2022, Mercedes-Benz announced plans to invest over $1 billion in an electric van factory in Poland. But while the economic relationship is good, it could be better: Lada-Konefal added that Poland’s ongoing battle with the European Union over the country’s democratic backsliding has spooked some German investors.

While Poland’s government has said it is willing to wait out Germany’s current position on the reparations issue, the majority of Poles want to push the relationship into the future. According to the German-Polish Barometer, an annual polling project that has examined the relationship between the two countries since 2000, 64% of Poles in 2021 wanted to disconnect from the past.

Poland’s government is often accused of distorting the past. It has tried to center Polish heroism and sideline Jewish victims by arguing that the majority of Poles tried to protect Jews from Nazi forces.

Germany has taken the position that all financial claims from World War II were resolved in 1953, when Communist Poland said it would not pursue reparations at the behest of Moscow. This position was settled again, the German government says, in the Two-plus-Four Treaty of 1990, which led to the reunification of Germany. Poland counters that earlier calls for reparations were ignored. 

Calling for reparations may play out as a key tactic for the Law and Justice party in the Polish parliamentary election expected later this year, allowing it to take votes from the far-right Confederation party. “Only the very hard part of the Law and Justice electorate really want to hear anti-German slogans, and the party needs to give something to this group,” said Lada-Konefal. In Polish elections, addressing the concerns of small groups of the electorate can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. 

Germany’s hesitation to send lethal military aid to Ukraine has reinforced Polish perceptions of Germany as being too soft on Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, Poland said it was disappointed by the immediate German response. And despite Germany signing off on historic military aid packages for the Ukrainian armed forces, Poland’s government continues to argue Berlin is not doing enough to protect Europe from a Russian threat. “The ambiguity around the German position on initial support for Ukraine and perceived sympathy towards Russia has affected the relationship,” said Maria Skora, a research associate at the Institute for European Politics, a policy research center.

Among the German public, Poland can be an afterthought in German politics, said Monika Sus, a visiting professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. “In general, there is a total lack of knowledge in Germany on Poland,” she said. “There is an education problem on modern Poland, especially when you compare this to the general understanding of France in Germany.” 

In late May, Poland’s embassy in Berlin criticized the German government for issuing teacher training material that portrayed a fictional Polish mother as a “devout Catholic” and a person who “hates gays.” Speaking to Polish media, Poland’s ambassador to Germany, Dariusz Pawlos, said the material “reproduces anti-Polish stereotypes and harmful generalizations.” Despite Law and Justice presenting LGTBQ rights as an attack on so-called traditional family values since coming to power in 2015, a growing number of Poles in all categories, from young to old, are in favor of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage, according to a June 2022 poll.

The post Poland’s ruling party demands Germany pay reparations to score political points appeared first on Coda Story.

The conflict is rooted in ethnic and tribal tensions. But there is also an element of the religious division for which India, under the nearly decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become increasingly known worldwide. In India’s last population census, administered in 2011, Christians made up over 41% of Manipur residents. About half of the state’s residents are Hindus. Groups of mostly Hindu Meitei people from the valley clashed on May 3 with Christian tribal groups who live in the hills around Manipur. The Christians were holding a demonstration in defense of their tribal status, which they believed the more privileged Meteis were trying to usurp for themselves.

During the riots, public property and people’s homes and vehicles were set on fire in arson attacks reported across the state. According to church groups, about 120 churches were set on fire or otherwise destroyed.  

The 2022 edition of the annual U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, released on May 15, noted that the Indian government is among those that “freely target faith community members within their borders.” The State Department quoted the spokesman of a Christian NGO who described the situation facing all minorities as “unprecedentedly grave.” The Indian authorities have dismissed the report as “based on misinformation and flawed understanding.”

But Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition Congress party, said that “what is happening in Manipur is the result of the politics of hate.” He was speaking at a rally in the southern state of Karnataka just before state elections on May 10, 2023. “Manipur is on fire,” Gandhi said, “people are dying and the prime minister doesn’t seem to be concerned.” 

Modi has continued to remain silent throughout the weeks of violence in Manipur, even as the army has been deployed to quell unrest and an internet ban and curfew have been imposed. 

In Manipur, the largely Hindu Meitei people inhabit the valley area where Imphal, the capital city, is located. The mostly Christian tribes, like the Kukis and the Nagas, live in the hills. The people of the mainly Christian hill tribes say they can no longer live with the mainly Hindu Meitei people. 

Historically, Hindu Meiteis have dominated positions in politics and the state administration. Meitei is one of 22 official languages recognized by the Indian Constitution and the sole official language of Manipur. Two-thirds of the members of the Manipur state assembly, including the state’s chief minister, are Meitei. And the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, which promotes an aggressively Hindu nationalist agenda, holds power  at both state and federal levels. The BJP government in Manipur, led by chief minister Biren Singh, has been accused of favoring the Hindu Meitei majority and enacting anti-tribal policies such as converting tribal land into protected state properties. According to Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, the national affairs editor at the Indian news website The Wire, “the chief minister appears to be behaving like a spokesman of the majority Meitei community.” 

While the BJP government of Manipur has been accused of favoring the Meiteis over hill-dwelling tribals, the Meiteis have also been lobbying for tribal status. Last month, an order by the Manipur High Court gave the state government just four weeks to grant the Meiteis special tribal status. This status is necessary to access certain government-run affirmative action programs, including quotas for government jobs. Christian tribes, particularly the Kukis, have argued that the Meiteis already enjoy privileges in Manipur and that any extra privileges might hurt the tribes for whom affirmative action is necessary. 

The Meitei people have been demanding special tribal status because, they say, the hill tribes are able to buy land in the valley, while they are unable to buy land in the hills. The tribes, though, point to the greater wealth of the Meiteis, gained from living in the valley and in Imphal, Manipur’s capital. Were Meitei residents able to buy land in the hills, the tribes argue, the Kukis and the Nagas, among others, would find themselves priced out of their own lands.

In response to the court order, a tribal students’ union organized a “solidarity march” on May 3, which sparked violence, including an arson attack on a Kuki war memorial.

Hesang, a Kuki activist, told me that the memorial was an “important part of the community’s history.” He said that while the protest was peaceful, the burning down of the memorial was a “provocation that was seen as a challenge to Kuki history.” Manipur has barely been able to pause for breath since. 

On May 22, after relative calm appeared to have returned, army units had to quell violence that was reportedly directed at Meitei shopkeepers. Houses were set ablaze in the capital, Imphal, and the state was placed under curfew from 2 p.m. until 6 a.m., with the already existing ban on mobile internet services extended until May 26.

The violence in Manipur, despite all the deaths and damage, has received scant attention on India’s numerous mainstream cable news channels. But there has been plenty of debate about the situation in Manipur on social media. Inevitably, some of the online content has been misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories, which is why the Manipur government says it has banned mobile internet access. Despite the spread of fake news, a Meitei person who requested anonymity told me that “in a situation like this, when you are cut off from genuine sources of information, the imagination gives oxygen to rumors.” 

Some of these rumors have been spread by the BJP government itself. Though the recent violence began after protests against the High Court’s order to grant the Meitei people special tribal status, the government claimed it began because of its crackdown on illegal immigrants from Myanmar. These illegal immigrants, the government says, grow poppies in the hills to use in the drug trade.  

The people the BJP government refers to as “illegal immigrants” are actually refugees who fled Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. These refugees share the same ethnic background as the Kukis. Angshuman Choudhury, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, told me that “there is a feeling amongst Kukis that their roots in Manipur are being questioned by both the state government and dominant civil society.” 

In March 2023, six Meitei student associations released a joint statement in which they accused “outsiders coming from the other side of Indian boundaries, especially Myanmar” of “encroaching on land which is owned by the state in the hills of Manipur.” These outsiders, the statement went on to conclude, represented a “never-ending threat to the indigenous people of Manipur.” A Metei activist, who wished to remain anonymous because they didn’t agree with some of the xenophobic rhetoric of the state government, told me that illegal immigration from Myanmar meant there had been an “unusual rise in the population of Kukis, and other communities in Manipur feel this is expansionism.” 

Kukis, the Meiteis say, fear that the BJP government will publish a National Register of Citizens in Manipur, just as it did in the bordering state of Assam in 2019. The much-criticized National Register is apparently intended to root out illegal residents from India. In Assam, though, it effectively stripped two million people of their citizenship, often on questionable grounds. 

Choudhury, of the Center for Policy Research, told me that in both Assam and Manipur,  BJP governments had introduced “a powerful regime of ethno-political protectionism based on a narrow and chauvinistic imagining of society.” He said there was a “subterranean attempt to reimagine and homogenize certain pluralistic ethnic identities, like Assamese and Meitei, as strictly Hindu.”

A member of the Indian Parliament from Manipur wrote to Modi, asking him to employ a “strong hand” to stop the threat of “Balkanization on ethnic lines” in Manipur. But it is arguably in the nature of BJP policies to exacerbate ethnic and religious divisions. Earlier this month, the writer Arundhati Roy told an audience at a literature festival in the southern state of Kerala that the BJP asking for votes was “like a lit match asking the firewood to ‘give us a chance.’”  

For three weeks, the BJP has been unable to douse the flames in Manipur. When will the prime minister take notice?

The post The BJP is failing to stop ethnic riots in northeast India appeared first on Coda Story.

Not long after, the armed men came to her polling booth and began ordering people to leave. Godwin, a first-time voter, was frightened and confused. A woman standing close by was in tears. She asked Godwin if she was Igbo. “They’re chasing Igbo people away,” she told Godwin. The mostly Christian Igbos comprise between 15 and 18% of the Nigerian population and are the third largest ethnic group, behind the Yoruba and the Hausa. 

Across Nigeria that day, there were many such incidents of ethnicity-based voter intimidation. The 2023 Nigerian elections were reported to have been so marred by violence and vote-rigging that both major opposition parties immediately called for the results to be overturned. Legal challenges have been filed but the disputed winner, Bola Tinubu, will be sworn in on May 29. 

The elections may now be over, barring an unlikely overturning of the result by the courts, but millions of Nigerians are still reeling from the divisive campaigning. Since Nigeria transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1999, no Igbo has been elected president. And though there has been an informal arrangement to rotate the presidency between the Muslim north and Christian south of Nigeria in order to bring together a linguistically, religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse country, there has also been no president from the southeast, where Igbos are the dominant ethnic group. 

But by February 2023, it seemed likely that Nigeria’s new president would be Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria who is ethnically Igbo and who led most polls. Obi defeated Tinubu on his home turf in Lagos State, but Tinubu still won the election. That Obi would not be president — after all the hope and promise he represented for many Igbos — was a bitter pill to swallow. Even if the courts rule that there are no grounds to overturn the election results, the violence, the disenfranchisement of Igbos in particular and various flaws reported in the voting process are enough to conclude, as international observers did, that the “election fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ reasonable expectations.” 

“We now understand that we are not one in Nigeria,” said Ebuka, who was forced to leave his polling unit in Surulere because he was Igbo. He later came back and voted with the help of the police. “Left to me, if the Yorubas and Hausas aren’t comfortable with the Igbos ruling them, then there should be freedom. Biafra should come, and everybody should go to their land,” he said. Ebuka is referring to the secessionist state founded by the Igbo people in 1967, the creation of which led to the Nigerian Civil War. By 1970, when the war ended with Biafra’s surrender, more than two million people had died and millions more had been displaced. 

The campaigning in the presidential election this February, and in state elections in March, showed that tribalism is resurgent in Nigeria and that ethnic prejudice and division still run deep. Tinubu, the incoming Nigerian president, will find he is in charge of a country that is once again asking itself existential questions, asking what it means to be Nigerian.

At the polling booth in Surulere on February 25, there were only two people ahead of Godwin in the queue when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Two men told her to leave the queue. “As I was leaving, the men started laughing. They said I was very stupid and that I should have gone to Nnewi to vote,” she told me. Nnewi is a commercial and industrial city in Anambra State, where Igbos are in the majority. 

Godwin looked at the electoral officials at the booth for help but they were powerless. “I walked away feeling very sad,” she told me. “I’d never felt that useless before. I had looked forward to voting.”

The ethnic profiling targeted at the Igbos living in Lagos during the elections was deliberate and amplified by social media, says Timi Olagunju, a policy consultant. It was a whipping up, he told me, of Nigeria’s “primordial public.” This is a reference to the work of Peter Palmer Ekeh, a Nigerian sociologist, known for his 1975 paper, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa.” According to Ekeh, the African experience of colonialism resulted in “the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West.” Ekeh characterizes these two publics as primordial and civic. The primordial concerns private interests and attachments such as ethnicity, religion and tribalism, while the civic refers to national and civil structures, such as the military or the bureaucracy. “Many of Africa’s political problems,” Ekeh wrote, “are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics.” 

In the heat of Nigeria’s rancorous presidential election, politically motivated tribalistic disinformation spread like wildfire across social media. Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, who is a Christian, was accused of destroying Muslim communities when he was a governor and portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, the secessionist organization in southeastern Nigeria.

Online narratives were further spun to imply that Igbo people wanted to take over Lagos. On March 18, three weeks after the presidential elections, most of Nigeria’s 36 states went back to the polls to elect state governors. In Lagos State, WhatsApp groups lit up with messages that warned that the Labor Party gubernatorial aspirant Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour intended to empower the Indigenous People of Biafra. If Rhodes-Vivour came into power, the messages said, he’d lay off civil servants in Lagos and hire Igbos to replace them. Rhodes-Vivour is Yoruba, but his marriage to an Igbo apparently raised hackles.

Anti-Igbo messages and threats were widespread in the days before the Lagos gubernatorial election. A video went viral on social media of Musiliu Akinsanya, a well-known Lagos civil servant and political operative, telling voters to stay home if they weren’t planning on voting for the ruling APC party. 

“Tell them,” Akinsanya was filmed saying, “‘Mama Chukwudi,’ if you don’t want to vote for us, sit down at home. Sit down at home.” Mama Chukwudi is a reference to a typical Igbo name. After the video attracted outrage on social media, Akinsanya claimed it was just a friendly joke. And the Nigerian police backed him up. But during the presidential elections on February 25, Akinsanya had been caught on camera preventing Igbo voters from voting in a polling unit in Lagos. He was not even reprimanded, let alone punished.

“If Akinsanya had been arrested and questioned, even if not imprisoned,” the policy consultant Timi Olagunju told me, “it would have sent shivers through the APC camp and empowered people to come out to vote.” The violent rhetoric and bullying at the ballot box had its desired effect. The voter turnout for the presidential election was a record low of 27%, and the turnout for the gubernatorial elections just weeks later was equally disappointing.

Ugo Ude, a second-year English student at Lagos State University, showed up to vote in the presidential election at 7:05 in the morning. The booths opened at eight and within 25 minutes she had cast her vote. Not long after she voted, she says, a gang of “fierce-looking” men showed up, singled a man out from the queue and told him to leave. As he did, Ugo heard an elderly woman say, “let Igbo go to their states to vote Igbo, and let Yorubas do the same.”

For Ude, the woman’s words were an insight into the mentality of some of her compatriots. She herself was told to leave the booth. “Go away,” Ude says people, including the elderly woman, shouted at her. “You’re a stranger.” Something broke inside her that day, she told me. When she meets fellow Nigerians, she is wary: “I’m now asking myself, ‘Would you stand up for me or would you be part of the machinery that’ll be used to attack me?’” 

Ude, who runs a nonprofit organization that provides educational materials to children, says she’s “always been optimistic about Nigeria.” She acknowledged that she had been shocked by the bigotry on display during the elections but took solace in the messages she’d seen that rejected tribalism. 

“I will keep voting and I will keep doing my nonprofit work,” she told me. “Although there will be times when I’ll doubt the effectiveness of what I’m doing, I just can’t let it slide. If the kids want to grow up and become tribal bigots that’s up to them.”

The post Nigeria struggles to bridge ethnic divide after the election appeared first on Coda Story.

Suddenly, we are Australians at war on the Western Front in 1918: Shells fly overhead with flashing lights, while the room shakes with the kaboom of bombs and machine guns. Actors shout and fall across the screens, their blood flying out in cartoonish spatters. The surround screens position us in the center of the action, a soldier in the trenches. Over on the right, a man fires off his prop machine gun, his face contorted like a boy playing soldiers.

A booming voice comes over the speaker, warning us about the unequaled horror of gas attacks. Darkness — then a fixture opens up on the floor, filling the room with smoke. It rapidly clears, and soon we are watching the brave Australian soldiers defeat the Germans, guided throughout by the military genius of the handsome Australian general John Monash. After an upswell in the music, the French prime minister is congratulating those brave Aussies for turning the tide of the war. We knew that you would fight a real fight, the heavily-costumed Georges Clemenceau declares, but we did not know that, from the very beginning, you would astonish the whole continent. The lights come back on and the doors slide open. The Aussies have won the war, saving the whole of Europe, and perhaps the world, from tyranny.

The Monash Centre is more than just a vivid historical fantasy. It is the culmination of a decades-long, state-sponsored conservative campaign to reorient Australian national identity — one aimed at shifting Australian public memory towards a triumphant set of narratives about war. 

The Centre isn’t a popular destination. It’s hard to get to. Almost all professional historians have disavowed it. And it cost the Australian government a fortune to build. Naturally, I decided I would have to go and see it.

Buying history

When the renowned military historian Bruce Scates was invited to advise on the Monash Centre, he was cautiously hopeful. Scates had published widely on WWI and advised the Australian government on numerous projects. The government at the time had been dedicating increasing sums of money to the commemoration of WWI, loosely timed around the centenaries of Australia’s involvement in battles at Gallipoli (now in Turkey) and on the Western Front — particularly at the French town of Villers-Bretonneux.

Villers-Bretonneux is important to Australians. In April 1918, all five Australian divisions — alongside forces from Britain and the French Empire, most notably Morocco — successfully recaptured the town in order to help slow Germany’s spring offensive. In the years following the war, an Australian connection remained in Villers-Bretonneux. Australian school children donated money to the rebuilding of the war-damaged town, while family members of deceased Australian soldiers — many of whom were buried in nearby cemeteries — came to pay their respects. Villers-Bretonneux became Australia’s European war commemoration hub. An Australian National Memorial was erected there in 1938 and expanded in 2014 with a massive budget and a crack team of advisors — Scates plus six other top historians.

“I thought the possibilities were enormous,” Scates told me. “Firstly, this was the most literate fighting force in the world: These men and women have left behind an extraordinary testimony. And I hoped, given the amount of money that was spent on the Centre, we’re talking about 100 million Australian dollars [roughly $67 million], we could do a lot with those stories throughout the exhibition and make a really powerful statement about the human cost of war. But that didn’t happen.”

Gradually, Scates realized that the parts of the Australian government responsible for designing the Monash Centre were uninterested in presenting a realistic version of Australia’s involvement on the Western Front. “They were working to manufacture a certain view of the war, one that was seen as politically desirable and had nothing to do with the actual telling of history,” he said. Suggested material about the causes or costs of war was continually edited down or removed. In meeting after meeting, Scates watched government officials steer the museum towards jingoism. “The assumption was: ‘We’re paying for this museum, so we will buy the kind of history that we want to hear,’” Scates said.

Scates and three other historians resigned in protest, but the Centre carried on, eventually opening in 2018 to great fanfare, boasting that it uses extensive “immersive and emotive elements” to “deliver a compelling visitor experience.” This appears to be accurate. According to one of the Centre’s contracted designers, Russell Magee, “We’ve observed people walking out crying on a daily basis and that’s what we wanted to achieve.” 

The Monash Centre may have missed its projected visitor targets by around 50% in the first year, but it has become a touchstone for conservative cultural politics in Australia. And it remains a monumental presence in the cold, rainy countryside of northern France. It is a lasting tribute to the chauvinism and steady militarization of Australian public memory over the last two decades and a clear articulation of the right-wing project — driven, above all, by the Australian Liberal Party and Australia’s Department of Veteran Affairs — to reshape Australian memory politics and national identity.

Celebrating war

I came to Villers-Bretonneux on a rainy spring day to see for myself this monument to the memory culture that has dominated Australian public life since I was a child. That culture has tended to center on Anzac Day, the national public holiday on April 25 that takes its name from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac), which, despite both nations having recently acquired independence from Britain, supported the British army in WWI. 

The date was chosen to reflect the anniversary of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey, when Anzac soldiers joined British and French Imperial forces in a combined attack on the Ottoman Empire. Although the campaign was a disaster in military terms, with the Anzacs withdrawing after months of terrible suffering, the bravery and togetherness shown in defeat inspired Australians in the latter half of the 20th century to claim Gallipoli as an emblem of the young nation’s identity. Since the 2000s, state-sponsored commemoration has been moving away from the losses at Gallipoli and toward Australian victories on the Western Front, including the battle at Villers-Bretonneux that also happened to occur on April 25.

The Monash Centre is located about a mile and a half outside Villers-Bretonneux, a quiet town that still wears its Australian connection with pride. The town hall has kangaroo decals on its facade and an Australian flag alongside the French tricolor. 

I walk north among stony green fields until the Australian National Memorial looms into view. The Monash Centre has been dug into the hillside so as not to disturb the view of everything else. There are hardly any other visitors, but the grounds are crowded with half-erected marquees, portable toilets and half-unpacked tables and chairs. Workers shout to each other as they prepare for a massive Anzac Day ceremony, which will be broadcast live to Australia in 10 days.

During the interwar period and after World War II, Anzac Day was a relatively somber affair, primarily aimed at people who lost loved ones in the conflicts. As the 20th century proceeded, WWI commemorations shrank as ever fewer veterans were alive to participate. But it also retreated on account of the cultural shifts, beginning in the 1960s, that saw progressive Australians looking to distance themselves from a military history with Britain and instead to rally more around multiculturalism.

This cultural shift, however, began to reverse course in the late 1990s, when the incoming conservative prime minister, John Howard, made WWI commemoration the focus of his cultural program. Opposed to recognizing Australia’s history of colonial violence and dispossession, Howard rejected what he called the “self-laceration” and “guilt” of prior governments. “In the Anzacs can be found the model and inspiration for the nation’s own self-esteem,” boasted an editorial in the conservative newspaper The Australian on Howard’s first Anzac Day. The federal government initiated a wave of massive state funding for education and memorialization programs, all of which focused not on independent Australia’s successful defense against fascist Japan in WWII but on the country’s achievements while fighting for the British Empire in a distant war that is widely considered avoidable and wasteful.

Howard also injected a celebratory tone into WWI commemorations, which had previously prioritized sober mournfulness. The idea that Anzacs had been fighting to defend democracy and freedom became commonplace in political speeches, in the media and in classrooms. “It is about the celebration of some wonderful values of courage, of valor, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost,” Howard said on Anzac Day in 2003, two months after Australia had joined the Iraq War. “They went in our name, in a just cause, to do good things to liberate a people.”

Anzac Day is now Australia’s de-facto national day. Politicians of both major parties, the right-wing Liberals and the center-left Labor, give speeches — often at the sites of overseas battles like Villers-Bretonneux — about how Anzac values of courage, camaraderie and sacrifice helped “forge” the young Australian nation. Anzac-themed football games draw large crowds. Pubs host parties involving the wartime betting game “two-up.” Throughout, the word Anzac has come to mean not just Australians who served in WWI but also, by association, that wartime generation and Aussie soldiering generally. And a specific set of images and stories about WWI — those battlefield values, red poppies and muddy trenches, the melancholy silhouette of a lone mourning infantryman — have coalesced into a quasi-mythological national narrative that Australians refer to as “the Anzac legend.”

Any critical voices are accused of disrespecting the suffering soldiers and, by extension, Australia itself. The sports journalist Scott McIntyre was fired from his public broadcaster job after tweeting critically about Anzac’s role in public life. The Sudanese-Australian media presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia after being harassed by right-wing media and politicians for making a Facebook post one Anzac Day that referred — using the standard Anzac commemorative phrase “lest we forget” — to armed conflicts in Syria and Palestine and to Australia’s scandal-ridden offshore refugee detention centers.

According to Frank Bongiorno, the president of the Australian Historical Association, the 21st century resurgence of interest in WWI history was not a revival of earlier Anzac narratives but rather a total reinvention of them. By the 1960s, Bongiorno explained, Anzac had come to seem “irredeemably identified with conservative values of the old imperial white Australia” but has, in recent decades, been reinvigorated to emphasize the involvement in WWI of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians. To Bongiorno, however, this newfound inclusiveness is only superficial, eliding the real diversity of Australian wartime experience while insisting on the privileged status of British (and occasionally Irish) Australians.

The new variation on Anzac has become a robust point of political consensus. Successive Liberal and Labor governments have continued to bolster Anzac’s profile by committing huge sums to commemoration activities. By 2015, it was estimated that over 500 million Australian dollars (about $336 million) of taxpayer money had gone towards the centenary, including over $67 million for the Monash Centre. “It’s said that Australia’s spending on the WWI centenary was greater than all the other countries combined,” Bongiorno said. “And since then, we’ve seen further spending.”

All in the family

I walk across the cemetery toward the Australian National Memorial, which lists the names of roughly 10,700 graveless Australian soldiers who died in France. My phone buzzes with a notification from the Monash Centre app, which I was instructed to download upon arrival. Brief stories about dead soldiers have been loaded into the app and geotagged, with an actor’s reading designed to begin as users approach the relevant grave. The app invites me to try looking up a name on the walls, perhaps that of an ancestor. I decline.

At the entrance to the memorial, I encounter a series of wreaths and one laminated card:

In loving memory

Of my great great great uncle

Gone but never forgotten

I thank you all for that you

Sacrificed for my freedom

The geographer Shanti Sumartojo, who has researched Australian commemoration sites in Western Europe, describes Villers-Bretonneux as the “jewel in the crown” of a curated set of experiences marketed together as the Australian Remembrance Trail. To her, the emotional impact of the memorial lies in how it combines personal and collective elements, making individual visitors feel physically humbled by the monumental architecture and the massive accumulation of soldiers’ names. It is no coincidence that Villers-Bretonneux and other Remembrance Trail sites are advertised using explicitly Christian language: Visitors are called “pilgrims,” cemeteries are referred to as “hallowed ground” and “sacred sites.”

The memorial also serves in the construction of a national narrative. Above all, according to Sumartojo, the emphasis on family names — coupled with the language of inheritance and the close focus on WWI — reinforces a national identity based not in civics and democracy but in ethnic kinship. This national kinship is, of course, slanted in favor of those whose family histories in Australia go back past 1918. “As an immigrant to Australia, and as a biracial person myself, that’s one of the reasons I’m so fascinated by Anzac: It’s this really powerful narrative, but I don’t think it actually holds space for contemporary Australia very well, because it’s so masculine and settler-colonial and white,” Sumartojo said.

At Villers-Bretonneux, memory follows the logic of inherited valor. I happen to have my own family connection here, although it’s not listed on the wall. My great-grandfather served Australia as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, where he was injured — so the family story goes — by a shell explosion that buried him, rendering him mostly amnesiac, left for dead and wandering lost. Eventually, he found his way to a company of Canadians who, recognizing his accent, passed him on to Australian forces in Belgium. From there, he was sent home to Australia where, gradually working off his trauma, he became gainfully employed and started a family — our family.

For most of my life, my family’s wartime history did not interest me at all. (My grandfather was in the army, too, having served in the Pacific against Japan.) Growing up in Australia of the 2000s, being descended from Anzacs meant occupying a privileged position in the national narrative — but I never felt comfortable accepting it. For one thing, this badge of honor felt like something I had done nothing to earn. For another, the way Anzac was discussed under the Howard government did not at all match the diverse Australia I knew.

Only recently did I discover the urge to learn more about my great-grandfather and his life. I had only ever known two things about him. He had been anti-war, hence his decision to enlist as a stretcher-bearer rather than a soldier, and he had been blown up on the Western Front. It suddenly struck me as a terrible irony that this man, who hated war so much that he cried when his son enlisted for WWII, would be remembered by his descendants only for being a soldier. Peppering my mother with questions, I learned that my great-grandfather was a man of remarkable gentleness. He loved birds, especially magpies. He was a whiz at fixing radios. And he was a committed pacifist.

My previous incuriosity is nobody’s fault but my own. Still, I cannot help but think that the Anzac legend offered me no viable narratives for thinking about my ancestors except the one that centered war. My pacifist great-grandfather, who never participated in Anzac Day, didn’t fit into the narrative, so I scarcely thought about him. 

What happens to a society when war stories — even gruesome and sad ones — dominate its self-image? I wonder this as I follow the signs out of the National Memorial and toward its 21st century extension, the Monash Centre. These signs lead me down into a series of trench-like walkways, where bits of retro Aussie slang (cobbers, diggers, mates) are carved into the walls and speakers blaze with noises of gunfire and shells. This place, it seems, is at once a cemetery, a museum, a monument and a reenactment experience — a reflection, perhaps, of the Anzac legend’s own crossed purposes.

Entering the Centre, I am greeted by a friendly Australian docent. She recommends hurrying so I have time for The Experience, which, she assures me, is very immersive and very moving. The interactive app guides viewers through the exhibits, triggering massive screens that show historical photographs and ultra-high-definition reels of actors who, dressed in WWI garb, either reenact key moments from the war or deliver quotes taken from soldiers’ letters and published testimonies. These screens, interspersed with boxes of objects, tell a version of the Anzac experience that heavily emphasizes Western Front victories. Hardly any space is dedicated to Australia’s decision to enter the war. No space at all is allotted to the vigorous peace movement — or, indeed, the two tremendously divisive conscription referenda that were voted down during the war. One follows the Anzacs’ narrative arc from excitement and confusion through the shock of gory early battles to the Aussies’ triumphant mastery of trench warfare. When it is suggested that Anzacs were defending the democracy and freedom of Australia and its allies, I begin to wonder if the Centre’s organizers have got their world wars mixed up.

Bongiorno has described how images of Anzac changed during the postwar decades, from the celebration of successful warriors toward the increasingly funereal tones of the 1980s and 1990s, when Anzacs started being represented primarily as sufferers. This mournful tone — and the accompanying gruesome portrayals of war — has been offered as a defense against accusations that Anzac’s prominent role in Australian memory culture is essentially militaristic. Yet, at the Monash Centre, battles are referred to as being among “the greatest” on the Western Front, with John Monash branded the “greatest” general. War is where nations are forged, where men are made and where a community’s heroic status can be secured for eternity. As William James once wrote: “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” If all the focus is on how the war was “won,” not on why it was fought — and who tried to stop it — then military engagement becomes the only viable form of courage.

As I enter the Centre’s middle chamber, and the video-game jingoism of The Experience gets underway, it becomes clear how easily the ostensibly anti-war strains of earlier Anzac memory culture can slip into the full-on glorification of violence. The French-Australian military historian Romain Faithi has been an outspoken critic of the Centre’s lurch toward national chauvinism. “Sometimes I just wonder what the men who are under would think about it,” he told me. “Would they be touched that thousands of people remember them, or would they be like, ‘You are so wrong. Fighting this war served no purpose except killing millions of people.’”

The Monash Centre reflects the broader imbalance of war and peace in Australian public memory. Throughout the 2010s, former Prime Minister Howard’s opposition to historians and the arts was taken up by successive Liberal governments, which inflicted crippling austerity on national cultural institutions and the main public arts funding bodies. To the academic and journalist Ben Eltham, this represents a kind of “implicit cultural policy” whereby arts budgets are cut while comparatively massive waves of funding are directed towards Anzac-style war commemoration.

Eltham also emphasized the war memorial’s enthusiastic courting of corporate sponsorships from defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (The ex-Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, who ran the National Memorial from 2012-2019, was chosen as the president of Boeing Australia in 2020.) I asked Eltham if it was surprising that military contractors were eager to contribute to a cultural mythology that still emphasized the goriness of wartime suffering. “I think it makes perfect sense,” he said. “In every nation, there seems to be a pretty direct relationship between the veneration of these old dead young soldiers and the glorification of future conflicts.”

The Monash Centre, and Australian memory culture more broadly, offers a warning for the United States. The U.S. author and former Marine Phil Klay has written eloquently on the limitations of a culture that offers veterans showy rituals of gratitude but remains essentially indifferent to the soldiers themselves and to the emotional and physical costs of war. James Fallows has noted in The Atlantic that politicians and the press typically discuss the military with “overblown, limitless praise,” while pop culture emphasizes the “suffering and stoicism” of the troops without ever venturing to learn about them. Outsiders, Fallows concluded, view the military “both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions.” One example of the funereal turn in American military memory culture came in the debates over Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests. When commentators accused Kaepernick of “disrespecting the troops,” they typically pointed not to U.S. military successes but to the immensity of the veterans’ sacrifice and suffering. His then-teammate Alex Boone said that Kaepernick “should have some fucking respect for people who served, especially people that lost their life to protect our freedom.”

A national soldier cult, it seems, serves nobody — not even the soldiers. And an iconography of suffering offers no protection against militarism. Leaving the Monash Centre, I remember the story Romain Faithi told me about Alec Campbell, the last living Anzac who experienced the battle at Gallipoli. Campbell was a socialist and trade unionist. He warned against the glorification of Gallipoli and was bemused by the frenzied media attention he received in old age. “When he was the only one left,” Faithi said, “the government approached him for a national funeral and he said, ‘Heck no, I used that part of my life. Don’t go to war!’ But of course it was bigger than him. So when he died, the government used him anyway.” Alec Campbell’s state funeral took place in 2002. His casket was placed on a two-piece gun carriage and led by a military Dodge truck, preceded by four riders on horseback wearing WWI uniforms.

The post Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of WWI appeared first on Coda Story.

The month-long manhunt for Amritpal had led to an internet blackout in Punjab and protests outside Indian embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. On social media in India, decades-old arguments about Sikh secessionists were being revived.

Last week, before Amritpal’s arrest, a video went viral across Indian social media. It featured a young woman, an Indian flag painted on her face, ostensibly being turned away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the most important religious site for the world’s 30 million Sikhs.

Off camera, a man asks a temple guard why the girl was denied entry. The guard, carrying a steel tumbler, says something barely audible about the flag on her face. “Is this not India?” asks the man off camera. “This is Punjab,” the guard says. 

The tense 40-second exchange unleashed a social media storm. “India is seeking an explanation and action,” tweeted Rajan Tewari, the vice president of the local Delhi chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party. Anshul Saxena, a self-described “news junkie” with a following of 1.1 million people, said the flag on the girl’s face was the reason she had been stopped from entering the temple.   

“Well,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, “Khalistan flags & posters of terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale are allowed inside the Golden Temple.” The video was evidence enough, apparently, of lingering pro-Khalistani sentiment in Punjab. 

Amritpal had become the face of this allegedly revived Khalistani movement. Since March 18, he had been on the run from the Punjab police. He was wanted for storming a police station with his supporters in February, leaving six officers injured. The chaotic official crackdown on Amritpal left Punjab on edge and caused a backlash from the Sikh diaspora across the world that has had diplomatic repercussions. Earlier this month, Indian officials were reported to have “disengaged” from trade talks with the United Kingdom because India wanted a stronger condemnation of “Khalistan extremism” after a demonstration outside the Indian embassy in London.

Until the February attack on the police station, few in India had heard of Amrtipal Singh. He had emerged from obscurity seemingly fully formed and ready to take on the leadership of Waris Punjab De, a fringe political organization that was founded in September 2021 by the Sikh actor Deep Sidhu to fight for the rights of Punjab’s farmers. Sidhu died in an accident in February 2022, leaving his newly formed party rudderless. Amritpal stepped into the breach, though Sidhu’s family refused to give him their backing.  

The idea for Waris Punjab De was born as Indian farmers took to the streets in huge numbers two years ago. For several months in 2020 and 2021, farmers, especially from Punjab, the bread basket of India, protested against three bills passed in the Indian parliament that they said would leave small farmers at risk of being destroyed by large corporations. The length and ferocity of the protests shook the Modi government. In January 2021, India’s attorney general claimed that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

It was an attempt to link Sikh farmers to a separatist movement whose leaders the Indian government has described as terrorists. When climate change activist Greta Thunberg and the pop star Rihanna tweeted about the farmers’ protests, the Indian media, quoting “sources in the security establishment, claimed they had been paid millions of dollars by Khalistan supporters and India’s foreign minister tweeted darkly about “motivated campaigns targeting India.”  

Last month, Coda reported that the Punjab government shut down the internet across the state as it launched its search for Amritpal. The government blocked the accounts of local journalists, a local member of the legislative assembly and alleged supporters of the Khalistan movement and restricted access inside India to accounts belonging to a Canadian politician and the bestselling Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. But Amritpal continues to elude the police even as hundreds of his associates have been arrested.

I traveled through Punjab to report on the effects of the government crackdown. Parminder Singh, a retired professor in Amritsar, where the Golden Temple is located, told me that the “excessive show of strength” from the authorities had backfired. It meant, he said, that Sikhs feel as if they are being bullied and that the “scaremongering” media and the state government were succeeding only in stoking partisan passions.

Many Sikhs I spoke to, regardless of age or gender, had sympathy for Amritpal. They didn’t necessarily buy into his politics — most Sikhs are not interested in a separate state. But they believed that the authorities were overreacting and that the use of anti-terror laws, the indiscriminate arrests and the information blackouts were a throwback to the darkest days of the 1980s. 

The movement for Khalistan in Punjab, a region that stretches across the border into Pakistan, petered out in the 1990s after a period of convulsive violence. In 1984, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, sent the army into the Golden Temple to root out Khalistan-supporting separatists. The battle inside the temple lasted for four days. The separatists were led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed during the fighting. 

While official numbers are hard to come by and disputed, the Indian government acknowledges that about 500 Sikhs were killed, including civilians. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. It was, the Indian government said, revenge for what had happened at the Golden Temple in June that year. She was India’s first, and so far only, female prime minister and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. 

After Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs were targeted by roving mobs and murdered, often in broad daylight. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Senior leaders of the Congress, the political party in power at the time, colluded with the massacre. In the elections held at the end of December, just two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the anti-Sikh riots, her son Rajiv swept to power with an unprecedented and still unmatched parliamentary majority.

Despite the Congress failing to properly atone for or even acknowledge its responsibility for the anti-Sikh riots, it has continued to win elections in Punjab at the state level. The Congress  governed Punjab for 10 of the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2007 and then again from 2017 to 2022. In between, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh-centric party, ruled for a decade in partnership with the BJP. In the 2022 elections, a third political force, the Aam Aadmi Party, founded in 2012, swept to power with an emphatic majority. The Aam Aadmi Party (Hindi for “the Common Man’s Party”) also forms the local government in Delhi, where it has been a thorn in the side for the Narendra Modi-led federal government. 

It is the Aam Aadmi Party that has been in power in Punjab as the Khalistan movement has made the headlines over the last month. Ironically, the party’s political opponents have frequently accused it of being funded by Khalistan supporters living abroad. Meanwhile, India’s federal government is run by the BJP, a party that Sikhs believe has been fueling unrest in Punjab since the farmers’ protest two years ago.

A common complaint I heard from Sikh people I spoke to in Punjab was that the Indian government has failed to listen to Sikh concerns on issues ranging from farming to the water crisis to widespread drug use in Punjab. Simranpreet, a young Sikh law student in Amritsar, told me that Amritpal was popular because he “represented the community’s concerns, was preaching about the rights of Punjab.” 

In Jalandhar, an old, culturally vibrant Punjabi city, a filmmaker told me that young, charismatic men like Amritpal, Deep Sidhu and the internationally successful rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, who was murdered in May 2022, had become youth icons because they represented the Sikh desire to have their voices heard. “People are emotional about Sikh and Punjabi identity,” she said. “And if they feel someone who represents that identity has been wronged, they will stand by them.” 

Amritpal seemed particularly aware of the meaning to Sikhs of Bhindranwale, who was killed by Indian soldiers in the Golden Temple in 1984. He dressed like Bhindranwale, posed with armed men like Bhindranwale and, according to lurid rumors in the Indian press, has had plastic surgery to look more like Bhindranwale. Amritpal supposedly had this plastic surgery while he was in the Caucasus, receiving training from Pakistani intelligence services. 

Gurtej Singh, an elderly historian based in Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed capital of Punjab, told me that he and Bhindranwale had been friends. His reputation as a feared terrorist in the rest of India, Singh said, was at odds with his reputation among Sikhs. “Bhindranwale is venerated as a martyr,” Singh told me, “because he died while protecting our holiest shrine.”

By straining so hard to make Amritpal seem like a national security threat, the authorities are showing their hand, he says. Chasing Amritpal, Singh argued, was less about catching Amritpal than it was about suppressing Sikh political protest by associating it with Khalistan.  

Respect for Bhindranwale, Singh says, does not indicate that Sikhs support Khalistan or want to secede from India. It means that there is a disconnect between the Sikh minority and the increasingly Hindu nationalist Indian mainstream.  

The disconnect is evident in much of the social media response to Amrtipal Singh. For many in the Hindu nationalist right wing, Sikhs needed to disavow Amritpal and Khalistan as a simple matter of patriotism. Sikhs, naturally, bristle when they are told they need to prove their loyalty and commitment to India. 

Pride in Punjab and in Sikhism are often subverted by Hindu nationalists on social media to suggest support for Khalistan. After the video of the woman being turned away from the Golden Temple went viral, an official from the committee that manages the temple was forced to defend Sikh patriotism. In a video, he said he was shocked at the allegations about support for Khalistan. “When you need people to go to the border to fight China, who do you send?” he asked. “You send Sikhs. Are they also Khalistanis?” Sikhs, who make up around 2% of India’s population make up close to 10% of its army.

An independent Khalistan is now largely symbolic for Sikhs in India, a rallying cry for Sikh and Punjabi pride rather than a realistic goal. But for the large Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, Khalistan remains a powerful idea. Sikh emigration has ebbed and flowed since the 19th century, but it was the Indian government’s violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in the 1970s and 1980s that politicized the diaspora. Writing in the Guardian on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the journalist Sunny Handal, who has Sikh roots, observed that it was “difficult to overstate the impact that 1984 had on Sikhs and their politics, even in Britain.” It was, he wrote, described by some in the community as the “Sikhs’ Kristallnacht.”

In Canada, the Sikh diaspora enjoys considerable political clout. There are an estimated two million Canadians with Indian heritage, 34% of whom identify as Sikhs and 27% as Hindus. The unresolved trauma of the riots of 1984 sometimes spills out onto Canadian streets. Last year, in November, a Sikh separatist group, classified as a terrorist organization in India, organized a referendum in Toronto on the creation of an independent Khalistan. The Modi government described it as “deeply objectionable that politically motivated exercises by extremist elements are allowed to take place in a friendly country.” Just days before the referendum, on October 24, Diwali night, in the Canadian city of Mississauga, about 500 people were filmed brawling in a parking lot. Some were carrying yellow Khalistan flags, others the Indian tricolor. 

Inevitably, Amritpal has become a celebrated figure within the Sikh diaspora. The police manhunt led to attacks on Indian consulates in London and San Francisco and to protests in Canada and Australia. On April 18, India’s National Investigation Agency said it would be examining the attack on the Indian embassy in London for evidence of Pakistani involvement.

After some 35 days of investigations, raids and hundreds of arrests, Amritpal was finally found and has been moved to a prison cell in the eastern state of Assam where, under the provisions of India’s stringent National Security Act, he can be held for up to a year without charge. A man with a relatively meager following has been elevated to the status of a revolutionary. And the pressure ordinary Sikhs now feel to publicly embrace their Indian identity — even as Hindu nationalist politicians openly call for India to be remade as a Hindu nation — is reopening old, still festering wounds.

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What counts as inappropriate? An official announcement on the Department of Education’s website says that parents should report lessons that focus on “race or ethnicity, rather than individuals and merit, promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content.” The hotline closely mimics a project that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin began in January 2022 and ended about eight months later due to receiving “little or no volume” of serious accusations, according to a Youngkin spokesperson.

The program was a key campaign promise of Arizona’s newly elected superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, whose platform focused on promoting right-wing notions of patriotism and attacking critical race theory. It is hard to come by an Arizona educator who would say that the scholarly theory — that race is a social construct used to oppress people of color — is taught in Arizona’s K-12 schools. 

Horne insists otherwise and is quick to assert his dedication to studying U.S. history. “If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would have been a history teacher,” Horne told me in an interview. “I’ve been reading history every day since I was 14.” Horne, who served as the superintendent of public instruction from 2003 to 2011, was the only Republican in Arizona to win a major statewide role last November.

His campaign website could be a case study in 21st century American far-right spin. Offering only dubious citations, the homepage sets up a mock polemic between Horne and his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman, in which he trots out right-wing, fear-mongering narratives about gender, race, slavery and capitalism in America, and of course about Covid-19. He attacks Hoffman for closing Arizona schools during the pandemic, offering social support for LGBTQ+ students and encouraging teachers to assign Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project.

‘If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say?’

The hotline was billed as a solution to these so-called problems. But Arizona public school teachers — the state employees whose work most directly affects student outcomes — have largely been left out of the discussion. What will the hotline mean for their work in the classroom? Teachers I spoke with expressed confusion about the program and fears that they would be subject to investigations concerning “inappropriate lessons.”

“Teachers are on a daily basis reaching out to us as union officers and asking if it’s okay to teach things in the approved curriculum,” said Kelley Fisher, who has taught kindergarten for 24 years. “If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say? What can and can’t they say in their classrooms? They’re scared, and that should not be what happens in a classroom. Teachers should not be afraid to teach students to think for themselves.”

Others worry that the hotline will cause parents to complain to state officials rather than addressing their concerns directly with teachers or administrators, creating a dynamic that could foster distrust and make it harder to resolve conflicts.

“There are already very well established ways for parents to bring concerns directly to teachers, or, if necessary, the school principal or administration,” said Emily Kirkland, a spokesperson for the Arizona Education Association. “The hotline goes around those existing systems entirely and leaves teachers with no due process at all. It’s really poorly thought out.”

Amber Gould, who has taught English for 12 years in the Glendale Union High School District and serves as treasurer for the Arizona Education Association, was among several educators who said they had received no guidance about what to expect from hotline reports or how to respond to investigations. In an interview, Horne confirmed that the department has not issued guidance to teachers.

Horne is primarily concerned about parents who feel they aren’t listened to, not teachers, he told me. “This has been intended to be a way for parents to communicate with us,” he said. He acknowledged concerns about bypassing existing systems, adding that parents with complaints should go to teachers and principals first. “[The hotline] wasn’t intended to do that,” he said. With regard to the process, Horne said he believes that the department would call the principal first, then the teacher, who would be asked to stop teaching whatever had triggered the call. “If they persist, theoretically we would make a discipline referral to the state board,” he said.

For Kelley Fisher, the hotline is an effort that neither helps teachers nor ensures that students are receiving the best instruction possible.

“This hotline was about appeasing the people who got [Horne] elected,” said the veteran kindergarten teacher. “It’s not about transparency in the classroom, it’s not about making sure teachers are doing a good job.”

Attacking standard K-12 teaching techniques

Perhaps most worrisome to educators is Horne’s vilification of social emotional learning, a key method used by teachers to help students learn to communicate, solve problems and act with compassion toward others. With little concrete evidence, Horne has alleged that teachers are using social emotional learning techniques to disguise their teaching of critical race theory, echoing narratives from right-wing organizations like the Center for Renewing America.

Several teachers expressed confusion about the link between critical race theory and social emotional learning, which they say are completely different. Abby Knight, a kindergarten teacher in the Kyrene School District, said the current discourse has created a deep misunderstanding about what social emotional learning is.

“There is a level of disconnect when you’re not in the classroom and you’re not doing it,” she said. “SEL is made up of really basic concepts that, if you’re not an educator, you don’t realize are crucial to teaching young kids.” 

She explained that you need to teach kids how to communicate effectively, problem solve, consider others and understand what constitutes an appropriate behavior for a given circumstance, in order to foster an effective learning environment.

“Learning really doesn’t take place unless there’s a lot of behavioral work that goes into a classroom,” Knight said. 

Empowering pranksters while leaving teachers behind

What has the hotline actually achieved since its mid-March launch? It has seen plenty of action but almost no reports of “inappropriate” lessons. Instead, its staff have been bombarded by thousands of prank calls from outside Arizona and about 1,000 calls from within the state, the vast majority of which also came from pranksters. In an email, Arizona Department of Education spokesperson Rick Medina said that as of April 10, the department had received only a handful of calls that warranted investigation.

Horne said there was one serious hotline case he was aware of: “Someone called us about [a teacher] evangelizing in the classroom. We called the principal who said he was aware of it already, so we dropped it.”

Meanwhile, Arizona educators continue to face very real pressures that the hotline isn’t going to fix. The state is facing a critical shortage of teachers — one in five positions is unfilled — and wages haven’t kept pace with economic changes. Nevertheless, state-mandated responsibilities keep rising.

“People are leaving because it’s not feasible mentally or financially,” Knight said.

“It’s about the way teachers are being treated and it’s driving them out of the classroom,” Kelley Fisher said. “There are plenty of people in this state who are certified to be teachers, but they just don’t want to be teachers right now. It’s really sad.”

Amber Gould, who began teaching at the end of Horne’s last stint as the public schools superintendent, said she felt deja vu about his return to office. “I would hope that we’re able to have conversations with [Horne], because at the end of the day I hope that he wants to do what’s best for kids and not necessarily for his political talking points.”

It remains to be seen whether the hotline will fizzle out like in Virginia or lead to actual investigations into teacher conduct.

“I honestly feel like it’s more of a publicity stunt for Superintendent Horne and his office, but when the fight comes, we’re going to be ready,” Gould said. “We know our rights and we know that in the end, we’re going to do what’s best for kids.”

The post A hotline to report teachers ratchets up tensions in US schools appeared first on Coda Story.

She looked at the uniformed man in disbelief. She was the mother of a toddler and a long-time public servant. The scene of the alleged offense was not an adult bookstore or the dark web. It was a high school library. The officer explained the situation. A parent had told the police that she was circulating pornography to students through the books in the school’s library collection. The policeman, a school resource officer employed by both the Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department, came to the library to investigate the claim. He came back again six months later, prompted by similar complaints from another parent at the school. The visit did not lead to any disciplinary action against Amy. But it left her deeply unsettled. 

“It just honestly shook me,” Amy, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym, told me. “The audacity to claim that I was making pornography available to kids, it was just devastating. Like, what is this going to do to my reputation if this is what people truly think I’m doing?”

The Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department did not respond to my requests for comment.

At the time of the officer’s visit, it was illegal under Missouri law to give pornography to minors. But what enraged a parent enough to call the police was a school library book — Amy never found out which one. At the time, library workers were trusted to choose books based on school board-approved selection criteria.

But that changed in August 2022, when the Missouri state legislature passed a law banning books that contained “explicit sexual material.” Under the new rules, police visits to libraries may become a more regular occurrence — and librarians found guilty of violating the policy could even end up behind bars. The statute, Senate Bill 775, has led to the removal of hundreds of children’s books across the state and caused library workers to aggressively self-censor under the threat of incarceration.

“This has struck fear into the work that many of our members are doing professionally,” said Tom Bober, the vice president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians, which represents hundreds of library specialists statewide. To Bober’s knowledge, no one has been criminally charged under the new rules yet — my reporting indicated the same. But the message the rules send is clear to him. 

“What we have with SB 775 is politicians saying, ‘We are going to determine what books should sit on your library shelves and be available to your students. And if you go against what we said there are criminal implications,’” Bober said.

Such a scenario would have been unthinkable for Amy when she began working in the field 15 years ago. But over the last several years, the conditions for library workers in Missouri and across the United States have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The Missouri law is part of a much broader movement, largely driven by conservative politicians and parents’ rights groups, whose primary target is books dealing with race, gender and sexuality. PEN America found that more than 80% of the 1,648 books banned from schools in 2021 and 2022 focused on, or featured, LGBTQ+ characters and people of color, and attempts to ban or restrict access to books from school and public libraries since 2020 have shattered previous records.

The movement’s secondary target is the workers who make those books available to students. As I reported for Coda last year, librarians have been subjected to online harassment and verbal attacks, accused of grooming children and promoting pornography, inundated with hateful messages, threatened with physical violence and, increasingly, targeted with hostile laws like SB 775.

The Missouri law is among the most extreme of the state policies singling out library work, although states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have also passed new laws targeting “obscene” materials in school libraries and databases. Tacked on as an amendment to a bill aimed at combating child sexual exploitation and protecting sexual assault survivors, the Missouri law makes it a Class A misdemeanor for librarians, school officials and teachers to provide students with “explicit sexual material.” Any librarian or educator found in violation of the policy faces steep penalties: a yearlong prison sentence and up to $2,000 in fines.

State library associations and library workers I spoke with described the law’s rollout as chaotic and panic-inducing. Librarians and school officials scrambled to make sense of the sweeping language of the bill, which defined “explicit sexual material” as any visual image that showed sexual intercourse, masturbation or genitalia, except for images that appear in books on anatomy or biology. Districts’ interpretations and applications of the law varied widely. According to Bober, whose organization surveyed hundreds of librarians statewide about their experiences with the law, some librarians received lists of titles to remove from district administrators and attorneys, while others were left in the dark and instructed to interpret the statute themselves.

Statewide, nearly 300 books — a disproportionate number of which are written by or about LGBTQ+ people — have been removed from school library shelves in response to SB 775, the nonprofit PEN America found. And the lack of guidance from state officials has become visible on library shelves. Some school districts have chosen to ignore the law or remove just a handful of books, while others have interpreted it more broadly. Wentzville, where Amy works, pulled 220 books after the law went into effect — more than any other district in the state. The long list of removals included a handful of Holocaust history books, scores of graphic novels and comic books, illustrated adaptations of Homer’s “Odyssey” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and more than 70 art history books featuring works by the likes of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. PEN America has a complete list of the books banned on the basis of SB 775.

Mernie Maestas, the lead librarian for the Wentzville School District, said the district’s middle school and high school librarians were given two weeks to go through their entire collections and remove any books that could potentially violate the law or lead to prosecution. “We had one librarian who began pulling absolutely everything because the fear became so overwhelming,” she said. “Others wound up shutting down their library for periods of time just so they could ensure they had gone through everything.” 

Amy told me that she was in tears as she pored over the books in her school’s library, confused and overwhelmed about how to evaluate the material on her bookshelves. “Do I pull a picture because there are breasts on the page? Are breasts included with genitalia? Who decides?” she said. “It was just a mess because you didn’t know what you were looking for.” 

Amy decided not to ask other library staff to help make decisions about what books to keep because she didn’t want anyone else to be liable for potential criminal charges. So she went through it all by herself. She estimates she set aside about 30 books to be reviewed by the district’s legal team. The entire process “felt so wrong, like I was being used for something I did not support,” she explained. But she felt she had no other option. She had a kid. She didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the law. “What do you do when you think you could go to jail?” she asked.

Following a public outcry, most of the Wentzville titles that were taken down — including an illustrated children’s version of the Bible — have been put back on the shelves. But 17 have been permanently banned, including the graphic memoir “Gender Queer” and illustrated adaptations of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” according to a list compiled by PEN America, which has been tracking statewide book removals. 

Wentzville librarian Maestas said the law has caused library workers to rethink which books they add to their collections. “You second-guess everything that you’re purchasing so you wind up self-censoring, even though that’s not our goal,” she said. “But you’re fearful.”

Maestas runs a reading club at the elementary school where she works. One day, a parent contacted the school to complain about a book on the group’s reading list, which explores themes related to sexual identity. The parent withdrew their child from the club and accused the district of promoting an “agenda.” 

Maestas worries about how the children in her school process that kind of language. “The kids absorb what’s happening in their home,” she explained. “And so when parents feel like the library has potential evil in it, so do the kids.”

So far, Maestas has not removed any books from her library under SB 775. I asked if she worries about the possible consequences of her decision. “Yes,” she replied. “All the time.” When she became a librarian nearly two decades ago, she added, “never would I have ever thought that the library could land me in jail. For people to think that I’m a monster and a villain, it stabs at your heart.”

For some, the pressure is too much to sustain working in the field. Amy had planned to be a librarian until she reached retirement age, but instead she is leaving the profession at the end of the 2022-2023 school year. She said the police visits, as well as SB 775, played a role in her decision to switch careers. She told me that the restrictions imposed on librarians under SB 775 left her unable to adequately carry out her job’s responsibilities, including providing students with material that could help them make sense of their identities, such as books about LGBTQ+ experiences.

But Amy also feels conflicted about the decision to leave the field: “In many ways, it feels like a cop out,” she confessed. “It is this war of, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ I don’t know. It’s been very difficult in the last couple of years and I’m just choosing something different.” To be a librarian in Missouri feels like a precarious tightrope walk, where criminal prosecution is always a looming threat. Some, like Amy, are choosing to walk away.

But others are fighting to put librarians on more stable ground. Last month, the Missouri ACLU sued the state over SB 775 on behalf of the Missouri Library Association and the Missouri Association of School Librarians, arguing that the law is vague to the point of being unconstitutional and puts educators in the position of violating students’ First Amendment rights or exposing themselves to criminal prosecution. Just last week, a top Missouri Republican lawmaker responded to the lawsuit by threatening to cut the entire state budget for public libraries in his proposed state funding package. On Tuesday, the Missouri House of Representatives approved the lawmaker’s budget. If approved in the state senate, it will strip public libraries of $4.5 million in state aid that they were slated to receive in the next year. The Missouri secretary of state has also proposed a rule change that would force public libraries to adopt a variety of “age-appropriate” checkout policies for minors or lose public funding. 

Joe Kohlburn, an academic librarian at Jefferson College in Missouri, said the array of policies targeting public library employees has prompted many in the field to search for jobs out of state. He mentioned a colleague who recently fled Missouri for Florida. “It’s pretty bad when you move from Missouri to Florida,” he chuckled. “I definitely am getting the message the Missouri state government is sending, that they don’t value librarians and are antagonistic towards our foundational ethics. And who wants to work in that situation?”

At the center of all of this are the students themselves, the subjects of so many of these laws, book challenges and policies — who rarely get airtime to weigh in on what they want to read, despite their starring role in the debate. But some are speaking out. When a set of proposed book bans came to a high school in Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high school students decided to push back. In preparation for a school board vote on the books, they asked hundreds of their classmates about their position on the restrictions and discovered the vast majority of students opposed the bans. 

Then, they put themselves to work, reading each and every book on the list, like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” which explores the legacy of colonialism and slavery in the African diaspora. They also read Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Thomasina Brown, a high school junior, said the coming-of-age story resonated with her as an “important representation of the adolescent experience,” helping teens process themes like grief, trauma and mental health in their own lives. If the district banned the book, “I felt like maybe kids wouldn’t be exposed to things they might deal with later in life,” she told me. 

Brown’s classmates also brought their observations to the school board meeting, describing the books and characters that reflected parts of their identities and life experiences or introduced them to new perspectives. But the meeting quickly descended into chaos, with some parents booing loudly, shouting over the students and calling on the school’s librarians to resign. 

Meghana Nakkanti, a high school senior who took part in the meeting, likened the situation to a role reversal: The students were showing more maturity and capacity to deliberate on the issue than the adults in the room. But the board ultimately voted to remove several books. 

The students found the adults’ vilification of the librarians they knew especially painful. One meeting stood out to them. A parent stood up and declared that the school’s two librarians should be placed on a sex offender registry. One of the librarians, who was present in the room, burst into tears and rushed for the door. Someone had to accompany her to her car because she was so distressed, the students recalled. That’s when the severity of the situation dawned on them: These librarians were being named, confronted and run out of public meetings in tears. Not just by adults, but by parents. 

Nakkanti told me it was hard to watch the librarians smeared because “of a few people who aren’t willing to read more than a few pages of a book that someone told them they shouldn’t like.” The students in the group, she added, are “trying to make people realize that the words that people say and the implications that are surrounding this have real meaning. These are people and they deserve to be respected.” 

A classic lesson from an adult to a child — turned upside down.

The post Missouri librarians are risking jail time – for doing their jobs appeared first on Coda Story.

As a people subject to ongoing repression in China — or genocide, as a U.S. congressional committee heard in Washington, D.C. last week — it could appear the Uyghurs have found peace in Turkey, a space where they can preserve and even revive their language and literature. 

But on Tuesday, March 14, the Kutadgu Bilik bookshop was raided by the Turkish police. They dragged books out in large bags to a van parked outside.

The first time the police raided the shop in August 2022, they confiscated hundreds of books. This time, members of the Uyghur community protested. Some lay down in front of the police van to prevent it from leaving.

“This shop is a solution for us,” the owner, Abdulla Turkistanli, told me, a day after the police raid. “We can teach our next generations here, we can keep our culture alive.”

Uyghur bookstores in Istanbul play a vital role in sustaining the culture, in giving Uyghurs across generations and continents access to their language and history. Estimates of the Uyghur population in Turkey vary from over 50,000 to around 150,000, making it probably the largest community of Uyghurs outside their traditional home in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China that borders several Central Asian countries, Russia, Pakistan and India.

For close to a decade now, the Chinese state has been conducting a violent crackdown on its Uyghur population. This campaign, which has increased in intensity since 2017, extends far beyond China’s borders. Uyghurs in the diaspora are subject to surveillance, while their families back home are sent to re-education centers and prisons where many have been tortured and raped. Uyghur literature has also been a prime target, with dozens of renowned writers, poets, publishers and academics disappeared into the labyrinthine system of internment camps. 

This has all but destroyed the small trickle of books coming out of the region, severing a critical link between those who escaped and those still trapped inside.

Turkistanli, the bookshop owner, wears his exhaustion on his face. Years of pressure from the Chinese state have left him depleted of energy, if not of the will to keep fighting. On the night of the raid earlier this month, he was rushed to a hospital with heart problems. It has been, he told me, a chronic ailment, first sustained after he was imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan after leaving Xinjiang in 2008. He says he was tortured by Chinese officials and injected with a mysterious substance. 

Speaking on March 23 to the newly formed U.S. bipartisan committee examining the rivalry with China, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-education camp for three years, said that the detainees were told they were being vaccinated when they were injected with undisclosed drugs but were actually being sterilized. 

Turkistanli was eventually able to leave Kyrgyzstan for Turkey. In 2013, he opened his first bookstore. At the time, he said, Uyghurs could travel more freely between Istanbul and Xinjiang. The Uyghur diaspora would return from each visit laden with books. In this way, hundreds, if not thousands, of books were removed to safety.

Over the years, the Uyghur diaspora community in Istanbul has added thousands of volumes to the Kutadgu Bilik collection. But the cost of reprinting these books is high. There are usually only two to four copies of any given title in Turkistanli’s shop. The Turkish police, when they raid the shop, say that Turkistanli does not have the copyrights necessary to reprint books. Acquiring the copyrights, Turkistanli told me, is impossible without the cooperation of Chinese authorities. Even contacting the authors of the books, if they are in Xinjiang, is impossible. Turkistanli estimates that around 90% of the books in his shop were written by people who have been swallowed up by the prisons and re-education camps.

He believes that the Turkish police are acting under pressure from the Chinese state when they raid Uyghur bookshops. In this environment, he told me, he does not know how much longer his shop can stay open.

It is a fate that other Uyghur booksellers in Istanbul also face.

In the district of Zeytinburnu, the once bustling heart of Uyghur life in Istanbul, Abdulhalil Abithaci told me he would soon be closing his bookshop. The pandemic, he said, and Turkey’s underperforming economy has meant that many Uyghurs — who tend to make less money than the general Turkish population — cannot afford to buy books anymore. Many, he adds, are leaving Zeytinburnu for less expensive areas, while others have left Turkey altogether to seek a better life further away from China’s reach in Europe, North America and Australia.

The first wave of Uyghurs came to Istanbul in the 1950s, escaping religious persecution under a newly formed communist regime in China. Subsequent periods of repression drove more and more Uyghurs to flee abroad. The fall of the Soviet Union brought a new era of controls, as the Chinese state increasingly sought to “Sinicize” Uyghurs by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture. 

For the few able to escape China’s harsher crackdowns since 2017, Turkey has been a place of refuge. As Turkic people, Uyghurs and Turks share historical, linguistic and cultural ties, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once seen as an advocate for Uyghurs. But as Ankara has sought closer ties to China, the situation for Uyghur refugees has become more precarious.

Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees in the world, with millions escaping war in Syria in particular. The Turkish government, though, is itself a notorious conductor of cross-border repression, especially targeting suspected followers of a movement led by the Muslim preacher and scholar Fethullah Gulen who has been based in the United States for over two decades. According to a report by the think tank Freedom House, Turkey was second only to China between 2014 and 2021 in perpetrating acts of “physical transnational repression.”

It is because Turkey so often acts to repress dissent beyond its borders that it acts as a willing accomplice to other repressive regimes, including China, says Howard Eissenstat, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University. “It boils down to a transactionalism,” he told me, “that both China and Turkey see as part of international relations, since neither is concerned with the rule of law.”

Many Uyghurs living in Istanbul fear that the threat to their safety is growing, as Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping become closer. Seyfullah Karatug, for instance, told me he feels his life as a Uyghur refugee in Istanbul depends on the whim of an unpredictable Turkish state. The fear of arrest or deportation constantly hangs over him.

I met the 24-year-old Karatug at the Uyghur bookshop Kutadgu Bilik, the day after the police raided it. One of his eyes had been blackened during the protests from the night before. Karatug told me he visits the store almost every day. As the only Uyghur bookstore in Sefakoy, Kutadgu Bilik closing would be a personal disaster. That’s why Karatug raced to the store when he received a WhatsApp message that it was being raided by the police.

When he asked the police if they had a warrant and filmed them manhandling protestors, a policeman punched him in the face. Video footage seen by Coda Story, as well as a hospital report, corroborates Karatug’s claims. Karatug told me his father had sent him and his brother to Egypt in 2016, fearing for their future in China. The brothers have had no contact with their family since late 2017, when they believe their father was arrested. Knowing the sacrifice his father made, Karatug told me, made him determined to keep his language and cultural traditions alive, to pass them onto his younger brother. It’s why Uyghur bookshops are so important to him.

For now, though, Kutadgu Bilik at least remains open. Once Abdulhalil Abithaci’s bookshop in Zeytinburnu closes, though, there will only be two Uyghur bookshops left in Istanbul. The impact will be felt beyond the streets of the Turkish metropolis, hurting the Uyghur diaspora around the world.

“Books are very important for the survival of our culture and people,” Dilnur Reyhan, a Uyghur sociologist based in Paris, told me over the phone. “If the bookstores in Istanbul do not survive, it will be a major blow. That is why I think the Chinese state ordered this attack, and the Turkish authorities executed it.” Reyhan, who edits a Uyghur-French magazine, added that the war in Ukraine had driven up the price of paper, putting the hope of creating new Uyghur bookstores away from Turkey further out of reach.

One Uyghur software developer, Memeteli Niyaz, has built a website that has around 3,000 free ebooks on it, 600 of which were sent from within China by an anonymous source. But Niyaz has already been forced to migrate the website to a new host after the one he was using received copyright complaints. He fears his website, too, will inevitably be shut down. 

A week after the raid, I visited Abdulla Turkistanli again. He told me that some Turkish writers had come to the shop and encouraged him to carry on providing books to Istanbul’s Uyghur community. Turkistanli had just donated hundreds of books from his shop to the community, something he does every year at the start of Ramadan. This year, he was more generous than usual.

If the store is raided again, he told me, it is better that the books are already spread throughout the community, where there is at least a chance they will be read, enjoyed and protected.

The post In Istanbul, the last Uyghur bookshops struggle to survive appeared first on Coda Story.

Violent clashes in December and January, including two mass killings, left 46 people dead. But “security forces were not to blame” for these incidents, she said. Instead, it was one group of protesters that fatally attacked another, with firearms smuggled over the southeastern border from Bolivia.

At a January 24 press conference, Boluarte cited only “unofficial” sources when she told reporters that most of the people killed in a recent confrontation in Puno, a predominantly Indigenous region that borders Bolivia, died after being shot with “a homemade weapon known as dum-dum,” in an apparent reference to expanding bullets that explode inside victims’ bodies. “The police do not use this type of lethal weapon,” she said.

“This is not peaceful protest,” she continued. “It’s a violent action by a group of radicals with a political and economic agenda driven by drug trafficking, mining, and contraband.”

But there is no evidence to support this story, as Boluarte herself appeared to acknowledge in her remarks to the media.

Extensive cell phone footage from the two mass killings — one in Ayacucho that left 10 dead and the other in Puno, which killed 18 — shows the National Police of Peru and the Peruvian armed forces opening fire on civilians. In both cases, people were killed by gunfire, according to Peru’s official human rights agency.

In the week following Boluarte’s press conference, Peru’s two leading investigative journalism outlets, OjoPublico and IDLReporteros, came out with exposes clearly laying out evidence that pointed to the national police and the army. The former published details of the autopsies, which found police munitions in the bodies of many of the dead protesters. The latter painstakingly reconstructed the Ayacucho deaths to show how the military used live rounds against civilians.

A few days later, Amnesty International published its own investigation, in which it accused the national police of “unlawfully” and “indiscriminately” using lethal force against “mostly peaceful” protests. The human rights group also warned that the killings had been motivated by “systemic racism ingrained in Peruvian society.”

This is all hard to take for many Peruvians, who have endured almost continual political chaos since 2018 — with six different presidents in five years. The current unrest is the result of the ousting of Pedro Castillo, whose 17 months in power were dominated by graft scandals and infighting on the far left. Castillo was removed from office by Peru’s Congress, after he attempted to dissolve the legislative body, overhaul the courts and rule by decree, just as anti-corruption prosecutors were closing in on him. Boluarte shared a self-declared Marxist-Leninist ticket with Castillo in the 2021 elections but allied herself with the far-right majority in the Congress as soon as she was sworn in as president, possibly to head off her own ideologically-driven impeachment.

The protests, which have no clear leader, initially called for Castillo’s reinstatement. But now demonstrators are targeting Boluarte and the Congress and demanding new elections. The president’s popularity has dipped to 15% and Congress’ to just 6%, according to one poll. The same study found that three-quarters of Peruvians want Boluarte to resign.

It is no coincidence that in a society divided by race, class and geography, where half of the population is food insecure, most of those protesting are the have-nots who have been largely excluded from Peru’s economic boom of the last two decades. Southern Peru, the epicenter of the turmoil, is the country’s poorest region, where many rural families have no running water or electricity. 

Although Boluarte has claimed to want “dialogue” and to never have authorized the use of deadly force against demonstrators, she has also repeatedly defended the national police, calling their handling of the protests “immaculate.” Compounding this are racist dog whistles from the military and far-right government leaders dismissing the protestors. Boluarte’s first head of military intelligence, Juan Carlos Liendo, insists that the left has sought to use Castillo’s ouster to divide Peruvians by income and ethnicity.

But in an interview, Liendo,  now a frequent analyst on Peruvian TV, appeared to do exactly that by blaming the unrest on the “Andean man,” a reference to Peruvians from mountain communities of Indigenous origin.

“The Andean man is very prone to violence. If you look at the history of Latin America, Peru is the most violent country. The societies that are most violent are those that live in the mountains, not in the jungle, unless it is jungles with mountains, like Vietnam.”

Ultimately, Liendo’s views proved too extreme even for Boluarte, who forced him out just a week after appointing him. But her broader views do not seem to have changed.

Lawmakers, most of Peru’s heavily-concentrated media and Boluarte herself also frequently conflate the unrest, which has included vandalism and rioting, with “terrorism.”

Falsely accusing one’s political opponents of terrorism — known in Peru as “terruqueo” — has a very particular and painful meaning for Peruvians. A well-established practice of the Peruvian far right, it is a reminder of the traumas triggered by the Shining Path guerilla insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s. The armed Maoist rebels launched a conflict that, according to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, took the lives of an estimated 69,000 Peruvians, most of them civilians.

Today, the last remnants of the Shining Path, which formally laid down its arms in 1994, have given up their revolutionary agenda and instead are providing protection to the cocaine trade in a remote, densely-forested area of the eastern Andean foothills.

On February 11, the group ambushed a police patrol deep in the cloud forest, killing seven officers. Yet no serious expert believes that the group still has the capacity to influence events beyond the immediate region, much less mobilize national anti-government protests. 

“The narrative doesn’t have to be logical. It just needs to be emotive,” said Eduardo González, a sociologist who advised the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “The government needs a monster, to create moral panic. This just shows that memory is a battle. It’s not reflexive or easy.” 

Antonio Zapata, a historian at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, pointed to the moral panic over communism in the 1930s. 

“Terruqueo is just the latest way in which the elites see the country,” said Zapata. “They always need an external agent. Now it’s Evo [Morales, the former socialist president of Bolivia], before it was Fidel and before that it was Stalin. Like all efficient lies, it has to be woven together with elements of the truth.”

This scare tactic has allowed the government to declare states of emergency in several of the protest hotspots, restricting the right to assembly and allowing warrantless searches of homes. Separately, it has introduced a bill to toughen already-steep penalties for public order offenses with fast track trials that violate basic due process norms.

Prosecutors even set up a terrorism hotline for citizens to report supposed “revolutionaries.” Chief prosecutor Patricia Benavides has converted several offices specializing in human rights abuses, including those committed by the state, into counter-terrorism units. 

At Lima’s San Marcos University, the oldest university in the Americas, riot police and anti-terrorism officers arrested 193 students and protestors, before being forced to free all but one of them for lack of evidence. The ultra-conservative mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, has also banned protests downtown in an obvious breach of the national constitution.

Meanwhile, an extreme-right group, which calls itself the Resistance and has ties to the mayor, has harassed and intimidated journalists and officials perceived to be progressive for months without prosecutors or the national police  lifting a finger. On February 21, the Resistance staged a rowdy picket outside the home of Gustavo Gorriti, a prominent journalist who heads IDL Reporteros, chanting antisemitic slogans. Police officers refused to intervene.

In many ways, Peru’s current turmoil feels like deja vu. Nearly 30% of those killed when the Shining Path was at its most powerful — some 20,000 people — died at the hands of the military and the police, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a fact that Peru’s authoritarian right still refuses to acknowledge. That grim story is laid out at the Place of Memory, a gray concrete museum overlooking the Pacific in Lima that memorializes the internal conflict. Lima’s mayor López Aliaga wants to hand over the control of the museum to the military, which would likely erase any mention of its own atrocities.

“It’s not that we don’t remember,” said Zapata, the historian. “It’s what we remember. On one side, there is this memory of being marginalized, excluded, of always being defeated. On the other, there is this memory of how to exclude and marginalize and how to defend privileges.”

That struggle for memory over the bloodletting of the 1980s and 1990s has never been far from the surface in Peru. But it has now detonated into a new, critical confrontation over Peru’s present.

The post Peru’s far right is reviving decades-old terrorism narratives to undermine protests appeared first on Coda Story.

Gurinder Dhillon still remembers the day he realized he had been tricked. It was 2009, and he had just taken out a $16,000 loan to start a new life. Originally from Punjab, India, Dhillon had met an agent in his home village who promised him the world. 

“He sold me this dream,” Dhillon, 45, said. A new life in Europe. Good money — enough to send back to his family in India. Clothes, a house, plenty of work. He’d work on a farm, picking fruits and vegetables, in a place called the Pontine Marshes, a vast area of farmland in the Lazio region, south of Rome, Italy. 

He took out a sizable loan from the Indian agents, who in return organized his visa, ticket and travel to Italy. The real cost of this is around $2,000 — the agents were making an enormous profit. 

“The thing is, when I got here, the whole situation changed. They played me,” Dhillon said. “They brought me here like a slave.”

On his first day out in the fields, Dhillon climbed into a trailer with about 60 other people and was then dropped off in his assigned hoop house. That day, he was on the detail for zucchini, tomatoes and eggplant. It was June, and under the plastic, it was infernally hot. It felt like at least 100 degrees, Dhillon remembers. He sweated so much that his socks were soaked. He had to wring them out halfway through the day and then put them back on — there was no time to change his clothes. As they worked, an Italian boss yelled at them constantly to work faster and pick more.

Within a few hours of that first shift, it dawned on Dhillon that he had been duped. “I didn’t think I had been tricked — I knew I had,” he said. This wasn’t the life or the work he had been promised. 

What he got instead was 3.40 euros (about $3.65) an hour, for a workday of up to 14 hours. The workers weren’t allowed bathroom breaks.

On these wages, he couldn’t see how he would ever repay the enormous loan he had taken out. He was working alongside some other men, also from India, who had been there for years.  ”Will it be like this forever?” he asked them. “Yes,” they said. “It will be like this forever.”

Ninety years ago, a very different harvest was taking place. Benito Mussolini was celebrating the first successful wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. It was a new tradition for the area, which for millennia had been nothing but a vast, brackish, barely-inhabited swamp.

No one managed to tame it — until Mussolini came to power and launched his “Battle for Grain.” The fascist leader had a dream for the area: It would provide food and sustenance for the whole country.

Determined to make the country self-sufficient as a food producer, Mussolini spoke of “freeing Italy from the slavery of foreign bread” and promoted the virtues of rural land workers. At the center of his policy was a plan to transform wild, uncultivated areas into farmland. He created a national project to drain Italy’s swamps. And the boggy, mosquito-infested Pontine Marshes were his highest priority. 

His regime shipped in thousands of workers from all over Italy to drain the waterlogged land by building a massive system of pumps and canals. Billions of gallons of water were dredged from the marshes, transforming them into fertile farmland.

The project bore real fruit in 1933. Thousands of black-shirted Fascists gathered to hear a brawny-armed, suntanned Mussolini mark the first wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. 

“The Italian people will have the necessary bread to live,” Il Duce told the crowd, declaring how Italy would never again be reliant on other countries for food. “Comrade farmers, the harvest begins.”

The Pontine Marshes are still one of the most productive areas of Italy, an agricultural powerhouse with miles of plastic-covered hoop houses, growing fruit and vegetables by the ton. They are also home to herds of buffalo that make Italy’s famous buffalo mozzarella. The area provides food not just for Italy but for Europe and beyond. Jars of artichokes packed in oil, cans of Italian plum tomatoes and plump, ripe kiwi fruits often come from this part of the world. But Mussolini’s “comrade farmers” harvesting the land’s bounty are long gone. Tending the fields today are an estimated 30,000 agricultural workers like Dhillon, most hailing from Punjab, India. For many of them — and by U.N. standards — the working conditions are akin to slave labor.

When Urmila Bhoola, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, visited the area, she found that many working conditions in Italy’s agricultural sector amounted to forced labor due to the amount of hours people work, the low salaries and the gangmasters, or “caporali,” who control them.

The workers here are at the mercy of the caporali, who are the intermediaries between the farm workers and the owners. Some workers are brought here with residency and permits, while others are brought fully off the books. Regardless, they report making as little as 3-4 euros an hour. Sometimes, though, they’re barely paid at all. When Samrath, 34, arrived in Italy, he was not paid for three months of work on the farms. His boss claimed his pay had gone entirely into taxes — but when he checked with the government office, he found his taxes hadn’t been paid either. 

Samrath is not the worker’s real name. Some names in this story have been changed to protect the subjects’ safety.

“I worked for him for all these months, and he didn’t pay me. Nothing. I worked for free for at least three months,” Samrath told me. “I felt so ashamed and sad. I cried so much.” He could hardly bring himself to tell his family at home what had happened.

I met Samrath and several other workers on a Sunday on the marshes. For the Indian Sikh workers from Punjab, this is usually the only day off for the week. They all gather at the temple, where they pray together and share a meal of pakoras, vegetable curry and rice. The women sit on one side, the men on the other. It’s been a long working week — for the men, out in the fields or tending the buffaloes, while the women mostly work in the enormous packing centers, boxing up fruits and vegetables to be sent out all over Europe.

Another worker, Ramneet, told me how he waited for his monthly check — usually around 1,300 euros (about $1,280) per month, for six days’ work a week at 12-14 hours per day. But when the check came, the number on it was just 125 euros (about $250). 

“We were just in shock,” Ramneet said. “We panicked — our monthly rent here is 600 euros.” His boss claimed, again, that the money had gone to taxes. It meant he had worked almost for free the entire month. Other workers explained to me that even when they did have papers, they could risk being pushed out of the system and becoming undocumented if their bosses refused to issue them payslips.

Ramneet described how Italian workers on the farms are treated differently from Indian workers. Italian workers, he said, get to take an hour for lunch. Indian workers are called back after just 20 minutes — despite having their pay cut for their lunch hour.

“When Meloni gives her speeches, she talks about getting more for the Italians,” Ramneet’s wife Ishleen said, referring to Italy’s new prime minister and her motto, “Italy and Italians first.” “She doesn’t care about us, even though we’re paying taxes. When we’re working, we can’t even take a five-minute pause, while the Italian workers can take an hour.”

Today, Italy is entering a new era — or, some people argue, returning to an old one. In September, Italians voted in a new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. As well as being the country’s first-ever female prime minister, she is also Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini. Her supporters — and even some leaders of her party, Brothers of Italy — show a distinct reverence for Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.

In the first weeks of Meloni’s premiership, thousands of Mussolini admirers made a pilgrimage to Il Duce’s birthplace of Predappio to pay homage to the fascist leader, making the Roman salute and hailing Meloni as a leader who might resurrect the days of fascism. In Latina, the largest city in the marshes, locals interviewed by national newspapers talked of being excited about Meloni’s victory — filled with hopes that she might be true to her word and bring the area back to its glory days in the time of Benito Mussolini. One of Meloni’s undersecretaries has run a campaign calling for a park in Latina to return to its original name: Mussolini Park.

During her campaign, a video emerged of Meloni discussing Mussolini as a 19-year-old activist. “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy,” she told journalists. Meloni has since worked to distance herself from such associations with fascism. In December, she visited Rome’s Jewish ghetto as a way of acknowledging Mussolini’s crimes against humanity. “The racial laws were a disgrace,” she told the crowd.

A century on from Italy’s fascist takeover, Meloni’s victory has led to a moment of widespread collective reckoning, as a national conversation takes place about how Mussolini should be remembered and whether Meloni’s premiership means Italy is reconnecting with its fascist past.

Unlike in Germany, which tore down — and outlawed — symbols of Nazi terror, reminders of Mussolini’s rule remain all over Italy. There was no moment of national reckoning after the war ended and Mussolini was executed. Hundreds of fascist monuments and statues dot the country. Slogans left over from the dictatorship can be seen on post offices, municipal buildings and street signs. Collectively, when Italians discuss Mussolini, they do remember his legacy of terror — his alliance with Adolf Hitler, anti-Semitic race laws and the thousands of Italian Jews he sent to the death camps. But across the generations, Italians also talk about other legacies of his regime — they talk of the infrastructure and architecture built during the period and of how he drained the Pontine Marshes and rid them of malaria, making the land into an agricultural haven.

Today in the Pontine Marshes, which some see as a place brought into existence by Il Duce — and where the slogans on one town tower praise “the land that Mussolini redeemed from deadly sterility” — the past is bristling with the present.

“The legend that has come back to haunt this town, again and again, is that it’s a fascist city. Of course, it was created in the fascist era, but here we’re not fascists — we’re dismissed as fascists and politically sidelined as a result,” Emilio Andreoli, an author who was born in Latina and has written books about the city’s history, said. Politicians used to target the area as a key campaigning territory, he said, but it has since fallen off most leaders’ agendas. And indeed, in some ways, Latina is a place that feels forgotten. Although it remains a top agricultural producer, other kinds of industry and infrastructure have faltered. Factories that once bustled here lie empty. New, faster roads and railways that were promised to the city by previous governments never materialized.

Meloni did visit Latina on her campaign trail and gave speeches about reinvigorating the area with its old strength. “This is a land where you can breathe patriotism. Where you breathe the fundamental and traditional values that we continue to defend — despite being considered politically incorrect,” she told the crowd.  

But the people working this land are entirely absent from Meloni’s rhetorical vision. Marco Omizzolo, a professor of sociology at the University of Sapienza in Rome, has for years studied and engaged with the largely Sikh community of laborers from India who work on the marshes.

Omizzolo explained to me how agricultural production in Italy has systematically relied on the exploitation of migrant workers for decades.

“Many people are in this,” he told me, when we met for coffee in Rome. “The owners of companies who employ the workers. The people who run the laborers’ daily work. Local and national politicians. Several mafia clans.”

“Exploitation in the agricultural sector has been going on for centuries in Italy,” Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focusing on migration, said. She described that the Italian peasantry was always exploited but that the system was further entrenched with the arrival of migrant workers. “The system has always treated migrants as manpower — as laborers to exploit, and never as persons carrying equal rights as Italian workers.” From where she’s sitting, Italy’s immigration laws appear to have been designed to leave migrants “dependent on the whims and the wills of their abusive employers,” Tranchina said.

The system of bringing the workers to Italy — and keeping them there — begins in Punjab, India. Omizzolo described how a group of traffickers recruits prospective workers with promises of lucrative work abroad and often helps to arrange high-interest loans like the one that Gurinder took out. Omizzolo estimates that about a fifth of the Indian workers in the Pontine Marshes come via irregular routes, with some arriving from Libya, while many others are smuggled into Italy from Serbia across land and sea, aided by traffickers. Their situation is more perilous than those who arrived with visas and work permits, as they’re forced to work under the table without contracts, benefits or employment rights.

Omizzolo knows it all firsthand. A Latina native, he grew up playing football by the vegetable and fruit fields and watching as migrant workers, first from North Africa, then from India, came to the area to work the land. He began studying the forces at play as a sociologist during his doctorate and even traveled undercover to Punjab to understand how workers are picked up and trafficked to Italy. 

As a scholar and advocate for stronger labor protections, he has drawn considerable attention to the exploitative systems that dominate the area. In 2016, he worked alongside Sikh laborers to organize a mass strike in Latina, in which 4,000 people participated. All this has made Omizzolo a target of local mafia forces, Indian traffickers and corrupt farm bosses. He has been surveilled and chased in the street and has had his car tires slashed. Death threats are nothing unusual. These days, he does not travel to Latina without police protection.

The entire system could become even further entrenched — and more dangerous for anyone speaking out about it — under Meloni’s administration. The prime minister has an aggressively anti-migrant agenda, promising to stop people arriving on Italy’s shores in small boats. Her government has sent out a new fleet of patrol boats to the Libyan Coast Guard to try to block the crossings, while making it harder for NGOs to carry out rescue operations. 

At the end of February, at least 86 migrants drowned off the coast of Calabria in a shipwreck. When Meloni visited Calabria a few weeks later, she did not go to the beach where the migrants’ bodies were found or to the funeral home that took care of their remains. Instead, she announced a new policy: scrapping special protection residency permits for migrants. 

Tranchina, from Human Rights Watch, explained that getting rid of the “special protection” permits will leave many migrant workers in Italy, including those in the Pontine Marshes, effectively undocumented. 

“The situation is worsening significantly under the current government,” she said. “An army of people, who are currently working, paying taxes, renting houses, will now be forced to accept very exploitative working conditions — at times akin to slavery — out of desperation.” 

Omizzolo agreed. Meloni’s hostile environment campaign against arriving migrants is making people in the marshes feel “more fragile and blackmailable,” he told me. 

“Meloni is entrenching the current system in place in the Pontine Marshes,” Omizzolo said. “Her policies are interested in keeping things in their current state. Because the people who exploit the workers here are among her voter base.”

And then there’s the matter of money and how people are paid. A few months into her administration, Meloni introduced a proposal to raise the ceiling for cash transactions from 2,000 euros (about $2,110) to 5,000 euros ($5,280), a move that critics saw as an attempt to better insulate black market and organized crime networks from state scrutiny.

Workers describe that they were often paid in cash and that their bosses were always looking for ways to take them off the books. “We have to push them to pay us the official way and keep our contracts,” Rajvinder, 24, said. “They prefer to give us cash.” Being taken off a contract and paid under the table is a constant source of anxiety. “If I don’t have a work contract, my papers will expire after three months,” Samrath explained, describing how he would then become undocumented in Italy.

Omizzolo says Meloni’s cash laws will continue to preserve the corruption and sustain a shadow economy that grips the workers coming to the Pontine Marshes. Even for people who once worked above the table, the new government’s laissez-faire attitude towards the shadow economy is pushing them back into obscurity. “That law is directly contributing to the black market — people who used to be on the books, and have proper contracts, are now re-entering the shadow economy,” he said.

In December, Latina celebrated its 90th anniversary — some people here call it the youngest city in Italy. Some believe that this land, with its marble towns built in the fascist rationalist style, has fascism and Mussolini to thank for its very existence. The town was founded as a kind of utopia: a vision for a fascist future.

“This place was born in 1932. You can see it everywhere, in the architecture, in the buildings. We can’t skip over fascism. We can’t tell this story from the beginning while cutting things away to suit our convenience,” Cesare Bruni, who organizes a monthly “market of memory” where people sell antiques and relics from the past, said. 

Bruni holds up an old photo from the New York Sunday News, showing a sun-dappled Mussolini visiting the newly drained marsh to help with the first harvest since the land was reclaimed, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. “Il Duce-Farmhand,” the headline reads, describing how the leader “put in three hours of hard work” out in the fields.

The idealistic image of the harvest was powerful propaganda at the time. Not shown were the workers, brought in from all over the country, who died of malaria while digging the trenches and canals to drain the marsh. It also stands in contrast to today’s reality. Workers are brought here from the other side of the world, on false pretenses, and find themselves trapped in a system with no escape from the brutal work schedule and the resulting physical and mental health risks. In October, a 24-year-old Punjabi farm worker in the town of Sabaudia killed himself. It’s not the first time a worker has died by suicide — depression and opioid addiction are common among the workforce. 

“We are all guilty, without exception. We have decided to lose this battle for democracy. Dear Jaspreet, forgive us. Or perhaps, better, haunt our consciences forever,” Omizzolo wrote on his Facebook page.

Talwinder, 28, arrived on the marsh last year. “I had no hopes in India. I had no dreams, I had nothing. It is difficult here — in India, it was difficult in a different way. But at least [in India] I was working for myself.” His busiest months of the year are coming up — he’ll work without a day off. And although the mosquitoes no longer carry malaria, they still plague the workers. “They’re fatter than the ones in India,” he laughs. “I heard it’s because this place used to be a jungle.”

Mussolini’s vision for the marsh was to turn it into an agricultural center for the whole of Italy, giving work to thousands of Italians and building up a strong working peasantry. Today, vegetables, olives and cheeses from the area are shipped to the United States and sold in upmarket stores to shoppers seeking authentic, artisan foods from the heart of the old world. But it comes at an enormous price to those who produce it. And under Meloni’s premiership, they only expect that cost to rise.

“These days, if my family ask me if they should come here, like my nephew or relatives, I tell them no,” said Samrath. “Don’t come here. Stay where you are.”

The post The Indian migrants lured into forced labor on Mussolini’s farmland appeared first on Coda Story.

Although nearly a quarter of Colombians identify as either Black or mixed race, the African diaspora and Colombia’s deep roots in the slave trade are conspicuously absent from official narratives about the country’s history. When Muntú Bantú opened in 2009, the museum was wholly unique in a country with one of Latin America’s largest Black populations yet no institutional centers or museums dedicated to their history, culture and heritage. The name is a tribute to the region’s African roots, referencing Bantu, a family of languages spoken across the African continent. According to the museum, Africa’s Bantu diaspora has a strong linguistic and cultural presence in the Chocó region, where it is located.

“Sometimes people enter as one person and exit as someone else,” Sergio Antonio Mosquera, an Afro-Colombian historian and the museum’s founder, told me in Spanish over a shaky WhatsApp connection. 

Visitors would pass through the building’s yellow facade and descend into the bowels of a ship, meant to evoke the transatlantic slave trade, and then be immersed in exhibits about African history and biodiversity, Black achievements in cinema and Afro-Colombian feminism. Some left transformed. 

“They found themselves with their history, their ancestors,” Mosquera added. “It’s a huge experience, understanding the world in Afro-diasporic thinking, not Eurocentric, Christian and white as we were taught.”

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But no one is walking through the museum now. A few months back, a local armed group set its sights on Muntú Bantú and sought to extort Mosquera and his colleagues, threatening violence if they didn’t pay up. The harassment led them to shutter Muntú Bantú in January, forcing the museum’s vast archive of Afro-Colombian history underground. 

In Chocó, the impoverished region in Western Colombia where it’s located, Muntú Bantú was a revelation — a gateway to an archive of repressed national memory. It had become a hallowed space in the community — so much so that for years, it was able to stay open despite the violence and instability plaguing Chocó.

Rich in natural resources like coca and gold, the Pacific Coast province is in the crosshairs of a violent battle for control between criminal groups lured by illegal mining and drug trafficking. These groups prey upon local businesses and organizations through extortion and harassment, and Muntú Bantú was no exception. When death threats and so-called extortion “war taxes” landed in front of Mosquera and his colleagues, they saw no option but to close up shop indefinitely over concerns for their safety.

The closure highlights the increasingly precarious position of activists working in the country’s conflict zones, particularly in the years since Colombia’s 2016 internal peace treaty, which is now faltering. It also comes less than a year after the inauguration of Vice President Francia Márquez, the first Afro-Colombian to hold such a high office.

Violence against activists and community leaders has reached record levels in Colombia as criminal organizations and armed groups fight to control territories and drug trafficking routes. Gangs threaten, harass and murder local leaders, activists and anyone they see as a threat to their power. Last year, according to government officials, at least 215 Colombian activists were murdered, the highest number ever recorded.

The violence has been especially pronounced along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, where Chocó is located. According to Gimena Sánchez, an expert on Afro-Colombian issues at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy group, a disproportionate number of the 1,200 human rights workers assassinated in the country since 2016 were of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous backgrounds. “Up until now, they’ve respected the space, which is seen as a source of pride,” she told me. But the winds seem to be shifting. In the city of Quibdo, the home of Muntú Bantú, the situation has “turned into a nightmare,” Sánchez said. “There are shootings every day. [Paramilitaries] extort absolutely everybody. It’s out of control.”

And then there’s Márquez, whose ascent has brought increased visibility of Afro-Colombian history, memory and culture in public life. Márquez herself — who before entering politics was an outspoken activist fighting against illegal gold mining — has been a top target of racist trolling, death threats and harassment. In January, Márquez denounced the threats against Muntú Bantú on Instagram, calling the museum a “sacred temple” for the Afro-Colombian community. Mosquera explained to me that this racist backlash has trickled down to the Afro-Colombian community as a whole, reaching public figures and everyday people. The threats aimed both at Márquez and Muntú Bantú seem to be a byproduct of this volatile and historic political moment: an era of increased exposure, and danger, for Afro-Colombian leaders as parts of the country remain locked in conflict. 

All the while, Colombia’s 50-year civil war looms in the background. The conflict between the Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (also known as FARC) left 260,000 Colombians dead and 8 million displaced. It officially ended in 2016, after the two parties brokered a historic peace agreement that was supposed to finally put an end to the bloodshed. The complex and wide-ranging treaty established a ceasefire and created a pathway for FARC militants to reintegrate into Colombian society in exchange for laying down their arms and demobilizing. The deal was also supposed to address the structural issues fueling the conflict — poverty and inequality — by investing in the economic development and security of long-neglected parts of the country that bore the brunt of the violence. But in places like Chocó, this redevelopment never happened.

After the accord went into effect, thousands of guerrillas turned in their weapons and the FARC withdrew from Chocó, bringing several months of relative peace and stability to the region. But in less than a year, it all came crashing down. New armed groups rushed to fill the void left by the FARC’s exit and the ongoing absence of the state, thrusting Chocóans into yet another cycle of violence and terror. 

There are versions of this scenario across the country, where peace remains elusive seven years after the agreement was signed. Critics say the treaty failed to live up to its lofty promises. Various armed factions, from paramilitary organizations to drug cartels and rival guerrilla groups, have muscled their way into territories formerly held by the FARC, holding a vice-like grip on local communities. Experts say these gangs recruit impoverished youth and threaten, harass and kill anyone they believe poses a danger to their economic and political interests, including activists and teachers.

“They’re seen as a threat by illegal groups because they’re educating people, so they [the armed groups] think that they’re educating people against them,” explained Sánchez.

María Fernanda Parra, the museum’s director, believes that Muntú Bantú may have been targeted because of the alternative vision it shares with the youth sought for recruitment by criminal groups. The center, she explained, provided activities to prevent young people from joining gangs. “We are teaching them another path and that there are other choices [one] can make,” Parra said, “So we are a target. But we didn’t think the aggressors would fight against culture. We thought culture was untouchable because it nourishes education and it shouldn’t be censored.”

Muntú Bantú’s closure threatens the fragile preservation of a history that’s long been ignored by the state. “We are paying a huge cost,” Mosquera said, “because our knowledge is not circulating.”

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In the English-speaking world, Dresden has become a symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general, most famously captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Arguments still continue, mainly among historians, about whether it was a necessary military action or a war crime motivated mainly by vengeance. 

For Germans today, talking about Dresden has far more immediate political stakes. One of Germany’s proudest cultural achievements has been its very public process of “coming to terms with the past,” establishing a mainstream political and cultural consensus around collective responsibility for the legacy of Nazi crimes. Where does the bombing of Dresden — a moment of suffering that totally reshaped the city, both culturally and architecturally, and that lives on in many local families’ memories — fit into all that? 

The far right has eagerly adopted the portrayal of Dresden as a senseless war crime, holding an annual “march of mourning.” They use the bombings to draw false equivalencies about the damage of World War II and to suggest that Germany’s apologetic and largely anti-nationalist memory culture has gone too far. More mainstream elements have tended to advocate either for the avoidance of the topic altogether or — as a compromise position — for a policy of dignified “silent commemoration,” hoping to reject any kind of politicization of the date. Left-wing and community organizations, meanwhile, have made a priority of interrupting far-right actions while arguing that any commemoration on February 13 should foreground Dresden’s own Nazi past and the dangers of fascist politics in general. Under public pressure, the city’s major religious institutions and municipal government have begun to move away from silent commemoration, opening up the city to a range of other memorial activities around the date.

Over the past 25 years, the anniversary of the bombings has become a passionately contested date, one that sees clashes in the media and in the streets as the whole city is turned into a chaotic public laboratory for memory culture. The question of how to talk about Dresden becomes a conversation about victimhood and complicity, apology and pride, pacifism and justice — and ultimately, too, about the identity of the city.

Dresden is a gorgeous, captivating, contradictory place. The capital of Saxony, Germany’s easternmost state, it was built up in elegant style from the 15th century onwards. Its reputation as a city of culture and beauty — praised by Goethe, painted by Canaletto, epitomized by the name “Elbflorenz” (Florence on the River Elbe) — was secured during the Baroque-era rule of Augustus the Strong. And, despite the many developments that have shaped the city since — the industrial revolution, Nazi rule, the Allied bombing and its aftermath, 40 odd years of the Communist German Democratic Republic — it is this period of Saxon prestige that Dresden turned to in the 1990s as it sought to rebuild its urban center. Now, thanks to phenomenally expensive renovations, visitors to Dresden can experience the architectural beauty of the original Elbflorenz, provided they do not venture too far from the city center.

For a long while, the bombings hardly featured in any national conversation. The GDR accused the Western Allies, their Cold War enemies at the time, of terror bombing innocents, cynically redeploying a narrative coined by the Nazis, although this remained a relatively minor element of East German national public history. West Germans, meanwhile, were more focused on either reviving their economy or, especially from the 1960s onwards, on acknowledging their own national guilt. How, if you are committed to accepting the collective responsibility of “coming to terms with the past,” can you account for your own suffering? 

The answer has tended to be to not talk about it, a tactic that W.G. Sebald criticized as an “inability to mourn,” citing the lack of literature on Germany’s bombed-out cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne. Yet this national silence, as Gunter Grass and others have warned, risks ceding the terrain of remembering German wartime suffering — not just the bombings but the atrocities committed by Allied and Red Army soldiers, among other things — to extremist right-wing elements.

“For the far right, Dresden is a symbol that can be used to support a different approach to memory about the Nazi past,” said Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims.” According to Petzold, far-right activists and politicians have been drawn to Dresden since the 1990s on account of its symbolic status as a German “victim city.” In doing so, they have capitalized on older mythologies of German victimhood, which flourished in postwar West Germany, in the GDR generally and among German families in private.

The annual far-right “march of mourning” has drawn openly militaristic groups like the neo-Nazi Kameradschaften networks as well as politicians from the extremist NPD party, which peaked in the 2000s before falling away. More recently, the Alternative for Germany, the far more professional far-right party that currently receives 28% of the vote in the Saxon parliament, also participated in the march. The anti-Islam Pegida movement and the Covid-skeptic Querdenker (“lateral thinker”) networks have also been present. These commemorations are openly provocative in a nation whose constitution forbids the relativization of Nazi crimes (one sign seen at the march last year read: “Bombenholocaust,” or bombing Holocaust). But they have never been banned by city or federal governments.

Commemorations grew in size over the 1990s and early 2000s but it was not until 2005, when the bombings’ 60th anniversary was marked by what was then the largest far-right rally in postwar Europe, that Dresdeners began to publicly rally in opposition.

At that time, the municipal government policy had been the avowedly “apolitical” silent mourning, and anything else in the inner city was banned. Dresden’s conservative administration, Petzold said, attempted to position themselves between the far right and antifascists, suggesting that each side was politicizing the date for extremist purposes. Gradually, however, the city’s wreath-laying ceremony began attracting more far-right elements, so much so that the Jewish Community of Dresden decided to boycott the event. Leftist groups began trying to blockade far-right marches. Community organization campaigns pressured the city government to unambiguously resist far-right appropriation of the date and encourage an approach to memory culture that included perspectives from the victims of Nazi persecution and other marginalized groups.

What has resulted since is a wide array of often competing activities around February 13. One of the numerous city-sponsored events is a “human chain” of remembrance, which symbolically encircles the historic downtown as a statement against xenophobia and a gesture of protection against far-right incursion. Many left-wing and civil society groups have gone further, organizing further blockades and counter-protests against the far right in addition to commemorative events around local Jewish sites and attempts to publicly draw attention to the city’s Nazi past.

Petzold explained that Dresden’s historic downtown has become an important element of local memory politics. “The competition over space, over who gets to be visible in public space, is really key,” he said. Far-right groups “were being allowed to use iconic sites like the opera house to create good images of themselves, which also makes them appealing to the media. There’s an appropriation, perhaps, not only of that space but also of those iconic buildings, which have become enshrined in local Dresden identity.”

I walk among these iconic buildings when I arrive in Dresden on February 11, the first day of commemorations. There are helicopters in the air and hullabaloo on the streets. Slipping around a group of police, I join what appeared to be an antifascist block party. A brass band is playing, while rainbow flags and antifa banners billow in the wind. People young and old stay warm by drinking coffee, tea and punch from the nearby kiosk. Right at the front, beside the cordoned-off street, stands a group of old women with a sign reading, “Omas Gegen Rechts,” — Grannies versus the (far) Right. I observe a few gruff middle-aged people, all alone, many small groups of fashionable 20-somethings and five or six clusters of rather hard-looking antifa, all dressed in black and with face masks, including one bloke with a hoodie that boasts of “German Punk Terror Since 1990.” A few people arrive dressed as sparkly unicorns. It is, to put things mildly, a difficult crowd to get a read on. Sensing my confusion, somebody turns to me and says: “We’re waiting for the Nazis.”

After an hour they arrive, on the other side of a police cordon. Most are dressed in black. They carry banners that read “Dresden 1945: Unforgotten” and “350,000 Europeans murdered.” A float goes past playing Vivaldi, with a sign in a Gothic-style font that reads: “That they do not lie in their graves in vain // is solely up to our will // our actions.” There seems to be about a thousand of them. Some wave black flags. I think I can make out a snatch of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the anthem of the Nazi party. A rumor spreads that the police have been confiscating sap gloves.

Here, on the counter-protest side, somebody is handing out whistles. Doja Cat’s “Boss Bitch” comes on over a loudspeaker, effectively drowning out Vivaldi. A number of chants go up: “There is no right to Nazi propaganda,” “Nazis piss off, nobody will miss you,” “German policemen are protecting the fascists.” Suddenly a 20-something with short pink hair and overalls surges to the front and shouts, in a strong Saxon accent: “Your kids are gonna be like us! Your kids are gonna be like us!” The rest of the crowd nearby joins in.

Afterwards, I meet up with Claudia Jerzak. A 43-year-old sociologist born and raised in Dresden, Jerzak has been documenting the far-right protests and counter-protests for over a decade — first for her Master’s degree on the topic and now for a doctorate she is completing part-time alongside her work as a researcher for an initiative on social work with refugees. She also co-wrote a 2012 film, “Come Together,” about Dresden’s contested memory culture. In her writing, Jerzak is critical of the city’s “silent commemoration” policy, which she believes has too easily tolerated the presence of far-right groups and obstructed any discussion of Dresden’s own perpetrator past. 

Jerzak wants to explain everything — she has the enthusiasm and eye for detail of a city tour guide — but on this day she has to rush off to see where the far-right demonstration ends up. We agree to meet again later. Before I let her go, I want to ask her a personal question. How does it feel, as a Dresdener, to see your hometown transformed at least once every year into a political battleground of international interest, a place where various factions squabble over the legacy of a long-past local wound? She gives an ironic laugh. “It’s exhausting,” she says, and then she’s gone.

“We’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said Michael Hurshell, the vice president of the Jewish Community of Dresden. February 13 is a difficult day for the community every year, he explained. “We tell our community members that maybe this isn’t the best day to be out and about in the inner city.’”

Hurshell, an American conductor and orchestra leader born in Vienna but educated in the U.S, moved to Dresden in 2002. Since 2020, he has led this Jewish community of some 700, a majority of whom are Russian speakers from Ukraine. When we met, he invited me to the ostentatious Cafe im Coselpalais, which is housed in a complex that Augustus the Strong built for his mistress. When I arrived, he asked if I had come to report on neo-Nazi protests. That, I said, but also the whole range of rituals and memorials around February 13, the diversity and enthusiasm of which surprised me. “Well,” he said, with a wry smile. “That’s Dresden.”

The city’s Jewish community is based in the New Synagogue, a blocky Modernist building erected on the site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is currently locked behind a fence, undergoing safety upgrades, recommended by the German authorities after a synagogue shooting elsewhere, that may last for up to two years.

Hurshell described the bombings as a “terrible, terrible act of suffering,” but took issue with the myth of victimhood some Dresdeners have adopted on the topic — which the far right has instrumentalized. Only recently did Hurshell learn that Dresden enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime, being among the first cities to engage in public book burnings. “And when it comes to the question of whether bombing Dresden was merely an act of reprisal, with no military significance,” he added, “the Jewish community likes to remind people that a number of our members are only alive because of the bombings.” Hurshell’s late friend Hans-Joachim Aris was one of these people: He and his sister were scheduled to be on a transport headed east days later when the Allied attack saved both of their lives.

A far-right party in 2004 won almost 10% of the vote in a Saxon state parliament election. Hurshell and his Jewish friends got together to discuss what to do: “Does this mean it’s time to get out of here?” Hurshell remembers how, in one of those early years, the far-right demonstrations around February 13 brought people from all across Germany for a march that was scheduled to go over the Carola Bridge and right past the synagogue on its way into town. Dresden’s city government insisted that it could not prevent a legally registered demonstration. Jewish community members had decided to stand in front of the synagogue arm in arm, following the progress of the oncoming far-right march by observing the police helicopters overhead. But the march never made it to the synagogue because a huge crowd of Dresdeners had come to the bridge and simply sat down, even though it was illegal to block a registered demonstration. “And that impressed me. It was an act of solidarity with us, which I hadn’t expected, and it was one of the reasons those demonstrations eventually petered out” Hurshell said. He, of course, decided to stay.

On February 13, 2023, I find myself losing my bearings. What I had expected, in Dresden, was a memory war with two sides: the far right against civil society and the leftists. Instead, as I enter town in the early afternoon, a vast spectrum of arguments and performances are taking place across the city.

At one square, there is a huge “peace” demonstration where several Russian flags are flown. One sign at this protest compares the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck’s call for an “economic war” against Russia to the “total war” of Josef Goebbels. Down by the Kreuzkirche, one of Dresden’s two main churches, there is a memorial plaque for the victims of the Holocaust. By the time I arrive there, seven women are holding a vigil. They are part of the Dresden chapter of the Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Right), which has been holding vigil at the site since 10 a.m.

This year, the Omas Gegen Rechts demonstrators are carrying a banner that reads: “For peace, against violence and war everywhere.” “We are against war,” explains Helga, a long-time Dresdener. I ask if they are saying they oppose Germany delivering tanks to Ukraine. “Well,” Helga hesitates, “we don’t all agree about that.” At the mention of Ukraine, one or two other Omas look over. Helga explains that they often argue about the situation — but always in a respectful manner. A fellow Oma, Christine Weimann, admits that, while her pacifist beliefs are unwavering, she has found herself uncertain in this instance. “I think it’s good that we’re always in conversation,” she adds. “And I wish our group did even more of it, because people need to stay in conversation and not divide people up into pigeon holes. It’s our only chance.”

I meet again with Claudia Jerzak, who has agreed to show me some memorial activities around the city. She describes Dresden on February 13 as a turbulent public stage for memory culture — a big meet-and-greet, almost, for the city and its histories. Dresden, in Jerzak’s view, generally lacks an earnest and thorough engagement with its past. The anniversary offers an opportunity to change that, and the “friction,” she says, is part of the process.

Up at the Neumarkt, the human chain is about to form. Dresden’s mayor and the rector of its main university give speeches about the importance of friendship, peace and solidarity, rejecting outright any switching of the victim and perpetrator roles. When the bells ring out at 6 p.m., people get into position and begin linking arms.

I ask Jerzak if she ever joins in. She says no. “If the idea is to protect the city, then why are we just protecting the historical buildings downtown — wouldn’t it be more valuable to protect the values of the city everywhere, to protect its vulnerable citizens and people of color, on this day and throughout the year?”

Jerzak leads me to a different square, a few blocks south and east, to show me some more explicitly political public memory activities. Here, a far-right rally is expected to arrive in the next hour or so. Since this year’s anniversary falls on a Monday, the “mourning march” has combined with the regular weekly Querdenker protests that lean more Covid-skeptic, libertarian and respectably suburban than the hardcore-looking cadres from Saturday. What is happening now is a counter-demonstration, a Gegendemo, designed to block far-right actors from marching into downtown Dresden. Once again, we are listening to a brass band.

Jerzak gets cold and heads home, while I follow the action to the decidedly un-baroque Pirnaischer Platz. Here a number of anti-right Gegendemos have combined to blockade the rally. The police presence is heavy, with some officers moving through the Gegendemo trying to find someone with whom they can negotiate a withdrawal. 

The withdrawal doesn’t happen, and suddenly the far-right demonstration arrives, separated by a long line of police vans. Unlike Saturday’s solemn procession, this group seems upfront about its desire to provoke. Because the police are now rerouting them, they each have a turn to face the Gegendemo crowd before turning down Saint Petersburg Street. Many of them point and laugh, while others mock-conduct antifa chants. Almost everyone takes a selfie. Some hold up peace flags and commemorative candles — a surreal act of coded provocation.

Later I learned that the blockade went down as a success. The far-right march was rerouted, and its estimated 500 to 1,000 attendees were outnumbered more than two to one by the counter-protesters. The arithmetic stays with me for a long time. If you include the reported 10,000 people in the human chain — plus all the other various community events — then February 13 has, per capita, been a day overwhelmingly defined by resistance to the pull of German victimhood and xenophobia. What the far right has triggered is a very public process of self-clarification for the city: Every year, every February, where do we stand? It must be utterly exhausting, and not just for Claudia Jerzak, but at least it gets everything out into the open.

Back at the Neumarkt, the human chain has ended and people are milling about. The last official event for the day is Nacht der Stille, “the Night of Silence,” to be held in the basement of the Frauenkirche from 10 p.m. onwards. I join the crowds filing in.

“Wars,” says the Frauenkirche’s pastor, Angelika Behnke, “do not begin or end with bombs.” Instead, she intones, they find their roots in envy, resentment and arrogance. Behnke somberly describes how the Frauenkirche collapsed in 1945 from the damage it sustained during the bombing. Yet with the memory of destruction comes hope, she continues: “We cannot do anything about what happened back then, but we can look around at what is happening today.”

For the rest of the evening, interspersed with music, a series of Dresdeners give short speeches about what they are lighting a candle for. We hear from the Jewish Community of Dresden’s Michael Hurshell and then from a Ukrainian-born Dresdener, a young woman from Iran and a Russian university student who opposes the war. The shift in context is surprising, but I begin to see its logic. If Dresden is now an open, multicultural city — if Dresdeners, now, bring with them a whole diverse array of remembered wartime suffering — then surely it’s not just the Dresden of 1945 that belongs to the city’s memorial duties but also 1938’s Kristallnacht, and 2022’s Ukraine.

The same goes for Syria in 2015, when its civil war changed the population of Germany, much to the ire of the far right. In 2017, Damascus-born Dresden artist Manaf Halbouni installed three upturned buses in front of the Frauenkirche, a visual homage to Aleppo civilians’ use of city buses as protective barricades during the Syrian civil war. Right-wing activists responded with outrage, but Halbouni, when we spoke on the phone, said that he was simply building a bridge between two destroyed cities, only one of which had yet had the chance to build back up. As to whether he might be accused of taking the date out of context, of instrumentalizing it to his ends, he replied sharply: “You could accuse anyone of that. Everyone is always instrumentalizing this day.”

When I depart Dresden the following day, I find myself thinking about what purpose memory culture serves. Even the best public monuments run the risk of growing stale, assuming as they do that everyone is on the same page. This anniversary, by contrast, sets the whole thing in motion. It demands a constant trying-out of new contexts and connotations. When the far right wanted to turn the city into a one-dimensional symbol of suffering, Dresdeners have responded with an ongoing public renegotiation of their history — a rowdy play of the past and the present against their ornate, Baroque stage.

At the very least, they’re having arguments. As my train pulls away, one particular image from the anniversaries stands out. It is 9:45 p.m. on a Monday night, the town square is filled with people and two old men are simply standing there and arguing — arguing about Russia, arguing about the bombings, arguing about their city and about what should be done.

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“It is an honor to be with Obrador!” 

“Women for AMLO!” 

“AMLO: best president ever!”

Hundreds of Mexicans living in the New York metropolitan area had come together to mark a historic moment — for the first time, they could vote in a referendum that would determine the country’s future. In this case, they would help decide whether President López Obrador would end his presidential term prematurely. Leading the Obradorista effort in this part of the U.S. is Morena New York Committee 1, an organization made up of fervent supporters of the president, his party and his ideals. They adhere to a political edict of social and economic progress known as the “Fourth Transformation” that imagines a future in which government employees no longer abuse their power in order to enrich themselves and protect their allies.

That Sunday in April, as Mexicans went to the polls, Morena New York Committee 1 staged three processions in New York City to show their support for the sitting president. At a rally in Union Square, an AMLO impersonator wore a larger-than-life papier-mache replica of the president’s head, shaking hands and bowing in front of the crowd. The committees encouraged those who didn’t or couldn’t register to vote to cast “a symbolic vote” during a ceremony scored with traditional music.

Since Morena’s inception in 2011 (and with the help of the president’s party), dozens of what are known as “affinity groups” have sprung up in the United States and organized ardent popular support for the Mexican president. Today, AMLO has a loyal base among Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. Most seem to perceive López Obrador as a restorative force in Mexican democracy, one who has put the most vulnerable communities first — including Mexican immigrants living abroad. For years, these groups have tried to amplify the voices of migrants through civic organizations and to exercise their voting rights in both Mexico and the United States.

“We are not fighting for ourselves, but for the next generations. [We] want to give them a better country full of opportunities so that they do not have to emigrate, like us who come here to suffer cold, hunger, political persecution and racial discrimination,” said Jose Luis Ramírez, a long-time supporter of the president at the rally in Corona, Queens. 

While some individuals have followed AMLO throughout his political career of nearly four decades, many only became active after years of living in the U.S. Empowered by AMLO’s critiques of “neoliberalism” and the “corrupt nature” of the governing parties before him, Morena sympathizers living abroad say they feel like they finally have representation in their country of origin. 

Guillermo Lucero, who joined the Morena New York committee in 2018, put it simply, “López Obrador has given us back our identity as Mexicans.”

But AMLO is not universally loved. Since he assumed the presidency in 2018, he has been criticized for gutting public institutions, lambasting the opposition and putting democratic institutions at risk. Most recently, critics have focused on López Obrador’s proposal to defund the National Electoral Institute that was created in an effort to clean up the electoral process in Mexico, which has seen its share of fraud. 

AMLO says that he wants to avoid expenses and the duplication of functions and claims that in its first year, the proposal will save up to $271 million in government expenses. But it is also well known that in 2006, AMLO lost the presidential election by a very small margin, and has since targeted the organization, accusing it of perpetrating fraud.

Last week, this proposal — known as “Plan B” — passed by a margin of 18 votes, though it will likely face a challenge before the Mexican Supreme Court. On February 26, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans took to the historic center of Mexico City to protest AMLO’s Plan B, members of Morena Committees staged their own counter-protests across the U.S. Waving Mexican and American flags, from Placita Olvera and Huntington Park in California to Times Square and Brooklyn in New York City, hundreds of Mexicans once again rallied to support the president. 

Plan B also purports to expand voting access to Mexicans living abroad, allowing them to vote with a passport and a consular ID, in addition to their voting card. But it also will bring big cuts to the electoral watchdog’s budget and will remove 85% of its workforce. Critics worry that the elections will no longer be as supervised or safeguarded and that even basic voting services (like staffing at polling places) will be in short supply. Some view the electoral Plan B as a blow to Mexico’s fragile democracy. 

“[Plan B] is not about access, it is a means of meddling with [the National Electoral Institute’s] powers and weakening it as an institution,” said Dr. Rafael Fernández de Castro, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. According to Fernández de Castro, the Mexican vote abroad has never determined an election and there is reason to believe that it won’t for many years. But now, some think otherwise.

Voting for Mexico, from the US

The number of Mexican individuals who are eligible to vote in the U.S. has doubled since 2005, and it’s a community that political parties in Mexico appear eager to tap into during the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. 

“Establishing the right to vote for Mexicans who left Mexico for any reason was extremely important,” said Claudia Zavala, an electoral councilwoman for the National Electoral Institute. “As Mexicans, we do not lose these rights regardless of where we are.”

Between the 1980s and 2007, the number of Mexicans living in the U.S. increased from 2.7 to 11.9 million people, though that figure has since plateaued to a little over 10 million. Today, nearly 10% of the Mexican population lives in the United States. But for most of that period, Mexicans living abroad were sidelined from politics altogether and unable to vote in federal or local elections, until 2005.

Today, only 2% of the foreign population holds voter identification cards. Less than 1% participated in the elections of 2018, according to a recent study co-authored by political scientist and former National Electoral Institute staffer Andrés Besserer Rayas. As of 2015, Mexicans can claim voting IDs in Mexican consulates at no cost. But even as officials have removed barriers to casting a ballot, for example by expanding Mexicans’ ability to vote online and by mail, participation remains low.

“There is very little information about partisan identity in the Mexican diaspora in the United States,” Besserer said, and, among migrants, there is a general distrust of authority figures. Mexican political parties and their candidates are also prohibited, by law, from campaigning abroad.

This has not stopped individual parties or presidential hopefuls from traveling to the U.S. to meet with Mexican migrants or from bolstering the creation of political affinity groups abroad, especially when elections are on the horizon.

In the late 1980s, presidential candidate Cuahtemoc Cárdenas of the Democratic Revolutionary Party famously visited migrant communities in Los Angeles. Vicente Fox, candidate for the National Action Party whose victory ended the 80-year single-party rule in Mexico in 2000, praised migrants as the “heroes of Mexico” and promised them the vote.

Earlier this month, Ricardo Anaya, the presidential hopeful for the conservative National Action Party, visited Dallas, Texas to inaugurate his party’s first “Committee for Migrant Action,” along with the party’s president, Marko Cortés. They told a small crowd that they hoped to visit other states in the near future.

AMLO’s Morena party has proven increasingly popular among the diaspora living outside of Mexico. Voting registration figures for Mexicans abroad have almost quadrupled, from just over  40,000 voters in 2006 — when AMLO first ran for president, unsuccessfully — to over 180,000 in 2018 when he was elected. In 2006, he only won 34% of the foreign vote. In 2018, that number spiked to 64%. 

Now, there are dozens of groups sympathetic to Morena in the United States, especially in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego. But Morena New York Committee 1 tops them all, boasting the largest digital footprint with a quarter-million followers on Facebook. The committee maintains a formidable presence online and broadcasts live events on its Facebook page.

‘We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries’

Since AMLO’s presidential victory in 2018, members of Morena New York Committee 1 have met regularly across New York City boroughs to celebrate new reforms or stage pro-AMLO demonstrations in parallel to events held in Mexico. Morena committees are also conceived as organizations to further voters’ political literacy. In the past year, Morena created the National Institute for Political Formation, an in-person and virtual academy that says it aims to provide a civic education to Mexicans everywhere. Course offerings include a primer on geopolitics, neoliberalism and the limits of capitalism. The Institute has held town halls in cities such as San Diego, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

According to Alina Duarte, who leads the Institute’s efforts abroad, Mexican citizens living in the U.S. have been celebrated for their financial contributions to the country but have otherwise been politically sidelined. In 2022, Mexican migrants living in the U.S. sent back $58 million in remittances, a number that is often invoked by AMLO during his daily press briefings. 

“Our migrant communities have this double responsibility. Not only do they sustain two nations economically, but they also play a fundamental role in the politics of both,” said Carlos Castillo, a former Morena representative from Mexico City who attended a meeting of the Institute in New York City last November.

To some, there is reason to believe that Mexicans living in the U.S. can set the political agenda for two countries at once. In recent years, several non-partisan groups have formed a bridge between organizers and bi-national institutions, including Fuerza Migrante, a bi-national organization based in New York.

“We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries — it is simply a matter of organizing,” said Avelino Meza, the director of Fuerza Migrante. 

Many of these organizations have helped to enact legislation that pushes for greater representation of immigrant Mexican communities in the Mexican government. In 2021, Mexico’s electoral court introduced the migrant representative whose main function is to represent individuals from Mexico living abroad. Morena has three sitting representatives. Ironically, those living abroad were not able to vote for any of them.

Though new measures have been introduced to encourage migrant participation, such as setting up physical voting booths in places like Dallas for upcoming state elections, some claim these actions are insufficient. And with Plan B enacted, some processes intended to ensure the integrity of elections may falter or be eliminated altogether.
But Morena supporters are hopeful. A poll conducted in November 2022 reveals that the president’s party is favored to win in 2024. “There is a historical debt owed to Mexican migrants, which the electoral reform barely begins to address,” said Alina Duarte of the National Institute for Political Formation. “But there is reason to believe that the migrant vote in 2024 will be historic.”

With reporting assistance from Gustavo García.

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“I will thank him profusely,” Finkel said. “He was the one that prompted me to write this book.”

That GRU agent had posed as a student who Finkel taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. While Finkel had always known that there could be spies at a place like SAIS, last year’s discovery of his student’s real identity as a Russian military intelligence service agent was devastating. Finkel had written the undercover agent a letter of recommendation to the International Criminal Court, where he was seeking an internship with the group that is now investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine. 

“You want to use me to know how Russian genocide is being investigated? That’s how I fight back,” Finkel said, referring to the book he is writing that will examine the origins of genocide in the current war.

A year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has triggered a reckoning at universities in the West over how Russia, the Soviet period and the wider region has been presented and taught across a range of subjects. It has raised complex questions about the outsized role Russia has played, how imperialism, colonialism and histories of violence have, or have not, been addressed and which perspectives and readings have been privileged.

I spoke with 17 scholars to understand the debates raging across academic forums and online publications (and even summarized through memes) that show no signs of letting up. At their roots is the question of whether the university departments need to undergo decolonization, a term that means different things to different people.

The academic debates are sensitive and emotional, especially for many with personal connections to the region. The stakes include what classes and languages are taught, who receives tenure, the names of departments (East European? Eurasian? Slavic? Russian Studies?) and even what photos are posted on departmental websites (should a picture of the Kremlin remain?).

At its broadest, decolonizing means removing Russia from the center of study and instead centering other nations and regions, said Oxana Shevel, an associate professor at Tufts University. Part of the difficulty is that there is no one way to do this or a consensus among scholars on what that should involve. Some scholars argue that they are already taking a critical approach, for example by teaching the violence of the Soviet period, she added.

This questioning of a Russia-centric narrative had been happening before the war in more advanced courses and among scholars, but the average undergraduate student, Shevel argues, doesn’t come away with this perspective and typically doesn’t know much about Ukraine or Central Asia.

For Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University who has written numerous books about Ukraine, decolonization is an imperfect term. “When I’m thinking about Russian history, it’s not about decolonizing per say,” he said. “It’s about de-imperializing Russian studies.” He adds that Russian historiography was never critiqued through the lens of empire like French or British history have been.

The current war started with an imperial argument from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are the same people — a view Plokhy says was held by some of the scholars who pioneered the writing of Russian history in the U.S. nearly 100 years ago.

And while the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to more scholarship on other countries in the region, like those in Central Asia, it hasn’t been enough, he argues. “We are behind as a field in that sense,” Plokhy said.

The questions scholars now ask themselves include whether Russia has received too much attention and emphasis, whether its empire-building has been examined enough and whether countries that have been dominated, occupied and colonized by Russia have been incorporated enough into scholarship, said Maria Popova. Popova is an associate professor at McGill University who is currently co-writing a book about the roots of the ongoing war with Oxana Shevel at Tufts.

Popova says there was a tendency prior to the 2022 invasion to dismiss perspectives from the Baltic states or Ukraine as “Russophobic” or distorted by historical experience. “The debate right now is about how to reincorporate or how to extend the research and scholarship into Russia as an imperial actor in the neighborhood,” she said.

Following the February 2022 invasion, it became clear to Finkel he wouldn’t be able to teach his previous course on Russia and Eastern Europe — it would need an overhaul. So he decided to teach a new class about the war called “Russia and Ukraine in Peace and War.”

Finkel is fully onboard with asking different questions and looking at perspectives from outside of Moscow. But he’s not keen on using colonization as a proxy and worries that it could take agency away from countries. “Taken to an extreme, it will simplify the very complex role that Ukraine played in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union,” he said.

Pushback

Not all scholars think the decolonization debate is needed.

Alexander Hill, a professor of military history at the University of Calgary, believes that attempts to decolonize Russian history could “result in a re-writing of all Russian history from the perspective of the Russian state as ‘oppressor’ — something that doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the development of the Russian, or indeed any, empire and certainly doesn’t do justice to the development of the Soviet Union,” as he wrote in an email to me. He added: “I see a debate as particularly unnecessary where the current growing fashionableness of ‘decolonization’ in Russian history seems to be motivated by pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian political biases relating to the current war in Ukraine.”

Sean Pollock, a professor of history at Wright State University, says scholars have been studying non-Russian territories and places since the 18th century.

“I see a long tradition where others, I suppose, feel the need now to call for the decolonization of the field. And I think it’s crystal clear these calls are a reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said.

Pollock understands the emotional reactions in this moment but thinks it’s important to separate personal views from professional scholarship — a view he knows many will disagree with. He told me he thought twice before agreeing to an interview because he knows people will hear him differently than how he intends to be heard.

“In my area, which is the history of the Russian empire, the field has suffered from those who have brought strongly negative feelings about Russian imperial politics to the study of the subject. I think there are ways to dispassionately approach the imperial dimensions of Russian history, and I frankly feel that it is our professional responsibility as academics to try and do that,” he said.

He also worries that “countless non-Russians [who] played important roles as Russian empire builders” will be lost to history.

Others have argued that the problem of Russocentrism has been overstated and that calls for decolonization are a stalking horse for halting the study of the Russian language, politics, society and culture. Many scholars themselves are wondering if research projects they had planned in Russia will ever be able to take place.

Unsettled debate

“Nobody is canceling Russia,” said Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. “You need to rebalance and give presence and voice to others and continue looking at Russia, but without giving Russian history or culture a pass to the very many problematic aspects it had.”

Chernetsky argues that many Russian literary classics, from authors including Pushkin and Dostoevsky, were given a pass without properly interrogating the colonial, racist or prejudicial views they presented. At the same time, important figures in Ukrainian literature such as poet Taras Shevchenko were read by few outside of the Ukrainian community, he said.

Kristy Ironside, an assistant professor at McGill University, is now teaching the most students she ever had in a class, in both her introductory Russian history course and a Soviet history course, something she attributes to students wanting to understand what’s happening. “We’ve always been a pretty political field,” she said.

When she was hired, Ironside changed the titles of many courses and says she’s never taught Soviet history from the perspective of only Russia. She’s recently added readings from Christian Raffensperger and Serhii Plokhy to give students more context on Kyivan-Rus, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to the medieval state.

Ironside is open to the decolonization discussion and understands the sense of urgency many are feeling as a horrible war continues, but she doesn’t want the work of earlier scholars to be overlooked. “There has been a lot of scholarship that has been done on the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union and I don’t think in this race to decolonize the curriculum…that we should act like that didn’t happen,” she said.

Ironside expects the process and debates around issues such as department names to be messy. “I think there is going to be a lot of trial and error in the next several years,” she said.

For Alexander Motyl, a professor at Rutgers University, decolonization is something he’s been supportive of his entire career.

“All of this is music to my ears,” he said. “How far should it go? Well at a minimum, it needs to increase our collective understanding and appreciation of the various non-Russian nationalities within the Russian Federation and of course those inhabiting states on Russia’s border. They have been historically neglected.”

Motyl is among the academics who have been banned from setting foot in Russia. In November 2022, his name was added to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ list of sanctioned Americans — those who, according to the Russian government, have been accused of promoting a Russophobic campaign and supporting the regime in Kyiv.

“I’ve been waiting for that for years,” he said. “I feel vindicated.”

Motyl expects to see a growing number of courses on non-Russia topics and shifting research agendas for up-and-coming scholars. “I’m not surprised people are resistant. It requires admitting guilt and no one wants to do that. And it requires changing your entire paradigm,” he said, adding it could take as long as 15 years to see a tangible change.

“Academics are being asked and being forced to make a choice,” Motyl said. “When you see a genocide and total war taking place, it’s arguably unethical and immoral not to express some criticism. It’s easier in that sense for Ukrainian specialists. It’s hard for Russian specialists, but they need to do it and not pretend it’s not an issue. This is what happens when you have big crises that impinge on your academic reality.”

Susan Smith-Peter, a professor of Russian history at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, attended the Ukraine Action Summit in Washington D.C. in September 2022. She believes that she was the only Russian historian who attended the event. “I don’t think it’s anti-Russian to want a better Russia or anti-Russian to think the current Russia we have is not the only Russia,” she said.

In many ways, the debates are just getting started. When well over 1,000 scholars gather at the end of 2023 at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, decolonization will be the year’s theme.

Russia’s full-scale invasion brought “long-simmering issues of Russocentrism in the region and in our fields of study” to the forefront, said Juliet Johnson, a professor of political science at McGill University and the president of ASEEES. She chose the theme.

But there are already concerns that all the talk around decolonization won’t lead to any meaningful changes.

“In my view, the changes have so far been largely cosmetic and the field is only waiting to return to business as usual,” said Oleh Kotsyuba, the manager of publications at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Because the conversations around decolonization are time consuming and onerous, John Vsetecka, a PhD candidate in the history department of Michigan State University, fears they could fade or even cause bigger divides between scholars, the longer the war goes on. 

“I’m worried that this decolonization moment for Ukraine and understanding what Ukraine is in the world is a moment and not something that’s lasting,” he said, adding that while the debates have been happening for longer than he’s been alive, he’s not sure how much they’ve been listened to previously.

Vsetecka is on the academic job market. He’ll defend his dissertation, on the aftermath of the 1932-33 Holodomor and the 1946-47 post-war famine in Ukraine, later this year. It’s a topic he says could be seen as political.

“The war in some senses is a litmus test for the job market,” he said. “How seriously will they take me?”

The post The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in universities appeared first on Coda Story.

“Something shady is going on,” said the lawyer at one point.

Little about the atmosphere indicated the stakes: $11 billion, the fate of Nigeria’s economy and a decision that could legitimize the practice of assigning moral responsibility for one country’s corruption inside the courtroom of an entirely different country.

The court case originated in Nigeria in 2008, when the nation’s president at the time, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, decided to end gas flaring in the Niger Delta. Gas flaring involves the burning of natural gas associated with oil extraction and was responsible for heavily polluting communities in the region. Instead, Yar’Adua instituted a policy of channeling the gas into salvaging Nigeria’s perennially ailing electricity sector.

P&ID, a firm registered in the British Virgin Islands and controlled by two Irish nationals with no experience in the oil sector, a skeletal staff and no website, approached the Nigerian government with an unsolicited proposal to refine the wet gas released when extracting oil. According to an agreement signed in January 2010, the Nigerian government would transfer gas for 20 years to a facility which was to be built by P&ID. The company would refine the gas for Nigeria for free. Nigeria would use the gas for power generation and P&ID would make a profit by selling the by-products on the international market.

But neither Nigeria nor P&ID laid a single brick toward fulfilling their contractual obligations, resulting in a lengthy legal tussle that has divided opinion about where responsibility lies when foreign businesses engage in shady deals with former government officials in developing countries. The resulting case shines a spotlight on an international system that can be seen to favor Western companies over poorer nations.

A London tribunal in 2017 found Nigeria guilty of a breach of contract and awarded P&ID $6.6 billion as compensation for what could have been its profit if the deal had materialized. Nigeria refused to comply with the judgment. With interest, the payout ballooned to $11 billion, which amounts to one-third of Nigeria’s foreign reserves, or 10 times its current health budget.

The devastating potential liability that the lawsuit imposes on Nigerian citizens is not widely known by the public. But there is a generally held consensus among Nigerian experts and academics that the country is the victim and that P&ID was in cahoots with corrupt government officials to fleece the country’s resources.

“It is a scam, from the onset, the whole transaction from the beginning was enmeshed in an unclear situation which could be attributed to corrupt practices by both parties,” said Chima Williams, the executive director of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

Nigeria’s central allegation in the case is that the initial contract was always a con in which neither party would perform their side of the bargain and then a sham arbitration would be held, according to Helen Taylor, a legal researcher at Spotlight on Corruption. Nigeria has insisted that P&ID officials — Michael Quinn, who is now deceased, and Brendan Cahill — deliberately worked with officials to defraud Nigeria and bribed the country’s legal representative who negotiated the contract and then again during the arbitration process.

“It is obvious that the so-called contract, coming from the background that the company lacks the profile, the experience, the pedigree even to establish such a kind of business transaction shows there is more than meets the eye in the whole transaction,” said Olarenwaju Suraju, the chairman of the Lagos-based Human and Environmental Development Agency.

In a 2020 U.K. High Court ruling granting the Nigerian government the opportunity to challenge the arbitration case, the judge, Sir Ross Cranston, said that there was strong evidence the contract was obtained through bribes as part of a scheme to defraud Nigeria.

Questions swirl around how a business deal that was supposed to revolutionize Nigeria’s energy sector became a threat to the stability of Africa’s biggest economy. According to a detailed 2019 Bloomberg story, Quinn had been involved in numerous failed contracts bearing a resemblance with the P&ID contract.

Quinn circulated among top-ranking military officials in Nigeria including Theophilus Danjuma, Nigeria’s former chief of army staff, and former Nigerian presidents Yar’Adua and Olusegun Obasanjo.

Through these connections, Quinn won a contract in 2001 worth tens of millions of dollars to upgrade British tanks for the Nigerian army, but the parts were never delivered. Almost a decade later, Quinn was involved in a 5-million-dollar contract to repair jets and aircraft for the Nigerian Airforce. The Nigerian Airforce reneged on the deal, and Quinn, who by then had become partners with Cahill, took the case to a Nigerian arbitration court. They lost.

In the P&ID contract, the seat of arbitration was the United Kingdom.

“Anti-corruption campaigners have long warned that courts and international arbitration tribunals in the U.K. and elsewhere are being used by criminals to launder money,” said Nick Hildyard, the founder and director of the Corner House, an advocacy group focusing on human rights and the environment. “This is achieved through seeking court orders that monies are due on the fake contract,” he said.

The idea that the fate of a huge chunk of the Nigerian economy can be decided in a Western court is seen by many in the Nigerian government as a legacy of colonialism. Outside Nigeria, experts say the case is less an extension of colonialism but instead points to culpability among those same Nigerian government officials.

Everyday Nigerians and business people understand that the case “isn’t about colonial legacy but about Nigerian officials and all their kleptocratic inklings,” said Matthew Page, an expert on Nigeria at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London.

And for Nigerian analysts and academics, it is a classic case of transnational businesses having too much sway in developing countries.

“This is the kind of scheme by some of these companies, that still operate with their colonial imperial mentality, to sign contracts with many of the developing countries and partners when they are very much aware that their process of contract agreement is actually a product of fraudulent concoction,” said Suraju of the Human and Environmental Development Agency.

Nnimmo Bassey, the former executive director of Environmental Rights Action, is in agreement. “Transnational corporations are quickly assuming imperial powers and actively procure rules that favor them against nations,” he said.

In 2016, Argentina was forced to pay out over $4 billion to a group of hedge funds following a 14-year battle — which included the seizing of an Argentine military ship in Ghana — over a debt the country had defaulted on in 2001 during a disastrous depression. Argentina’s hand was finally forced when a U.S. judge blocked the country from paying other creditors until the hedge funds had been paid. The case was an example of the immense pressure that can be brought to bear on governments dependent on having unfettered access to the global financial system.

Reports that the VR Capital Group, a private equity firm specializing in distressed assets whose subsidiary bought a 25% stake in P&ID following their arbitration win in 2017, might go down this route by seizing Nigeria’s assets abroad has rattled Nigerian government officials.

International investment agreements are “highly problematic” because they strip “national governments of sovereignty and effectively give investors the upper hand,” said Hildyard of Corner House.

The Nigeria case is less about corruption in Nigeria and more about the U.K. legal system, said Taylor from Spotlight on Corruption. “This was an arbitration held in London, involving London-based lawyers, and it’s the legitimacy of that system which was allegedly abused to cover up and give a veneer of legal legitimacy to what is alleged to be a corrupt deal,” she said.

In 2020, the U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel urged Nigeria to pay P&ID, infuriating Nigerian analysts. “I find continuities between this sham contract and previous sham protectorate contracts that were not only signed under dubious circumstances but also that exploited the significant power disparity and vulnerability of leadership unaccountability and poor oversight,” said Akin Oyewale, an assistant professor of international politics at the University of Warwick.

As Nigeria prepares for a crucial presidential election this month, the prospect of a debilitating payout will be a major issue to contend with. The next president is set to inherit a battered economy struggling with rising inflation, a heavily depreciating currency and an inability to service national budgets. But the posture that Nigeria is a victim of past corruption is also a message that is very well received by business people in the country.

The trial will end in March 2023 and it will be months before a decision is made. If the judge rules in favor of P&ID, it will no doubt provoke outrage within Nigeria. Anger is unlikely to deter P&ID and its backers, who have been dogged in their pursuit of a lucrative judgment. The case has garnered little interest in the U.K., which does not bode well for anyone seeking to reform the country’s legal system that they see as facilitating the exploitation of poorer countries.

Correction: an earlier version of this story stated the court will come to a decision by March 2023. It is unknown when a decision will be made.

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