We were meeting at offices owned by the Yesevi Alperenler Association, a nationalist Islamist organization run by Mican, who also leads a coalition of conservative Turkish nongovernmental organizations. Dressed in a blue suit and shirt, Mican fidgeted with his pen as we talked. The 41-year-old was affable, but was eager to get to his next task.

“There was a belly dancer in front of a mosque, there were naked statues where you can see their body details, and symbols of satanism,” Mican told me. He was describing the works featured in an exhibition at ArtIstanbul Feshane, a cultural center in Istanbul’s Eyup neighborhood. In Mican’s view, the show was disrespectful of Islam and Turkey, and an attempt at spreading LGBTQ “propaganda.” “The owners of the artwork and the organizer of the exhibition will be punished,” he said.

Titled “Starting from the Middle,” the exhibition featured a diverse set of works by 300 artists and was organized by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, whose president is Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a member of the CHP, the secular left-wing party that represents Turkey’s main opposition party. Pieces included photographs of the Gezi Park protests in 2013 against the government’s creeping authoritarianism; a video that explores a massacre of Alevi Kurds by the Turkish army in the 1930s; and a text accompanying an installation that talks about the artist’s struggles as an LGBTQ person in Turkey.

Although the show had support from CHP-aligned public officials, other elements in Istanbul’s city government saw it differently. Last month, prosecutors in Istanbul launched an investigation into the organizers of the exhibition, which ended of its own volition in late September, on allegations of “fomenting enmity and hatred among the public or insulting them” under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code. The law has frequently been used to criminalize blasphemy or retaliate against critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Previous

Next

But the case against the art show didn’t exactly start with Turkish authorities. A few days after the opening, a headline in the state-aligned newspaper Sabah read: “Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality supports LGBT perversion! Outraged exhibition in Feshane: It should be closed immediately.”

The next day, Mican led a group protest outside the exhibition with people chanting, “We don’t want perversion in our neighborhood.” ArtIstanbul Feshane is situated in the Eyup neighborhood of Istanbul, a symbolic area to Muslims in Turkey as it is home to the burial site of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad.

In early July, after they attended one of Mican’s speeches about the event, a group of men tried to break through a line of police officers in an effort to vandalize the space. Mican says he did not encourage the violence, but also said that if the exhibition had not been held in such a religious area, the reaction would have been more muted.

“The police struggled to hold the people when I was reading the statement, they had to get 10 times more security,” Mican said. “If they hadn’t done it in the Eyup neighborhood we wouldn’t see that much reaction, so many people wouldn’t even know about it. I didn’t encourage the people to do that, but the people were angry and they gave a reaction.”

And now prosecutors have launched their investigation, following a criminal complaint against the exhibition, filed by Mican’s organization. 

None of this came as a shock to the show’s curators or to the artists involved. “Every time we want to open an exhibition, especially in a conservative area, we open it with the fear of being attacked,” said Okyanus Cagri Camci, a transgender woman and interdisciplinary artist whose work was featured in the show.

For artists like Camci, the prosecution’s investigation is part of an increasingly familiar pattern, in which criticism from conservative groups and the state-aligned media are followed by legal repercussions. 

Figures like Mican appear to have increased their influence on prominent political leaders in Turkey, drawing them down a more conservative path than they walked in the past. Grappling with a steep economic downturn and public frustration with the government’s slow response to the devastating earthquakes that hit southeast Turkey in February, Erdogan and his allies have seized the opportunity to make the LGBTQ community a scapegoat, using similar language to a burgeoning global anti-LGBTQ rights movement.

This newer shade of Erdogan and his AKP party was on full display during presidential and parliamentary elections in May, when Erdogan ramped up attacks on the LGBTQ community to rally support among his right-wing and religiously conservative base. “The family institution of this nation is strong, there will be no LGBT people in this nation,” said Erdogan at a rally in April. Erdogan and his allies are also seeking to turn rhetoric into legislative changes, starting with an amendment to the constitution that would define marriage as solely between a man and woman. 

Suleyman Soylu, deputy leader of the AKP and a former interior minister, made the erroneous claim to a group of NGOs in April that the LGBTQ community “also includes the marriage of animals and humans.” He accused the community of being under the control of Europe and the U.S., who “want a single type of human model where they follow a single universal religion, are genderless, and no one is in the family structure.” The tone and messaging in these speeches echoed the language of a swelling global movement that claims Western liberals are staging an assault on traditional family structures by imposing homosexuality and transgenderism on societies across the world. This movement has anchors in Russia, Hungary and the U.S. and is gaining a foothold in countries around the world, including, it seems, in Turkey. Mican confirmed to me that his organization has connections with groups in Russia, Hungary and Serbia — another place where LGBTQ people are facing increased hostility.

It wasn’t always like this under Erdogan, who has been president of Turkey since 2014, and served as prime minister for more than a decade prior to that. Mican lamented that as recently as two years ago, Erdogan was unwilling to talk about LGBTQ issues in the same way as he is now.

Kubra Uzun, a singer and DJ who is non-binary, has observed the same evolution, albeit from a different vantage point. Life under Erdogan was not always as bad as it is now, they said. But Uzun told me that in recent years, they’ve felt increasingly unsafe. “If I’m not playing or if I’m not having anything outside to do, like if I’m not shopping, I don’t go out anymore,” they said. “I mostly stay at home and read and listen to music.”

When we met at their home in late September, there was a small group of friends sitting in their kitchen. One was a trans woman who Uzun was hosting after she fled her home city in part because she feared for her safety. The community refers to Uzun as a mother, but they do not like being called that. “I am non-binary and mothering feels binary to me,” they told me.

Lying on the sofa and puffing on a cigarette, Uzun recounted a “golden period” in Turkey in the early 2000s, when there were fewer restrictions. 

“It was like you were in London clubbing,” they said. “You can walk freely, you can wear whatever you want.” But those times are long gone.

Although the tides began to turn following an economic recession in 2009, it was after the Gezi Park protests of 2013 that people like Uzun saw a real shift. At that time, what began as a vocal rejection of plans to build a shopping mall in a public park in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square ultimately drew hundreds of thousands of Turkish people to take a public stand against what they saw as the AKP’s erosion of secularism in Turkey and the dismantling of key democratic institutions, namely press freedom. It became a seminal moment in deepening the divide between liberal secular Turks and Islamist conservative supporters of Erdogan. 

Three years later, Turkey witnessed a failed coup attempt that was carried out by military personnel, but which Erdogan has long insisted was orchestrated by the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. In the ensuing period, Erdogan launched a major clampdown on Turkish society, imprisoning thousands of critics of the government that he and his allies accused of being stooges of the West seeking to undermine Turkey. By 2020, nearly 100,000 people had been jailed pending trial for alleged links to the Gulen movement. From Kurds to followers of Gulen and now, increasingly, gay and trans people, Erdogan has framed a variety of groups as enemies of the state, allowing him to cast out critics while boosting his popularity among his political base. He has passed sweeping legislative and constitutional changes that curtail freedom of expression, cementing his hold on power.

Along the way, Mican and other leading conservative figures have pushed politicians to harden their stance on the issue. Prior to Istanbul’s Pride march in 2016, Mican told state officials he and his organization would intervene if the event went ahead. Mican was later fined for making threatening remarks, but the march was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office after they cited security concerns and the need to protect public order.

For the ninth consecutive year, the Istanbul pride march was banned in June, with the AKP governor of Istanbul saying it posed a threat to family institutions. Police clad in riot gear detained 113 people who marched despite the restrictions.

The more Erdogan focuses on homosexuality and transgenderism, the more other parties have started putting anti-LGBTQ policies into their agendas. Mican himself underlined this point in our conversation. The Vatan Party, a nationalist secular party that has supported Erdogan, in the past used protection from the threat of terrorism as a central tenet of its platform. Now it has shifted to the so-called threat of the “LGBTQ agenda.”

Even the CHP and other opposition parties thus far have remained quiet on discrimination against the LGBTQ community, particularly around the election period, said Suay Ergin-Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international organization that promotes freedom of expression. When I asked Uzun about whether they would have felt better if the CHP had won instead of Erdogan, they responded, “Same shit, different color.”

Uzun fears that Turkey is turning into Russia, where the state frequently equates homosexuality with pedophilia and has passed a series of anti-LGBTQ laws over the past decade. Erdogan further solidified his position on gay and trans rights on the global stage in 2021, when he pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty opposing violence against women, after religious conservative groups criticized the law, arguing that it was degrading family values and wrongly advocating for the rights of the LGBTQ community. The convention has come under attack from leaders in several Eastern European countries, who argue that the document’s definition of gender is a way to dismantle traditional distinctions between men and women and a way to “normalize” homosexuality.

Another state that has notably hit the brakes on accession to the convention is Hungary. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has also tried to push through a ban on the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. The law is currently being challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state. 

Populist leaders have positioned the family as something sacrosanct and used the idea that it is being destroyed by Western liberals as a way into power, said Wendy Via, president of the U.S.-based Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

Right-wing leaders in the U.S. and Europe have framed LGBTQ rights as an agenda, personifying the concept as an enemy entity that is taking over. But Via argues the real entity that is taking over is a vast, well-resourced network of organizations with anti-LGBTQ and anti-woman agendas.

In Turkey, that network consists of dozens of conservative NGOs, who on September 17 held a large rally called the “Big Family Gathering” in the Eminonu area of Istanbul, for which Mican was one of the key organizers.

At the gathering, conservatively dressed mothers and their children held signs that read “Stop Pedophilia” and milled about while speaker after speaker decried Western imperialism before a crowd estimated by organizers to number in the thousands. Part way through the rally, Alexander Dugin, the far-right Russian political philosopher with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared on a large screen and gave the crowd a speech about the need to fight global liberalism. It is “the fight of all normal people,” he told the crowd, “to save the normal relations between sexes, to save the family, to save the dignity of the human being.”

At the end of the rally, sitting on a park bench as people bustled around us clearing away equipment, I spoke to two men in their 20s, Kayahan Cetin and Yunus Emre Ozgun. They lead Turkiye Genclik Birligi, a youth organization closely associated with the pro-Russia Vatan Party. Cetin spoke in Turkish and Ozgun helped interpret into English, sometimes chiming in himself.

The pair were proud to note their connections with Dugin and Putin’s United Russia party. Cetin and his group are associated with Vatan, but they also identify as Kemalists, a secular ideology that seeks to follow the principles of the Turkish Republic’s founder Kemal Ataturk. This means they may not always see eye to eye with the Islamist right who dominate the anti-LGBTQ movement in Turkey. But they share the common belief that LGBTQ rights present an existential threat to Turkish society and that they are an agenda being imposed by the West.

Cetin is trying to push legislation that would crack down on what they call “LGBTQ propaganda and institutions” and pointed to similar laws on the books in Russia, Hungary and China. Cetin says he has no problem with people’s individual “choice” to be gay, but wants parliament to place restrictions on organizations who are using their platforms to support LGBTQ rights through the media, including streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus. These kinds of cultural interventions are already underway — Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council in July fined Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Mubi among other streaming platforms, accusing them of depicting homosexual relationships that are “contrary to social and cultural values and the Turkish family structure.”

With local elections in March 2024, the LGBTQ community fears Erdogan’s attacks on them will be amplified further. The government is seeking to implement laws that will ban content seen to promote LGBTQ identities in schools, a blow to younger gay and transgender people already struggling in the current environment. Last month the national education minister, Yusuf Tekin, said that authorities must fight homosexuality and that a new optional course called “The Family in Turkish Society” had been added to the school curriculum.

Two days after our first meeting, I met Uzun again at a club in the heart of Istanbul’s tourist district. There was a power cut soon after I arrived. When the lights came back on again, Uzun was quick to get back on the dancefloor. The room filled with a red glow as queer Istanbulites danced freely, the jubilant scene in stark contrast to the seismic shifts occurring beyond the walls beaded in sweat.

At the end of the night I had to wait my turn to say goodbye to Uzun. I asked them one final question about why Istanbul’s queer scene seemed to be thriving despite all the restrictions and threats against it. Uzun shouted over the music, “Text me your question.” They texted me their response the next morning: “RESISTANCE.”

But this isn’t the whole story. It is hard to resist when you fear being attacked on any street corner. Uzun told me that over the course of the past year, more than 50 of their friends had left Turkey. And they may be next. If their visa application is accepted, Uzun will leave for London.

The post How the global anti-LGBTQ movement found a home in Turkey appeared first on Coda Story.

They are in a shrinking minority. In Italy today, 3 in 10 gynecologists provide abortion care. The rest refuse on the grounds of “conscientious objection.” And in numerous hospital systems around Italy, it’s impossible to find a single gynecologist willing to provide an abortion.

“If your boss is an objector, your working life will be difficult. He might not lay it out in black and white, but he’ll let you know he won’t make it any easier if you continue giving abortions,” said Silvana Agatone, a gynecologist in Rome who leads the Free Italian Gynecologists’ Association, a group dedicated to protecting abortion rights in Italy. “It’s psychologically taxing.”

The group chat has become a refuge where doctors can exchange advice about how to keep doing their work and find some support too. This is critical for doctors like Agatone, who are facing a new wave of anti-abortion sentiment brought on by Italy’s ruling government and by forces across the Atlantic.

“You’re given the hardest shifts, you’re sent continuous letters being reprimanded for this, that or the other. You’re ground down in an environment where you’re persecuted every day,” Agatone told me.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1978, joining a global wave of reforms that followed the legalization of abortion in the U.S., Italy passed a law protecting a woman’s right to an abortion — and doctors’ rights to provide abortion care — in the first 90 days of pregnancy. While the law stipulates that doctors can refuse to provide an abortion on the grounds of conscientious objection, it also says that this should not limit women’s access to abortion care. 

But today, abortion access is harder and harder to come by. Catholic universities run many of Italy’s top hospitals — so the heads of gynecology units tend to oppose abortion, Agatone told me. In many cases, entire facilities don’t offer abortion care, due in part to their religious affiliation. Patients regularly come up against doctors who try to coerce them out of the decision or deny them access to abortion pills.

As the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has galvanized far-right, anti-abortion campaigns around the world, the mood among Italian gynecologists who carry out abortions has reached a new low.

“It worries me. It worries me a lot. This movement has touched everyone in different countries. It’s as if we’re having to start all over again to get our rights back,” said Agatone. “It feels like we’re on a roller coaster — we got our rights, now they’re being taken away, and now we have to fight to get them back.”

More and more of Italy’s doctors have declared themselves anti-abortion in recent years, as they’ve faced ever-increasing challenges to their work and their well-being. In the 1970s, 59% of doctors opted out of providing abortion care. But for the last decade, the number has hovered around 65%, with some regions seeing objector rates as high as 80%.

In September 2022, Italians voted in a new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who campaigned for years on a platform claiming to champion “family values.” She has made consistent pledges to raise Italy’s birth rate, warning voters that without intervention, the nation is “destined to disappear.”  

When she first took office, Meloni softened her stance, saying she had no intention of going after abortion rights. In an interview in March 2023, she pledged that the state would financially support women who might otherwise seek abortions so that they don’t “miss out on the joy of having a child.” But under Meloni, the joy she spoke of is not intended for everyone. The same month, the Italian government stopped the city of Milan from officially recognizing LGBTQ parents on birth registers, leaving these families in legal limbo. Milan was previously the only city in the country where LGBTQ families had full legal recognition. In other regions that had been moving toward a similar equal rights regime, Meloni’s government threatened legal action on the matter shortly after she came to power.

“Everything is linked to this movement that doesn’t want contraception, divorce or homosexuality,” said Agatone, who believes that the money and influence of these groups continue to be a top concern in Italy.

In some parts of Italy, abortion access is hanging on by a thread, with just one pro-choice gynecologist serving entire regions. Patients needing an abortion have to navigate a number of bureaucratic and practical obstacles before the 90-day deadline. They must observe a mandatory “cooling-off period” of seven days before undergoing the procedure. And some now have to make journeys of hundreds of miles before they can find a doctor willing to provide the care they need. For a person facing serious health repercussions from an unviable pregnancy, these obstacles are dangerous. It’s a system that Human Rights Watch described in 2020 as “labyrinthine” and “burdensome,” demonstrating “how the country’s outdated restrictions cause harm instead of providing protection.”

Agatone described how her colleagues would thwart her when she was trying to take care of her patients by refusing to give them the medication they needed or by putting women having abortions into labor and delivery units, where other women were giving birth. “I would try in every way to have them put in a different ward, and I’d have to fight with the staff,” she said.

Obstetricians and gynecologists in Europe only have to look at the United States to see what might come next. This January, anti-abortion activists firebombed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Illinois. And the U.S. is facing an acute shortage of OBGYN specialists, particularly in anti-abortion states, where the number of medical students pursuing gynecology residencies has plummeted since the reversal. 

“The fact that abortion has been overturned in America has made people think that they can’t be complacent about the right,” said Mara Clarke, the co-founder of Supporting Abortions for Everyone (SAFE), a European abortion charity she started in February 2023 to combat the attack on abortion rights in Europe. “When the right rises,” she said, referring to the political right, “women, children and LGTBQ people are the first targets.”

Italy — alongside other European states like Poland and Hungary — has long been a target for pan-Christian conservative movements that promote anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and lobby for a rollback of those rights in Europe. Often, the first step in their strategy is to limit access to abortion care with tactics like imposing waiting periods and restrictions on abortion medications. But the ultimate goal is to introduce a blanket ban, according to research by the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights.

Rather than banning abortion completely, the current strategy is “more a chipping away of rights,” said Irene Donadio of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, who spoke to me in a personal capacity.

For years, these networks and their myriad backers — including Russian oligarchs, Italian politicians, European aristocrats and American Christian conservatives — have made significant inroads. One network, Agenda Europe, is thought to have played a key role in influencing Poland’s abortion ban, while successfully lobbying against same-sex marriage during referendums in Croatia, Slovenia and Romania.

The “family values” movement reached a fever-pitch in Italy in 2019, when Verona played host to the World Congress of Families, the flagship event of the U.S.-based International Organization of the Family — a coalition of groups that promote anti-abortion and anti-LGTBQ agendas in the name of “affirming, celebrating and defending the natural family.” Among the speakers was Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League party, and Giorgia Meloni herself. In a speech at the event, Meloni warned of a world in which a woman is “forced to have an abortion because she sees no viable alternative” and added: “Is it right for a society to spend a lot more energy and resources on finding immediate, easy, quick ways to get rid of human life rather than on fostering it? Is that normal? Can you call that ‘civilization?’” She also spoke of her opposition to the use of surrogates by gay families, likening it to “snatching a puppy dog away from its mother.”

“In this cultural climate, which is becoming heavier and heavier, it’s becoming harder every day for young gynecologists to declare themselves non-objectors,” said Agatone, referring to the high number of OBGYN practitioners who opt out of providing abortion care. At 69, she sees pro-choice doctors like herself, who trained in the 1970s and 1980s, during an impassioned era of pro-choice activism, aging out of the system.

“I believe abortion access in this country could lapse,” said Agatone. “Because even if there’s a law protecting people’s rights to abortion, if no one’s there to do them, then that’s that.”

The post Italy’s pro-choice gynecologists reel from post-Roe shockwaves appeared first on Coda Story.

Bulchak’s case is not unique. On the day Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, another Catholic priest, Father Alexander Baran, posted a photo of the Ukrainian flag and the flag of the Belarusian opposition movement on social media. He was subsequently arrested, charged with “illegal picketing” and the “dissemination of extremist materials” and sentenced to 10 days in prison. Around the same time, Father Andrei Kevlich, another Belarusian Catholic priest, was detained and later fined for reposting content about the war from banned independent media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tightened the space for the Catholic Church and its priests in Belarus to criticize the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the clampdown on the Church began soon after the rigged presidential election in August 2020, which saw Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote, the Belarusian regime has taken advantage of the attention given to the war in Ukraine to gain an even greater hold over a key religious institution in Belarusian society. 

It has also proved to be an opportunity to end what the Belarusian government believes is a dangerous pocket of Western influence in a country that allows the Russian military to use its territory to wage its war on Ukraine.

For Catholics in Belarus, “the whole atmosphere has become one of fear,” said Natalia Vasilevich, a Belarusian theologian and human rights lawyer based in Germany. “Sermons are being watched, trust is even being tested inside some communities, even the social networks of priests are being checked. People cannot trust any structures anymore. They can only trust the relationships in front of them.”

Historically, the Belarusian Catholic Church has close ties to the Polish Catholic Church, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, helped to beef up the numbers of the Belarusian Catholic clergy. By working to sever the ties between these two Churches, Lukashenko believes he has exorcized a malign Western influence hanging over the country’s second-largest religious community.

If the Catholic clergy in Belarus was hoping that the Vatican would advocate for their right to free speech, they have been mistaken. In fact, Vatican diplomacy has seriously weakened the ability of the Catholic Church in Belarus to withstand the slings and arrows of Lukashenko’s government. Instead of defending its priests, the Vatican’s ecclesiastical diplomats have taken a conciliatory tone with the Belarusian regime, ensuring that the Church’s high-level influence is not diminished. It’s a move reminiscent of Ostpolitik, a Cold-War era strategy that saw the Vatican open communication channels with the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe.

“The role of the Vatican in Belarus has been to make the Catholic Church less visible as a protesting institution,” said Vasilevich, the Belarusian theologian. The justification for such a move, Vasilevich argues, is that the Vatican has seized an opportunity to become a bridge between Lukashenko and the West while foreign diplomats close their doors in response to Belarus’ alliance with Russia. 

In November 2022, nine months after the first Russian tank rolled across Belarus’ border to invade Ukraine, the Vatican’s ambassador to Belarus gave a speech to celebrate 30 years of relations between the Holy See and Belarus. He stated that the relationship between the two states “continues to be supplemented with new wonderful pages.” His speech came weeks after mass was banned in Minsk’s iconic Catholic Red Church, which was damaged in a mysterious fire that September. Later that year the same Vatican ambassador, Ante Jozic, told Belarusian state TV that Minsk could host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, a line also parroted by Lukashenko.

To Belarusian Catholics, no other example reflects the Vatican’s coziness with the Belarusian government than the case of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. After defending the rights of anti-government protesters in 2020, the widely respected cleric was denied entry to Belarus on his return from a ceremony in Poland. When he was eventually allowed to return to Minsk following an intervention from Pope Francis, Kondrusiewicz was forced to retire and replaced with a Belarusian bishop, Iosif Stanevsky, thought to be more sympathetic to the regime. In November 2022, Stanevsky gave a papal Order of St. Gregory to Alexander Zaitsev, a close ally of Lukashenko and businessman subject to EU sanctions. 

“Now there is no illusion among Belarusian Catholics about the Vatican’s stance. However, at the parish priest level, almost all Catholic priests are against the authorities,” said Aliaksei Lastouski, a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. The Vatican declined to comment for this article.

In response, Catholic priests in exile from Belarus have mobilized to counter the threats to Catholic priests who remain in the country. Father Viachaslau Barok, an exiled parish priest, sent a letter to Pope Francis that questioned the Vatican ambassador’s relationship with the Belarusian government and pleaded with the pontiff not to be swayed by the regime. “Everyone can see that by calling you ‘the best Pope,’ Lukashenko only seeks to hide behind the authority of St. Peter’s successor,” he wrote. 

It’s not only the Vatican. The Belarusian Orthodox Church, the largest religious denomination in the country, has also sought to placate the regime. After the 2020 presidential election, the leaders of the Orthodox Church were reported to have removed senior members known to be critical of Lukashenko. Since the full scale Ukraine invasion, it has transferred priests as punishment after they showed opposition to the war. This alliance between the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the state was on display when Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, visited Minsk last June to celebrate the 1,030th anniversary of Orthodoxy in Belarus, a visit that highlighted Moscow’s willingness to drag Belarus, a nation widely regarded as one of the most secular former Soviet states, into its religious sphere of influence. 

All the while Belarus’ Catholics are becoming less engaged with the Vatican and more frightened of their precarious position in the country. “The Vatican is no longer a pillar that you know will always be on your side,” said Vasilevich.

The post The Vatican is turning its back on Belarus’ Catholics appeared first on Coda Story.

As it turned out, it was murder. But this was no gangland killing, no drug deal gone sour or any other cinematic cliche. 

The bodies found in the car were those of two Muslim men, Nasir and Junaid, from the neighboring state of Rajasthan. Their families had reported both men as missing and, after their bodies had been found, alleged that they had been kidnapped and burned alive by activists from the militant Hindu supremacist group Bajrang Dal. One of the murdered men had been accused previously of so-called “cow smuggling.” 

In India, transporting cattle across state lines is restricted because, in several states, cattle slaughter is illegal. Many Hindus consider cows to be holy — symbolic of Mother Earth, of nature and its bounties. While cow slaughter is taboo in much of India, beef is still a part of the diet for many Indians, including Hindus. Much of this “beef” is water buffalo meat, and its export has made India one of the world’s largest beef-exporting countries alongside Brazil, Australia and the United States. 

But since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, a cottage industry of vigilantes has mushroomed, claiming that they are protecting cows from being transported for slaughter. These vigilantes, almost always Hindu, beat up, torture and even kill men, almost always Muslim, who they claim are cattle smugglers. Sometimes they film these actions for their followers on social media.

The violence of these cow protectors, gau rakshaks as they are called in Hindi, are a bloody reminder of India’s divisions under Modi. For all his talk of a resurgent India, an India defined by its world-beating economic growth, its geopolitical maturity and its superpower ambitions, Modi’s legacy might yet be tainted by the actions of militant Hindu groups.

Several men have been identified as suspects in the kidnapping and murder of Nasir and Junaid last week, though only one has been arrested. Chief among these suspects is Monu Manesar, a man widely reported to be a local Bajrang Dal ringleader. He remains at large. And while he has yet to speak to the police, he has protested his innocence through video messages posted on social media. Manesar is so popular on social media that he has received a YouTube Creator Award, the Silver Play Button, for amassing over 100,000 followers. (At the time of writing, he has over 200,000.)

And so influential is Manesar in the state of Haryana that at a local meeting attended by hundreds of villagers and right-wing activists, the Rajasthan police were openly threatened with violence if they dared to search for Manesar or speak to his family. The leader of one right-wing Hindu group said the “inhuman” behavior of the Rajasthan police — asking questions — “would not be tolerated.” 

These groups, including the Bajrang Dal in which Manesar is prominent, are not part of some ragtag fringe. They are the footsoldiers of the “Sangh parivar,” the broad family of right-wing organizations, which includes the Bharatiya Janata Party that forms India’s federal government led by Modi. 

According to one study, 97% of attacks connected to cow smuggling between 2010 to 2017 occurred once Modi came to power in 2014, and 24 of the 28 people killed in these attacks were Muslim. Another study finds that just four cow-related hate crimes were reported by the Indian media between 2010 and 2014, compared to 71 between 2015 and 2018. 

Human Rights Watch, in April 2017, called on the Indian authorities to “promptly investigate and prosecute self-appointed ‘cow protectors.’” These vigilantes, said HRW South Asia director, Meenakshi Ganguly, “driven by irresponsible populism are killing people and terrorizing minority communities.” In the Kolkata-based Telegraph newspaper, Indian academic and writer Mukul Kesavan observed acidly that the “cow is so totemic for the BJP that the murder of human beings in this animal’s cause makes responsible leaders resort to silence, deflection, denial, defensiveness or arguments in mitigation that would shame the moral sense of a three-year-old.”  

In June 2017, a young Muslim man was beaten and stabbed to death by a mob on a train. What began as a fight over seats descended into insults about “beef-eating,” said the young man’s brother, and then violence. Modi, as if shamed by the scrutiny of cow vigilantes — scrutiny that was going global and had the potential to embarrass a prime minister not yet halfway into his first five-year term — publicly denounced cow vigilantes. “Killing in the name of a cow is unacceptable,” Modi said. “We belong to a land of non-violence.” 

Just to be sure that questions about cow vigilante violence wouldn’t continue to crop up, the BJP simply stopped tracking hate crimes after 2017. As recently as last year, the BJP informed the parliament that the data “was unreliable,” which was why they had stopped collecting it.  

While Modi has gone on the record more than once to condemn cow vigilantes, the violence itself has not stopped. In fact, it could be argued that the authorities enable the violence. In 2021, the Haryana government appointed “special cow protection task force” teams, which were staffed by several vigilantes, including Monu Manesar. 

Since Manesar was named as a suspect in the murders of Nasir and Junaid, a couple of Indian newspapers and fact checking organizations have revealed just how connected he was not just to BJP officials in Haryana but to the top brass in Delhi. 

Asaduddin Owaisi, one of India’s few Muslim members of parliament — fewer than 5% of MPs in India are Muslim, though Muslims comprise about 15% of the population — told me that Haryana’s special task force gave “arbitrary powers to vigilante groups that circumvent the police and the rule of law.” He said the BJP wants to “create an atmosphere of fear and establish Muslims as anti-Hindu and anti-national, which benefits its politics.” 

Apoorvanand, a professor at Delhi University and prolific commentator on politics and culture, says that the special task force is an exercise in “parallel policing.” He argued that Modi’s previous condemnations of vigilante violence should be taken with a large pinch of salt because the BJP has “normalized a culture of impunity in which vigilantes like Manesar thrive.” What was once a crime, he told me, “is now posted on social media and treated as if it is in service of the greater good.”     

The links between cow protection vigilantes and the Haryana authorities are so tangled that, in the course of my reporting, I discovered that the car in which the Rajasthan police said Nasir and Junaid were abducted once belonged to the Haryana government. It is a car that has appeared in at least two videos posted on social media by cow vigilantes that show them assaulting people and pointing guns at them.

As I interviewed people, I learned that Manesar and his fellow cow protectors terrorized whole neighborhoods, all the while filming their high-speed car chases, their victims with bruised and swollen faces and their guns. Owaisi said more scrutiny should be directed at social media platforms that allow such footage to be posted. In one video Manesar posted to Instagram, men can be seen beating a Muslim ragpicker with bamboo sticks. These are the men, Manesar captioned his video, “who throw stones at our soldiers and Hindutva supporters.”

Last month, Manesar was involved in another suspicious death. He posted footage of three young Muslim men with facial injuries. Off camera, a man was aggressively asking for names. One of those men, Waris Khan, died hours later in hospital. His cousin told me that he believes the violent video was shot by the same gang of cow protection vigilantes who killed Nasir and Junaid. Manesar admitted that he shot the footage to the Indian press but denied beating the men who appear in the video. He had just happened upon some men who had been in an accident. The Haryana police, too, said the men had been in an accident.    

The Indian government is notorious for the volume of its requests to take down Tweets, often by verified journalists, for resorting to internet blackouts and for seeking to ban YouTube channels. Big Tech platforms usually comply with these demands. Strangely though, the ugly, brutal videos posted by Manesar and other vigilantes are rarely taken down, even though they violate all reasonable rules of conduct.

When I put the question to Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, they bargained for time, claiming to be “investigating the issue” and asking for “specific links/pages that you can share with us,” though links had been shared and the videos widely reported. YouTube did not respond to my numerous questions. “How can these companies be allowed to fund violence,” Owaisi, the member of parliament, asked. “How can they be giving silver buttons to people accused of lynching and mob violence?” 

It’s a question that, more importantly, should be put to the authorities, at both state and federal levels. Why are people still being killed in the name of cow protection on your watch?

UPDATE (2/28/23): After this story was published, YouTube reached out to me to say Monu Manesar has been “indefinitely suspended” from its “YouTube Partner Program,” which means he can no longer make money from the videos he posts. YouTube has also taken down nine videos from his channel for violating “Community Guidelines” and put age restrictions on two others. 

The post India’s ‘cow protectors’ are getting away with murder appeared first on Coda Story.

The Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have worked in lockstep to promote a conservative idea of “family values.” Russia has taken upon itself the role of principal opposition to the supposed excesses of Western progressives. Its soft power strategy, particularly evident since the start of its war in Ukraine, is to persuade much of the world that it is defending “traditional values” on the frontlines of the global culture wars. 

Kristina Stoeckl, a sociology professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, has spent years embedding herself in the transnational Christian conservative movement. It’s an alliance that spans borders and religions and is dedicated to protecting conservative values, a worldview that leads it to lobby and agitate against policies that protect women, the right to abortion and LGBTQ rights, among others. 

Co-authored with Dmitry Uzlaner, Stoeckl’s new open-access book, “The Moralist International,” examines how the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have built up international alliances and support for its version of Christian social conservatism, in part by emulating the strategies of international human rights organizations.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you explain what the moralist international movement is?

It’s a movement of transnational moral conservatives, often religious, that try to work against liberal institutions and international human rights movements, which they see as too heavily driven by progressive liberal goals. These moral conservative alliances are often rooted in different religious traditions, but you also now get right-wing actors that are hooking onto the movement. Like Italy’s Lega Nord, or Hungary’s Fidesz for example. 

In the book, you talk about the World Congress of Families, a United States-based coalition that promotes conservative Christian values around the world and historically has strong ties with Russia. Tell me a bit about embedding yourself in this movement. 

I’m a sociologist and I do empirical research and fieldwork, and being inside that conservative milieu for a long time — it’s tiring. It’s also challenging. What I’m trying to do is to reconstruct their meaning. I want to understand why they think what they think, why they say what they say, and not just dismiss things at face value as illogical lies or propaganda. 

Because for them, it makes sense. And as scholars, we should understand how they construct their world and their meaning. So that’s the spirit in which I approach that world. Now that we’ve published our book, I’m not sure if it will be possible to go back.

I attended World Congress of Families events in Tbilisi, Chisinau and Budapest. My sense from the research was that a lot of people come to this milieu or begin attending something like the Congress of Families because of a very specific set of grievances. Maybe, for example, someone is worried about abortion and just thinks it’s wrong or it shouldn’t happen. Interestingly, I came across other people, like environmentalists who just think the world is heading in the wrong direction. 

And what this moralist movement does is couch their grievance in a bigger story. 

So what is that bigger story? 

The international moralist worldview tells the whole story of the 20th century in a new way. It reframes ideas around the society we live in and the political divisions we face. It tells people that capitalism and communism have both been equally bad for family values because in both systems, women have to work. 

It talks about how rights pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity are useful to the capitalist system because confusing our identities means we can more easily be controlled as consumers. One layer of this worldview after another is introduced. And then a proposal for a new order of things is proclaimed. 

So for that person who is against abortion — maybe they’re not against gay marriage at first. But then this story is told to them, that gay marriage and abortion are both part of a bigger design that’s bad for families. And it becomes one big narrative all packaged up. And that’s threatening for democracies because it prevents solutions. 

What kind of solutions does a worldview like that prevent?

Take domestic violence for example. Domestic violence is a real problem, both in Russia and in many other countries. But it can’t be discussed properly in this movement. Because if you start talking about women’s rights, you also talk about gender, and then you talk about homosexuality, and then it all goes down a slippery slope. Real solutions to real problems are blocked by ideology.

In the book, you describe Russia as a “norm entrepreneur” for international moral conservatism. Can you describe what that means?

For a while, Russia wanted to become a leading actor in that moralist international world. And it did quite well at first. So in places like the U.N., Russia was very effective in pushing certain resolutions. For instance, the resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council that says that a better understanding of traditional values can contribute to the protection of human rights. That’s clearly an agenda to say, ‘Well, the West should stop pushing a certain definition of human rights, and other definitions are also legitimate.’ At one point, the Russian Orthodox Church started to become very attractive to conservative Christians outside of Russia. Especially for those who believe that laws against hate speech are threatening conservative Christians. Russia became a kind of hero when it passed its so-called gay propaganda laws. And so, Russia began to push for this conservative agenda abroad, by financing NGOs, and I think that for a while, transnational moral conservative alliances were thriving because Russia was leading the way.  

What’s been the response from this movement since the war?

So the Christian groups that used to engage directly with Russia — for example, the American Homeschool Legal Defense Association and [conservative activists] CitizenGO — I get the sense they’re trying to hide or obfuscate their relationship with Russia. But I don’t think they have changed their views.

What has been Russia’s goal in establishing and funding these transnational conservative alliances?

One goal is basically to disturb what they perceive as a Western-dominated liberal world order, made up of the United Nations, the international human rights regime and so on. They do that by sponsoring and funding NGOs in the West that criticize these institutions and say, ‘We don’t agree with the direction our society is taking.’ 

From the Kremlin’s side, I think the second goal — which hasn’t really worked out — has been to build more stable alliances. Perhaps, when they invaded Ukraine, they thought that sanctions wouldn’t happen and protests against the war wouldn’t happen because of the alliances they had built around traditional values. That has not really worked, but Hungary is an example of how the moralist alliance can effectively lead to the blocking of EU sanctions.

Now with the war in Ukraine, it’s all become a lot more difficult for Russia. But things might easily have gone another way. Think about Italy. The response to the invasion might have been different if, instead of the Brothers of Italy, Salvini or Berlusconi, who are much more pro-Putin, had won. Or if Marine le Pen had won in France. So for Russia, it was about weaving political alliances from the beginning. 

The post Russia spent years courting the Christian right. With the war in Ukraine, has the alliance faltered? appeared first on Coda Story.

The conference was a political lightning rod. As it began, protestors swept through the streets of Verona while conference attendees gave interviews outside the event hall. “Homosexuals must be treated, otherwise hell is waiting for them,” one woman told journalists outside the conference. 

Also at the conference, Giorgia Meloni, who was elected last month to be the new prime minister of Italy, gave a rousing speech to a standing ovation, railing against surrogacy for gay couples. “A puppy rightly cannot be ripped from the mother’s womb as soon as it’s born. So two rich men should not be able to buy a son from a desperate mother,” she told the enraptured crowd. 

Meloni’s election victory also swept in Fontana, 42, who was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament — the third most powerful position in Italian politics. But despite their history of overlapping values and a shared conference podium, the appointment came as a shock to people who have been watching Meloni’s rise to the pinnacle of government. 

“I was surprised,” said Marianna Griffini, a lecturer in European and international studies at King’s College London. She described how Fontana’s election as speaker is at odds with Meloni’s newfound moderation strategy. “As soon as she stepped into Parliament, into government, she basically went through a makeover of her discourse and image. The style was much less aggressive, much less emotional, much more moderate in tone.” 

In contrast to Meloni’s trajectory toward the middle, Fontana doesn’t mince his words, eschews compromise and calls for the complete repeal of Italy’s abortion law. This positions him as Meloni’s ideological standard-bearer, allowing her to sidestep political purity tests. In being her choice for parliamentary speaker, said Griffini, Fontana represents the new government’s core ideology, while Meloni wears a mask of moderation: “We have to see that she’s walking a tightrope between mainstreaming and radicalization.” 

Fontana, meanwhile, stakes out a hardline defense of “traditional family values,” a movement at the core of Meloni’s rise to power, which has been promoted and financed by a coalition of pan-European, U.S., and Russia-backed individuals and institutions for nearly a decade. A year before the Verona conference, Fontana, at the time Italy’s minister for families, made headlines when said he believed LGBTQ families “don’t exist.” Key figures in the traditional family values movement have coalesced in support of Fontana.

The multi-country campaign to roll back LGBTQ, immigrant and reproductive rights across Europe was galvanized five years ago by Vladimir Putin’s repressions against many public expressions of gay life in Russia — notably a ban on the promotion of “LGBT propaganda” among children that last month was expanded to include people of all ages. “The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world,” said Larry Jacobs, the Congress of Families’ late managing director. In 2016, Fontana said that “with gay marriage and and immigration they want to dominate us and wipe out our people,” adding that the example to follow was Russia. 

Fontana joined the hard-right League party when he was 16 years old. He drove a forklift before becoming a politician. “Never has a politician from the city of Juliet risen to such heights,” the Italian newspaper La Repubblica wrote of him.

Intensely religious, Fontana has called Vilmar Pavesi, a priest in Verona with virulently anti-LGBTQ views, his spiritual father. “Gays are a creation of the devil,” Pavesi told Espresso magazine in 2018, before saying that he and Fontana think the same way. “If we thought differently, our paths would divide.” Fontana says 50 Hail Marys a day, and his social media channels are peppered with images of Christ and the Madonna. 

Fontana’s fast rise in Italian politics is often linked to his ability to cultivate connections with the larger constellation of right-wing, Catholic associations in Europe. In addition to the Congress of Families, Fontana has called members of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement his “friends.” He has links to CitizenGo, the ultra-conservative Madrid campaigning platform that sends bright orange “freedom planes” and “freedom buses” around Europe with slogans like “boys have penises, girls have vulvas, don’t be fooled.” Fontana has also campaigned alongside Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the renegade, anti-vaccine, conspiracy-theory-promoting former Vatican envoy, who recently blamed the war in Ukraine on the American deep state, U.S. bioweapons labs and Zelensky’s “LGTBQ ideology.” 

Fontana admires Vladimir Putin. He once called him “a light for us Westerners, who live in a great crisis of values.” Alongside Matteo Salvini, a right-wing Italian politician known for his hostility toward immigrants, Fontana wore a “no to Russian sanctions” T-shirt in the Italian Parliament during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Later that year, the Kremlin invited Fontana to Crimea, alongside other members of pro-independence and anti-immigration parties, to act as international observers in a sham independence referendum.

Meloni has vowed to maintain unflinching support for Western sanctions against Russia no matter the energy implications on Italy this winter. Fontana, meanwhile, has expressed concern that sanctions against Putin could “boomerang” and that allowing Ukraine to enter the European Union “would risk exacerbating the already bad climate with Moscow.” 

Space between Meloni and Fontana is largely confined to foreign policy, while positions concerning LGBTQ people and women are more in lockstep. “I think they will try to make us like Poland. Keep out the possibility of abortion. The possibility to get a divorce, to get contraception. They will try — and I think they will succeed also,” said Silvana Agatone, a gynaecologist in Rome who leads an association protecting the rights of women to receive an abortion in Italy.

While Meloni has said she will not repeal Law 194, Italy’s version of Roe v. Wade which protects the rights of women to an abortion, Fontana has made no such promise. Instead, he is a member of a group called Committee No To 194, which works explicitly to overturn the 1978 law.

“We are concerned that they might create obstacles — financially, organizationally, institutionally  — so they might not touch the law, but they might physically make implementation impossible,” said Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It’s already incredibly hard, for poorer women, from southern Italy, from outside the big cities to actually access abortion,” she said. Doctors in Italy are allowed to invoke conscientious objection to performing an abortion, a law she worries will be taken advantage of by the new government. 

Since the new government was elected, Agatone, the Roman gynaecologist, has been receiving new, strange messages from people asking about her views on abortion after 22 weeks and abusive notes accusing her of “wanting to kill babies.” She said that her colleagues from other associations have received similar messages. “It’s almost like they are trying to catch me out in some way. Like my answers are under observation. So I think we will be attacked in some way.”

In espousing ideas about population decline, demographic implosion and an immigrant invasion, Fontana echoes white nationalists in the U.S. and in Northern Europe who embrace the Great Replacement — a conspiracy theory that holds that nonwhite people are being allowed and encouraged to come to the U.S. and Europe to “replace” white voters and achieve a leftist political agenda. In 2018, Fontana wrote a book called “The Empty Cradle of Civilization” where he argues Italians risk “extinction.” The legality of abortion forms part of this concern — in his view, the problem partly stems from births being terminated. “If every year we lose a city the size of Padua, the demographic decline is comparable to that caused between 1918 and 1920 by the Spanish flu,” said Fontana. 

In fact, Italy is currently facing population loss, a brain drain of young and talented people leaving the country in the hundreds of thousands every year. Fontana claims mass immigration  — alongside same-sex marriage and gender fluidity — will “wipe out our community and traditions.”

Outlawing abortion as a way of addressing demographic challenge is a tactic deeply rooted in the history of European fascism, said Neil Datta, executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive rights. “It puts women and their procreative role in some sort of nationalist objective, producing more babies for the glory of the nation,” Datta said. 

When Fontana was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament, protesters took to the Piazza Dante in Naples dressed in the dystopian red robes of the Handmaid’s Tale. “We dressed up as handmaids to recall the novel and TV series in which women are subjected to constant violence, so that their only role is to be a reproducer,” one protester told journalists. Members of parliament also staged a protest at the appointment, holding up a banner saying “No to a homophobic, pro-Putin president.” 

Others celebrated. On the World Congress of Family’s official news site, an article enthusiastically praised Fontana’s rise to high political office. “Lorenzo Fontana is the Parliament Speaker,” the article read. “One of us.”

The post As Italy’s Meloni plays it moderate, her political lieutenant draws a hard right line appeared first on Coda Story.

Spain’s parliament is expected to discuss amendments to the law in the upcoming weeks. 

The legislation, which has sparked political controversy, echoes years of debate over transgender rights in Spain. “That transphobic orange bus, it was pretty horrible,” recalls Eric Dopazo, when in the winter of 2017 an “anti-transgender bus” took to the streets of Spain.

The bus first appeared in Madrid, decorated with a slogan claiming that the only gender is the one assigned at birth. “It’s biology. Boys are boys, girls are girls. You can’t change sex,” the bus announced. For Dopazo, a Youtuber from the northern Spanish region of Galicia who describes himself as a “Friendly Trans Man,” the bus was the most obnoxious stunt yet from conservative groups attempting to spread an anti-trans message.

The bus managed to travel unusually far for a heavy vehicle with wheels. It was brought to the front of the Washington Monument in Washingotn DC, and to the entrance of the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan and the Stonewall Inn in New York’s West Village, designated the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement in the U.S. From there, the bright orange coach crossed borders again, reaching Latin America before returning to Europe. It also made an appearance in Kenya.

The vehicle offers a metaphor for how far-right campaigns revolving around gender and sexuality have evolved to ping-pong across continents. Grassroots efforts from people who hold conservative ideas to preserve traditional religious values had been largely limited to movements focused on the countries in which they were based, with little international coordination. But LGBTQ and transgender-rights legislation has activated a powerful transatlantic accord among a series of influential right-wing organziations. 

The bright orange coach was a project of HazteOír, which nicknamed it the “Free Speech Bus.” Essentially an online petition website, HazteOír began as a platform recruiting hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions and send emails in bulk to public figures in Spain. 

For the past twenty years, HazteOír, shepherded by its founder and CEO Ignacio Arsuaga, has supported ultra-conservative views in Spain. Its website describes its initiatives as promoting “life, family and liberty.” That translates into opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and denialism of transgender identity and gender-based violence, among other positions. 

In 2013, HazteOír began to expand its geographical scope. It changed its English-language name to CitizenGO and became active in other countries. It maintained its founding objective to fight against “gender ideology” — the belief, widespread among ultra-religious groups, that any critique of traditional concepts of femininity and masculinity is a form of ideological indoctrination from LGBTQ groups. 

The adoption of the name CitizenGo heralded a profound shift in how right-wing tactics circulated between North America and Europe, leading to CitizenGO becoming a global force — claiming over 16 million active members. Today, its online platform is published in 12 languages. Far-right activists on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to adhere right-wing populist ideas onto local histories and concerns — a unified agenda shared from Toledo, Ohio to Toledo, Spain.

While the current Spanish government is a self-described progressive coalition between the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and the far-left group Unidas Podemos, the third political force in the country is the powerful, ultra-conservative Vox, which is closely associated with CitizenGo. 

“A party like Vox breaks in, challenges the boundaries between right and wrong, and generates this Trump-like, Bolsonaro-like discourse, but adapted to the peculiarities of Spain,” said Almudena Cabezas, a geopolitics professor who researches the far-right at Madrid Complutense University. In 2018, Vox’s leader flew to the White House to meet Steve Bannon.

While Vox gained political traction, CitizenGO worked behind the scenes. Its CEO, Ignacio Arsuaga, met with Vox leaders to discuss their agenda and touted the platform’s “indirect” support of the party by promoting campaigns that align with its ideology. Vox officials have compared CitizenGO to an American-style super-PAC and have re-purposed Trumpian slogans such as “Make Spain great again.”

Neil Datta, Secretary of the EFP, a network of members of Parliaments around Europe who work for the protection of sexual and reproductive rights, said that CitizenGO supporters are cheerleaders encouraging the implementation of far-right policies.

This is part of a strategy that Arsuaga has been developing for decades, establishing a consolidated network of international conservative figures, from the U.S. and elsewhere. “Arsuaga is like an octopus,” says Cabezas, the professor at Madrid Complutense University. “He has tentacles everywhere.”

Arsuaga’s resume states that he learned lobbying and mobilization tactics from the American political system, after he attended Fordham Law School in New York. In a 2003 interview, he described U.S. politics as a model. “We have a lot to learn from the United States. It is a young society, much more lively than the European one,” he said at the time. He described how he designed the CitizenGo website to reflect the work of American grassroots organizations.

Arsuaga is closely affiliated with the World Congress of Families, a U.S.-based conservative group with global connections. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes it as a “political power broker,” and designated it as a hate group for its openly anti-LGBTQ stances. 

The president of the World Congress of Families, Brian Brown — who raised millions of dollars to oppose same-sex marriage in the US — serves on the board of directors of CitizenGO. 

Leaders of CitizenGO and the World Congress of Families meet frequently to network and share insight on lobbying efforts and mobilization campaigns. Networking, says Raven Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a key feature of these groups. “Even when there’s no official affiliation, they’re rubbing shoulders with each other.” 

Analysts say this constant networking is an essential ingredient feeding the political polarization that has become a shared hallmark of U.S. and European democracies. 

Typical was a November 2021 panel Arsuaga was scheduled to lead on how to promote “life, family and freedom” in national parliaments at a summit for conservative leaders in Budapest. The conference would feature Brown, the World Congress of Families leader, as well as the founder of Vox, a staunchly conservative Hungarian government minister, Katalin Novak, the main supporter of a recent law to ban same-sex adoptions in Hungary, and other right-wing American leaders. The conference offered a lot of time for networking, according to the program published online.

CitizenGO launched two petitions calling on strong opposition to Spain’s proposed trans-rights law to “deal a blow to the project of social-communism where it hurts the most.” In six days, the petitions collected over 18,000 signatures — a large number in Spain. For every signature, a pre-written email is sent to members of the parliament.

The transatlantic alliance of far-right groups and their strikingly similar discourse on social media mean “these groups create media spaces where their discourse travels fast and generates a lot of action and hate,” said Almudena Cabezas, the geopolitics professor. They replicate campaigns, they replicate agendas, so that rights are no longer rights, they become opinions.”

LGBTQ groups are outgunned, said Saida García Casuso, vice president of a Spanish collective which supports transgender rights. “What we have is our imagination, and the ability to take to the streets, which we do constantly. This has been a long fight, and we’re not stopping now,” she said.

The post Anti-transgender campaigns bussed across the Atlantic transform European politics appeared first on Coda Story.

Lashkarava, who worked for the local opposition TV channel TV Pirveli, had suffered a number of injuries, including a concussion. After undergoing surgery, he was discharged from hospital and was receiving treatment at home. An official cause of death has not been announced.

Sunday’s protests were led by civil rights organizations and activists demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili. Speakers accused the government and the Georgian Orthodox Church of sanctioning the violence. The church organized what was billed as a public prayer meeting on July 5, but priests and members of violent radical groups were seen threatening journalists.

At a government meeting on Monday, Gharibashvili said the administration condemned the July 5 violence and was investigating Lashkarava’s death. He repeated an earlier statement that the planned Pride March was a provocation and said that opposition groups were using the tragedy to further their political aims. 

“The investigation is working on several theories, including the theory of how those aggressive people appeared there and why they deliberately attacked journalists and camera operators,” he said. “This is a legitimate question that the investigation should answer.” 

Lashkarava’s death has unleashed a disinformation campaign by far-right groups.

In a special YouTube episode of a political commentary show by Alt Info, an alt-right group that led the July 5 anti-LGBTQ protests, host Irakli Martinenko referred to the involvement of “liberals” in Lashkarava’s death. “They probably sacrificed, murdered, one of their own and are now using it politically,” he told Alt Info’s nearly 17,000 subscribers. “Generally, the way the liberals fight differs from that of the conservatives. The main tool for the liberals is taking the position of victim.”

The disinformation angle has been picked up by other prominent figures in Georgia. On July 11, Levan Vasadze — an ultra-conservative public figure and businessman who has long campaigned against the LGBTQ community and has strong ties with pro-Kremlin actors such as the Russian far-right ideologue Aleksandr Dugin — made a video statement on the Georgian-language channel of the World Congress of Families, a U.S. and Russia-led coalition of right-wing Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion and which has just under 65,000 Facebook followers. 

In the video, Vasadze cast suspicion on the timing and circumstances of Lashkarava’s death. He also called out the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia Kelly Dagnan for pressuring the Georgian government to let “this provocation take place,” referring to the Pride march. 

James Nixey, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, said the attempts to obfuscate the circumstances of Lashkarava’s death bore all the hallmarks of a disinformation strategy. “These are tried and tested tactics in Georgia from enemies foreign and domestic, and those domestic enemies are often funded by the foreign. There’s a merging of tactics there and we’ve seen it before.” 

LGBTQ rights have been in the firing line in a number of countries in Europe. Last week, Hungary passed a new law banning the dissemination of educational material viewed as promoting homosexuality in schools. In Poland, Andrzej Duda won a second presidential term last year on a platform of anti-gay rhetoric. In March, the nation’s government banned same-sex couples from adopting children and since the summer of 2019, more than 100 towns and areas have declared themselves “LGBT-free.”

“There’s the trend of an illiberal streak we see running across Europe from Brexit to the rise of the far-right in France,” said Nixey. “You move from there into Eastern Europe and the intolerance shown by the Polish and Hungarian governments there. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing, but each one has its specificities.”

Lashkarava’s death caused wide discussion on Georgian Facebook as well, where many echoed the unproven theories of the Alt Info anchors.

“The United National Movement sectarians forced him on TV channels to yell that he had been beaten. Then they killed him with narcotics, so that they could get people’s support and cause unrest in Georgia in the name of the deceased,” said one user, referring to the main opposition party politicians and supporters.

While Alt-Info’s website and Facebook page were both suspended on Sunday for as yet unknown reasons, its Telegram group of over 2,600 subscribers has been filled with discussion about Lashkarava’s death.

“The guy died of an overdose and they are calling us murderers,” one of the Telegram group members commented.

The comments echoed speculation by allegedly far-right users on Facebook that Lashkarava had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs the day before his death. The theories point to July 10 street camera footage released by the Interior Ministry, which allegedly shows Lashkarava stumbling while walking.

On July 13, as dozens of mourners gathered at Lashkarava’s funeral to pay respects, a group of journalists disrupted a health briefing by Georgia’s deputy health minister, Tamar Gabunia. 

One journalist who interrupted the briefing held up a photo of Lashkarava and a sign that called for Gharibashvili’s resignation. “Irakli Gharibashvili must resign because he is the number 1 homophobe in our country and he is a violent prime minister,” he said.

Additional reporting by Burhan Wazir

Additional research by Sophiko Vasadze and Masho Lomashvili

The post Georgian far-right launches disinformation campaign following death of journalist beaten in anti-LGBTQ attack appeared first on Coda Story.

Kusherbayev’s statement, made to almost 53,000 subscribers, comes days after the LGBTQ rights group ILGA-Europe called for Uzbekistan’s government to abolish an article in the country’s newly drafted criminal code that punishes same-sex relations between men with up to three years in jail. 

Uzbekistan remains one of only two countries in Central Asia where homosexuality is criminalized. The other is Turkmenistan, one of the world’s most repressive dictatorships.

More than 40 human rights organizations have demanded that Uzbekistan respect its commitments as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council and carry out reforms. The calls came after the new draft of the country’s criminal code categorized homosexual relations as a crime “against family, children and morality.”

“If they say that this is against human rights, I spit on those rights. A nation’s friend won’t put forward such an illogical, unnatural proposal that will ultimately lead to the extinction of generations,” Kusherbayev wrote.

“What you get in Kusherbayev’s comments is both a misunderstanding of the issue from a human rights and criminal perspective but also, you can detect so-called traditional values and so-called Islamic values infused into what he’s saying,” says Steve Swerdlow, a lawyer and an assistant professor of Human Rights at the University of Southern California.

In its 2020 report on Uzbekistan, the U.N. Human Rights Committee raised concerns about ongoing discrimination, harassment, violence and abuse towards the LGBTQ community in the country. Swerdlow adds that victims of abuse cannot rely on the state for protection, as it has effectively criminalized their existence.

According to a member of the ILGA-Europe team, who works with the LGBTQ community in Uzbekistan and spoke on condition of anonymity, categorizing homosexual relationships as crimes against family, children and morality turns LGBTQ people into political scapegoats, as has been seen in nations including Poland and Russia, and will only worsen their situation.

“Now anything that happens with families, anything that happens with ‘morality’ is going to be blamed on LGBT people,” he told me. “It is basically formalizing this practice of instrumentalizing LGBT people for the failures of the state.”

The post Uzbekistan’s law reforms still criminalize homosexuality appeared first on Coda Story.

The demonstrations, which have made headlines around the world, began peacefully, with students demanding the resignation of the institution’s new rector Melih Bulu — a former politician with the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), handpicked for the role by the conservative government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Then, in early February, police scattered the crowds using riot shields and pepper spray.

What started as a series of on-campus actions against an undemocratic appointment has now morphed into a protest movement in solidarity with Turkey’s increasingly embattled LGBTQ+ community, which has spread to cities including Ankara and Izmir. 

Over the past five weeks, the protests have taken many forms, from mass meditation and yoga sessions in front of the rector’s office to free open-air lectures by professors. They even included the collective singing of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” after students discovered Bulu’s love of the band.

But, at the start of February, an art exhibition held by students shifted the dynamic of the demonstrations. One of the works on show was a digital collage depicting the Kaaba, the Muslim holy site in Mecca. Superimposed upon it was a basilisk or serpent king — a representation of evil in Anatolian folklore. Rainbow flags associated with the LGBTQ+ movement were also pinned in its corners. 

The image caused uproar on social media. After the final day of the exhibition, on January 29, five students were detained by police. Two of them were placed under house arrest and two more taken into custody.

In a Twitter posting now restricted by the platform according to it rules governing hateful conduct, Turkey’s Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu called the detained students “perverts.” His statement prompted calls for the demonstrations to widen their focus in defense of LGBTQ+ rights in the country.

“You can’t just call students perverts. These are students who are fighting for other students’ lives and education, to express themselves freely,” said Willie Ray, who is enrolled at Boğaziçi University’s western languages and literature department.

Speaking by telephone, Willie Ray, who identifies as queer and uses gender-neutral pronouns, said that they now live in fear of leaving home, believing that such rhetoric renders members of the LGBTQ+ community particularly vulnerable to reprisals and discrimination.

A large number of students and university professors have, however, returned to the streets, campus and courthouses. Such shows of defiance have led to an increasingly hardline approach from the state. In the first week of February, snipers were positioned on buildings outside Boğaziçi University’s campus in the Beşiktaş and Sarıyer neighborhoods. The city governor’s office issued a ban on public assemblies in those neighborhoods, but failed to deter the protestors, prompting police to open fire on them with rubber bullets.  

On February 2, the students and their supporters moved the protests to Kadıköy, on the Asian side of the Bosporus Strait. They were greeted with helicopters flying overhead and further police aggression on the ground. The governor’s office then issued a further ban on gatherings there. 

By the end of the week, more than 600 people had been detained across the country since the demonstrations began, the vast majority of which in Istanbul. Most have now been freed, though 11 remain  imprisoned and 25 more under house arrest.

Yaren Bozar, a third-year sociology student who has participated in the demonstrations, believes that Erdogan’s government is worried that the gatherings will grow and spread at a time when its popularity appears to be waning. 

That fear is not unfounded, given the enduring memory of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, which also underwent their own transformation. Beginning in opposition to a development plan for Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a violent police raid ignited nationwide demonstrations calling for freedom of expression and assembly, and highlighting the government’s erosion of Turkey’s secular values.   

“They see that the students are not giving up, and we are resisting the police brutality on our campus — people who are just 20 years old — I think it’s a scary atmosphere for the government now,” Bozar said. 

Alongside fellow faculty members, political science professor Dr. Zeynep Gambetti was part of the campus demonstrations. She believes the LGBTQ+ community is being deliberately leveraged by Erdogan’s administration, in order to stoke anger and resentment against progressive groups. 

“In Turkish society, gay rights or freedom of sexual orientation is still pretty much a taboo,” she explained. “That is one of the fault lines the government can abuse.”

While Turkey has long been a secular and diverse country, the AKP has, over its 18 years in power, asserted an increasingly conservative Islamist vision of the nation.

On February 3, Erdoğan stated that there is “no such thing” as the LGBTQ+ community. He added that: “This country is national and spiritual and walking to the future with these values,” then compared the protesters to terrorists. 

Willie Ray believes that the students had no intention of offending the cultural and religious sensibilities of others.

“Right now we are the target and we always have been the target, because we are minorities. We aren’t privileged and our voices aren’t heard,” they said. “It’s tragic to see the officials don’t see that.”

In common with nations from Eastern Europe to Africa, many religious conservatives in Turkey view the LGBTQ+ movement as a liberal western campaign to undermine traditional values. Recently, Soylu made televised remarks claiming that, until now, no one in Turkey had ever identified as LGBTQ+. “It is something completely marketed and introduced by the West,” he said.

The AKP’s current vision of Turkey was not apparent when it first came to power in 2002. Back then, it was still lauding the European Union and trying to gain credibility in the West. As it consolidated power, though, the party’s liberal wing began to fade. 

A failed coup attempt in 2016 and a subsequent state of emergency allowed Erdoğan to tighten his grip on the country. Those steps included giving himself the power to appoint politically sympathetic trustees to universities and dismiss thousands of academics from their positions. 

The first move Bulu made upon his appointment in January was to close Boğaziçi University’s LGBTQ+ club. Willie Ray described the action as “unlawful” under current policies, which stipulate that strict procedures must be followed in order to open and close university societies. They also believe that there should be room in academic institutions for the discussion of controversial artworks. 

“Art has its purpose. You can criticize it, you can like it or not like it, you can be offended by it. So why, instead of creating such a platform for debate and objectively trying to listen to each other’s voices, do people just start targeting, threatening and generalizing?” they said. 

That position has won allies across the student body. Following the crackdown on protestors and the discriminatory language used against LGBTQ+ people, a group of Muslim students put out a statement calling for the immediate release of individuals who had been detained. 

“Even though the artwork is hurtful for Muslims, it is never acceptable to resort to violence, threats, lynching and punishment in the resolution of such disputes,” it read. “In light of both the tolerance taught by Islam and the traditions of Boğaziçi University, we think that such problems should be resolved through communication.”

The post Istanbul student protests are a new frontline for the LGBTQ community appeared first on Coda Story.

Surrogacy is legal in Russia but has come under fire from conservative lawmakers and the Orthodox church. Police arrested a number of fertility doctors earlier this year and have accused them of “child trafficking” in an ongoing case.

State news agency TASS recently quoted an unnamed official saying that investigators intend to widen their investigation into surrogacy to include single fathers, whom the official assumed would be gay.

“They are planning to arrest more suspects, including single Russian men who used surrogate mothers to have babies,” the official said, claiming it was illegal for gay men to have children in this way.

The cases are being scrutinized by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.

The anonymous source’s words have not yet been supported by official statements, but their comments appear to be a warning that the authorities are gearing up to investigate some of the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives.

State investigators have jailed seven people and placed three children in state care, following the death by natural causes of a newborn baby in an apartment near Moscow in January. Authorities established that the apartment was home to other babies also conceived by surrogates and several nannies were reportedly looking after them while their intended parents completed paperwork before being able to take them home abroad.

Reports about a “suspicious apartment” appeared on Russian television and the babies were put in a care home, and the inquiry was expanded to include other cases of surrogacy and organized human trafficking resulting in death.

Several people have been arrested and at least ten, including doctors and two nannies, have been charged. Most work for the company Rosjurconsulting, which specializes in reproductive law and medically assisted reproduction, or for the European Surrogacy Center in Russia (ECSM), which provides a number of services, including medical assistance for in vitro fertilization to surrogate mothers.

Lawyer Igor Trunov, who is representing the parents in the case, said authorities are attempting to link parenthood with sexual orientation. “There is no law restricting gay men to be donors and have their kids by surrogacy,” he said. “I know the father who was already questioned by investigators as a witness in this case. But he can easily be turned into an accused one.”

A public petition to stop the criminal investigation of the arrested medical staff has been signed by 7,000 people.

Russian law explicitly allows IVF treatments for couples and single women. Surrogacy legislation in Russia is ambiguous — neither permitting nor prohibiting the practice for single men. However, the principle of single fathers parenting via surrogacy has already been successfully defended hundreds of times in Russian courts.

Gay father Alexander (not his real name), from Moscow, recently told BBC Russian that he fled Russia with his six-month-old son the day after the TASS report was published.

“I don’t know when I will be back,” he said. “In our country, no matter how right you are, to prove your innocence before the state is not even stupid, but dangerous.”

Olga Okhotnikova from the Saint-Petersburg based LGBTQ rights organization Coming Out, which campaigns for equality in Russia and provides families with legal and psychological support, says single fathers have become scapegoats in a long-running campaign to enforce traditional values. State media often present the idea of gay rights as a western import that poses an existential threat to Russia while portraying the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as a defender of “traditional values.”

“When a single father raises a child it is suspicious, whether he is gay or not,” said Okhotnikova. “But if he is gay, or if it is a gay couple, people always equate them to pedophiles. Those stereotypes are alive because people don’t understand how LGBTQ families work. If they don’t know something and are afraid of it, they are easy to manipulate. This is how our state advocates traditional values, by manipulation.”

While polling data suggests younger generations are increasingly tolerant towards the LGBTQ community, a controversial bill introduced in 2013 outlawed the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.” In July this year, a change to the constitution defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, further setting back hopes for marriage equality for LGBTQ populations.

Konstantin Svitnev, a Russian lawyer and the CEO of Rosjurconsulting, is the main suspect in the ongoing investigation into surrogacy and organized human trafficking. During a recent telephone conversation, he told me that he is currently based abroad and is too afraid to come back to Russia. “Many people in Russia believe all single men are homosexuals which equates them to pedophiles. I never asked my clients for their sexual orientation, it’s not our business. If he wants to have a child my job is to help him.” 

Coda Story has seen a transcript of the interrogation of a doctor arrested in conjunction with the death of the newborn baby in January. Investigators asked pointedly whether the doctor had noticed “signs of homosexuality” in one of his clients.

Rights experts are concerned any case against the surrogate fathers could worsen already rampant discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community. 

“This criminal case can lead to even greater secrecy of LGBTQ-families,” said Max Olenichev, legal adviser to Coming Out.

“The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation uses this homosexuality thing against the fathers on purpose, to gather the support of the homophobic part of society,” he continued. “But I think the desire to become a parent, even in such uncertainty, is much stronger than the fear of government interference.”

The post Russian investigators single out gay fathers in latest crackdown on LGBTQ rights appeared first on Coda Story.

In the passenger seat was a blogger with the ultra-conservative LGBT hate group “Fundacja Pro — Prawo do Życia” (Pro Right to Life Foundation), holding a camera. 

Szpanowska, an activist with the left-wing Razem (Left Together) party, explained that around 100 people had gathered near the vehicle to express their outrage at its message. “I’m sure he was trying to provoke a reaction from the crowd for infotainment,” she said. 

Since its 2015 election victory, Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party has leveraged prejudice against the LGBTQ community for political gain. In 2019’s parliamentary elections, the party’s leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski claimed his victory would prevent “homosexual marriages.” And, ahead of last month’s presidential polls, President Andrzej Dudza described so-called LGBTQ ideology as “a kind of neo-Bolshevism.”

Along with hate-mongering against queer people, the Polish government has frequently referred to “gender ideology,” an international conspiracy theory that claims Marxists are plotting to destroy white nuclear households by erasing differences between men and women. Attacking “imported” sexuality and reproductive rights while pledging allegiance to the “pro traditional family” is what historian Andrea Peto describes as “a nationalist neoconservative response to the crisis of the global neoliberal world order.” 

The impact has been devastating. In the past year, nearly 100 local governments, representing a third of Poland’s territory, declared themselves “LGBT free zones.” A 2020 report from an academic at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń estimates that the number of queer people under the age of 25 who attempt suicide increased from 30% in 2016 to 45% in 2020. Kolodziej found that 84% of young LGBTQ people are now having suicidal thoughts. 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Helena de Cleyre, a 29-year-old trans-activist who lives in Warsaw. Almost every day she hears about attacks against LGBTQ people. 

“Mostly what I am thinking about is migration,” said Cleyre. “I want to be treated like a citizen. I don’t want my neighbors and people in public to treat me like I am not a human being.”

In April 2019, the ultra-conservative LGBT group Fundacja Pro drove a car around the city of Gniezno, a Catholic stronghold in western Poland, with a banner that read, “What the LGBT lobby wants to teach kids: masturbation; consenting to sex; first sexual experiences and orgasm. Stop pedophilia.” Since then, these cars and vans have become a common sight in big cities.

“It is the most aggressive homophobic campaign I have seen in my life,” said Katarzyna Warecka, a lawyer for the LGBTQ group Tolerado, based in the predominantly liberal port city of Gdansk. Last year, she tried to sue Fundacja Pro for “spreading false and homophobic content about the alleged link between pedophilia and homosexuality.” However, the court ruled against it. Subsequently, none of the city’s schools, councils and other public institutions have spoken out against the group. 

More recently, people have started confronting Fundacja Pro’s vans directly on the street. On August 8, gender-non-binary activist Malgorzata Szutowicz was held in pre-trial detention for three weeks for slashing the tires of one such vehicle. In the protests that followed, the police arrested 48 people, including one passerby who had simply exited a nearby grocery shop and was carrying a shopping bag. 

A week after Szutowicz’s arrest, 27-year-old software developer Linus Lewandowski saw a Facebook post about a Fundacja Pro van near his Warsaw apartment. He arrived at the scene in time to try and cover up the van’s massive banner with swirls of orange-colored graffiti. The incident was filmed by Maciej Zemla, a reporter from the right-wing online TV channel wPolsce.pl. Zemla made a name for himself in May 2019 by filming an LGBTQ volleyball event without permission and using the footage to give the false impression of a gay plot to bring “erotic gadgets” into primary schools. 

Lewandowski is one of the 48 arrested during the protests after Szutowicz’s detention. Since then, he has had to report to his local police station twice a week. He has been charged with being part of a plot to violently attack property. The charges are “completely bogus”, he said.

Lewandowski has first-hand experience of the worsening climate for LGBTQ communities in Poland. In August, he and his boyfriend were beaten up by two strangers, who had seen them walking hand-in-hand. Despite the bleak situation, he sees some possibility for change and plans to run for office in Poland’s parliamentary elections in three years’ time. 

While liberal politicians used to claim to be “neutral” on queer rights, last month, a group of Polish opposition MP’s came to parliament dressed in the colors of the rainbow, in order to protest the government’s rhetoric. “If the current government falls,” said Lewandowski, “we will probably get rights that we have been fighting for.”

Spearheading the anti-LGBTQ campaign

Mariusz Dzierzawski, who founded Fundacja Pro in 2005, describes himself as a Christian “seeker of truth.” He is also known as Poland’s “most radical anti-abortionist,” even though the country already has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. Since 2015, the group has turned its attention to criminalizing sex education in schools, with a homophobic campaign called “Stop Pedophilia.”

On its campaign website, Fundacja Pro spreads pseudoscience and disinformation that purports to link LGBTQ people and sex education to child sex abuse.

The group bases its many claims on the research of U.S. sociologist Mark Regnerus and psychologist Paul Cameron, whose discredited work is cited by a wide variety of anti-LGBTQ groups.

Malgorzata Szutowicz is a founding member of the queer activist group Stop Bzdurom (Stop the Bullshit). Founded one year ago, its members organized dance events to block Fundacja Pro’s vans — which some activists call “homophobuses” — and information stalls on LGBTQ issues. More recently, they put rainbow flags and anarchist symbols on statues in Warsaw, enraging Poland’s conservative government.

“We are only three, four or five people at times,” Szutowicz said. “We would do our actions, post about it on social media and wait for feedback.” 

Szutowicz and her partner Lania Madej started the group after they came across a Fundacja Pro information stall, where volunteers were handing out leaflets and collecting signatures to support their “Stop Pedophilia” law. This proposed legislation demands jail sentences for anyone who teaches sex education to people under the age of 18. Fundacja Pro’s bill was co-drafted by a lobbying group named the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture — an offshoot of an international ultra-conservative Catholic network known as Tradition, Family and Property.

In June 2019, Helena de Cleyre joined Szutowicz and Madej to protest against a Fundacja Pro stall in the city of Poznan. Upon arrival, they were stopped and questioned by police officers. 

“For many years, there have been attempts to get basic rights legally for non-straight people in Poland but this has failed,” said Cleyre. “Many people believe what the Fundacja Pro trucks say, because the local priest is saying it, the local politician is saying it and especially because you have no sex education in schools.” 

As the attacks against LGBTQ communities have increased, activists have found themselves facing a new front — the 100 local governments that have signed non-legally binding charters to declare themselves “free from LGBT ideology.” In July, the European Union announced it would no longer provide funding to six of the “LGBT-free” Polish towns. 

In September 2019, Cleyre and some of her friends hit the road under the collective banner of the Queer Tour. Their plan was to drive to so-called LGBT-free zones, talk to local people and debunk the government’s propaganda. “It’s really difficult because you can waste so much time trying to convince just one person,” Cleyre said. “We try to say things like: ‘Hi, I am LGBT, do I look like I am destroying Poland?’ Sometimes it works.” 

On a recent weekend, Queer Tour went to the south-eastern city of Debica. After setting up their stall, police officers surrounded them and made them leave, while the town’s mayor told them their actions were “illegal.” 

Queer Tour and Stop Bzdurom send packages of stickers, comics and books to young LGBTQ people all over Poland. The stickers say things like “I am not an ideology” or show famous figures, including Jesus Christ, on a rainbow background. Since Szutowicz’s arrest, the groups’ go-to print shop is afraid to produce material for them.

“They sent us emails to say that they support what we do, but half of our designs are probably too controversial,” Szutowicz said, via Skype. 

Szutowicz is still facing multiple charges for hanging rainbow flags on Warsaw monuments and for slashing the tires of the Fundacja Pro van. 

In August, Stop Bzdurom received $80,000 in donations, which they would like to give to small collectives across Poland. But the Polish crowdfunding platform Zrzutka refuses to let the group withdraw the funds. 

I recently spoke to Szutowicz and her life partner Lu, who is non-binary, via Skype. They had just ordered pizza and were getting ready to go to a house party. 

Szutowicz explained that Stop Bzdurom has been forced to halt its activities after she and Lu were recently followed by plainclothes police officers. “Because of police investigations against us and being stalked all the time, we are not able to make any new actions right now,” Szutowicz said. 

Meanwhile, international campaigners have asked the EU to protect Poland’s LGBTQ communities. Last week, activists delivered a petition with more than 340,000 signatures demanding that the EU take action against homophobia in Poland’s “LGBT-free” zones. The petition, launched by the global equality movement All Out, urged the EU’s commissioner for equality, Helena Dallito, to denounce the discriminatory policies and pass legislation on hate crimes to protect the Polish LGBTQ community.

In a sign of increasing international concern over the treatment of LGBTQ people, 50 ambassadors to Poland earlier this week wrote an open letter calling on Warsaw to help forge “an environment of non-discrimination, tolerance and mutual acceptance.” The signatories, including ambassadors from the U.S. and Britain, urged Poland to “end discrimination, in particular on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Lu, who has recently started their own collective to hang up rainbow flags around Warsaw and throw paint over homophobic banners, was more optimistic. They read out a Facebook message sent by a stranger, who’d written to say, “Thank you…When I see the flag, I see that someone is fighting for me.”

The morning after we spoke, Szutowicz texted me to say she and Lu had been assaulted twice after the party. Later that evening, she texted me again: Lu had just been attacked. “The man had keys in his hands so Lu has bruises and swelling,” Szutowicz wrote.

“The situation is getting worse on many fronts in Poland and the problems are really important to me,” she said. “So if it gets worse, I have this stupid mindset of ‘I have to work harder because it’s not enough.’ But many of my friends and I are in a situation where you physically cannot do anything more.” 

The post Poland’s anti-gay crusade: “The most aggressive homophobic campaign I have seen in my life” appeared first on Coda Story.

In 1999, Matt Drudge was a rising star on the American right. With his eponymous web publication, the Drudge Report, he had pioneered a new form of aggregative political journalism. Still basking in the fame he had won by breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal the year before, he got into an ugly public dispute with Fox News, to which he was a regular contributor.

After he notified the TV channel of his intention to broadcast a photograph of a fetus undergoing surgery as evidence for his criticism of late-term abortions — a completely different procedure — the network forbade its use. Enraged, Drudge canceled his appearance and published a headline on the Drudge Report that read “I WILL NOT BE CENSORED!”

But that was 20 years ago. Since then, the conservative media landscape that Drudge helped to create has shifted so far under his feet that Fox News’ most prominent anchor recently denounced him as “firmly a man of the progressive left.” And now, a group of anti-abortion activists has launched a publication modeled on the Drudge Report, but aimed at those “tired of” its “leftward tilt.” 

The Drudge Report’s influence on the American right has been waning for years. However, the source of conservative pundits’ current anger at the publication largely stems from Drudge’s increasing willingness in the last year to criticize Donald Trump, to whom he gave largely favorable coverage during the 2016 presidential race.

The new publication is almost identical to the Drudge Report in style and appearance. The Volontè Report is a project of the International Organization for the Family, a socially conservative non-profit group. The new publication takes its name from its editor Luca Volontè, an Italian politician best known for a money laundering scandal in which, as a member of the Council of Europe, he received €2.4 million from Azerbaijani officials.

The Volontè Report is not even the first attempt at usurping Drudge. In December, the failed Republican congressional candidate Dan Bongino launched his own Bongino Report in response to Drudge’s perceived leftward shift. 

“The market structure of digital publishing skews toward delivering ideological control over fact-based information,” said Gabriel Kahn, a professor of journalism and the co-director of the Media Economics and Entrepreneurship program at University of Southern California. 

With the rise of platforms like Facebook, writing that strikes an emotional chord gets more clicks and shares, and hyper-partisan content feeds emotion. “Then it only makes sense that publications respond to that signal and produce highly emotional news,” said Kahn. That’s what the Volontè Report seems to be doing with sensationalist anti-abortion headlines. 

Caitlin Thompson contributed reporting.

Photo by Stefano Montesi – Corbis / Getty Images

The post Anti-abortion activists launch publication to counter the Drudge Report’s “leftward tilt” appeared first on Coda Story.

Back in July, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda secured a second term in office on a platform of anti-gay rhetoric. Now, activists say that homophobia is rising within the country. The latest example of this is a government-issued cash reward for a town that has declared itself “free of LGBT ideology.”

The funding was allocated to the southeastern town of Tuchow by the Ministry of Justice after the European Union rejected its application for grants in response to the resolution. Handing over around $68,000, the Polish government has roughly tripled the sum that the municipality could have received from the EU. 

“It’s not just replacing the same amount, it’s giving more to show to other cities that they should not be scared to also make such resolutions,” explained LGBTQ activist and photographer Bart Staszewski.

Tuchow is not the only town to pass such a resolution — around 50 municipalities across Poland have declared themselves free of what they term “LGBTQ ideology.” In July, the EU announced that it would not provide funding to six Polish towns that had made similar statements.

Poland is, at present, the largest net recipient of EU funding. However, Duda has described the organization as “an imaginary community from which we don’t gain much.”

Since January, Staszewski has traveled through Poland’s “LGBTQ-free” zones, documenting the lives of LGBTQ people who live within them. 

“It’s disgusting and horrible,” he told me during a telephone conversation. “It’s simply an example that the Polish state is sponsoring homophobia more obviously than we’ve ever seen before.”

Staszewski is a member of Love Does Not Exclude, Poland’s largest LGBTQ group. According to him, fewer people have been willing to be photographed for his project since Duda’s re-election. In larger cities, activists have been detained by police for protesting against what many are calling homophobuses — trucks covered with anti-LGBTQ messages that are driven through city streets by supporters of so-called family values.

While homophobia has long been present in the largely Catholic and conservative country, LGBTQ rights became a central campaign issue in the past year. “We will have a choice between the white-and-red Poland represented by the current president and a rainbow Poland,” said the chairman of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party’s executive committee, ahead of the presidential election.

Now, these attitudes appear to be there to stay.

“Everyone was thinking that it was just a political game during the election time,” Staszewski said. “Now, everybody sees that it is something that is ongoing. I think it’s getting worse and worse. We are a public enemy.”

The post Polish government gives cash to ‘LGBT-free’ town appeared first on Coda Story.

Though the Ministry’s letter gave little away, Dolgopolov was in no doubt as to its seriousness. Fearing the consequences for a routine in which he poked fun at the Orthodox Church, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, he left Russia. 

“I knew that if they got hold of me, they would put me in jail,” he told The Independent at the time.

That same day, the Ministry of Internal Affairs press service confirmed his suspicions. An unidentified resident of Orekhovo-Zuyevo — a city 500 miles from the Saint Petersburg venue — had made a complaint, having watched the year-old routine on YouTube. In response, local police had opened an investigation of Dolgopolov under Article 148 of Russia’s criminal code, for “offending the feelings of religious believers”.

According to his lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, Dolgopolov, who has since returned to Russia, will continue to live under the threat of criminal charges for the time being.

“For whatever reason, the investigation hasn’t yet led to formal charges,” said Solovyov, via Facebook Messenger.  “However, in theory they could decide to prosecute at any moment in the next 18 months, before the limitation period expires.”

Introduced in 2013, Article 148, the so-called “blasphemy law,” has caused controversy ever since.

Coming in the aftermath of the Pussy Riot case, in which members of the Russian feminist punk collective were arrested for an explicit performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the broad and vague law, which prohibits “offending the religious feelings of believers” rode a wave of popular outrage. Though Pussy Riot had been prosecuted under pre-existing laws against hooliganism, Article 148 was seen at the time as a way of ensuring that such an incident did not happen again. 

However, the Kremlin also had a clear political motive for banning blasphemy. In the wake of huge street protests against rigged elections in 2011 and 2012, the Russian government began a rhetorical pivot towards traditional values, leveraging religious and patriotic sentiment to bolster its popularity.

“Article 148 has always been primarily a political law”, says Alexander Verkhovsky, the head of the SOVA Center, a Moscow think tank focused on the relationship between church and secular society. “It was aimed at consolidating conservative support for the government at a time of crisis.”

Blasphemy legislation, along with bans the adoption of Russian children by foreign citizens and “homosexual propaganda,” can be seen as part of this effort. These new laws also helped boost Russia’s standing within the international religious right. In June 2013, only days before Putin signed Article 148, Larry Jacobs, head of the World Congress of Families, a coalition of anti-abortion and anti-gay hard-liners, said, “The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.”

While the blasphemy law has rarely been used, activists like Verkhovsky say it remains a potent symbol for Russia’s religious conservatives. 

Pushback against Article 148 

In March 2019, it was announced that a draft of the Law on Culture to be debated in the State Duma would exempt “works of culture … from the articles of the Criminal Code concerning offense to the feelings of religious believers,” a change that had long been demanded by prominent figures in the Russian art world.

In short, Article 148 would apply only to the public actions of private citizens. The full freedom to criticize and even ridicule religion would be restored to film, theatre, literature and museums, effectively defanging the blasphemy law.

Though an outcry from the Orthodox hierarchy saw presidential advisor on culture Vladimir Tolstoy quickly and publicly deny that any decision to amend the legislation had been made, it was clear that Article 148 was still politically contentious. Soon afterwards, the draft law was quietly dropped, and Article 148 left in place.

“The law itself is simply too vague”, says Konstantin Dobrynin, a former Russian senator and lawyer who now lives in London. “No one has any idea what “offending feelings” means in a legal sense. Theoretically, it could cover almost anything.”

Accordingly, the state has largely declined to enforce the legislation. 

Since its introduction in 2013, there have been only 19 prosecutions under the law, most of which were prompted by social media comments, memes or videos posted online by private citizens. Of these, only 12 have ended in a conviction, two of which have been overturned. In the Russian legal system, where over 99% of cases end in a successful prosecution, this is an exceptionally low conviction rate.

The law’s application also appears to be in decline, with 10 cases in 2017, eight in 2018 and just one in 2019. 

“No one is really sure what sort of evidence you need to prove that religious feelings have been offended, so police and prosecutors tend to avoid opening cases. They don’t want to create problems for themselves,” said Verkhovsky.

However, the state’s unwillingness to prosecute people under Article 148 has had effects of its own. In the absence of a coordinated, central policy, the law’s enforcement has become more and more unpredictable, with investigations largely dependent on private citizens making legal complaints to the authorities. 

The case of Ruslan Sokolovsky, a YouTuber investigated for uploading a video of himself playing Pokemon Go inside a cathedral in the city of Yekaterinburg in 2016, is another example.

In the footage, which contained strong language mocking Christianity, Sokolovsky likened Jesus Christ to a Pokemon character and said he had decided to play the game inside the church after seeing a media report that said that people who did so could be fined or jailed. The video attracted more than 1.9 million views.

Sokolovsky’s case, which ended in 2017 with a suspended sentence of  two years and three months, was precipitated by a criminal complaint made by local Urals-region newswire, Ура.ру, which had earlier interviewed Sokolovsky about the video.

“There’s no logic whatsoever to the government’s approach to Article 148. They’ve lost interest in the law over time, and prosecutions have started to depend on individual citizens making their own complaints to local authorities,” said Damir Gainutdinov, a researcher at Agora, a Russian human rights organization that has monitored  the use of the blasphemy law.

“Above all, the people behind Article 148 complaints are from the far-right section of Orthodoxy”, said Dobrynin. 

The increasingly dysfunctional and arbitrarily applied blasphemy law has come in for criticism from both sides of Russia’s political aisle.

Russia’s organized religious right, empowered by the Kremlin’s conservative turn, has demanded that the blasphemy law be more tightly enforced, and that its focus shift from social media transgressions to the nation’s wider culture.

One target for religious conservative ire was the 2019 release of a song entitled “i_$uss” (Jesus), by Leningrad, a popular ska-punk band. The song’s video, which depicted a Christianity-themed LSD trip, met with furious denunciation from religious figures such as the ultraconservative Orthodox priest and political commentator Vsevolod Chaplin, who demanded that the band be prosecuted under Article 148.

Once again, however, no case was opened. 

Meanwhile, some prominent clerics have criticized the blasphemy law’s impact on society.

“It is completely obvious to me that this law doesn’t act in the church’s interests, but actually discredits it,” Father Alexey Uminskiy, a prominent liberal Russian Orthodox priest, told a TV interviewer in 2018.

“‘In the past few years we’ve seen a number of cases initiated under this law that have done enormous reputational damage to the Church,” he added.

Despite criticism of the blasphemy law from across the political spectrum, the likelihood of major change in any direction seems remote. The latest draft of the Law on Culture, agreed by the State Duma in December 2019, looks set to continue the government’s fence-sitting approach on the issue of blasphemy.

“Even if it’s barely enforced, keeping the law on the books is useful to the government by making it look as though it wants to protect religious believers,” said Verkhovsky. “They can’t scrap it, because it would make religious believers think they’re not interested in them.”

Illustrations by Gogi Kamushadze

The post Russian prosecutors struggle to protect bruised religious feelings appeared first on Coda Story.

However, first impressions on social media can be deceiving. Kleine, 28, is an important influencer on Germany’s far-right scene and a member of the anti-immigrant Identitarian movement. Along with his colleague Phillip Thaler, he produces a YouTube channel titled Laut Gedacht (“Thinking out loud”).

Clearly aimed at a millennial and younger audience, Laut Gedacht’s weekly-posted videos regularly attract up to 200,000 views. In one, Thaler and Kleine openly mock the speech of the environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who lives with Asperger’s syndrome. In another, more recent posting, the two men criticize German media outlets for their “insincere” coverage of Hungary’s right-wing populist prime minister Viktor Orban.

At first glance, Laut Gedacht might appear to be like any one of the dozens of far-right YouTube channels now operating in Germany. A closer look at its sponsor list, however, reveals links to a well-resourced and carefully organized information operation. 

Klein and Thaler receive financial support from a group named Ein Prozent (One Percent), the aim of which is to spread nationalist narratives among young Germans.

The group was founded in 2015 by Götz Kubitschek — a former reserve officer in the German army, who reportedly served in Bosnia, but was later dismissed from the military for his involvement in “right-wing extremist” politics. According to its website, Ein Prozent was formed in 2015 as a reaction to the German government’s decision to take in large numbers of refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

The organization is primarily funded by small donations from a large network of like-minded individuals. According to the group’s website, almost 50,000 people gave an average sum of $22 to Ein Prozent in 2018, allowing it to spend $425,000 on “patriotic projects” that year.   

Since its founding, the group has backed more than 80 right-wing cultural initiatives across Germany. They range from youth magazines to music projects and social media channels, such as Laut Gedacht. Ein Prozent propagates support by deploying slick online marketing techniques to build and nurture networks of young influencers already well established in German-language far-right social media circles.

Although Ein Prozent is not officially affiliated with any political party, it has strong links to Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Kubitschek, for instance, is a regular speaker at AfD events, while AfD politician Hans Thomas Tillschneider is on the group’s board of directors.

Founded in 2013, AfD has quickly risen to political prominence. In Germany’s last parliamentary elections, held in 2017, it won 12.6% of the vote and 94 parliamentary seats. The party’s growing popularity can be largely attributed to its hardline positions on immigration and Islam. AfD co-chairman Alexander Gauland has openly and frequently spoken of fighting an “invasion of foreigners.”

Culture war

Stefan Laurer, is the editor of Belltower News, a Berlin-based publication that specializes in coverage of extremist organizations. According to him, Ein Prozent is “basically implementing a policy based on the ideology of the New Right.” 

Laurer refers to the metapolitical strategies of the Nouvelle Droite movement. Established in late-1960s France and borrowing heavily from radical left-wing theory, its proponents believe that, in order for the far-right to be successful, reactionary ideology must be gradually and comprehensively filtered into society, via non-political channels such as music, literature and art.

“The assumption is that in order to get more people in Germany to vote for the far-right AfD party, the whole culture needs to change first. People need to feel like it is a completely normal thing to do,” he explained. “The idea is that a real, long-lasting change in politics needs to be preceded by a cultural change.” 

Back when these ideas were first established, attempts to radically alter the cultural landscape of any nation would have been faced with almost insurmountable obstacles, given that the monopoly on cultural output was held by the legacy media. But, in the age of social media, the ability of previously marginal voices to create content and reach large audiences has greatly expanded. 

While the global far right has proved adept at exploiting the potential of 21st-century technology to deliver its political message, Ein Prozent is notable as an organization dedicated to achieving this wider cultural shift. 

To help spread its ideas to German youth, Ein Prozent actively backs right-wing German musicians. According to Belltower News, in 2016 the group promoted a track called “Europa” produced by a 27-year-old rapper known as Komplott (German for “conspiracy”).

According to Patrick Stegemann, who has recently published a book about Germany’s far-right online networks,  the group considers “Europa” to be the “unofficial anthem” of young, indigenous Germans.

Another notable example of Ein Prozent’s incursion into the German music business is the 28-year-old rapper Chris Ares, whose nationalist-themed album “2014-2018” briefly topped both the German iTunes and Amazon Music charts. 

It includes tracks such as “Narrativ,” which features the  lyrics, “They call you Nazi, if you are not left-wing and don’t sound cosmopolitan and intelligent. If you don’t want women to be raped — Nazi! If you want to grow happily in this country — Nazi!” 

The album was produced by the label Arcadi Musik, an offshoot of the far-right lifestyle magazine Arcadi, which receives financial support from Ein Prozent. The group also contributes funding to the alternative media site Redpilled.de, which aggregates short films on topics such as violent crimes committed in Germany by immigrants, a number of which are made by Ein Prozent’s own in-house media operation.

International links

Ein Prozent also produces several podcasts featuring well-known German far-right personalities. The strategy of collaboration is not limited to Germany alone. Kubtischek also organizes annual summer “academies” at his home, in a small village in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, to which he invites influential figures from the international far right.

Visitors have included Jack Donovan — an alt-right anti-feminist writer and men’s rights activist from the U.S., with more than 30,000 followers on Instagram — and the Austrian Martin Sellner, a key figure in the Identitarian movement.

Sellner has been permanently banned from the U.K. and denied a travel permit to the U.S. In 2019, he was investigated by Austrian police after it emerged that he had received a donation of $1,500 from Brenton Tarrant, the Australian-born gunman who murdered 51 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Together with Kubitschek, Sellner founded the German branch of the Identitarian movement. 

Kubitschek also runs a publishing house named Verlag Antaios, which prints books by notable far-right figures, including Sellner, Donovan and Alain de Benoist, the French political philosopher widely considered the founder of the Nouvelle Droite.

In 2019, Ein Prozent was banned from Facebook and Instagram for its links to the Identitarian movement. Now, the group’s main platforms are its own website and YouTube channel, which at the time of writing had just over 11,000 subscribers. It also communicates with an audience of 7,000 via Telegram, an encrypted messaging platform popular with far-right and other extremist groups.  

While these numbers are relatively small, experts believe that the group’s real influence lies in the projects and organizations it supports — many of which have a far wider reach and affect public discourse in a deeper way than a single, fringe political organization could hope to. For example, a chart-topping rap album is likely to connect not only with those already dedicated to the far-right cause, but also potential new converts. It also helps to normalize and entrench reactionary themes within popular culture. And that is precisely what Ein Prozent is all about. 

“They work as a PR company. That’s how they understand politics,” Stegemann told me. “It’s much more powerful to finance somebody else to tell your truth than to do it yourself.”

The post German far-right group uses YouTube, podcasts and rap to convert Gen Z appeared first on Coda Story.

Antonina is 23 years old. She doesn’t identify as male or female, and accepts any pronoun people assign to her. She has cropped dark hair and talks softly during our video chat.

“Yesterday, on the street, a little boy called me ‘lady’ and an old lady called me ‘boy,’” she told me. 

Before the lockdown began, life in Yekaterinburg, a city to the east of Russia’s Ural mountains, often threw up these situations for Antonina. She asked to be referred to by her first name only, for fear of repercussions. 

“The society in Yekaterinburg is not exactly tolerant,” she explained. 

In Russia, members of the LGBTQ community have long faced hostility, ignorance and abuse both outside and within their own families.

As Russia’s Covid-19 cases have rocketed to more than 414,000 – the third-highest infection rate in the world — a strict lockdown has been imposed across the country. Those measures have exacerbated Antonina’s feelings of isolation. 

“Self-quarantine is quite hard for me. I live completely alone and I get lonely,” she said. 

Unexpectedly, the early days of the lockdown also offered an opportunity to Antonina and many others. A LGBTQ-friendly festival had been planned for April in a St Petersburg warehouse complex. Rather than cancel it, the organizers decided that the three-day event would take place over Zoom. 

In previous years, Znakravenstvafest – which takes its name from the Russian for “sign of equality” – had been hugely successful with the community. 

“People felt they were in a different world – a different universe,” Nastia Dyakova, one of the organizers, told me during a recent video call. 

When the lockdown began, the organizers realized that holding a physical iteration of the festival was no longer possible. So, using the Russian social media platform VK, they began to advertise it as a ticketed online event.

On April 12, hundreds of people logged in to Zoom. The organizers asked attendees to shout out where they were from. The chat pinged with cities and regions all over Russia, the former Soviet Union and beyond. 

“People weren’t afraid to turn their cameras on,” said Dyakova. “They were dancing in their underwear, waving LGBTQ flags, and the atmosphere of acceptance was fully present.”

The 350-person gathering provided many young people with a means to escape the claustrophobic situations they had suddenly found themselves in. 

“I remembered that cleansing feeling of walking into a space and realizing people are like you,” said Alina, 21, who attended the festival from her bedroom in Karelia, northwest Russia and preferred I use just her first name.

The freedoms of the LGBTQ community in Russia are limited by both society and law. For instance, in 2013, Vladimir Putin’s “gay propaganda” legislation enshrined longstanding homophobic attitudes in law by banning the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” 

In practice, the law means that people under the age of 18 no longer have access to educational resources about sexuality. Activist groups like Human Rights Watch also report that these measures have contributed to a growing lack of mental health, legal and psychological support services for members of the LGBTQ community.

Russians will go to the polls on July 1 to vote on a constitutional amendment that will allow President Vladimir Putin to remain in power until 2036. On Tuesday, pro-Kremlin media released an anti-gay campaign video, warning viewers to vote for the amendment or face a country where same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples is allowed. The video showed an orphan boy finding out he’s being adopted by a make-up wearing man. “Is this the Russia you’re voting for?” the video ends, as the couple embraces. The clip attracted hundreds of thousands of views – and harsh criticism. But the homophobia and prejudice it upholds are everyday realities for LGBTQ Russians like Antonina.

For Antonina, the festival — which included lectures, discussions and breakout rooms, all on Zoom — was eye-opening. 

“I realized there were so many people from the community,” she said. “There was a lecture on activism that really inspired us all to get engaged with the LGBT community in our cities.” 

For the first day of the festival, Antonina left her camera off, feeling safer watching anonymously.

 “On the second day, I got really into it. I turned my webcam on and was having fun with everyone else. I was smiling and started writing into the chat,” she said. Soon, she was dancing in full view of everyone. 

Gayza, 20, another festival attendee who asked to be identified only by her first name, is quarantined in the western city of Izhevsk with her parents. They don’t know that she identifies as queer.

“I’m still financially dependent on my parents,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out if they’d accept me. I’ve been trying to test the waters.”

Gayza added that her parents consume a steady diet of state media, via which the government’s anti-LGBTQ narratives are widely spread.

“My mother repeated some propaganda to me about same-sex marriage,” she told me. “She said, “how awful!”.”

Gayza had never been to an online or queer party before Znakravenstvafest. She stayed in her bedroom for three days, worried her parents might walk in because there was no lock on the door. 

“I told them not to disturb me,” she said. “I said it was educational, about feminism, and my mum didn’t react well. For her that’s the same thing as saying “queer.” She was like, ‘Don’t get yourself into a sect.’”

For the duration of the festival, Gayza joined her family only at mealtimes. Often, she found the lectures so interesting that she didn’t want to tear herself away.

 “My parents would get offended – “how is it possible?” they said. They couldn’t understand what was so important that I had to miss lunch.”

Since Znakravenstvafest, smaller LGBTQ and sex-positive Zoom parties have been happening every weekend in Russia. The security can be strict. 

Kinky Party is a Moscow-based sex party that welcomes people of all genders and sexual orientations. At its recently launched online events, there are queues to get in, and virtual doorstaff check names off against a list. On entry to the Zoom call, guests must introduce themselves to the host, or be unceremoniously kicked out. 

Despite hosting an altogether different kind of event, the people behind Znakravenstvafest also have to be careful. If the festival inadvertently admits someone under the age of 18, the organizers could face criminal charges under the propaganda laws. Meanwhile, LGBTQ-friendly events are constantly under threat of being hijacked or crashed by homophobic groups.

“We’re always trying to avoid the risk of the government approaching us or sanctioning us in any way,” said Dyakova, the festival’s organizer. 

But they believe the risks to be worth it. After the online event, Znakravenstvafest set up a Telegram chat, via which young people from all over Russia and the wider world could continue to talk. 

We are staying on the story of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ campaign. Last month, reporter Katia Patin examined how the laws forced one Russian YouTuber to flee the country.

Dyakova cried at the messages she received. Even over the internet, the festival had built a whole new universe. 

“The world we managed to create really was less violent and more accepting,” she said. “It was more open-minded than our reality.”

It has also paved the way for other online gatherings. 

Maxim Cuclev is an activist and filmmaker from Chisinau, Moldova, who has strong links with the Moscow queer scene and has made documentaries about LGBTQ life in his own country. 

Along with about 50 people from Russia, Moldova and Europe, I attended a Spring Queerantine party he co-hosted with fellow Moldovan activist Paula Cerescu in early May. Cuclev painted his face in what he described as “acid harlequin” makeup. Green disco lights bounced off the wall behind him and a patchwork of Zoom windows showed other faces lit in orange, pink and blue. 

Slava Rusova, a young non-binary musician quarantined with her mother in the Moscow region, stared through the camera with a languid expression, wearing a white tank top. The screen lit up her pale face. 

“Since we were born, we’ve been in self-isolation,” she said. “But it’s harder right now. We can’t be together with our friends.” 

However, Rusova added that the online gatherings do feel more secure than LGBTQ events in the real world. “You can just push the button and the person that’s trying to bully you goes away,” she explained. 

Still, lockdown – which is beginning to ease in Russia, despite continually rising Covid-19 numbers – can’t end soon enough. 

“I want to go to a real party,” she said. 

Photos by Thomas Dworzak, a photographer and current president of Magnum.

Alexandra Tyan contributed reporting. Karina Levitina contributed research.

Correction: The anti-gay ad was run by a pro-Kremlin outlet, not state media as stated in a previous version of this article.

The post Under lockdown, LGBTQ Russians were more isolated than ever. Then, the Zoom parties started appeared first on Coda Story.

The number of young adults who want to leave Russia is at a 10-year high — more than half of 18 to 24-year-olds would emigrate if they had the opportunity — but Pich never dreamed of a better life abroad. She fled Russia out of fear.

Pich, 25, had been building up a viral video production business since 2013, when she moved to Moscow from a small town in the Urals. She now has nearly two million subscribers on YouTube. Most of her projects are entertainment videos, but she also produced a series of children’s programming titled “Real Talk.” 

On one episode of the show, posted to YouTube last spring, she invited a gay man to talk to children about his life. This led to the police investigating the channel for the crime of “sexual violence against minors,” punishable by between 12 and 20 years in prison. Pich is now on the run.

“Real Talk” was modeled on the U.S.-based YouTube series “HiHo Kids,” in which children chat with a diverse range of guests. Past “HiHo” episodes have included conversations with a teen mom and a person living with dwarfism. The goal is to raise delicate topics in a parentally controlled environment, in order to promote tolerance and respect.

“The American show inspired us,” Pich said. “We decided to make a similar program, just one set in Russian realities.”

The LGBTQ episode featured a 21-year-old graphic designer named Maksim Pankratov. He fielded questions from a precocious group of kids. Most of the children’s parents agreed to be involved because their families included an LGBTQ person.

The episode’s YouTube page attracted more than 1.5 million views, with hardly any negative comments. Pich was especially proud of it and says that she believes that it does not violate Russian law. Sex was never mentioned or even alluded to. 

“What did we do? We just asked a person about his life,” she said.

Two of the children even voiced negative feelings about gay people. “I really don’t like it. I just really don’t understand,” said 10-year-old Daniel Massov. “Why would you have a relationship with a man, if women exist?”

Pankratov took it all in his stride, laughing along with the children’s questions. At one point, he broke down how a person realizes that they are gay to the youngest participant, age six, by telling her it is like being sure you like chocolate.

Elisei, 10, said that he wasn’t keen on the idea of homosexuality, either.

He then asked Pankratov, “Tell me, what do you not like about Russia?”

“I don’t like Russia because it doesn’t fit the parameters of my life,” Pankratov replied. “I can’t be fully open here and feel protected.”

“I hope Putin doesn’t hear that,” the boy said.

Russian Realities

In Los Angeles, where she now lives, Pich wakes up every morning and scans Russian headlines for at least an hour, checking for any updates on her criminal case which is still open.

“I start to feel sick every time,” she said.

The media has moved on, but in September Real Talk made primetime TV news. The complaints began when an organization dedicated to the promotion of “family values” reported the episode to Russia’s internet watchdog Roskomnadzor. 

Pyotr Tolstoy — a vocally conservative deputy in the State Duma, also known for his antisemitic remarks — denounced the show as “ethically unacceptable and immoral.” When Roskomnadzor ruled that Real Talk did not break Russian law, Tolstoy appealed the decision and sent the complaint higher up, to the state prosecutor’s office.

What happened next came as a surprise, even taking into account Russia’s dismal track record on LGBTQ rights.

The state prosecutor’s Investigative Committee not only opened a case under Russia’s controversial “gay propaganda” law, which prohibits the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” It also began a probe under Article 132 of Russia’s criminal code, which relates to sexual violence against children. The law is most frequently invoked in felony cases involving pedophilia and child pornography.

“I was in shock. I didn’t think that something like this was possible,” said Svetlana Zakharova from the rights organization Russian LGBT-Network.

Roskomnadzor then overturned its earlier judgment, adding the episode with Pankratov to its official blacklist, which is available online, and sending a complaint to YouTube that the video violated Russian law.

YouTube notified Pich that if she did not remove the video, the platform could be required under Russian law to block it. Representatives of Google, YouTube’s parent company, did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but the company’s online transparency report shows that the Russian government tops all other countries in total takedown requests. 

Since 2009, when Google began tracking statistics, the Kremlin has sent the company 80,033 requests for content removal. Historically, Google has honored 75% of these demands from Russia. By comparison, the U.S. has filed 7,962 and China just under 1,000. The requests documented by Google span its product range, including Web Search and Blogger, but more than half are for YouTube.

Google’s transparency report also lists the total number of items flagged for removal by countries since 2009. Each “item” is a piece of content on one of Google’s various products — for example, a blog post on Blogger, a video on YouTube or a URL in its search results. The graph below compares the total number of items flagged by country. Russia’s total is a staggering 477,146 items.

In response to all the negative attention, Pich immediately deleted the entire “Real Talk” channel from YouTube.

She hoped that the story would end there.

A Circus

It turned out that her actions only fueled the controversy. Now, the media could selectively choose sound bites from the show and no one could watch the full episode in context.

“An American video platform is educating Russian teenagers with revelations from porn stars and faggots,” read one online headline. Television broadcasters ran a marathon of news coverage.

Vitaly Milonov, another deputy in the State Duma, joined Tolstoy’s crusade against Real Talk. He dominated TV discussions, mixing innuendo and homophobic jokes with stern warnings about decadent western values corrupting traditional Russian society.

“A small child is being told about the nuances and details of sexual relationships,” Milonov said during one broadcast. A live studio audience clapped and cheered on his outrage. When Milonov shouted that he would “sock that imbecile in the jaw,” referring to Pankratov, many burst into laughter.

Many themes in the various broadcasts about the Real Talk show were familiar to regular viewers of Russian state TV, where homosexuality is frequently equated with bestiality and pedophilia, and the internet cast as a dangerous space that must be controlled and monitored.

“It’s just a circus,” Pich said. “If this was really about a crime and they believed that, they wouldn’t be laughing like that.”

‘Gay propaganda‘

Pich was 19 years old in 2013, when Russia’s “gay propaganda” law was ratified. It was the year she moved to Moscow. Back then, her news feeds were filled with music videos and posts by beauty bloggers, not politics. She has never voted in an election and never been to a protest. “To be honest I didn’t even know that such a law had passed,” she said.

In 2017 the European Court of Human Rights condemned the law as discriminatory. However, as Alexander Belik, who provides legal aid to the Russian LGBT-Network, explained to Coda Story, it is hardly ever enforced in Russia. The law was used to prosecute two people last year and since its passing, just 20 people have been charged under it.

While judges are loath to apply this notoriously vague legislation, Roskomnadzor frequently turns to it, in order to erase online content without having to go through the courts. The body is able to block websites and pages via a rubber-stamp process that allows it to circumvent formal court proceedings, in which content creators would be given the chance to defend themselves. Blocking is a subtler way to silence the LGBTQ community than prosecutions — especially when companies like Google are helping to enforce it.

Roskomnadzor does not track the number of websites or pages that are blocked, making the number of LGBTQ groups being silenced online both unreported and unreportable.

“They are trying to snuff out the LGBT community as much as possible through blocking,” said Belik. 

One in a hundred

Back in fall 2019, lawyers assured Pich that the accusations being made against her were “absurd” and that there was a “one in a hundred chance” that a criminal case would be opened against her.

But, for weeks, the state prosecutor’s office kept calling in the parents of children who had participated in the Real Talk show and Maxim Pankratov for questioning. The parents told activists that the authorities pressured them to give statements denouncing Pich and threatened them that their children could be taken away by child services. Pich was questioned twice. She began to believe the case had become too political for the authorities to back down. She booked a one-way ticket to the U.S.

She flew the next day, but was scared that the plane would be stopped before she took off. Pankratov was recognized on the street, beaten up and began to receive death threats. He is now seeking political asylum in an undisclosed European country.

Now, Pich alternates between sleepless nights and days when she can hardly get out of bed. She is terrified she could somehow be deported to Russia.

“If I knew about the consequences, I never would have done this,” she said. 

Even if her case is closed, Pich is still scared of going back to Russia, where she now faces the prospect of imprisonment for what amounts to a child rape charge. “The case can be closed and it could be reopened just as easily,” she added. “That’s what can happen in Russia.”

Alone and having only just started to learn English, Pich says that the state-wide coronavirus lockdown has deepened her sense of isolation. She spends most of her time producing videos about celebrities and entertainment for her remaining YouTube channel. She hasn’t shared her story with her two million followers.

The post On the run in LA from Russia’s anti-LGBTQ campaign appeared first on Coda Story.

“I was bullied at school for 12 years. I still hate to visit the place, because every day it was terrifying, each day meant facing death. Today I cannot visit my parents in Kakheti [in eastern Georgia], because it is dangerous,” said Sozashvili. “This is the difference between me and you. You will never, never understand this, you will never understand what it costs me to stand here and say this,” he told the politicians, jabbing his finger for emphasis.

Since the 2000s and especially in recent years, Georgia has sought to distance itself from its Soviet history and to market itself as a wine-soaked country firmly in the European camp. Tourism is booming in Georgia, and Forbes has proclaimed its capital one of Europe’s hippest destinations, declaring in 2018 that Berlin was “out” and Tbilisi was “in.”

While many in Georgia’s government have embraced the mantle of a rapidly developing nation that celebrates Western culture and values, LGBTQ activists like Tamaz have faced a less tolerant side to the nation: violence and political indifference in their fight for civil rights and justice. For a month after his speech at parliament, the 23-year-old was afraid to ride public transportation for fear of reprisals after he had outed himself in public.

This week, a small group of Georgian activists are swallowing their fear and holding Tbilisi’s first-ever Pride Week, a five-day long affair that includes a theater performance of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a conference and a march.

But the groundbreaking events have hit a wall of resistance within the LGBTQ community as well as the nation at large, underscoring the challenges Georgia faces at a time when the legitimacy of liberal European values are being called into question and Russia, its aggressive neighbor to the north, is interfering in the debate.

A few days before Pride Week commenced, the Georgian Orthodox Church released a statement calling Pride “absolutely unacceptable” and a “sodomite sin,” calling on the government to shut it down.

In response, queer activists held a rally in downtown Tbilisi, where they clashed with nationalist groups. At least eight people were detained.

A few days later, the Ministry of Internal Affairs — which had said previously it could not guarantee protestors’ safety and that the Pride march should not take place outdoors– announced it will “protect both freedom and freedom of expression, regardless of their political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and other marks,” so long as such expression does not exceed “permissible limits.”

But just this week, Levan Vasadze, a Georgian businessman who uses his millions to strip LGBTQ people of civil rights, announced his intention to organize vigilante patrols on the streets of Tbilisi during the Pride march. “We will tie their hands with belts and take them away,” he told his supporters at a rally on Sunday evening.

Civil society groups moved quickly to defend the rallying activists and condemn actors like Vasadze, and while they welcomed the Ministry’s response, they also noted that “the strengthening of such [extremist] groups over the years is the result of the government’s inappropriate policies, inaction and often tolerant attitudes.”

Soon after the Pride Week commenced, on Wednesday, Tamaz wrote on Twitter that members of far-right groups had announced their intentions to storm the offices of Tbilisi Pride and tried to attack several organizers as they left the building. Tamaz also reported that he received a death threat the same day.

Six years ago, a large LGBTQ celebration of the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia was held in Georgia. Thousands of counter-demonstrators led by Georgian Orthodox Christian priests broke police lines and attacked a group of about 50 activists.

The aftershocks of that violence still grip the LGBTQ community and many struggle over how best to achieve equality. Some question whether having a high-profile Pride event is helpful for the country or whether it elevates Western values of visibility and “coming out” over the safety of its activists.

When the modern queer liberation movement started with the Stonewall Riots in America 50 years ago, the enemies of equality were clear: discriminatory legislation, prejudiced societal beliefs, religious conservatism.

But now, in an age of information manipulation, it’s getting much harder to define who exactly the enemies of the LGBTQ are. In 2019, Georgian activists find themselves facing similar prejudices to those faced by Stonewall protestors, but in a world complicated by fake news, disinformation campaigns and cyber threats.

Vasadze, the ultra-conservative businessman, says modern wars are no longer fought between countries. Instead, the fight between the “life culture” and the “death culture,” by which he means families versus LGBTQ people, is played out “in every living room and in every bedroom where your wife and my wife [and] our children sleep.”

As Tamaz was speaking to the human rights committee last year, a demonstration was raging outside Parliament. The same committee that decided that the annual May commemorations for International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia should be canceled had put together an action plan that included a stipulation for an awareness-raising campaign about LGBTQ issues, according to activists.

The bureaucrats’ decision was supported by around four dozen LGBTQ activists. They feared nationalist groups capable of mobilizing great numbers were planning counter-demonstrations, and the risk of violence was too high. A larger group of activists decided to demonstrate anyway, gathering outside government buildings in the city center.

Giorgi Tabagari, who took part in last year’s demonstration, gained confidence with its success. He then spent months drumming up support for what to some must have seemed like a radical proposition: a Pride Week in Tbilisi. He felt that staging bold events would institutionalize queer activism, increase visibility and accelerate social change. “Visibility comes first, and the changes follow,” he said.

In the wake of the announcement of the planned Pride week, LGBTQ community members have been fiercely debating the decision, including at a seminar held outside Tbilisi.

A Georgian woman who works at an international nonprofit network and attended the event told me that some queer Georgians, especially those from regional towns, said they felt Tbilisi-based organizations were out of touch with the community’s interests. She said the critics felt that the urban activists “sit around discussing sex and sexuality, watch [queer] movies and eat cookies.”

Those against the Pride celebrations fear the visibility that the events bring, terrified of coming out themselves for fear of being shunned from their families or fired from jobs. More attention, they said, needs to be paid to poverty, homelessness, domestic violence and access to healthcare and education, issues that affect LGBTQ people in their daily lives. Pride may increase awareness, but many fear it does nothing to address problems head-on.

And with memories of the violence six years ago still fresh, some community members are afraid Pride will incite another backlash.

The nationalist group Georgian March announced its plans to form a political party and run in the next parliamentary elections in 2020, and although the group does not yet attract much support, events like Pride may give it a galvanizing issue to attract votes. Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group, a local LGBTQ nonprofit, said it fears that “the likelihood of the mobilization of politically motivated and managed homophobic groups remains high” as Pride nears.

Tabagari, the Pride organizer, concedes that violence could occur, but says this is “unavoidable” in a country where LGBTQ people are, according to some measures, still the most-hated group. “Either you have to say no to visibility and publicity and go down underground and never come out, or if [you do the opposite] there will always be people who are against you,” he explained.

Not all of Georgia’s liberals agree.

Giorgi Ptskialadze is a charmingly boyish young man who has read Judith Butler in English and clenches his fists in excitement when he talks about Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign. There isn’t much about the 19-year-old’s politics that differs dramatically from his millennial and Gen Z peers in the West who have increasingly voiced the opinion that the leftist ideals of their parents’ generation are just not left enough.

Ptskialadze, an art history student, attended the queer seminar this spring that was rocked by debate over Pride. He described the conversations there as focused on how to bring about “authentic queer activism” in Georgia separate from the current strand of identity politics that he says further divide society. He doesn’t want to follow the United States, for example, where the queer liberation movement led by white gay men is perceived to have ignored many trans people and people of color.

Ptskialadze worries, though, that Georgia is headed down the same path, towards a future where LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people, atheists, and Orthodox Christians are more segregated than they are now, and what he sees as the more pressing political struggle — battling big government, big business and capitalism — is neglected. He says the very idea of Pride Week disgusts him. He dismisses it as a hyper-commercialized spectacle that does nothing for the community, while companies like Coca Cola rake in money from advertising. “They stick a rainbow on water bottles and charge you more for it,” he said. “This is not activism for me.”

As Pride kicks off this week, many in Georgia’s queer community, like Ptskialadze, will stay on the sidelines, which is itself another kind of protest.

Others, like a young, closeted psychology student I spoke to, barely know where they stand on the issue.

In hushed, nervous tones, she told me of her first queer experience, a drunken night with a female friend, after which she felt only shame. When I spoke about Pride, she looked confused — she hadn’t heard of it. Nor, it turned out, did she know that LGBTQ rights nonprofits even existed. After explaining the possibility of violence at Pride, she cocked her head to the side and asked why it would be violent. Despite the risk, she plans to attend anyway.

The post LGBTQ Georgians debate rights strategy as violence threatens Pride Week appeared first on Coda Story.

In reality, human rights workers say, authorities delivered the final blow in a bitter campaign by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to delegitimize and silence government critic Oyub Titiev, the activist who was one of the last people in his homeland brave enough to document abuses of power, extrajudicial killings and torture.

Titiev, the head of Russian rights group Memorial’s Chechen office, says he is innocent of any crime, and says his conviction was based on fabricated evidence.“You don’t need a law degree to see the absurdity of this case,” he said in his closing statement last week.

The tactics against Titiev are part of a longstanding Russian playbook to deploy active disinformation campaigns as well as questionable legal proceedings against government critics, especially human rights workers. In Chechnya, which has suffered through two brutal wars, waves of intimidation by regional authorities against human rights activists and government critics have been particularly terrifying.

Titiev and his Russian rights activists say that this jail sentence carries more grave consequences than his loss of freedom: it could signal the end of any independent rights group in Chechnya.

“These court proceedings are nothing more than a circus!” said Svetlana Gannushkina, a prominent Russian human rights leader who attended Titiev’s final court hearing. ”Kadyrov’s goal is to silence the last opposing voices to his inhuman regime, and ruin Titiev’s reputation.”

Titiev started working for Memorial after the 2009 kidnap and murder of his predecessor Natalia Estemirova. Her killers were never found.

Estemirova’s death was part of a broad crackdown against dissidents and activists under Kadyrov’s tenure. In January 2017, local authorities arrested dozens of homosexuals in Chechnya and killed 27. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya from Novaya Gazeta have also been killed when investigating abuses in Chechnya, and the Russian newspaper has come under attack by Chechen authorities for its ongoing critical coverage.

Human rights workers and Titiev’s friends say that Titiev’s strong reputation in Chechen society for a long time made the authorities more wary of attacking him directly.

Titiev spent years helping rebuild medical clinics and schools across Chechnya’s mountain villages that had been destroyed by the wars. He was also known to provide pro bono legal assistance to families searching for murdered relatives. Titiev pushed for authorities to investigate kidnappings, acts of torture and killings reportedly perpetrated by Chechen security agencies. He also called for inquiries into war crimes perpetrated during both Chechen wars.

Then, the gloves came off early last year.

Titiev was arrested in January 2018 after local police stopped his car during his daily commute from his village of Kurchaloi to Memorial’s office in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Hours later, after Titiev refused to succumb to police pressure to confess to drug charges, police announced the discovery of marijuana in his car.

Titiev says the police planted the drugs and said the arrest violated procedural norms.

Immediately, news of the arrest and the charges were splashed over local television. Soon afterward, Kadyrov himself went on air and denounced Titiev as a drug addict, without offering any proof.

Kadyrov then followed up with an impassioned denunciation of human rights activists. “They have no clan, no nation, no religion,” he said on the local television channel “Grozny.” “They should know that in our republic their work will be stopped.”

Anna Dobrovolskaya, who works for Memorial in Russia, says the accusation of drug use is particularly sensitive in Chechnya, a conservative society where people take offense to perceived immoral activities.

“To place narcotics on him is what can hurt his trust the most in a Muslim dominated region,” said Dobrovolskaya.

Titiev’s case mirrors the legal troubles of Memorial’s office director in Karelia, Yuri Dmitriev, who also faced a judicial proceedings aimed at silencing him and ruining his reputation, she said.

The 62-year-old Dmitriev was arrested and being tried on the charge of sexually abusing his adopted daughter, after being acquitted on child pornography charges that also involved his daughter. He says the charges are politically motivated and untrue.

”It is a common tactic, a concentrated effort to discredit both Titiev and Dmitriev. The state applies the methods that can hurt the most in the area where the activists are working,” Dobrovolskaya said.

Despite a year-long pre-trial detention and vociferous media campaign against him, the effort to blacken Titiev’s reputation has had mixed results.

In Shali, where Titiev’s court case was held, several local residents said they did not believe the charges against him. Titiev is a former physical education teacher who is known for his pious lifestyle and abstention from drugs and alcohol. ”Nobody here believes that he is guilty,” said an elderly woman in a local café who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

But the larger goal of silencing dissent may prove more successful.

While he serves his four-year sentence, it’s unclear who will take over Titiev’s work documenting alleged crimes by the Chechen authorities.

Kadyrov has said that all human rights activists will be denied access to Chechnya once Titiev’s trial ended.

Video by Front Line Defenders for HRC Memorial and Oyub Titiev

The post How the last Chechen rights activist was silenced appeared first on Coda Story.

But it’s the deeper message of the film “Temporary Difficulties,” which premiered earlier this month in Russia, that has sparked such an outcry. Because even in a country where the disabled are routinely treated in ways that would shock many Americans, the film is being seen as a call for a return to an even darker past, when people with any kind of handicap were largely airbrushed from day-to-day life.

Movie critics have condemned the film, which was partly funded by the Russian Culture Ministry, as insensitive, inflammatory and down right harmful. But viewers have been more positive, with some describing it as “motivating.”

It tells the story of an average Soviet-era family, whose son is born with cerebral palsy — based on a true story, according to the filmmakers.

The mom, Rita, a beautiful woman with a kind smile, accepts the boy the way he is and does everything you would expect a caring mother to do. She takes him to doctors, holds his hand through painful physiotherapy, finds him a comfortable wheelchair and generally tries her best to make his life as easy as possible.

Ivan, the father, does not. Played by the famous Russian priest-turned-actor Ivan Okhlobystin, he refuses to acknowledge his son is sick and calls his condition “temporary difficulties.”

“What, are you saying he can’t be just like everybody else, like all ‘normal’ people?” he shouts at a colleague who has the temerity to suggest that Sasha, the boy, probably wouldn’t become an astronaut or a professional boxer.

Ivan decides to push his disabled son into becoming stronger, more self-sufficient and more “normal” — in a way that most people would regard as abuse.

Ivan decides to push his disabled son into becoming stronger, more self-sufficient and more “normal” — in a way that most people would consider as abuse

He throws away the boy’s wheelchair, forcing him to struggle with crutches. He refuses to take him to a special school for disabled kids. (When he finds out that his wife has tried to do so behind his back, it’s Sasha who stops him from hitting her — by raising his one of his crutches) He enrolls him instead in an ordinary school where his classmates mock and bully him. He forces Sasha to do chores around the house, and when the boy forgets to take out the trash, empties the bin into his bed.

When Sasha struggles — with heavy doors, steep stairways, or just eating — his father never helps him. Instead, he yells. When Sasha does well at school — so well in fact that he is the only one in class who wins a trip to a prestigious Soviet summer camp — Ivan doesn’t even smile, let alone praise him. He just stands there, silently, looking smug and angry.

Anger has been his main look ever since doctors in the maternity ward tell him there is something wrong with his baby. Without even looking at his crying wife, Ivan snaps at the doctor “Who’s at fault for this?” and storms off.

By the time 16-year-old Sasha is dropped off in the forest and told to crawl home, he is almost entirely paralyzed. But then comes the twist.

After crawling through the woods for two days and almost getting eaten by a bear, Sasha not only survives, but, in the film’s portrayal, gets on the path to becoming “normal.”

He leaves his hometown for Moscow, becomes a successful business consultant famous around the world and, just to complete this stereotypically perfect picture, gets engaged to an attractive young woman. His symptoms go away almost completely. And in the end, he concludes that it was all thanks to his father’s toughness. Sasha even apologizes for not speaking to him for 15 years.

The film, by aspiring young director Mikhail Raskhodnikov, carries several messages: weakness of any kind should not be tolerated. Being disabled, or just different, is shameful, and that one should always strive to be “normal.” If it is carried out with good intentions, being abusive can be justified, and a “tough love” approach to those who require special care works.

In some ways, these notions hardly break new ground in Russia. The disabled are already receiving plenty of “tough love.”

People with physical and mental disabilities are routinely kicked out of Russian cafes and movie theaters, on the grounds they make other customers feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. Reports of people objecting to the installation of wheelchair ramps and other aids in apartment blocks are common — often because parents don’t want their children to see disabled people.

Just last month, “Russki Reporter,” ran a column headlined “Love the invalid, scum!” in which the author attacked the idea of giving disabled people rights and special help. He reminisced nostalgically about Soviet times, when the disabled were largely kept out of sight.

“I wish that musicians were not always without hands, but with hands, too, sometimes; that artists could see at least with one eye, and a plumber didn’t have cerebral palsy — maybe just gout,” wrote Igor Naydyonov. “Before, it was shameful [to be disabled], now it’s honorable.”

“Before, it was shameful [to be disabled], now it’s honorable.” Writer Igor Naydyonov

In a sign that attitudes have indeed shifted from Soviet times, the piece provoked a backlash on social media — prompting Russki Reporter to remove the article from its website, and an apology from the editor.

But now “Temporary Difficulties” has, so to speak, picked up the baton.

Critics have panned it, among them the prominent movie writer Anton Dolin, who called it “the worst film of the year.” And even though “Temporary Difficulties” received government money, the state-news agency TASS ran a column describing it as “a crime of a film.”

“The worst film of the year.” Movie critic Anton Dolin

Disabled rights groups have also condemned the film for the attitudes it was encouraging. “We are at risk of creating a phenomenon of cerebral palsy denialism, just like HIV denialism,” wrote Yekaterina Klochkova, founder of the Physical Rehabilitation Center for People with Motor Impairment, in a column for the Miloserdie.ru charity news site.

“Parents who don’t have access to specialized support will use Okhlobystin’s character as an example. Other people would blame parents who failed to ‘cure’ their kid’s cerebral palsy for not doing enough and spoiling their children [with kindness].”

Russian movie-goers are still making their minds up, it seems. But some are clearly supportive. After its first weekend, the movie ranked fourth in Russian film website Kinopoisk’s ratings, behind two Hollywood blockbusters and a Russian wedding comedy.

It is being screened at some 600 movie theaters all across Russia — about half the number showing the number one ranking film, “The Predator,” but still indicating significant interest from distributors.

On Russia’s flagship entertainment and culture platform, “Afisha,” 29 out of 32 viewer reviews were positive at the time of writing. Similarly, on Kinopoisk, most of the comments gave the film the thumbs up.

Viewers called the film “powerful” and “motivating,” praising it for showing that “what seems impossible is, actually, possible.” Another said that “everything is temporary difficulties while you’re still alive.”

“Yes, the methods that the father used [to deal with his son’s condition] are controversial,” one viewer wrote on the Afisha site. “But they helped, didn’t they?”

If the reaction to “Temporary Difficulties” has proved one thing, it’s that in the battle for values in modern Russia, there’s still plenty of support for a return to the past.

The post Russia’s disability ‘denialism’ appeared first on Coda Story.

She already had a son — with a man who was jobless and regularly drank himself into oblivion. “He’d use his fist on us,” she said, recoiling at the thought of him. They lived in a small, lightly-built wooden house, more like a summer cottage or dacha. During the months of snow and ice that engulf her native Sakhalin island, in Russia’s Far East, she lived in constant fear of her son freezing to death. Another child would be too much.

Besides, she had not fully recovered from a lopsided C-section when she gave birth. The thought of opening up her scar terrified her. And she had gone through an abortion before, six years earlier.

But when Yulia (not her real name) arrived at a state-run clinic in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the island’s administrative center, ready to go ahead with the termination, she discovered the staff had another plan for her. “I was told I had to wait,” she said.

After being given a scan confirming her pregnancy, she was sent for a consultation with a psychologist. There were photos of ruddy-cheeked babies on the wall, Yulia recalled. They were children, the psychologist told her, who had been “saved.”

“I told her I couldn’t bring another baby into a family like ours, not with a violent father,” Yulia said. But the psychologist responded by sending her home for what is called a “week of silence,” a policy introduced in 2011 with the aim of reducing Russia’s high abortion rate. And by the end of that week Yulia had changed her mind. Despite all her misgivings, she would go through with the pregnancy.

If you listen to anti-abortion activists in Russia, such cases are increasingly common and have led to a marked fall in the country’s high abortion rate. It’s a sign, they say, of how their campaign to ban abortion, backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, is changing government policy and public opinion. It’s a campaign that the Kremlin has given the impression it agrees with — both to maintain its alliance with the church, and support among advocates of conservative “traditional values” at home and abroad, for whom abortion is a touchstone issue. One result is that the Christian Right in the U.S. and elsewhere have held up Putin’s Russia as a global example.

Yet, as so often in Russia, not all is as it seems — and many choose to see what suits them.

The Kremlin has given the impression it agrees with the campaign, to maintain its alliance with the church, and support among “traditional values” conservatives at home and abroad

When President Vladimir Putin was inaugurated this May after winning a fourth term in office, he made sure to give the stage to the Orthodox Church — in effect putting the Kremlin’s alliance with the church on public display.

Resplendent in an emerald green cloak, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the church, presided over the ceremony, which took place in the Kremlin’s 15th-century Cathedral of the Annunciation, once the personal chapel of the tsars. This was Putin the pious on show.

The Russian leader crossed himself in front of the camera and then, after receiving the Patriarch’s blessing, kissed a large icon of the Virgin Mary before crossing himself once more.

It was a blessing from a man who has been very public about his views on abortion. Speaking to members of the Russian parliament last year, the Patriarch said it was time that what he called this “evil” was outlawed. “This would not be some revolutionary step,” he told lawmakers, “but a necessary return to normality, without which it will be impossible for men and women to achieve happiness.” And fellow believers say things are going their way.

“Step by step, we have slowly changed people’s minds,” said Maksim Obukhov, a Moscow archpriest and founder of an anti-abortion group called “For Life.”

Obukhov described how he and his fellow campaigners used to distribute leaflets around city apartment blocks to promote their cause in the dying years of the Soviet Union. As he saw it, they were rebels on the edge of society.

A quarter century later, speaking under the glow of the candelabras hanging in his church in northern Moscow, he triumphantly listed what he regards as a string of victories. As well as the “week of silence,” Obukhov cited the introduction of crisis centers — refuges for women who need support to go through with a pregnancy — and a 2011 law that state-run clinics must show pregnant women an ultrasound if they are considering an abortion. “When the woman hears the heartbeat,” he said, “this is when we get real success.”

Demonstrable success would mean a significant and sustained reduction in terminations. As things stand, Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world — partly a legacy of Soviet times when it was the primary form of birth control.

The biggest test for Russia’s anti-abortion movement lies in the country’s Far East, a vast region about the size of Australia. Here, the abortion rate is three times greater than in Moscow. Government officials partly attribute this to the region’s high unemployment. The Orthodox clergy cite the historically low number of churches. “It was a place for migrants, and had more atheism than religious worship,” said Obukhov.

On the mainland, going southwards from Sakhalin, is the port of Vladivostok, the largest city in Russia’s Far East, and affluent by comparison with the rest of the region. It has also become a hub for an increasingly active network of Christian charities. They have even got their supporters inside state-run clinics, putting them in positions that can influence a woman’s decision in getting an abortion. But they also have an interest in exaggerating their impact.

It was an encounter with one of these Christian activists that changed 33-year-old Ekaterina Zinyukhina’s mind. She initially wanted to have an abortion when she became pregnant two years ago. Zinyukhina already had two children and was concerned she wouldn’t be able to balance work and child-rearing, with her husband working too. “I have no parents to look after the kids,” she explained, sitting in her small Vladivostok apartment, and balancing the blue-eyed boy she gave birth to last year on her knee.

She said her resolve started to crumble when she was made to listen to the fetal heartbeat, during her first visit to the local state clinic. And then she had a session with a psychologist linked to a charity called “Cradle,” who had become known in the city for “rescuing” babies. “That’s when I changed my mind,” said Zinyukhina.

Now Cradle helps her with baby-sitting, and members regularly call in, bringing cakes and children’s toys. “It’s tough,” she said, “but we survive and make do.” Her consultation with the psychologist “made me realize that God was giving us a gift,” Zinyukhina said. “People shouldn’t be the ones who decide.”

That idea has become something of a refrain for anti-abortion campaigners. Back on Sakhalin Island, I met an obstetrician who has become an insider activist. “It got to the point when I felt every woman wanting an abortion was making a mistake,” said Svetlana Moskaleva.

After 20 years of running a clinic in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Moskaleva performed her final termination at the end of last year, when she decided not to renew her abortion license. “Russians are very emotional people,” she said. “They need guidance making such decisions.”

“Russians are very emotional people. They need guidance making such decisions.” Svetlana Moskaleva, obstetrician and anti-abortion activist

What she didn’t mention is the guidance coming from above, from her employer, the Russian government. For all the closeness between church and state, the state continues to have full control over policy, and in essence that policy is “pro-choice.”

Just months before the election that handed him his fourth term, a different version of the Russian leader was on display. This, you could say, was Putin the pragmatist.

Every year, Putin holds a live televised news conference, with questions coming in from across the country as well as from his studio audience. It’s an occasion that he uses for grand announcements, or to set out his views on major issues of the day. Someone asked a question about banning abortion. And his answer could not have sounded more distant from the beliefs of his allies in the Orthodox Church.

“In the modern world, the decision is up to the woman herself.” President Vladimir Putin

“In the modern world, the decision is up to the woman herself,” said Putin. “Any decisions on restricting abortion in the future, he continued, “must be careful, considered and based on the general mood in society and the moral and ethical norms that have developed in society.”

You can understand why the Russian leader appears to be performing this balancing act when you look at public opinion figures. According to a Pew Research Center study last year, 71 percent of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians, and there’s no doubt that the church is widely revered. But a very slightly larger proportion of Russians — 72 percent — say they oppose an abortion ban, according to a survey by the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM).

For comparison, polls in the United States show that opinion is evenly divided, with around half of Americans describing themselves as “pro-choice,” and a similar proportion identifying as “pro-life,” or against abortion.

Yet you could hear that Putin was choosing his words with care, with none of the blunt language he is known for, sidestepping this major difference of opinion with the Orthodox Church and his wider traditional values support base.

He needs both constituencies to maintain power and promote his vision of Russian exceptionalism. And so, aided by its grip on the Russian media, the Kremlin has fostered the illusion that it is on side on this crucial issue for conservatives, while actually doing the opposite.

Putin also gets help from his cheerleaders abroad — who are sometimes willfully blind to his publicly-stated views. A case in point is the World Congress of Families, a U.S.-led coalition of right-wing Christians opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion. At their annual gathering, in Chisinau, Moldova, earlier this month, delegates heaped praise on the Russian leader for his leadership style and what they see as his support for family values.

You see similar contortions among the growing number of Trump Republicans who admire Putin— who ignore not just Putin’s position on abortion, but his support for strict gun control too.

“Putin is very conservative,” said Lech Kowalewski, one of the delegates, who heads the Polish branch of Human Life International, a U.S.-based anti-abortion group. “He’s not a leader, he is a monarch of his kingdom.”

The Polish campaigner refused to even acknowledge that Putin had publicly backed continued state funding for abortions. “Even if he [Putin] is pro-choice, he would not say so out loud because the political climate right now in Russia is religious,” said Kowalewski. “I don’t know his views, but I know he wants to limit abortion.”

You see similar contortions among the growing number of Trump Republicans who admire the Russian leader — who not only ignore Putin’s position on abortion, but on issues like gun control too.

Orthodox Church leaders have behaved in much the same way, avoiding any mention of Putin’s pro-abortion stance, clearly conscious of their own wider interests.

But some priests lower down the hierarchy have spoken out, even questioning the Russian leader’s faith. “Anyone who thinks Putin is a true believer is fooling themself,” said Mikhail Plotnikov, a priest and lecturer at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow. “True believers do not become friends with people like Trump and Berlusconi. They do not divorce their wives.”

Though he believes the momentum is in his favor, Moscow-based Archpriest Maksim Obukhov concedes the reality. “Putin follows public opinion,” he said. “So he won’t do anything that would make him lose favor with the population.” From his point of view, this underlines the importance of continuing with efforts to change attitudes and prevent women from going ahead with terminations.

But even on this count, the shift may be more imagined than real. Take the much-heralded “week of silence” for instance. Although there are no comprehensive figures, anecdotal evidence from Russia’s Far East suggest it has had a minimal effect at best. In interviews, several psychologists in the region said that on average just 1 in 10 women give up on the idea of an abortion after completing their one week “cooling-off” period.

“When that happens, I am so happy,” said Svetlana Ustyuzhanina, a psychologist in a Sakhalin state clinic, her eyes widening with delight. “They have chosen a life,” she added. “To kill another person is a sin.” But then, acknowledging how few women actually change their minds, she said: “It’s not nearly enough.”

Her consultation room was decorated with gilt-edged Russian Orthodox icons, and drawings she said had been sent by “the grateful” — mothers she had persuaded to change their minds. She also has a collection of tiny fetus dolls, which she uses as a prop to make her point during her consultation sessions. An icon of the Virgin Mary stood beside her computer screen. “She protects families,” said Ustyuzhanina, giving the picture a pat.

In answers to written questions, Russia’s Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said that the ministry had worked “primarily with the Russian Orthodox Church” in formulating its abortion “prevention strategy,” as well as with lawmakers and civil society groups.

The signs are, though, that the “week of silence” and other measures billed as restrictions are designed as much to appease the church and its supporters, maintaining the Kremlin’s cloak of traditional values, while making sure that abortions remain widely available, and free.

The minister reiterated Putin’s opposition to an abortion ban, adding that she feared it would only make things worse for women, leading them to resort to illegal procedures, putting their own lives at risk. Skvortsova noted that the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, imposed just such a ban in the 1930s (with the aim of boosting the population), lasting for nearly 20 years, which led to a spike in female mortality.

The Kremlin has a real interest in raising birth rates, with the country on the verge of a demographic crisis. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has seen its population plummet. There were 203,000 fewer people born in 2017 compared to the year before, according to the federal statistics service.

Anti-abortion activists claim that the high abortion rate is a major reason why. Although the number of terminations has dropped from Soviet times, at around 400 per 1,000 live births it is still far higher than the figures for countries at comparable levels of economic development. But demographic experts say that a far more important factor in explaining the population decline is the high overall mortality rate, and the desire of many women to have fewer children than their predecessors.

Putin has long offered cash incentives to encourage childbearing. Ahead of this year’s presidential election, he expanded the subsidy for families, hoping this will prompt Russians to have more children. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has previously sung the praises of large families, explaining that Russia would have suffered without third children such as the astronaut Yuri Gagarin.

So far, though, such efforts appear to have had little effect. “The conditions still do not exist to make women and couples willing to have larger families,” according to Marge Berer of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion. And she said that anti-abortion measures advocated by the Orthodox Church and its supporters “are bound to fail.”

What would put a real dent in Russia’s abortion rate, population experts say, is improving the availability and affordability of contraception. While the state provides abortions for free, a 30-day pack of birth control pills costs $16 on average, a lot of money for hard-pressed Russian families.

Widespread myths about birth control are another problem, according to Tatyana Nikonova, a sex education advocate and blogger based in Moscow. “There are a lot of lies out there about contraceptives,” she said, “that they’ll make you infertile, or blind.”

But in the Far East, the commitment of Orthodox activists remains undimmed, regardless of their impact.

Since deciding to have her third child, Ekaterina Zinyukhina has joined them, becoming an anti-abortion evangelist herself.

In the past, she would have described herself as most Russians do, she said: as a follower of the Orthodox faith, but not a church-goer. But after her psychological consultation, Cradle arranged for a priest to visit her. And he finalized Zinyukhina’s conversion — to being against abortion, and believing in God.

The post Putin the pro-choice champion appeared first on Coda Story.

That was the message from American delegates at the latest gathering of the World Congress of Families (WCF) — a U.S. and Russian-led coalition of right-wing Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion, which has been accused of exporting “hate” because of its overtly homophobic policies.

Trump “is not a fully-formed conservative,” said Alan Carlson, one of the organization’s American founders, acknowledging the U.S. president’s questionable status as a standard-bearer for the WCF’s ideals. But he said: “We have to take our allies where we find them.”

“We have to take our allies where we find them.” Alan Carlson, World Congress of Families

The ideological compromise of overlooking the president’s two divorces, reputation for adultery and past support for abortion is a small price to pay, delegates argued, for having someone in the White House committed to filling federal courts with conservative judges and who now styles himself as a “pro-life” crusader.”

Over two days of wining and dining, largely funded by the Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, the subtext of the discussion among these self-styled defenders of the institution of marriage was that such marriages of convenience are now an essential tactical tool.

Similar calculations are in play in Russia, where Putin’s alliance with the Orthodox Church has enabled him to position himself as a champion of “traditional values” at home and abroad, even while he takes a “pro-choice” position on abortion.

The country should become a “moral pillar” for the world, said Russian delegate Olga Letkova, head of A.R.K.S, a parental rights group that has supported the decriminalization of domestic violence.

But when asked if Putin is really “conservative”, she laughed: “I don’t really know. We are trying to educate him,” said Letkova. “We send him letters and articles and we collect signatures. We’ve collected one million signatures against abortion.”

Carlson confessed to doubts about Putin’s true beliefs too. “Unlike George Bush, I’ve never looked him in the eye to read his soul. But maybe he really has become a religious person, a genuine convert. I think he cares about Russia’s demographic future. That’s genuine.”

Hosting the conference in Moldova was seen locally as a way for the country’s pro-Kremlin President Igor Dodon to deepen ties with Russia. He reportedly met with Malofeev last year, and asked him to fund the event.

There were signs that Russia’s influence on the W.C.F. (which grew out of the founders’ involvement with campaigns against abortion and gay rights in Moscow) is expanding further.

Two weeks before the meeting got underway in the Moldovan capital, the list of speakers was substantially changed, to make way for more Russians, according to Alex Schadenberg, a Canadian from an organization called the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. “Some Westerners disappeared from the schedule, clearing space for representatives of the Russian Duma,” he said.

Most prominent among them was the ultra-conservative Russian politician Yelena Mizulina, who has spearheaded the decriminalization of domestic violence and the country’s controversial 2012 law outlawing so-called “gay propaganda,” which has helped spark a surge in attacks on the LGBTQ community in other former Soviet states.

Mizulina heaped compliments on Putin during the opening session, claiming that under his leadership the Kremlin is “setting up everything that is necessary to support a traditional family,” calling Russia an example to the world.

But under the guise of its advocacy for what it calls the “natural family,” the W.C.F. actively promotes homophobia, according to the U.S.-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Center. It has designated the W.C.F. as a “hate group” alongside white nationalist and other extremist groups. And investigations by Coda Story have shown how Putin allies connected to the W.C.F. have been developing connections with anti-gay activists worldwide.

The World Congress of Families has been designated as a “hate group” alongside white nationalist and other extremist groups

As in previous W.C.F meetings, there was also a strong current of white nationalist thinking flowing through the discussions, with Putin being held up as an ally in the struggle.

Among the speakers was an advisor to Italy’s far-right Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, who has been praised by former Trump aide Steve Bannon for his strongman brand of nationalistic populism.

Claudio D’Amico, the advisor, issued an apocalyptic warning that “European civilization” is in danger of being “replaced” by newcomers from Africa and the Middle East, because Italians and other Europeans are not having enough children.

The West, he said, needs to resolve its tensions with Russia to deal with what he called the “new problem,” the threat of a “Muslim invasion and Muslim terrorism.”

The answer, D’Amico claimed, was to form a common front together. “Russia is with us. I’m pro-family and I can see that currently, the Russian government is pro-family.”

He too argued for compromise with leaders who do not adhere to their “family values” principles — mentioning Italy’s former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, as an example.

“Personal behavior” is one thing, D’Amico argued, ideas and values another. “The family is the base of the society and needs to be protected. Personal freedom is another issue. Everybody has to decide if they want to be faithful to their wife or not, or to go with men or not.”

Berlusconi’s widely reported philandering and other controversies, D’Amico argued, could be excused because of his broader support for conservative ideals.

“For example, Berlusconi was not trying to introduce a law that you can go with a prostitute whenever you want,” he said, before taking another swipe at the LGBTQ community and gay rights. “If all the men went with men and all the women went with women, the world would die.”

President Trump famously said that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone and still not lose votes.

The unanswered question at the World Congress of Families was how far the Christian Right is prepared to compromise, in order to advance its agenda.

The post For Christian conservatives, ‘sinners’ are essential allies appeared first on Coda Story.

Gay rights groups in Georgia called off a planned rally on May 17 after threats of violence and continued tensions following riots in Tbilisi over the weekend, effectively ceding the city to religious conservatives and small neo-Nazi groups. But individual activists, defying the LGBT groups’ decision, still came out to rally.

May 17 is International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOT), and Georgia’s embattled gay community and activists often try to hold various public events on the occasion. This year several advocacy groups and activists announced that they were planning to gather in front of the prime minister’s office to “remind the community of the destructive consequences of hate.”

But after watching police barely contain far-right mobs from attacking liberal protesters a few days earlier, LGBT rights activists said the city’s downtown would not be a safe place to demonstrate. “We decided to concede our constitutional right of the freedom of expression this time […] not to let these forces create tension,” LGBT rights activist Giorgi Kikonishvili said on a Facebook live broadcast on the eve of the rally.

Over the weekend, club-goers and liberal protesters took to Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue after police carried out violent raids against two popular nightclubs, ostensibly to crack down on drug dealing. They were met by far-right counter protesters, and violence was barely averted.

The near-riots marked an escalation in the country’s deepening culture war, where Georgia’s increasingly vibrant, liberated and internationally famed nightlife — and its liberal attitudes towards drugs and sexuality — is a frontline.

The weekend’s turmoil set the stage for a tense sequel, as Georgian conservatives planned to come out again for counter protests against the IDAHOT events. Priests and their parishioners, ethno-nationalists and even white supremacists had all been planning to head downtown to rally, divided in their tactics but united in their disapproval of Georgia’s small gay-rights movement.

Heavy police forces, too, were to be deployed to act as a human shield against potential clashes as they were over the weekend. But IDAHOT organizers said they didn’t feel that was enough.

“On the formal level, the Interior Ministry gave us safety guarantees, but in the light of recent events and based on our past experience we did not trust them,” Kikonishvili told Eurasianet.

Small groups of LGBT activists did hold hit-and-run rallies in front of various government buildings, protesting the government’s inability to protect them. In the late evening, several dozens protesters, defying the cancellation of the main rally, gathered in front of the prime minister’s office, holding posters reading “No to Homophobia!” and “No Fascism!”

Police blocked off the access to the area with metal shields to avoid attacks. “We are citizens of this country and we are members of this family,” said activist Nino Bolkvadze. “We are not going anywhere.” The near-riots marked an escalation in the country’s deepening culture war, where Georgia’s increasingly vibrant, liberated and internationally famed nightlife — and its liberal attitudes towards drugs and sexuality — is a frontline.

But after the LGBT activists took a step back, so did an ultranationalist movement, Georgian March, which had planned a rival demonstration; leader Sandro Bregadze said Georgian March was going to join events organized by the Georgian Orthodox Church.

Critics charged that the absence of the LGBT activists in Tbilisi’s streets on Wednesday and the earlier tensions spoke to the Georgian authorities’ failure to ensure freedom of expression to all parts of society. “[T]he authorities have a duty to take actions, and strengthen security to protect a threatened group of people,” Giorgi Gogia, South Caucasus director for Human Rights Watch, told Eurasianet. Police did detain four members of openly neo-Nazi groups, who were seen giving Nazi salutes in central Tbilisi today.

That left the Georgian Orthodox Church to carry the day. Church officials notoriously attacked LGBT protesters during Tbilisi’s IDAHOT commemorations in 2013. Since then, the Church has been marking May 17 as the “Day of Sanctity and Integrity of the Family” in an apparent attempt to drown out the voices of the LGBT community and to show who is the bigger force in the devoutly Christian country.

This May 17, Georgian clergy marched through Tbilisi’s downtown in a liturgical procession. The church also organized mass weddings — between men and women, naturally — across the country. As many as 500 couples got married, 50 of them in the main Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Tbilisi, the church said.

Top clerics took the occasion to castigate both the LGBT groups and drug-liberalization activists.

“The war against family and its values is a war against God,” said Archbishop Shio, the locum tenens of the aging pontiff of the Georgian Church, Patriarch Ilia II, in a morning sermon. He called for treating drug addicts but preached against the idea of drug liberalization. “Narcotics are a great sin, poison and evil […] we need to fight against them,” he said.

The post Small gay rights rally held in Tbilisi amid fears of violence appeared first on Coda Story.

Safe sex has become the latest battleground in Georgia’s culture wars after a court effectively outlawed a brand of condoms featuring religious jokes.

Condom maker Aiisa (Georgian for “that thing”) ran afoul of the law this month with a new line of irreverent prophylactics. One had packaging featuring a hand gesture representing sign of the cross, with two fingers inserted in a condom. Another had the tagline “I’d jerk off, but it’s the Epiphany,” a catch phrase from a controversial music video from last year.

Tbilisi City Court Judge Lasha Tavartkiladze issued a 500 lari (about $200) fine to Aiisa on May 4, a ruling that touched off a debate in the deeply Christian country on where to draw the line between the constitutional right of freedom of expression and protections against defamation of religion.

Critics argued that the court ruling sets a dangerous precedent for limiting freedom of speech. “The court ruling is shameful, as it cannot be left to the court to decide what constitutes an offense to someone’s feelings, especially religious feelings,” Tamar Chergoleishvili, editor of libertarian Tabula magazine, told the news website Palitra. “The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is registered [as a religious group] in Holland, so should we ban depictions of spaghetti to make sure they are not offended? This is a direct road to absurdity.”

Two other sets of condoms also failed to pass the muster with the judge. One featured Queen Tamar, a deeply venerated medieval monarch and saint, with a slogan punning on the Game of Thrones TV show. The other alluded to a famous battle fought between Georgians and invading Turkish armies from the 12th century.

Earlier this year, Georgia’s much-revered Orthodox Church had condemned the condoms as “reprehensible” and called for the authorities to put in place legal protections for the faithful’s feelings. Aiisa responded by thanking the church for its interest and for “choosing the Georgian brand of condoms.”

Later, an ultraconservative group, the Georgian Idea, lodged a formal complaint about Aiisa’s condoms with the Tbilisi Mayor’s Office, which found the condoms offensive and took the case to court for review. Aiisa founder Anania Gachechiladze said that she will appeal the court decision. In the meantime, she invited consumers to snap up the banned condoms before the court’s decision becomes effective on May 14.

The post Georgia’s condemned condoms appeared first on Coda Story.

The post How Two Russian Grandmothers Turned Into An Internet Sensation appeared first on Coda Story.

It was only a few months since the 32-year-old had been elected to parliament, one of a new generation of politicians who had come to power since Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. But because of the conflict, she told world leaders, Ukrainian women had shifted their focus “from equality to survival.”

But by taking a stand, Zalishchuk also became a target for a new kind of disinformation. A screenshot began appearing on posts about her speech showing a faked tweet claiming that she had promised to run naked through the streets of Kiev if the Ukrainian army lost a key battle. To underline the point, the message was accompanied by doctored images purporting to show her totally naked. “It was all intended to discredit me as a personality, to devalue me and what I’m saying,” says Zalishchuk.

She is far from alone. Female politicians and other high profile women worldwide are facing a deluge of what you could call sexualized disinformation. It mixes old ingrained sexist attitudes with the anonymity and reach of social media in an effort to destroy women’s reputations and push them out of public life.

Several female politicians in the small Caucasian nation of Georgia were the victims of a sexualized disinformation campaign last year, in the run-up to parliamentary elections. A series of videos purportedly showing them having sex were released online, with intimidating messages. The goal was to spread “fear” among women involved in politics, says Tamara Chergoleishvili, a prominent journalist and activist, whose husband is a well-known opposition politician. Georgia is a very conservative country where patriarchal attitudes remain strong, so that made the attack more potent. To underline the point, the message was accompanied by doctored images purporting to show her totally naked.

Chergoleishvili was targeted too, in a video supposedly showing her engaged in sex with two other people. But Chergoleishvili says it was a fake. “They didn’t know I’ve had a huge tattoo on my back since, like, 2000,” she laughs.

Though it backfired in her case, another female politician implicated in an extramarital affair as a result of the videos has all but retreated from Georgian political life.

By contrast, the men who featured have not suffered, “because male adultery is a common thing,” says Chergoleishvili. “Maybe the family suffered, but society would be less judgemental, whereas women are supposed to be the Virgin Mary. They’re not supposed to have sex.”

There was one exception. A man who appeared in the video aimed at Chergoleishvili was labelled as “gay,” which put him at extreme risk because of deep-seated homophobic attitudes in Georgia. “It took a long time for him to get over that,” she recalls.

Like Chergoleishvili, Zalishchuk has withstood the attacks against her, and continues to maintain a high profile. But she can’t escape her naked doppelganger. “Whenever I speak publicly somewhere abroad, someone will comment on it [on social media],” the Ukrainian MP says, often adding a link to the photo. “I have no resources to fight that.” “It was all intended to discredit me as a personality, to devalue me, and what I’m saying.” Ukrainian MP Svitlana Zalishchuk

Zalishchuk suspects a pro-Kremlin hand in the abuse she has experienced, as it started at the height of the conflict with Russia. And the fake claims and doctored images first appeared on pro-Kremlin platforms. But whatever the case, it has become a worldwide problem for any women who takes a position online.

The use of realistic pictures — which is easy to achieve with modern software — adds to the potency of these misogynistic disinformation campaigns, says Sandra Pepera, director of Gender, Women, and Democracy programs at the National Democratic Institute, in Washington, D.C. “Obscene harassment is bad enough, but the visualization of it is what tips the balance.”

Such abuse is becoming almost part of the job for female politicians. But logging off to try to escape is not really an option, as being on social media is such a crucial part of being a modern-day politician.

In Georgia, the government eventually condemned the release of the sex tapes, and they were removed from YouTube. But that could not mitigate the damage entirely, as the names of those shown in the videos spread widely. And intimidation like this can have a smothering effect on female engagement in politics, says the NDI’s Pepera, “limiting both the number of women able to participate online and the range of issues discussed.”

And in countries where violence against women is common, online slurs can quickly translate into direct physical threats. “If it happens to you and you’re Hillary Clinton that’s one thing,” says Pepera. “If that happens to you and you’re in Indonesia, Malaysia, or Pakistan, you could pay for it with your life.”

There is more awareness now of the the threat of sexualised abuse online, but both governments and the social media giants have yet to come up with an effective response. Sexualized disinformation mixes old ingrained sexist attitudes with the anonymity and reach of social media in an effort to destroy women’s reputations and push them out of public life.

Examples like Georgia’s, where offending videos were removed have been rare. Twitter and Facebook have been facing mounting criticism over what is seen as selective enforcement of their own rules. Victims who have responded to abuse with harsh language have sometimes been censored, while the perpetrators of the initial attack — who frequently threaten rape or other violence — have been left alone.

A new bi-partisan bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers to clamp down on so-called “revenge porn” may be of some help to victims there, and provide a lead for other countries. But sexual disinformation is still a slightly different case, as almost by definition it is from anonymous sources — and so it is much harder for victims to seek legal redress. Libel and slander laws offer similarly spotty protection, and once the online attacks are out there, it is often too late to salvage damaged reputations.

Zalishchuk recalls how, months after the campaign against her died down, a German journalist closed an interview by asking if it was true that she ran naked through the streets of Kiev. “How could you believe this?” she responded, shocked at the question. She is convinced it won’t be the last.

The post How disinformation became a new threat to women appeared first on Coda Story.

But as next month’s international release date approaches, the movie’s backers are facing an increasingly virulent campaign for it to be banned.

Orthodox Christian activists have led nationwide protests calling the film “blasphemous” and “a slap in the face to Russian nation”. The director’s studio has been firebombed and Russia’s largest cinema chain now says it won’t show the film because of security fears.

The film — which tells the true story of Nicholas II’s love affair with a teenage Polish ballet dancer – has poked a central nerve among the standard-bearers of Russia’s Orthodox and traditionalist post-Soviet identity. It is a vision that President Vladimir Putin has himself encouraged, and many of those advocating the ban are his natural supporters. Yet for the moment, the Kremlin is staying above the fray – biding its time, some speculate, in the hope of using this clash of narratives for its own ends.

At the root of the controversy is a deepening personality cult around Russia’s last emperor – whose reign was brought to an end by the Bolshevik revolution 100 years ago.

DIVINE SACRIFICE

The campaign against the film has been underway for nearly a year, led by Natalia Poklonskaya, a lawmaker from Putin’s own United Russia party. According to Russian media reports, she is close to Archimandrite Sergiy Romanov, a controversial Orthodox priest from Yekaterinburg – where Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. He believes the last tsar is a deity who was sacrificed to redeem Russia’s sins. Protesters condemned what they called this “evil attack” on “royal passion bearers” — a reference to Nicholas II’s past canonization as a believer “who had faced death in a Christ-like manner”

The fact the film focuses on Nicholas II’s affair with the ballet dancer Mathilde Khessinska has sharpened the outrage. Poklonskaya has called for the director to be prosecuted for “intrusion into one’s private life” among a host of other alleged violations, citing complaints from offended Orthodox believers. And an online petition calling for a ban has attracted 24,000 signatures.

Yet so far the Russian authorities have remained unmoved – saying they could find no legal violations in the film. In July, Putin himself gave a brief show of support to Matilda’s director, Alexei Uchitel, saying that he respected him as “patriotic” and talented. And last month the Culture Ministry gave the go ahead for Matilda to be screened in all Russian regions.

But that decision has provoked growing street protests. Orthodox activists recently organized demonstrations in cities across Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg – and as far away as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Far East. Sorok Sorokov, an ultra-conservative Orthodox movement previously known for backing pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, played a key role in coordinating the gatherings, according to Russian media.

Some protests were turned into public prayer sessions where activists condemned what they called this “evil attack” on “royal passion bearers” – a reference to Nicholas II’s past canonization as a believer “who had faced death in a Christ-like manner.”

The leaders of Russia’s Muslim republics have joined in the dispute as well, taking sides with Poklonskaya to demand that the Culture Ministry exclude their regions from the film’s distribution certificate.

FIREBOMB ATTACKS

There has been violence too. In late August, unidentified assailants firebombed the Lendok film studio in St. Petersburg where Uchitel works. Then a preview screening in Moscow was cancelled after cars parked outside the law firm that represents the director were set alight. “Burn for Matilda,” read a note left nearby. Poklonskaya is supporting a “terrorist organization”, said Alexei Uchitel, director of Matilda. Her campaign “has nothing do with Russian traditions, nor with Orthodoxy.”

Just days earlier, a Yekaterinburg movie theater was partly destroyed after a suspected Orthodox activist drove a truck full of gas canisters into the building and set it on fire. And earlier this week, the Cinema Park and Formula Kino chain had decided not to show the film in its theaters.

“They are only interested in destabilizing society,” said Uchitel in a statement denouncing the attacks, accusing Poklonskaya of supporting a “terrorist organization.” Her campaign, he said, “has nothing do with Russian traditions, nor with Orthodoxy.”

CULTURE WAR

The Orthodox Church has belatedly condemned the violence, though with the caveat that “true believers” could not have been involved. Alarmed by the movie theater chain’s decision to drop the film, the Russian culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, has weighed in too, denouncing what he called “shameless ‘activists’ pressuring the state and cinema business… through socially dangerous means.”

In a statement, he also criticized Poklonskaya for initiating the “uproar,” adding that he “didn’t see anything [in the film] offending Nicholas II’s historical memory.”

Yet some observers believe this new culture war over Russia’s identity suits the Kremlin just fine.

“If the presidential administration wanted to, it could have been stopped this in three minutes,” says Yuri Saprykin, former chief editor of Afisha, previously Russia’s flagship culture magazine. “It means they need this for some reason.”

KREMLIN ADVANTAGE

You can detect the Kremlin’s ‘wait-and-see’ approach in the state media, says Andrei Akhrangelsky, culture editor of Ogoniok magazine, emphasizing the “different opinions” about the film without coming down on any side.

One theory is that the Kremlin is using the dispute to divert attention from this year’s anniversary of the 1917 October revolution – while preparing to use next year’s anniversary of the regicide of Nicholas II and the Romanov family to its advantage. “Some members of the royal family are still unburied,” points out Saprykin, “so next year they can bury them with great fanfare, turning it into a huge event.”

What’s more, he says, with presidential elections also due next year, the dispute could be politically useful too. “The more you have these relatively small, local conflicts here and there, the more people will want to vote for Putin,” says Saprykin, “as the one and only arbiter who can end this.”

But personality cults have a habit of getting out of control. And with passions flaring, the man who has been called Russia’s new tsar will have to be careful how he handles the legacy of the last.

For earlier Coda coverage of this story, read: Kremlin, Nationalists Face Off Over Romanov Romance ‘Mathilda’

The post Why the Kremlin is waltzing over ‘Matilda’ appeared first on Coda Story.

But few journalists have written about how Russian security agencies gather kompromat, or compromising material, on gay men in the region in order to blackmail and recruit them. An exclusive interview with a young gay man Ruslan (his name has been changed to protect his identity) from the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan by the Caucasian Knot sheds light on a practice which dates back to Soviet times and is still used by Russian security services.

It was a winter day in 2014 and 23-year-old Ruslan was on his way to meet a friend in his hometown of Derebent, Dagestan, when a car pulled up blocking his way across a crosswalk. “Get in,” the driver told him.

A devout Muslim in a region where authorities have battled Islamic insurgency for decades, Ruslan said he was used to unannounced summons for questioning by Russian state security services. The men in the car weren’t wearing uniforms, but he could already tell from the way they spoke that the two were likely to have been from the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency.

“Someone’s come from Moscow who wants a word with you,” they told him.

But instead of the local police station where Ruslan had been previously questioned on several occasions, they drove him to a hotel. There, in a room on the second floor, he was interrogated, shown a secret recording of himself with another gay man and given a choice: work as a spy for the Russian government in Syria or everyone on his contact list would see the video. “Someone’s come from Moscow who wants a word with you.”

Homophobic messages are widely circulated on Russian state television and by politicians, however in the predominantly Muslim republics of the Caucasus being gay can be deadly. In Dagestan and Chechnya where honor killings are still practiced, being gay can get a man killed by his own family.

The Novaya Gazeta investigation revealed that local Chechen authorities were systematically encouraging families to carry out honor killings of their gay sons and brothers. Subsequent follow ups to the story revealed that dozens of men, believed to be gay, had been rounded up and held in secret prisons where they were tortured and in some cases killed. The story was reported across front pages around the world thrusting Russia’s LGBTQ rights record into the spotlight.

There are no concrete numbers, but Ruslan says the FSB’s practice of gathering kompromat, compromising material used for coercion, is well known to members of Dagestan’s secretive gay community. By the time he met his recruiters, Ruslan already knew of a gay friend who went to meet a man that he met online and ended up instead in an apartment with officers from security services. After the encounter he turned into a pro-government activist, participating in government-organized events and filming videos praising the government that he would post online.

Ruslan says that he’s not the only gay man to be threatened by the FSB in the region.

Ruslan, a fluent Arabic speaker, was given a different task: to infiltrate and report on Dagestani fighters in the Middle East. According to Russia’s Ministry of Interior close to 1,200 Russians from the Republic of Dagestan fight alongside ISIS troops in Syria; several hundred others fight in Iraq. Islamic extremism fuels a homegrown insurgency in the Caucasus that the Russian government has struggled to crush since the fall of the USSR. Ruslan said that his recruiters wanted him to infiltrate their ranks and help gather intelligence on how people move in and out of Russia to Syria and Iraq.

“They told me that it’s in my interests to work with them, unless I want everyone to find out who I am,” Ruslan told the Caucasian Knot. During his interrogation that lasted for hours in the hotel room in Derbent he was repeatedly shown the video of him and his friend, over and again, if he refused to answer their questions. The agents showed him that they even had access to his social media accounts and messages. “I am the government. I am offering you a chance to work together.”

Ruslan refused to go to Syria. The man questioning him then told him, “I am the government. I am offering you a chance to work together.”

Ruslan told the Caucasian Knot that they “told me to accept the offer. That if the government offers something, you need to accept it. They said it was being done for the people, for the country.”

Ruslan was given five days to make his choice: go to Syria or face the danger of being exposed as a gay man to his family. Several days after his interrogation he fled, first to neighboring Azerbaijan and later to Turkey where he is still in hiding today. He cut all contact with his friends and family, fearing that security services would intercept his messages again. Only six months later did he found out that after he fled, his family home was searched and his relatives were threatened by the authorities.

Three years after leaving Derbent he still fears using his real name in an interview and says he will never be able to return home.

The post Meet the gay Russian man blackmailed to infiltrate terrorist groups in Syria appeared first on Coda Story.

Sokolovsky was arrested in September, placed under house arrest and later confined to pre-trial detention for five months. Last week the prosecutor demanded a three-and-a-half year sentence for the 23-year-old for the Pokemon video and several other videos from the Sokolovsky’s “atheist” blog, saying that otherwise other young people will feel a sense of impunity.

“Ruslan didn’t offend anyone with anything. He simply expressed his opinion with words,” Sokolovsky’s mother told Coda in the first installment of Jailed for a Like, a video series that tracks cases of Russians imprisoned for their activity on social media. “He was shocked that for some cartoon you can be jailed or fined 500,000 rubles [$8,390].”

After hearing on television that playing Pokemon Go in a church was now banned in Russia, Sokolovsky filmed a video where he quietly played the game in an almost-empty church. In The Simpsons’ nineteenth episode of the show’s twenty-ninth season, Homer interrupts a church service while playing “Peekimon Get,” a clear reference to Pokemon Go, and his friend tells the priest that “This game is, or at least was, bigger than Jesus.”

Several Russian Orthodox theologians spoke out against this scene, saying that the newest episode of The Simpsons confirms that Hollywood produces “powerful propaganda” to disintegrate society,” especially in Russia, reported TASS. One of the theologians Andrei Novikov recommends raising the age restrictions for the Fox sitcom which is rebroadcast on the channel 2×2 and also strengthening control over media in Russia.

Another Orthodox cleric from the Ivanovskaya region also told TASS that The Simpsons’ episode could “shake the moral foundations of young viewers.”

“We don’t air content that can compromise the network or cause social controversy, therefore we won’t be showing this episode,” said Anastasia Shablovskaya, 2×2’s PR director to RBC.

The Russian Orthodox Church has not officially commented on the episode.

The post Russian TV network won’t air ‘Simpsons’ episode over fears of offending christians appeared first on Coda Story.