Deadly catalogue of killings continues unchecked despite hopes raised by election of centre-left female president
One Sunday morning in January, Pablo Isabel Hernández set off to walk to church in San Marcos de Caiquín, a remote part of Honduras, but never arrived. One of Hernández’s brothers, who followed later, found Pablo, 33, dead on the road. He had been shot in the back.
The next day, as Thalía Rodríguez, 46, lay in bed with her partner 500 miles (800km) away in the capital, Tegucigalpa, masked armed men stormed into her flat and shot her in the head.
A targeted response, including sanctions against those leading the repression, will allow Sudanese striving for a fairer future the freedom to organise
In Sudan, where prices for bread and fuel have risen sharply after the coup, people are once again taking to the streets. The global shortage of wheat triggered by the war in Ukraine may be adding fuel to the fire, but dissatisfaction has been brewing for years.
Five months ago, Sudan’s military carried out a coup, bringing an abrupt end to the country’s short-lived transition towards democracy and empowering a repressive clique, many of whom were in power when the former strongman, Omar al-Bashir, was in charge. Sudanese from all walks of life have been rallying in resistance ever since.
Three years ago this week — on March 15, 2019 — an estimated 1.4 million young people and supporters in 128 countries skipped school or work for what was then the largest youth-led day of climate protests in history. That record was soon eclipsed by even larger demonstrations later that year, with 1.8 million joining a May 24 day of action, and 7.6 million protesting for the climate over the course of Sept. 20 and the week that followed. The school strikes for climate movement, launched by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden in late 2018, had reinvigorated the global climate movement and brought public participation to levels never seen before.
By early 2019, thousands of young people were already skipping school to protest for the climate each week in Europe, but the school strikes had only just begun to catch on in the United States. March 15 of that year was arguably when Thunberg’s campaign truly became a global phenomenon, with large demonstrations in cities all over the world. The youth-led strikes went on to revolutionize and grow the climate movement, helping to popularize concepts like the Green New Deal and grab the attention of policymakers and the media. Three years on, it’s a good time to assess what this flood of activism accomplished and how the youth climate movement has adapted to the challenges of the early 2020s.
The years since the first global school strike have not been easy to navigate — for climate activists or almost anyone else. They have seen a global pandemic, a long-overdue uprising against racial injustice in the U.S. and — most recently — a war in Ukraine that has upset the established world order. COVID-related restrictions made large climate demonstrations hard to organize, and school closures made the idea of striking from class moot. While a surge in youth voter turnout helped sweep Donald Trump from the presidency and flip the Senate blue, the Democratic Congress has failed to advance comprehensive clean energy legislation. What’s more, President Biden’s administration has also walked back on some of its most important climate promises.
Yet, even as the mass demonstrations of 2019 have receded, and the very real barriers to progress at the federal level seem to mount, the school strikes and other large climate protests of 2019 have left a legacy too powerful to simply fade away. Instead of succumbing to the new challenges they face three years on from the first global school strike, climate activists are learning to adapt and build on their past efforts with bold new forms of resistance.
A Legacy of Organizing
“We never stopped doing climate activism during COVID,” said Shiva Rajbhandari, a climate activist and high school senior from Boise. “But the pandemic highlighted the intersectional nature of climate justice and the way climate change exacerbates society’s other problems.”
Rajbhandari attended a climate strike event in Boise on Sept. 20, 2019. For him, and thousands of other young people around the country, the day of action served as a point of entry into the larger national climate movement. While Rajbhandari had been involved in local environmental activism projects previously, the strike movement helped him take his participation in climate organizing to a new level. At the Boise event he connected with an organizer for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which later led to getting involved in a new chapter of the direct action-focused group Extinction Rebellion.
Rajbhandari’s trajectory of involvement in the suite of new climate organizations that were taking root across the country in 2019 exemplifies how the climate strikes paved the way for a new generation of activists to become more deeply involved in the movement. Many of these young people have continued working for climate justice through all the challenges of the early 2020s.
When COVID-19 restrictions precluded organizing large climate protests, Rajbhandari shifted to other activism tactics. He got involved in Youth Salmon Protectors, a project of the Idaho Conservation League, and eventually became the initiative’s youth engagement coordinator. He reached out through social media to high school environmental clubs all over the Northwest — working to build a region-wide movement to remove the four dams on the lower Snake River that, along with warming temperatures, have contributed to a dramatic decline in salmon runs.
“Our goal is to help the general public think differently about the salmon issue,” Rajbhandari said. “Until now, it’s been widely seen as an old white man’s issue — like, ‘Grandpa loves to fish and now he can’t because there’s no salmon.’ We’re trying to highlight the stories of Indigenous people who’ve had salmon as part of their culture for millennia, and young people who may have never had the chance to see a wild salmon.” Students involved in the efforts have organized banner drops, held letter-to-the-editor writing campaigns and testified at hearings in favor of removing the dams.
The Snake River dams issue is a deeply intersectional one, overlapping with struggles for tribal sovereignty, sustainable energy and the health of rivers where salmon fight to survive as water temperatures rise. The school strike movement contributed to an infusion of new, youth-led energy into the campaign to remove the dams, as students who attended strike events looked for other opportunities to take action. It is just one example of how the strike movement continues to have ripple effects across the U.S. and the world.
State and Local Wins
When North Carolina passed a law in October mandating that major electric utilities source all their energy from renewables by 2050, it became the latest addition to a growing list of states with similar legislation. As recently as 2018, only California and Hawaii had 100 percent renewable electricity mandates, but today these policies are on the books in 11 states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, since the climate strikes and groups like Sunrise popularized the concept of a Green New Deal, municipalities from New York City to Seattle to Austin have used it to frame new, far-reaching climate plans that will reduce emissions at the local level. These kinds of actions are a reminder that while efforts to pass federal climate legislation have so far continued to fall short, the youth climate movement has had a real impact in the halls of state and city governments.
“I love our lobbying work,” said Anna Cerosaletti, director of operations for the statewide organization New York Youth Climate Leaders, or NY2CL. “It’s so powerful to have youth bring their concerns directly to policymakers at the state level.”
NY2CL, which launched toward the end of 2019, was a direct outgrowth of the strike movement founded by students who participated in that year’s mass demonstrations. The group’s first major campaign was to advocate for divesting New York’s pension fund from fossil fuels, alongside other member organizations in the Divest New York Coalition. In July 2020, New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced the fund would divest from coal. That December, in response to continued pressure from climate activists, the comptroller’s office committed to full divestment from fossil fuels, including oil and gas. The move marked a stunning victory for a state divestment campaign that had been running for years, before gaining new momentum in the wake of the 2019 youth-led climate activism surge.
Today, NY2CL continues to work on policy in New York, including a bill to divest the state’s Teachers’ Retirement System from fossil fuels and legislation to eliminate subsidies for coal, oil and gas. The organization has navigated COVID by focusing on setting up virtual lobby meetings between legislators and students. “Someday I hope we get to actually talk with legislators in person,” Cerosaletti said. “But virtual lobbying has worked really well. It’s a great way to continue reaching legislators during a pandemic.”
Tarnishing Corporate Polluters’ Image
Last September, student activists at Harvard scored a victory in a campaign that once seemed unwinnable: After nearly a decade of public pressure, the Ivy League school announced it would allow remaining investments in fossil fuels to expire, effectively divesting from the industry. A tweet from the student-led Divest Harvard campaign called it “a massive victory for our community, the climate movement, and the world — and a strike against the power of the fossil fuel industry.”
An influx of first-year students who had been involved in climate strikes and similar demonstrations helped reinvigorate an existing divestment campaign at Harvard. Their long-awaited victory provides yet another illustration of how climate activists have continued advancing their cause since the school strike movement crested. In fact, even as some other kinds of organizing subsided over the last couple years, divestment campaigns at higher education institutions have continued winning victories almost uninterrupted.
In September 2019, around the time of the largest international strike day, the University of California system announced it would divest its $13.4 billion endowment and $80 billion pension fund from coal, oil and gas. Smith College in Massachusetts followed suit that October. Schools that committed to full or partial fossil fuel divestment in 2020 included Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania, Antioch, Cornell, Creighton and University of Vermont. In 2021, this list grew by over a dozen additional institutions including Columbia, Tufts, University of Southern California, Rutgers, University of Michigan, Amherst and Princeton.
The divestment movement has always been about reducing the political power of the fossil fuel industry by hurting its public image — and victories on campuses have helped pave the way for developments that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. At the United Nations climate conference last December, 20 countries including the U.S. announced that they would end public financing of overseas fossil fuel projects. It was merely one of the highest-profile examples of how global capital is fleeing the industry.
According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, more than 250 financial institutions and insurers around the world have taken steps to reduce their exposure to coal since 2012, with a majority of commitments having been announced in the last few years. At least 80 companies have established similar policies to avoid oil and gas. “In many ways, the fossil fuel industry is on its heels,” said longtime climate activist Matt Leonard, who has worked on national campaigns to stop fossil fuel infrastructure. “They don’t have the political capital they once did, or the same degree of influence. Investors are realizing they aren’t a viable long-term investment. That’s a huge change.”
Changing With the Times
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and world governments’ unprecedented global response to it, is a stark reminder of how national and international politics in the 2020s can be reshaped by developments that would have been difficult to predict months or even weeks beforehand. The task of navigating such a constantly changing political landscape is one of the major tests confronting today’s climate activists. At the same time, each new crisis illuminates ways in which global climate, environmental and social justice issues are interconnected.
“The Ukraine invasion has revealed the extent to which the U.S. is still dependent on fossil fuels,” Cerosaletti said. “Energy prices are high, and everyone’s understandably stressed about that. But if we weren’t so reliant on our own individual modes of transportation — for instance, if public transit was more accessible — banning oil imports from Russia wouldn’t seem like such a big deal.”
The most destructive waves of the pandemic may hopefully be behind us, but the climate movement will almost certainly have to meet fresh challenges head on in the coming months — whether related to events in Ukraine, future COVID variants or completely new international crises. How activists will adapt their organizing to deal with these developments remains to be seen. But what is certain is that the movement that brought millions of people into the streets in 2019 has proved itself durable enough to survive for the long haul.
“The youth climate movement is more alive than ever,” Rajbhandari said. “What’s really changed over the last few years is the background music.”
As thousands of antiwar Russians flee their country or remain trapped there due to devastating economic sanctions, President Vladimir Putin made a chilling video address to the Russian people on Thursday in an attempt to justify his disastrous war in Ukraine. He urged a “self-cleansing of society” to rid it of unpatriotic “scum and traitors.”
Putin is directing nationalist vitriol against an antiwar movement that has bravely defied state censorship and a violent police crackdown to protest the war in Ukraine. The autocrat appeared to conflate antiwar resistance with support for Russia’s perceived enemies in the West as he seeks to paint the conflict as a clash of civilizations that threatens Russia’s very existence.
Antiwar Russians come from all walks of life, but activists say many organizers and protesters are women, and now thousands of antiwar feminists, mothers, sisters, grandmothers and queer people across Russia are standing in the crosshairs of pro-Putin vigilantes and the Russian police state.
“They say antiwar protests, they have a woman’s face in Russia,” said Asya Maruket, a Russian antiwar and women’s rights activist during a Zoom call with fellow activists across central and Eastern Europe this week. In 2014, when war between Russia, Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas regions first broke out, antiwar protests in Russia were also led by women, Maruket said.
Maruket, who, like many others, has fled Russia to speak freely about the war, presented a recent picture of a young woman holding a protest sign and being led away by police. The sign reads “peace to the world” in Russian.
“This woman was arrested for the words, ‘peace to the world,’” Maruket said.
Putin’s government has effectively criminalized antiwar activism with a law that punishes Russians for statements that challenge the Russian military and the Kremlin’s narratives about the war, which it still calls a “special military operation” despite the escalating bloodshed and attacks on civilians. Activists who violate the law can face up to 15 years in prison for treason.
“The voices of antiwar activists are not heard, we cannot even say it is a war, because according to the new law, we can only name it as a ‘special operation,’” Maruket said.
Still, Maruket said millions of Russians do not support the so-called “special operation” in Ukraine, and activists are getting “creative” to avoid punishment under the harsh dissent law.
Women have been leading silent pickets to avoid arrest and holding signs calling for peace instead of an end to “war.” Activists offer emotional, psychological and legal support to those who are detained by police, and organize “peace-building” actions for women in Ukraine by sharing contacts and linking activists and refugees from both countries.
The distribution of leaflets, antiwar publications and reliable independent media challenge the Kremlin’s propaganda.
Maruket is a member of the Russian Feminist Antiwar Resistance, which she said has 20,000 participants and has organized initiatives and actions in 190 cities across the world.
Maruket, who is a psychologist, stressed that the antiwar movement must be international, and all wars waged across the world — not just the war in Ukraine — are reason for global solidarity.
“Any war affects all of us and our psychological conditions, and threatens the health of our planet,” Maruket said.
Russian activists, intellectuals and members of civil society are also helping each other evacuate the country to avoid repression and arrest, which Maruket said has become increasingly difficult due to crushing economic sanctions placed on Russia by the United States and its allies. The value of the ruble has tumbled, and people cannot easily access the money needed to flee. In Ukraine, more than 3.1 million people have fled the violence to neighboring countries, according to the United Nations.
“All these people said that they are refugees from their country too, because it’s not safe for them to stay in Russia,” Maruket said.
Internationally, the most famous challenge to the war and the anti-dissent law has come from Marina Ovsyannikova, a journalist who interrupted a news broadcast on a leading state-run television network this week with an antiwar sign warning Russians that they are being lied to about the conflict.
“Come out and protest. Don’t be afraid. They can’t jail us all,” Ovsyannikova said in a video statement recorded before her protest. Ovsyannikova was quickly arrested and interrogated for 14 hours before being fined $280 for inciting people to protest. However, Ovsyannikova continues to speak out, including to Western media outlets, putting her at risk of further prosecution.
As of Thursday, nearly 15,000 Russians had been detained or arrested for protesting the war, including lawyers, children and journalists, according to the Russian human rights watchdog OVD-Info. Many of those who’ve been arrested are women, including two women who recently leaked recordings of violent interrogations by police in Moscow to independent media outlets. OVD-Info reports that various criminal trials for antiwar activists continued this week, and several activists were fined, arrested or sentenced to compulsory labor.
Iva, a resident of Nizhny Novgorod, the sixth-largest city in Russia, told OVD-Info that a group of people arrested during an antiwar action on March 6 were jailed in a “special detention center” and “were forced to squat naked and were not allowed to sleep.” The group included eight women, Iva said. The next day the activists were taken to court and released from there.
“We were cold and sleepy. They started and one by one, forced us to strip naked and squat,” Iva said in a translated statement, adding “what else can be expected from Russia?”
The Russian government has responded to antiwar protests and efforts to raise money for Ukrainians suffering under Putin’s invasion with “new repressions” and “tightening censorship,” according to OVD-Info. People who signed petitions against the war “faced dismissals or expulsions from universities, threats and other types of persecution for expressing their antiwar position.”
Most independent news outlets in Russia have stopped covering the war due to the anti-dissent law, activists say, and social media is censored, leaving millions of Russia reliant on state-run media.
Markut and other activists emphasize that the Russian people are not the Russian government, and anti-Russian sentiment, or Russophobia, in the United States and across Europe — exacerbated by the war — is also a problem for antiwar movements. Russian expats and refugees face judgement in other countries, and when people abroad assume that all Russians support Putin’s aggression, “it’s additional pain for us,” Maruket said.
“Millions of people who are not seen and not heard want to stop this war,” Maruket said.
Maruket said severing connections between Russians and the rest of the world is not a solution to the war. In fact, antiwar organizers from countries across the world are trying to do the opposite, creating new political formations to support antiwar protests in Russia as well as the people of Ukraine while demanding that all parties of the war — including Ukraine’s allies in the U.S., which is supplying the country with weapons — deescalate the conflict, end international sanctions and negotiate an immediate ceasefire.
“We need to build new ways of connection and build something beautiful and strong and healing,” Maruket said. “We need to build something new.”
Back in early 2020, we saw new coronavirus (Covid-19) laws being hastily passed through parliament which gave the police sweeping new powers to arrest and fine people. Hundreds of ever-changing lockdown laws were put in place over two years.
Now, in 2022, activists are still finding themselves in court, and judges are finding them guilty for breaching coronavirus regulations while attending protests when restrictions were in place. But are these convictions even legal? And, importantly, can they be overturned?
A ludicrous conviction
Recently, one activist was found guilty for breaching coronavirus legislation after he attended a Kill The Bill gathering in Bristol on 23 March 2021. That evening, around 200 police used some of the most disgusting physical violence I have ever seen in the UK, surrounding the gathering on all sides, assaulting people, and setting their dogs on protesters. The police used coronavirus regulations as an excuse to justify their brutality.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) argued that the police had the right to restrict articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights – freedom of expression and freedom of assembly – in the interest of public health and safety. But as the defendant pointed out in court, a parliamentary inquiry into demonstrations in both London and Bristol at that time highlighted “significant failings” by the police forces: that the Metropolitan police’s actions were “unlawful and breached fundamental rights”, and that Avon and Somerset police hadn’t “properly considered or understood the Article 10 and 11 rights”.
Despite pointing this out, the defendant was found guilty of not leaving the scene under coronavirus regulations, despite having heard no warning by the police to do so.
This conviction is ludicrous when we take a look at the numerous cases where it has been found that police have not been acting lawfully when it comes to enforcing coronavirus regulations.
Take the court case of Jasmine York, for example. She was sentenced to prison on a ridiculous arson charge following another Kill The Bill demonstration in Bristol in March 2021. During her trial, the CPS showed footage of the policing that day. The footage showed police officers telling protesters that their attendance was illegal under coronavirus legislation. Yet during York’s trial, the CPS admitted that the police were wrong to do this. In fact, it agreed that protest was not specifically banned, and that Avon and Somerset police were “wrong in their assumption that any protest was illegal”.
Kevin Blowe, campaigns coordinator for the Network for Police Monitoring, argues that coronavirus regulations were “an absolute gift to police across the country”. He told The Canary that the rules
gave senior officers the discretion and the powers to disrupt and shut down protests, regardless of whether there was any genuine risk to public health and with no consideration of human rights obligations.
Also in 2021, Avon and Somerset police were forced to issue an apology to four Bristol protesters who had been fined for demonstrating outside court in January of that year. It admitted:
We now accept we misinterpreted the regulations and that the arrests and the issuing of fixed penalty notices were unlawful.
And in September 2021, the CPS dropped charges against Black Lives Matter activist Bianca Ali, after alleging that she organised a protest in breach of coronavirus regulations. Ali had been given fixed penalty notices, but she refused to pay and was being taken to court. At the time, Ali’s solicitor Patrick Ormerod said:
The case appears to be another example of a misunderstanding of the interaction between Coronavirus regulations and the Human Rights Act 1998, and another example – like Clapham Common – of the over-policing of protest relating to the conduct of the police.
Police in London and Bristol acted unlawfully
On 12 March, a judicial review condemned the Metropolitan Police for breaching protesters’ rights in 2021. The Met had told organisers of a Reclaim These Streets vigil that their protest would be “unlawful” under coronavirus laws. But a judge found that the Met:
infringed the claimants’ rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
None of the Met’s decisions was in accordance with the law
In response, Reclaim These Streets said:
The decisions and actions by the Met Police in the run-up to the planned vigil for Sarah Everard last year were unlawful, and the judgment sets a powerful precedent for protest rights.
Blowe told The Canary:
The primary weapon [that the police used] was the use of fines on organisers and participants, either imposed or threatened. The recent High Court judgment on the policing of the Clapham Common vigils in March 2021 said this was enforced unlawfully. In the case of fines for protesting in Bristol later the same month, our view is that Avon & Somerset Police was motivated less by concern about the spread of Covid and more by the vindictive belief that Kill The Bill protests were illegitimate and needed crushing.
It’s time to drop all other coronavirus cases
The Reclaim These Streets judgment gives good grounds for appeal for activists who have received convictions for breaching coronavirus laws. And other coronavirus-related protest cases outstanding should be dropped on the back of it.
Meanwhile, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry has been set up to examine the state’s response to the pandemic.
Blowe said:
The forthcoming Covid Public Inquiry needs to consider the reversal of all coronavirus fines.
It’s telling that while protesters are still being hauled into court, the police showed great reluctance in investigating Tory politicians for the 16 parties they held during the pandemic, 12 of which are now subject to criminal investigation. It is also telling that it is still unclear whether the public will ever know the result of this investigation.
The way that police forces all over the country have handled the policing of protests throughout the pandemic is especially worrying, given that they will get sweeping new powers when the police bill becomes law. Across the country they have got away with using brute force and physically assaulting citizens in the name of coronavirus regulations.
Blowe pointed out:
we cannot allow the police to make up the rules about how protests are policed and then pretend they respect the right to demonstrate. With new, poorly-defined anti-protest legislation imminent, this kind of sweeping discretion is a danger to our human rights.
As protesters, it’s down to us – and any sympathetic lawyers – to make sure that we hold the police to account. We must appeal any fixed penalty notices we received while protesting during the pandemic, and we must definitely appeal convictions we were given by the courts.
Content warning: this article contains material some readers may find distressing
On 14 March, the City of London & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership published its Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review. The review details two Metropolitan Police officers’ strip search of a Black schoolgirl – known as Child Q – at her Hackney secondary school in 2020.
The review condemns officers’ degrading treatment of the child throughout the search, which they conducted on school grounds without supervision by an appropriate adult. This horrific case of state violence against a schoolchild shows that we must take urgent action to get police out of schools.
A series of safeguarding failures
According to the review, teachers referred the 15-year-old Child Q to police, alleging that she smelled of weed.
Teachers – who are responsible for safeguarding pupils – left the child alone with police officers. They allowed police to conduct the search without supervision, and they failed to call the pupil’s mother.
In Child Q’s words:
Someone walked into the school, where I was supposed to feel safe, took me away from the people who were supposed to protect me and stripped me naked, while on my period.
The review explains that police stripped the child and forced her to expose her “intimate body parts”. They made the child – who was on her period at the time – remove her sanitary pad.
Child Q’s mother told the review that officers made the child “bend over [and] spread her legs… whilst coughing”. On concluding the degrading search, police refused to let the child use the toilet before returning to an exam. Officers didn’t find any drugs on the child.
Reflecting on the trauma caused by the incident, Child Q said:
I don’t know if I’m going to feel normal again… But I do know this can’t happen to anyone, ever again.
“Undignified, humiliating and degrading”
The review concludes “that Child Q should never have been strip searched”. Highlighting the integral role that racism played in the dehumanising search, it states “that had child Q not been Black, then her experiences are unlikely to have been the same”.
In a letter to the review, the child’s aunt said:
I cannot express to you how aggrieved I am with the school and the police enforcement officers for exposing Child Q to such an undignified, humiliating, and degrading exposure.
The review notes the role that “adultification bias” played in teachers’ and officers’ mistreatment of Child Q. Adultification is “where adults perceive Black children as being older than they are”. This bias is a product of racist stereotypes which are used to justify the exploitation, abuse, and criminalisation of Black children.
Expressing ‘heartbreak’ for the child and her mistreatment, grassroots coalition No More Exclusions co-founder Zahra Bei told The Canary:
It’s appalling but it’s not surprising that the school dealt with this child and the situation as a criminal matter as opposed to a safeguarding matter. As it says in the report, she was seen as the risk instead of being at risk. And that is what fundamentally needs to change for Black children. Their childhood, their vulnerability, their needs, their humanity has to be recognised in its fullness.
Not an isolated incident
Child Q’s dehumanising experience is an extreme example of the routine humiliation, harassment, and targeting that marginalised children and young people experience at the hands of police in their schools and communities. According to the review, police strip searched 25 other children in Hackney over 2020/21. Most of these were drug-related searches. Police found nothing on 22 of these children.
This reflects the Met’s increasing use of the degrading practice, including against children. As The Canary reported in February, a Freedom of Information request submitted by criminology researcher Tom Kemp found that:
the force carried out over 9,000 strip-searches on children in the last five years, including more than 2,000 under-16s.
Data shows that Met police disproportionately use section 60 stop and search powers against children – particularly those from Black and racially minoritised backgrounds – despite overwhelming evidence that the practice does not prevent crime.
Reflecting the state’s tendency to enact violence against marginalised young people, police disproportionately use tasers and spit-hoods against Black and racially minoritised children – some as young as 10-years-old.
After decades of reform in education and policing, little has changed. In many cases, reform serves to mask or legitimise harmful practices.
Today, schools systematically push Black pupils out of mainstream education and into pupil referral units, alternative provision, and – ultimately – prisons. Educators enact this through ‘zero tolerance’ policies which punish Black and minoritised pupils for wearing colourful hijabs or natural afro hair.
Schools disproportionately and excessively exclude pupils for ‘persistent disruptive behaviour‘. This vague, subjective description could include anything from ‘kissing teeth’ to answering back.
Factors such as a culture of low expectations and an ahistorical, Eurocentric curriculum also serve to ensure that schools alienate marginalised learners.
This draconian and discriminatory school environment feeds the UK’s ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline. As a result, young Black and racially minoritised people now make up more than half of children in prison in England and Wales today.
No police in schools
It’s in this context that the No Police In Schools campaign – led by grassroots groups Kids of Colour and the Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP) – raised local community concerns over the increasing presence of police in Manchester schools in 2020.
Speaking to The Canary in 2021, NMPM and No Police in Schools member Dr Laura Connelly said:
Our own community consultation of over 500 people in Greater Manchester shows that SBPOs [school-based police officers] have a range of negative consequences that are felt most acutely by those from working-class and Black and ethnic minority communities.
She added:
We are deeply concerned that police will bring into the school setting the institutional racism and police violence already experienced in over-policed communities.
More police and more police powers
Despite the evidence that police do not create safety in our schools and communities, the state seeks to expand the institution’s reach and powers.
The government’s response to the controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities includes pledges to further increase police contact with schoolchildren. The response – published just two days after the Child Q review – states:
To help build trust within communities, it is important that the police engage with young people at an early age.
This initiative includes the introduction of ‘Mini Police’, a framework in which officers would engage with primary school children to teach them about “personal safety”. Police officers’ abuse of Child Q demonstrates just how dangerous this could be.
The government is also planning to increase police powers through its draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The state’s active encouragement of the UK’s school-to-prison pipeline is perhaps best exemplified by its introduction of ‘secure schools’, as set out in the bill.
Child Q’s experience of state violence in school demonstrates the harm that carceral and punitive measures inflict on the most vulnerable in society.
As the No Police In Schools campaign has highlighted, marginalised young people and communities need investment, not policing.
We are in the midst of a cost of living crisis and a global pandemic – both following years of austerity. This calls for urgent investment in essential services such as healthcare and affordable housing.
Successive governments cut funding for youth services by 73% in the decade up to 2020. Rather than police expansion, we should be seeing resources directed towards infrastructures of care like youth workers, community centres, and schools.
Join the fight to get police out of schools
Parents, educators, young people, and community members must channel our collective rage to resist police violence and racism in our schools and communities. The horrific assault of Child Q underscores the urgency of this undertaking.
The state and its institutions do not – and will not – protect us. This isn’t a case of ‘a few bad apples’. The system can’t be fixed because it isn’t ‘broken’. It deliberately traumatises and criminalises society’s most disadvantaged and marginalised young people by design.
Now is the time to say no to police in schools and the expansion of police powers. Say no to the degrading practice of strip search – especially against children. And say no to all policies and practices that surveil and criminalise marginalised young people.
We must demand an end to short-sighted punitive approaches to complex social issues, and work to create a just society that ensures children’s safety, dignity, and freedom from all forms of violence.
About 100 coffee growers in Vietnam’s Central Highlands staged a protest to regain land rights they lost after they stopped sending some of their crops to a forestry company that had allotted the parcels to them but did not invest in production, farmers involved in the demonstration said Thursday.
The Southeast Asian country is one of the world’s leading exporters of coffee, with the Vietnam General Statistics Office predicting exports worth U.S. $3 billion for 2021, up more than 9.4% over the previous year. The Central Highlands are Vietnam’s largest coffee-growing area,
The protest followed a court ruling against farmers who refused to provide Buon Ja Wam Forestry Company Ltd. with a portion of their annual output as rent payment.
The group of farmers from the country’s majority Kinh ethnic group and ethnic minority people who live in Ea Kiet village of Cu M’Gar district have gathered for four days to object to the revocation of land-use rights, they said.
The farmers say they cleared the land themselves, but then had to turn over what they produced to the company, which collected their crops without providing fertilizer, water or technical assistance.
The Cu M’Gar District People’s Court issued the ruling in a lawsuit initiated by Buon Ja Wam against the farmers.
In 2018, the company took legal action against 13 households that had failed to fulfill their responsibilities in accordance with leasing contracts they signed with the company.
In 1993, local authorities allocated 6,940 hectares (17,149 acres) of forest land in the Eo Kiet and Ea Kueh commnunes to Buon Ja Wam. Three years later, the company signed contracts with local residents stating that it would lease them 400 hectares (988) of land and receive part of their crops as rent payment each year.
But since 2016, many farmers have refused to deliver their crops to the company, which then sued them for nonpayment of debt and demanded they return the land.
A resident of one hamlet in the area, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the farmers decided to fight for their rights in response to the company’s dishonesty.
“As we all know, when doing business together, the company should have had some investments to enable farmers to do their farming work so that they could pay taxes and products to the company,” he said.
“Although the company did not give farmers a single grain of fertilizer or a drop of water or any technical assistance, it still collected the farmers’ crops,” he said.
The villager also said that Buon Ja Wam used to send staff to intimidate and threaten farmers who failed to make their in-kind payments on time, beating some to the point where they sustained serious injuries.
Local authorities told the villagers that they could not do anything to help them.
“We think there must be an interest group backing this company,” the resident said. “Their wrongdoings have been obvious, but as rank-and-file farmers, we had no choice but to work as slaves.”
RFA was unable to reach Buon Ja Wam for comment.
Dialogue unlikely
In an article published by Vietnam’s Business and Integration online newspaper in 2018, Phan Quoc Tan, Buon Ja Wam’s deputy director general, said the reason why farmers had stopped making in-kind payments was that “bad guys had encouraged and incited them to do so.”
Local farmers wanted to meet with company officials to discuss the situation, but the company refused the request, said another farmer who also requested anonymity for the same reason.
“Although local residents requested in earnest that Buon Ja Wam Company, local authorities at all levels, and coffee growers sit down together, they [the company] refused to do so,” he said.
“We want the local authorities to mediate the dialogue so that we can find a solution that is mutually beneficial and minimizes losses for both sides,” he said. “We have requested such a dialogue many times, but the authorities still have failed to make it happen.”
Residents say that they cleared the land in the 1980s when the government called for the development of new economic zones in the Central Highlands, and that officials did not allocate the land to Buon Ja Wam to grow coffee until 1996.
Because of this, local residents argued that the government should have granted land-use rights to them instead of to the company.
A farmer who lives in another hamlet in Eo Kiet said his family never received a land-use certificate for a parcel of land they bought from a family who had cleared it in the 1980s.
Although his family has been living on the land for years, they fear they will lose it due to their lack of the certificate.
“What we want is for the authorities, especially the Dak Lak People’s Committee, to revoke the land from the company and return it to the local government,” he told RFA. “Then the local government could allocate the land to local residents so that we can grow crops on our own land in order to pay taxes to the state and secure our livelihoods.”
RFA could not reach Cu M’Ga district officials for comment.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) was supposed to be protesting at this year’s Tory spring conference, but it ended up redirecting its energy to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Never fear, though – as local groups in the North West are refusing to let the Tories off the hook that easily.
The conference is taking place on 18 and 19 March at the Blackpool Winter Gardens.
Over the coming fortnight we will be mobilising trade unionists in support of the ITUC day of solidarity with Ukraine on 15 March.
And we will support the mobilisations in London and around the UK for the UN Antiracism Day on 19-20 March – particularly as this government refuses to welcome enough refugees from Ukraine into the UK.
The wages and bills crisis is about to bite. The TUC and the whole trade union movement demand action. So we will be bringing our campaign to win pay rises and a new deal for workers to a town or city near you soon and hosting a national mobilisation in London this summer. Dates and details to be announced soon.
But local groups clearly felt they should still take action.
Tory spring conference: the demo is on
So, two days of action are happening anyway. Wendy Fell from Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Trade Union Council and Unite Community Lancashire said in a statement:
Within 24 hours we and allies locally… turned round the TUC pulling out. We have got things agreed with the police who will be all over that area of Blackpool. We have got a march route organised and adverts and social media material ready.
The two days of action will see plenty going on. On 18 March, St Johns Square in Blackpool will see stalls and speakers from 1pm. Then, on 19 March, people will meet at the Comedy Carpet on the sea front near to the Blackpool Tower. They’ll march to the Tory conference at Winter Gardens/St Johns Square. If you can make it in person, be sure to follow the demo on social media:
will try and dominate the domestic news agenda with their narrative. While the media and the Conservatives are in Blackpool, we will attempt to get our own ideas across, ideas which include social justice and fairness – unlike theirs.
The Conservatives haven’t had a conference here since 2007 and it warrants a big turnout to let them know we’re watching. Watching as they trash our NHS, increase food-bank use, give their mates lucrative contracts, fail to deliver on any promises, ignore the refugee crisis, refuse to act on the environment, the cost of living crisis and so much more.
With the price rises and cost of living crisis, disabled people face the devastating impacts of poverty more fiercely than other demographic. Please do all you can to help us in that crucial task.
So, if you’re in or near Blackpool on 18 and 19 March, it’s time to show the Tories that people won’t take their toxic governance lying down.
Indonesian police have arrested a total of 90 Papuan students during a protest action near the Presidential Palace complex in Central Jakarta which ended in chaos with allegations of assaults on six protesters.
The demonstration by the Papuan students last Friday was to oppose the creation of new provinces in Papua.
“A total of 90 people”, said Metro Jaya regional police public relations division head Senior Commissioner E Zulpan when sought for confirmation on the arrests.
After being arrested, the students were taken to the Metro Jaya regional police headquarters.
Zulpan said that they would be returned home after being questioned.
“They will be returned home after being identified and questioned,” said Zulpan.
The protest, which ended in chaos, resulted in Central Jakarta district police intelligence unit head Assistant Superintendent Ferikson Tampubolon suffering head injuries after being allegedly assaulted by the protesters.
In addition to this, a number of other police officers were injured.
The demonstrators claimed that five protesters suffered injuries during the clash with police. One of them, a women, was knocked unconscious.
Zulpan however denied that police assaulted any of the demonstrators.
“There were no police officers who assaulted the demonstrators,” said Zulpan.
Advocacy Team slams police violence The Papua Advocacy Team has called on the Metro Jaya police chief to punish the police officers who allegedly committed violence against six Papuans during the rally near the Presidential Palace.
One of the Advocacy Team members, Teo Reffelsen, said that if the acts of violence by police were based on an order from a superior officer, then they must also be held responsible.
“Police must legally process police officers who committed the violence against the six Papuans,” said Reffelsen in a written release sent to CNN Indonesia.
“If it was based on an order, then their senior officer must also be held criminally responsible,” he said.
Reffelsen also said that based on information obtained from the participants in the action, one of the six students, Ince, was kicked in the chest by a police officer and fell unconscious.
Another, Bob, suffered scratches to his leg and chest after being kicked. Samuel Purwaro was kicked and dragged into a detention vehicle and suffered injuries to his right eye, and Deris Murib was kicked in the forehead and back of his body.
Daten meanwhile was struck in the head using a motorcycle helmet and a member of Solidarity Indonesia was kicked by police.
Suffered injuries, cracked teeth
“He suffered injuries to his body and cracked teeth. His genitals were grabbed, then his mobile phone. [But] his mobile phone has been returned,” said Reffelsen.
The Papuan students clashed with police near the Presidential Palace when they wanted to move off to the Home Affairs Ministry to protest against the creation of six new provinces in Papua.
Around 30 people claiming to be Papuan students tried to head off to the nearby Home Affairs Ministry on Jalan Medan Merdeka Utara via Jalan Veteran near the State Secretariat building in the presidential complex.
There, scores of police officers had already prepared a blockade and the demonstrators were prohibited from going any further. Tough negotiations between the two parties proceeded for up to 30 minutes.
The police continued to refuse to let the demonstrators pass and the two sides began pushing and shoving each other. A short time later the demonstrators broke through the blockade.
Police then chased the students and succeeded in breaking up the demonstration. Several were involved in fist fights.
IndoLeft News notes: A second article by CNN Indonesia later on the same day reported that 89 of those arrested had been returned home. “Yes, they’ve been sent home”, said Zulpan when sought for confirmation. Zulpan said however that one person named Alfius Wenda was still being questioned in relation to the alleged assault on Assistant Superintendent Ferikson Tampubolon.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to join anti-war demonstrations across Europe on Sunday as Russia continued its deadly assault on Ukraine, bombarding major cities and intensifying a humanitarian crisis that is having reverberating effects worldwide.
In addition to protests in Berlin, London, Warsaw, and Madrid — where participants carried signs and banners that read “Stop the War” and “Peace and Solidarity for the People in Ukraine” — demonstrations sprang up on a smaller scale in occupied Ukrainian cities and in Moscow, despite the threat of arrest and police brutality.
Thousands of Russian anti-war protesters have been detained and abused by law enforcement since the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, according to human rights organizations.
Despite threat of arrest, kidnapping and worse, Ukrainians in their thousands still come out to protest against occupying Russian forces. This latest video from Berdyansk on the Azov coast. pic.twitter.com/AFUf2bz0Wa
The demonstrations Sunday came amid some signs of diplomatic progress in talks between Russia and Ukraine, which have been negotiating on the border of Belarus since the early days of the invasion.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Sunday that Russia is “beginning to talk constructively” and predicted that “we will achieve some results literally in a matter of days.”
Leonid Slutsky, a Russian delegate to the negotiations with Ukraine, echoed his counterpart’s assessment.
“According to my personal expectations, this progress may grow in the coming days into a joint position of both delegations, into documents for signing,” Slutsky told reporters Sunday, without offering specifics on what an agreement would entail.
Seemingly positive developments in diplomatic talks came as Russia showed no sign of easing its attack, which has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee Ukraine and internally displaced millions more.
Zelenskyy said Saturday that around 125,000 people have been able to escape through humanitarian corridors established in besieged cities, but hundreds of thousands remain trapped in Mariupol and other areas facing heavy shelling from Russian forces.
Early Sunday morning, Russia bombed a Ukrainian military facility located just 22 miles from the border of Poland, a NATO member. The airstrike, believed to be Russia’s westernmost attack on Ukraine thus far, killed dozens of people and wounded more than 130 others.
The Associated Press reported that “continued fighting on multiple fronts heaped further misery on the country Sunday and provoked renewed international outrage.”
Brent Renaud, an American journalist who had previously contributed to the New York Times, was killed by Russian forces in the town of Irpin, Ukrainian authorities said Sunday. A second journalist who was traveling with Renaud was reportedly injured.
“We are shocked and saddened to learn of the death of U.S. journalist Brent Renaud in Ukraine,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement. “This kind of attack is totally unacceptable, and is a violation of international law. Russian forces in Ukraine must stop all violence against journalists and other civilians at once, and whoever killed Renaud should be held to account.”
According to the United Nations, at least 549 civilians have been killed and nearly 1,000 have been wounded since Russia invaded Ukraine — estimates that are believed to be significant undercounts.
Local Ukrainian officials said Sunday that 2,187 civilians have been killed in Mariupol alone since the start of Russia’s attack.
A New Zealand protest flotilla has arrived outside the luxury Northland home of Russian oligarch Alexander Abramov.
The eight vessels sailed to Helena Bay, north of Whangārei, early today to protest over the two-week-old Russian invasion of Ukraine facing the private estate owned by Abramov.
Locals on kayaks and boats were expected to join them.
The flotilla is asking the government to freeze Abramov’s New Zealand assets.
Although he is one of the few super-rich influential Russians with assets in New Zealand — a handful of wealthy Russians are estimated to have $60 million invested in the country — he is not on the official sanctions list intended to put pressure on Russia to stop the invasion of Ukraine.
The government has said the list will remain under review.
Greenpeace joins protest
The global environmental campaigner Greenpeace has joined the flotilla.
Greenpeace programme director Niamh O’Flynn is on board a yacht, and told RNZ the water was a bit choppy, but demonstrators plan to remain on their vessels in the bay and stay for a few hours to get their message across.
“The main message is that we need to do our bit to end this war peacefully, and that means sanctioning oligarchs, it means freezing the assets of oligarchs like Alexander Abramov, immediately.”
She said sanctioning oligarchs puts pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
Greenpeace’s Niamh O’Flynn at the protest in Helena Bay, in front of Alexander Abramov’s Northland property. Image: Greenpeace
On February 24, the government announced a list of officials from the Russian government and others involved in the invasion of Ukraine, who are named in a targeted travel ban.
On March 9, the new Russia Sanctions Bill was passed by Parliament under urgency by all parties. It allows for New Zealand to impose harsher sanctions.
Some Northlanders living near Abramov’s lodge earlier put up Ukrainian flags on their properties.
The luxury Abramov lodge in Northland’s Helena Bay. Image: RNZ
A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from International Women’s Day in Istanbul to ‘kill the bill’ protests in Cambridge
Reclaim These Streets welcomes judges’ decision as ‘a victory for women’ and calls for Met reform
The Metropolitan police breached the rights of the organisers of a planned vigil for Sarah Everard in the way they handled the planned event, high court judges have ruled, in a decision hailed as a “victory for women”.
Reclaim These Streets (RTS) proposed a socially distanced vigil for the 33-year-old, who was murdered by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens, near to where she went missing in Clapham, south London, in March last year.
Several hundred protesters marched down Oxford Street in Sydney on March 5 to celebrate the LGBTI community and to protest the Religious Discrimination Bill and the corporatisation of Mardi Gras.
The rally began at Taylor Square and ended with a dance party at Hyde Park. Organised by Pride in Protest (PIP) and Community Action for Rainbow Rights, the protest was attended by various community organisations, activists and the 78ers, organisers of the original 1978 Mardi Gras protest.
Several hundred protesters marched down Oxford Street in Sydney on March 5 to celebrate the LGBTI community and to protest the Religious Discrimination Bill and the corporatisation of Mardi Gras.
The rally began at Taylor Square and ended with a dance party at Hyde Park. Organised by Pride in Protest (PIP) and Community Action for Rainbow Rights, the protest was attended by various community organisations, activists and the 78ers, organisers of the original 1978 Mardi Gras protest.
On 3 March, private bailiffs evicted students who were peacefully occupying a university building at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS). The occupiers characterise their eviction as ‘forceful and illegal’.
The eviction came nine days into the occupation, in which students made calls for a demarketised, decolonised education system. What they mean by this, is an education system that puts the needs of staff, students, and communities before profit. And one that challenges – rather than reproduces – systems of racist, colonial oppression.
Fire Habib campaign
On 23 February, SOAS Strike Solidarity – a group of students – began occupying senior management’s offices in the university’s main building. The occupiers delivered a set of demands for SOAS management to implement.
The students are fighting for a demarketised, decolonised education, free from institutional racism. This begins with the removal of SOAS director Adam Habib.
On 11 March 2021, Habib used the n-word during a meeting with students. The uni boss went on to justify his use of the racial epithet in a series of tweets. Reflecting his regressive impact on the university, SOAS terminated its undergraduate African Studies programme under Habib’s leadership. Protesting students deem actions such as this to be indicative of the institutional racism that continues to function within the university.
Habib is also connected to the violent suppression of student protests in South Africa. In his role as vice-chancellor of South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, he called in private armed security and police to suppress students calling for a free, accessible, and decolonised education as part of the Fees Must Fall movement.
In 2016, South African police used rubber bullets and tear gas to suppress protesting students on campus. Police shot protest leader Shaeera Kalla in the back nine times. And on 10 March 2021, police shot and killed student Mthokozisi Ntumba outside the police-occupied university campus. A number of the students involved in the Fees Must Fall movement remain political prisoners in South Africa.
In a statement, the SOAS Strike Solidarity group said:
The SOAS student body has no illusions that Habib’s appointment at SOAS was specifically linked to his experience in repressing student movements.
Habib’s appointment at SOAS is particularly disturbing given the university’s reputation as a progressive hub of critical anti-colonial thought and radical politics. It would appear that university bosses continue to exploit this image to attract students and academics while suppressing radical political action on campus.
Students take a stand
The student group is also protesting in solidarity with university staff who are engaged in an ongoing fight against widespread race, gender, and disability pay gaps; increased casualisation and precarity; increasing workloads and real-terms pay and pension cuts. The students are urging university management to meet the University and College Union (UCU) and UNISON’s demands, and to cut senior management’s excessive salaries.
Protesting students are also urging management to improve working conditions for SOAS workers, particularly the university’s cleaning staff. And to meet the needs of disabled students.
SOAS Strike Solidarity has linked their fight for a demarketised, decolonised education with global struggles for social justice. They are demanding that the university divests from companies that are complicit in Israeli apartheid, and investigates its investments in companies that are complicit in human rights abuses against Uyghurs.
An ‘illegal and forceful’ eviction
On 3 March, private bailiffs and security wearing riot gear evicted the SOAS occupiers “in the middle of the night”. SOAS Strike Solidarity claims that prior to the eviction, “management only engaged in one “official” session of negotiation with the occupiers”, and failed to acknowledge all of their demands.
Upon learning about the eviction, members of the student body gathered outside the building in resistance.
The Eviction Response Team carried out the eviction – a private company which shockingly boasts “a wealth of experience when it comes to the removal of protestors, squatters & travellers”.
SOAS Strike Solidarity maintains that three occupiers sustained injuries after private bailiffs “violently dragged” them out of the building. Their press release includes an image of one occupier’s grazed back.
In a statement, the group said:
This was an illegal eviction and at no point were occupiers violent, or causing criminal damage. SOAS Management did NOT have a court order to legally carry out this eviction, and thus resorted to a cowardly private eviction in the middle of the night.
After nine days of occupation we decided that allowing further disruption was untenable and we proceeded on the basis of common law. Throughout this period, we were closely advised by legal opinion on the matter and we strongly refute the allegation that the removal of the occupiers was illegal. The removal was conducted without any physical injury and our priority was to ensure the safety and security of all involved.
They added:
We had hoped to resolve this matter through dialogue and over the course of nine days, we engaged in extensive discussions with the occupiers on the progress already made on some of their demands and work underway on others. Despite these engagements, the occupiers consistently refused to leave the premises.
The struggle continues
Reflecting on the institutional racism, imperialism, and marketisation which characterises the UK’s higher education system, SOAS Strike Solidarity said:
The occupiers, and the overall SOAS community, is outraged at the management for carrying out this eviction in such a violent manner. It has shown the true nature of the current management—unwilling to engage in any dialogue or negotiation with the demands of a significant proportion of the student body.
They added:
The force used in this eviction was just a brief exposure of the violence on which the institution is based. This includes the violence they inflict through the exploitation of immigrant workers and Global Majority students, and the history of colonial violence on which the institution is built. SOAS management is unwilling to respond to their students’ needs and instead are only interested in protecting their profit-making institution.
In spite of their traumatic experience, the group stands firm in their ongoing fight. SOAS staff and students are protesting on the university campus on Thursday 10 March.
STUDENT AND STAFF WALKOUT TMMR @ 12PM
Resist management’s authoritarian tactics. They have bolstered security, restricted the right to protest with dignity, and ILLEGALLY EVICTED students.
— soasstrikesolidarity (@soasstrikesol) March 9, 2022
The SOAS Strike Solidarity group is urging supporters to join them in condemning their forceful eviction and demanding a free and fair education system for all.
Featured image with permission from SOAS Strike Solidarity
Scores of Papuan activists have held a protest in front of the Army Strategic Reserves Command (Green Berets) headquarters in Central Jakarta, demanding that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo withdraw military troops from Papua, reports CNN Indonesia.
The protesters, who came from the Pro-Democracy Alliance and the Greater Jakarta Papua Student Alliance (IMAPA), accused the military in Papua of assaulting a primary school child for allegedly stealing a firearm and causing the child’s death.
“[We] demand that the president immediately withdraw the military from the land of Papua,” said one of the speakers in front of the Kostrad building on Monday.
“The primary school kid’s didn’t know it was a firearm. They didn’t know it was theft,” he said.
In an official release, the group also said that joint TNI (Indonesian military) and Polri (Indonesian police) operations following the fatal shooting of Papua regional National Intelligence Agency (BIN) chief Gusti Putu Danny in April last year have resulted in civilian casualties.
They said that the security forces have set fire to residents’ homes and committed violence against local people.
As a consequence, residents have chosen to flee their homes in order to save themselves.
“To the president, immediately withdraw the military in the land of Papua,” called the speaker. “Jokowi is responsible for the oppression in Papua.”
Earlier, on Sunday, February 20, a class 4 primary school student with the initials MT died after being allegedly assaulted by security personnel in the Sinak sub-district of Puncak regency, Papua.
Based on information received from Amnesty International Indonesia, the incident began when MT and six other children were arrested for allegedly stealing a firearm belonging to a TNI member in Sinak.
“Based on local media reports on February 26, two youths allegedly took a firearm belonging to a TNI member in the vicinity of the Tapulinik Sinak Airport, Puncak regency, Papua, on the evening of February 20,” read a tweet on the Twitter account @amnestyindo on Monday February 28.
[BREAKING] Kami juga kembali mendesak pemerintah untuk mempertimbangkan kembali pendekatan keamanan yang digunakan untuk merespon masalah di Papua.
On March 3, 2022, police in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, opened an investigation into Asad Ali Toor for allegedly leading an unauthorized protest earlier that week, according to newsreports and Toor, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.
On March 4, the Islamabad High Court ordered police not to arrest anyone named in the case until another hearing on Monday, March 7; at that hearing, Chief Justice Athar Minallah said that police officers’ use of excessive force and the registration of a criminal case against the protesters constituted an abuse of state power, according to newsreports.
Toor, who was present at the March 7 hearing, said that Attorney General Khalid Jawed Khan told the court that the state would withdraw the case. Toor told CPJ on March 9 that he had not been formally notified that the case had been withdrawn.
Khan and Shabbir Ahmad, the station house officer of Islamabad’s Kohsar police station who filed the complaint, did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via messaging app.
Toor told CPJ that he denied any leadership role in the protest, held on March 1 at the city’s National Press Club to protest the disappearance of an ethnic Baloch student, and only attended to cover it as a journalist.
A number of students were injured when police charged the protesters and attacked them with batons, according to Dawn. Toor alleged that the investigation was retaliation for his coverageofthe protest and the police crackdown on his YouTube-based current affairs channel, Asad Toor Uncensored.
In a first information report, a police document opening an investigation, authorities accused Toor and several others of criminal conspiracy, rioting, unlawful assembly, obstruction of a public servant’s duties, defamation, and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace. The most serious of those crimes, criminal conspiracy, can carry a death sentence, according to Pakistan’s penal code.
Previously, in September 2020, the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency in the northern city of Rawalpindi filed a first information report against Toor for allegedly defaming the army through his social media posts, according to newsreports.
After four months of legal proceedings, the Lahore High Court dismissed the case for lack of evidence, according to news reports and Toor. He said that the state never informed him or his lawyers about who filed the complaint that led to the registration of a first information report, or which social media posts were allegedly defamatory.
Separately, in May 2021, unidentified armed men attacked Toor at his home and left him bound and gagged, as CPJ documented at the time. Toor told CPJ that police have not identified the perpetrators of that attack.
CPJ emailed the Federal Investigation Agency and Islamabad Police Inspector-General Muhammad Ahsan Younas for comment, but did not immediately receive any replies.
“I have never had that fear before that I might get physically hurt,” says Patrice Allen, a Ngati Kahungunu and Newshub camera operator based in Wellington.
“You’re going down there, you don’t know what it’s going to be like. A person from Wellington Live got beaten up.”
Māori Television’s press gallery videographer David Graham (Taranaki Whānui and Waikato) started working as a news cameraman in Wellington in 1989. He was there for the seabed and foreshore protests, and “in the 1990s it was Moutua and Pakitore,” he recollects. “But this is the most volatile one I have seen.
“Back then we [the media] were part of the show. They wanted us to be there. Now we are a part of the ‘axis of evil’, along with the police and government.”
Up against your own
“Now there are Pākehā calling you kūpapa [Māori warriors who fought on the British colonial troops side during the New Zealand Wars in the 19th century],” he says. He has just returned from filming with his phone in the crowd, and has heard protesters say things. Nasty things.
“Stuff like ‘you should be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed of your whakapapa!’”
“I just don’t engage,” says Graham. “And I am not a random man with a camera here. I actually have whakapapa back to this marae on my father’s side,” he says, referring to Pipitea Marae where Taranaki Whānui laid down Te Kahu o Raukura as a cultural protection over the surrounding land that includes the Parliament grounds.
The protesters had lots of livestreams and many of them kept filming media camera-ops who were filming them. (Below: David Graham finds himself in one of the live feeds while a protester in the crowd heckles him.)
A standup by Maori Television’s Parliament videographer David Graham captured on protester’s social media grab. Image: Māori Television
Allen feels the mamae is stronger when it comes from your own people.
“He was a big dude and he was really getting in my face. I was not feeling very safe. And I thought, ‘how can I diffuse this?’” So she asked them where they were from.
“And they were like where are you from? What are you?”
“Oh, Ngati Kahungunu, just over the hill in Wairarapa,” she replied. The man said something targeting not just her but also her iwi. “And that just broke my spirit,” says Allen.
“It was one of the days I went home and cried.”
‘We’re the enemy now’ “We are the enemy now,” says Allen. “And there is nothing you can do or say that will change their minds.”
Her teammate Emma Tiller thinks the camera can be a beacon in the crowd. “As soon as you put it up, everyone knows who you are. And they hate you.”
And even though security cover has become standard practice for all news camera-ops filming in the crowd, there are times she feels vulnerable. “It’s hard to think back to protests when we were out there. We didn’t have security with us. It didn’t even cross our minds.
“But now who wants to risk the violence?” she says.
“They have thrown things at the police. If they can do that to them, what can they do to us?”
The Speaker’s balcony is empty today … a far cry from Wednesday, March 2, when it was packed with camera operators and reporters (below) as police cracked down on the occupation and cleared Parliament grounds. Image: Māori TelevisionThe balcony was allocated by the Speaker of the House to media workers as a safe space. David Graham (left) and Patrice Allen (third from left). Māori Television
“The last time I had security was when I was filming in East Timor,” says Allen. It was a long time ago, she adds, and at a time and place when there were terrorists around.
“It’s really bad because it’s made it ‘us and them’, media against protesters, and it’s not supposed to be like that.”
‘Difficult to turn off’
Sam Anderson, 22, is TVNZ’s camera operator at the press gallery. “It has been difficult to turn off,” he says “ I have been there [on the Speaker’s balcony] from 9am to 6pm just streaming the whole day.
“It’s all you are doing – copping the abuse, being yelled at, having your morality questioned.
“I sometimes hide behind the pillars from the frontliners who can yell all day.
“And throw that in with reading all the signs around you,” says Tiller.
“And they yell at you. And you go home and you can’t switch it off.”
Throughout the protests, the signs have been as much anti-“mainstream” media as they have been anti-government. Image: Māori Television
Anderson’s teammate, Sam von Keisenberg, was on that balcony on February 11 when police made many arrests. Shortly after they arrested someone at the forecourt and the crowd was yelling at the police, a lady pointed a finger at him and said “You! You are a paedophile protector!”
“At first I was like, ‘that’s new’. But then she said it 50 times, as loud as she could, just at me.”
He pulled his camera off the tripod. “It was getting to me”, he says. “I have children. I would never protect a paedophile.”
His colleague asked him where he was going. “Just to punch some lady in the face,” he said under his breath. “And I walked out and just went to the bathroom.”
Sweeping generalisations
“Sometimes you have to take a step back,” von Keisenberg says.
“I had never experienced hate [directed] at me before,” RNZ video journalist Angus Dreaver says. Especially this type, he says, where they think media are traitors, and they want them to know.
“Four months ago, I was doing kids’ TV.”
Dreaver thinks the generalisation works both ways. While the protesters see the mainstream media as a monolith and sweep them with one giant brush, “it’s important for us, conversely, not to see them that way.”
Von Keisenberg believes there were more moderates in the crowd than extremists. “I always felt there were enough people around me,” he says. And that made him feel safe in the first week when he was filming undercover, knowing that “if things did get violent, there would be some moderate ones who would stop them”.
He saw that in action, too. In his forays of the first week, when he joined the crowd unmasked to avoid attention. He saw a man there in his 70s wearing a mask.
“The first thing he said to me was that he was immunocompromised, which is why he was wearing the mask.”
“It’s fine, mate. It’s a freedom rally, do what you want,” von Keisenberg said. But another protester came up and “tried to pull his mask off and started berating him, saying he had no identity. The mob mentality started and people around the gate joined in and started giving him grief.”
Von Keisenberg intervened. “Oi! chill out man. It’s a freedom rally, he’s free to wear a mask!”
“A woman close by turned around and said, ‘Yeah, come on guys! leave him alone.’ And they did.”
Mainstream media
When people tell von Keisenberg that they don’t watch mainstream media, his follow-up is, “Well then, how do you know we are ‘lying’?”
“They say, ‘we get our news from Facebook, which is different’. Yeah, different, because there aren’t many rules around it,” von Keisenberg says.
“Mainstream media is held more to account than social media,” Allen says. “But they think the opposite.”
Some of Dreaver’s acquaintances have shared his photos on Instagram, in posts that read “Mainstream media are liars”. “Bro, that’s me!”, he says.
Trying to remain objective in the face of constant harassment is a real challenge.
“I am almost hyper-aware of that, where I am trying to capture the mundane and relax as much as the heightened states,” he adds. “And I am trying to not let my anger affect the pictures I take or how I cover it.”
But for camera operators, the task ends once they take the picture. “We only aim for clear sound and sharp, steady pictures,” Graham says. “The rest of the stuff is for other people to decide what to do with.”
Anderson thinks there are differences in perspectives within newsrooms. People who have watched the protests from a distance or from their desks often take a kinder view of the protesters, he says.
“But me and the other camera ops, we copped a lot of abuse over three weeks. We just have a more bitter taste in our mouths for this crowd.”
The PM in ‘disguise’
There have been the fun moments, though, Anderson admits. There have been “raves” with young people dancing on the frontlines and he found himself almost filming to the beat. And there was a protester who thought he was the prime minister in disguise.
A Reddit thread with a screenshot of a protester’s post. Image: Sam Anderson screenshot
“Now that is one theory I know is not true,” says his teammate von Keisenberg. But how does he know for sure?
“Because I have seen both of them in the same room at the same time.”
And von Keisenberg has had his fun moments in the crowd, too. In one instance when he was filming undercover, a woman went on the stage and started talking into the mic about electric and magnetic fields (radiation) and how crystals could block them.
“Bullshit!” von Keisenberg turned around and shouted.
“We are here for the mandates,” he added, not snapping out of character, and for the benefit of those around him who were listening to the woman speak.
A potential for volence
“The vibe changed every few days, and that was because people kept coming and going,” von Keisenberg says. “But there were always the elements who were there for whatever happened on day 23.”
One camera op I spoke to said there had been a “potential for violence” right throughout. And when someone like Winston Peters visits the crowd and says “the mainstream media have been gaslighting you for a long time,” it gives them validation, and lends credibility to their theories.
But for those on the ground gathering news amid a hostile crowd, it exacerbates the possibility for harm.
Added to this potential of violence is the constant anticipation of things to come. “You have to be always prepared for when something will happen,” as Tiller puts it. “And that is exhausting.”
Emma Tiller describes her experience of the Speaker’s balcony as, “You feel like you have to be prepared for if something is going to happen, and that is exhausting.”
Emma Tiller on the Speaker’s balcony … “You feel like you have to be prepared for if something is going to happen, and that is exhausting.” Image: Sam James/Newshub
“The day things turn to custard, you want to be there on the ground,” Graham said to me a few days before the police operation. “You don’t want to be at home watching it on TV.”
And turn to custard it did; the threat of violence became reality on day 23. While the “battle” raged between the police and the protesters, the media people found themselves being targeted.
Dreaver was in the crowd by the tent where a fire had started. “A Mainstream! We have got a Mainstream here,” a woman who spotted him started shouting.
Brandishing a camping chair, she told him to, “get out of here! Out! Out!” The riot police were advancing behind him and he stood his ground.
“She started hitting me on the back with it,” he said. “She didn’t have a lot of speed but it was still a metal chair.”
“It hurt a bit,” he reckons.
“Get out of here,” demands the woman who attacked Dreaver with a chair. “Just go” shouts a man standing beside her. Screengrab from RNZ’s video story.
“Get out of here,” demands a woman who attacked RNZ’s Angus Dreaver with a chair. “Just go” shouts a man standing beside her. Image: RNZ screengrab from video story.
‘Not everyone’
“There were some protesters who were trying to stop the violence. Even right at the end,” says Dreaver, recollecting how when some people were breaking up bits from the concrete slabs to get smaller throw-able chunks, another person tried to physically get in the way and stop them.
“But the other guys had a metal tent pole and whacked him over the head with it.”
Throughout the three weeks of protests, there had been repeated calls from the protesters asking the media to talk to them. On the morning of day 23 when I was filming from the Speaker’s balcony, a TV reporter had just finished a live cross into the bulletin.
A man’s voice rang out from among the crowd, on the PA, inviting the media on the balcony to “come down and talk to real people and report the truth.” The same voice went on to berate us for wearing masks, behind which we were allegedly smiling smugly.
Less than a minute after the initial invitation, he followed up with another call to step down so he could put a fist through the mask.
“Why don’t you come down to talk to us? Because getting bashed with a chair was always inevitable,” says Dreaver. “It’s crazy it took so long.”
Protesters whacked another protester with a tent pole as he tried to stop the violence. “It didn’t look as though it injured him, because the tent poles are quite light, but it looked quite gnarly,” Dreaver says.
Protesters whack another protestor with a tent pole as he tries to stop the violence. Image: Screengrab from RNZ video story
The aftermath
Parliament’s grounds have been reclaimed. All but one street around the buildings is now open to the public. On Sunday, Te Āti Awa held a karakia to reinstall the mauri of the land. There is currently a rāhui over the Parliament grounds.
It is time for healing. And moving on.
“I was feeling sad last week. And then I look at Ukraine and realise there are bombs going off next to all these journalists and camera operators,” Dreaver says “I got hit with a camping chair and I am going to sit around and complain about it?”
The effect of these protests linger though. Graham spent last Friday a week ago filming the hau kainga at Wainuiomata on high alert, and trying to keep the protesters from entering and setting up camp on their marae, as have other hapū around the capital.
The crowd has dispersed but not vanished, and neither has their kaupapa.
“I have seen some of their kōrero online,” Graham says. The mandates might be gone soon, but “there will be other stuff,” he reckons.
“It’s definitely not over.”
Rituraj Sapkota is Māori Television’s videographer in Parliament’s press gallery. Republished with permission from Te Ao Māori News.
On Monday, hundreds of students staged a walkout at a high school in Orange County, Florida, demonstrating against a proposed bill that would limit discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools throughout the state.
More than 500 students participated in a protest at Winter Park High School, organized to oppose legislation — colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — that is currently being debated in the state Senate. The legislation would ban discussion of LGBTQ issues in primary school classrooms and severely curtail what can be discussed in older grades, and could have disastrous repercussions beyond lesson plans.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has signaled that he will sign the bill into law if it reaches his desk.
Students at Winter Park High School shouted slogans in support of their LGBTQ peers, chanting “We say Gay” to demonstrate their opposition to the bill. Students taking part in the demonstration also held signs in support of transgender students.
Students at my alma mater, Winter Park High School, protesting the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Will Larkins, a junior at the high school and one of the students who helped organize the protest, said that the walkouts would continue if the legislation moved forward or was eventually passed into law.
“We wanted to show our government that this isn’t going to stop,” Larkins said to CNN. “There were walkouts all last week. This is going to continue. If this passes, there will be protests everywhere.”
Jack Petocz, a junior who helped organize the walkout against the anti-LGBTQ bill, said that the principal of the school told him ahead of the event that he wasn’t allowed to hand out rainbow flags.
The school’s principal questioned “the intentions of our protest, asking if pride flags were relevant to opposition to the bill,” Petocz later explained. “I decided to move forward and handed the flags to other student organizers for distribution at the event.”
After the protest concluded, Petocz said that he was called into the principal’s office yet again, and suspended for being “disrespectful and openly advocating against staff.” The junior says that he plans to speak to his family’s lawyer about the events.
Experts predict that the “Don’t Say Gay” bill will have a detrimental effect on students if it is passed into law. “The likely outcome of the bill would be to deter teachers from addressing these issues and to chill open discussions and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students,” Ryan Thoreson, a researcher at Human Rights Campaign, said in February.
It’s also possible that the bill could result in increased harassment of LGBTQ students, and less consequences for those who bully them; due to the bill’s vague language, students might feel as though they are unable to discuss their situation with teachers, and may be less willing to share that their LGBTQ status is the basis for their harassment
In Turkey, International Women’s Day is not celebrated only at corporate breakfasts and morning teas. It is celebrated on the streets and at night by marching, dancing, and chanting. At Feminist Night Marches, celebration also means resistance, writes Burcu Cevik-Compiegne.
This year marks 20 years of Feminist Night Marches in Turkey. On 8 March International Women’s Day, women take to the streets in major cities to march, sing, dance and repeat their iconic slogan: “If you ever feel hopeless, remember this crowd”.
“If you ever feel hopeless, remember this crowd”
This is a simple yet powerful slogan, as it is not uncommon to feel hopeless in this country. At a time when femicide and transphobic crimes have skyrocketed, it is easy to succumb to feeling powerless. In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women and domestic violence.
The Istanbul Convention, as it is known, saves lives by laying out the framework to deliver justice and support to women who have suffered gendered violence. When a presidential decree can undo years of work overnight – which is essentially what happened when Turkey withdrew from the Convention – it automatically raises the question: what is there to celebrate on the International Women’s Day in Turkey?
Celebration takes on a different meaning in the context of contemporary Turkey. An increasingly authoritarian rule has systematically attacked women’s rights and freedoms in an attempt to shape society made up of families after its own image, featuring an unrestrained, vindictive and self-righteous male head of the household. The role that is defined for women in President R. T. Erdogan’s so-called New Turkey is one of the dutiful wife and mother.
Against this background, claiming the streets and the night to perform their spiteful joy is a powerful response to neoconservative familism that aims to confine women to home, and their social and public life to the daytime only.
Women take to streets at night on every 8 March to express a range of views and emotions. In the current political environment, the power of their actions cannot be overstated.
The two emotions that stand out are anger and hope. Yet it is joy that links these two together and sets the atmosphere of the Feminist Night Marches. When women are told not to laugh out loud in public by top government leaders and they are arrested for insulting the President by jumping to the rhythm, a joyful celebration at night on the streets gains a whole new meaning; it becomes resistance.
The Night Marches do not use joy to tone down anger or smoothen the rough edges of feminism in a bid to make it more palatable. Women use music, dance and humour to create an atmosphere where they feel united, strong and untamed in equal measure. The witty and dark sense of humour that comes through the placards is not to please the outsiders. One often used slogan suggests “We don’t want a dictator, we want a vibrator”. Another advocates for “three orgasms per week” rather than the three children recommended by President Erdogan. These slogans intend to shock the sensibilities of the mindset that ties women’s sexuality to reproductive and marital duties.
This resistance hasn’t gone unnoticed. The authorities’ response to Feminist Night Marches is loud and clear. Every year, the security forces put in place blockades to prevent women from marching, using intimidation and arrests as dissuasive measures. The very same women who ordinarily feel threatened on those same streets become perceived as a threat to an order that oppresses them.
The legitimacy of authoritarian rule depends on the polarisation of society, and the creation of constant crises. In a highly polarised society, like Turkey where difference can be a matter of life or death, Feminist Night Marches do not just tolerate, but instead embrace and celebrate difference. Run by a coalition of diverse organisations, the press releases are broadcast in four of the most common native languages spoken in Turkey (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Armenian).
Women can be seen carrying their placards in their native language, joined by the rainbow-coloured flags of the vibrant LGBTQI+ communities. Women proudly proclaim their identities as Muslim feminists, socialists or sex workers. Along with the Pride marches, Feminist Night Marches is arguably the only regular event that has achieved and nurtured such solidarity. And that in itself is worth celebrating!
Feature image: The feminist night march was organized to protest violence against women and defend women’s rights. Turkey Istanbul Beyoglu March 8, 2021. Picture: Shutterstock
We speak to Russian activist and historian Ilya Budraitskis after over 5,000 antiwar protesters were detained on Sunday as part of a sweeping crackdown on Russian civil society and the media. Activists in Russia are relying on alternative outlets such as social media for information, as the Russian government continues to censor major news outlets. Writers and independent news outlets such as Novaya Gazeta have faced the threat of criminal investigations for spreading so-called disinformation, which includes using the words “invasion” and “war” to describe Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, says Budraitskis.
A troupe of environmental activists descended on Rotterdam, Netherlands, last month for an evocative demonstration. Dressed as jellyfish, sea anemones, and “fisher folk,” protestors from the advocacy group Ocean Rebellion sang songs and projected messages onto the hull of a 750-foot-long drilling ship, urging policymakers to protect the seafloor from mining companies.
“The Deep Sea Says No,” some signs read, as others called seabed mining “100% Unnecessary.”
Deep-sea mining in international waters is currently illegal, and environmental organizations, scientists, and many governments want to keep it that way. They argue that the practice could irreversibly harm one of the planet’s remotest ecosystems, one of the few places on Earth that has largely escaped human disruption.
Now, their calls have become increasingly urgent, as international regulators are expected to begin issuing deep-sea mining permits by the summer of 2023. Activists are trying to enlist everyone from tech companies to United Nations delegates in an all-hands-on-deck push to stop mining companies from exploiting the seabed.
“The ocean is 70 percent of this planet,” said Clive Russell, an activist with Ocean Rebellion. “We need to stop people from abusing it.”
The case for deep-sea mining is simple: As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, increased demand for technologies like electric vehicle batteries and solar panels will require massive quantities of cobalt, manganese, nickel, and other clean-energy metals. Land-based metal reserves are few and far between, and they’re often located near communities that are harmed by mining activities. But there are billions of dollars’ worth of these metals at the bottom of the ocean — far from civilization — and no one is yet taking advantage of them.
Some also argue that, by powering clean-energy technologies and thereby accelerating a shift away from fossil fuels, deep-sea mining will protect the oceans from unabated climate change. Rising CO2 emissions have already caused devastating ocean acidification, deoxygenation, and the decline of marine species populations around the world. Gerard Barron, CEO of the Metals Company, a Canadian firm that is already preparing vessels to begin mining the ocean deep, has argued that deep-sea mineral deposits are “the easiest way to solve climate change.”
However, ocean experts vehemently disagree. The deep sea is one of the planet’s most obscure places, home to tens or even hundreds of thousands of plant and animal species that are still unknown to humans. Scientists argue it would be reckless to disrupt this environment. According to research from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, more than half of marine species in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone — a mineral-rich fracture zone that extends 4,500 miles along the floor of the Pacific Ocean — are dependent on the deep-sea mineral deposits that mining companies have set their sights on. Removing these potato-shaped deposits, which are known as polymetallic nodules, “would trigger a cascade of negative effects on the ecosystem,” the researchers concluded. And recovery would be nearly impossible, given the fact that these nodules take millions of years to develop.
Ocean Rebellion activists protest deep-sea mining in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Charles M. Vella / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
“The threat to biodiversity is really quite concerning,” said Jeffrey Drazen, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Drazen also warned that seabed mining could potentially exacerbate climate change by disrupting carbon sequestration dynamics in the deep ocean.
In short, experts agree that too little is known about the dangers of seabed mining for it to proceed safely, while a growing number assert that its risks vastly outweigh its potential benefits. The world’s clean-energy needs can be met with land-based mining, they argue, or better yet through technological innovation and dramatically improved recycling infrastructure that could significantly reduce the need for most mining in the first place.
Helen Scales, a marine biologist who teaches at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education, also emphasized the need for far-reaching, creative changes in the way the world adapts to climate change — like the dramatic expansion of public transportation. “Looking to the deep sea and saying we’re going to use those metals to build a billion electric cars is assuming that that’s what we should be doing,” she said. “It’s a very simplistic argument to say the only route to reduce carbon emissions is by mining the deep ocean.”
The reason the debate about deep-sea mining is escalating now is because of a surprise move from Nauru, a tiny island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Last summer, Nauru sent a letter to the International Seabed Authority, or ISA — the organization charged by the United Nations to regulate mineral-related activities in the deep ocean — expressing its intent to begin mining the seafloor in international waters. This triggered an obscure “two-year rule,” forcing the ISA to begin issuing deep-sea mining permits by the summer of 2023. The ISA will attempt to finalize regulations for seafloor mining before that deadline, but this is not necessarily required by law; ISA regulators are expected to open up the seabed to mining companies next summer even in the absence of a mining code.
Relicanthus sp., a new species from a new order of Cnidaria collected at 4,100 meters in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ). It lives on sponge stalks attached to polymetallic nodules.
NOAA
It’s unclear whether the Metals Company, the firm that is partnering with Nauru, will have the technological or financial capacity to begin mining so soon. Duncan Currie, an international environmental lawyer who has worked with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said that disagreements between countries over profit-sharing for deep-sea metals could also delay the start of large-scale seabed mining. The U.N Convention on the Law of the Sea explicitly calls for the “equitable sharing of the financial benefits” among ISA member countries and the European Union, Currie explained, but countries are “miles apart” on what that sharing should look like. Still, the timeline imposed by the two-year rule has still frightened many scientists and environmental advocates, who fear a “race to the bottom” for seabed metals.
“It’s reckless,” said Farah Obaidullah, founder of the advocacy group Women4Oceans. “This is something we know ahead of time is going to cause irreversible damage to the deep seas,” and it could begin without rules or regulations in place.
The Metals Company did not respond to Grist’s request for comment for this story.
Environmental advocates’ ultimate goal is to convince international lawmakers to put in place a moratorium on deep-sea mining. In response to the ISA’s looming deadline, 622 marine science and policy experts have called for a pause on the practice. Eighty-one governments and government agencies in the International Union for Conservation of Nature similarly called for a ban last fall. Other organizations and prominent individuals — including nature broadcaster David Attenborough and oceanographer Sylvia Earle — have made similar, often impassioned, pleas that seabed mining be halted.
Because the ISA has mining industry ties, experts don’t expect the group to ban deep-sea mining. The only body with the power to supersede the ISA’s authority and implement a moratorium on deep-sea mining is the U.N. General Assembly — but advocates don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. It’s very possible that companies could begin drilling in the deep ocean before U.N. member countries have a chance to stop them.
Given the pressing timeline, many advocates have focused on strategies that could offer immediate, albeit limited, protections for the deep sea while simultaneously drumming up support for a moratorium.
One strategy is to get large, metal-hungry companies to publicly disavow seabed mining. Arlo Hemphill, a senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, said these disavowals could show mining interests that there is insufficient demand from large corporations to make seabed mining profitable. The tactic has gained some traction, with large tech and car companies like Google, BMW, and Samsung promising to keep deep-sea metals out of their products. Banks like Triodos have also promised to exclude deep-sea mining from their financing.
Red handfish, Thymichthys politus, live in the deep sea. They are rare and critically endangered.
Auscape / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Another approach would be U.N. intervention to bar deep-sea mining in critical ocean areas like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. This is what some advocates hope could happen at a U.N. conference on marine biodiversity in international waters that will take place in New York starting this week. The conference is focused on the high seas, but according to Hemphill, it’s possible that it could have implications for the deep ocean as well. If negotiators agree on a treaty creating sanctuary zones for marine species — whales, for example — it could place entire swathes of the ocean out of the reach of mining companies.
The catch, however, is that for this approach to be effective, sanctuary zones would have to extend all the way down the water column, from the surface to the ocean floor. This is a big hurdle; according to Obaidullah, much ocean policy fails to connect these two sections of the ocean, treating them as distinct realms.
“As somebody with common sense, I don’t see how that’s possible,” she said. “If you start mining the deep ocean, you’re going to have sediment plumes in the water column at all stages, at all depths.”
Another caveat: Even if the U.N. comes up with a powerful treaty at its March meeting in New York, Obaidullah noted that ratification and implementation could take years — much longer than the 16 months remaining before mining companies may begin breaking ground in the deep ocean. She envisioned a scenario in which the ISA is opening up vast tracts of the seabed to extraction, even as other bodies are still haggling over how to conserve the waters directly above.
Hemphill expressed hope that a growing spotlight on the Metals Company, the two-year rule, and the dangers of deep-sea mining will stop the practice in its tracks. He supports a moratorium, but stressed the need to pursue parallel objectives: working to reduce or dependency on clean energy metals, for instance, by boosting recycling, designing products to last longer, and investing in public transit systems as an alternative to electric cars.
Russell, the Ocean Rebellion activist, agreed, calling for a sea change in the way humans interact with the ocean. “We need to begin to question why these people think that it’s a good idea to go deep-sea mining in the first place,” he said. “We have to start changing our relationships to the planet, and a big part of that is the ocean.”
Mr Tsewang Norbu, a 25 year-old Tibetan musician, who self-immolated in protest against China’s brutal and illegal occupation of Tibet, has died from his injuries according to information emerging from Tibetan sources. His sacrifice was made February 25 in front of the Potala, former residence of Tibet’s Dalai Lama.
Twenty-eight of the anti-public health protesters who occupied New Zealand’s Parliament grounds over the past month have now tested positive for covid-19.
In a statement, the Ministry of Health said 11 district health boards had reported covid-19 cases from the protest, including Wairarapa, Waitematā, Waikato, Taranaki, Southern, MidCentral, Tairawhiti, Hutt Valley, Counties Manukau, Capital and Coast, and Canterbury.
“These people are thought to be protesters, although they have not been interviewed as they would have been prior to the recent changes in case investigation,” the statement said.
“In phase 3 [of the Omicron response], cases are not routinely interviewed by health officials and are instead asked to fill out a contact tracing form.
“Only cases that are identified through their interaction with the health system can therefore be identified as having attended the protest.”
The ministry is urging all those who were at the 23-day occupation to get tested and vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Wellington City Council said most of the remaining protesters seemed to have left the capital over the weekend, except for a group at Mahanga Bay who were not on council land.
Work was well underway to remove rubbish, deep-clean, and repair damaged roads, street lights and sewer pipes, it said.
The Department of Conservation said there were no protesters left at its Catchpool Valley campsite in Remutaka Forest Park, which was now closed for cleaning.
Wellington City Council has repairs and a clean-up underway of Parliament grounds after the 23-day occupation by protesters ended. Image: Wellington City Council/FB/RNZ
Christchurch library shuts for two hours over protesters In the South Island, Christchurch central city library shut for almost two hours this morning when 40 protesters who were stopped from entering refused to leave.
A council spokesperson said Tūranga was closed after a warning that a group linked to the Freedom and Rights Coalition might protest there.
The council was not considering increasing security staff in response to the incident.
A police spokesperson said the 40-strong group was refused entry to the library because they did not have vaccine passes.
Police arrived at the library, where the group stood outside for a while before leaving, but no one was arrested or trespassed from the building.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On February 5, protesters took to the streets of major Brazilian cities asking for justice. A young African man, Moïse Kabagambe, was lynched — tortured to death — on a beach in Rio de Janeiro in January. The alleged perpetrators, working men themselves, are in custody, and claim there was no intention to kill; that they were responding to the erratic behavior of the victim. The victim’s family, on the other hand, claims he was only asking to be remunerated for two days of work. No narrative, however, justifies what happened, which was caught on video.
To protesters, Kabagambe’s case went beyond the debate in court of whether his death was a homicide or an accident. The men involved claim their intention was to punish the immigrant for causing trouble, but the video shows how the beating went on for several minutes after Kabagambe was unresponsive, and the sheer physical stamina needed for the act implies hate was the fuel.
At the protest in São Paulo, African immigrants spoke of the disappointment they felt towards their reception in Brazil. Of how Brazilians need to do better to welcome African brothers and sisters, and to treat them as they would their family and neighbors. From the Congolese community, there was rage, pain and frustration; speakers’ voices cracked and pitched with angst. They came here looking for a better life, hoping to be embraced, and faced hostility and marginalization instead. Kabagambe’s case represents the rampant xenophobia Brazilians direct at Africans, remnant colonialism in labor relations and society at large, and the farce of racial democracy and meritocracy so often championed by Brazilian politicians.
Kabagambe’s murder caused sadness and outrage not only in Brazil but also among the international community.Fabio Teixeira
Fleeing Violence in the DRC Only to Encounter Violence in Brazil
Moïse Kabagambe was a Congolese refugee fleeing ethnic conflict, who arrived in Brazil as a child in 2014 with his mother and brothers. At Barra da Tijuca, a wealthy suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Kabagambe worked for daily wages, taking drink orders from people at the beach and delivering cocktails. According to his family, on January 22, he went to the Tropicália kiosk to ask for two days of pending wages. It was then that, at the age of 24, he was beaten to death at his place of work.
At the beach where he was brutally murdered, he was known as the “Angolan.” That’s like calling a Brazilian “Venezuelan” just because these countries are on the same continent. The lack of understanding about the circumstances which brought him to Brazil in the first place is already an injustice — one which will not be reversed with someone’s imprisonment.
In Brazil and around the world, the news was followed by debates on Brazilian racism and xenophobia.Fabio Teixeira
By 2008, the Second Congo War, which started in 1998, had killed over 5 million people and is considered the deadliest since World War II. The first one happened right before, also in the ‘90s, and was a direct result of colonial and imperialist forces meddling with African leaders and exploiting ethnic differences in the region. Zaire, which is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was made into a rope in the tug-of-war between communist and anti-communist forces, until the dissolution of the USSR and of the U.S.’s interest in endorsing its leader.
After the CIA aided a coup to replace Patrice Lumumba with Mobutu Sese Seko in the mid ‘60s, the newly instated leader enjoyed robust financial and military aid from the United States for quite a while. Toward the final years of the Soviet Union, Seko leaned diplomatically towards China, and the U.S. began portraying his administrative tactics as “grotesque.” In fact, about seven weeks after the Los AngelesTimes published a piece titled “U.S. Must Cut Ties to Mobutu,” the leader was forced into exile. A year later, the DRC had entered a new, even deadlier war.
Kabagambe was born the year one war ended and as another one started, which was a period when over 5 million children did not receive an education due to political turmoil — literacy levels were at their lowest, and child labor and exploitation at their highest. Throughout his youth, his country was under a so-called “peacekeeping” United Nations operation (MONUSCO) which did more to create a clandestine weapons industry than to prevent conflict. Among the countries involved in this operation was Brazil, with its military and police personnel. Today, a Brazilian general is the force commander of MONUSCO, and he is the fourth officer from Brazil to hold the position, making it the most represented country in terms of leadership in the operation.
Much before all that, the Congo region had already lived through atrocities under a Belgian regime and its rubber industry. Between the last decade of the 1800s and the first one of the 1900s, Africans under the colonial regime of Belgian King Leopold II were enslaved, mutilated and killed at horrific rates. Famine, disease and exploitation perpetuated by colonialism and its for-profit industries were responsible for the deaths of over half of the local population — uncountable lives.
Fleeing the war, Congolese people face violence, the pandemic, racism, hunger, poverty and unemployment as they start over in Brazil.Fabio TeixeiraCongolese refugees have sought sought work in Brazil amid economic crisis, high unemployment and the COVID-19 pandemic.Fabio TeixeiraThe vast majority of Congolese refugees live in slums, having fled the dangers and difficulties of their country only to face a routine of violence and shootings in the city.Fabio Teixeira
Despite incessant geopolitical opportunism, Congo has endured geographically and thrives culturally. According to the World Wildlife Fund, “The Congo Basin has been inhabited by humans for more than 50,000 years and it provides food, fresh water and shelter to more than 75 million people.” The Congo River is the largest in volume after the Amazon River. Its tropical forest is also the largest after the Amazon. As a Brazilian, our passion for preserving our most magnificent and precious asset ought to be extended to our ecological neighbor, since, together, our countries are the keepers of the world’s most important wilderness areas left on Earth.
Congolese musicians and writers have also found artistic expression as a tool for self-esteem and power. Kolinga, a Congolese group, is around today making decolonial feminist anthems. Last century, soukous and Congolese rumba hits became international classics, perhaps best represented in the Congo Revolution compilation “Revolutionary and Evolutionary Sounds From The Two Congos 1955-62.” Literature, in need of more translation and wider distribution, is even more moving and representative of the artistic tide of the nation. The poem “Second Dimension” by the Congolese writer Rais Neza Boneza, from his book, Nomad, Sounds of Exile, is particularly insightful, perhaps even specifically to the plight of Kabagambe and his immigrant community in Brazil. May it speak for itself:
Near his table rests a glass of water; Through his window he glances at passerby: He observes and always waits, waits, waits.
Bitterness nourishes his being; Subjected to misunderstandings And false airs of ‘people’ He is a prisoner.
He sits, hands cupped around his chin Solemnly thinking In his dreaming, his spirits escape The world of hardships And travel in the expanses of the Wild blue sky
He leans on his table, half worried, half-contented. In this place of his there is no compassion; Evil prowls around its prey; Rancor sings its melody of morning,
A stranger to his land, He melancholically sips from his glass– A sip of freedom. Marginalized and needy, Very far is the wind of liberty blowing for him He is a clandestine, always without address, Not a nomad, but a recluse in the midst of humanity.
In his unbroken crystal enclosure He follows the echoes of his silent screams. A rock of madness, only solitude answers him.
He startles! His heart rapidly beats! He rises from his bed! Ah! It’s only a nightmare!
This is a nightmare Moïse Kabagambe and his family will not wake up from, nor will the African diasporic community at large be shielded from the inhumanity of such brutal acts. But we can, as a society, begin to perceive justice as a much broader concept: Justice means seeing, respecting and appreciating the value of welcoming people into our communities. Justice means doing what we can to learn, understand and fight against a geopolitical paradigm driven by abuse and exploitation. Justice means thinking, asking and feeling the humanity in all of us.
An earlier version of this article appears in Portuguese at Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in cities including Santiago, Vancouver Paris and New York in support of Ukraine, demanding an end to Russia’s invasion.
The protesters rallied on Saturday against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack, which began on 24 February and appeared to be entering a new phase with escalating bombardment.
Ukrainian territorial defense forces in a basement used as a military base on the 5th day since start of large-scale Russian attacks in the country, in Dnipro, Ukraine, on February 28, 2022. Andrea Carrubba / Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesSounds of sirens and explosions have rocked Yurii Sheliazhenko’s five-story house in Kyiv every day since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Sheliazhenko is the executive director of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and an isolated yet determined voice for peace in a country very much at war. She has experienced a “lot of hate” for refusing to bear arms and to join neighbors in making Molotov cocktails to fend off advancing Russian forces, which face stiff resistance from civilians turned fighters determined to defend Ukraine.
“Firstly, tell the truth, that there is no violent way to peace,” Sheliazhenko said when asked over email about what people in the U.S. can do to support activists in Ukraine.
Somewhere else near Kyiv, “Ilya” and his comrades have taken up arms against the Russian military and are training for battle. Ilya, who must conceal his identity due to escalating violence, is an anarchist who fled political repression in a neighboring country and decided to resist the Russian invasion. Along with fellow anarchists, democratic socialists, anti-fascists and other leftists from Ukraine and around the world, Ilya joined one of the “territorial defense” units that operate like voluntary militias under the Ukrainian military with some degree of autonomy. With support from a horizontal alliance of mutual aid groups and volunteers with civilian duties, anti-authoritarians have their own “international detachment” within the territorial defense structure and are fundraising for supplies, according to a group known as the Resistance Committee.
“When the enemy is attacking you, it is very difficult take an antiwar pacifist stance, and this is because you need to defend yourself,” Ilya said in an interview with Truthout.
Sheliazhenko and Ilya’s divergent paths illustrate the difficult and often extremely limited choices facing activists and progressive social movements in Ukraine. Notably, their different views on the role of violence in politics have led both activists to take up active struggles that seem to compliment rather than antagonize one another.
Ilya and his comrades have no illusions about the Ukrainian state, which he says “obviously has a lot of shortcomings and a lot of rotten systems.” However, Ukraine, Russia and pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine have engaged in low-level warfare since 2014, and like many others on the left, Ilya believes “Russian imperialist aggression” that could impose Putin’s style of brutal authoritarianism is the greatest common threat at this moment. Ukrainian may not be a well-functioning democracy, but anti-authoritarian activists say the country’s problems will not be solved by Russian intervention and the incredibly repressive political conditions that come with it. Demonstrators in Russia are currently defying a brutal police crackdown and risking lengthy prison sentences to protest the war.
“In Russia a broad antiwar movement is arising and I greet it for sure, but here as far as I can estimate, most progressives, socialists, leftists and libertarian movements are now taking sides against Russian aggression, which does not necessarily mean solidarizing with Ukrainian state,” Ilya said.
Sheliazhenko blames right-wing nationalists on both sides for the deadly war, which has claimed hundreds and possibly thousands of civilian lives so far. Sheliazhenko and a fellow peace activist were doxed or “blacklisted” as traitors for opposing war with Russian-backed separatists by a far right website in Ukraine before being attacked by neo-Nazis in the streets. However, she said the rise of fascist gangs and far right ultranationalists since the 2014 Maidan uprising that deposed a pro-Russian president in Ukraine is no excuse for the bloody Russian invasion as Putin has claimed.
“The current crisis has a long history of misbehavior on all sides, and further attitudes like ‘we the angels can do whatever we wish,’ and ‘they the demons should suffer for their ugliness’ will lead to further escalation, not excluding nuclear apocalypse, and truth should help all sides to calm down and negotiate peace,” Sheliazhenko said.
While many civilians have volunteered to fight with the Ukrainian military, there is plenty for activists to do besides fight the Russians as the war enters its second week. Ilya said “civil volunteers” are helping families flee violence, speaking to media outlets worldwide, supporting the families of resistance fighters, gathering donations and supplies, and providing care to those returning from the front lines. Trade unions are currently organizing resources and helping refugees as they flee war-ravaged Eastern Ukraine to the West and neighboring countries such as Poland.
Volunteers come from a variety of political backgrounds, but for anarchists like Ilya, participating in resistance provides an avenue for increasing the capacity of radicals to influence politics and social development now and after the war. Grassroots “self-organizations” that provide mutual aid and autonomous resistance are also springing up everywhere as a means of survival.
“To specify, not everyone in our unit identifies as anarchist. The more important thing is that a lot of people organized spontaneously to help each other, to guard their neighborhoods and towns and villages and to confront the occupiers with Molotov [cocktails],” Ilya said.
Meanwhile, Sheliazhenko and scattered peace activists continue to oppose forced conscription into military service with tactics that include non-violent civil disobedience. Sheliazhenko said men aged 18 to 60 are “prohibited from freedom of movement” and cannot even rent a hotel room without authorization from a military official.
Sheliazhenko said bureaucratic red tape along with discriminatory alternatives to military service prevent even religious people from conscientious objection to military service. Activists in the U.S. should call for evacuation of all civilians from conflict zones regardless of race, gender and age and donate to aid organizations that are not bringing in more arms into Ukraine that could escalate conflict, she added. U.S.-led NATO coalition has already supplied the military with plenty of weapons, and the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO was a major pretext to the war.
“Underdeveloped peace culture, militarized education training rather obedient conscripts than creative citizens and responsible voters is common problem in Ukraine, Russia and all post-Soviet countries,” Sheliazhenko said. “Without investments in development of peace culture and peace education for citizenship, we will not achieve genuine peace.”
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