Month: May 2019

The issue of women’s rights in Azerbaijani society is often discussed in superlatives, whether by the government or the local media almost uniformly under their control. Pro-government women’s rights organisations often pat themselves and the national leadership on the back for the enormous strides women have purportedly made in the 28 years of independence.

Almost all groups in society have adopted the national narrative, claiming that women in Azerbaijan have achieved the highest level of recognition and equality. This message is targeted at both domestic and international audiences. For instance, no government official, nor GONGO worker, would overlook the opportunity to mention to a western visitor the short-lived Azerbaijani Democratic Republic, which granted women political rights in 1918, two years ahead of the United States.

This narrative is often supplanted with outward-facing visuals, such as the fact that Mehriban Aliyeva, President Ilham Aliyev’s wife, was recently appointed vice president, the second highest position in the country’s leadership. This appointment was spun not as a consolidation of power in the hands of Azerbaijan’s ruling family, but as some sort of achievement for women — a sign that gender equality was being implemented.

But from time to time, Azerbaijani society is jolted back to reality by press reports about troubling cases of sexual assault against young women. Unlike the West, gender-relations issues are often discouraged and shunned in public discussions in Azerbaijan.

No allies after the “kidnapping”

The very fact that cases of sexual assault do find their way to the public conscience shows that this problem is much more severe than we can imagine, says Shahla Ismayil, attorney and Chairwoman of the Women's Association for Rational Development (WARD). A shocking case in point comes from November last year, when an Azeri middle-school student tried to take her own life live on Instagram after being sexually assaulted.

When these discussions become inevitable, people often come up with various euphemisms for sexual situations (from the benign to the more grave, such as rape or sexual assault). The issue of rape or sexual assault against women when they are kidnapped, as the definition implies, against their will and then may or may not be sexually assaulted, is often described as something more benign: the “kidnapping” of a young woman by a man.

This term implies in some, but not all cases, complicity on behalf of the woman, who is suspected of voluntarily taking part in the process. It always presupposes that a sexual act took place, and the woman’s reputation was irreparably damaged.

The lack of free and independent professional media in Azerbaijan does not provide a conducive environment for a well-rounded, balanced coverage of “kidnappings” of young women, as well as sexual assault and rape that takes place, and their true scale. Instead, “kidnapping” is thrust to the top of the public agenda when rare and horrific cases seep into the media. Even then, media coverage sensationalises the incidents with scant regard for the women who suffered, in a format that contributes little to nothing to informed and sustained public discourse.

“Of course, there are exceptions, but as a rule, the families’ reaction is try to cover it up,” says Shahla Ismayil , commenting on what happens after these incidents. “Very rarely do the families allow the information to become public. It may happen by accident, for instance, if there is a leaked video or photo.”

Ismayil adds that families usually do their best to hide and destroy sources of information, denying that anything happened.

In the aftermath of sexual assault, the woman ends up being married off to the perpetrator — in almost all cases, against her will. These occurrences force public discussion, however indirect, in a society that puts a premium on understatement in all issues related to sex and sexual acts.

Unfortunately, these topics are closed not only to public discussion, but are also discouraged within families.

Culture of silence and “blame the victim” mentality

“There is this idiotic notion of ‘preserving the curtain’ that is in line with the majority of the Azerbaijani families’ perception of morality and traditions,” says Gulnara Mehdiyeva, a women’s and LGBT rights activist.

By the “curtain”, Mehdiyeva refers to yet another euphemism used to describe family relationships when certain things are not discussed, or swept under the rug, especially between parents and their children. In her view, this approach is far from innocuous: “This leads to situations when a girl is embarrassed to tell her parents about incidents of verbal or physical harassment, the ones that didn’t rise to the level of rape. They don’t feel comfortable sharing these kinds of things with their parents.”

As a result, Mehdiyeva says, children and youth do their best to conceal incidents from their parents for as long as possible. “Parents find out only when it is already too late, for instance, when a girl is pregnant, and it becomes impossible to hide the signs of pregnancy, or when there are physical injuries that cannot be concealed.” So, she says, parents only find out when the situation is already critical, when it is too late for them to help, or it is already impossible. In addition, parental reactions can be quite different — from total support for their daughters to blaming them for the incidents. “Blaming the victim is quite a popular occurrence in Azerbaijan,” Mehdiyeva adds.

Mehdiyeva describes a recent incident in the region of Beylaqan that provoked a widespread public discussion after the video of the incident found its way to social media:

“A school student, a 10th-grader was kidnapped by a father of two, an adult man. Her father went to the police, but since the police chief is related to the alleged kidnapper, the police didn’t pay attention. Also, the teachers from the school [the young woman attended] went to complain, and the school principal pressured them into silence.”

The reaction of the school administration in Beylaqan is not at all atypical, says Kamala Agazade, director of the Azerbaijani Children Union's Children’s Shelter and Reintegration Center. “Education facilities do not try to help children. They do their best to make sure that the name of the school is not mentioned anywhere.”

Agazade also says that education facilities often adopt “blame the victim” approach when it comes to sexual assault. In her words: “Their usual reaction is: a good girl would not allow such things to happen.”

She also laments the fact that no one takes into account the fact that “girls are defenseless or weak in these situations.”

Of the case in Beylaqan, she says: “The school principal shamelessly denied that the video in question [of a girl being raped] was filmed inside the school. Indeed, it was filmed there. The girl became the center of attention, everyone shamed her, she became the object of round condemnation. Only her mother stood by her. I spoke to her father, and he said to me: ‘A girl like that better die. What do I need her for? I am dishonored, because her videos are online.’”

Agazade finds the fact that the father did not demand justice for his daughter, and did not call for perpetrators to be punished, bewildering. “This is the attitude,” she says with the notes of bitterness in her voice.

Forgotten by law

If there is a role for Azerbaijani law enforcement to play in these situations, those interviewed for this article inside the country uniformly note that the police prefer to leave these issues to families.

“Law enforcement has people who think the same way,” Kamala Agazade says, “that the girl’s reputation is soiled. They say, let’s reach an agreement, let’s come to some terms.” Here, Agazade makes a hand gesture that indicates money, implying bribes and payments. “This kind of an agreement,” she adds, saying there are some cases when perpetrators are punished.

Azerbaijan does not have “marry your rapist laws” like some of its neighbours in the region and beyond that indemnify the man who “kidnaps,” rapes, or sexually assaults a woman from criminal prosecution if he eventually marries her. But women are often coerced by their own families to marry the men in order to avoid public stigma and shame on the family, as evidenced by sporadic media reports and activists on the ground.

“Often what will happen in these kinds of cases is that the victim’s family will either agree to have her marry him, or maybe even want to have her marry him because of this issue of honour. This traditionally has been very common in the Middle East, although, several countries have recently repealed these laws,” says Hillary Margolis, a researcher at the Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The lack of statistics exacerbates the problem. “Understanding the scope of the problem of violence against women in Azerbaijan is rather difficult. We do not have a database [on violence], despite the fact this was one of the CEDAW recommendations for the country,” says Ismayil, referring to the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Azerbaijan ratified the convention in 1995.

Kamala Agazade estimates that in 80 percent of cases of sexual assault in Azerbaijan, young women are married off to the men who raped them. A veteran employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Agazade says she is well-positioned to piece together and estimate these figures based on experience, partial statistics she had seen, and anecdotal evidence she had come across in her 10-year experience with the police ministry.

Shahla Ismayil also laments the lack of reliable statistical data available to the public: “It is quite possible that the fact that women are married off to those who perpetrated sexual violence against them is a very widespread practice, but we have absolutely no instrument in our possession to measure its scope.”

She blames all parties involved. “There are definite attempts to cover up this information by all parties – the family, the local executive authorities, police,” says Ismayil. “We find out only if cases reach the courts, which they do in the rarest of instances. In general, cases are usually covered up.”

The fact that Azerbaijan is a country where both women and men are pressured into marrying at a young age by their families only exacerbates the issue: a large number of these “kidnapped” women are underage. Full data on the age of Azerbaijani citizens when they get married is unavailable, or has to be gleaned from a cross-section of other information (data on child births by mothers who have not reached legal age, for instance).

According to statistics supplied by Agazade (which are based on official information), in 2017, in Baku and other large cities, a total of 8,167 children were born to underage mothers. In rural areas, their number was 14,629. Among the mothers aged 15 to 17 who gave birth, 840 of them lived in the capital Baku, or other large cities. Of these women, 671 had their first child, 65 had their second, three had their third, and one had her fourth child.

According to Azerbaijani law, in some exceptional cases, official recognition of marriage may be granted to persons one year below the age of 18. But data shows that, in 2017, 240 children were born to mothers aged 15-17 in officially recognised marriages.

“Most likely, in these cases we are talking about girls ages 16-17,” explains Agazade. “There are some cases where families have a parent that is gravely ill, and it is their wish to marry off their daughter before they die. These are exceptional cases.”

Hillary Margolis has no doubt that coercing a young woman into marrying a man who had sexually assaulted her is a violation of her human rights: “This is absolutely a violation, there is no question. There are several different aspects of this that are clear rights violations that are, according to international treaties, including the UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, very clearly stated to be violations.”

What can be done?

In a country whose culture deeply discourages discourse on sensitive issues such as relations between sexes, anything related to sex itself, or even early marriage, what can be done to address a stigmatised problem such as “bride kidnappings” and bring about change?

Agazade sees the answer in enforcing the already-existing laws: “Our legislation [protecting the rights of women] is perfect on paper, but the [enforcement] mechanisms are very weak. The men who perpetrate these crimes try to cite so-called traditions, saying, my grandmother was married off at a young age too.”

When it comes to the parallel universe of enthusiastic pronouncements by the Azerbaijani government, glamourous lifestyle magazines and smiling faces of the women in the country’s First Family, dressed in haute couture and posing for pictures with celebrities, there is a clear contradiction with the everyday life of an average Azerbaijani woman. “I would say that [violations of women’s rights] really is at odds with any government claims that it is pro-women’s rights, that it supports equality and non-discrimination.” says Margolis.

An important aspect of beginning to address the problem, according to Margolis, is making support services available and creating shelters for women.

Kamala Agazade happens to be running one such shelter in the capital, Baku. Behind the statistics, she sees faces of girls and boys who have come through her shelter in the five years of its existence.

“A few years ago, we had a girl placed here from one of the regions. She was the victim of sexual assault by several men. We worked with her for two years. Afterwards, she continued her education, and three months ago she sent me pictures of a wonderful family that she has now. She promised to come visit us next week together with her husband,” Agazade adds, smiling for the first time in the interview.

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One year ago today Sajid Javid was appointed as the UK’s Home Secretary. He said he wanted a “fair and humane” approach to immigration. His comments were very welcome and raised hopes of a fresh start. Though they were also received with some cynicism by activists and campaigners for a more humane immigration system.

Those who work in and around the immigration system know that it’s stacked against people who want to make a new life in the UK. From exorbitant fees to significant delays in getting a decision, all underpinned by the risk of detention and deportation if you slip up. Applying for any kind of immigration status in the UK is only easy for those with very deep pockets. But the new Home Secretary started by making the right noises. He refused to endorse the much-maligned net migration target and talked about Britain being open to talent from across the world. So we waited to see if he would take steps towards fixing the broken immigration system and introducing a new fair and humane approach.

But our hopes were dashed. Over the last 12 months the Home Secretary has failed to properly consult on his proposed new immigration system to manage migration post Brexit, instead opting for a year of so-called “engagement” around a salary-based approach. He has overseen the roll out of the highly controversial EU Settlement Scheme, the programme to register three million EU citizens. He spent the festive period warning potential asylum seekers making their way to the UK from Calais to return to France as they are not welcome here. He has also come under fire over the Windrush Compensation scheme and for imposing high fees on young people who came to the UK as toddlers when they apply for citizenship. Finally, he is appealing a High Court decision which judged that Right to Rent rules were causing racial discrimination.

Just this week an investigation into the Home Office's decision to cancel 36,000 student visas over accusations of cheating in English language tests has been launched and the Dublin Cessation Team, the central Home Office unit managing asylum claims, has purportedly been making mistakes due to “overworked, under-skilled, bullied and highly stressed caseworkers”. People have been unlawfully detained as a result of these mistakes.

A year on, the promise of a fair and humane immigration system seems a long way off, but there is still time to turn this around. If Sajid Javid is still serious about his commitment, we stand ready to help fix the broken system.

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We need to turn the immigration system on its head, to build an immigration system and an integration strategy which welcomes those who wish to make the UK their home and want to contribute to our great nation.

By positioning Britain as a place which attracts and nurtures talent; welcomes those who participate in our communities and offers a safe haven for those fleeing persecution we can create a system which works for all and saves money.

Civil society has plenty of ideas on how to do this. For example, over 170 charities and businesses have come together to highlight the benefits of allowing people who are seeking asylum to work. Migrants and refugees wanting to make the UK their new home tell us it’s difficult if you can’t contribute and care for yourself and your family. People don’t want to be a burden on the system, they want to contribute so we know that by investing in integration we can build more resilient communities. How we treat people while their cases are assessed needs to be in line with the rule of law. Across the legal profession there is agreement that there must be a 28-day time limit on detention. No one should be held without knowing when they will be released. The Home Office efforts to develop community-based alternatives to detention with civil society are welcome.

Every day we hear from communities who want to provide a welcome sanctuary to those most in need. This is why the Home Secretary should create a new resettlement programme to succeed the Syrian Resettlement Programme which is due to close shortly. We work alongside people – 'citizens of nowhere’ – who want to be New Brits and could be helped on this journey by creating faster and more cost-effective routes to citizenship.

We will continue to make the case for a fair and humane immigration system, for the sake of those let down by current arrangements and for the wider benefits of this to the UK. Together we can create a better system for people who wish to migrate and it can’t come a moment too soon.

Please sign this petition asking the government to scrap the minimum income requirement which prevents British people who earn less than £18,600 a year from living with their partner from outside the EU in the UK.

As I entered my Edinburgh polling station today, I walked past a forest of A boards from the different parties. The Conservative’s consisted entirely of a lie.

It said, “Only by voting for Ruth Davidson’s team can you stop the SNP winning a majority of seats”.

Scotland has six seats, and six parties in contention for them. If your main aim is to stop the SNP getting a majority, then a vote for any of the others would be an equally good way of achieving this aim.

But it’s not fair to single out the Tories. The Lib Dems have been equally guilty of lying in this election. And, in a sense, their lies are worse: partly because they are more persistent and more consistent. But also because they are actively trying to mislead people into thinking that this vote operates in roughly the same way as the UK’s first past the post electoral system, despite being advocates of proportional representation as used by the European Union.

For example, the party delivered this leaflet in south-west England , declaring that a Green vote is “a wasted vote”. In the last election, the Greens won an MEP in the region , and the Lib Dems didn’t. Polls for this election show both have a chance of getting a seat (though, of course, either could miss out).

And this isn’t just a one off. I’ve been shown examples of Lib Dem leaflets from this election which use bar charts from individual Westminster constituencies showing that “only” they can beat whichever other party in this election. This is, of course, a no-holds-barred , straight-down-the-line lie, carefully printed on thousands and thousands of leaflets, and intentionally designed to mislead voters about the system used in the election, and that people should perhaps consider the same questions as they might when voting for a constituency MP.

Even when parties aren’t lying, first-past-the-post culture infects so much of British politics. For example, the main Labour message in this election is that they are the only party that can “beat” the Brexit party: as though it’s some kind of sport, and what matters is which colour of rosette is on the highest number of elected EU candidates, rather than their actual politics. If the Brexit party gets three MEPs in a region with seven seats, is it more of a refutation of their politics if Labour get four, or if Labour also get three and the Greens get one?

Looked at from the perspective of how those MEPs will actually go and vote in the European parliament, the latter will certainly have as much impact on policy and politics as the former. The question of “who comes first” is really just about what the headlines say the day after the count – it’s about how the media will interpret the result. Which is, of course, politically significant, but we should at least be explicit about it.

Various leading Remainers have engaged in just this silliness, arguing that a vote for this Remain supporting party or that Remain supporting party in a given region is the best way to maximise the number of Remain supporting MEPs, with huge numbers of people seemingly willing to follow this advice.

It’s amusing that a community of people, many of whom swore blind after the referendum that they would never believe opinion polls again are, only three years later, willing to decide who to vote for based on the limited evidence of these polls – and, usually, unweighted subsamples of such polls in their regions.

There are very good reasons that pollsters struggle to predict modern politics: first, how do you get hold of anyone under the age of 40? I don’t answer our landline and am terrible at getting back to emails. I’m best accessed on WhatsApp and Facebook. Lots of my generation are similar. Second, predicting differential turnout in these votes is mighty hard. The different polling firms in these elections – all run by thoughtful experts – have very different assumptions about who is going to show up to vote today. None of us has any real clue about who is right.

Here’s the most anyone can sensibly say: north-east England only has three seats, and so you may want to vote tactically if you live there, for or against whatever you care about most. Wales only has four seats, and so, likewise.

In the rest of the UK, The Brexit Party, Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and Greens (and SNP) are all in with a chance of getting a seat or, in some cases and places, a number of seats. No one has any real idea who is going to vote for whom, nor who will turn out at all. So tactical voting is a mug’s game.

It’s important not to discount the impact this culture has on our politics. While those who represent the interests of the powerful have access to much of the media to make their arguments, those who represent the interests of the rest of the country rely much more on ground and online campaigning.

But in this European election – as in most elections in the UK – the arguments made on leaflets and doorsteps – and in Tweets and Facebook posts – have largely been about how to game a complex voting system in order to stop someone you don’t like. They haven’t been about people’s lives. They haven’t been about how to transform society. They haven’t made a political argument that can persuade anyone of anything important, or – vitally, excite people to go and vote at all.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage is free to take to the airwaves and talk about actual issues, with his simple message: “defend democracy”. And so, while he won’t get a majority of votes, he’s already won.

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In April 2018 we co-authored a report, now translated into English, on the French Prostitution Act of 2016. This act introduced the ‘Nordic model’ to France, which targets the demand for commercial sex by criminalising its purchase (the clients) rather than its sale. Our report drew on data from over 70 interviewed and 580 surveyed sex workers to assess the law’s impact so far. We revealed that the lives of sex workers have worsened considerably since their clients became criminals, with their working conditions, health, rights, security and overall living conditions all suffering as a result.

This spring we consulted NGOs and grassroots organisations across France to follow up our analysis. The situation has not improved. Repression resulting from the criminalisation of clients continues to negatively impact the lives of sex workers. It reinforces marginalisation and increases violence and stigma, exposing them to financial precarity and threats to their health.

Equally concerning are the disappointing results to date from the act’s much lauded ‘prostitution exit programme’. The programme has so far only reached a limited number of people across the country and its existence has further reinforced stigma against those who do not wish or are not able to stop sex work.

The closed entrance of the ‘prostitution exit programme’

On the face of it, the exit programme holds some promise. It contains provisions that, in many cases, could respond to the expressed needs of sex workers. These include temporary residence permits, access to housing, and help with looking for other forms of employment. However, the mechanism has come in for harsh criticism in terms of its implementation and the images of sex work it conveys. Furthermore, as our report showed, within implementation committees there is a strong tension between the government’s and local authorities’ approach to fighting irregular immigration, and providing tangible support to the people wanting to stop sex work.

More than half of the sex workers we interviewed at the start of 2018 were unaware of the exit programme. One year later, according to the organisations we consulted, the number of individuals who have successfully applied to the programme remains relatively small. The local authorities that have validated the highest number of applications appear to be the Haute Garonne region (Toulouse), where eighteen applications had been successful as of April 2019, and the eight local authorities in the greater Paris region, where 57 applications had been validated as of the November 2018. Other regions, including those with large cities, have accepted few to no applications.

One likely reason for this is that sex workers are asked to quit sex work before presenting their applications to the exit programme committees. The organisations we consulted repeatedly emphasised the problem with this, namely that it leaves open the question of how applicants are expected to financially support themselves and their dependants in the interim. Waiting for a decision on an application can take a very long time.

While it is unclear how committees apply this criterion or how they intend to control what sex workers do for a living whilst being in the programme, giving up sex work immediately and entirely remains a requirement for accessing the exit programme’s provisions. This administrative demand does not leave room for gradual changes that could lead applicants to an eventual exit from sex work according to their needs and possibilities. The exit must be hard, and it must be now.

Exit programme committees: selection criteria and structural suspicion

The problem is complicated by the many different actors involved in administering the programme. These range from the committees presided over by the regional prefect, to the many organisations active in the field, to the social workers following up on sex workers’ applications. All of these are potential gatekeepers. The prefect, for example, selects who will be accepted based upon the recommendations of accredited organisations. This not only gives the prefect discretionary power, but turns accreditation into a powerful tool for choosing which groups have a say in the process. This means that sex workers’ ability to choose the organisation that supports them is restricted. The selection process also takes time. Entering the exit programme often involves a wait of several months between the date a committee deliberates and the date their response is given to applicants. Sometimes, as was the case in Marseille and Nice, the dates of the committees themselves are pushed back several times.

Local authorities may choose which entrance criteria they emphasise, and this can lead to contradictory approaches. Some focus on the most precarious groups, in particular Nigerian women. Others have systematically refused applications from Nigerians, their arguments resting on stereotypes that present Nigerians as both victims and ‘profiteers’ of the mechanism. On the one hand, members of some local committees pigeonhole them as victims of human trafficking and refuse their applications on the basis that international criminal networks might take advantage of the system. Other committees suspect these racialised women migrants of instrumentalising the system themselves. They have argued that Nigerian women apply to the system only to obtain temporary residence permits, thus systematically questioning their motivations. NGOs and grassroots organisations have also reported on the use of racist and sexist language and stereotypes by members of the local committees during their deliberations.

Download the complete report as a PDF

Sex workers and organisations alike have also observed that, within some exit programme committees, the criteria for applicants’ to be eligible have multiplied: they must not be subject to an order to leave the territory (deportation order); they must not be seeking asylum in France or another European country; they must provide a birth certificate, evidence of their housing situation or health status; they must be proficient in French, and so on. In some regions, applicants were even asked to prove that they had filed a complaint for pimping.

Further contradictions include the fact that some committees have accepted applications from people who have already stopped sex work for several years. Our analysis shows that most sex workers who change careers and find other employment do so by their own means or with the support that organisations already provided without recourse to the exit programme. The immediate advantage of changing work autonomously, or asking for support outside of the exit programme, is that people don’t have to suddenly break with their previous lives. The exit programme requires them to do so. This precipitous break, without sufficient means to provide for one’s basic needs, means that some sex workers must choose between their willingness to find other work and the necessity to earn a subsistence income.

Despite the contradictory criteria and the time consuming configuration of such a system, it is important to note that in a few French departments the committees went smoothly and they cooperated well with the NGOs involved. This, however, has occurred in regions where the number of potential applicants is very small. A small victory perhaps, but organisations stressed that, for these few women, the mechanism provided respite by allowing them to regularise their statuses and enabling them to seek other work and new life opportunities.

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Dear DiEM25 members, dear European Spring activists, dear fellow progressive Europeanists,

Today is a day to celebrate, while taking stock of our remarkable achievement.

Today is also a day to lament Europe’s downward spiral, while planning the next phase of our paneuropean effort to bring hope back to the hundreds of millions who have lost it.

When in late 2017 we decided to take our Green New Deal for Europe to a ballot box across Europe, friends feared for us and cynics laughed at us. What neither our worried friends nor the cynics understood was the nature of our collective endeavour

Our task was not to maximise our seats in this European election. Our task was not to demonstrate that another Europe is possible. No, our task was to show that another Europe is already here – inside a single paneuropean movement dedicated to a single progressive policy agenda for all Europeans.

DiEM25 was born of a radical idea: We are not simply Greeks or Germans or Italians or whatever nationality, ethnicity we carry with us. We are all that but we are also Europeans determined to oppose the internationalism of the bankers and its mirror image: the internationalism of the racists. And to do so with a single, internationalist, European agenda that is realistic, immediately implementable and radical.

We worked long and hard to put together that progressive agenda. We are proud of our Green New Deal for Europe that is the only antidote to the logic that, in this EU, there is no alternative to socialism for the bankers, austerity for the many and catastrophe for the environment. Our Green New Deal for Europe can uniquely bind together Europe’s progressives, as a counterforce to the nasty xenophobia that binds together the nationalists.

From the outset, we had a choice: we could form coalitions of convenience. For instance, we could have easily gained many seats in these European elections provided we were prepared to run together with existing political actors who were committed to not having an agenda for Europe or who disagreed with our radical Europeanism. Or we could stick to our principles, to our fascinating Green New Deal for Europe, and run on our own – with no funding or institutional backing. We chose the second option not simply because it was hard but because it was the only way we could continue our struggle happily, in good conscience, true to our principles and goals.

Our strategy and our tactic coincided. Stand behind DiEM25’s agenda, nurture our political ethos, do justice to it — and never betray the future generations whose future depends on the implementation of our Green New Deal across Europe, indeed even beyond Europe.

This decision came with a cost — but not an unpredictable one. We always knew that our road would be long and stony. But we also knew that this European Parliament election was about so much more than seats won and lost. It was about putting forward a new vision for Europe, about demanding a Green New Deal, about inspiring people across the continent to think beyond the narrow confines of their nation. It was about demonstrating in practice what another Europe would look like.

And on this, my friends, we have won. We showed Europeans how a common agenda can be put together collaboratively by many political actors coalescing from all over Europe. How a common list of candidates, in support of this common agenda, can emerge. How we can campaign across Europe, together, under the banner of this agenda.

In the months and weeks leading to May 26, I have had the distinct privilege of campaigning with all of you in Paris, in Brussels, across Italy and the UK, in Denmark, in Portugal and, of course, in Greece and in Germany. In every one of these places I saw the way in which you brought the best out of each other and out of your communities. You led with brilliant ideas, you demonstrated what principled, transnational, humanist politics looks like. You worked tirelessly without optimism but with bundles of hope. You were a joy to behold and to treasure. Your dedication, sense of fun, friendship, wisdom and kindness made everyone around you feel hopeful again about our Europe, its politics, its civilisation.

In the end, the quantity of votes we received fell short of our expectations – even though about 1 million Europeans honoured us at the ballot box and in Greece, the Ground Zero of Europe’s economic and democratic crisis, MeRA25 rose from zero into parliamentary contention – a result that augurs well for the soon-to-come national elections.

Comrades, friends, DiEMers,

We have planted a beautiful, radical idea in the minds of Europeans. Our task is now to help this seed of hope grow. Feel proud for what you have achieved. Rest for a day or two. After that, we shall all get back to work, planning for the next steps that must surely include a paneuropean DiEM25 get-together where we shall spend days and nights mapping out the road ahead.

Carpe DiEM25!

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“There are no gays in Chechnya,” said Ramzan Kadyrov in a now notorious interview in 2017. Two years on, it seems like the Chechen leader is trying to make good on those words by launching a new purge against LGBT people.

According to recent reports, two LGBT people have been killed and nearly forty detained in the North Caucasus region since December 2018. The Chechen authorities have apparently widened the net: alongside gay men, the purge has now reached lesbian and trans women. And while all the victims face extreme stigma in Chechnya today, for LGBT women that stigma comes with a deafening silence.

Perhaps to an even greater degree than with gay men, Chechen society cannot countenance the idea of their existence.

But I know that there are LGBT women in Chechnya. And in my attempts to contact them, I learned why they declined to be interviewed for this article. All I can do now is give voice to their fear.

That voice is all the more urgent given that the wave of violence against Chechnya’s LGBT women is yet to make international headlines. As I scrolled through personal stories of LGBT people who had managed to escape and sifted through interviews with human rights activists, I couldn’t find many interviews given by Chechen women. The closest thing I found were news reports on a group of feminist activists who gathered outside the Moscow offices of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in 2017. The activists accused the Russian media of systematically excluding women from their coverage of the purges, demanding that LGBT rights organisations offer equal support in evacuating women from the region.

The Russian LGBT network, founded in St Petersburg in April 2006, is the only organisation in the country which works directly with the victims of Chechnya’s LGBT purges. The network reported on the first anti-LGBT purge in Chechnya back in 2017. I reasoned that if anyone outside Chechnya knew about victims, it would be them.

Arriving in St Petersburg, I was hosted warmly by a lesbian couple in close contact with the organisation. When my host brought me to the nondescript office building where the LGBT Network is based, she dropped its cover name to the concierge before we walked in. Even here in Russia’s most LGBT-friendly city, the network prefers to be known by a more neutral-sounding name than that given to the media.

The network’s programme director Igor Kochetkov greeted me in his office, sitting behind a desk decorated with flags celebrating nearly every conceivable LGBT identity. Kochetkov believes Chechen women to be the most vulnerable group in the region’s anti-LGBT purges, and laments at the extreme difficulty his organisation faces when trying to assist them.

“I have to start by telling you that we know nothing about the women who are currently in these prisons. And this grieves us,” Kochetkov began. “We know that women were detained, that they were tortured as much as men, some were raped. We know for sure that the detention of lesbian women began in 2018.

“In the summer of 2018, we received information that two girls were detained. Their fate is still unclear. We know that in November [2018] at least two girls were also detained – they were also subjected to torture. […] Unfortunately, this is all that we can say in full certainty, because we do not know their names or where they are kept.”

Nevertheless, at least 12 Chechen women have appealed to the organisation so far. All of them reported suffering threats and violence from their families and even visits from the police between 2017 and 2018.

Some of these women were successfully evacuated from Chechnya and have already left the country. While I offered to guarantee the anonymity of the women, the LGBT Network staff told me that they had either left the country already or refused to give interviews. Kochetkov explained that, having essentially been hostages in their own homes, these women were still afraid to share their stories and refused all contact with journalists.

“Women are less willing to speak to journalists because they fear that their families will identify them by some details from their stories. As a rule, [Chechen] women are required to stay at home all the time, and their phones might be controlled. So fewer women request our assistance as communication is more challenging, let alone physical evacuation,” added Kochetkov. “[Chechen] men can at least leave on the pretext of work or study and then claim asylum.”

Kochetkov explained that Chechen society technically follows three types of law: Russian federal law, Islamic Sharia law, and Adat, Chechen customary law. While each of these systems is mutually incompatible on certain issues, the most empowered side in a conflict can choose whichever system of law suits them best. In Chechnya, the losing side in a domestic dispute is frequently the woman. For example, when a wife leaves her husband, Adat grants exclusive custody of the children to him. As the main risk for women who want to flee Chechnya is the loss of their children, Kochetkov said he was aware of some cases where the husband has had to be evacuated alongside the wife who is trying to separate from him.

As such, when a Chechen woman runs away from home, continued Kochetkov, her family will often use all the means at their disposal to retrieve her, including everything from threats of violence to enlisting law enforcement.

“A woman’s family will try to get her name on the federal wanted list, meaning that police all over Russia will be searching for her,” Kochetkov said. “The reasons can be absurd. But once they find her in any part of the country, the police are obliged to notify the department [back in Chechnya] that filed the missing case. Once they know where she is, the family immediately comes over. And then the police have to repatriate her to Chechnya whether she likes it or not.”

Yet another group of hidden victims, concluded Kochetkov, are the wives of gay men who have fled Russia. The stigma attached to them and their children is truly enduring.
I said farewell to Kochetkov and his flags, and left the office uncertain as to how to proceed. That evening, my hosts and I sat around the kitchen table wondering which of our acquaintances might have female LGBT friends from the North Caucasus – somebody who might shed light on the everyday challenges and struggles of a Chechen lesbian. The topic turned out to be such a taboo that potential interviewees, all of them friends of friends, gave me a wide berth. They had enough problems to deal with.
Just as my search began to feel fruitless, I learned that there were other, unexpected ways for these women to speak to me.

The next day, I was wading through props and decorations mounted up in a backstage corridor of a theatre in St Petersburg, and stumbled on Zhenya Muha’s workshop. This tiny room of three metres square seemed even smaller under the watchful gaze of dozens of puppets: Zhenya’s handiwork. A little embarrassed by my interest, she took a while to speak while I hesitated, self-conscious of being the pushy journalist.
Click Here: Zhenya is from the North Caucasus, and identifies strongly with the social context in Chechnya. It’s a place, she says, where women live in fear; a place where women are confined physically and socially to their homes by lieu of their gender identity, and forced to remain silent throughout it all. Zhenya’s latest play, titled Voices, depicts the lives of two lesbian women and two trans women who fled Chechnya after receiving death threats. (Voices has recently finished its final rehearsal, and is due to premiere in St Petersburg in fall 2019.)

Harsh realities have forced Zhenya to become something of a ventriloquist. In 2017, she interviewed four women, whose lives she has dramatised for the first and last time. For security reasons she never spoke to them again. It’s sound reasoning. If the families of her heroines ever get in touch demanding to know the whereabouts of their daughters, wives, or sisters, Zhenya can truthfully tell them that she knows nothing.

All four heroines are played by puppets on stage. As in Zhenya’s other plays, the scene employs rich symbolism to depict their inner worlds without exposing the identities of the original storytellers. A fifth character will represent the Qu’ran, though what exact form it will take on stage has not yet been determined. The Qu’ran will be the focus of a dialogue highlighting the contradictions in modern interpretations of the sacred text, and those at the heart of Chechnya’s LGBT purge.

“I don’t just want to bring these four women onto the stage,” explained Zhenya. “I want to show the horror that these women experienced through the collective imagery. A puppet as a narrator can say even more than live actors. They can depict violent scenes without shocking the audience, but also without losing a deep emotional impact.”

Casting puppets not only enriches the power of metaphor on stage, but also exempts the director from the need to hire professional live actors. When it came to such sensitive subject matter as this, that was a definite advantage. Zhenya, an experienced director and playwright, knew that Russia’s theatrical community had a tendency towards self-censorship over controversial topics. All of the theatre professionals Zhenya invited to work on her play abstained on various pretexts, likely out of concern for their careers.

There’s no discernible trace of complaint or resentment in her voice. Zhenya completely understands their refusals: her own work also places her career at great risk.
“I mainly do puppet theatre,” explained Zhenya. “Unfortunately, in Russia, puppet theatre is mostly for children. So if I decide to apply to work in a school, and they see some publication about me and my play, they probably won’t hire me. I can’t say that I’m not afraid, both personally and professionally. But I won’t hide. It’s important that I do something. And I see this as my opportunity to do something [which matters].”
But Zhenya can’t do everything alone. She still needs somebody to give voice to her puppets. The current cast mostly consists of amateur actors from feminist and LGBT activist circles. One of them turned out to be my host in St Petersburg: all this time I had been much closer to the story than I thought. Ekaterina Petrova, a feminist and LGBT activist, was also born and brought up in the North Caucasus, and strongly identifies with the character she plays.

“I find a lot of similarities with this woman’s character,” reflected Ekaterina. “She identified as a lesbian from her early years, and tried her very best to resist the pressure she faced from her family and society, whether it meant dictating her clothing or limiting her life choices.”

Ekaterina has also witnessed the region’s strictly patriarchal social norms first hand as an activist and human rights defender. While there may be more information about the persecution of gay men in Chechnya, Ekaterina is also convinced that women remain the most vulnerable group in the region. She says that she has seen women physically barred from leaving homes without permission, their documents held by parents or male relatives. She also knows of many cases of so-called honour killings, mostly committed by families who have been scandalised in the public eye.

Even after dozens of rehearsals, Ekaterina is still strongly emotionally engaged with Voices. Ekaterina says that the most challenging part is when her character describes the enduring love she has for her mother, despite the pain she caused and intolerance she shows towards her daughter.

“My character says at some point that her mother still loves her. And perhaps that partly echoes with my story,” Ekaterina told me. “My family doesn’t have [ethnic] North Caucasus roots, but I certainly don’t have very supportive parents. These days we simply do not discuss my personal relationships, even though it has already been at least seven years since I came out to my family.”

“There is a proverb in Chechnya,” added Ekaterina. “‘If a son embarrasses himself, he puts shame on himself. If a daughter embarrasses herself, she puts shame on her whole family.’ And in the current situation, it seems that the shame brought by a single woman spreads to the entire republic, and by extension the entire Chechen nation.”

My search came to an end. I will probably never meet these women. Neither the four heroines of Voices, nor the twelve Chechen women who bravely picked up a telephone, perhaps in the dead of night, and phoned that office in St Petersburg. Wherever they may be now, their voices live on.

I only hope that somebody will be brave enough to listen.

Unit is a network of journalists who want to improve the quality of reporting on LGBTQ and other marginalised groups in post-Soviet states. We are working with a core team of journalists from all post-Soviet countries to publish articles in regional and western outlets, as well as connecting journalists with human rights defenders and strengthening their journalistic skills.

Invisibility serves the abuse of power only too well in the continued struggle of ordinary Colombians. Thus, understanding the context of recent astounding events in this nation, post peace-accords, is essential, because it is illustrative of the difficult path to be traversed towards real peace and democracy.

In June 2018 – when it looked like an alliance of opposition political forces (consisting of the progressive Colombia Humana / Decentes, the Green Alliance and the left Polo Democratico) might just win the general elections and achieve a massive turn-around for this nation – the usual lot got back into power (54% versus 42%), to a certain degree helped by intimidation and vote buying.

Let us be clear. What Colombians now have is not just a “right-wing” government. It is a government infused with callousness, incompetence and deceit, where that minority who bleed the country dry, (and often literally to death – at least 533 human rights defenders have been killed since 2016), continue to implement a moribund and savage version of neo-liberalism.

That is the creed: an inhumane project elaborated via a dual minority elite business/latifundial alliance working hand-in-hand with military/narco-paramilitary support, financed by billions of war-dollars from abroad – ostensibly, to sequentially, and unsuccessfully, “fight communism”, “eradicate the drug-trade” and “get rid of terrorism”.

In truth, the billions of military funds invested have actually gone into cementing a ruthless state and its repressive apparatus, in favour of its cronies, thriving in a country where the “oldest democracy on the continent” paradoxically exists alongside extreme inequality and injustice. And, even though most conflict with the largest guerrilla organization, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) has now stopped, there are now persistent attempts at watering down the Peace Agreements and negotiations with the other major guerrilla combatants, the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN), has ground to a halt.

So it is that, this August 2018, under far-right ex-president Alvaro Uribe’s tutelage, Ivan Duque, ex-technocrat for the Interamerican Bank for International development (IBID) and, despite disproven Harvard qualifications, took the presidency. In these last brief 100 days, whilst the country convulses from crisis to crisis, Duque appears to perform with pre-programmed ideological vacuousness.

Now and again, he makes an appearance to threaten on-going national protests called by beleaguered social movements and trade-unions. This he does with the help of his new defence minister, Guillermo Botero – an industrialist and firm believer in the glyphosphate fumigation of coca plantations and the curbing of peaceful protest, via the ESMAD riot squads, if necessary.

Duque, via Finance Minister, Alberto Carrasquilla, has gone back on pre-election promises to avoid over-taxing the poor and to properly invest in education and health, to name a few. Support for anti-corruption initiatives is tepid and the urgency of climate change has also by-passed this administration. The national plan is to carry on with fossil fuel exporting, including fracking.

The omens for the next four years have not been good. His approval rating is now at 22%. But Duque is not recognizably the string-puller, but part of the grand plan. This is now even more evident, especially after the sudden deaths of Aval Group auditor, Jorge Enrique Pizano, on 8 November 2018, and the cyanide poisoning of his son, three days later, both key witnesses in the Odebrecht scandal in Colombia.

As is well known, Brazilian infrastructure giant Odebrecht has been implicated in huge bribery scandals all over Latin America. In most countries judicial prosecutions are in progress. In Colombia, however, bringing those guilty to justice has been slow and often obstructed.

But, in foreboding of his death or disappearance, Pizano left his investigative evidence with a number of reliable journalists and parliamentarians – including Senator Gustavo Petro of the Colombia Humana / Decentes movement. The video, recordings and documents referred to the suspected corruption he found in his auditing of the accounts of some of Odebrecht’s key business partners. In particular, the Corficolombiana bank, part of the Aval group, both owned by Colombia’s richest man, the banker Luis Carlos Sarmiento.

Pizano also refers in the documents and recordings to inexplicable lack of cooperation by Sarmiento’s then lawyer, Nestor Humberto Martinez (NHM). The paradox is that the latter is now in post, as Colombia’s Chief Prosecutor – in charge of investigating Odebrecht corruption. And further, he denies prior knowledge of Pizano’s accusations – despite audio recordings by Pizano, which disprove that.

Last week therefore, on Tuesday 27th November 2018, a historical emergency debate on Odebrecht corruption was scheduled by senators of the opposition. The 8-hour long session was led by opposition Senators, Gustavo Petro, Jorge Enrique Robledo (Polo Democrático), and Angelica Lozano (Green Party). It was one of those earth-shattering moments when business-as-usual came to a shuddering halt, and the veil hiding the causes of oppression, was suddenly ripped. The raison d’etre, for extreme violence and rampant corruption in Colombia, was openly hung-out for all to see and judge. And it was not a pretty sight.

The debate amply illustrated the unbelievable spider’s web of relationships between Odebrecht bribes, private enterprise and the Colombian state. Both Uribe and Santo’s presidential campaigns appear to have been funded by Odebrecht money. And even Duque has been identified as having been present at a meeting in Brazil with Odebrecht functionaries, when he was Senator, in 2014. (In clarification, he did state that he had left the room to go to the toilet, during bribery discussions).

Obviously, what Odebrecht has been interested in are the lucrative infrastructure contracts it could obtain through the allocation of strategic bribes to politicians and ministries. Some of the largest infrastructure projects in Colombia were handed over to Odebrecht and its collaborating companies in Colombia, through complex financial arrangements, and third parties, which render opaque the system of bribery, through fictitious firms and through overpricing, which has resulted. The disaster for Colombians is that, with all too frequent regularity, infrastructure projects have either been badly executed (at times causing loss of life) and/or exponentially expensive, causing great strains on public funds.

According to the evidence presented at the Senate debate, Odebrecht’s declaration to the US Department of Justice, recently, seems to have under-played both the number of fictitious construction contracts and amounts of money laundered asbribes, in Colombia. Only about a 1/3 of transactions seem to be accounted for, and in further the Colombian State Prosecutors Office has been slow to investigate.

Most worryingly, the Senators’ debate indicated how NHM with his prior myriad posts as lawyer for several of the involved companies and subsequent work as public functionary, seems to have acted as both architect and legislator for many of these questionable deals.

During the debate, opposition senators strongly called for NHM to immediately resign as Chief Prosecutor, due to undeclared conflicts of interest. This he roundly refuses to do, and his politicized personal defence at the Senate debate, was delivered with threats to both debating Senators and members of the press, who had published the details of this unsavoury and questionable labyrinth of business dealings. This includes nationally and internationally reputable journalists such as Daniel Coronell and Maria Jimena Duzan.

The latter, and others, have now been forced to appeal to the UN Human Rights Commission in Colombia, to protect their freedom of expression.

But the powerful corrupt undercurrents in Colombia cannot forgive the Senators, most especially, Gustavo Petro. Senator Petro has been a thorn in their side since his key debates back in 2007 revealed the links between politicians, corrupt business and the human rights abuses of the narco-paramilitary mafia.

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The latter, and their closest allies in government – the Centro Democratico party – have been trying to remove Gustavo Petro from politics for years. It is as well to recall that, during his time as Mayor of Bogota (2012-2015), they tried to destitute him at least 3 times, with unsuccessful and archaic accusations of “threats to privatization”, “chaos in waste disposal” (for giving jobs to recyclers) and the “crime of allocating transport subsidies to the poor”.

An attempt to disqualify him from public office for a period of at least 15 years was, also unsuccessful, in 2017, after intervention from the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights. They have, though, managed to practically bankrupt him by reviving (previously legally shelved) fines for the above “crimes”.

So, it is unsurprising that ever since Petro and the Colombia Humana / Decentes political movement and its allies, won 8 million votes, last 17 June 2018, compared to Duque’s 10 million, the establishment started to get a bit concerned. The death threats and illegal set-ups against the opposition, have therefore been stepped up once more.

During his rather inappropriate and irate defence last Tuesday, Chief Prosecutor Martinez acknowledged to be using the Fiscalia to hack and spy on, what he considers to be, targets, including Senator Petro. The problem is that there appears to be little judicial control, as to who is targeted.

To many Colombians, this harks back to the time during Alvaro Uribe’s government (2002-2010) when the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS – Administrative Department of Security) was used to eavesdrop and spy on the opposition. Back then, this was not just unlawful phone hacking – the names and personal details of the people hacked were then passed on to paramilitary death squads and many innocent people were, not only targeted, but assassinated.

Things got so bad that the DAS has now been disbanded. And now? How is this is being regulated by a Chief Prosecutor, whose role is under severe scrutiny?

At the end of the historic debate last week, Paloma Valencia, a somewhat unhinged Centro Democrático senator, purported to show evidence of dodgy dealings by Gustavo Petro by playing a (conveniently silent 14-year-old) video, where he is seen to receive cash from an unknown source.

This week, that has proved to be another fabricated set-up against Petro. It turns out the money handed over was US$6000 meant as campaign donations from sympathisers, which were duly declared to the National Electoral Commission (CNE).

But the bought-media have taken this opportunity to tone down coverage of the Odebrecht scandal, despite its remaining improperly investigated, and involving sums totalling, at least, US$50 million, in irregular payments. Even so, whilst the enormity of the Odebrecht-Aval-Martinez labyrinth is ignored, Gustavo Petro now faces a Fiscalía (Public Prosecutors) investigation, with Nestor Humberto Martinez, as Chief Prosecutor.

But recent events do mean that corruption have fewer places to hide and Colombians are unsurprisingly thoroughly disgusted at the sight. It looks to everyonelike the country is being manipulated by an all-encompassing mafia who have captured not just significant public works, but, quite possibly, sectors of the institutions of justice, as well.

In response, the corrupt networks have now launched death threats on all cylinders. Those feeling exposed are clearly still hoping to silence their critics and, at the very least, do a Lula-like coup on Petro, before too long.

However, in Colombia, resistance to decades of repression will not be silenced.

A national general strike by thousands of students, trade unionists, indigenous and campesino peoples is still on-going. Additionally, activists on twitter have this week asked everyone to move their money and pensions from Sarmiento Angulo’s banking empire to other entities, including the public pension system, which will actually result in better final yields.

All this despite ESMAD violence and legal threats to the activists from Duque’s vice-president, Marta Lucia Ramirez, “for generating financial panic”. Ramirez’ dilemma is that her threat is in direct opposition to her government’s much-lauded neo-liberal value of “freedom of choice”.

In any case, social media have rubbished her warnings and thousands have closed their Aval group accounts. Sarmiento’s Aval group is dive-bombing in the stock exchange.

Colombia now has an institutional crisis on a huge scale, as citizens wonder what faith can be had in a government that, not only bars the opposition from lawful debate, but which also allows its Chief Prosecutor to carry on in this astonishing and anomalous manner.

You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller

In recent years there's been a global awakening to the momentous choice humanity now faces: do we cling to the old system and choose extinction, or create a new system that grants us a future worth living?

Movements such as Standing Rock, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future are giving voice to the widespread longing for a tenable alternative to capitalism – our urgent need for new, regenerative ways of living: systems of life that use clean renewable energy, restore ecosystems, and re-position human beings as nurturers of social networks that enable us to be caretakers for the Earth.

In Fridays for Future, the weekly youth strikes kick-started by Greta Thunberg's solo action of protest, a new generation are questioning the apathy of the societies they've been born into, marching under the slogan "System Change, Not Climate Change." They are loudly demanding that we wake up, pull ourselves back from the brink of catastrophe, and put our energies into co-creating a system of life that can avert climate disaster.

The success of Extinction Rebellion, "a revolution of love, deep ecology and radical transformation," is partly due to the ways in which their vision of building such a regenerative culture guides their methods of organization. It was the integrity of their commitment to nonviolence and the functioning support systems that emerged among members that made it so difficult for the police to make arrests during the recent ten days of protest in the UK.

Those who thronged the streets were nourished by the actions they took part in, which were creative and joyful. This led to results, with the UK Parliament declaring a climate emergency. It remains to be seen whether this will really influence decision-making in the UK, but it's further proof that nonviolent action sustained by networks of real solidarity can create change.

Standing Rock set a precedent for this form of holistic activism. It was one of the most diverse mass political gatherings in history, hosting such historic scenes as US army veterans asking forgiveness from Native American elders. Its unique power to gather together Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, spiritual seekers and ordinary Americans was a tribute to the depth of intention at its core – people took a stand for life itself, for the water, for the sanctity of the Earth. It showed how a global cry of outrage can be transformed into a healing convergence for life.

Although President Trump's executive order to go ahead with the pipeline was eventually passed and the camp violently evicted, the story did not end there. Resistance continues at Standing Rock, and its example has inspired many other water protectors to stand up in movements around the world. But how can we create a worldwide and permanent shift to regeneration in every sphere of life?

What could a regenerative culture look like?

In 2017, when members of the Tamera Peace Research and Education Center in Portugal heard about the resistance at Standing Rock, they accompanied the protest with prayer and reached out to its leaders in solidarity. This exchange led to the initiation of the annual "Defend the Sacred" gatherings, which foster a network of exchange and support among activists, ecologists, technologists and Indigenous leaders who share the vision of creating a regenerative cultural model as a response to the global crisis.

Tamera is an attempt by Europeans to restore community as the foundation of life, with the vision of seeding a network of such decentralized autonomous centers (known as Healing Biotopes) right across the world. Creating solidarity between diverse movements and projects requires deep investigation of the human trauma that so often creates conflict and derails attempts at unification. This is why Defend the Sacred gatherings focus on healing trauma through consciousness work, community building, truth, and transparency. The goal is to create bonds of trust among people that are so strong that external forces will no longer be able to break them.

The leaders of the gatherings know that we can’t create a regenerative culture solely by trying to ‘smash capitalism.’ Instead, we need to understand and heal the underlying disease that generates all such systems of oppression. This disease can be described as the Western sickness of separation from life, or "wetiko," as it was named by the North American Algonquin people. Martin Winiecki (the gatherings' co-convenor) describes it like this:

"'Wetiko,' literally 'cannibalism,' was the word used by the Indigenous peoples to describe the disease of white invaders. It translates as the alienated human soul, no longer connected to an inner life force and so feeding on the energy of other beings.”

Wetiko is the psychic mechanism that keeps us trapped in the illusion that we exist separately from everything else. Within the isolated selfish ego, the pursuit of maximum personal gain appears to be the goal and meaning of life. Coupled with the chronic inability to feel compassion for the lives of other beings, violence, exploitation and oppression are not only justified, but appear logical and rational. If we resist only the external effects of wetiko, maybe we can win a victory here or there, but we can't overcome the system as a whole because this 'opponent' also sits within ourselves. It is from within that we constantly feed and support this monstrous system.

An important part of healing wetiko relates to healing our interracial wounds. It's significant that Defend the Sacred was initiated in Portugal – the place from where so many perpetrators of genocide and slavery in the Americas and Africa set out. A new path towards a nonviolent future will emerge from creating spaces where we can acknowledge our violent past and gain insight about what we have done as a collective. Such spaces offer the possibility of finally stepping out of the futile pattern of oppression, guilt and blame.

Tangible visions of the future.

In a recent co-written book, Defend the Sacred: If Life Wins, There Will Be No Losers, participants in the gatherings offer a mosaic of short essays that present their shared vision, along with many different ways to put it into practice. These include ending fossil fuel dependence, healing natural water cycles in cooperation with ecosystems and animals, transforming economic structures from systems of extraction to systems of giving, re-centering the voice of the feminine, creating a planetary network of solidarity and compassion, and anchoring everything in spiritual connection with the Earth as a living organism.

Supporting the transition away from fossil fuels, some members of the group are developing decentralized alternative technologies based on solar energy, while others are creating open source blueprints that enable people without specialist knowledge to construct simple plastic recycling machines all over the world.

Continuing the work of Standing Rock, the last two gatherings focused on thwarting oil drilling threats in Portugal, and each included an aerial art action in which participants used their bodies to form giant images alongside messages to "Stop the Drilling." These actions strengthened the growing resistance in Portugal to fossil fuel extraction, which won a significant victory in October 2018 when the oil companies involved announced that they were voluntarily withdrawing all plans to extract oil in the country.

The group is also working on an approach to climate change that goes beyond the mechanical question of carbon reduction or balancing inputs and outputs, to one that views the Earth as a living whole whose ‘organs’ all need to be intact for life to flourish. A key part of this approach is the widespread restoration of ecosystems through creating Water Retention Landscapes (a method of sculpting the land to help it absorb and retain rainwater where it naturally falls). Such landscapes heal natural water cycles, which in turn can rebalance the climate and protect forests from the increasing risk of wildfires.

Another central aspect of the group's work is to create social systems that both support the revival of feminine power and reestablish a basis of mutual support between the masculine and the feminine. Since overcoming patriarchy cannot be achieved by simply demanding change, this means creating forms of human co-existence that do not replicate patriarchal structures, but, as Monique Wilson puts it (another contributor to the book and coordinator of One Billion Rising), instead allow women to rediscover solidarity and "remember their abilities to heal, to teach, to create and to lead."

Imagine what would happen if all the separate movements for climate justice, racial justice, ending sexual violence and developing new forms of economy could unite around a shared spiritual center, just as they did at Standing Rock. Imagine if, drawn together by their love of life and their commitment to protecting our home, the Earth, they could come together to articulate a shared vision for a future that is more compelling to people than remaining in the current broken system. This is what our planet needs now.

To join this year's Defend the Sacred gathering from August 16–19, please click here.

For more information on our new book, Defend the Sacred: If Life Wins, There Will Be No Losers, please click here.

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This article was published in partnership with Human Rights and the Internet. Read more from the series here.

concrete

Computers are essentially just faster collections of vacuum tubes. How can they emulate human activities like recognising faces or assessing criminality?

Think about a least squares fit; you're trying to assess the correlation between two variables by fitting a straight line to scattered points, so you calculate the sum of the squares of distances from all points to the line and minimise that. Machine learning does something very similar. It makes your data into vectors in feature space so you can try to find boundaries between classes by minimising sums of distances as defined by your objective function.

These patterns are taken as revealing something significant about the world. They take on the neoplatonism of the mathematical sciences; a belief in a layer of reality which can be best perceived mathematically. But these are patterns based on correlation not causality; however complex the computation there's no comprehension or even common sense.

Neural networks doing image classification are easily fooled by strange poses of familiar objects. So a school bus on its side is confidently classified as a snow plough. Yet the hubristic knights of AI are charging into messy social contexts, expecting to be able to draw out insights that were previously the domain of discourse.

Deep learning is already seriously out of its depth.

callousness

Will this slow the adoption of AI while we figure out what it's actually good for? No, it won't; because what we are seeing is 'AI under austerity', the adoption of machinic methods to sort things out after the financial crisis.

The way AI derives its optimisation from calculations based on a vast set of discrete inputs matches exactly the way neoliberalism sees the best outcome coming from a market freed of constraints. AI is seen as a way to square the circle between eviscerated services and rising demand without having to challenge the underlying logic.

The pattern-finding of AI lends itself to prediction and therefore preemption which can target what's left of public resource to where the trouble will arise, whether that's crime, child abuse or dementia. But there's no obvious way to reverse operations like backpropagation to human reasoning, which not only endangers due process but produces thoughtlessness in the sense that Hannah Arendt meant it; that is, the inability to critique instructions, the lack of reflection on consequences, a commitment to the belief that a correct ordering is being carried out.

The usual objection to algorithmic judgements is outrage at the false positives, especially when they result from biased input data. But the underlying problem is the imposition of an optimisation based on a single idea of what is for the best, with a resultant ranking of the deserving and the undeserving.

What we risk with the uncritical adoption of AI is algorithmic callousness, which won't be saved by having a human-in-the-loop because that human will be subsumed by the self-interested institution-in-the-loop.

By throwing out our common and shared conditions as having no predictive value, the operations of AI targeting strip out any acknowledgement of system-wide causes hiding the politics of the situation.

far right

The algorithmic coupling of vectorial distances and social differences will become the easiest way to administer a hostile environment, such as the one created by Theresa May to target immigrants.

But the overlaps with far right politics don't stop there. The character of 'coming to know through AI' involves reductive simplifications based on data innate to the analysis, and simplifying social problems to matters of exclusion based on innate characteristics is precisely the politics of right wing populism.

We should ask whether the giant AI corporations would baulk at putting the levers of mass correlation at the disposal of regimes seeking national rebirth through rationalised ethnocentrism. At the same time that Daniel Guerin was writing his book in 1936 examining the ties between fascism and big business, Thomas Watson's IBM and it's German subsidiary Dehomag were enthusiastically furnishing the Nazis with Hollerith punch card technology. Now we see the photos from Davos of Jair Bolsonaro seated at lunch between Apple's Tim Cook and Microsoft's Satya Nadella.

Meanwhile the algorithmic correlations of genome-wide association studies are used to sustain notions of race realism and prop up a narrative of genomic hierarchy. This is already a historical reunification of statistics and white supremacy, as the mathematics of logistic regression and correlation that are so central to machine learning were actually developed by Edwardian eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.

antifascist

My proposal here is that we need to develop an antifascist AI.

It needs to be more than debiasing datasets because that leaves the core of AI untouched. It needs to be more than inclusive participation in the engineering elite because that, while important, won't in itself transform AI. It needs to be more than an ethical AI, because most ethical AI operates as PR to calm public fears while industry gets on with it. It needs to be more than ideas of fairness expressed as law, because that imagines society is already an even playing field and obfuscates the structural asymmetries generating the perfectly legal injustices we see deepening every day.

I think a good start is to take some guidance from the feminist and decolonial technology studies that have cast doubt on our cast-iron ideas about objectivity and neutrality. Standpoint theory suggests that positions of social and political disadvantage can become sites of analytical advantage, and that only partial and situated perspectives can be the source of a strongly objective vision. Likewise, a feminist ethics of care takes relationality as fundamental, establishing a relationship between the inquirer and their subjects of inquiry would help overcome the onlooker consciousness of AI.

To centre marginal voices and relationality, I suggest that an antifascist AI involves some kinds of people's councils, to put the perspective of marginalised groups at the core of AI practice and to transform machine learning into a form of critical pedagogy. This formation of AI would not simply rush into optimising hyperparameters but would question the origin of the problematics, that is, the structural forces that have constructed the problem and prioritised it.

AI is currently at the service of what Bergson called ready-made problems; problems based on unexamined assumptions and institutional agendas, presupposing solutions constructed from the same conceptual asbestos. To have agency is to re-invent the problem, to make something newly real that thereby becomes possible unlike the probable, the possible is something unpredictable, not a rearrangement of existing facts.

Given the corporate capture of AI, any real transformation will require a shift in the relations of production. One thing that marks the last year or so is the sign of internal dissent in Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and so on about the social purposes to which their algorithms are being put. In the 1970s workers in a UK arms factory came up with the Lucas plan which proposed the comprehensive restructuring of their workplace for socially useful production. They not only questioned the purpose of the work but did so by asserting the role of organised workers, which suggests that the current tech worker dissent will become transformative when it sees itself as creating the possibility of a new society in the shell of the old.

I'm suggesting that an antifascist AI is one that take sides with the possible against the probable, and does so at the meeting point between organised subjects and organised workers. But it may also require some organised resistance from communities.

A thread is a sequence of programmed instructions executed by microprocessor. On an Nvidia GPU, one of the AI chips, a warp is a set of threads executed in parallel. How uncanny that the language of weaving looms has followed us from the time of the Luddites to the era of AI. The struggle for self-determination in everyday life may require a new Luddite movement, like the residents and parents in Chandler, Arizona who have blockaded Waymo's self-driving vans 'They didn’t ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test' said a mother who's child was nearly hit by one. The Luddites, remember, weren't anti-technology but aimed 'to put down all machinery hurtful to the Commonality'.

The predictive pattern recognition of deep learning is being brought to bear on our lives with the granular resolution of Lidar. Either we will be ordered by it or we will organise. So the question of an antifascist AI is the question of self-organisation, and of the autonomous production of the self that is organising.

Asking 'how can we predict who will do X?' is asking the wrong question. We already know the destructive consequences on the individual and collective psyche of poverty, racism and systemic neglect. We don't need AI as targeting but as something that helps raise up whole populations.

Real AI matters not because it heralds machine intelligence but because it confronts us with the unresolved injustices of our current system. An antifascist AI is a project based on solidarity, mutual aid and collective care. We don't need autonomous machines but a technics that is part of a movement for social autonomy.

This piece is based on a talk given by the author in April, 2019 Towards an anti-fascist AI. Zenodo.

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There is a historical paradox: the last decades, not the preceding centuries or millennia, seem to shape the present. The homoerotism of 8th century poet Abu Nawas, the medieval love between Hind and Al-Zarqa – a history of queer desire in the Middle East vanished under the rug of a briefer history of desiring the Middle East. Arriving colonies or American corps, Baudelaire's exoticism or Hollywood's, a struggle for independence or a fear of foreign interference – East vs. West, an inevitable by-product, arguably as old as the Greeks' possessive longing for Troy. Damage is done. The struggle for gay rights in the Middle East cannot turn a blind eye toward this binary. To achieve gay liberation, Beirut cannot be Washington or London – same fight, different grounds; in fact, perhaps a different fight altogether because it has London and Washington in its satellite.

Background

The background around Lebanon's unique position between East and West is too massive to cover within a short article. To set the stage, I start off with Saadallah Wannous's Drunken Days (1997), a play set in 1930s Beirut during the French occupation. A vivid scene introduces us to a Lebanese family of four young siblings, who surprise their old father with a tailored suit, a tie, and a Gatsby-style hat. The immediate refusal of the Lebanese father, wearing his traditional sherwal attire and typical tarbush hat, contrasts with the zeal of his four children, who celebrate their modern and clean-cut looks, signé designers, as well as their fluency in French and their excitement for social advancement. This scene exemplifies a kind of intergenerational clash of civilization within Lebanon akin to the country's gay rights struggle, one that ties, though wrongly, progress with westernization.

A precedence is women's rights. In Women's Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Progress Amid Resistance, Kelly and Breslin (2010) have noted how women's rights in Lebanon have been historically negotiated along Eastern vs. Western lines; a clash that borrows imaginary models from both hemispheres and that charges advocates of full women's rights as 'too westernized'. On the other side, the opponents of women's rights, women included, are charged to be inherently backwards and 'too Eastern' – the same complaint addressed to the traditional father in The Drunken Days, whose refusal of western standards comes at the price of refusing to bow down to the winds of modernity itself.

The real-life impact of this conflation between rights and geographies is seen in articles such as "Who owns the fight for LGBT+ rights in the Arab world?", published following the Luxembourg Prime Minister's supportive comments about gay rights in a Euro-Arab conference. This article, though fairly questioning whether gay rights ought to arise from within or without the region, is telling of the sensitivity of the topic itself – the trope of the western savior coming to liberate the East for the sake of freedom, a promise that had disastrous consequences in Iraq. This close scrutiny of any nod from the West about the East's progressive agenda is paralleled with a closer scrutiny of any efforts to reach out to the West within the East. This is best exemplified by Beirut Pride's refusal to hold any typical pride parade in its first edition in 2017. The following reads on its website's description of the events:

"Beirut Pride is not a westernized, imported platform, as its programme and initiatives are local and reflect on the specificities and intricacies of the Lebanese complex social fabrics."

One Lebanese academic who has predicted this conflation between East and West, past and present, straight and gay, is Tarek El-Ariss. In Trials of Arab Modernity, the reader gets a sense that what is modern in Arab society is neither the term gay nor surely rainbow flags – it is institutions within the region such as marriage and the nation-state that are modern; as modern as their new efforts to conceal and hide identities, which, in their part, have historically remained unchanged. In another work, Ottomania, El-Ariss goes as far as qualifying Arab masculinity as a modern by-product of the East-West divide – its arrival, he argues, coincides with a time of increased antagonism against the West; a new social patriarchy finding legitimacy in the political cause, a machismo that veils its newness by precisely hiding what is deep-rooted and age-old; empowered women and homosexuals.

Discourse

An exception in the Middle East; the New York Times and other media have continually labeled Lebanon as such, emphasizing its special relationship to the remainder of the LGBT+ community in the Arab world. Indeed, articles such as "Beirut and Lebanon: The gay paradise of the Arab world" about the region's first gay club, "Everyone is welcome: the only gay hangout in the Arab world" about its first gay organization, "Lebanon launches Arab world's first gay pride week" about its first pride parade, all reveal a fascination with Lebanon as a new sexual oasis for Arabs.

The way the western media has covered Lebanese gay tolerance however deserves close scrutiny. Clearly, Lebanon's case is media-worthy – it paints the Orientalist trope of the calm and paradisiac oasis, its lakes and its palm trees, in the midst of desert and tribal warfare. This fantasy has been readily cashed in by the New York Times, France 24, BBC and others – but these have at the same time cashed in on its counter-narrative, especially when the second edition of Beirut Pride in 2018 was shut down by force.

Articles such as "Lebanon's gay-friendly reputation challenged by abuses," as well as "Lebanon Is Known as Gay Friendly. But Pride Week Was Shut Down," and "Not A Shock: The Only Gay Pride Event In The Arab Middle East Has Been Canceled" reveal how easily the West can retract its fascination of Lebanon – making its earlier favorable coverage merely a temporary spark of hope in a doomed region. Lebanon, for the West, becomes this small oasis in an Arab desert where homosexuality is both the most possible and the least desirable – as though Lebanon were indeed that no-man’s-land between East and West, a hollow valley spared from the East's hell but which falls short of western paradise.

Local Lebanese media has also revealed this tension between the two worlds. This tension has manifested itself in peculiar media events: a marriage announcement between a Lebanese singer and his Spanish boyfriend in Spain and an Instagram picture of a Lebanese politician's daughter declaring a woman to be her 'wifey' and a ban on rainbow flags at Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram's concert in Sweden. What these Lebanese media events have in common is this bridge between Beirut and foreign cities – the cosmopolitan city and its diaspora that seem to have stretched too far.

The virality of Nicolas Chalhoub's marriage announcement to a man in Spain, a social media phenomenon that landed him on national television, can be explained through the old Lebanese diasporic cautionary tale: should you send your kids abroad; the West will corrupt them. They will get into drugs. Shamelessly bring back to grandma's home a foreign girlfriend. And the catastrophe – come back with an earring. God forbid on the right ear. This trope was briefly explored by Tarek El-Ariss in a chapter of Trials of Arab Modernity, which begins with the following epigraph:

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"I fear, my son, that the West might take you away from us. What I fear most is that a European woman might captivate and lure you into her web, which will break your poor mother's heart. Nahida is awaiting your return, my son. Even if you don't want Nahida, there is always Ni'mat and Thurayya and your cousin, Hadba. There are plenty of girls here. Come back, my son, and I will marry you off to the most beautiful girl, pure and chaste. – Suhayl Idris, "The Latin Quarter" (1953).

This epigraph speaks volume of the media's craze over Nicolas Chalhoub's marriage with a Spanish man and yet it dates from 1953. I fear, my son, that the West might take you away from us. This is indeed the poignant age-old fear for Lebanese parents; the problem with their children's orientation is not sexual but geographical. The father's fear of western women's lack of chastity and purity parallels the craze over Chalhoub, who, in Lebanese diaspora imaginary, was, to quote the father, taken away by the West; in this case, damned for being lured not merely by the gender of the Spanish guy he married but perhaps more so his tempting and taboo Spanishness as well.

The same goes with the craze over Walid Joumblat's daughter, who posted a picture with a girl on Instagram with the caption "wifey". Almost immediately, major news outlets reported that the famous Lebanese politician's daughter was gay and that she was married to a woman. This drastic reaction – besides its political motivations – can be explained through the same lens with which the Lebanese have seen Nicolas Chalhoub's marriage with a Spanish man. Joumblat's daughter becomes his female equivalent – the gone-wild girl of an esteemed and old-fashioned Lebanese politician who seems to have betrayed all of her family's values and has run off to the West with her wifey.

Special emphasis should be placed on the medium she used (Instagram) and the logos she employed (wifey) – both borrowed from a western dictionary. The reason media outlets jumped to the occasion to cover this fictional story – for Joumblat's daughter had used the term in a friendly basis, as most teenagers do – becomes both the result of a generational miscommunication and a geographical mix-up; western logos and teenage know-how completely confused.

The fascination over the rainbow flag ban in Nancy Ajram's concert also follows the same pattern as Nicolas Chalhoub's marriage and Joumblat’s daughter's Instagram caption – all of them partake in this negotiation between East and West, old and modern; simultaneously praised for embracing the latter and condemned for foregoing the former. One must highlight the false nature of such binaries; young Lebanese are often surprised to find their grandmother in mini-skirts in old pictures, before conservatism sprouted later on in the country's history. Including gay rights within a false and rather cyclical 'progress narrative' is also amnesiac if we were to recall that it was the French who had first introduced the penal code 534 that aimed to criminalize what modern western colonial powers found to be an unrefined, backwards, barbaric and typically Eastern practice – anal sex.

This inversion transposes the fight for progressive values in Lebanon onto a geographical battlefield between East vs. West; the culmination of which is best represented with the shutting down of Beirut Pride's 2018 version, a drastic measure from the Ministry of Interior that had up until then often turned a relatively blind eye to gay emancipation efforts in the country. What pushed their buttons this time?

Their negotiation between acceptability and repression, I argue, is embedded in an East vs. West clash. Contrast Beirut Pride with Lebanon's first gay NGO – Helem. The latter's communications, in their emphasis on Arab-feel posts and its occasional avoidance of western-like imagery, guarantees them to work unnoticeably under the Ministry's radar. In contrast, Beirut Pride's social media is filled with western evocative imagery – Hollywood movie references, rainbow flags, and Grindr catchphrases. The latter's shutting down becomes more due to its westernized feel than its queer content – its 2018 cancellation becoming an old wound freshly ripped open; as though the dormant monster, the state, was triggered more by Ru Paul than his eastern equivalents.

But this standard does not hold true all the time. In a 2012 press conference, lawyer Nizar Saghieh called the classism with which the Lebanese state criminalizes homosexuality. Despite regular subpoenas issues against 'provocative' social media users, the Instagram post of Walid Joumblat's daughter, for example, will not place her under the radar of the Ministry of Interior, which, according to Saghieh, bullies more vulnerable groups. A small footnote ought to be added to the East vs. West binary; despite its horizontal antagonism, there are vertical variables (i.e. social class, influence) that abate or maximize the clash; punishing some while vindicating others.

Another contradiction in terms of acceptability at the governance level manifests in the sectarian lens with which Lebanon's progressive agenda is unfolding. The women's rights battleground is a prime example – claims that Muslim, not Christian, parties are responsible for stalling the motion to end child marriage have entrenched Lebanese society, pitting once again Muslim vs. Christian, this time not over Palestinians but over women, and soon, homosexuals. The similarity with Lebanon's 15-year civil war may strike as excessive, but what both clashes have in common is the East vs. West binary; in the militia war of the past, the choice was between eastern solidarity over Palestinians or western antagonism to it, in the social war of the present, the choice is between Eastern misogyny and homophobia or western liberalness and acceptance.

This new sectarian battle can be argued on several fronts: Christian-led political party Kataeb's unprecedented inclusion of gay rights in its electoral programme in 2018, Christian-run channel LBCI's widest coverage of LGBT+ news, as well as the Christian Aouanites' monopoly over the foreign ministry, the sole institutional bridge between East and West, and its calls for social reforms for the sake of 'global integration.'

One ought not to be fooled by the sectarian lens with which social progress is unfolding in Lebanon – though it is media-worthy and comprehensible enough to see Lebanon as a place where refined Christians are asking for change and barbaric Muslims are refusing it; the reality on the ground is not so. Besides the active homophobia of the Maronite Church in Lebanon, as attested by its member in a BBC documentary, and the explosion of biblical quotes among Lebanese Facebook users whenever gay rights are invoked, further proof of this false sectarian progress narrative is civil society group Kelna Watani and its contention for the last elections – cross-sectarian parties from a diversity of backgrounds and faiths, which, all, without much debate, voiced their support in 2018 for a range of social reform, gay rights included.

The East vs. West binary at the political level is therefore the most deceitful and the most dangerous: though not reflective of Lebanese society's plurality, tolerance and acceptance of seemingly-contestable social issues, the narrative being constructed is a binary of western Christians vs. eastern Muslims; a new age of crusades that sees once more the left-behind Christians of the East pleading western powers to come to their rescue in a cavalier packs of UN diplomats and US foreign ministers – lost human rights becoming the new weapon of mass destruction that must be flocked to and uncovered.

Faced with this clash between East and West, the Lebanese online and offline are both very forward about the clash of civilization in the making and yet very unconscious of its implications – their outrage, on either side of the debate, clocks between East and West without critical thought. We end up with a false clash of civilization – an ardent cause for both camps, which insist on conflating the subject-matter (i.e. gay rights) with Lebanon's position between East and West – the valley in-between, though habitable, becoming to both sides a no-man’s-land, Dante's dangerous neutrality stage, a needle that pokes you back into either camps; a civilized West or a classic East. The exit out of this limbo is indeed the main challenge to gay rights in Lebanon – the first step is to bring out the elephant in the room and call the real problem by its name: westphobia.