Refugees' life jackets in Parliament Square, London. Howard Lake/Flickr. CC (by-sa)

Have you ever stopped to consider what happens to the bodies of undocumented migrants when they die trying to reach the shores of Europe? Who they are, who mourns their loss, where and how they are buried?

The nameless and un-mourned bodies of undocumented migrants feature prominently in the lived experiences of the Mediterranean coastal towns where they wash up – the triangle connecting Tripoli, Zouara and Lampedusa has been nicknamed “the black zone” by locals because of the countless corpses floating around – but they are conspicuously absent from the broader migration narrative and from the rhetoric of many influential actors involved in policy, academia, and the media. This blind spot is unsettling. Policy makers urgently need to discuss undocumented migrant body identification from a human rights perspective and to address the shortcomings of current management and identification efforts in European countries.

The International Organization for Migration’s “Missing Migrants Project” estimates that there have been 16,003 migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean since 2014. Like the estimates on living undocumented migrants, the true figure is likely to be much higher due to the difficulties of tracking those that do not wish to be tracked, and of counting bodies that have sunk below the surface of the waves. Most of those bodies will likely never be found.

Those that are found will just as likely never be identified. This is partly because of the inherent difficulties of identification in this context: there is no readily available information on the migrant’s nationality, route, or family relations; any personal belongings or identification documents may be ruined or rendered illegible by the water; and the bodies that have drowned are usually found as they resurface from the sea floor during decomposition, at which point they will have begun to lose physical attributes and appendages. Identification is also hindered by the lack of national legal provisions for dealing with migrant deaths – and the ensuing issues with funding, overlapping mandates, and incoherent policy – which means that there is currently no systematic collection or storage of information that would be useful for future identification efforts.

The triangle connecting Tripoli, Zouara and Lampedusa has been nicknamed “the black zone” by locals because of the countless corpses floating around.

Identifying these bodies thus comes with many challenges, but it’s certainly not impossible. This has been proven by the success of Italian authorities’ identification efforts following three shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa. For one of these shipwrecks the Italian National Commission for Missing Persons and its team achieved an impressive 58.5% identification rate by rigorously following best practices for the treatment of the dead; by engaging in a multi-stakeholder process that combined a range of scientific approaches; and by utilising diplomatic and civil society to contact the victims’ families for ante-mortem information.

In another case, forensic scientists and anthropologists managed to identify bodies that had been submerged for a year within the vessel, thus proving that identification is possible with DNA technology even in the advanced decay or skeletonisation stages of decomposition. “With a little bit of money, a lot of goodwill and some hard work”, said Vittorio Piscitelli, the head of the Italian Commission, “it can definitely be done”. The next logical step is to provide this service to as many dead migrants as possible, not just those on large-scale shipwrecks that receive political and media attention.

European states have the specialised bureaucracy and the technological capacities required to improve their attempts at identifying migrant bodies. They also have the money, considering that the EU’s budget for the management of external borders, migration and asylum will increase from €13 billion to €34.9 billion in the coming years. As a start, experts recommend establishing a centralised database to collect the relevant information (photographs, gender, nationality, DNA, burial locations), as well as standardising the procedures for body management and identification. The feasibility of identification only strengthens the human rights argument of properly attempting to identify the migrant bodies for the sake of the individuals, the families, and the states involved.

Rights after death

The right to be identified after death is universally recognised in domestic and international law. Beginning with the 1949 Geneva Conventions, a range of international frameworks have been developed for dealing with identification after death, including the 1956 UN Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods, the ICRC Guiding Principles on the Missing, and Interpol’s Disaster Victim Identification. The common imperative of these frameworks is that identity and identification is a human right that extends past death. But states’ recognition of this human right seems to be dependent on the circumstances surrounding the migrant deaths; the deaths of ‘regular’ migrants (tourists, students, businessmen) in accidents and disasters are met with large-scale international responses that include advanced technological equipment and specialised teams while the deaths of ‘irregular’ migrants are met with bureaucratic ambiguity and administrative inaction.

Identity and identification is a human right that extends past death.

The contrast is striking, and it emphasises the differences in value that societies place on human lives. An undocumented migrant is implicitly considered, as Judith Butler put it, “an ungrievable life, one that cannot be mourned because … it has never counted as a life at all”. More systematic and concerted efforts for undocumented migrant identification would remedy the state of invisibility that many have been subjected to during their journey by restoring the name, story, and humanity that they had previously been stripped of. The naming that comes from identification efforts would also push back against the normalisation of undocumented migrant death and the securitisation narrative that surrounds them.

Right to mourn

Identification efforts would also restore dead migrants’ links to their families and communities after death and provide closure for those who were close to them. The families have to live every day without knowing the fate of their missing loved ones, and this often leads to psychological or psychosocial problems, as well as economic and administrative complications regarding funeral arrangements, remarriages, inheritances, guardianships, and land ownerships.

Taking these many burdens into account, it seems crucial to incorporate the families into the narrative of migrant death and the process of undocumented migrant identification. This would facilitate access to practical information and acknowledge the emotional component inherent in the passing of a loved one. It would also improve the visibility of the families, who are rarely able to exert political pressure to demand accountability, justice, and commemoration.

State commitments to human rights

Even the states involved in the management of undocumented migrants are likely to benefit from promoting identification efforts. The current policy vacuum around dealing with migrant bodies has created a dissonance between the values that states proclaim and the actions they take to uphold them. This dissonance has human rights implications because of the way in which it consistently undermines the rights to human dignity, freedom, and equality of dead migrants.

With states choosing to frame undocumented migrant deaths as accidents rather than direct consequences of their intensified border control policies, it is no wonder that some critics have gone so far as to call the Mediterranean the “graveyard of European values”. Developing and implementing specialised policies for the identification of undocumented migrants would provide much needed coherence to states’ approaches to migration, as well as facilitate social inclusion by proving to the living migrants they are hosting that their lives are worth the same as those of their own citizens. 

Until now, the issue of undocumented migrant death identification has been lost in the wide and complex narrative of migration. But it is important that we begin to consider the human rights implications of ignoring this topic, as well as the inherent value of implementing policies that facilitate identification. There are human rights in life and in death for all human beings, and the consistent denial of these migrants’ identity – of their name, their family, and of the life they fought so hard for – through inadequate identification systems should be considered a human rights violation. For the sake of the individuals and their families, and for the credibility of the European project, more can and must be done to address this.

Cooling towers at ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih. CC BY-SA 3.0 Dogvillan / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.

The past year has seen a wave of mobilisation inside Kryvyi Rih's mining and metal complex, particularly at the flagship foreign ArcelorMittal plant, one of the largest metal plants in the world. After weeks of negotiations, workers officially announced a labour dispute in late March. Then, on 14 May, railway workers in Kremenchuk started a work-to-rule action over conditions and pay, which was then taken up in soldidarity by railway workers at AMKR on 16 May. This solidarity action catalysed an existing dispute over pay at AMKR. AMKR plant management announced that it was shutting operations on 17 May. 

This article, originally published in Ukrainian left-wing journal Commons, is the first attempt to analyse what is happening at AMKR in both the long-term and short-term perspective. With the author's permission, we publish a translated and shortened version here. 

Ukraine’s mining and metal industry was constructed largely in the era of fulfilled (and over-fulfilled) five-year plans. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, these factories and mines played (and continue to play) no less a role than in the Soviet state. Today, every school student in Ukraine has to know about the shortcomings of the planned economy for their final exams. But after the transition to the market economy, these shortcomings became, if anything, more pronounced: throughout the 1990s, the share of ferrous metal production in Ukraine’s GDP grew thanks to loss of mechanical engineering and other branches of the country’s economy which produced goods with a high additional value.

By the early 2000s, steel exports had become one of the main sources of income for the state budget. Steelworkers could thus claim proudly that they were the ones responsible for bringing in the largest amounts of foreign currency, although the core of the 2000s boom also contained the factors that after 2008 would provoke crisis after crisis both in Ukraine’s economy and political sphere — the strong dependency on the global economy and concentration of profitable enterprises in only a few of the country’s regions. In recent years, the mining and metal complex has suffered, with the loss of mines and factories in Ukraine’s uncontrolled territories. At the same time, the proportion of complex production (cast iron, steel, prefabricated construction materials) within the production cycle has decreased while iron ore exports have risen.

Today, Kryvyi Rih workers are involved in a struggle that could have far-reaching consequences for the whole of Ukraine

These tendencies are hardly positive, but despite all its problems, metal production remains a central pillar of Ukraine’s economy. Even in the crisis year of 2015, it guaranteed nearly a sixth of industrial production, a quarter of goods exports and 1.5% of jobs. This last figure might not seem impressive at first glance, but metal workers are one of the best organised, conscious and active parts of Ukraine’s working class. The fact that so many jobs are concentrated at large plants, which gives a sense of a working collective; involvement in complex production processes, which raises the veil masking the “secrets” of the economy; the tradition of independent trade union movements, which began at the end of the 1980s — all of this creates a situation in which workers can act independently and achieve certain results. A situation that is far from typical for most other sectors of Ukraine’s economy.

The longest city’s largest factory

From this point of view, the metal workers and miners in the south-eastern city of Kryvyi Rih particularly stand out. We can assume that the size of the city plays to the Kryvyi Rih workers’ advantage. But it’s not the (famous) length of the city that’s important here. Kryvyi Rih, on the one hand, isn’t an regional centre, overflowing with state authorities and businessmen who suppress any manifestation of independent activity from the lower classes. On the other, in terms of size, the heart of the Kryvbas iron ore basin significantly outclasses your standard provincial monocity in Ukraine, where the factory management can discipline workers with ease. In other words, while in other east Ukrainian cities like Dnipro or Alchevsk (which is now under the control of the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic), the balance of power is such that independent trade unions are either absent or barely survive, in Kryvyi Rih workers fight off attacks and are even able to organise counter-attacks. This “economic geography” works to Kryvyi Rih workers’ advantage, although this is only a favourable condition that real people draw on in their everyday struggle.

16 May: railway workers on strike at AMKR. Source: 1st City Channel, Kryvyi Rih. For Kryvbas — and Ukraine in general — the post-Maidan years have been incredibly difficult. The war has broken production and trade networks, sending some workers to the front, and others - in search of work. In 2014, Ukraine’s national currency declined in value on three occasions, though price fluctuations on the external markets have been far more modest. This has created a “paradox” which is perfectly logical for capitalist relations: if prices for Ukrainian metals have already managed to rise again since the 2015 collapse, then real wages have remained lower than their pre-war level. In 2013, the average wage at the country’s biggest metallurgical plant ArcelorMittal-Kryvyi Rih (AMKR) was 5,808 hryvnia (€534), then in 2017 it was 10,278 hryvnia (€306).  

The crisis and war have thus intensified a long-term tendency. While over 2010-2018, AMKR began bringing its owners three times more in pure profit, this same period saw the share of the wage fund drop from 11.3% to 5% of the cost of production. There have been constant cuts to staff numbers — from 65,000 workers in 2005 to 23,000 today. In reality, this “optimisation” has meant the greater exploitation of those who stayed working at the factory, reducing the amount the factory spends on its employees after outsourcing their jobs, the lack of state programmes to help people, forced out of their jobs by automation of the production process, re-train for other jobs. The situation has been similar at other factories and mines in Kryvbas.

2017: Kryvyi Rih rises up

Kryvyi Rih workers eventually responded to the actions of plant owners. In May 2017, coordinated protest actions began at the city’s main plants (Kryvyi Rih Iron Ore Plant, Evraz-Sukha Balka and AMKR) — employees stopped work, held public meetings and occupied administration offices. It was here that the demand for a monthly wage of 1,000 USD/Euros was first expressed publicly. In Ukraine today, this sounded like far too much, but until 2014 a range of specialist workers in Kryvyi Rih did in fact receive this wage. The plant owners constantly refer to average wages in Ukraine, yet workers, via contacts in international trade union organisations, know that even in Kazakhstan, where protests broke out among workers at the ArcelorMittal plant in Temirtau in December 2017, metal workers receive considerably more (€386 in 2017). In comparison with metal workers in developed countries, Ukrainians receive 20 times less — and this is one of the lowest wages across the global industry.

The scale and coordination of workers’ actions made the owners and managers receptive surprisingly quickly. The conflict stopped after an agreement was reached to gradually raise wages (on average by 50%).

Moloch demands a sacrifice

For the owners of Kryvyi Rih enterprises, however, this agreement did not mean recognising that the workers, or the economic rationality of their demands, were “right”, but merely marked a lost battle in an ongoing war. The owners postponed and rewrote the promised wage hikes in their favour and increased the pressure on independent union activists. At the same time, they began playing the role of the “good boss” who gives workers crumbs from his table, but doesn’t let irresponsible troublemakers “bite the hand that feeds” and bring down the enterprise with their unreasonable demands.

The plant, however, was falling apart by itself — literally. On the night of 3-4 March 2018, the roof collapsed at AMKR’s converter shop, killing a 25-year-old worker as a result. Indeed, while metallurgy remains a source of income for hundreds of thousands of workers, Ukraine’s state budget and big capital, this industry has terrible health problems: the level of aging of industrial equipment is between 70-80%. For workers in Kryvyi Rih, this statistic is a reality: outdated equipment leads to injuries, disabilities and even death.

The aftermath of the roof collapse at AMKR on 3-4 March 2018, which killed one employee. Source: Social Movement. The Ukrainian government hasn’t only distanced itself from this problem, but is acting in favour of capital, deregulating work safety procedures and reducing the powers of its own oversight agencies. Thus, in 2016, a State Labour Service commission found dozens of violations at AMKR, but in January 2018 a court rejected the demand to temporarily stop work at the plant (a stop costs Kryvyi Rih factories and mines close to $7.5m per day).

2018: the long road to the strike

Workers at AMKR have thus had to resort to more decisive measures. There are 10 unions operating at the plant, and the largest of them is the Union of Metalworkers and Miners of Ukraine (PMGU), which is part of the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU). PMGU can be considered a so-called “yellow” trade union— an official institution with its roots in the Soviet era, and which mostly avoids conflicts with owners and concentrates on distributing bonuses, sanatorium trips and gifts on public holidays to its members.

Alongside the PMGU, there’s several other independent unions at AMKR. These are the successors of the perestroika-era workers movements of the late 1980s and 1990s, when workers broke out from under Communist Party control and encountered the realities of capitalism. Independent unions have less in terms of physical assets than their counterparts in the FPU, but are prepared for more decisive actions in labour disputes, even real confrontation with management over wages and safety. Many of them are members of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU). There’s also militant unions at AMKR which can count thousands of workers among their members. These are branches of national unions (Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine — the largest union at the factory, and the organisation behind the protests — and others) and regional unions, as well as employee associations operating inside AMKR. And there’s another “professional” organisation allegedly operating at AMKR, which I will come to in a moment.

Alexander Vilkul, Kryvyi Rih parliamentary deputy and co-chairman of Opposition Bloc, calls on workers to support Serhiy Kaplin in the coming elections and attend a parallel workers' conference on 27 March 2018. Source: Social Movement. The situation at AMKR — accidents that end in fatalities, the management’s sabotage of the 2017 wage agreement and dismissive attitude to worker activists — has convinced both the independent unions and even PMGU of the need for decisive action. On 14 March this year, they held a public rally outside the factory management’s office, where they raised the following demands to the owner and general director: raise the average wage to €1,000, create safe working conditions, stop job cuts and outsourcing, and stop pressuring labour organisations. Over several days, 12,000 employees signed this petition — nearly half of the factory’s personnel.

But mass protest isn’t only an expression of material discontent, but an opportunity to build political capital — and which instantly attracts specialists of this craft. Serhiy Kaplin, Ukraine’s head “social democrat” and only “left-wing” parliamentary deputy, quickly travelled to Kryvyi Rih for the 14 March meeting. Kaplin’s speech was typical of the current dominant political culture: calls to concentrate on struggling lawfully for European working conditions and lifestyle were heard alongside xenophobic attacks against the “Indian exploiters” (a reference to ArcelorMittal CEO Lakshmi Mittal).

For most of the workers present, this nationalism exported from Kyiv was something alien. But the factory management took advantage of this, accusing the trade unionists of playing politics, selling out and xenophobia. Preparations for an employee conference (necessary in order to launch a labour dispute) were held against a background of dirty PR tactics typical of local political campaigns. The AMKR administration even held an “identical” conference at the same time, spreading provocative and defamatory leaflets and newspapers, as well as pressuring workers.

27 March 2018: an employee conference at AMKR. Source: Maksym Kazakov. Despite these barriers, the employee conference was held on 27 March, and 300 delegates from all the factory’s shops voted for the demands made at the rally. In their official response, the administration completely ignored the unions’ claims against them, and thus the employees’ authorised representatives voted to start a labour dispute. According to Ukrainian legislation, this means that employees and employer should try to come to an understanding via a reconciliation commission and with the assistance of the National Service of Mediation and Reconciliation — and if where reconciliation is not achieved, then there is the opportunity to start a legal strike.

Black metal and “black” accounts

AMKR workers are well prepared in the nuts and bolts of workplace conflict. For them, it’s essential: at the centre of it there’s the question of wages and their relationship to enterprise income. Even according to official figures, the amount of money that workers have been receiving has dropped year on year.

Anyone interested in Ukraine’s economy is well aware that, alongside its dependence on raw materials and aging infrastructure, there is also the key problem of offshore schemes. It’s hard to imagine the scale of what has happened over the past few years. Three quarters of domestic metal exports are processed via foreign middlemen, and this almost always leads to hiding profits offshore in order to reduce the amount of tax paid in Ukraine (transfer pricing).

After the official start of the labour dispute, the conflict has moved into the stage of drawn-out negotiations, tactical manoeuvres and mobilisation of resources

In the past, workers at AMKR have only mentioned this as a general problem — like any ordinary Ukrainian citizen who rails against “the oligarchs stealing our country” in their kitchen. But thanks to the efforts of left-wing economists Oleksandr Antonyuk and Zakhar Popovych, they can now know the details of these grand schemes. AMKR exports its production to dozens of countries around the world, particularly to Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, China and Lebanon. Trading companies registered in offshore countries act as the middlemen, and they are also part of the transnational corporation ArcelorMittal. Thus, one company belonging to the corporation sells its production via other companies of the same corporation, which are registered outside Ukraine.

Let’s take a concrete case: on 26 September 2017, a consignment of reinforcement steel (one of AMKR’s main export products) was sent to Lebanon through the southern Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv at the price of $324 per tonne (all information from ImportGenius). The market price for this product is $510 per tonne. The formal client for this was ArсelorMittal International FZE, which is registered in United Arab Emirates. The difference between the sale price to the trading company and real buyer ($186) goes to the head office of ArcelorMittal in Luxembourg, and is not taxed in Ukraine. AMKR produces 5.4m tonnes of this steel per year, and most of it is exported.

Approximately 50% of AMKR’s production is sold via these schemes, and at least $150 is made on each tonne — this means that nearly $400m is evading both Ukrainian taxes and workers. The current wage fund at AMKR is $85m. And in this light, local workers’ fight at this factory becomes a struggle of national importance — one about channeling incomes to the country’s budget.

A healthy person’s 1st May

After the official start of the labour dispute, the conflict has moved into the stage of drawn-out negotiations, tactical manoeuvres and mobilisation of resources. A public action on 1 May was important in maintaining people’s fighting spirit, overseeing the collective and bringing in new allies, and was organised by the independent unions.  Indeed, the march in Kryvyi Rih was the most important 1st May action in Ukraine this year (the actions in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro were organised by political parties financed by big capital, and therefore don’t count).

More than 300 factory workers attended the 1st May in the city — the majority of them, although they emphatically supported the start of collective bargaining in March, celebrated a four-day weekend in Soviet style at their allotments and dachas. Their speeches and comments to the media may have lacked the punch of PR professionals, but they demonstrated a clear level of class consciousness. And this is worth noting when Ukrainian society is experiencing extended atomisation, state propaganda aimed at diffusing class identity, celebrating neoliberalism and nationalism, and the fact that left-wing intellectual websites, books and journals are operating on a small scale. Here are some quotes from the rally:

“In any case, they [workers who migrate] remain second-class people abroad. We need to fight for a just wage here.”

“Trade unions aren’t about trips to sanatoriums, but defending people and human rights.”

“If the oligarchs don’t offer a compromise after the strike, then we have another option — revolution”

“He [AMKR General Director] says that we aren’t Europeans, that we’re uncivilised. And uncivilised people don’t get big wages, you can pay them enough for soup and that’s it.”

There were many conversations about the latest accident at the plant, which happened two days before, on 29 April. Having completed repairs to one of the blast furnaces, workers tested it, but it spilled 40 tonnes of molten iron in the process. Thankfully, no one was injured, and shop workers dealt with the consequences.

"1,000 Euros instead of 1,000 words". 1 May 2018 in Kryvyi Rih. CC Vector Media. Some rights reserved.Meanwhile, two dozen members of left-wing organisations Social Movement and Direct Action, as well as anarchist organisations joined the May Day events. In their speeches, these left-wing activists drew attention to AMKR’s involvement in offshore schemes and international solidarity for organised labour, which helps achieve results in concrete conflicts.

The local branch of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, which is friendly with PMGU, marched separately under their own banners, although May Day was supposed to be held without any party symbols. This column spoke out in favour of Serhiy Kaplin. In my opinion, SPU members are wrong to put their hopes for the renewal of their party in Kaplin. He is a  businessman who represents the interests of workers in parliament (via FPU) and yet at the same time sabotages the fight against the proposed new Labour Code, which is anti-worker. Kaplin is also linked to oligarch Dmytro Firtash, having originally been part of a political party financed by him, and now regularly appearing on Firtash’s TV channel and organising protests in support of his factories. In a word, Kaplin is hardly the best candidate in a “left-wing” party or the fight against economic injustice.

The far right also took part in the International Day of Workers’ Solidarity — they traditionally appeal to workers movements in their search for new electorate and members. The Ukrainian far-right political party Svoboda (“Freedom”) has its own trade union, Freedom of Work — and several members of its AMKR branch were present, as well as Yuri Noyevyi, a far-right Kyiv city deputy known for organising attacks on the feminist movement and LGBT activists in the capital.

Svoboda's trade union presence at the 1 May 2018 action. Source: Social Movement. Another Svoboda member’s speech underlined the far-right’s vision of proletarian struggle: it should be waged in support of a “Ukrainian worker’s state” led by the “best” — i.e. Svoboda members and their totalitarian integral nationalism.

The anti-democratic spirit of this party can be seen in their trade union, which, according to its charter, is led by a “Head of the Union, a single-person elected position of the union”. Taking into account this union’s small membership, the election for this position turns into the worst Soviet ritual of voting for one candidate. The Svoboda members did not take part in the 14 March rally and called on people not to attend the 27 March conference, yet now claim on television that they are the leaders of the strike. Worker activists — who are involved in the real struggle against the factory’s owners and management — believe that Svoboda members are trying to build reputations via someone else’s struggle, creating an image of themselves as a socially-oriented party. They’re also useful for the AMKR administration, playing the role of “controlled radicals”.  

A marathon with hurdles

After 1 May, AMKR management and trade unionists managed to square off for another few rounds. While in April, the factory administration tried to prolong the reconciliation commission in any way possible, since the beginning of May it seems to have agreed to join the negotiation table. Their policy, however, hasn’t changed — they’re still applying administrative pressure, legal manipulations, buying some people off and frightening others. Management has now raised workers’ wages by 12%, inferring that a bird in the hand is better than an exhausting struggle against a team of professional lawyers and managers with connections in the state apparatus. On 3 May, a meeting to agree who would be represented on the reconciliation commission turned into a 25-hour marathon. Here, management played for time, the police blocked union representatives from leaving the room, and workers held a spontaneous protest and nearly occupied the factory administration building. In the end, the necessary documents were signed and the reconciliation commission was confirmed by both sides.

On 10 May, the reconciliation commission finally held its first meeting; secretaries were appointed, and procedures were confirmed. It seemed that it would now be possible to begin examining employee demands. But alas the next day it turned out that the administration has filed a court case the previous week, demanding that the 27 March conference be declared illegitimate. The owner will try and stop the reconciliation commission while the case is heard in court. These kind of manoeuvres can last for a very long time.

An April 2018 letter from Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) demanding that mine managers in the Donetsk region keep the SBU informed of independent trade union activity and "destabilising elements". At this point, the state decided to get involved — after all, it is led by big capital and is concerned with its problems.

The city’s State Security Service department (SBU) took an interest in the activities of the independent trade unions. And this is a manifestation of a direct policy: in Donetsk region, the SBU recently requested that mining companies report on the activity of independent unions as potential “destabilising elements”. Perhaps they consider dividing the interests of labour from the interests of capital “separatism”.

The Kryvyi Rih unions’ appeal to state institutions is completely understandable and symptomatic — your average Ukrainian is far more law-abiding than those who write or enforce the laws for them.

Unfortunately, Ukraine’s current political elite comes from those social circles which actively practice the art of “optimising” and “minimising”.

Our locomotive is hurtling forward

But there’s more to life than highly paid lawyers and corrupt public officials in their sterilised offices. Help for the AMKR workers came — naturally — from other workers.

On 14 May, independent trade unions on Ukraine’s railways started a work-to-rule action, demanding higher wages, the return of cancelled privileges and new locomotives. AMKR’s railway shop also joined the “Italian strike” as it’s called, driving their trains into the repair yards and stopping the transfer of ore to the furnaces. The factory’s general director contacted the police with a list of “crimes” committed by AMKR employees, before starting a rumour that the factory would close, and that Ihor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov (Ukrainian oligarchs who own part of the Kryvyi Rih complex) are involved in the conflict. Independent trade unionists responded: it is factory management who are responsible for the situation, and there is no strike — employees are simply refusing to work in injust and unsafe conditions.

Serhiy Moskalets, Free Union of Railway Workers of Ukraine, announces a work-to-rule action at Kremenchuk rail depot on 14 May 2018. Source: Nabat TV>On 18 May, the AMKR administration made their move, deploying strikebreakers with the help of the state. Locomotives from Ukrainian Railways began working again at the factory; militarised security was brought onto the site. When millions of dollars are under threat, workers find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun. Kryvyi Rih residents are trying to remind these people — who are serving the interests of others — about the unity of class interest.

The situation at the factory and around it is now so tense that ArcelorMittal’s owner, Lakshmi Mittal, was supposed to visit on 25 May. Meanwhile, AMKR General Director Parajmit Kalon has offered employees an increase to the factory’s wage fund in November — to the tune of 1.1 billion hryvnya. This figure sounds astronomical, but in practice this will mean a raise to average wages of €130 per month. And the rhetoric found in Kalon’s official communication is striking in terms of its lies and manipulation, camouflaged in evenhandedness and corporate language. The rise in wages, so the official communication goes, will place the factory in a difficult position; employees are “ruining the investment attractiveness of Ukraine” (An economic counter-revolution! Where is the SBU?); people should be thinking about introducing new technologies, not higher wages. But who has prevented ArcelorMittal over the past 13 years to stop using the last Martin furnaces in Ukraine, aside from the Alchevsk metal factory? Of course, the director did not mention offshore schemes at all.

If the trade union movement can bring the plant’s finances out into the open, then they will have to have a say in how those funds are used

Instead, the top manager pressured employees by referring to figures with an innumerable amount of zeros and hints of an apocalypse, but you can sense his own despair when he reads out the words “when our blast furnaces will be full again” in his video address to workers.

What are we fighting for?

Today, Kryvyi Rih workers are involved in a struggle that could have far-reaching consequences for the whole of Ukraine. The protesters’ main demand is raising wages, but this issue isn’t limited to paying for medical insurance policies, new washing machines and holidays abroad. Higher wages are a necessary condition for developing real forms of democracy in Ukraine. Workers with good wages can spend more time and resources on participating in political life, gain better access to information and (self-)education — and thus the right skills for making decisions. Events in Kryvyi Rih prove that workers can break through the smokescreen of bourgeois manipulation to the real nature of things, and propose well thought-out (in comparison with the factory owners and officials) policies. The main task of left-wing intellectuals remains explaining the nuances of political economy to workers and putting their struggle in the broader context. It’s nothing new, but this is the classic first step that needs to be taken as part of a long path towards progressive change.

Workers at large heavy industrial plants are a minority in the working class, but in this sector of the economy there are still the conditions that make self-organisation and struggle possible. This is why metal workers and miners, as they achieve results in their conflict with management, present an example of collective action and inspire workers in other sectors where the instincts of self-organisation aren’t so well developed. This could produce a domino effect. The realisation that group interests are the basis of genuine pluralism and directing class struggle into a constructive direction. Thus, real social groups and collectives can come to replace the all-encompassing constructions of “Ukrainian patriot”, “Soviet person” and “homo economicus”. These social groups can define their own course of action in free discussion and through forms of grassroots democracy. This is what Kryvyi Rih workers are doing now. Independent trade unionists are convinced: decentralised structures contain the strength of protest. The AMKR management simply doesn’t know who the unions’ main decision-maker is (this person simply doesn’t exist), and therefore who to pressure first.

By raising the issue of transfer pricing, the workers of Kryvyi Rih are presenting the vices of the ruling order and the defects of the current course of economic development to the court of public opinion. This will, however, present them with new problems. If the trade union movement can bring the plant’s finances out into the open, then they will have to have a say in how those funds are used. After all, democratisation without modernisation always slips into a scramble for limited resources, one that is harmful for society as a whole. The infrastructure in Ukraine’s mining and metal complex needs to be renewed, and the priority needs to be given to producing complex goods. The taxes on profits that a renewed heavy metallurgical industry could bring to the Ukrainian state could be used to develop new hi-tec enterprises and social welfare (healthcare, accomodation and education). State power and big capital have clearly not done this and will not do so, even imitating the fight against offshore schemes.

This returns us to the question of workers’ control over production, the real participation of the working class in discussing and voting on political decisions at the national level (impossible without creating modern workers’ political parties), as well as developing international cooperation of organised labour — the only symmetrical response to the power of transnational corporations. If in the last century, the movement in this direction led to unexpected and sometimes opposite results, this does not mean that we have to refute those ideas. Today, history is made in struggle.

Satellite photo of the Shayrat Airfield in the Homs region of Syria. Picture by USA TODAY Network/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.In essence, the theories that circulated questionning the Assad regime's responsibility for the April chemical attack on Douma rest on two core claims: Firstly, that the Assad regime has been ‘winning the war’, and hence has no need to deploy chemical weapons; and secondly, that the attack ‘conveniently’ came after a US declaration that it was withdrawing from the conflict. Here, the rebels would benefit from such an attack if it brought intervention against the regime

Each of these theories, in turn, are based on crucial assumptions.

“Assad was already winning the war”

1. One of the main assumptions on which this notion rests is that there have been effectively only ‘three’ chemical attacks that the regime has been accused of ‘by the west’: Ghouta 2013, Khan Shaykhoun 2017 and Douma 2018. According to this reading, on each occasion western powers have jumped on these incidents to launch an attack on the Syrian regime

In reality, there have been hundreds of chemical attacks in Syria reported since 2012 - including up to 85 merely in the past year since Trump’s ‘airfield strike’ of April 2017 (according to Human Rights Watch) - most of which only garner marginal media coverage and provoke little media and online commotion.

Indeed, there have been several chemical attacks even in the past few months since Trump’s ‘airfield strike’, including in Ghouta (taking place across January,February and March as well as repeatedly in 2017) and Idlib. These have been largely ignored in the various English-speaking ‘mass media’ outlets (whether ‘mainstream’ or ‘alternative’ platforms: whereby a shared proclamation of a “new campaign of bombing Syria” - with “Syria” comprising empty buildings belonging to the Assad regime - has arguably provoked more coverage and opposition than thousands of US-led airstrikes on non-regime-held “Syria” since 2014).

The vast majority of Syria’s chemical attacks have gone unnoticed and unchallenged

In reality, the vast majority of Syria’s chemical attacks have gone unnoticed and unchallenged. It is only the largest of these ‘mass casualty single incidents’ - often involving the use of Sarin or nerve gas (though there have been incidents reported of these which have gone unpunished) - that have forced a response. It seems that the more graphic footage of children foaming from the mouth (rather than simply struggling for breath from Chlorine attacks), has greater success in garnering western media coverage and making the frontpage of newspapers.

Whilst most of these occasions were Chlorine gas attacks, once described by President Obama as “not historically a chemical weapon”, there have also been reported incidents of Sarin gas attacks that have gone unpunished, as took place for instance in 2015. Indeed, in December 2016, the Syrian regime used Sarin gas again in Palmyra. The western response wasn’t only to ignore the atrocity, but the US led Coalition actively supported a regime offensive on Palmyra, dominated by foreign militias including Hezbollah, months later.

Indeed, in 2015 the US Obama Administration blocked a newspaper investigation into Syria’s (continued) chemical weapons stockpile after a reported Sarin attack, whilst it has been revealed earlier that the UK had exportedthe chemicals used by the Syrian regime to make the nerve agent.

2. Secondly: a general trend of ‘winning’ in a protracted conflict does not equate progress in a specific battle (nor does it negate real conflict dynamics and difficulties on the ground). The rebel group in Douma, Jaish al-Islam, happened to be the single largest individual brigade in Syria, being substantially equipped with heavy weaponry (by stark contrast to most FSA groups) as well as tanks captured from the Syrian regime. Its ‘Hamas-like’ military parades propelled it to fame as one of Syria’s strongest rebel outfits. Unlike the FSA faction Failaq al-Rahman (which controlled the Ghouta suburb of Jobar) and Ahrar al-Sham (which controlled Harasta), the group refused to evacuate Douma as part of the agreed evacuation deal with the other two factions - preferring to hold out for a separate and better deal specifically adapted to their (self-perceived) greater military weight.

Whilst other groups chose to relocate to other rebel-held areas - leaving behind heavy weaponry and only taking light arms - it has been reported that Jaish al-Islam by contrast offered to “reconciliate” as a local “police force” without heavy weaponry - something allegedly accepted by Russia, but refused by the Assad regime. Indeed, tensions surfaced between the regime and Russia regarding the negotiations, with the regime releasing a pointed statement declaringthat“any negotiations held now are [to be] with the Syrian State exclusively” (despite Assad having previously delegated this authority in interviews).

A military campaign on Douma would have likely cost the regime much in materiel and manpower, and probably have taken months to complete if the rebels decided to stay rooted. Two days before the chemical attack, the rebels declared that they would not leave the area. A day after, they reversed the decision.

3. Thirdly, part of the main reason the regime has been ‘winning’ the war is precisely the consistent use of such chemical weapons that terrorise local communities and place psychological pressure on local rebels to withdraw. This is what took place in Douma. Repeated chemical attacks are also used by the regime to ensure its supporters’ (crucially including businessmen and local capital) continued loyalty, since the message it sends is that “there is no intervention coming” and it makes sense to ‘hedge bets’ on the regime. Simultaneously, the same message is sent to the armed opposition and its civilian constituency: “no one is coming to save you”, and this in turn has been one of the key backdrops to various “reconciliation agreements” agreed by exhausted rebel pockets with the regime (these have often simultaneously included the forced displacement of thousands who otherwise risked death on the regime’s recapture of the area).

Indeed, this was alluded to by the reporting of Iran’s ‘Al-Alam’ TV, Lebanese correspondent Hussain Murdata, who threatened in a ‘selfie video’ taken from a hill overlooking Douma (whilst celebrating the pounding of the district behind him) that if the rebels refused to withdraw, they “would see a big thing today that they have not seen before” during the battle. The video has been since widely-circulated for its potential implications.

4. “From Chlorine to Sarin”: The regime often escalates its chemical weapons use following perceived positive signs from the US administration.

During at least three different points in the conflict, there has been a noticeable tendency for the regime to escalate its chemical weapons from the ‘allowed’ medium of Chlorine to Sarin or nerve gas - following certain statements by the US administration. The first such example took place in December 2015, when the Syrian regime re-used Sarin for perhaps the first time on record after the ‘chemical weapons deal’ of 2013. This incident took place only one week after John Kerry released a series of pointed statements within the space of a few days (that US policy in Syria was “not regime change”, that the rebels could cooperate with the Syrian Army against ISIS even before Assad stepped down, and a reminiscent interview in which he recalled Assad was ready to make peace with Israel before the conflict started). The attack went ignored. The second incident took place in April 2017, when the Trump administration declaredthat it was “no longer focussed” on pressuring Assad to resign, and finally the third attack followed Trump’s recent announcement of US ‘withdrawal’.

The Trump strikes were forewarned and targeted already evacuated bases

On both of the latter occasions, the Trump strikes were forewarned and targeted already evacuated bases. Indeed, in the case of the former, the US-led military command explicitly declared that the intention of the strikes was “not to render the Shayrat airfield inoperable” (that is, even a single airfield; and indeed the regime was back to bombing from Shayrat the next day) and the advance warning was meant “to minimize the risk to Russian and Syrian personnel”.

In other words, even the comparatively ‘assertive’ Trump administration (vis a vis Obama) struck empty buildings after indirectly assuring the regime that it did not have much to fear.

In reality, the military support provided by the US administration to the Assad regime, whether by allowing the influx of tens of thousands of fighters from the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMUs) backed by the Coalition in Iraq, or by returning former ISIS territories exclusively either to factions collaborating with the regime (the SDF) or the regime itself, has been infinitely more valuable.

5. Finally, the questioning of why an authoritarian regime - which has already deployed an unprecedented degree of violence in a 21st century conflict - would use a different form of violence because it is‘winning the conflict’, can be a strange one. ‘Winning’ the conflict following little deterrent against this degree of violence - including a historically rare use of an airforce by a government inside its own borders - will of course embolden the regime’s authoritarianism, since it presumes its victory is a foregone conclusion and there is no need for restraint.

History is filled with such examples. The US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan when the war had already been won. The ‘rape of Germany’ by both allied and Soviet forces after the Second World War is indicative of this ‘victorious’ sense of impunity. The effective questioning of why a party would use disproportionate violence against another party betrays an implicit notion that the accused has an interest in not alienating the local population. Ironically, such arguments denying the ‘rape of Germany’ by supporters of the allies would have undoubtedly been repeated in the same terms: “why would our forces do this when we had already won?”.

Whilst this line of reasoning has been heavily deployed by unabashed regime apologists, it has also been put forward by those who posit‘objectivity’. In this regard, groups such as Stop the War Coalition and the Labour Party have asked for an ‘independent investigation’ into the attack at Douma, whilst never having commented on the previous independent investigation which found the regime guilty of the Khan Shaykhoun attack. Human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and the UN (all of whom have heavily criticised the rebels) have consistently found the regime responsible for attacks. This has happened in 2014 (where the UN confirmed the repeated use of Chlorine by the regime on 8 occasions during two months), 2016,2017 (where a minimum of 34 occasions were recorded, with much higher numbers likely due to restricted access) and 2018.

Perhaps what is more astounding for such theories, is that the UN’s “Independent International Commission of Inquiry” on Syria found the regime responsible for chemical attacks in the same area of Ghouta, only a month ago.

Indeed, the regime has often denied such attacks to have happened in the first place, as was notably the case in Khan Shaykhoun. On that occasion, Assad declared that the victims had been acting and the attack had been a‘fabrication’; only to be contradicted by the Russians who declared that toxic gas had been released after a ‘rebel chemical factory’ was struck. The UN found the regime guilty of chemical attacks, with the OPCW confirming that the substance used was Sarin (in the process disproving the widely circulated theory of ‘fertilisers’ put forward by Seymour Hersh).

It stands to question, therefore, what the point of asking for repeated investigations is if their findings are consistently ignored. By contrast, groups such as Stop the War Coalition and the Labour Party did not wait for independent investigations during their unequivocal apportion of ‘war crimes’ to the Turkish-backed rebel operation in Afrin, or Saudi war crimes in Yemen.  

The attack coming after US announcement of withdrawal

Another common refrain is that the regime attack came "immediately after the US announced its withdrawal from Syria". This understanding rests on the notion that US policy in Syria has been one of "regime change", and that in so acting the regime has inexplicably given the "excuse the US wanted" to act against the regime (presuming the past seven years were not enough).

The implication that the US military presence in Syria has been ‘supportive’ of the rebels - rather than being anything but drastically detrimental - is another symbolic example of how far such narratives are removed from the reality on the ground. Here, one only needs to look at a map showing the areas captured by rebels fighting both Assad and ISIS in which US airstrikes have taken place. These are non existent. Indeed, the original ‘pre-ISIS’ areas controlled by the Syrian rebels since the start of the US-led intervention in 2014 have been halved:

Post by Omar Sabbour | "US essentially stole vast swathes of Syria," gave it to YPG https://t.co/MRZ9BAVzF7pic.twitter.com/o9IQfLYgLl

— James Miller (@Millermena) August 15, 2016

In Manbij, US Special Forces present on the ground have repeatedly exchanged fire with FSA forces attempting to get them to evacuate. The US military presence in Syria has effectively transferred the ownership of vast swathes of territory liberated by the rebels from the regime in 2012-13 (and which were the hotbeds of the 2011 protests) to the YPG; a group which has declared its willingness to become part of the regime army in exchange for regional autonomy. This is not surprising: former US Secretary of State John Kerry declaredlyraised the prospect of rebels fighting alongside the Syrian Army against ISIS even before a departure of Assad.

The US has only supported ‘rebels’ that don’t rebel

In other words, the US has only supported ‘rebels’ that don’t rebel. This has led to certain oxymorons, not least headlines (from none other than pro-regime sources) proclaiming ‘US backed rebels declare neutrality with Assad’ and ”set up joint operations room with the Syrian Army”.

In certain areas such as Manbij and Tel Rifaat, the ownership was then further transferred back to the regime, meaning that towns and villages which constituted the epicentres of the 'Arab Spring' protests and later the FSA's ‘natural constituency’ (as with the regime in areas such as Latakia and Central Damascus, and the YPG in areas such as Afrin and Kobane) were indirectly transferred under the auspices of the US military, back to the regime. In other ex-rebel territories such as Deir al-Zor andPalmyra, where US airstrikes helped foreign pro-regime militias recapture areas from ISIS, this transfer was even more direct.

Indeed, one of the biggest ironies of the conflict is that in the fight against ISIS, there have been more recorded occasions of the US-led Coalition supporting pro-regime militias than there have been of active anti-Assad groups. The only opposition ‘coloured’ groups that the US has supported are those that have agreed to suspend their fight against the regime, such as the Arab factions of the SDF,anti ISIS only factions at the al-Tanf border garrison (groups which fought pro-regime militias around this area were subjected to US-approved regime airstrikes, as well as being allegedly threatened with direct US airstrikes), and the often-cited ‘Division 30’ fighters of the Pentagon’s ‘Train and Equip’ program.

More conclusively, the rebels left Douma, starting their exit even before the ‘punitive’ strikes took place. If the plan was to conduct a ‘false flag’ to wait for a decisive intervention, they would certainly (and indisputably) not have surrendered the last rebel bastion around Damascus threatening the regime after six years of control.

50.50 at the 2018 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.Lara Whyte (LW): Hello and welcome to the third episode of The Backlash, a podcast series by 50.50, the gender and sexuality section of openDemocracy. I’m Lara Whyte and thank you for listening.

This month’s podcast is a little bit different, because we were at the International Journalism Festival in the beautiful Italian city of Perugia and we hosted a panel on why we need feminist investigative journalism. So we thought for this episode, we could give you a flavour of the conversation that we had there.

On the panel, we have 50.50 writer Claudia Torrisi; we also have Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, who is the co-editor of openDemocracy’s UK investigative section Shine a Light; and Crina Boros, an independent data-driven investigative reporter.

Here’s the editor of 50.50, Claire Provost, starting us off by explaining what we mean when we say feminist investigative journalism.

Claire Provost (CP): So I became particularly attracted to and interested in investigative reporting because of its promises, its very core promises, to uncover and expose abuses of power, to reveal critical new information in the public interest.

So where are the investigative journalists challenging patriarchy, challenging structural violence against women, challenging intersecting forms of power and oppression? Now, of course, there are some incredible journalists who are doing this work, but they often do this thanklessly and with too few resources. And this is just not enough.

The goal of our ‘Tracking the Backlash’ series is to demystify how international networks of ultraconservative and fundamentalist organisations are increasingly working together internationally to undermine [sexual and reproductive] rights in law, in policy, in media and other battlegrounds.

So we see feminist investigative journalism as serious investigative reporting about women and LGBTI rights, but not only that.

We want to produce important investigative stories in collaboration with other and with younger women and trans writers to also build their capacity, and thus our collective capacity, to investigate these issues. So it’s not just about what we write, but also how we write and how we work.

"It's not just about what we write, but also how we write and how we work."

LW: And so, Claire, why do you think this hasn’t been happening so far?

CP: This is something you and I have talked about a lot. And I think there are a couple of reasons, and one of them is about the structure of newsrooms and the structure of media organisations that are – you know, this is no surprise – are often very male-dominated, particularly when you look at who holds power in these spaces: who the seniors editors are, who the commissioners are, when you look at job titles and responsibilities and the freedom that individuals have within newsrooms to pursue things that interest them.

In the US, there was one really striking study from the Women’s Media Center, which is a non-profit that tracks issues like these, that looked at when reproductive rights, for example, are covered in the media – when they are covered – it’s more often by men. And they produced a study in 2016 that looked at 12 major outlets in the US and found, for example, that at The New York Times men authored nearly twice as many reproductive rights stories as women did. And that men are were also quoted more often in these stories.

And if the exclusion of women’s voices in debates around our rights is part of the problem, then why do we accept this?

Because who speaks and who frames issues in public debates, it really does matter. And in addition to this, our very male-dominated newsrooms are often filled with a really ultra-competitive atmosphere that kicks questions like this to the curb in the race for my byline, my story, my moment, my recognition, my career, my promotion… always about the individual.

And this doesn’t encourage collaboration or mentorship or solidarity between reporters. And it can also reproduce and really fail to challenge extremely disempowering and damaging power dynamics.

"Who speaks and who frames issues in public debates, it really does matter."

This isn’t to say that all women are feminists, they aren't; and it’s not to say that doing this work is easy, it really isn’t.

As an editor, it can be easier, it can be faster, to work with a highly-educated (in a traditional sense), highly-experienced (in a traditional sense), native English-speaking man, based in the same time zone as you, who doesn’t ask these difficult questions, who doesn’t ask their editor: “Am I really the right person to write this story? Maybe should you give it to someone else.”

But that doesn’t mean that the status quo is right, or that we should continue to abide by it or to support that status quo.

Meaningful collaborations, working in solidarity with other women, supporting new writers, challenging corporate power, challenging fascisms, fundamentalisms, investigating structural violence this is also really difficult and delicate work, which I think is another reason why mainstream organisations, in particular, might not choose to focus their time on these areas.

We spend a lot of time with our writers. We spend a lot of time getting to know them, working with them, developing relationships, editing their pieces really carefully, explaining our edits, engaging in a back and forth that most news desks and editors wouldn’t dream of. It would seem really inefficient.

But our goals are different; our goals are also very explicitly about challenging the exclusion of women’s voices, of trans women, of women of colour, politically-radical women, working-class women, challenging the exclusion of their voices from media and public debates – this is really core to what we want to do, but of course it requires significant care, time and resources.

LW: Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi is an investigative reporter and the editor of Shine a Light which is openDemocracy’s UK investigative section. So, Rebecca, I wanted you to talk us through how Shine a Light covers state and structural violence against women.

ROO: Our sources tend to be based in communities and actually living through an injustice rather than people with access to money and power who might blow the whistle on something. We cover structural violence against women where it’s related to the British government’s austerity program. That program began in 2008 in response to the financial crisis and it’s continued since then.

London women’s protest against austerity cuts. Photo: Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi.By austerity I mean cutting the role of the state in society – so that's less spending on public services like social security, which we call welfare benefits in the UK; that’s less money for local authorities; that’s cuts to legal aid for people who aren’t rich; and that’s a freeze on salaries of public sectors workers.

It's also lowering taxes, saving money by cutting spending, and all of this hurts women most – that’s really well documented. There is a ton of statistics I won’t go through now. But, just broadly, the reason women are more affected by austerity programmes is because they are more likely to use public services; they are more likely to be in low-pay jobs in the public sector; and they are more likely to do unpaid care work when the government is no longer providing a particular social service.

And all of these policy choices are very deliberate. Impacts assessments were produced and sent to civil servants and they still went ahead. And some of these policies seem to be a deliberate attempt to create an old-fashioned nuclear family where women are forced into financially-dependent relationships in order to survive.

"Some of these policies seem to be an attempt to create an old-fashioned nuclear family where women are forced into financially-dependent relationships in order to survive."

So, as you can imagine, there is a huge swathe of material to investigate. You've got public services that have been built over decades, usually by feminist activists, over time, that have become state services, and they are being rolled back through this policy.

And one area that I have tended to focus on is the lives of black and brown women and working-class women because we have data to show that they lose even more than the poorest white women, so they are really hit by some of these policies, and they are also dealing with existing structural disadvantages.

How does this play out in my work? In the long history of the battle for women’s rights and civil rights, and I include trans women in that struggle, personal testimony, and women talking and being listened to, has been crucial in forcing a public awakening that precipitates activism, protests, legal and policy change.

But in the world of investigative journalism, it’s very masculine, so there are certain stories that are deemed worthier than others, and the voices of women just aren’t seen as a priority. In my reporting, I deliberately listen in a particular way, especially when I’m with women of colour, groups often invisible to wider society, in policy, in politics, in feminism – there are so many stories to investigate: the violence is pervasive and it’s hidden in plain sight.

"There are so many stories to investigate: the violence is pervasive and it’s hidden in plain sight."

One story I worked on was in collaboration with journalists in Scotland and Northern Ireland to tell the story of refugee women, and women with uncertain immigration status, trying to leave violent relationships… and there is this huge gap and there is this group of women who are not being helped.

So I wrote about a smart young woman named Nabila who came to the UK from Pakistán and married a British man. Her migration status was a bit iffy; she didn’t have complete rights because she was in the UK on a spousal visa.

He was physically abusive, his family bullied her, and one day she just decided that she’d had enough. So she went to the British police and instead of supporting her, and treating her as a victim of crime, they interrogated her. When she went to a domestic violence refuge, they asked “What’s your immigration status?” before asking, or even saying, I believe you.

There is a gap in the law, basically. And it means that some migrant and refugee women in the UK who are there on a spousal visa can’t access certain public services. Nabila managed to somehow get out of this situation, leave her abusive husband, but she had nowhere to go, so what happens next?

As part of my research, as well as interviewing women, one thing that I tried to do was to get data from the government.

I sent Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office (they manage immigration). They said they don’t keep the data on domestic violence victims. I also sent requests to 34 local authorities across England and Wales, part of a network who are already monitoring migrants with precarious immigration status. Not one single council had kept any data on these women.

One of the problems that I had, as someone who is trying to track what happens to women who aren’t white or who have uncertain migration status, is that sometimes the data isn’t collected. In another quick example, I worked with a university researcher on this. She was writing a story for me about the cuts to services for South Asian women and other women of colour in her area, and she found statistics on gender, statistics on race, but never statistics on both, and it made her feel invisible and frustrated.

"She found statistics on gender, statistics on race, but never statistics on both, and it made her feel invisible and frustrated."

LW: Thank you Rebecca. To move on to Crina – Crina is a freelance data-driven investigative reporter based in London, but from Romania. I wanted you to start by telling us how you started looking into gender-related stories as a data journalist.

CB: Freelancers must find the underreported stories for a living. And I report on drivers of injustice, so I chase dodgy people, questionable business interests and harmful policies. To get a comprehensive understanding, I usually start with data analysis. When reporting on vulnerable groups, it is impossible not to find examples where women suffer the brunt of inequality.

I reported on compensation policies implemented by the British Ministry of Defense (MOD) for victims in war-torn Afghanistan. A table I obtained via Freedom of Information laid out the sums the ministry paid out for each type of injury: partial blindness, $1,000; loss of a foot, $2,500; loss of both legs, between $2,500-7,000, etcetera.

I found that women victims were compensated by default and design significantly less than men for the same type of injury. For example, if a man was accidentally killed by the British armed forces, his family would be compensated with anything between $8,000-12,000. Yet, if a woman was killed, her family would be paid between $5,000-8,000.

And so on for pretty much every single type of injury, apart from one: facially disfigured women were compensated with more money than facially disfigured men because it affected their prospects of a good marriage, if any. Asked why they made this stark discrimination between sexes, the defence ministry of Britain said they were applying local customary laws.

Case 2: I conducted two international polls on women’s rights in a small team of two. One examined endemic sexual harassment and violence on public transport in the world’s megacities. We interviewed over 6,600 women. Parisian women interviewees felt that no one will help them if they were attacked in a metro station or on a train at night. Women felt safer to travel in gender-segregated coaches or carriages in Latin America, while in India they reported being targeted even more for using women’s only transport vehicles.

The most shocking aspect of this research, to me, was to find out that women around the globe choose their lives and livelihoods not around their aspirations, dreams or ambitions, but, say, on how long they will have to walk on a street with no public lighting – a seemingly banal aspect of everyday Western life.

Women using gender-segregated public transport in Jakarta. Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown/Flickr. CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0. Some rights reserved.Case 3: A look at outward migrations patterns in Romania’s most underprivileged areas shows that children left at home suffer when mothers are the first in a couple to migrate for seasonal work. Due to language similarities, Romanian women prefer to migrate to Italy, Spain and Portugal. Their departure, forced by economic circumstances, had led to children going through emotional trauma, burnout phases, spikes in child sexual abuse (especially in girls) and divorces. The migrating mothers are abused too.

Their physical and mental health, self-esteem and civil rights suffer as they toil abroad, often in abject conditions. Strawberry farmers are discouraged from bringing their husbands, but they are strongly encouraged to bring other women from their village... these women have become the main breadwinners of their family. Underprivileged Romanian villages are experiencing a poverty-induced matriarchal revival.

Data-driven investigations: they have the power of showing if a wrongdoing is systematic, whether it is scientifically-correlated with another aspect of life or politics.

"Data-driven investigations: they have the power of showing if a wrongdoing is systematic."

When you go about your reporting using a data-driven approach, there is a certain integrity in your findings. Sometimes you must write your stories around extreme cases; sometimes the average is the biggest anomaly you will ever find. Evidence-based reporting, rather than anecdotal, shelters both journalists and their sources, to some degree, from retaliation.

It’s sometimes better to protect vulnerable sources when you have a database, that’s an inanimate object: you can’t kill it. Most of the times, with data, you don’t assume, you know.

LW: Claudia Torrisi is an independent reporter who writes a regular column for us. Claudia, a lot of your work for us focuses on violence against women. Why?

CT: I think that violence against women is one of the best examples of why Italy needs real feminist journalism. In Italy, the mainstream media talks a lot about stories of femicides, women killed or abused by their partners, raped by strangers. Newspapers and TV programmes are full of these kinds of stories. The problem is that telling stories about women is not the same thing as telling women’s rights stories, and too often the caution and the care that should be applied to reporting on such a critical issue is absent.

Italian media too often use a sort of romantic frame to talk about these stories. The murder is often presented as a crime of passion. You can read words like sick love, jealousy – it is really unbelievable how widespread this narrative is. If you do a quick search on Google, with the words in Italian “killed for jealousy” (uccisa per gelosia), you will see an incredible number of results.

An example: last month in Sicily, a 20-year-old girl was stabbed to death by her boyfriend and there were plenty of articles and headlines saying that he killed her for jealousy. But if you dig a little into this story, you find that the relationship between that girl and her boyfriend was far from being perfect and healthy. She had been beaten up by her partner several times, but she had never filed a complaint with the police.

"Telling stories about women is not the same thing as telling women's rights stories."

So I think that is why this narrative, full of stereotypes and this romantic frame, is dangerous – because describing the violence as linked to individual responsibilities leaves out from the story the roots of the violence, which are patriarchy, unequal power relations between women and men, discrimination.

There are a lot of issues related to femicides and violence that need to be investigated. For example, a lot of victims had filed complaints to the police before being killed. So the question is: why are Italian laws and authorities failing to protect women from violence? Or why do women’s centres and refuges have so many difficulties in carrying out their activities? Why are many of them about to close? Or, another example, why is Italy unable to set school education programs to prevent violence?

Something is changing now, thanks to groups of female journalists and researchers who are trying to reconstruct the way we talk about violence against women in Italy. There are initiatives, education courses, protests when there is bad coverage, but still, this narrative is predominant, so we definitely need better reporting on violence against women.

LW: You give us one of our biggest hits on 50.50 when you looked into the Weinstein scandal and how the Italian media were reporting it. Do you want to tell me about that, and what was different about how it was being reported in Italy, compared to other countries?

CT: One of Weinstein’s accusers was the Italian actress and director Asia Argento who told The New Yorker she was sexually assaulted by Weinstein in 1997. That’s the reason why the Italian media gave significant space to the scandal, but instead of focusing on Weinstein, they scrutinised the victims. We can definitely say that, in Italy, the Weinstein scandal quickly became Asia Argento's scandal.

Asia Argento in Cannes, 2012. Photo: Hahn-Marechal-Nebinger/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Media reports focused on her behaviour, describing her as an opportunist, even a prostitute, questioning why she had waited so long to come forward, and some reports said that what she was claiming wasn’t violence as she was not beaten, she did not scream, she did not escape, she did not fit the stereotype of a sexual violence victim. What is worse is that such voices, here, are seen as common sense: “She could have done something to avoid that situation.”

The debate here got stuck in show business and was treated by the media as gossip. It seems that industries all over the world had their own moments of reckoning inspired by the Weinstein scandal, while we did not have any.

Here the discussion around sexual harassment at work remains a sort of taboo. This is, of course, a cultural problem and it shows how much sexual abusers and harassers can feel safe in this country, but this also has to do with the Italian media industry which is a world in which the power is all in male hands. So the real problem is that narratives are shaped by men who are in power and we know that harassment is about power.

"The real problem is that narratives are shaped by men who are in power and we know that harassment is about power."

Our National Institute of Statistics estimated that 8.2 million Italian women between 14-65 years old have experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime. 1.4 million women have experienced physical harassment or sexual blackmail in their workplace. What's more: 80% of these women said that they told no one at work about the incident; almost no one had reported the incident to the police.

So we need feminist investigative journalists to uncover this system of harassment and abuse in every working field, including the media, and to tell these underreported stories to create safer spaces for women to share their experiences.

LW: That’s it for us. Join us again next month. You can tweet us at @5050od or @Backlash_Track. Feel free to give us a bell, let us know what you think, give us some ideas, feedback also welcome. You can email us, or you can find us on Facebook.

50.50 is an independent feminist media platform. You can support our work by donating on our website. Help us track the backlash against women’s rights.

This episode of The Backlash is an edited version of 50.50's panel at the 2018 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, chaired by Lara Whyte. Audio editing and music production by Simone Lai. Produced by Lara Whyte and Claire Provost; assistant producing by Rocio Ros. 

The Backlash 3.mp3

Image: Juan Rubio, Pacifista. All Rights Reserved.

This article is being published as part of the partnership between ¡Pacifista! and democraciaAbierta. You can read the original here 

The results of the first round of the Colombian presidential elections on May 27 showed the firmness of the political empire founded by Álvaro Uribe, now represented by Iván Duque.

They also showed the emerging strength of an independent Left led by Gustavo Petro, who stands for the intellectual and political legacy of democratic socialism.

These two stories were reflected in the results, which a divided country produced – although the balance tilts slightly more to the Right.

Changing president means a new timetable for implementing what was negotiated in Havana and perhaps even some setbacks regarding certain processes and guarantees of compliance. 

According to the National Civil Registry Electoral Organization, out of a total of 36.783.940 people who were qualified to vote, 19.636.714 went to the polls - just a little more than half.

Iván Duque ended up with 39.14% of the votes, followed by Gustavo Petro with 25.08%, and Sergio Fajardo with 23.73%. Candidates Germán Vargas Lleras and Humberto De La Calle got, respectively, 7.28% and 2.06%.

At regional level, things went like this: the department of Antioquia could have chosen Iván Duque as president in the first round, since he won more than 50% of the votes there - unsurprisingly.

Gustavo Petro, however, snatched Córdoba from Álvaro Uribe’s party, Democratic Centre, which had been reigning in the region for a long time.

But despite the fact that he is a former mayor of the city, the Human Colombia candidate lost in Bogotá to former mayor of Medellín and former governor of Antioquia, Sergio Fajardo. The Liberal Party candidate, Humberto De La Calle, went into debt for failing to reach the minimum percentage of votes (4%) to qualify for the public financing of the campaign.

The results have left many doubts and some concerns in different sectors of Colombian society. One of the questions which has undoubtedly been generating much distress is what will happen with the Peace Agreements and their implementation.

Changing president means a new timetable for implementing what was negotiated in Havana and perhaps even some setbacks regarding certain processes and guarantees of compliance. Everything depends on who gets elected on June 17.

Gustavo Petro sees peace as a social pact; he demands that the FARC comply with the agreement; he tells the ELN that they have only two options left: "being part of the agreement, or keeping to the battlefields.

If the latter, they will be fought by the State"; his program includes taking care of the victims of the conflict in health, education and housing, as part of the necessary restoration of their rights; he is also proposing to create a tax for unproductive rural land and to open the option of buying, distributing and assigning land to the victims of the conflict.

Iván Duque campaigned for the No vote at the plebiscite on the Peace Agreements; for him, some points of what was agreed in Havana represent a threat to the country’s institutions and he has said that he is willing to change them; he wants eradication of illicit crops to be mandatory; he proposes to reform the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which it considers "a monument to the impunity of the FARC”; he does not accept any negotiation with the ELN, and leaves them with the only option of laying down their arms and accepting their prison sentences.

Ricardo Esquivia

Ricardo Esquivia is a spokesperson for the Montes de María Regional Peacebuilding Space, a network made up of several civil society organizations from the Montes de María region which symbolically signed the first peace agreement on March 15, 2016:

"On the one hand we have Duque, who is saying that the Agreements need to be modified. He represents that group of people who are not very happy with them.

On the other side we have Petro, who has not said that he disagrees with the Agreements, but who has not committed himself fully either. I think that given the situation in which the process is right now with the current government, a situation where the Agreements have not been fully complied with, either of the two candidates, if he makes it, will not strengthen the process much - and the process will most probably continue to face difficulties.

But the important thing is that, little by little, communities are realizing that this is not actually the State or the governments’ agreements, but theirs, and that they are the ones that must move forward. "

"I think that Duque's side offers less security, because he represents the No and he is thinking of making amendments to the Agreements. Petro, at least, does not attack them. So, clearly, Duque's position is more unfavourable than Petro’s."

"I am not really fond of extremes, of either one thing or the other, but one has to make a decision here: everyone must think which candidate favours the Agreements most."

"I believe that the current government is unsettled. It wanted to ensure disarmament rather than a peace process. It felt very safe throughout the disarmament process, but not with regards to the rest.

There are not enough resources or sufficient policies on the one hand, and there are doubts and legal questions on the other, all of which are holding back compliance with the Agreements.

And although legal tools actually exist, the problem is that social change is not something that can be made by law. If civil society learns to use these tools, it could determine the way in which officials use them.

Most people put a great deal of interest in actions by the State, and commit themselves to caudillos, and believe that things can be resolved by them, but they are missing the fact that the power to change things actually lies in civil society. "

"What will happen with the Agreements does not depend so much on the incoming president but, mostly, on what the establishment and the officials think."

"It worries me that the State in general has not understood the importance of the Agreements for peace. Institutions have to make them their own and comply with them. If they do not, they will perpetuate the existence of a violent and unjust society. "

Wilfredo Cañizares

Wifredo Cañizares is a member of the Making Progress Foundation, an organization that promotes human rights through the building of peace and the development of democracy:

"We are making an important commitment to consolidating peace and social justice and reconciling the country, and this possibility is represented by Gustavo Petro only."

"Uribism has made very clear during the campaign what it wants to do with both the Agreements and the country. So, there is no doubt that the only possibility we have of guaranteeing the successful implementation of the Agreements is for Petro’s Human Colombia to win in the second round.

His program clearly expresses the will to implement the Agreements and to guarantee the continuity of the talks with the ELN. He has put the defence of life with social justice at the centre of his political proposal."

There is no doubt that the only possibility we have of guaranteeing the successful implementation of the Agreements is for Petro’s Human Colombia to win in the second round.

"The Agreements as a whole are in a critical situation. It is as if President Santos had put aside both his mandate and the agreements.

We must remember that a part of the Agreements still have to go through Congress. This, I think, will be a complex business. But on the political side, on complying with the agreement, we have no doubts about what Petro will do."

"The current Congress has shown its teeth before the Agreements and has lacked the will to guarantee the necessary legal framework for their implementation.

Congress will also be a difficult space for Duque, but it is far easier for Uribism to get Congress to vote on changing or cancelling part of the Agreements, than for Petro to get something positive out of it.

This is not a Congress for peace, it is a Congress fuelled by bureaucracy, politicking and corruption. The sectors of Congress that can guarantee the promotion of laws in favour of the Agreements are in a minority. "

"The only thing we see that could effectively shield the agreements is the Constitutional Court: there is a judgment of the Court saying that the agreements must be complied with and setting a deadline for it.

But we know how things are in this country under a far-Right government: they would probably push new laws through Congress limiting or eliminating the Agreements and we know, from past experience, that the Court would then act in agreement with the sitting president."

"What we hope for is that, in case of there being an Uribist government, the Constitutional Court would stand firm."

"We can expect almost anything. Uribism can do anything to achieve its goals. Anything can happen. One scenario would be a limiting of the Agreements, another would be law proposals to change the JEP, oppose agrarian reform, or end talks with the ELN. "

"The vast majority of the human rights and victims movement is supporting Human Colombia, because there is definitely a greater chance of guaranteeing a peace scenario with them than with Uribism." 

Juliana Hernández

Juliana Hernández is a member of Careful with Peace, an organization that monitors the processes and the implementation of the agreements:

"Right now, the situation puts at risk an important negotiation: the negotiation with the FARC. The candidate who is likely to be president is Iván Duque and he has not been supporting the Peace Agreements as a member of Congress."

"He wants to make structural changes to the Peace Agreements on social issues, justice, truth and comprehensive reparation to the victims.

A government of the Right would directly affect things that are currently being done and that are actually working within the Truth Commission, and institutions such as the National Centre for Historical Memory, which has been able to report independently and objectively on what happened during the conflict."

"Iván Duque reaching the presidency is synonymous with Álvaro Uribe reaching the presidency."

"With candidate Gustavo Petro there is definitely an opportunity - because he has publicly given support to the Peace Agreements, because he carries in his agenda the issue of comprehensive rural reform, and because he considers the possibility of redistributing land.

He is someone who has supported victims of the armed conflict, like María José Pizarro (congressional candidate for the List of Decency and daughter of Carlos Pizarro, the leader of the M19 guerrilla in the 1980s) – they have both been talking about the conflict for many years.

As has Ángela María Robledo (congresswoman for the Green Alliance, now running as vice-presidential candidate with Gustavo Petro), who has been a major advocate of the agreements on issues of gender, truth and justice."

It seems that 50 years of war are not enough for us in this country to take the decision to vote for peace. 

"Meanwhile, Iván Duque is proposing changes in order to transfer some cases to the ordinary courts. This poses the risk of increasing dissidence, much in the same way as happened in 2005 with the paramilitaries.

It also puts at risk the possibility for demobilized persons to receive the funds they were promised to start economic projects of their own, or to access a country whose civil society they can join."

"Considering that only 18% of the agreements have been implemented, the overall picture is quite complicated. If people do not vote for Human Colombia, they will be voting against peace."

"The Agreements have no legislative shield at this time. The only things effectively shielded are the Truth Commission and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.

In theory, the Constitutional Court should shield the Agreements, but if there is no political will to do it, it is unlikely that it will. In addition, there is another risk: they could begin cutting the funds for the JEP, which needs magistrates to operate."

"It seems that 50 years of war are not enough for us in this country to take the decision to vote for peace. We have deeply internalized a discourse which sees organizations as unique political subjects.

When we talk about the FARC, we talk as if they were an individual, when in fact they are thousands of poor rural people who had probably no other options for survival. The Right appeals to this vision so as to be able to stigmatize others."

"Human Colombia has Gustavo Petro as its leader, a former M19 fighter, and that is something they do not forgive. Duque is the scenario we have always known." 

Rashan Charles

The inquest into the death of Rashan Charles who died after being restrained by police opened today at St Pancras court in London.

A jury heard that Rashan died on 22 July last year after contact with a Metropolitan police officer and a second man, said to be a member of the public. The incident took place at a convenience shop in Hackney, East London. Rashan was 20 years old and a father of one. 

CCTV from the shop and from police body worn camera footage was slowed down and played to the court, including the moment when Rashan is restrained, handcuffed and held down by the two men. A member of Rashan’s family left the court tears after watching the footage. 

Members of the public and the press could only listen to proceedings from two narrow pews behind a floor-to-ceiling black curtain which hung across the small court. The curtain was put into place to provide anonymity for two police officers and two witnesses. 

Last November coroner Mary Hassell granted anonymity to the police officers and two witnesses — including the officer and member of the public involved in restraining Rashan. The officers will be referred to as Bx47 and Bx48 throughout the inquest, while the witnesses will be called Witness 1 and Witness 2. Their faces will be seen only by the jury, members of the court, named members of the family and lawyers. 

In footage of the incident shown to the court, officer Bx47 can be seen grabbing Rashan from behind, spinning him around and throwing him to the ground. As he kneels over Rashan, a second man, Witness 1, arrives at the scene and holds Rashan down. The two men handcuff Rashan. By now Rashan’s body is limp. Witness 1 leans on Rashan, his knee on the young man’s leg, while Bx47 is focused on Rashan’s mouth. 

Ms Hassel asked Bx47 why he didn’t ask Witness 1 to leave the scene. “Looking back with hindsight, do you think that it would have been better for you to have taken charge more?” Bx47 answered: “It’s hard to say. I couldn’t say. I honestly don’t know.” Hassell pressed him and asked that if a similar situation occurred again would he ask a member of the public to leave a scene so that he as a police officer could take charge. Bx47 said: “Possibly.”

Ms Hassell asked Bx47 about Rashan’s state during the restraint and why called back up before calling an ambulance. “I didn’t think he had lost consciousness,” he said.

Bx47 will continue to give evidence tomorrow. The inquest is scheduled to last three weeks. 

Women in Grozny, 2012. Photo: Ramil Sitdikov / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.Every time the issue of women’s rights rears its head in Russia’s North Caucasus, defenders of tradition – religious and lay figures alike – solemnly declare that nowhere do women enjoy the kind of protections and respect they receive as they do here. But their slogans in no way coincide with reality, in which monstrous crimes are committed with the tacit consent of society.

Moreover, young people are becoming ever more conservative in their attitudes to women’s rights. And these attitudes are being endorsed by the state authorities – not only at the level of the North Caucasus republics, but at the state level as well.

“Ordinary” murders

In February 2018, the European Court of Human Rights awarded €20,000 in compensation to Khava Bopkhoyeva from the village of Galashki in Ingushetia. Her daughter Zaira was 19 when she was taken to hospital and diagnosed as having been poisoned by “unknown substances”. The girl fell into a coma as a result of impaired oxygen flow to the brain.

A couple of months previously, Zaira had been bride-kidnapped on her way home from college. Though bride-kidnapping is banned – at least on paper – in Chechnya, it is still practised in Ingushetia and North Ossetia. The kidnapper’s mother was unhappy with her son’s choice (“But she’s divorced!”) and Zaira was returned home on the following day. Still, she ended up being married to the man who’d kidnapped her. Zaira didn’t see her husband again, however: he promptly left town, leaving Zaira with his mother and sister. The short period Zaira spent with her new family was punctuated by several trips to hospital: a previously healthy young woman, she experienced poisoning symptoms and suffered from epilepsy-like seizures. Two months later, an ambulance finally removed Zaira from her mother-in-law’s house.

Zaira Bopkhoyeva. Source: Bopkhoyev Family / Pravovoye sodeistvie - Astreya. There’s a lot of unpleasant details in Zaira Bopkhoyeva’s case. Khava Bopkhoyeva, Zaira’s mother, was prevented from initiating criminal proceedings on eight occasions. Zaira herself, meanwhile, remained utterly powerless throughout: kept in her husband’s house as a prisoner, she wasn’t allowed to contact her mother and had her phone confiscated. But perhaps the most appalling detail of all is the role played by Zaira’s relatives on her late father’s side.

Having learnt of her abduction, seven men – individuals on whose help and support the girl could ostensibly rely – lured her out of her home and took her to a forest.

Subjecting Zaira to an hours-long beating, they interrogated her as to whether she and her kidnapper had been physically intimate, and eventually came to a decision: Zaira would return to the man who’d kidnapped her and become his wife. They would play no further part in her fate. Zaira is now 27. She still hasn’t come out of her coma, and no one’s been punished for what was done to her – a perfect illustration, but far from the only one, of the “respect” and “protections” accorded to women in the North Caucasus.

Maryam Magomedova. Source: The New Times / Magomedov Family. Divorced and living with her mother in Moscow, Maryam Magomedova was lured back to her home village of Nechaevka in Dagestan on the pretext of attending her cousin’s wedding. Kusum Magomedova found her daughter’s body in a freshly dug grave in the village cemetery. Maryam was killed by relatives on her father’s side. As in Zaira’s case, everyone around knew what was going on, but Maryam would have vanished without a trace had it not been for her mother’s tenacity. Violating an unspoken social contract that required her, at the very least, to remain silent, Kusum brought the matter to court.

Doing so, however, is often only half the battle. Lawyers representing defendants in trials on so-called “honour killings” have begun deploying a remarkable new rhetorical strategy. The fact that their client is sitting in the dock instead of accepting congratulations merely points, they claim, to the inadequacy of the law. Consider, for example, a speech made by lawyer Ilyas Timishev at the trial of Sultan Daurbekov, who confessed to murdering his daughter in 2015. Timishev wasted no time in denying the guilt of his client. Summoning the full force of his eloquence, Timishev explained that such murders are actually “a good custom”, and one “designed to protect the woman’s honour and dignity”. It’s all done for the victim’s benefit, you see: “He didn’t kill her,” said Timishev. “We ought to put it like this: he removed her from life so she wouldn’t bring shame on herself, on her father and on all her close relatives. That would be more accurate.”

There’s little novelty in Timishev’s arguments; the only novelty is that they’re being made by a lawyer during a criminal trial. But the general idea has long been entrenched in the public consciousness: “Woman! If you’re killed, you’ll have only yourself to blame, unmindful as you’ve been of the fact that every aspect of your existence is determined by your relatives – first by your father, your brothers, your uncles, and subsequently by your husband or even your son. You are their chattel.” And what rights are accorded to items of chattel? None: not over their own lives, nor their own bodies.

A few years ago, a court in Dagestan examined a murder case in which the victim was a 14-year-old girl. After a days-long search, some relatives found the girl’s corpse near her home. The deceased’s father, who played an active role in the search, went to the police that same day and confessed that he’d killed the girl in a fit of anger on discovering that she was “sleeping around”. Some time later, however, new evidence emerged, and the picture completely changed. This morally upstanding father, it turned out, had raped his child over a period of two years. And when the girl finally resisted and threatened to expose his misdeeds, he grew fearful that she’d go through with her threat – and strangled her to death.

Intra-familial sexual violence is a taboo topic. And perhaps Timishev would fail to see a direct link between the existence of a “good custom that protects a woman’s honour” and incest. But once the “right to take life” and the “right to inflict violence”, physical and psychological alike, are effectively enshrined in law, the “right over a woman’s body” is very quick to materialise as well.

“National traditions”

Honour killings are not a ubiquitous phenomenon, of course. But they do exist, and they’re justified on the basis of tradition, which renders any discussion around women’s rights absurd. Furthermore, there has been a recent tendency to make allowances for “national traditions” even in court, especially when it comes to post-divorce custody decisions. We’ve witnessed many cases of Ingush and Chechen women being forcibly separated from their children. So many, in fact, that one is tempted simply to focus on those where everything ended happily.

Elita Magomadova. Source: Instagram. Having reviewed Elita Magomadova’s appeal, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in April 2018 that her right to family life had been violated and awarded her €15,000 in compensation for moral damages. This marks the first time that a case concerning familial relations in Chechnya has been resolved in such a senior court.

Elita’s son was returned to her only in 2016, three years after the boy was kidnapped and relocated from Moscow to Chechnya by her ex-husband.

Elita did her best to put up a fight. But the Russian court ruled again and again that the child would remain with his father. Even after the latter was killed in a road accident, his relatives still refused to give the child back to her mother. Though Elita managed to win the case following numerous legal proceedings, the court bailiffs spread their arms in a gesture of helplessness: we cannot find the child! Desperate now, Elita appealed to the ECHR, which sent an inquiry to Russia. As was to be expected, however, our country failed to recognise that any rights violation had taken place. The court’s decision not to return the kidnapped child to her mother and leave him in the care of his father’s family was explained with reference to “the national idiosyncrasies of child-rearing in Chechen families”.

“He didn’t kill her, we ought to put it like this: he removed her from life so she wouldn’t bring shame on herself”

People wishing to join the battle against “immorality”, whatever the meaning of that word, are a dime a dozen. But sometimes the participants in this battle go beyond the usual teenager users of Youtube and social media groups and include state officials. For instance, in 2016, Gadzhimet Safaraliev, the then head of the State Duma Committee for Nationality Affairs, recommended that one participant should never reveal that she was, in fact, from there. Why? Because Albina Ildarova had posed for swimsuit photos, as per the contest’s requirements.

“Patriarchal paradigms manifest themselves more strongly in the Caucasus than elsewhere in Russia,” Irina Kosterina, sociologist and coordinator of the Henrich Böll Foundation’s Gender Democracy initiative, explains.

“In certain republics, gender relations are strongly influenced by local traditions and customs that regulate social distance, interaction rituals and sometimes also people’s behaviour and appearance. Local researchers and journalists may enjoy writing about the ‘special role of women in Caucasian society’, but they certainly don’t enjoy writing about the problematic side of things: washing your dirty linen in public, they believe, is a definite no-no. Caucasian men are particularly averse to the topic, regarding the slightest reference to women’s rights infringements as a potshot aimed in their collective direction and serving to undermine their reputations.”

A new generation chooses

Two years ago, a group of researchers from the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy conducted a study of the values held by Dagestani Muslims. Troubled though Dagestan might be, 60% of respondents felt “secure”, while 85% declared themselves to be “happy” or “relatively happy”. The questionnaire also featured questions about family and relationships with children. Older people, as it turned out, were generally in favour of the idea of working women, with 90% asserting that women could work as long as they had someone to leave the children with. The equivalent percentage among the younger generation was far lower – a mere 64% – and dropped to 59% among adherents of “non-traditional Islam” (so-called Salafis). But the latter group also proved more tolerant to the idea of women taking the initiative in the search for a husband, with 33% in favour (as compared to a mere nine percent among “secularised Muslims”).

Respondents were also presented with a hypothetical scenario featuring a ne’er-do-well son, a straight-A daughter and a paterfamilias who can afford to educate only one of his two children. 59% of all respondents suggested that he should accord this privilege to the daughter, but only 49% of younger respondents agreed. 40% said that the daughter should be given her own say in the matter, while 19% maintained that she be married off.

In this 2016 talk show broadcast in Dagestan, young men and women voice their concerns about "women's behaviour".

That young people hold conservative attitudes towards women’s rights was also evidenced during a Dagestani talk show on the subject at the time. The talk show’s interactive audience was made up of law school students, and only two of them answered in the affirmative to the question of whether “women in Dagestan have problems”. As it turned out, one of the two had misunderstood the question, while the second proved more unwavering and dug in his heels: “Yes, they do! Many girls don’t dress properly!”

On the talkshow, not a single girl answered that she’d stand up for her herself and assert her right to have her own plans and forge her own way in life

The discussion eventually segued into a family-versus-career debate. The girls among the student audience were asked the following question: what would you do if your other half refused to allow you to continue your studies or go into work after graduating from law school? Not a single girl answered that she’d stand up for her herself and assert her right to have her own plans and forge her own way in life. They were then asked if the very wording of the question didn’t trouble and disconcert them. Did they really believe that anyone, no matter how beloved, had the right to give them – grown adults now – consent to do anything, or to withhold that consent? Cue an awkward silence in the studio – a silence interrupted by a sonorous, girlish voice: “Yes!” “Why?” “He’s responsible for me!”

But “responsibility”, as Caucasian men understand it, isn’t about ensuring that women feel happy and protected. It’s about ensuring that they don’t step out of line. Which entails keeping them under control. A control that can be all-encompassing. A colleague of mine – a woman who’d been working in Chechnya for a couple of months – once made an obscure quip: if a young Chechen hasn’t checked his iPhone for an hour, his sister must be married! No one got what she meant. “Well,” she explained, “if his sister’s married, it’s up to the husband to make sure she’s kept in check. But if she isn’t, any ‘upstanding’ Chechen brother will monitor her every move through her phone’s GPS.”

“A different purpose”

Discussions around gender inequality tend to focus on the male-female wage gap, on “glass ceilings”, on the fact that a woman stands less chance of getting a job than a man with the same level of qualifications, and on the list of occupations from which women are legislatively barred. But in the Caucasus, this list is much broader than elsewhere, and people become acquainted with it long before they actively consider potential employment avenues. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” a five-year-old girl is asked. She answers – and confronts the reality of her world for the first time.

Zarina Beksalova, a teacher from Ingushetia whom I contacted for comment on this matter, didn’t confine herself to a two-sentence response. She sent me an extensive letter, and a very bitter and acerbic one. If we weren’t acquainted, I would never have believed that this young woman, who wears a hijab, could have written something of this kind. I’ll end by quoting two excerpts from Zarina’s letter, followed by her title. She insisted that I don’t omit the latter.

In my conversations with my students, I often tell them about the diversity of professions in the world: there are people who pick up penguins in the Arctic, marine biologists, archaeologists, animators, freelance correspondents, sailors in the navy, etc. The girls listen with great enthusiasm, ask interesting questions, express their concerns. Then someone pipes up: ‘I won’t be allowed to train as an archaeologist. I’m a girl and I have to choose a girly profession.’ She’s followed by a second girl, a third, a fourth, a tenth, all of them breaking out into bitter lamentations.

Girls are barred from many occupations because they serve a ‘different purpose’. Furthermore, ‘men are smarter and stronger / women must wholly submit to the will of their families / girls haven’t the right to study abroad / women’s opinions aren’t taken into account’. A woman can be forcibly married off at any time and to whatever husband her patrilineal relatives deem appropriate. Divorce proceedings, too, can only be initiated with the permission of her family’s menfolk. In our society, a divorcee loses even the little power she wielded as an ‘innocent’ girl or as a married woman.

The absurdity of it all is encapsulated by the fact that widow, divorcee and woman of easy virtue are all rendered by a single Ingush word – zhiiro. I don’t think I really need to expand upon how hard it is to be divorced or widowed in a patriarchal society where everyone can construe the meaning of ‘zhiiro-hood’ however they please. But the time has come for us women to decide what role we are to map out for ourselves in any of the world's communities, and how (if at all) this choice is influenced by this or that status.

Zarina Beksalova, zhiiro.

Palestinian refugees (British Mandate of Palestine - 1948). Public Domain.Seventy years ago, on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, eight hours before the British Mandate over Palestine was set to expire, declared the independence of the State of Israel. Celebrations for this occurrence, in 2018, began at sunset on 18 April and ended on the evening of the following day –  due to the date difference between the Gregorian and Jewish calendars.

Following President Trump’s decision, the US administration has moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on 14 May of this year – a move that has already caused outrage among Palestinians all over the world. The US move is as historically blind as it is politically foolish. It utterly ignores what the dates I have just mentioned represent for the counterpart of a conflict – to say it cynically – that has lasted as long as the State of Israel exists: the Palestinians.

Palestinians consider 15 May one of the most painful days in their calendars. It is the day of the commemoration of the Nakba (in Arabic يوم النكبة  or Yōm al-Nakba, the «Day of the Catastrophe»), the ‘uprooting of the Palestinians and the dismemberment and de-Arabisation of historic Palestine’, as Professor Nur Masalha has poignantly defined it in his book The Palestine Nakba. While it is commemorated every year as if it belonged to the past, the Nakba lives on not only symbolically, but also as a unifying descriptor of a constellation of measures enacted by the State of Israel – often in violation of international law – to drastically reduce public spaces for Palestinians.  

Celebrations of the Israel Independence Day have obliterated the memory of events such as the Deir Yassin massacre. On 9 April 1948, troops belonging to Zionist paramilitary organisations Irgun and Lehi took over the Arab village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, and slaughtered between 101 and 254 Palestinian villagers in the course of a campaign to lift the Arab blockade of Jerusalem. The massacre shocked Arab communities all over Palestine and pushed entire families to leave their lands before something similar befell them too, as Susan Abulhawa narrates in her heart-rending book Mornings in Jenin. 

Similarly, the ‘Great Book Robbery’, the large-scale pillage of books belonging to wealthy Palestinian families of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nazareth and other cities by either individual or state-sponsored looters, sometimes with the aid of the Israeli army, has largely remained unknown. Some of the stolen books have been reported to have been recycled into paper, whereas others are held in the archives of the National Library of Israel under the authority of the Custodian for Absentee Property. Some still bear the marks of their original owners, including dedications from those who gave them away as presents.

These two episodes are exemplary of an arguably all-encompassing and long-term policy to incrementally shrink public spaces for Palestinian culture, memory and dissent. What many refers to as ‘creeping annexation’ – that is, ‘a putative acquisition of territory … undertaken not in one fell swoop, but gradually through a pattern of oblique and sometimes informal measures’ – to describe the territorial aspect of the prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and – arguably – the Gaza Strip could be extended to encompass also the history of the land.

Such – to a certain extent, less tangible – annexation is carried out through a mixture of legislative and administrative actions and the pursuance of a politics of the fait accompli. In the following paragraphs, I seek to cursorily show how seemingly isolated legislative measures appear to contribute to the progressive erosion of Palestinian identity, culture, history and memory.

Expropriation has concerned not only immovable but also movable property

Section 1 of the Absentee’s Property Law 5710-1950 defines an ‘absentee’ as inter alia a Palestinian citizen who ‘was a legal owner of any property situated in the area of Israel or enjoyed or held it’ and who ‘left his ordinary place of residence in Palestine’. Thus, section 4(a) of the Law empowered the Custodian of Absentees’ Property, appointed by the Minister of Finance under Section 2 of the Law, to take possession of the land belonging to Palestinians who were compelled to flee their land to seek refuge in Jordanian-held territories of historic Palestine or abroad.

This, along with the Land Acquisition Law (Actions and Compensation) of 1953, has resulted in the acquisition by the Jewish National Fund of most of the Palestinian-owned land in Israel (Palestinians living in Israel currently own 3-3.5% of the land, as compared to 48% in 1948). As the ‘Great Book Robbery’ demonstrates, expropriation has concerned not only immovable but also movable property, including books, which are nowadays held by the National Library of Israel.

This move has contributed to the physical and symbolical appropriation by the State of Israel of a cultural and geographical space previously occupied by a lively Palestinian society, which some laudable initiatives, such as the recently opened Palestinian Heritage Museum in the Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of the American Colony, are seeking to reclaim. 

Furthermore, the Law of Return 5710-1950 grants every Jew ‘the right to come to this country as an oleh’ (a Jewish immigrant into Israel), without even mentioning non-Jews – including Palestinians who were forced to abandon their lands for fear of being killed. The Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel, passed by the Knesset in 1980, declares that ‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel’, single-handedly wiping out any Palestinian claim to the Holy City – and in utter disregard of international law.

The State Education Law 5713-1953, as amended in 2000, emphasises the role of State education in perpetuating Jewish and Zionist values while only acknowledging the language, culture, history, heritage and traditions of the Arab population. In a similar fashion, the Broadcasting Authority Law 5725-1965 privileges the diffusion of Jewish culture and traditions among the institutional objectives of the Authority and links them to the purposes of the State Education Law. The Budget Foundations Law (Amendment No. 40) 5771-2011 empowers the Minister of Finance to cut state funding to entities who commemorate ‘Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning’, thus violating the Palestinians’ right to commemorate the Nakba.

The Law Preventing Harm to the State of Israel by Means of Boycott 2011 defines the ‘boycott against the State of Israel’ as a civil wrong, including if motivated by the affiliation of the person or body boycotted with an area under the control of the State of Israel – thus, including the boycott against settlement produce. Notwithstanding the illegality under international law of the settlements. In a controversial move that evidences Israeli authorities’ intolerance towards dissent, Human Rights Watch Israel and Palestine director, Omar Shakir, was revoked his work permit over alleged boycott activities on 7 May 2018.

In more recent times, the Israeli authorities have sought to implement a wide range of measures aimed at progressively shrinking public spaces for Palestinians, including discussions on a bill which seeks to limit the Muslim call to prayer between 11pm and 7am, a bill that would allow for closure of organisations critical of the IDF, including for example Breaking the Silence, the enactment of the Entry into Israel Law (Amendment No. 30) 5778-2018, which empowers the Minister of Interior to revoke the permanent residency status to individuals who have performed a ‘deed which involves breach of allegiance to the State of Israel’.

The Nakba has never ended

The common thread that connects all these seemingly isolated examples seems to be the progressive and incremental restraint of Palestinian identity, culture, memory and history, which is enacted in – at least – three different ways. First, through what could be seen as cultural appropriation, which includes the use of existing legislation to appropriate material and immaterial artefacts of Palestinian descent. Second, through the dispersion of Palestinian claims to the land, which includes the mythologization of an inextricable and exclusive connection between the land of Palestine (aka Israel) and Jewishness. With a spillover effect into the realm of education and entertainment. Third, through the repression of dissent disguised as safeguard of national security. 

Within this trajectory, the Nakba seems only the beginning of a ‘creeping annexation’ of public spaces once occupied by Palestinians. Alternatively, it could be said that the Nakba has never ended and the progression of laws increasingly curtailing the expression of Palestinian claims to their history and land is nothing more than a subtle perpetuation of the Catastrophe.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fought on several grounds – the physical battlefield, bi-lateral negotiations, international institutions and the domestic and international legal arena – but it is also a battle of conflicting narratives, where a party retains superior “firepower” and is able to impose – at least domestically – its own narrative. However, until the original sin – the Nakba – and its repercussions on the subsequent, and still current, Israeli legislative policy are acknowledged and remedied, there cannot be viable prospects of pacification, let alone reconciliation.

marcovdz/Flickr. CC (by-nc-nd)

“A trade union is like a bundle of sticks. The workers are bound together and have the strength of unity … A worker who is not in a union is like a single stick. She can easily be broken or bent to the will of her employer”.

The bundle of sticks story was often told by Mary Macarthur, the founder and leader of the National Federation of Women Workers, a pioneering all-women trade union that existed between 1906-1921. In 2018, 100 years later, the UK workforce is increasingly comprised of ‘single sticks’.

The UK has near full-employment but trade union membership has declined from over 13 million in 1979 to around 6.2 million people today in a total workforce of 32 million. 2017 saw the overall number of union members increase slightly but this followed the biggest annual decline in 2016 since records began. Despite this year’s increase the proportion of the workforce in a union fell to 23.2% in 2017, from 23.5% in 2016. Gavin Kelly and Dan Tomlinson have outlined the stark demographic challenge facing unions as older union members retire and aren’t replaced. They argue that just to stand still and halt the decline will require an 80% rise in union membership among the under 35s by 2030. 

In parallel to declining membership there has been a decline in collective bargaining coverage. Just 15% of private sector workers are covered by a union-negotiated agreement. The absence of agreements denies workers the chance to have their say, collectively through their union, on issues including pay and working conditions but also about ways to improve the business model and increase productivity. Lone voices are easier to be ignored than many.

These huge challenges for unions are bound up with structural shifts in the labour market that are making working life more individualised for many. Platform and ‘gig economy’ companies load risk onto the individual worker by classifying them as independent contractors and not as employees. This decouples work from hard-won employment rights like the minimum wage, sick and holiday pay, and means individuals often have no choice but to accept all the work they can. In more traditional low-pay industries like retail or warehousing – where union membership tends to be low – similar dynamics are at play. Hours are allocated by algorithm and the widespread use of flexible, casualised contracts means work isn’t guaranteed.

New forms of non-standard, individualised employment risk changing people’s expectations about work. Unless challenged, today’s controversial working practices could become the norm tomorrow. And if that work takes place in a non-unionised environment then it will increasingly change people’s expectations about their (in)ability to have a collective say and any influence over their working life.

Unless challenged, today’s controversial working practices could become the norm tomorrow.

None of this is news to trade unions and contrary to some commentary they are not standing still. Around the world and in the UK the labour movement is challenging unfairness and insecurity at work and developing innovative and collaborative responses.

In Australia, United Voice, a large established trade union, has just set up Hospo Voice, a digital union for workers in the low-paying hospitality industry. IG Metall, the German Metalworkers Union, along with the Austrian Chamber of Labour, Austrian TUC and the Swedish union Unionen have established faircrowdwork.org which provides information for people working on online ‘crowdwork’ platforms about unions and their legal rights. Couriers in Austria working for Foodara in Austria, an app-based restaurant delivery service, formed a works council with support from Vida, a transport and services trade union. UK, Dutch and Swiss seafarer unions have merged to form Nautilus International, a cross-border union to represent workers in a cross-border industry. Nautilus has since negotiated a global three-year pay deal with Shell International on behalf of workers from 49 different countries.

In the UK, Community union and Indycube have partnered to provide representation and support for freelance and independent workers. In the courts, unions, led by GMB, have continued to secure victories to provide employment rights for workers in the gig economy. And later this year, ahead of their 150th anniversary, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) will announce the fruits of innovative research to find new ways to organise young workers.

At the recent Unions 21 national conference the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), in conjunction with openDemocracy, organised a session to add to the conversation about new ways unions can organise and engage workers. For the rest of this week we will publish articles from the session’s speakers that set out their ideas.

Whilst unions have always developed new ways of organising, some things don’t change. SPERI’s research for Unions 21 suggests that the most effective way of reaching potential young members is through face-to- face communication at work, and ideally through colleagues who are already union members. Collective organising happens person-by-person through individual conversations. This was as true for factory workers 100 years ago as it is for couriers, academics, or warehouse workers today.

When there are fewer union members in workplaces and when work is more individualised this becomes increasingly hard, but there are plenty of examples of how and where unions are responding. Today word can spread quickly, and campaigns and best practices from around the world should be learnt from and tested. Not everything will be a success but the key is experimentation and evaluation followed by investment in what works. For the union movement to renew and build up the ‘bundle of sticks’ it will require blending old principles and new ideas and techniques.

If you would like to respond to this piece and contribute to the series, please email us at beyond.slavery@opendemocracy.net

17 May 2018: President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev visits the White House. Photo: Sipa USA/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.President Trump’s meeting with Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoev brought a sudden end to the country’s international isolation this month, opening the door to new investment opportunities and the possibility of a renewed strategic military partnership, vital to the American war effort in Afghanistan.

Since inheriting power from his deceased predecessor, the dictator Islam Karimov, then winning a dubious election in September 2016, the new Uzbek leader has made it his mission to thaw relations with his central Asian neighbours and take the country back onto the international stage. Mirziyoev has also taken some steps toward addressing the country’s egregious human rights violations and making the country easier to do business in.

The changes are largely superficial, however, and the US will need to push hard for structural reform if international businesses and their staff are to enjoy a safe operating environment in Uzbekistan. The Trump White House should push for that reform sooner rather than later, if it wants to avoid an embarrassing repeat of President George W. Bush’s acrimonious split with Uzbekistan more than a decade ago.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration was so eager for Central Asian bases to support its war in Afghanistan that it agreed a strategic military partnership with Uzbekistan, despite the brutal and repressive nature of the Karimov regime. That eagerness was short-sighted; when Karimov overstepped by ordering his security forces to shoot dead hundreds of protesters at Andijan in May 2005, Washington was left with little choice but to join international condemnation of the slaughter. The dictator struck back, shutting down the US airbase at Karshi-Khanabad, opened just three years earlier.

Karimov was never invited on an official visit to the US or any major European capital again.

Mirziyoev wants to avoid that kind of infamy. He is clearly keen to improve Uzbekistan’s image as one of the most repressive countries in the world. His government has recently allowed visits by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, released prisoners of conscience, and begun a dialogue with the Cotton Campaign, an international movement including Uzbek exiles like myself, which seeks to end the yearly practice of forcing Uzbeks to pick cotton for little or no pay. On the eve of Mirziyoev’s travel to the US, defendants accused of conspiring to overthrow the government, which routinely leads to at least ten years in prison, were spared jail. The trial was conducted with unprecedented openness and regard for due process.

All of this can be reversed on a whim, however, if there is no reform to the judiciary to ensure its independence.

Mirziyoev is similarly keen to improve the country’s reputation for endemic corruption. Yet he has so far failed to establish mechanisms to prevent and punish it. The government has yet to learn its lesson from the recent scandal over bribes extorted by Karimov’s daughter from international telecom companies TeliaSonera and Vimpelcom. The tendering process in the country remains opaque, often non-existent. Public officials have no legal duty to file annual declarations that would be open to the public. There is no public database of companies and their owners. Regulating conflict of interest has not even been discussed. And there is no anti-corruption agency that should enjoy autonomy and independence from the executive. All this must change. If corrupt officials can continue to extort local and international businesses, in all likelihood they will.

Instead, the government has invested in cosmetic change, by transforming a part of the capital into Tashkent City, a glittering complex of skyscrapers, to accommodate international businesses. To do so the city government has used the police, administrative pressure and intimidation, to evict hundreds of households, without consent or adequate compensation. Foreign investors would do well to consider how easily the rights of property holders can be rendered meaningless in Uzbekistan. The treatment of those families echoes how, under the Karimov regime, Newmont Mining Corp. and Oxus Gold were expelled from the country.

It is true that some trade and administrative barriers for businesses are being lowered or removed, the tax system is being reviewed for reform, and the currency exchange policy has been liberalised. But as in Russia and Ukraine, embracing the free market will mean nothing for Uzbekistan’s ordinary citizens if there are insufficient safeguards against corruption and collusion between public office holders and private businesses. The result will be an economic and political environment dominated by oligarchs.

Foreign investors are unlikely to be eager to operate in environments with such a high degree of risk. During his American visit, Mirziyoev signed 20 contracts for a total amount of $4.8 billion, which sounds like a great boost to the nation’s economy. Yet if you look at the small print, most of these are Uzbekistan committing to invest in the US economy, creating 10,000 jobs for Americans, not for Uzbeks.  

My country is at a crossroads. If it does not reform its governance system to better protect against corruption, it will become mired in crony capitalism, with all the consequences that entails – underdevelopment, new forms of authoritarianism, repression and inevitable mass discontent. The White House must keep on pushing Tashkent for institutional change if it doesn’t want another Andijan on its conscience.

Image: 2014 walk-outs by criminal barristers over legal aid cuts - action has now escalated. Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA Images, all rights reserved.

Since 1 April, criminal barristers in England and Wales have been refusing to go to court.

What has incensed our learned friends so much as to leave defendants unrepresented in the dock? The latest wave of cuts to legal aid that would bring an already creaking criminal justice system to its knees.

Social media comments suggest, however, that many members of the public are unmoved:

‘Will they now have to drive Porches instead of Lamborghinis?’

‘One phone call to [my] lawyer and two letters written by [my] lawyer. Bill was over £500. Difficult to justify how much they charge!’

Sadly, many people like the commenters above confuse legal aid work, which is publicly funded, with private work. They’re therefore probably unaware that some barristers earn as little as £12,000 per year.

Here’s how—and why you should care.

Legal aid work involves barristers representing people who can’t afford to pay privately. Those barristers aren’t paid by the people they represent, but by the state. The vast majority of criminal cases are publicly funded, and many involve representing some of the most vulnerable people in society—including children, the mentally ill and the homeless.

Many barristers take on exclusively (or almost exclusively) legal aid work—I was one of them. In criminal cases, it’s common for barristers early on in their career to represent someone at court for under £100—and sometimes as little as £50.

That includes all case preparation, travel time (often to another part of the country), time spent in conference with the client, time spent waiting to get called on, time spent in court, time spent advising the client and their solicitor on the result (potentially including the prospect of an appeal) and time spent writing up a record of all of the above afterwards.

From that figure, the barrister (who’s typically self-employed) will take off their travel costs; their clerks’ fees (typically 10–20 per cent of the barrister’s fee); their practising certificate, professional membership and annual training fees; the cost of their legal reference books (hundreds of pounds); and the cost of their wig, gown and other required items of court dress (hundreds of pounds).

That’s before tax.

It’s not difficult to see how many barristers can earn well below the minimum wage—or even end up paying to go to court. In my first year as a barrister living in London in 2008, I was in court five or six days a week (including some Saturdays) and preparing cases at home on Sundays.

For my efforts I earned the princely sum of £10,000.

Since then, repeated cuts to legal aid have meant barristers’ fees have plummeted more than 40 per cent in real terms.

Can you think of any other profession that has faced anywhere near this level of swingeing cuts?

But this isn’t about legal aid barristers whinging about how little they’re paid—no one does this job for the money. It’s about protecting access to justice.

Fewer people are now eligible for legal aid, meaning many are left to represent themselves in the criminal, family and civil courts in cases that can have life-changing consequences for them.

I can’t count the number of elderly and mentally ill defendants I’ve seen arguing their case alone in front of a judge, fighting for their liberty. It’s shameful.

It’s also crucial for justice that the criminal bar attracts the best and the brightest from a wide range of backgrounds. It has become nigh on impossible for students who aren’t from privileged, middle-class families, backed up by the bank of mum and dad, to thrive—or even survive—as criminal barristers. Some have spoken out about being even unable to afford their train ticket to court or relying on their Boots Advantage Card to be able to afford lunch.

These situations aren’t uncommon, and they show how little successive governments have valued our criminal justice system. 

Yes, the most experienced criminal barristers—QCs and the like, who’ve been working for decades and deal with complicated and high-profile murder and terrorism trials—are paid very well. But they’re absolutely not representative of the criminal bar, despite the fat-cat stereotype the tabloids love to peddle.

The question is: why on earth would someone want to become a criminal barrister nowadays—to rack up huge amounts of debt in university fees and the necessary further years of training to earn a pittance for what is extremely hard work, with no minimum wage, no maternity leave, no paid holidays and no pension?

I applaud the criminal barristers now refusing to work in protest. And I’d be joining them, if I hadn’t already thrown in the towel and left the bar two years ago.

Image: Ruins left by an American missile attack on Syria, Tasnim news agency. Rights: CC 4.0

Ian Sinclair interviews Dr Florian Zollmann, a Lecturer in Journalism at Newcastle University and author of the recent book Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention (Peter Lang, 2017). Zollmann starts by setting out the main findings of his study.

Florian Zollmann: Leading news organisations in liberal democracies employ a double-standard when reporting on human rights violations: If countries designated to be ‘enemies’ of the West (in my study, I look at cases from the past including the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012) conduct human rights violations, the news media highlight these abuses and report demands for action to stop human rights breaches. Such measures may entail policies with potentially serious effects for the target countries, including sanctions and military intervention. If, on the other hand, Western states or their ‘allies’ (in my study, I look at cases from the past including the US-led Coalition in Iraq in 2004 and Egypt in 2013) are the perpetrators of human rights violations that are similar or in excess of those conducted by ‘enemies’, the news media employ significantly less investigatory zeal in their reporting and virtually no measures to stop abuses are suggested.

My study shows, on the basis of an assessment of extensive quantitative and textual data, that the news media utilise different journalistic norms in terms of how they convey emotional sentiment, handle facts and evidence, use sources and perspective and classify events. These journalistic double standards, then, translate into a radically dichotomised news framing of problem definitions, responsibility of actors and policy options in response to what constitute relatively similar human rights violations: Official ‘enemies’ are depicted as pariah states, facing international condemnation and intervention. Western states and their ‘allies’ are depicted as benign forces, which may at best be criticised for using the wrong tactics and policy approaches. The dynamics of such dichotomised propaganda campaigns have had the effect that only some bloodbaths received visibility and scrutiny in the public sphere.

In Libya, conflict between government and opposition groups erupted on 15 February 2011. By 23 February, Western newspapers had provided generous space for quotations by US, UK and EU government spokespersons as well as partisan actors who demanded intervention in Libya in accordance with the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine. The dominant news media discourse depicted the actions of the Libyan government as atrocious crimes, ordered by the highest levels of governance. The United Nations Security Council eventually authorised the 19 March 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

Yet, whilst the International Criminal Court estimated that about 500-700 people had been killed in Libya in February, no independent investigation into the incidents had been conducted at the time of the NATO onslaught. As my study shows, the international press had acted as a facilitator for intervention in Libya. This so-called ‘humanitarian’ intervention was far deadlier than the violence that had preceded it. According to Alan J. Kuperman, ‘NATO intervention magnified the death toll in Libya by about seven to ten times’. Moreover, it turned out that Libyan security forces had not indiscriminately targeted protestors (see here). My study also shows how the pretext for intervention in Libya was discursively manufactured.

Another case study in my book looks at news media reporting of so-called US-Coalition ‘counter-insurgency’ operations during the occupation of Iraq. In October 2004, the respected medical journal The Lancet published a study suggesting that 98,000 people had been killed during the US-Coalition invasion-occupation of Iraq between 19 March 2003 and mid-September 2004. The authors of the study wrote that the violent deaths ‘were mainly attributed to coalition forces’ and ‘most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children’. On 8 November 2004, US-Coalition forces attacked the Sunni city Fallujah, the centre of Iraqi resistance against the occupation. US-Coalition air and ground forces used an array of heavy weaponry including artillery, tanks, helicopters, jets, heavy bombs, and other devices, like explosive coils to clear minefields, in residential areas. Fallujah was treated largely as a ‘free-fire zone’. It is estimated that during this assault between 800 and 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.

As I document in my book, the Western press hardly reported these figures. The findings of the Lancet study were largely ignored and not linked with US-Coalition warfare in Iraq. In fact, the press depicted civilian carnage as ‘casualties’ – the tragic outcomes of ‘war’. Whilst the press included indignant statements by Iraqi actors and human rights organisations, there were almost no reports of any statements conveying policy options that would have put a constraint on the US-Coalition’s use of military force such as sanctions or measures in line with ‘responsibility to protect’.

IS: Why do elite newspapers in the West report foreign affairs in the way you describe?

FZ: The Western elite press draws heavily from government officials to define, explain and accentuate events. Such performance results from institutional imperatives: newspapers have to operate cost-effectively in the market system. The institutional requirement to make profits compromises journalistic standards, such as to report accurately and in a balanced way, to search for the ‘truth’, or to monitor the powerful. Markets incentivise the use of pre-packaged information provided by governments and powerful lobby groups. Nurturing such official news beats decreases the costs of newsgathering and fact-checking. Official statements are regarded as authoritative and their publication does not lead to reprimands.

Additionally, there has been a vast increase in government and corporate propaganda activities that feed into the news media cycle. If newspapers engage in critical investigations that undermine the official narrative, they face costly repercussions: denial of access to official spokespersons, negative responses by think-tanks and actors as well as the threat of libel suits. Because small losses in revenue may threaten their economic survival, news organisations are driven towards the powerful in society.

Commercial constraints are augmented by the integration of newspapers into quasi-monopoly corporations. According to the Media Reform Coalition, ‘Britain has one of the most concentrated media environments in the world, with 3 companies in control of 71% of national newspaper circulation and 5 companies in command of 81% of local newspaper titles.’ Such levels of media concentration encourage ideological homogenisation. For example, market concentration allows media owners to synchronise the news agenda and incentivises the recycling of information across different platforms. Corporate consolidation establishes market-entry barriers and prevents the launching of alternative newspapers. Finally, the commercial press is dependent on corporations that act as major advertising sponsors. The research I discuss in my book suggests that news organisations are inclined to not undermine the interests of their sponsors. Moreover, work by James Curran highlights how advertisers act as de-facto licensers: without advertising support, commercial news organisations go out of business.

IS: Did you find any significant differences between the US, UK and German press?

FZ: On a macro-level, there are strikingly similar reporting patterns in the US, UK and German press. This means that the dichotomised reporting patterns outlined above are replicated across countries independent of a newspaper’s national or ideological affiliation. Such a performance can be explained by the fact that US, UK and German news organisations are subject to the same economic constraints. Furthermore, US, UK and German governments share a similar ideological outlook in terms of US-led Western foreign policy objectives. We have seen numerous examples in recent years when the UK and German governments have supported US foreign policies, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The news media broadly reflect this alignment. Of course, there are also differences. National political interests manifest in reporting as well. For instance, the German press included tactical reservations about using military force in Libya. This appeared to reflect national elite disagreements, as German politicians preferred other policy options. There were also differences in the quantity and detail of coverage. The US press arguably provided the most comprehensive coverage in terms of the amount of published material. The ‘liberal’ UK press reported in more detail on humanitarian issues and was more critical of US-Coalition actions in Iraq – albeit not in a way that substantially challenged policy.

IS: The ongoing war in Yemen is not one of the case studies you analyse in your book. From what you have seen of the media coverage of the Yemen conflict, does it conform to your thesis?

FZ: As I have written elsewhere, the Yemen case fits well in the framework of my study. The humanitarian crisis is largely a consequence of the blockade and invasion of Yemen orchestrated by a Saudi-led military coalition. Saudi Arabia has been a close ally of the West. During the war in Yemen, the US and UK have provided substantial diplomatic and military support to Saudi Arabia. Consequently, there has been no willingness by the so-called ‘international community’ to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to stop its actions in Yemen and R2P and related doctrines have not been seriously evoked. This, then, has been reflected in muted news media coverage. Whilst reports and critical discussions about Saudi Arabia’s military conduct and the way civilian areas have been systematically targeted in Yemen have been published by the press, there has been no sustained campaign in the news media aimed at seriously constraining the Saudi military’s ability to use force. Comparing this with reporting on Syria, where the Western news media have been constantly featuring reports that include discussions about military and other forms of intervention, the double standards could not be more obvious.

IS: What advice would you give to interested citizens keen to get an accurate understanding of world affairs?

FZ: I am hesitant to recommend specific news outlets. It is important to draw from multiple and diverse sources of information and to question official announcements, narratives and ideologies, independent of where they come from.

Eurozine is the network of Europe’s leading cultural journals, facilitating the exchange of texts, ideas and knowledge between 84 publications from 33 countries. In its online magazine (www.eurozine.com), Eurozine publishes original articles and translations from partner journals and other sources for an international readership.

Eurozine is currently seeking an Editor-in-chief to join its team in Vienna.

The Editor-in-chief will be responsible for all content published by Eurozine on its website and in social media and will oversee Eurozine’s editorial staff. Together with the international Editorial Board she/he will set an editorial strategy and be responsible for its implementation. The nature of Eurozine as a network and cultural publication in its own right requires a strategy that allows for representation of different perspectives coming from the network partners, their contextualization in current European/international debates and the setting of specific focal points.

Together with the Managing Director, the Editor-in-chief will actively represent Eurozine externally to the public and cooperation partners, and internally to the network partners; she/he will also contribute to fundraising. She/he will conceptualize the annual network conference and other events organized by Eurozine.

The organization is seeking a team-player with extensive journalistic/editorial experience, who shares and develops Eurozine’s vision and mission, strives to strengthen the network of cultural journals, shapes the profile of the online magazine, is well-connected and excels as a communicator.

Requirements:

• Strategic view on editorial and organisational development
• Extensive journalistic/editorial experience, preferably in the context of cultural journals or feuilleton journalism
• Overview of relevant European / international debates
• Experience in an institutional setting, preferably with leadership experience
• Excellent command of English, further languages are a plus
• Open, inclusive personality with networking capabilities

Join a motivated and skilful team in an internationally renowned, not-for-profit organization. Eurozine offers an intellectually stimulating, international working environment with opportunities to travel. The employment includes full social security coverage according to Austrian regulations.

The offered position is a full-time position; part-time over a transitional period is also an option. Presence in Vienna is required.

Please send your CV and covering letter, including information on your preferred starting date and salary expectations per email only to Filip Zieliński at jobs@eurozine.com.

There is no deadline for applications. The position will become available as of 1 July 2018. Applications will be considered on an ongoing basis; we therefore encourage you to apply as early as possible. Before applying, please consult Eurozine’s website (http://www.eurozine.com/contact/) for updates on the recruitment process.

For any questions, please contact Filip Zieliński: f.zielinski@eurozine.com

Link to PDF of this job advertisement: http://bit.ly/editor2018

Image: Evening Standard editor and former Chancellor George Osborne. Credit: Matt Cardy/PA Images, all rights reserved 

George Osborne’s London Evening Standard has abandoned the scheduled launch of its controversial £3 million campaign, just days after openDemocracy revealed companies such as Uber and Google had been promised “money can’t buy” news coverage as part of the lucrative deal.

openDemocracy understands that the London 2020 project was planned to be given a fanfare launch in the Evening Standard today. It was to include high-profile, high-impact announcements and ambitious promises on housing, tech, and measures to combat pollution scattered throughout the paper.

Six signed-up partners, each paying £500,000, had been promised positive news and “favourable” coverage that would continue “for the next two years” as part of the 2020 deal.

A “transformation of the capital” into an “economic powerhouse, environmentally and socially sustainable and fit for future” was part of the “editorial” launch.

However when the first copies of the paper arrived at rail and underground stations this afternoon, there was no mention of the project.

Although Evening Standard’s owners ESI Media say they have not ditched the project, there is now no firm launch date.

Since openDemocracy first revealed details of the controversial 2020 deal last week, there has been a storm of outrage over the project, which effectively sweeps away the ethical dividing line between independent editorial and advertising.

The ‘cash for column inches’ scandal has seen calls for George Osborne, the former UK chancellor who led the project, to resign as editor of the Standard. Others called for the Standard – which distributes 900,000 copies throughout Greater London – to be banned from valued distribution points outside London Underground and rail stations; and for the Advertising Standards Authority (the ASA) to take action against ESI Media, the Standard’s parent company owned by Russian oligarchs Alexander and Evgeny Ledbedev, for breaking one of the ASA’s key rules that news cannot appear as editorial content “when it is not.”

openDemocracy asked ESI Media to comment on why the planned London 2020 launch had been called off, if any commercial partners had pulled out of the project, and whether Osborne had been forced into a complete rethink given the public outrage and widespread negative coverage across UK print and broadcast media.

A spokesman for ESI Media said: “You have been misinformed. ESI Media and our partners are committed to launching the London 2020 project and are excited about the potential it holds to deliver tangible change in improving the lives of Londoners. There has been no fixed date for the project to start. We are looking forward to launching the project to our readers during the summer.”

Bigger problems afoot?

openDemocracy has now learned of other developments which could spell trouble for ESI.

Back in 2016, ESI sold the i newspaper to the Johnston Press group. As part of that deal with Johnston, the i signed up to a two-year deal that gives it access to content generated by the Evening Standard and the online Independent.

openDemocracy has now learned that the “i-Standard-Independent” content deal remains in place, but that negotiations over its renewal have now stalled.

A spokesman for Johnston Press said they would not be commenting on whether there was a plan to renew the content deal or not.

A source with knowledge of the Johnston-ESI negotiations said there were a number of straightforward “journalistic reasons” why renewal of the 2016 deal was unlikely. However the source said that although the i had previously taken content from the Standard, that was forecast to stop “given the current atmosphere.”

Outrage over the 2020 project, and the negative press generated by openDemocracy’s investigation, has seen Osborne’s editorship rendered toxic by many industry analysts who see the ‘church-state’ divide between news and advertising as critical to the future of newspapers.

The extent of the financial difficulties being faced inside ESI is not fully known. There are new reports that the local television station, London Live, which barely registers on audience-research evaluations and continues to lose ESI millions each year, has been put up for sale.

“PR death”

Both the tech-giant Google and the international taxi-app firm, Uber, though formally asked to comment on their decision to take part in the London 2020 project, have so far remained silent.

A number of companies chose not to be involved. One of them was the coffeehouse giant, Starbucks. The company told openDemocracy it had met with ESI Media, but had decided not to take the matter further. A company executive told openDemocracy privately that it did not “buy” its reputation and called the idea of paid-for news “PR death.”

ESI Media have denied that they crossed the editorial-advertising divide and insisted that “editorial independence is and remains guaranteed in the contracts we sign.”

However the co-leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, scrutinised the Standard’s 2017 coverage connected to a commercial deal with the Swiss-agri-chem giant, Syngenta. She said the ESI claims that it had never crossed the ad-ed ethical divide did “not stack up”.

She urged Osborne and the Standard to “come clean” about its “hidden commercial agendas.”

High Level on LSD. Credit: Flickr/Kurt Bauschardt. CC BY-SA 2.0.

“Microdosing” on psychedelic substances like LSD—ingesting just enough to heighten cognitive faculties, enhance creativity, improve concentration and alleviate depression—is currently back in vogue among people not normally associated with anything remotely ‘countercultural’ in the USA.

The term psychedelic was coined in 1958 by British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and is derived from the Greek words psyche ("soul, mind") and delein ("to manifest"), hence "soul-manifesting," the implication being that psychedelics can access the soul and develop unused potentials in the human mind. It’s a contention that’s gaining increased acceptance in mainstream universities.

New York University, for example, is hosting clinical trials using psilocybin to treat alcohol addiction. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has been at the forefront of research in treating patients suffering from chronic treatment-resistant PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) with MDMA, commonly known as ‘Ecstasy. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently designated its MDMA-assisted psychotherapy project as a ‘breakthrough therapy.’ Apart from MDMA, MAPS also advocates the use of Ayahuasca,Ibogaine and medical marijuana fora variety of conditions ranging from bipolar syndrome and drug addiction to autism-related disorders, ADHD and clinical depression.

The therapeutic use of psychedelics isn’t new. Between 1953 and 1973, the US federal government funded over a hundred studies on LSD with more than 1,700 subjects participating. Psychedelics were tested on convicts, substance abusers, people suffering from chronic depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenics and terminal cancer patients. LSD was also tested on artists and scientists to explore its effects on creativity, and on divinity students to examine spirituality from a neuroscientific perspective. The empirical data gathered from these tests was largely positive.

LSD “truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind… and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority” says author Michael Pollan in his book How To Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. And that’s what makes this subject socially and politically interesting.

“It is curious to me that what I see as the two greatest threats—environmental crisis and [political] tribalism—these drugs directly address both those mindsets” Pollan told the Guardian in a recent interview. “They undermine our tendency to objectify nature, to think of ourselves as separate from it. They undermine tribalism in that people tend to emerge from these experiences thinking that we are all more alike, all more connected.”

If this is true, then those of us committed to social transformation must start to take the use of psychedelics much more seriously. But what’s the actual or potential connection between LSD and politics?

It was a Swiss chemist called Albert Hoffman who discovered the drug by accident in 1938. While conducting research on another pharmaceutical compound he absorbed the drug through his skin and staggered home to lie down on his sofa, where, “in a dreamlike state, with eyes closed”, he wrote later, “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.” Hoffman felt he had been given the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.”

A few decades later in August 1960, Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist from Harvard University, traveled to Cuernavaca in Mexico and ingested psilocybin (‘magic’) mushrooms for the first time, an experience that radically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary commented that he had "learned more about ... (his) brain and its possibilities...[and] more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than...in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology." Leary became a lifelong evangelist for the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics.

Theoretical physicist Carlos Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, says his romance with quantum theory and the mysteries of the space-time continuum were sparked by his LSD trips as a student radical at the University of Bologna. “It was an extraordinarily strong experience that touched me also intellectually,” he told the Guardian. “Among the strange phenomena was the sense of time stopping. Things were happening in my mind but the clock was not going ahead; the flow of time was not passing any more. It was a total subversion of the structure of reality. How do I know that the usual perception is right, and this is wrong?”

Rovelli has spent the better part of his life grappling with the relationship between space, time and consciousness, fundamental concepts that underlie existence and how we simultaneously perceive the world and shape it. “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” he writes, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’” The concept of time, he says, “has lost layers one after another, piece by piece.” We are left with “an empty windswept landscape almost devoid of all trace of temporality…a world stripped to its essence, glittering with an arid and troubling beauty.”

Large parts of the world are being polarized at a rate rarely seen before, helped in no small measure by social media ‘filter bubbles’ and algorithms that divide people sharply along the lines of nationality or ideology, their underlying human connections rendered increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps such deep hatred and suspicion of the other was always there, but now it has taken center stage and is being used as a potent election strategy by populist and hyper-nationalist leaders the world over. Like herds of cattle, large numbers of people are being programmed and deployed as pawns for a larger agenda.

Therefore, perhaps real change begins with rewiring our perceptual framework. Psychedelic substances have been ingested sacramentally by indigenous cultures to achieve this goal since the dawn of time, and now they’re being validated by the scientific and medical communities. The shifts in consciousness that can be brought about by psychedelics can help in dissolving the man-made boundaries or fear of the other that are implanted in our collective psyche.

While Silicon Valley bio-hackers microdosing on LSD to enhance their workplace performance may not be looking to bring about tectonic shifts in collective consciousness, there’s no reason to restrict the use of psychedelics to these groups and purposes. They could also work as a potent catalyst to awaken humankind to the dangers of toxic nationalism and rabid nativism that threaten to engulf us.

Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were involved in creating "dialogue" between the Soviet Union and the US during the late 1980s. Photo: Mark Lennihan / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.When Russian troops entered Syria in 2015, many people started talking about the inevitability of a military conflict between the US and Russia. In mid-April 2017, President Donald Trump declared that Vladimir Putin, Russia and Iran “would pay a high price” for a chemical attack on the city of Douma that killed several dozen people. The US announced that it was preparing for a retaliatory missile strike on Syrian army bases, drawing a threat from Russia’s Ambassador to Lebanon that Russia would shoot down America’s Tomahawk missiles in response.

The American public are used to treating their president’s outrageous tweets as a joke (Trump on missiles: “Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!”), but in these circumstances Trump’s warning sounded like a return to the apocalyptic mood of the Cold War. After all, in Vladimir Putin Trump is facing another unstable character who, unlike him, doesn’t have to answer to the state and the public. It was Putin who first resorted to the nuclear threat as a tool of international politics when he stated in 2015 that he was prepared to put Russia’s nuclear weapons on standby during the Crimea crisis in 2014.

The Western allies’ April 2018 rocket attack on Syrian bases was, nevertheless, successful, and Russia, fortunately, kept out of it (at least officially: the anti-aircraft defence forces that shot down the Tomahawks could have been commanded by Russian officers). The war with the west was postponed and the period up to and after Putin’s recent re-inauguration (or until after the Football World Cup) can be seen as a time of relative quiet.

Less than a month after the new flare-up in Syria, at the 9 May Victory Day Parade in Moscow, the usual empty intercontinental missile launchers rolled across Red Square: this year they were for Yars missiles (in 2017, it was Topol-M missiles). One 0.9-1.2 megaton Yars can destroy a city of a million people in an instant (the bomb that fell on Hiroshima had an explosive power of 13-18 kilotons). Apart from its Yars missiles, Russia also has one-megaton Topol-M and 25-megaton Voevoda rockets – and a lot more besides.

Fifty years ago, humanity already knew about the futility of nuclear war, given the stockpile of warheads accumulated by that time. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was a product of the 1960s. But now we have a new arms race. The number of warheads may be decreasing, but billions are being spent on delivery (bombs and missiles), as well as control and direction systems.

Meanwhile, there is no mass international anti-nuclear movement of the kind that existed 30 years ago. We hear nothing about scientists calling on their governments to stop nuclear escalation. In the euphoria that greeted the end of the Cold War, it seems, the world has lost its awareness and understanding of the possible consequences of a global conflict.

A poster showing women arrested after a silo dance at Greenham Peace Camp. Source: Sophie Mayer. Admittedly, a couple of useful bodies have continued to function since the time of Détente. The Pugwash Conferences were founded in 1957 by a group of scientists, including Einstein and Joliot-Curie, and have been gradually turning into a kind of peace committee over the years. Many Soviet, and later Russian scientists have been involved with it – but only those recognised and approved of by government: there have been no new Andrey Sakharovs. Billionaire industrialist and public figure Cyrus Eaton, one of Pugwash’s founders and its main sponsor, was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1960 “For strengthening peace between nations”. There is also ICAN– the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, which most of us only heard about last year, when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

These organisations, with their budgets, grants and management structures, can’t however be regarded as a genuine mass civil anti-nuclear arms movement of the type that existed in the 1980s. While there are enough weapons in the world to destroy our planet, we need to think again about global danger.

A disaster on an indescribable scale

In 1983, Andrey Sakharov wrote an open letter from exile to his colleague, the American theoretical physicist Sidney Drell. In that year, Samantha Smith, a young American girl, had already visited the USSR on a private invitation from the then Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who had been responsible for exiling the great academician to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod). Samantha’s visit may have promoted rapport between the USA and the USSR and the launch of the future policy of Détente, but it was still the peak of the Cold War.

Andrey Sakharov, 1988. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Vladimir Fedorenko / RIA Novosti. Some rights reserved.In his open letter, Sakharov described thermo-nuclear war as a “disaster on an indescribable scale, with totally unpredictable consequences – the unpredictability, moreover, would be for the worse.”

The total capacity of the world’s nuclear arsenal at the end of 1980 (50,000 warheads), he wrote, had a cumulative power of 13,000 megatonnes; by comparison, the payload of all the weapons used during the Second World War was a mere six megatonnes.

“You quote a figure,” Sakharov wrote to Drell, “according to which the launch of five thousand missiles with an overall payload of 2,000 megatons will lead to the death of 750 million people from just one affecting factor - the shock wave. <…>The accepted average number of deaths from one warhead is 250,000 <…> Another crucial factor in the effect of nuclear explosions is thermal radiation. At Hiroshima, up to 50% of deaths were due to fires. <…> Inevitably, radioactive ‘traces’ will appear – a fallout zone of dust raised by the explosion and ‘fed’ by the products of uranium fission.”

The first 3-D model of nuclear winter, obtained by the CIA from the International Seminar on Nuclear War in Italy 1984. It depicts the findings of Soviet 3-D computer model research on nuclear winter from 1983. Public Domain / Wikipedia. But what, according to Sakharov, would be even more serious for humanity was the indirect ecological and social repercussions of the blasts. One such factor would be the consequences for the atmosphere, which would lose its transparency as a result of the smoke and dust raised and be starved of oxygen, leading to a nuclear winter. This single factor, the physicist believed, would be enough to destroy all life on the planet.

And then there would be the panic, chaos, impossibility of providing medical aid to the millions of victims and the appearance of innumerable gangs “who will kill and terrorise people and fight amongst themselves under the rules of the criminal world: ‘You die today, I’ll die tomorrow.’”

Here, Sakharov writes that there can be no victors in a large thermo-nuclear war (“It’s collective suicide”) and comes to the following conclusion: “The only reason for having nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear aggression from a potential enemy.” So he proposed the abolition of nuclear arsenals using a process of parity, where each side would gradually and simultaneously reduce its number of warheads.

New policies

Today, however, relying on a policy of disarmament developed in the 1980s will no longer work. Boris Zhuykov, a chemistry specialist who heads the Radio Isotope Complex Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Nuclear Research, tells me that Sakharov’s theory of nuclear parity is out of date, as the situation has changed considerably over the last 35 years: “The idea of nuclear parity as a deterrent is nonsensical today. Even if only one power delivers an attack, using just a small part of its nuclear potential, and takes out several large cities, the majority of the world’s population will soon die – not from radiation, but from catastrophic global cooling, like the dinosaurs 70 million years ago after a large meteorite crashed onto earth and exploded. Precise estimates of such a ‘nuclear winter’ have been made; the figures are open to question but haven’t been seriously refuted.”

Estimates do indeed exist. The American climatologist Alan Robock has published the results of a computer model showing the effects of a local nuclear war between, say, India and Pakistan. The model presupposes that each side explodes around 50 nuclear missiles (about 0.3% of the global arsenal in 2009), each equal in power to the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, setting them off in the atmosphere above cities. This, he has calculated, will trigger an unprecedented climate change known as a “nuclear winter” and comparable to the Little Ice Age, a period of regionally cold conditions in Europe between roughly 1300 and 1850 CE.

“Let’s drink to our products exploding as successfully as they did today – over test ranges, but never over cities”

According to Boris Altschuler, a physicist and human rights campaigner who has written a memoir of Andrey Sakharov, Sakharov was aware of the unacceptably high level of risk of nuclear war among other things, and because he knew “what kind of people control the USSR’s red button, he was aware of the total divorce from reality of those who lived on this Soviet Olympus.”

Altschuler suggests that a curious incident in the 1950s led to Sakharov’s political volte-face. He was asked to propose a toast at a celebratory dinner after the successful test of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1955. Sakharov raised his glass, saying: “Let’s drink to our products exploding as successfully as they did today – over test ranges, but never over cities”. In his toast, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, who had been in charge of the tests, responded with a dirty joke about an old man and woman, in which the man kneels before an icon and prays in typical Orthodox style for “strength” and “direction”, and the woman replies: “You pray for strength, I can direct it myself.”

Comparisons between missiles and penises aside, what the man in charge of the Soviet Union’s artillery was implying was that scientists should make weapons, and the military should decide how to use them. Altschuler cites Sakharov as replying: “I’m not easy to offend, especially with a joke. But the Marshal’s quip wasn’t a joke. Nedelin felt the need to put down my unacceptable pacifist leanings and put me and anyone else with similar ideas in our places.”

Technology in the hands of a barbarian

The Soviet Union’s perestroika years coincided with an unprecedented international anti-nuclear civil society movement, whilst Gorbachev initiated moves to sign important agreements on arms reduction between the USSR and the US.

There had, of course, been pacifist protests in western countries before, against the deployment of American missiles in Europe, for example, but never before had such a powerful peace movement encompassed every continent at once. Among its high profile elements was the “Nevada-Semipalatinsk” anti-nuclear movement founded in Kazakhstan in 1989, thanks to which the number of planned nuclear tests on the Semipalatinsk range were halved, and the range closed down by the county’s President Nazarbayev in 1991.

“An accident – that’s what I’m afraid of. I’m talking about the danger of a technical accident”

We can put aside the question of the extent to which Mikhail Gorbachev’s actions were governed by his consciousness of impending economic catastrophe caused by the arms race. It was his actions that mattered: from the end of the 1980s, a process of arms reduction in both the US and USSR led to the liquidation of two thirds of the world’s nuclear arsenal (from 63,000 warheads in 1987 to 20,250 in 2010). The remaining stockpiles are, of course, still sufficient to exterminate life on the planet many times over.

Today, the supposedly forgotten fear of nuclear war is being reborn. Rhetoric about a possible victory in such a war is becoming literally state-controlled in Russia. And mantras such as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s pronouncements– that while 500 billion dollars owned by Russia’s elites still lie in American banks he can’t see any chance of Russia using its nuclear potential – don’t do much to calm the situation.

In 2016, Mikhail Gorbachev told the New Times magazine that: “An accident – that’s what I’m afraid of. I’m talking about the danger of a technical accident. And then there’s the danger of nuclear arms getting into the hands of flagrant opportunists. I worry that when people talk about local wars, they sometimes find the idea of using nuclear arms acceptable – and then our government goes and writes it into its defence policy.” Here Gorbachev was effectively repeating his concerns of 30 years ago.

A heightened risk is not just a question of the number of warheads you have in your arsenal, but also the quality of your propaganda. The intentions of the “President of Russia”, appointed thanks to an illegal and anti-constitutional election and backed into a corner by his fear of inevitable criminal charges if he loses power, have become more or less clear over the last few months: he wants to raise tension to the max and, relying on global fear of his failure, try to make himself president for life.

Perhaps it won’t get to that stage, and an operator’s shattered nerves and antiquated equipment will perceive a reflection bouncing off Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket as a nuclear attack, sending us into an accidental nuclear war. It feels as though everyone is very interested to find out what will become of the Earth when a series of essential conditions suddenly fall murderously into place and a fateful finger makes contact with the red button.

Mapped data in London. Thomas Corrie/Flickr. CC (by-sa)

“Will you be happy when the last union office turns its lights off? Is that what success looks like?” This is a challenge Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, sometimes lays down to employers and HR professionals, evoking an image that only the most hard-bitten anti-union ideologue would endorse. When he said it at the recent Unions 21 conference, hot on the heels of a graph charting 40 years of declining membership, it had the ring of a warning to the movement. If we carry on like this, our extinction is a real probability. Adapt or die.

If “the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt to the changing environment in which it finds itself”, the evidence suggests that trade unions are not very good at adaptation. It’s time we took lessons from the modern masters of the art.

If we carry on like this, our extinction is a real probability.

Take Netflix, a chameleon of the digital age: from DVD rentals by post to an entirely cloud-based service. The changes to their business model have been choreographed to keep pace with the evolution of their customers’ behaviour. Netflix have mastered the art of survival by learning to diagnose and predict their changing environment, and by planning their adaptation in advance. They do it with smart, strategic use of data. Unions can learn it too.

With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation, and in the wake of the Facebook data breach, I understand why unions have been treating their data more as a liability than an asset. But I believe, with the soul of a trade unionist and the mind of a data scientist, that it is a matter of our survival that we get data use on the front foot.

So what applications of data would win your union round?

All this is possible, and more besides, but it will take an investment in data skills to get us there. Big businesses, from Netflix to premiership football teams, employ in-house data experts. However, with membership declining, and where ‘lean’ is the watchword, it would take a radical leap of faith for trade unions to start adding data specialists to the payroll.

A practicable alternative is to build a data ‘toolkit’ that answers the business data needs of the union. The idea is that, if we can articulate the logic of what we want to learn from our data, we can invest in the human data skills up-front, and code them into software that does the work for us. No need to commit to the ongoing expense of an in-house data analyst. No need, even, to do the work alone. Not when the thinking, the cost, and the product could be shared by other trade unions with similar goals.

Unions 21 is exploring the requirements and appetite for a shared trade union data and analytics platform. We hope to engage the input of experts in all trade union functions: from organisers to general secretaries to administrators. We want to hear

Good data science combines technical expertise with ‘domain expertise’. I have some technical insights that might help provide answers, but I’m counting on my trade union colleagues to provide some great questions. We want to understand how data insights can help reboot trade union activity. Ultimately, we would like to break down some of the practical barriers that prevent unions from making best use of the data available to them.

Of course, the barriers to turning unions into data-driven organisations are not all practical ones. It is entirely possible that scientific analysis will tell us that some of our processes, structures and traditions are no longer fit for purpose. Forty years of decline should be enough of a clue that something isn’t working. If we identify practices that are broken, are we brave enough to fix them or scrap them? If we can’t or won’t adapt, are we ready to see the lights go out?

Change can be a bitter pill for a movement that cherishes its heritage and its tradition. But if Darwin has a lesson for us it is this: there can be no posterity without survival.

Our first priority as a movement, our responsibility to future generations of workers, is to survive and pass on our heritage. Learning to read and predict our changing environment through strategic use of data might just be the key.

A roadside mural in Auckland, New Zealand. Chris Christian/Flickr. CC (by-nc)

New Zealand is a unusual context in which to explore the dynamics of sex worker-led organising against exploitation and the influence and impacts of the anti-trafficking framework on sex workers’ lives. What makes the country’s context so unique is its legal framework. New Zealand became the first country in the world to fully decriminalise sex work when the Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) was passed in 2003. It is also distinct because of the central role played by the sex worker-led New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC). NZPC was established by a small group of sex workers in 1987. It has since developed into a strong, government funded organisation that is well respected as an authority on sex work issues. The organisation led a successful campaign for law reform which culminated in the decriminalisation of sex work in 2003. Thus, the situation in New Zealand is unique not only due to the legal framework in place, but also because of the impact sex worker organising has had on the government’s approach to sex work.

The power of decriminalisation

Since the passing of the PRA in 2003, research has highlighted the multiple benefits of decriminalising sex work. The evidence clearly indicates that sex workers are in a better position than they were prior to decriminalisation. Owing to this evidence, the decriminalisation of sex work is now widely supported by a range of international organisations, including Amnesty International and the World Health Organisation. The concrete benefits of decriminalisation are well illustrated by a 2014 case in which a sex worker, with the support of the NZPC, brought a case against a brothel operator for sexual harassment. This would be unthinkable in other countries where sex work is illegal. What’s more, she won the case and was awarded NZ$25,000 in compensation. The rights available to sex workers in the decriminalised context have clearly strengthened their capacity to challenge those who seek to exploit them.

The decriminalisation of sex work is now widely supported by a range of international organisations, including Amnesty International and the World Health Organisation.

A perfect law?

While it is indisputable that the law change has brought many positive benefits, and other countries would be well advised to adopt a similar framework, the law is still far from perfect. An infrequently discussed deficiency of the New Zealand model is the status of temporary migrants who work in the sex industry. Although it was (and still is) thought that migrants represent a minority of the overall sex worker population, in the latter stages of the law reform process some of those involved began to panic regarding risks of trafficking and a potential influx of sex workers into New Zealand. Subsequently, an amendment was introduced which prohibits migrants with temporary permits from working in sex work.

Thus, as the law currently stands, people who hold temporary permits can be deported if they are found to be selling sex. While not aggressively policed, the possibility of deportation is not an idle threat. In 2012, eight brothels were raided and 21 sex workers were found to be working illegally. Two of these sex workers left the country voluntarily and 19 were served with deportation liability notices. A study conducted in 2013 highlighted concerns regarding the precarious legal status of migrant sex workers – specifically that this situation could make migrant sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation.

A law of unintended consequences

Following on from this earlier work, I recently carried out nine in-depth interviews with NZPC representatives, sex workers, and a member of a faith-based organisation as part of the GAATW multi-country project on sex worker organising and responses to risks of exploitation. This research echoed concerns highlighted in the 2013 study, but also provided concrete examples of how this discriminatory aspect of the law manifests in sex workers’ working lives. For example, one migrant sex worker from China recalled being told by a client to provide a “good service”, or she risked him providing information on her work to authorities. Another sex worker described a situation in which a migrant co-worker had been blackmailed by an abusive client to provide services free of charge, and was too afraid to report this situation due to the risk of deportation. Sex workers interviewed were also concerned that the law opens up opportunities for brothel operators to exploit migrant workers through imposing long and inflexible working hours.

One migrant sex worker from China recalled being told by a client to provide a “good service”, or she risked him providing information on her work to authorities.

The interviews I conducted with the NZPC and the member of the faith-based organisation echoed these concerns. All participants felt strongly that the current law places migrant sex workers at increased risk of exploitation, instead of protecting them against it. While the clause that prohibits migrant sex work was introduced in part as an anti-trafficking measure, the insights gathered in this research suggest it has created conditions that are more likely to foster exploitation. The policy creates a significant disincentive for migrant sex workers who experience exploitation and violence to report these incidents. It is understandable that some migrant workers choose not to report adverse experiences when they could be asked to leave the country if immigration officials become aware of their sex work.

Supporting sex workers

This situation also presents a dilemma for NZPC in their work to support sex workers and challenge exploitation and violence. NZPC is a well-respected organisation that has developed relationships within government organisations, including the police, to champion sex worker rights and model best practice approaches to supporting sex workers. However, the valuable support that NZPC can provide is hamstrung by the current policy which fosters a fear of authorities among migrant sex workers. All interviewees felt that the law needs to change to ensure that all sex workers in New Zealand can fully benefit from a context that is explicitly intended to foreground their occupational health and safety.

A call for change

The framework in place in New Zealand is undoubtedly a good example for other countries to follow – decriminalising sex work has clear benefits. However, while it is important to learn from and celebrate the success of New Zealand’s model, we must also highlight its shortcomings and seek to address them. The discriminatory policy that is currently in place puts migrant sex workers at risk. If New Zealand is to live up to its reputation as a country that prioritises the health and safety of sex workers, then the law must change so that the protections of decriminalisation are available to all sex workers.

Dear Fellow Remainers,

We are failing to keep our country in the EU. Even as Brexit softens to the point of complete incoherence positions are hardening. Normally I write for all interested readers whatever their particular views. But here I just want to address you. Not because I want to close off what I’m saying from those who support Leave. But because we Remainers are not engaging with Leave voters in the way we must. So I’m writing to you about how we should communicate with Brexit supporters.

To do so we have to face up to reality: we are in the midst of a deep struggle over the future of our country. It is not just a matter of opposing views but the nature of the antagonism.

For over a year competing Remain campaigns had no coherent vision and made no impact. At last, thanks in good part to the efforts of Henry Porter, Director of the Convention on Brexit, most of us are uniting around support for People’s Vote. Its demand is that if a deal is formulated, voters should have the final say: is the proposed actual Brexit one we want, or should we stay in the EU? When I went to visit the crowded office of People’s Vote last month in London’s Millbank tower, nine organisations were working together, mobilizing support for a large demo on Saturday 23 June, and a tenth, Better Britain is cooperating.

I support People’s Vote to the hilt. But we should be careful what we wish for. Despite significant shifts towards Remain in Northern Ireland and Wales, there is a good chance that if there is a referendum we will lose - while a narrow win without an energetic, positive follow-up could put Nigel Farage in No 10 within five years.

We have to aim for the long-term as a full-spectrum contest is underway. This being Britain, it is mainly argued about in terms of trade, business and how to organise economic growth. The forces that unleashed it, however, are fired by patriotism rather than pragmatism – on both sides. To put it in terms of opposing, negative caricatures: a passionate rejection of losing our independence to the EU is up against our stubborn refusal to embrace Great British isolationism. Each side is committed to a future unacceptable to the other.

Most Remainers and Leavers are understandably reluctant to see themselves as initiating such an alarming confrontation. The Tory Brexiteers hoped success would be like the advent of Thatcherism. There would be cries of pain and continued opposition from multi-cultural leftists. But they expected the political order as a whole to accept the outcome, rally to their vision, and continue the British tradition of ‘losers consent’, while Whitehall delivered Brexit. In a parallel fashion, leading Remainers wilfully hoped good sense would prevail, as the impossibility of leaving the EU while retaining the benefits of membership sunk in; then Brexit would be abandoned like the Poll Tax, and the country would revert back to business as usual. On both sides, leaders saw their opposition to the other as a way of returning the country to its old normality.

In fact, a political revolution is the ineluctable consequence of the Brexit vote. There is no way back to how the UK was governed before 2016. The question is whose revolution will it be. Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Leave campaign, has just published a furious open letter to Tory MPs and donors on the “Brexit shambles” accusing them of failing to understand this. His devastating critique of the May government’s hapless approach to Brexit (“The Government effectively has no credible policy and the whole world knows it”) seems as unanswerable as his core argument: that “Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system”. His final warning: “If revolution there is to be, better to undertake it than undergo it… Best wishes”.

In a separate blogpost, Cummings applied his warning equally to those Remainers like Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson (who in effect chaired the disastrous ‘Stronger In’ campaign for the Remain side in the referendum), and ex-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, and all those who hope a second referendum will return the country to being ruled by their successors. Cummings tells them that such a re-run will leave SW1 – his shorthand for Whitehall and Westminster – a “smoking ruin”.

Finally, the penny seems to be dropping on our side. To take a dramatic example, Andrew Adonis and Will Hutton, both of whom played significant roles in the reproduction of the Blairite political order, open their new book Saving Britain with a ringing declaration: “Brexit voters were right. The status quo is insupportable”.

Adonis, who was a minister under Blair and is now in the House of Lords, and Hutton, who edited the Observer and is now a columnist for it, have entered the process that Michael Sandel and Jon Cruddas have called for: an essential reckoning with the recent past. Adonis and Hutton accept that a despotically over-centralised UK state was responsible for delivering the country into the hands of a neoliberal form of globalisation, which then generated its Brexit repudiation. They rightly insist that the source of the problem is in Britain itself and not the EU and that staying in Europe is essential to repairing the damage.

The bitter paradox is that the democratic cry of ‘Take Back Control’ has been captured by hedge-funded bigotry. Were Brexit to succeed, it will deliver not independence or an honest democracy but rule by oligarchs and their financial servants, such as the hard-right Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, under a mendacious exploitation of the rhetoric of sovereignty. The two authors call on us to resist this outcome with all our might, and conclude their book with Tolstoy’s sober warning in War and Peace, “A battle is won by those who are firmly resolved to win it.”

As anger rises on both sides, Martin Wolf, the influential Chief Economics Commentator for the Financial Times, who rarely comes to a judgment without at least two supporting graphs, observes that the result is a form of “civil war… over the sort of country this is”. He sees a clash between two “irreconcilable… evenly-matched” sides. Although he’d have loved for Brexit to be halted, he advocates “damage limitation” and a deal that keeps the UK in the customs union because frustrating Brexit will “tear the country apart”. In response, Ian Dunt, editor of Politics.co.uk and a coruscating critic of Brexit, tweeted that for him it is already a form of civil war and to cease calling for a reversal of Brexit would be to accept a defeat he has no intention of embracing.

On the Leave side, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Daily Telegraph’s columnist on global economic affairs, thundered that the compromise Wolf wishes for will in fact result in exactly what he hopes to avoid. Leaving the EU while staying in the customs union is a “Brexit from Hell. Such an outcome would risk a slow slide towards civil war”. Evans-Pritchard predicts fury, “volcanic fury”, if Britain remains in the Customs Union,

“How can any British parliamentarian support such a formula? It cannot plausibly lead to a settled outcome. It must chafe so badly that passions erupt with volcanic fury within five years or sooner, further poisoning British relations with Europe, and nurturing a lethal sentiment in much of British society that this ancient island democracy has been subverted by a self-interested elite”.

Adamantine language goes back to the immediate period after the referendum, when regular people in working class constituencies were asked if they would accept any other consequence than ‘Out’. Just watch this clip from a fish and chip shop in Burnley, which voted 67% for Leave. Speaking calmly and steadily from over the counter Liz Pugh tells Michelle Clifford of Sky News it will be “civil war” if politicians do not deliver.

Two years on there is a shift of tone and class, wending its way via UKIP’s Neil Hamilton in 2016 threatening “armed revolution” to Farage saying in 2017 that he would “pick up a rifle” if Theresa May does not deliver Brexit. Now, it is the arriviste political-media elite who speak of violence. Unlike Pugh they lose their cool. Allison Pearson observed the House of Lords debate on May 1 for her Telegraph column. Her response is worth reading at length as it reeks of the stench of right-wing cordite,

"Watching the debate, I was absolutely disgusted. Who were these unelected toads dripping with condescension for the British people? Lord Bilimoria actually said that Parliament knows what is “in the best interests of the people and the country”. No, mate, you are the servants and we are the masters. Hard to compute in your ermine-lined ivory tower, I know, but the clue is in the word “democracy”… Theresa May should tell the Tory rebels, ‘This is a matter of confidence’… the Lords if they have any sense… will accept the Commons verdict, if they don’t then I’m afraid it’s war. The British People vs Parliament. I’m looking for a tank on eBay. Do they really think we will be told we voted the wrong way by an elite no one voted for at all?"

Leave aside the vile, pseudo-plebeian swagger - no proletarian worth her salt would write about people as “mate” in this manner - as Sundar Katwala observed, if Pearson had been a Muslim who tweeted she was searching for a tank on eBay, the police would be knocking on her door. The Telegraph removed Pearson’s article from their website but it is cached in Press Reader.

The Daily Mail, being better edited, is careful not to incite violence directly. But when its front-page headlines denounce judges as “enemies of the people” and members of the second chamber as “traitors” (in response to the same debate Pearson wrote about), its language is more seriously inflammatory, because so much more prominent. 

Brexiteers don’t have a monopoly on virulent, polarising rhetoric. They are expressing their frustration more loudly now. Immediately after the referendum, it was Remainers who belittled Leave voters in a vile fashion and were responsible for the initial hardening of positions; as the Brexit-backing Claire Fox’s recent testimony demonstrates.

What is needed is not more alarmism but a cool grasp of the forces at work. These are not rational or transactional ones. The Daily Mail, at least, has an understanding of the difference:

“The truth inveterate Remoaners cannot grasp is that it was not wholly, or even principally, on economic grounds that the country voted to leave. No, the decision owed far more to a deep-seated human yearning to recover our national identity and independence by taking back sovereign control of our borders, laws, money and trade. For this precious prize voters were prepared to risk taking a knock to their standard of living, at least in the short term, should Project Fear’s scare stories prove true”. 

Everything we know about the referendum confirms this is how it was seen, certainly by the English outside London, who voted by an 11 per cent majority for Leave. These two contrasting word-clouds illustrated what happened: 

Researchers, Chris Prosser, Jon Mellon, and Jane Green of The British Election Study Team asked a large cross sample what mattered to them in the referendum. The word-clouds map the answers. Remainers were overwhelmingly concerned with their economic future. Leavers said ‘immigration” but “were actually more likely to mention sovereignty related issues overall”. The conclusion? “The referendum campaign was not a fight about which side had the best argument on the issues… Instead, the fight was about which of these issues was more important.”

Both sides argued past each other and dug in. Not all referendums are like this. Scotland’s in 2014 on independence saw voters engage within a single shared framework of issues, as did Ireland’s more focussed one on abortion. Why should a new UK-wide plebiscite on EU membership, however, be any different from the first? When the Prime Minister embraces a form of customs union as she must, what if she calls a snap referendum this Autumn to deal with her back-bench hard-liners and any Cabinet dissent?

Even if Labour supports Remain in such a referendum, are we going to win England - if we are calling for free-movement, are all over the shop on sovereignty, and say we should stay in an EU that is visibly in crisis and screwing Italy? I doubt it.

Three things are necessary.

First, we have to get our tanks onto their word-cloud. We have to engage with issues like immigration, sovereignty, regulation, and ‘taking control’ as well as economic policy. Above all, we need to make the democratic impulse locked within Brexit our own. Confining the argument to economic consequences, especially when the Euro is on the edge of a meltdown and there could be another global financial crash, won’t cut through (nor should it). Brexit is about how we are governed not how much money the country makes. Like Adonis and Hutton, we must embrace the referendum’s verdict on the UK’s democratic failure - and come up with credible solutions to it. We need to begin this now or, if we have to scramble for unconvincing answers in October, we will be positioned as nostalgic for a failed status quo. We have to show, in a principled fashion, why the EU enhances our capacity to govern ourselves, how we can manage free movement, that we need not be afraid that Brussels will undermine our democracy or stop us improving our way of life, that there is no such thing as “our” oligarchs, and that fleeing into their arms in any EU crisis only leaves the fat for the fire. And we need to sum this up in a clear positive story.

Second, we must not indulge in infantile, self-defeating bouts of verbal terrorism against the other side that simply consolidate their sense of grievance and defiance. We must not treat them as if they are simultaneously venomous and inconsequential; A.C. Grayling, for example, tweeted that if we stop Brexit, the episode will evaporate like a “nasty, temporary, hiccup, soon forgotten” - as if the judgment of 17 million people was a mild outbreath of halitosis. Even those who take the forces of Brexit very seriously, like Timothy Garton Ash, can use language that implies it is a passing danger, as when he called on us to “foil” Brexit as if it was a mere thrust, potentially deadly but not in itself of lasting significance. This is especially important in terms of respect for Labour MPs. Some with North and Midland constituencies share what their voters feel. Our starting point for every argument about the need to remain in the EU should be “Brexit voters were right. The status quo is insupportable”.

Third, mobilising to march through London, speeches that rally the converted, poster campaigns that reposition the EU in a positive way, exposing the economic dangers especially to employment, are well-tried methods of strengthening one’s own side and shifting opinion. But what is happening is unprecedented and Brexit will not be reversed by traditional techniques alone. We need to be gathering in Leeds, where 49% voted Leave, as well as London, or Doncaster (69% Leave) as well as Westminster. We need to talk with those who think anyone seeking to stay in the EU is trying to “kill democracy”, see January’s vivid Guardian survey.  We could create more citizens assemblies on Brexit like the Manchester one and give them national publicity. We need to learn from last month’s Irish referendum. As Fintan O’Toole describes, those who won decided to “talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody” and they did not “jeer back”.

If we want another referendum the work needs to begin now to make it an honest one. O’Toole emphasizes that the best thing about the Irish referendum was the way voters shared their own stories, which proved a vital antidote to hi-tech marketing. This is hard to emulate when it comes to EU membership, which is so remote that people project their bogies and fantasies onto Brussels. Yet something personal is taking place. Jon Trickett is, in effect, Corbyn’s Shadow Secretary for the constitution. In an important speech on why “the change that is needed can’t be achieved by the existing arrangements” (as he put it in the discussion afterwards) he emphasised, “For many, the sense of community, of purpose, of who we are, and of the place we inhabit, is so disrupted that the future now feels more dangerous than the past”.

Fear. Fear is an important ongoing reason for Brexit. Fear of  the future, fear of loss of security, fear of cuts, fear of being without a government that knows what it is doing, fear of a government that does know and is indifferent to you, fear of a general ‘loss of control’. Fear and precarity are generated by a culture of competition and a form of capitalism that feeds off anxiety, insecurity and debt. Well justified fear. The EU, while not wholly innocent, is not primarily responsible. And it is the English who fear most of all. We must heed these fears in one of the richest countries of the planet, if we are to reverse Brexit. The Irish Yes campaigner’s showed us how to do it. They listened to people’s fears, assuaged them and went positive - instead of going negative and playing on people’s fears, as the UK’s Remain campaign did in 2016.

Brexit has already begun. Any attempt to deny this and merely ‘stop Brexit’ will fail. For we have to reverse a fundamental challenge over the nature of our country; one that is well advanced. Already, it has ensured that we can never return to the Britain of 2016 in any of our country’s four constituent nations. Let’s strain every sinew to rescind Article 50, but to succeed we must overthrow the Brexit project with another positive one - a more democratic patriotism of diversity. Fail to recognise this and we will lose the civil war.

This is the start of short series of pieces on Brexit, next: Sovereignty and Regulation: a fourth branch of government.

The Lure of Greatness, England’s Brexit & America’s Trump– Anthony Barnett

“Brilliant”, Suzanne Moore, “Blistering”, Zadie Smith
“A dazzling, all-encompassing, big picture analysis of the Brexit vote, easily the best of its kind in print, brilliantly written and endlessly thought-provoking. Do read it.” Andrew Sparrow, Editor, Guardian Politics Live
“Responding to momentous events with deep and passionate arguments… for his verve, range and insatiable urge to take on vast themes, Barnett deserves loud applause… this is a very good book.” John Harris, New Statesman
“The best book about Brexit so far… brilliantly caustic, there is some comfort in that Barnett has been right about so much before.” Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times
“One of the most important political books of 2017”, The Guardian Editorial on Renewing the United Kingdom, 1 January 2018
“Essential reading for students of politics, constitutional law and international relations.” Professor David Marquand
“A wonderful and compelling page turner that artfully weaves together debates on freedom, security, liberty, sovereignty and nationalism... This is a book that deserves to be read.” Natalie Fenton, Goldsmiths Professor of Media and Communications

A supporter of Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Picture by Ameer Al Mohammedaw/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved. For the past and possibly the next few weeks, Baghdad has been witnessing intense meetings between politicians, religious figures and international lobbyists to guarantee a governmental ally in the capital, as a result of the parliamentary elections held on May 12th 2018. To some, this is Iraq’s fourth democratic achievement since 2003, and to others, it stands for the fourth legitimization of a corrupted system, designed by an occupier – as reflected by the low 44.5% voter turnout. These are the first elections following Iraq’s war (2014-2017) against ISIS and the major spat between Baghdad and Erbil, following the independence referendum organised by Iraq’s Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani, against national and international criticism. The unlikely alliances and the unforeseen results of the elections present many challenges for the formation of a new government

Who are the winners?

The top four winners, starting from the highest were the Sairoon (Forward) Alliance, al-Fatah Alliance, al-Nasr (Victory) Alliance and the State of the Law (SOL) Coalition and the KDP sharing the fourth place. Sairoon, which won with 54 seats, is led by prominent Shi’ite nationalist figure, Muqtada al-Sadr, in alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party. Al-Fatah came in second with 47 seats and is led by pro-Iran Hadi Al-Amri, leader of Badr Corps, a guerrilla force formed by Iran to fight the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war. Al-Amri is also known for being one of the Popular Mobilization Unit’s (PMU) main leaders, which is why many media platforms refer to his political coalition as the PMU representative, a very inexact generalization of a diverse force. Prime Minister (PM) al-Abadi’s al-Nasr only came in third. This came as a surprise, as most were betting on his victory following the government forces’ defeat against ISIL and his impressive diplomacy in dealing with the Kurdish referendum, retaking Kirkuk without causing a civil war. Finally, there was a tie at 25 seats between former PM Nouri al-Malki’s SOL and Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party.

What’s next?

The Iraqi parliament, known as the Council of Representatives, consists of 329 elected seats, with a quota for women and minorities. The winning party needs a majority of 165 seats to form a cabinet and appoint a PM. Thereupon, forming coalitions with other parties is paramount, and it would entail candidates that please all parties involved.

Sairoon and al-Fatah are very similar, in that both derive from paramilitary backgrounds. However, they have major differing principles. While a powerful nationalist whom always opposed Iran’s dominance and US military presence in Iraq leads the former, the latter is the leading pro-Iran figure in these elections, and the man behind Iran’s role in the PMU. Thereupon, the first coalitions after the results were formed based on the Iran factor. Sairoon so far announced its possible alliance with al-Abadi’s al-Nasr and al-Hikma (Wisdom) alliance, which is led by former pro-Iran religious and political figure al-Hakim. The opposing group is predictably al-Fatah with SOL, as both share the Iran allegiance, and aim at preventing al-Abadi from gaining a second term.

The new outcomes

Regardless of the cabinet’s formation, there are four major outcomes of these parliamentary elections:

The US issue

Muqtada al-Sadr once led a paramilitary group known as the Mahdi Army, which steered a violent resistance against the US invasion in 2003 and was greatly involved in the sectarian conflict between 2006 and 2008. Al-Sadr was also the first Shi’ite figure who criticized Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraqi’s highest religious figure, for his silence over the invasion. Regardless of his role in the sectarian civil war, he was able to create a Shi’ite-Sunni resistance alliance against the US invasion, which healed the scars of the sectarian schism. 

The US might be trapped now: on the one hand, Sadr has had a prominent anti-US posture, but on another – he is also the perfect counter against Iranian hegemony. Although to what extent would Sadr allow himself to become a tool for US proxy wars against Iran?

Nevertheless, past conflicts have proved never to be obstacles to present political interests. Allegedly, mediations between US officials and Sairoon occurred, where both sides signalled willingness to cooperate.

The ruling party’s collapse (Da’wa)

The Shi’ite Islamist Da’wa Islamic Party, which has been the lead of all post-2003 Iraqi governments, lost the elections for the first time in a major defeat. This was expected due to the divisions caused by personal interests between al-Malki and al-Abadi since 2014, when both led two different coalitions from outside their party. Alternatively, their loss would also derive from the fact that they failed to deliver any improvements in education, health care, security, economy, infrastructure and youth employability, creating ethno-sectarian and corrupted institutions instead. 

The secularist rise

The secular drift came as a result of the Da’wa-led Islamist failure, similar to the rise of Islamist political movements in the 1980s, which resulted from the let-downs by the socialists and the Pan-Arabism in Iraq and beyond.

In the 2014 elections, various secular parties and politicians from the Iraqi Communist Party to right-wing liberal parties formed the Civil Democratic Alliance. This coalition promoted a civic state against the ethno-sectarian quota. The Islamist parties waged a media war with propaganda against the coalition, labeling it ‘western’ and ‘atheist’. With no multimillion US dollars financial sponsorship, regional support or paramilitary groups, it won 3 seats in their first round. Thus, politicians started presenting themselves as ‘secular’ such as al-Malki SOL’s former candidate and media figure, Ahmad Mullah Talal.

Secular politicians existed in post-2003 Iraq such as Iyad Alawi, who was interim PM in 2004. Nonetheless, the distinction with the newest ones, brought up by the Civil Democratic Alliance, is their new vision for Iraq - one that resists the triangle of administrative and financial corruption and the ethno-sectarian quota in governance. Alawi might be a secular individual, but never criticised the sectarian quota.

The anti-sectarian secular presence in today’s Iraqi politics might be broken up in different coalitions – however, its presence in Sairoon and its mentions in political media platforms is definitely an effective beginning.

The anti-Iran factor

Iran benefited greatly from Iraq’s power vacuum following the fall of Saddam Hussein, by utilizing its new and existing proxy tools such as Badr to dominate the political scene. Iraq’s PM today must not only be a Shi’ite Arab to match the sectarian quota, but also favoured by Iran. Qassem Soleimani, who heads Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and is known for being the most influential non-Iraqi figure in Iraq, is arguably one of the major lobbyists in Baghdad’s parliamentary bargaining to maintain Iran’s influence in the upcoming government. This comes as a shock for Iran towards the Sadrist-Communist alliance’s victory in the elections. Al-Sadr is the most prominent anti-Iran Shi’ite figure, and his stance cannot be ignored due to his great political influence. The anti-Iran discourse within the post-2003 Iraqi government was always driven by Sunni Arab and Kurdish officials, and with the support of their co-regional partners from Sunni Arab states or Turkey. However, the Sadrist rise in government means that Tehran is facing a Shi’ite motivated opposition from Iraq, which is potentially its most strategic threat in Iraq since 2003. This is due to its dependence on the Shi’ite sectarian-cultural linkage and its influence towards the country’s largest community and Shi’ite political parties.

These ramifications do not necessarily mean that we will witness a better Iraq; nonetheless it will certainly differ from the one we know of today.