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09 April 22
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My policy was to work for the best, while expanding NATO to prepare for the worst.
If Russia stayed on a path toward democracy and cooperation, we would all be together in meeting the security challenges of our time: terrorism; ethnic, religious, and other tribal conflicts; and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. If Russia chose to revert to ultranationalist imperialism, an enlarged NATO and a growing European Union would bolster the continent’s security. Near the end of my second term, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO despite Russian opposition. The alliance gained 11 more members under subsequent administrations, again over Russian objections.
Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.
As United Nations ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeleine Albright, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion. So were Secretary of State Warren Christopher; National Security Adviser Tony Lake; his successor, Sandy Berger; and two others with firsthand experience in the area: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, who was born in Poland to Georgian parents and came to the U.S. as a teenager, and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who translated and edited Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs while we were housemates at Oxford in 1969 and 1970.
At the time I proposed NATO expansion, however, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side. The legendary diplomat George Kennan, famous for advocating for the policy of containment during the Cold War, argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO had outlived its usefulness. The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said Russia would feel humiliated and cornered by an enlarged NATO, and when it recovered from the economic weakness of the last years of Communist rule, we would see a terrible reaction. Mike Mandelbaum, a respected authority on Russia, thought it was a mistake too, arguing that it wouldn’t promote democracy or capitalism.
I understood that renewed conflict was a possibility. But in my view, whether it happened depended less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts, or seek to re-create a version of its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military?
I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st-century democracy. My first trip outside the United States as president was to Vancouver to meet with Yeltsin and guarantee $1.6 billion for Russia so it could afford to bring its soldiers home from the Baltic states and provide for their housing. In 1994, Russia became the first country to join the Partnership for Peace, a program for practical bilateral cooperation, including joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries. That same year, the U.S. signed the Budapest Memorandum, along with Russia and the United Kingdom, which guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in return for Ukraine’s agreement to give up what was then the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Beginning in 1995, after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War, we made an agreement to add Russian troops to the peacekeeping forces that NATO had on the ground in Bosnia. In 1997, we supported the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs, and supported Russia’s entry to the G7, making it the G8. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces. Throughout it all, we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin.
In addition to all these efforts to involve Russia in NATO’s post–Cold War missions, Albright and our entire national-security team worked hard to promote positive bilateral relations. Vice President Al Gore co-chaired a commission with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to address issues of mutual interest. We agreed to destroy 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium each. We also agreed to pull Russian, European, and NATO conventional forces back from borders, though Putin declined to go ahead with the plan when he assumed the Russian presidency in 2000.
All told, I met with Yeltsin 18 times and Putin five times—twice when he was Yeltsin’s prime minister and three times in the 10-plus months that our terms as president overlapped. That’s just three short of all the U.S.-U.S.S.R. leaders’ meetings from 1943 through 1991. The idea that we ignored, disrespected, or tried to isolate Russia is false. Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.
When my administration started, in 1993, no one felt certain that a post–Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable, and democratic. Big questions remained about East Germany’s integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans, and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against the threat of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders. The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for Central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go-it-alone strategy of militarization.
Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO, under inspiring leaders such as Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, Lech Wałęsa in Poland, and, yes, a young pro-democracy Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Thousands of everyday citizens crowded the squares of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, and beyond whenever I spoke there.
As Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December 2021, “It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go West.”
Or as Havel said in 2008: “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.” To reject Central and Eastern European countries’ membership into NATO simply because of Russian objections would have been doing just that.
Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliance’s then-16 members; two-thirds consent of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate; close consultation with prospective members to ensure that their military, economic, and political reforms met NATO’s high standards; and near-constant reassurance to Russia.
Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine. As a child in war-torn Europe, Madeleine and her family were twice forced to flee their home—first by Hitler, then by Stalin. She understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic, and other tribal divisions that threatened it. She used every item in her famed diplomat’s toolkit and her domestic political savvy to help clear the way for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO in 1999.
The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever-larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security. Per capita GDPs have more than tripled in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. All three countries have participated in a variety of NATO missions since joining, including the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. To date, no member state of our defensive alliance has been invaded. Indeed, even in the early years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the mere prospect of NATO membership helped cool long-simmering disputes between Poland and Lithuania, Hungary and Romania, and others.
Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary. Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil. And it is the strength of the NATO alliance, and its credible threat of defensive force, that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum said recently, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years … We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn’t done it.”
The failure of Russian democracy, and its turn to revanchism, was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin. He could have used Russia’s prodigious skills in information technology to create a competitor for Silicon Valley and build a strong, diversified economy. Instead he decided to monopolize and weaponize those abilities to promote authoritarianism at home and wreak havoc abroad, including by interfering in the politics of Europe and the U.S. Only a strong NATO stands between Putin and even further aggression. We should therefore support President Joe Biden and our NATO allies in giving as much assistance to Ukraine, both military and humanitarian, as possible.
My last conversation with Madeleine Albright was just two weeks before she died. She was vintage Madeleine, sharp and direct. It was clear she wanted to go out with her boots on, supporting the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom and independence. On her declining health, she said, “I’ve got good care. I’m doing what I can. Let’s not waste time on that. The important thing is what kind of world we’re going to leave our grandchildren.” Madeleine saw her lifelong fight for democracy and security as both an obligation and an opportunity. She was proud of her Czech heritage and certain that her people and their neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe would defend their freedom, “because they know the price of losing freedom.” She was right about NATO when I was president and right about Ukraine now. I miss her so much, but I can still hear her voice. So should we all.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (photo: Twitter)
ALSO SEE: Von Der Leyen:
'The Unthinkable Has Happened' in Bucha
European Commission chief visits Bucha before meeting Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv
During a visit to Bucha on Friday, where forensic investigators started to exhume bodies from a mass grave, Von der Leyen looked visibly moved by what she saw in the town northwest of Kyiv where Ukrainian officials say hundreds of civilians were killed by Russian forces.
Russia denies targeting civilians and has called the allegations that Russian forces executed civilians in Bucha while they occupied the town a “monstrous forgery”.
As EU officials were about to arrive in Kyiv, at least 50 people were killed and many more wounded in a missile strike at a railway station packed with civilians fleeing the threat of a major Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
At a news conference, Von der Leyen condemned what she called “the cynical behaviour” of those who wrote “for our children” on the weapons found near the scene.
Saying the EU could never match the sacrifice of Ukraine, Von der Leyen offered it a speedier start to its bid for bloc membership.
The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen
— Alberto Alemanno (@alemannoEU) April 8, 2022
pic.twitter.com/z5tsdnze0z #Ukraine #UkraineRussianWar #Zelenskyi
Handing the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a questionnaire which will form a starting point for a decision on membership, she said: “It will not as usual be a matter of years to form this opinion but I think a matter of weeks.”
Zelenskiy told the same news conference he would come back with answers in a week.
“Russia will descend into economic, financial and technological decay, while Ukraine is marching towards the European future, this is what I see,” Von der Leyen said.
Earlier in Bucha, she told reporters: “The unthinkable has happened here. We have seen the cruel face of Putin’s army. We have seen the recklessness and the cold-heartedness with which they have been occupying the city.”
Von der Leyen’s trip to Kyiv was aimed at offering Zelenskiy moral and some financial support.
She pledged her support for Ukraine to “emerge from the war as a democratic country”, something, she said, the European Union and other donors would help with.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, said he hoped the EU could allocate a further €500m (£420m) to Ukraine for arms purchases in a couple of days.
Zelenskiy has urged Brussels to do more to punish Russia, including banning purchases of Russian oil and gas, and has called on the EU to accept Ukraine as a full member.
Earlier, Borrell said oil sanctions were “a big elephant in the room“, with some concerns that a move to cut out Russian crude could cause a spike in prices that would be painful to European economies. He said a decision on exports would be raised on Monday in Brussels.
More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 injured in a Russian rocket strike on a train station in eastern Ukraine on Friday as civilians attempted to evacuate to safer parts of the country, said the national railway company. (photo: GWN)
Shortly after soldiers were celebrating the carnage on Telegram, state media “corrected” them and blamed Ukraine for the attack on evacuating civilians.
The missile struck the main evacuation center in the area and seemed to herald the beginning of an intensified offensive that Russia warned was coming.
Minutes later, the messages, which included claims to have successfully obliterated “a crowd of Ukrainian militants at the Kramatorsk railway station,” were edited or disappeared altogether, according to several accounts by journalists in the region.
Journalists who had visited the train station in recent days documented hundreds of people crowded onto platforms waiting to evacuate. The local governor said there were as many as 4,000 people waiting to evacuate when rockets struck the building. A Russian Defense spokesperson denied the attack, calling it a “provocation” instead.
Ukrainian military officials posted photos of the aftermath on Telegram, which showed mangled corpses and suitcases on the tracks. “The ‘Rashists’ knew very well where they were aiming and what they wanted,” regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told Reuters, referring to a nickname for Russian fascists. “They wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible.”
Ukrainian Presidency Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Tetiana Ihnatchenko, spokesperson for the Donetsk regional administration, told CNN that the Russian military knew the station would be full of civilians. “[Evacuations] have been going on since February 26, and the Russians knew that thousands of people are there every day,” she said. “I believe that’s what they were counting on.”
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky called the act another atrocity. “The inhuman Russians are not changing their methods,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population. This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”
Russia also hit at least two residential houses in the once-picturesque port city of Odesa on Friday. It is unclear if there are any victims in that attack.
And north of Kyiv, Zelensky warned that the razed city of Borodianka is “significantly more dreadful” thank Bucha, where Russian troops are blamed for grisly executions and indiscriminate shelling of civilians. At least 300 people are known to have died there.
A deputy passes a line of inmates, seen during a tour of the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: J. Emilio Flores/Corbis/Getty Images)
Los Angeles sheriff’s department accused of hours-long group strip-search as court report adds to string of scandals
The Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD), which oversees the largest local jail system in the country, appears to be routinely violating use-of-force policies, with supervisors failing to hold guards accountable and declining to provide information to the monitors tasked with reviewing the treatment of incarcerated people.
The report, filed in federal court on Thursday, adds to a long string of scandals for the department. The monitors – first put in place in 2014 to settle a case involving beatings – suggested that some problems in the jails appeared to be getting worse after they visited the facilities in December 2021.
The monitors, Robert Houston, a former corrections official, and Jeffrey Schwartz, a consultant, alleged that the use of “head shots”, meaning punches to the head, had been “relatively unchanged in the last two years or more, and may be increasing”. They also wrote that deputies who used force in violation of policy were at times sent to “remedial training” but that “actual discipline is seldom imposed”. And supervisors who failed to document violations were also “not held accountable” .
The authors cited one incident in which a deputy approached a resident who had “walked away from him” while he was being escorted. “With no hesitation, Deputy Y grabbed [his] chest and slammed him into the wall. Deputy Y punched [him] 5‐9 times in the head, and Deputy Z punched [him] 6‐8 times in the head as they took [him] to the floor because they ‘feared’ that the Inmate might become assaultive”.
The report also documented an incident on 7 September 2021, when there were reports that a firearm “might have been smuggled” into Men’s Central jail. Guards responded by instituting a “shakedown” and strip-search of residents.
“They said they were taken out of their cells in the morning, given no explanation (except for one inmate who said he was told the reason for the search by a deputy), strip-searched, then walked naked en masse through the jail and down to the room with the X‐ray machine,” the report said, citing complaints from jail residents. “Passing large numbers of male and female staff members, some of whom … mocked them or made other humiliating comments”.
Those interviewed said they eventually got underwear, but still no shoes, and were taken to a yard where they were forced to wait for hours until they returned to their cells later that night.
LASD did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the report on Friday.
The monitors said they had written officials in January to ask if this was standard procedure, and whether the residents were given food, water and access to bathrooms while waiting. According to the monitors, the department responded that it had completed a “report” about the incident with “corrective action plans”, but in the three months since, it had not sent documents or further information.
The report raised further concerns about the department’s use of the “Wrap” device, which functions like a full-body restraining jacket and is used to “immobilize” people. The Wrap procedures pose a serious risk of asphyxiation, and “the continuing practice … cannot be justified”, the monitors said.
The department had failed to fulfill its requirement to write a Wrap policy that the monitors had approved, and it had further misled the monitors about how the jail was using the device, the report alleged: “The practices used with Wrap appear to be almost diametrically opposed to the way in which the Department explained that Wrap was being used.”
In 2018, a man in jail in northern California died of asphyxiation after being subjected to the Wrap device, sparking widespread scrutiny of the practice.
The LA jails have for years been plagued by corruption and obstruction of justice scandals, with the former sheriff Lee Baca and his second in command both convicted in cases stemming from misconduct investigations. Guards in the Men’s Central jail have also long been accused of being part of a “deputy gang”, known for allegedly using excessive force. The department has also faced mounting questions this year about the death of a 27-year-old in solitary confinement.
“These are not one-time incidents – this is the culture and history of the department,” said Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, executive director of Dignity and Power Now, a group that has long been fighting to shut down the Men’s Central jail. He said the report reminded him of the misconduct allegations and obfuscation from department leaders in a 2012 case. “After 10 years of exposure, 10 years of scandal, 10 years of reform, this department has had a lot of opportunities to get this right … but has continued to revert back to some of the most vicious attacks on Black and brown people.
“It is clear our loved ones are not safe in the custody of the sheriff’s department,” he added.
Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said it was especially disturbing that the problems seemed to be escalating under sheriff Alex Villanueva, who was elected in 2018: “They are treating incarcerated people in the jails in a sub-human manner … There’s just an utter lack of accountability, which ultimately goes to the top.”
Helen Jones, an organizer whose 22-year-old son died in LA sheriff’s custody in 2009, said she wasn’t surprised by the report: “It’s been this way for so long, it’s just the norm. It’s out of control, and there are no consequences.”
Demonstrators at a rally in support of transgender rights outside the Alabama State House in Montgomery. (photo: Nicole Craine/NYT)
Alabama is the third state in the country to pass a restriction on gender-affirming care for minors — though it's the first to include criminal penalties.
One of the bills makes it a felony for medical professionals to provide gender-affirming medical care people under 19.
Her signature makes Alabama the third state in the country to pass a measure restricting transition-related care, though it is the first state to impose criminal penalties.
Ivey said in a statement that she signed the bill because she believes that "if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl."
"We should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life," she said in a statement.
Major medical organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association — oppose restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors and say they go against best practice standards and will harm the wellbeing of trans youth.
Ivey also signed another bill that will bar transgender students from using sex-segregated school facilities that align with their gender identities and will prohibit classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-5 — adopting language used in a bill recently signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Ivey referred to the part of the bill that focuses on bathrooms and other sex-segregated facilities as a "no-brainer" and said it will also "ensure our elementary school classrooms remain free from any kind of sex talk."
The restriction on gender-affirming medical care will take effect in 30 days unless it faces legal action, which is likely. Two groups of civil rights organizations announced Thursday that they plan to sue should Ivey sign the bill.
The bathroom- and education-related bill will take effect in July unless it faces litigation.
Transgender youth in the state are already bracing for the bills' impacts.
Ninth grader Harleigh Walker, 15, spends her time after school like many girls her age: doing homework, listening to Taylor Swift, collecting records and hanging out with friends.
But this year, her spring break also included trying to persuade members of the state House and Senate to reject the two bills Ivey signed Friday. If the health care restriction takes effect, Harleigh will no longer be able to take testosterone-blocking drugs.
“Honestly, I’m a little scared now,” she said Thursday after learning the bill had passed. ”But we’re still going to fight no matter what.”
Harleigh said she is holding out hope the bill will be be blocked by a court.
Alabama is among multiple states with Republican-controlled legislatures that have advanced bills not only to block medical treatment but to ban transgender children from using school restrooms or playing on sports teams that don’t correspond with their sex at birth. The Alabama health care bill is one of the most far-reaching: It would put doctors in prison for up to 10 years for prescribing puberty blockers or hormonal treatment to trans kids under 19.
“In one breathtakingly cruel and cowardly day, the Alabama legislature passed the single most anti- transgender legislative package in history,” said Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, a national advocacy group for the LGBTQ community.
Conservative lawmakers say the measures are needed to protect children and parental rights.
“We regulate all kinds of things that are harmful for minors — alcohol, cigarette smoke, vaping, tattoos — because their minds aren’t ready to make those decisions about things that can affect them long term,” said Rep. Wes Allen, the sponsor of the House version of the Alabama legislation. Allen cited public hearing testimony from a woman who said she regretted taking hormone therapy to try to transition to being male.
“With these powerful medications that have detrimental effects on their body long term, we just want to put a pause on it ... give them a chance to develop and grow out of that,” Allen said.
But opponents say transgender health is being used as a deliberate political wedge issue to motivate a voting base — in the same way they say bills about critical race theory have been employed. Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. Numerous Republican-controlled legislatures have proposed bills to block its teaching in public schools.
The measures involving trans youth have prompted swift backlash from medical experts, Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. Department of Justice and the families of trans youth. Last month, the Justice department sent a letter to all 50 state attorneys general, warning them that blocking transgender and nonbinary youth from receiving gender-affirming care could be an infringement of federal constitutional protections.
“My child is not a political tool. This is not a fair fight to pick on vulnerable children,” said Vanessa Finney Tate, the mother of a 13-year-old trans boy in Birmingham, Alabama, after testifying at a public legislative hearing on bill that would block students from using bathrooms corresponding to their gender.
Harleigh’s father, Jeff Walker, notes that many of the same Alabama lawmakers who supported the ban on gender-affirming medical treatment recently argued, ‘It’s your body and your choice’ regarding coronavirus vaccinations. He said the family is now scrambling to find another state where it can continue Harleigh’s medical care.
“We just don’t want people meddling in our medical care,” he said.
Harleigh received puberty blockers — which stop her from going through male puberty — only after consulting with a team of doctors for years. She said it’s “weird” to see lawmakers with no medical experience call her medication “child abuse,” when six doctors have agreed she should have it.
Similar bans are moving forward in other states.
In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate as abuse reports of transition care for kids. And a law in Arkansas bans gender-affirming medications. That law has been blocked by a court, however.
Trans youth in many red states say they feel attacked, angry, betrayed and scared by the wave of legislation aimed at them.
“It feels like a back-stab,” Harleigh said. “I’ve lived in this state my whole life. For them to just say, ‘Well, you know what, this is an issue that’s really popular on my side of the aisle so I’m just going to raise it up and support it because it’ll help me win my election’ — It just hurts to see them do that.”
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A soldier searches a man at a checkpoint at the 22 de Abril neighborhood after a declaration of a state of emergency in Soyapango, El Salvador. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
With a new state of emergency, any residual hint of civil liberties has been suspended in ‘the world’s coolest dictatorship’.
Late that night, President Nayib Bukele took to Twitter – his preferred platform for presidential communications – to pressure Salvadoran lawmakers to approve a “state of exception”, which they obediently did in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, March 27.
Currently in place for 30 days but eligible for extension, the state of emergency basically entails a formal suspension of any residual hint of civil liberties in a nation where the president self-defines as the world’s “coolest dictator” and sports a backwards baseball cap accordingly. The emergency arrangement eliminates the right to association and legal defence while increasing the permissible period of detention without charge from 72 hours to 15 days and authorising the state to spy on private correspondence sans court order – not that the state ever seemed to require a court order for such activities in the first place.
In a downright terrifying turn of events on Tuesday, April 5, the Salvadoran parliament enacted a law to “punish anyone who shares information about gangs with up to 15 years in prison”, the New York Times writes. The new measure is “so vague, critics say, that virtually anyone can be arrested for speaking or writing about [gangs], putting journalists in the cross hairs”.
Bukele presents this latest wanton trampling of rights as a necessary and noble component of the “#GuerraContraPandillas”, the war on gangs, an ever-handy distraction from the other assorted emergencies Salvadorans face – like, you know, the wanton trampling of rights. In his ongoing Twitter crusade, Bukele has lambasted international human rights organisations for their critiques of Salvadoran shortcomings and has implied that the “international community” is effectively complicit in “terrorism” due to intermittently expressed concerns about the treatment of suspected gang members.
On Thursday, March 31, Bukele tweeted that, as of Sunday, food rations in Salvadoran prisons had been curtailed and that 16,000 prisoners had “not left their cells or seen the sun”. Three thousand additional alleged gang members had furthermore been arrested – “and we will continue”, boasted Bukele, which meant that “there will be less and less space and we will have to ration even more”. How’s that for cool?
Never mind that the Bukele administration itself has collaborated extensively with the, erm, “terrorists”, as has been revealed by entities ranging from the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro to the US Department of the Treasury. The New York Times notes that, according to the Treasury, the Salvadoran government “provided financial incentives to the gangs and preferential treatment for gang leaders in prison, such as access to mobile phones and prostitutes”. In exchange, the government reportedly finagled a pledge from the gangs to keep the national murder rate down and to throw their electoral weight behind Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) party, as if megalomaniacally hypocritical right-wing machinations were a remotely “new idea” in El Salvador or anywhere else.
To be sure, such a calling-out on the part of the US is no insignificant matter, coming as it does from the superpower that relentlessly backed right-wing slaughter during the 12-year Salvadoran civil war, in which more than 75,000 people were killed and countless Salvadorans fled north to Los Angeles – a hostile environment of a different sort, prompting the formation of Salvadoran gangs as a means of communal self-defence.
Once the war had officially ended, the US commenced mass deportations of prison-hardened gang members back to El Salvador, where a subsequent proliferation of gang membership reflected the reality of a devastated society now at the mercy of neoliberal pillage and a succession of governments more concerned with hyping the gang menace than with attending to the basic needs of the average impoverished citizen. In other words, it was a state of emergency from the get-go.
Fast forward three decades from the war’s end, and war is going strong in El Salvador, as Bukele continues to perpetrate vast socioeconomic injustice while endeavouring to convert the nation into a corrupt investor-friendly Bitcoin dystopia. As per the Bukelian narrative, the relatively low murder rate that had until now attended his reign – which began in 2019 – was thanks not to negotiations with MS-13 and Barrio 18 but rather to his unilaterally glorified “Territorial Control Plan”, the details of which are conveniently shrouded in secrecy but which has served as a militarised pillar of the #GuerraContraPandillas.
Lucid observers of the Salvadoran landscape reckon that the sudden surge in killings in late March has to do with some glitch in government-gang negotiations, causing the gangs to once again assert their power in a country that has long been a usual suspect on lists of global homicide capitals. Speaking of asserting power, it bears mentioning that Bukele’s Territorial Control Plan came about via such presidential antics as deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside the Salvadoran parliament building and threatening to dissolve the legislative body if parliamentarians did not cooperate in approving the loan he required for said plan.
This was in February 2020, a month before the coronavirus pandemic provided Bukele with the opportunity to enact his first state of emergency: one of the most maniacal lockdowns on earth, which forced many already barely surviving Salvadorans to confront starvation face-to-face (the current prison “rations” come to mind). A spike in homicides in April then produced a presidential Twitter decree authorising the army and police to utilise lethal force against presumed gang members and “in defence of the lives of Salvadorans” more generally – no doubt odd instructions coming from a person involved in the forcible starvation and general punishment of Salvadorans.
Anyway, the pandemic response was a whopping success in El Salvador, as noted by a Bloomberg opinion article in May: “Police were given broad powers to enter homes without warrants and arrest those thought to be violating quarantine; security forces mistook a young woman who’d gone shopping for a Mother’s Day present for a criminal gang member and shot her dead.”
A year later, in May 2021, Bukele oversaw the spontaneous sacking of five Supreme Court judges and El Salvador’s attorney general. In short, he really isn’t joking about the whole “dictatorship” thing.
Now, judging from Bukele’s activity on Twitter, it seems that Salvadoran security forces have once again been given the “green light” to go after gang members as they see fit – as if they ever really needed it. Back in 2018, CNN reported on Salvadoran “elite paramilitary police officers” who stood accused of extrajudicial killings – all with the firm backing, surprise surprise, of the US.
On March 27, the day this year’s “state of exception” came into effect, Bukele tweeted that, while some aspects of daily life in certain Salvadoran neighbourhoods would undergo temporary shutdowns, in most areas activities involving religious services, sporting events, shopping, education, and other stuff would continue as normal – “unless you are a gang member or the authorities consider you suspicious”. Consider this a warning to all Mother’s Day shoppers.
And while Bukele has whined on Twitter that no other countries “have decided to help us in the war against gangs” – so much for US support for lethal operations – he has received solid endorsement from the likes of Mexican billionaire businessman Ricardo Salinas, Bitcoin fan and one the planet’s richest people, who tweeted his applause for the Bukelian state of emergency: “That’s what it means to have balls.”
The Salvadoran head of state meanwhile took it upon himself, in the aftermath of the Oscars, to tweet: “Salvadoran soldier > Will Smith”, an apparent reference to the superior qualifications of El Salvador’s finest when it comes to self-righteous displays of violence and the illusion of “having balls”.
In the end, such is life in the world’s coolest dictatorship – a state of emergency if there ever was one.
A bonobo baby in the arms of its mother. (photo: Hendrik Schmidt/Getty Images)
“Maya’s place is in the forest,” Fanny Minesi, who heads the nonprofit, said in a statement referring to the group’s matriarch. “This is the day we worked for — for decades — to put bonobos back in the wild where they are protected.”
These great apes, along with chimpanzees, are the closest relatives of Homo sapiens; humans and bonobos share 99% of their DNA. But unlike chimpanzees and most human societies, bonobos live in tight-knit matriarchal groups.
Maya was orphaned as a baby when poachers killed the adults in her family. She was rescued by Claudine André, the founder of Friends of Bonobos, also known by its French acronym ABC, 25 years ago. After spending more than two decades at a bonobo sanctuary founded by André, she is now returning to her forest home with three children of her own.
Every bonobo birth is a cause for celebration. There are less than 50,000 bonobos left in the wild, and that number could be as low as 15,000. They are found only in the DRC in Central Africa. Population estimates are uncertain because researchers have only surveyed about a third of their thickly forested range. Some experts fear that bonobos (Pan paniscus) could disappear within a human lifetime (70 years).
Like with other primates, hunting has hacked away at bonobo populations. Poverty and a reliance on traditional modes of subsistence among communities that live near bonobo habitats drive illegal hunting. Adults are killed for their meat and body parts, and baby bonobos are often illegally sold off as pets.
Infant bonobos are deeply attached to their mothers, who hold familial groups together. These apes are famous for using sexual interactions to maintain peace in their tribe. Their general easygoing nature is well-documented, yet they continue to surprise researchers interested in altruistic behavior. Last year, a team studying bonobos reported the first known cases in great apes of females adopting infants from outside their social groups.
Not all orphans are as lucky to be taken under the wing of adoptive bonobo parents. However, some do find shelter with surrogate human mothers when they land up at the Lola ya Bonobo center run by ABC on the outskirts of the DRC’s capital, Kinshasa.
André established ABC and the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in 1994. The center’s name means Bonobo Paradise in the local Lingala language, and in keeping with its name, it is a kind of haven for orphaned bonobos. Here, they are nursed and cared for by a team of veterinarians, nutritionists, caretakers and employees trained to act as surrogate mothers. Some bonobos stay at the center until the end of their days. With the reintroduction program, rehabilitated animals can now take the leap back to their ancestral jungle homes.
ABC selects individuals who are at least 8 years old; however, all babies go with their moms. They shouldn’t have severe handicaps nor be a threat to the group. Those who are very attached to their human friends are not considered. The potential candidates are then cajoled into spending time together to see how they get along.
The first batch of bonobos was released in Ekolo ya Bonobo Community Reserve in Équateur province in 2009. The second edition of the rewilding effort was held back by an Ebola outbreak that gripped pockets of Équateur in 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic striking that same year, the already complex operation became even more difficult.
The 14 bonobos travelled by plane, in the back of a truck, and atop makeshift rafts to get to their new home. And, they had to quarantine, too — for almost four years — on Totaka Island near the reserve. The quarantine was prolonged thanks to the multiple delays. On the island, they had the chance to acclimatize to their new surroundings, while still receiving food and care from the ABC team.
Ekolo ya Bonobo Community Reserve, spread across 120,000 acres (48,600 hectares), was designated a protected area in 2019. Most of Équateur province is cloaked in dense woodland. But the region has lost 3% of its primary rainforests in the past 20 years, according to Global Forest Watch, a platform run by the World Resources Institute. The DRC lost 5% of its old-growth humid forests in the same period.
“The bonobos that are being placed in Ekolo are pioneers for interventions that may become more visibly needed as we move into a future of growing fragmentation and depletion of Congo’s forests,” John Hart, a primatologist, told Mongabay in 2019. However, Hart, who is not associated with ABC, said that preserving natural habitats and their resident bonobos should still be the top priority.
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just warp travel plans and the reintroduction schedule; it also brought greater attention to zoonotic diseases. With so much shared genetic heritage, great apes are often susceptible to the same or similar diseases that attack humans. One of the concerns surrounding reintroduction is the risk of bonobos raised among people carrying pathogens from humans to wild populations.
According to guidelines from global conservation authority the IUCN, areas earmarked for reintroductions should be carefully selected so the boost to wildlife populations doesn’t exacerbate friction with nearby communities.
Ekolo ya Bonobo is managed jointly by the NGO and residents in adjoining villages. Villagers are recruited as forest guards who perform patrols and also help monitor the apes. ABC is working on curbing forest destruction and strengthening awareness among communities. The reserve itself was carved out of tribal land leased from four villages. There are plans to expand the reserve by 80,000 acres (32,400 hectares) a move that ABC says depends on negotiations with local communities, national authorities and the availability of funding.
ABC also plans to seek national park status for Ekolo ya Bonobo.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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