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03 July 22
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“In my mind, the idea that this was based in any kind of reasoned debate or philosophical education — the Supreme Court is now the Fox News of justice in my mind,” Stewart said on an episode of “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
“It is a cynical pursuit in the same way that Fox News would come out with ‘we’re fair and balanced’ under the patina of what would be a high-status pursuit to the betterment of society, journalism. They are a cynical political arm,” the comedian argued.
Stewart went on to criticize the process by which justices are confirmed, which involves nominees going through rounds of televised questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who all voted to overturn Roe — have been criticized for dodging questions about the landmark 1973 decision or saying they regarded it as an important precedent during the confirmation process.
“When you look at the ridiculous kabuki theater now of justice confirmation, where they can just go out there and just f—— lie, like if this were about debate, then they would’ve understood what perjury meant,” the former “Daily Show” host argued.
“But they are now the Fox News of justice. I mean, there is no consistency. States can’t regulate guns, but they can regulate [uteruses], you know?”
Stewart continued by referencing the Martin Luther King Jr. quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“I think the thing that struck me was, you know, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ Right? And I think we’re all sort of steeped in that ethos. What you don’t realize is there is a goodly amount of individuals who are trying to bend it back.”
Stewart’s comments come amid a strong backlash from Democrats and abortion rights advocates following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, with recent polling showing that a majority of Americans are concerned the ruling will be used to overturn other rights.
Laurence Tribe speaking with Wolf Blitzer. (photo: CNN)
In March, editor Marina Ovsyannikova interrupted Russia’s Channel One evening news with a sign saying: 'No War. Stop the war. Don't believe the propaganda. You are being lied to here.' (photo: DSK/EPA)
Little moderation, huge audiences and biddable owners make porn and gambling sites a safe haven from censors
Vladimir Putin had been aggressively turning Russia’s internet into a fortress and, as a CEO at a Ukrainian digital marketing company, Baydachenko knew a way to infiltrate it. The plan was simple: buy ad space across websites in Russia and Belarus and use them to link to independent news on the war in Ukraine. The adverts could be direct, or they could be oblique, even titillating, to conceal their true nature and evade the censors.
At first Baydachenko targeted the usual suspects – Google, YouTube, Facebook and other sites with high traffic. But with each passing day the task became harder. The introduction of Russia’s “fake news” law catapulted the country’s internet into a darker realm. And so Baydachenko moved into a darker one too: the world of online gambling and pornography. These sites were perfect – little moderation, huge audiences and people behind them whose allegiances were with the highest bidder. If all else failed she’d try to take on Putin through porn.
Baydachenko wasn’t a lone ranger. Instead she was part of a bigger network and through this network money began to come in. The operation expanded. Baydachenko reckons that their ads have reached hundreds of millions of Russian internet users. “Informational resistance works,” Baydachenko says with confidence, adding that she believes pushback to the war from mothers of Russian soldiers is partly because of the campaign.
This is just one example in a growing list of people and organisations exploiting digital loopholes in Russia to challenge Putin’s control. Last month alone, hackers have turned the mobile version of news radio station Kommersant FM into a jukebox of Ukrainian anthems and have placed an appeal to end the war on smotrim.ru, the main website for accessing state-run TV channels and radio stations.
Rob Blackie is one of the directors of Free Russia, a campaign to bring independent news about the war to Russians through ads. He spearheaded the campaign (first doing so in 2014 when Crimea was invaded) and now works with Baydachenko. He jokes that from Putin’s perspective he’s running “a criminal spam operation”.
What he and the other people in this space actually operate is a modern-day samizdat network. Samizdat, the Russian word for clandestine material, was highly influential in the USSR, helping spread a mass of protests, banned work and documents. The method was the typewriter, the means people’s hands – now upgraded to the internet and its offshoot of tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and the encrypted apps Telegram and Signal.
Even TikTok was recently used by US-backed news organisation RFE/RL to track the movements of troops across the country as they made their way to the front. RFE/RL – which has suspended operations in Russia after pressure from police and politicians – is still working with journalists there and breaking important stories. Its message is clear: we’ll find ways to get information in and out.
Some are fighting the information war by merging the modern with the old, such as the team behind Zvezda, an independent digital publication. When their site was blocked in early March they began publishing a weekly text edition on their Telegram channel in an A4 format that could be easily printed out. Stepan Khlopov, the editor-in-chief, said he hoped people would leave the newspaper lying around for passersby to pick up.
Resistance isn’t always in the form of hard-hitting news. The Kopilka Project, an online repository of anti-war poetry from over 100 Russian speakers, was launched a few months ago in the form of a live Googledoc to which readers can request access. Kopilka translates from Russian as “piggy bank”, and Julia Nemrovskaya, one of the organisers, told me they consider their efforts to be “throwing a tiny copper coin into a bigger kopilka: the collective effort to defeat Putin”. Kopilka’s aims are twofold: to challenge Putin’s propaganda and to keep the poems safe from the Kremlin’s destructive arms.
At Index on Censorship, where I am editor-in-chief, bad-news stories are our bread and butter. When I stumble on positive stories I embrace them. And even in the middle of this awful war, there is some good. Protest still exists in Russia. It exists in headline-grabbing instances of journalists brandishing anti-war signs on the evening news and thousands taking to Russia’s streets. But it also exists in large-scale, high-impact digital operations, meticulously planned and involving, of course, a hefty dose of bravery.
Putin can ban journalists all he wants – as he did in mid-June when he banned 29 UK journalists from entering Russia, including correspondents from the Guardian. He can saddle protesters with hefty prison terms and fines. He can block independent, critical sites. Yet people are finding ingenious ways to get the non-airbrushed truth out and to pass the message on.
Yes, it’s important not to overstate their role. Today’s dissidents play a high-stakes game. Putin isn’t a man to mess with. His punishment is swift and harsh, and while he might not run as well-oiled an online censorship machine as, say, Xi Jinping does in China, he’s fast catching up. But allow us a moment to rejoice in the image of people in Russia visiting porn sites only to be served the naked truth about the Ukraine war. If anything deserves to be called a “special operation”, it’s surely that.
Few words in American history are invoked as often as the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, published nearly 250 years ago, and few more difficult to define. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
“Those words say to me, ‘Do better, America.’ And what I mean by that is we have never been a country where people were truly equal,” Jennings says. “It's an aspiration to continue to work towards, and we're not there yet.”
Ryan T. Anderson is president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. He, too, believes that “all men are created equal.” For him, the words mean we all have “the same dignity, we all count equally, no one is disposable, no one a second-class citizen." At the same time, he says, not everyone has an equal right to marry — what he and other conservatives regard as the legal union of a man and woman.
"I don't think human equality requires redefining what marriage is," he says.
Few words in American history are invoked as often as those from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, published nearly 250 years ago. And few are more difficult to define. The music, and the economy, of “all men are created equal” make it both universal and elusive, adaptable to viewpoints — social, racial, economic — otherwise with little or no common ground. How we use them often depends less on how we came into this world than on what kind world we want to live in.
It’s as if “All men are created equal” leads us to ask: “And then what?”
“We say ‘All men are created equal’ but does that mean we need to make everyone entirely equal at all times, or does it mean everyone gets a fair shot?” says Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, which promotes expanded voting rights, public financing of political campaigns and other progressive causes. “Individualism is baked into that phrase, but also a broader, more egalitarian vision. There's a lot there.”
Thomas Jefferson helped immortalize the expression, but he didn't invent it. The words in some form date back centuries before the Declaration and were even preceded in 1776 by Virginia's Declaration of Rights, which stated that “all men are by nature equally free and independent.” Peter Onuf, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia whose books include “The Mind of Thomas Jefferson,” notes that Jefferson himself did not claim to have said something radically new and wrote in 1825 that the Declaration lacked “originality of principle or sentiment.”
The Declaration was an indictment of the British monarchy, but not a statement of justice for all. For the slave owning Jefferson “and most of his fellow patriots, enslaved people were property and therefore not included in these new polities, leaving their status unchanged,” Onuf says. He added that “did not mean he did not recognize his enslaved people to be people, just that they could only enjoy those universal, natural rights elsewhere, in a country of their own: emancipation and expatriation.”
Hannah Spahn, a professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin and author of the upcoming “Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition,” says that a draft version of the Declaration made clear that Jefferson meant “all humans” were created equal but not necessarily that that all humans were equal under the law. Spahn, like such leading Revolutionary War scholars as Jack Rakove, believes that “all men are created equal” originally referred less to individual equality than to the rights of a people as a whole to self-government.
Once the Declaration had been issued, perceptions began to change. Black Americans were among the first to change them, notably the New England-based clergyman Lemuel Haynes. Soon after July 4, Haynes wrote “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping,” an essay not published until 1983 but seen as reflecting the feelings of many in the Black community, with its call to “affirm, that Even an affrican, has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.”
Spahn finds Haynes’ response “philosophically innovative," because he isolated the passage containing the famous phrase from the rest of the Declaration and made it express “timeless, universally binding norms."
“He deliberately downplayed Jefferson’s original emphasis on problems of collective assent and consent,” she says.
The words have since been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted. By feminists at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 who stated “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” By civil rights leaders from Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in his “I Have a Dream” speech held up the phrase as a sacred promise to Black Americans. By Abraham Lincoln, who invoked them in the Gettysburg Address and elsewhere, but with a narrower scope than what King imagined a century later.
In Lincoln's time, according to historian Eric Foner, “they made a careful distinction between natural, civil, political and social rights. One could enjoy equality in one but not another.”
“Lincoln spoke of equality in natural rights — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” says Foner, whose books include the Pulitzer Prize winning “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” “That’s why slavery is wrong and why people have an equal right to the fruits of their labor. Political rights were determined by the majority and could be limited by them."
The words have been denied entirely. John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and vehement defender of slavery, found “not a word of truth” in them as he attacked the phrase during a speech in 1848. Vice President Alexander H. Stephens of the Confederate States contended in 1861 that “the great truth" is "the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade and other recent Supreme Court decisions has led some activists to wonder if “All men are created equal” still has any meaning. Robin Marty, author of “Handbook for a Post-Roe America,” calls the phrase a “bromide” for those “who ignore how unequal our lives truly are.”
Marty added that the upending of abortion rights has given the unborn “greater protection than most,” a contention echoed in part by Roe opponents who have said that “All men are created equal” includes the unborn.
Among contemporary politicians and other public figures, the words are applied to very different ends.
— President Donald Trump cited them in October 2020 (“The divine truth our Founders enshrined in the fabric of our Nation: that all people are created equal”) in a statement forbidding federal agencies from teaching “Critical Race Theory.” President Joe Biden echoed the language of Seneca Falls (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal”) while praising labor unions last month as he addressed an AFL-CIO gathering in Philadelphia.
— Morse Tan, dean of Liberty University, the evangelical school co-founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., says the words uphold a “classic, longstanding” Judeo-Christian notion: "The irreducible worth and value that all human beings have because they (are) created in the image of God.” Secular humanists note Jefferson's own religious skepticism and fit his words and worldview within 18th century Enlightenment thinking, emphasizing human reason over faith.
— Conservative organizations from the Claremont Institute to the Heritage Foundation regard “all men are created equal” as proof that affirmative action and other government programs addressing racism are unnecessary and contrary to the ideal of a “color-blind” system.
Ibram X. Kendi, the award-winning author and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, says the words can serve what he calls both “antiracist” and “assimilationist” perspectives.
“The anti-racist idea suggests that all racial groups are biologically, inherently equal. The assimilationist idea is that all racial groups are created equal, but it leaves open the idea some racial groups become inferior by nurture, meaning some racial groups are inferior culturally or behaviorally,” says Kendi, whose books include ”Stamped from the Beginning" and “How to Be an Antiracist.”
“To be an anti-racist is to recognize that it’s not just that we are created equal, or biologically equal. It’s that all racial groups are equals. And if there are disparities between those equal racial groups, then it is the result of racist policy or structural racism and not the inferiority or superiority of a racial group.”
Members of Black Lives Matter-LA, along with community members, held a press conference in July 2021 to demand answers and full reparations from the Los Angeles Police Department. (photo: Al Seib/LA Times/Getty Images)
A task force is calling on the state to provide “comprehensive reparations” to Black Americans.
But these stories leave out the experiences of thousands of enslaved African Americans, including those who were transported out west to California in the middle of the 19th century. The California Reparations Task Force, created by Gov. Gavin Newsom in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, is calling up this history and calling for reparatory justice at the same time.
The task force — a body of nine appointed individuals responsible for studying what a reparations program would look like for the state — launched its effort in 2021, and in June 2022 released a comprehensive interim report that examines the state’s history of slavery as well as the oppression of Black Californians since the state was established in 1850.
The report found that though the 13th Amendment empowered Congress to remove “all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States,” California perpetuated new iterations of harm that have “been innumerable and have snowballed over generations.”
The report is the most thorough government-issued report on race since the 1968 Kerner Commission, which found that racism drove the riots of the late 1960s, Kamilah Moore, chair of the commission, told Vox. “My hope is that people use this report as an educational and organizing tool,” she said.
It details that, in addition to the original harms of enslavement and racial terror, the American and Californian governments engaged in political disenfranchisement against Black people, instituted housing segregation and separate and unequal education, and that racism influenced the development of the state’s infrastructure, creating environmental injustice. The report also pointed out that the federal and state governments have made it harder for Black families to stay together, with Black children overrepresented in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems; hindered Black Americans from getting employment opportunities; and made it more difficult for Black Americans to build wealth.
California’s racial wealth gap is understudied, but a few studies of Los Angeles show the disparity. One 2016 study found that the median net worth of white Angeleno households was $355,000 while that of native-born Black Angelenos was $4,000. The same study found that the median value of liquid assets for Black households was $200 compared to $110,000 for white households.
The Reparations Task Force report substantiates the claim for reparations at the state and federal levels. But the commission still has major questions to explore. Mainly: What would reparations even look like? And would California be able to afford the cost?
California’s history of terror easily makes the case for reparations
Though there was a movement to bar the westward expansion of slavery, California’s history with the institution created long-lasting effects, the report’s authors highlighted.
California’s early lawmakers tolerated slavery, and it is estimated that up to 1,500 enslaved Black people lived in California by 1852, according to the report. This was the case despite California joining the Union as a free state in 1850. Enslavers mostly trafficked young men and teenage boys to have them work in gold mines amid the state’s gold rush.
The state passed a fugitive slave law in 1852 that made it “a more proslavery state than most other free states,” the report stated. The law required state officials to help enslavers capture enslaved people who escaped to free states, punished people who tried to help freedom seekers, and limited the enslaved person’s ability to defend themself in court. From 1852 to 1855, anyone accused of being a runaway slave could be sent back to enslavement in the South, even if they had been living in the free state of California since 1850.
And though the federal government in the Reconstruction era abolished slavery, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws and the right to vote, California was slow to sign on to those reforms. It didn’t ratify the Fourteenth Amendment until 1959 and the Fifteenth Amendment until 1962.
This early history had lingering negative effects on life in California that are still felt today. In the early 20th century, the state sometimes held more Ku Klux Klan events than Mississippi or Louisiana, with California KKK members holding top positions in government and police departments, the report points out.
Racial animus informed lawmakers’ decisions around housing, development, education, and family life. The government created segregation through redlining, zoning ordinances, and discriminatory mortgage practices. Black people were sometimes forbidden from living in entire areas and towns, like the suburbs outside of San Francisco and Los Angeles, due to “sundown town” restrictions.
White neighborhoods flourished while Black ones languished since the government actively razed Black areas for alleged “urban renewal” and “park construction,” according to the report. This segregation was a part of school life, too, since the state Supreme Court ruled in 1874 that segregation in public schools was legal. A century later, school desegregation efforts repeatedly failed across the state — and today California is the sixth most segregated state for Black students, according to a study cited in the report.
Disparity is evident in other areas of California life today as well, like the disproportionate representation of Black children in foster homes or the high representation of Black Californians in the state’s legal system as a result of law enforcement’s propensity to stop and arrest them.
“California has this history and the formal plan that we recommend to the governor will reflect the kinds of terror that Black people in California had to endure,” Moore told Vox.
Can California afford the bill?
The report makes dozens of preliminary recommendations to address the glaring disparities it maps out.
For example, to end legal slavery in California, the task force recommends that the state remove specific language in its constitution that allows involuntary servitude as punishment for crimes. To address racial terror, the report suggests that the state hold law enforcement officers accountable for violence by eliminating state law immunities that protect misconduct. To remedy environmental racism, the authors argue for plans to tackle unequal exposure to pollutants. And to address unequal education, the task force wants the state to support Black students with education grants.
While the recommendations are extensive, the task force has yet to suggest cash payments to Black Californians, a pillar of reparatory justice that advocates say could be the most meaningful for residents. At the federal level, economists have estimated that reparations could cost the federal government around $10 trillion to $12 trillion, or about $800,000 for each eligible Black household.
But the task force hasn’t ruled it out. Its report is an interim one, and its members plan to undertake more discussions and research before it must submit its final report to Gov. Newsom. Moore noted that cash reparations aren’t out of the question, particularly with the state’s estimated $97.5 billion state budget surplus.
“California does have the budget to provide reparations in the form of cash payments, and the surplus is even added evidence of the fact that it has the budget,” Moore said.
As of 2020, 39.5 million people reside in California, with 2.8 million, or about 6 percent, identifying as Black. The task force voted that only Black Californians who can prove their direct lineage to enslaved ancestors would be eligible for reparations through the state. Moore says the figure would be within the state’s budget.
Others have argued that in order for cash payments to be reparations, they must close the racial wealth gap in a manner that makes up for the government’s exclusion of Black Americans from programs like Social Security and the G.I. Bill.
According to Moore, the task force will take all these factors into consideration as it works through its next phase.
“We still have a lot to think through,” Moore said. “The final plan for reparations will address payment for rehabilitation, social services, medical services, stolen wealth, satisfaction, and a formal apology.”
Gia Batonisashvili chops wood in March while his mother Nora stands at the window. They lost their backyard - and the toilet in there - three years ago after Russian troops put up barbed wire as part of a process of borderization that is causing Gia, Nora and other residents of Khurvaleti, a village in Georgia, to lose access to agricultural land, cemeteries, water and other resources. (photo: Julien Pebrel/MYOP/Al Jazeera)
Khurvaleti is increasingly affected by Russian forces demarcating the ‘border’ of breakaway state South Ossetia.
Gia, 63, and his mother Nora, 81, live in a decaying house at the end of the only asphalt road that crosses Khurvaleti, a village almost surrounded by the Moscow-backed breakaway state of South Ossetia which borders Russia. Roughly 4km (2 miles) long and 2km (1 mile) wide, Khurvaleti juts into South Ossetia like a small peninsula.
It is located in a valley about 60km (37 miles) northwest of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and lies just a few kilometres from a major highway that connects the country’s east and west, and from the gas pipeline linking Azerbaijan to the Black Sea.
Khurvaleti, like many rural Georgian communities, consists of several clusters of owner-built houses surrounded by fields and orchards. The homes have large balconies to enjoy the summer months and the view of the hills and mountains where Russian soldiers patrol. Its population of around 160 families is mostly involved in agricultural activities with some artisans and teachers working at the local school.
Gia and his mother survive on Nora’s monthly pension of 360 laris ($120) and subsistence farming which hardly cover their needs.
“We have no means to repair the roof that is constantly leaking. With the pension we just buy medications and we also have to purchase food since we lost access to most of our agricultural land and a large orchard. We only have this small plot in front of our house left to grow vegetables,” says the former stonecutter, with both resentment and resignation.
On one side of their house looms a Russian observation tower covered with green camouflage. On the other, the narrow path leading to the house of their Ossetian neighbour is also closed off by a barbed-wire fence and a green banner warning that trespassing the “state border” is forbidden.
After the 2008 war, borderisation
In Khurvaleti, Gia and Nora are hardly an exception. The village territory continues to be fenced off by Russian forces following the 2008 five-day war with Russia.
“Since 2008, we no longer have access to the cemetery or pasture lands, and many inhabitants have also lost part of their agricultural land,” says Badri Adikashvili, the representative of the Gori municipality for Khurvaleti and the surrounding villages.
According to figures published by the ombudsman of Georgia, Khurvaleti lost 36 hectares of agricultural land and pasture – roughly the size of 50 football pitches – due to Russian border guards carrying out a process known as “borderisation” to demarcate South Ossetia’s “state borders”.
At the end of August 2008, after Russia’s invasion of Georgia and a war that killed some 850 people, Moscow unilaterally recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two separatist entities located respectively in the western and central parts of the country that broke away from the newly independent Republic of Georgia in the early 1990s following violent conflicts.
The following year, South Ossetia and Abkhazia outsourced the protection of their “state borders” to Russia. Since then, several thousand soldiers and Russian Federal Security Service border guards have been stationed in a cluster of more than 30 military bases and outposts. Two of them are just a few kilometres from Khurvaleti.
The “state borders” are based on old maps of Soviet Georgia depicting the administrative boundaries of the autonomous provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Since 2008, both de facto states have relied heavily on support from Russia, viewing it primarily as a protector against Georgia and the ethnonationalism and oppression that they accuse it of. Moscow’s grip extends to most spheres of life and policies. The main language in local media is Russian and Russian channels are widely broadcast. The rouble is the only currency, state budgets are dependent on Russian subsidies, and most inhabitants hold a Russian passport.
Borderisation started after the 2008 war but has accelerated over the past decade and has nearly reached completion in some areas.
“It is starting from ground lines to ditches, fences, metal fences, barbed-wire fences, different types of technological systems like sensors, movement detectors, up to watchtowers, observation points and permanent bases of the Russian Federation border guards,” explains Marek Szczygiel, the Polish diplomat heading the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) in Georgia that has been patrolling the administrative boundary line (ABL) daily since the autumn of 2008. Of the 400km (250 miles) surrounding South Ossetia, the EUMM says that almost 90km (56 miles) have been fenced off, or 40 percent of the total passable areas.
Patience and creeping occupation
After Georgia’s 2008 defeat on the battlefield, pro-Western president Mikheil Saakashvili who rose to power following the 2003 Rose Revolution kept his parliamentary majority for four more years.
The autumn of 2012 saw a peaceful transition of power to a coalition of the opposition called Georgian Dream led by Georgia’s wealthiest oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. Shifting away from the staunch anti-Russian line of the Saakashvili years, the new Georgian government has adopted a policy of non-confrontation with Moscow while still claiming to be in favour of EU and NATO integration. In March this year, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Georgia applied for EU membership.
Fearing reprisals or escalation, Georgian authorities have rarely interfered in the borderisation process. Georgian Dream has employed what International Crisis Group analyst Olesya Vartanyan calls “strategic patience”. “You see the Russians building fences but at the same time you are not responding to it mainly because you understand the kind of short-term and longer-term consequences for your country if you start opposing and get into an open confrontation,” she says.
But they have been denouncing “creeping occupation”, the grabbing of additional land that belongs to Tbilisi.
The face of the resistance to this occupation was Data Vanishvili, an outspoken resident of Khurvaleti, who passed away in March 2021 at the age of 89. In 2011, he refused to leave his house – which he shared with his ethnic Ossetian wife Valia – when it was cut off from the rest of the village by barbed wire and became a symbolic location for visiting Western leaders and diplomats.
“Unlike others, he would only take the Georgian pension, not the South Ossetian one, on principle,” says Malkhaz Vanishvili, 33, who was raised by his grandfather and grandmother in Khurvaleti. “Russian soldiers would randomly come to our house, just open the door and check the basement. Data was angry and cursed them, I always tried to calm him down.”
Sporting a beard and a black baseball cap, Malkhaz currently lives in the nearby village of Nadarbazevi where the Georgian state provided him with a new home last October. He lives on the first floor of an empty house with his pregnant wife Tatia and their first child, one-year-old Giorgi.
“I had no other choice but to leave as it was too much stress staying there,” he says, standing in the cold living room of his house which came unfurnished and is still not connected to the heating.
As Malkhaz is unable to work due to health issues, the family’s only income is the 200 laris ($68) they receive monthly as social welfare. One of their only valuables is his grandfather Data’s posthumous honour medal he received from Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili.
To get through the winter, the young father sold a piece of his garden for 500 laris ($167), cut some of its trees to make firewood and relied on the help of his grandmother who still lives behind the fence. “Once or twice a month, we meet at the barbed wire. Last time I offered her a clock. Usually, I would give her bottles of water and she would give me some food,” says Malkhaz, referring to his grandmother’s homemade cheese or donated goods from the South Ossetian Red Cross.
Hardening ‘border’
In 2008, Khurvaleti was spared the fighting but, as elsewhere in Georgia, the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine has reopened old wounds. Khurvaleti resident Eka Etsadashvili, 42, recalls Russian tanks rolling into the near-empty village in 2008. “People had fled to Tbilisi,” she says. “The war in Ukraine reminds you of your own tragedy and the fear rises. Who knows what fantasies Putin will have in the future? We are already living with a creeping occupation from Russia and you can do nothing about it.”
In the living room of Gia and Nora, opposition channel Mtavari Arkhi, with a strong anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine stance, broadcasts devastated cities and buildings from across the Black Sea. “It hurts my heart. Is there real blood in Putin’s veins? I am overloaded with information, I don’t want to watch this any more,” says Gia. “What can we do?” he asks, holding up a small knife, a smile on his craggy face, to show his only means of defence.
His mother, Nora, is an ethnic Ossetian from the nearby village of Tsinagari who married a Georgian man from Khurvaleti. Intermarriages occurred very frequently between Georgians and Ossetians up until the 2008 war.
“I am Ossetian but before the 1990s, there was no discussion in the village about being Georgian or Ossetian. Every Ossetian has Georgian relatives and every Georgian has Ossetian relatives,” says Meriko Jioevi, 80, who wears a long, dark skirt and sits on a bed in her living room while her Georgian husband Zauri takes a nap next to the stove. She also grew up in Tsinagari which is now inaccessible despite being only 3km (1.9 miles) away.
The borderisation process is putting a definitive hold on the long cohabitation between the two communities which had persisted in many rural areas even after the civil war of 1991-1992 between South Ossetian and Georgian forces. Beyond marriages, it involved mutual visits for religious celebrations, invitations to funerals and birthdays, friendships and strong economic ties.
Many locals still maintain contact with friends and relatives living on the other side through phone calls and chat apps as physical encounters have been almost impossible for more than two years.
In November 2019 – following a rare dispute with Georgian authorities over borderisation in a forest between a Georgian village and an Ossetian settlement – the de facto South Ossetian authorities decided to close all official checkpoints along Tbilisi-controlled territory. The decision was then upheld due to the pandemic. This year, three checkpoints were reopened briefly for two religious holidays, Orthodox Easter in late April and the Lomisoba festival in June.
One community has particularly suffered from the closures. Fifteen kilometres (nine miles) east of Khurvaleti, the Akhalgori valley lies between some small mountains. It is the main area in South Ossetia which has remained predominantly inhabited by Georgians. There, Georgians were not forced out during the war and their villages burned to the ground in its aftermath.
“The main crossing point leading to Akhalgori used to witness approximately 400 crossings per day,” says EUMM head of mission Szczygiel, referring to visits for reasons such as shopping, business, seeing a doctor or meeting relatives. “We currently only observe approximately 50 such crossings per month, mainly for medical reasons. Akhalgori valley residents are almost totally cut off and isolated from the rest of Georgia, from their friends and family members. It creates a very dramatic impact on the living conditions and wellbeing of this population.”
‘I am afraid to cross again’
Another sign that borderisation has hardened in recent years is that informal crossings seem to have diminished. Both Georgians and Ossetians living close to the boundary line used to bypass official checkpoints to visit relatives, friends or the graveyards of their ancestors. Pensioners from both sides would also cross the separation line to collect their monthly allowance.
According to figures released by Tbilisi, the number of Georgian citizens detained by South Ossetian de facto authorities for “illegal crossing” went from 163 in 2015 down to 64 in 2020. Crossings became too risky as Russian soldiers are not only building physical obstacles and patrolling along the “border” but also operating a fully fledged system of surveillance and control with the installation of cameras and electronic jamming systems.
“We have not witnessed any detention during the past two years. Before they would mostly arrest shepherds who were moving in areas where there was no visible sign. They would take them to Tskhinvali (the de facto capital of South Ossetia) and release them on the second day after they paid a small fine,” says local municipal representative Adikashvili (according to the EUMM the fine is 2,000 roubles ($30) for first-time violators).
But not all detention cases are like this. In 2018, Akhalgori resident and former soldier Archil Tatunashvili died in custody following torture.
In 2019, Khvicha Mghebrishvili, who lived in a village close to Khurvaleti, was beaten and held in Tskhinvali temporary detention centre. He was accused of collecting bats for the Lugar Research Center, a Tbilisi-based biomedical laboratory which has sparked many conspiracy theories from Kremlin-backed media.
Malkhaz was arrested several times in South Ossetia for crossing the “border” informally even though he is from a mixed family and holds dual citizenship. “I was often sneaking across the border (into Georgia proper) and that’s also how I met my wife in one of the shops in Khurvaleti,” he says. “One time they kept me in a small and cold room. The South Ossetian KGB beat me and made me insult Georgians in Ossetian language. I am afraid to cross again, if they catch me I might be tortured.”
‘Russian soldiers always watch’
In 2019, Amnesty International released a report focusing on widespread human rights violations related to the borderisation process. It said that “‘borderisation’ negatively affects communities on both sides of the ABL, limiting freedom of movement and liberty, eroding living standards, and entrenching discriminatory attitudes and measures”.
The grabbing of agricultural lands and deprivation of access to natural resources such as wood and water for irrigation have taken a toll on rural communities living near the boundary line with South Ossetia.
Villages around the boundary line have lost between 10 to 50 hectares of farmland and pasture, according to the Amnesty report. It also stressed that residents no longer cultivate plots close to the boundary line for fear of being abducted. Many people living in areas affected by the borderisation process speak of anxiety and precarity.
“I can’t think about the future, I have no plans further than tomorrow,” says a Khurvaleti resident whose house is located only 30 metres from the fence. Her long black hair hangs down her apron as she sits on a bench in the lush yard of her workplace, crowded with tall grass and fruit trees.
She works at a community retirement home located in a big house on the main road.
“My husband works for the Georgian army. When I am washing his clothes, I am not hanging them outside. I can see four observation posts from my kitchen. Russian soldiers always watch and observe the village,” she adds while holding the hand of one of the home’s 16 occupants.
The retirement home was founded in 2016 by Luda Salia, 64, a former nurse who was forced to flee her home during the conflict in Abkhazia in the early 1990s and lives in a Soviet apartment block on the outskirts of Tbilisi when she is not in Khurvaleti.
“I renovated the house of my husband’s mother in Khurvaleti. After 2008, there were many empty houses as a lot of youth left. Only elderly people stayed and I thought about how we could take care of them,” she says sitting on a metal bench in a small playground next to her Tbilisi flat.
Luda wears a blue and yellow badge on her jacket. As a vocal critic of Russia and the Georgian Dream government, she supports Ukraine and is worried that the situation in Georgia is getting worse: “A new conflict can erupt. It was less dangerous in 2016 than today. Russians have taken a lot of territory through creeping occupation.”
For the time being, the war in Ukraine has not created new tensions around South Ossetia or Abkhazia. But many in Georgia fear that their country could be a potential target of Russia’s next military intervention.
“If Ukraine wins, Georgia is saved,” says Luda. “But I don’t want war as I experienced it. I hope the situation can be solved through diplomatic ways.”
A scorched structure and vehicles stand on a property mostly destroyed by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire on June 2, near Las Vegas, N.M. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The GAO is examining controlled burn policies at the Forest Service and other federal land agencies.
On May 20, USFS Chief Randy Moore halted all so-called prescribed fires on its land for a 90-day safety review. The New Mexico fire has burned more than 340,000 acres and is still not fully contained.
But many fire ecologists and forestry experts are concerned that this "pause" is only worsening the wildfire risk. Critics say it's merely masking the agency's dangerously incremental, outdated and problematic approach to intentional burns and fire mitigation, a policy that has failed to adapt to climate change and megadrought.
"A lot of the planning tools that fire managers rely upon for planning prescribed burns were built under a climate that no longer exists," says biologist and professor Matthew Hurteau, who studies the intersection of climate change, wildfire and forest ecosystems at the University of New Mexico. "That's a systemic problem," he says.
Controlled burns are seen by forest ecologists as perhaps the most essential tool for reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire and helping to undo a century of fire suppression policy that has worsened wildfire conditions that now annually wreak havoc across large swaths of the West.
Climate change makes controlled burns more urgent and dangerous
Hurteau and others are concerned that the Forest Service — and other fire agencies — continue to fail to put climate change at the fore of decision-making, despite mounting scientific evidence and the agency's own stated goals about reducing dangerously high levels of built-up fuel in western forests.
"We've seen pretty substantial changes to the climatic conditions, particularly here in the Southwest, but across much of the Western U.S. And we need to address that by developing new tools that account for the fact that we've got these persistent drying trends in a much warmer and much drier atmosphere," Hurteau says.
The Forest Service's recently released internal review of the New Mexico burn only magnifies those criticisms, as it amounts to a stunning admission by the agency that it essentially failed to take climate change into account when conducting an intentional burn during a historic drought.
Numerous sections of the report underscore that point, including noting that prescribed fire officials failed to realize it was set "under much drier conditions than were recognized." And it notes that a better understanding "of long-term drought and climate factors versus short term weather events" would have helped.
"Seems astounding," fire ecologist Timothy Ingalsbee tells NPR's Here and Now. "Never again should we have the excuse that we failed to include climate conditions and climate data in our fire management actions. That's just the era we live in," says the former Forest Service wildland firefighter who now directs the group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. "I can understand why people are upset. It sounds like the 'dog ate my homework' kind of excuse,' he says.
Human-caused climate change is driving ever drier conditions, extreme weather and megadrought. That's turning live vegetation into fuel even faster and making the forests' old built-up fuel more explosive.
Ingalsbee and other experts in the field say the pace and scale at which the USFS is implementing intentional fire is dangerously insufficient. He hopes the agency uses this 90-day burn pause to start to make good on its stated goal of making a fundamental shift away from prioritizing wildfire suppression.
"If we were to shift those resources and funding into prescribed burning, have as many crews as possible to manage prescribed burning, that would be a big help."
Funding to prevent fires, not just fight them
Leading politicians, too, are frustrated. In a letter, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, recently chastised the U.S. secretaries of Interior and Agriculture for not moving fast enough to hire more firefighters amid a staffing crisis and to boost pay. And he implored them to answer basic questions about wildfire mitigation strategy and spending despite a record infusion of new federal money. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed last November, provides some $8 billion for states to help mitigate wildfire risk and $600 million to raise firefighter pay.
"Your departments received this much needed support. Now, more than six months after being given this new flexibility, we are past time for action," Wyden wrote.
The people who fight wildfires are often the same ones doing the controlled burns. So there are growing calls for the Forest Service to do more to help develop a dedicated, prescribed fire workforce with training academies and recruiting. Experts have long called for creation of a professional corps dedicated to expanding prescribed fire — experts who can move swiftly across geographic and political boundaries the same way wildfires always do.
"What we need to do as a society is make a fairly substantial investment in training and developing a professionalized fire management workforce," says the University of New Mexico's Hurteau. "And, you know, that's going to take some structural changes to our federal land management agencies."
"For the United States Forest Service to say they followed their policies and procedures does not take into account that those policies and procedures themselves were flawed," says New Mexico Democratic Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, who pushed for the Government Accountability Office investigation. Large parts of her district were devastated by the historic fire.
Fernandez says she is frustrated "when I read the Forest Service kind of hiding behind that they followed their burn plan without saying 'our burn plan was flawed and we need to completely rethink how we do our prescribed burns.' That's why I want an independent investigation, because we need to regain the trust in the Forest Service," she says.
The GAO probe, she says, will examine policies and procedures and come up with recommendations lawmakers might turn into action.
Forest fuel levels are now at "crisis proportions"
The Forest Service is well aware that fuel levels, as it states in its own reports, are now at "crisis proportions." The agency's blueprint "Confronting the Wildfire Crisis" concedes that "the scale of work on the ground has not matched the need, and it will take nothing less than a paradigm shift to protect the Nation's western communities."
In announcing the intentional burn pause, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore wrote that it's "imperative for the Forest Service and partners to work together to increase fuels treatments by up to four times current levels in the West, including using prescribed burning as well as mechanical and other treatments."
But many in the field are simply fed up with the agency's minor, incremental approach to change while the climate crisis routinizes megafires that are devastating lives, property and livestock and altering the Western landscape.
"We all know federal agency agencies turn at the speed of an aircraft carrier, they're just incredibly slow," fire expert Barbara Satink-Wolfson says. "Yes, we have to be patient. But at the same time, we're all impatient because we know that we really need to make this change quickly."
The federal agency says that at least 234 million acres of forest are at a high risk of dangerous wildfire. But in the last decade, controlled burns have treated less than 1% of that total.
For those reasons and others, experts worry that the agency's prescribed fire "pause" is little more than political window dressing that tapes over those ongoing, glaring gaps between rhetoric and reality. Hurteau notes that just about all of the peer reviewed research on the issue as well as the Forest Service's own plans for reducing hazardous forest fuels call for a historic scaling-up of prescribed burns.
"The question remains: Is the agency ready to make changes to the point that it will create conditions where the personnel, their personnel can do that effectively and that they're well supported and well-resourced in order to accomplish those goals?"
As the New Mexico megafire clearly shows, prescribed fire can be risky. But prescribed fire "escapes" are still very rare — fewer than 1%. And the vast majority of those are contained relatively quickly and without widespread damage.
In an open letter to Chief Moore, dozens of forest experts with the Association for Fire Ecology recently urged him to reverse course and not make intentional burn pause nationwide. Doing so, they argued, will only make fire conditions worse in places that are not too dry to burn.
"There's basically a small window in which they can conduct the prescribed burn," says Satink-Wolfson, one of the letter signers and a fire adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension on the Central Coast. "I think other places in the country could have continued. And we definitely missed opportunities."
In addition, the Forest Service assists or coordinates with many other federal and state agencies on prescribed burns, so the pause has a much wider national ripple effect, Satink-Wolfson says. "Projects that are collaborative with the Forest Service — and there are a lot of them — those will also be held up."
USFS Chief Moore repeatedly declined NPR's interview requests. Spokesman E. Wade Muehlhof, who also declined to be interviewed, wrote in an email that the agency's burn pause will be used to assess and improve safety protocols. Muehlhof added, "The devastation caused by Las Dispenses escaped prescribed fire in New Mexico is tragic and causes enormous grief within the agency."
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