08 August 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Politicians educated at some of the US’s most elite universities are spreading conspiracy theories that they surely know are untrue. What happened to ‘service and stewardship’?
Since then, Harvard has produced eight US presidents; Yale, five. (Stanford can boast Herbert Hoover, if it feels compelled to do so.)
Elite universities have also produced a disproportionate number of senators and representatives from both parties. In fact, Republicans elected to the Senate over the last decade are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to have attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford.
So how to explain Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, now the third-ranking House Republican, who recently called the January 6 hearings a “partisan witch-hunt”, voted to invalidate the 2020 election, and has repeated Trump’s big lie of election fraud?
Or Josh Hawley, Stanford class of 2002 and Yale law class of 2006, now senator from Missouri, who in December 2020 became the first US senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, then led Senate efforts to overturn the electoral college vote count, and fist-bumped the rioters on January 6?
Or Ted Cruz, Princeton class of 1992 and Harvard law class of 1995, now senator from Texas, who in late 2020 joined in John Eastman’s and Trump’s plot to object to the election results in six swing states and delay accepting the electoral college results on January 6, potentially enabling Republican state legislatures to overturn them?
And how to explain a new crop of Republican Senate candidates?
JD Vance, Yale Law class of 2013, now Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, has claimed that there “were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis” in the 2020 election. When asked earlier this year if he thought the 2020 election was “stolen”, he said, “Yeah, I do.”
Blake Masters, Stanford class of 2008 and Stanford law class of 2012, now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona, has declared in campaign ads that “Trump won”. He promotes rightwing “replacement theory” – that Democrats favor illegal immigration “so that someday they can ‘amnesty’ these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat”.
These alumni of America’s finest institutions of higher education haven’t adhered to their alma maters’ ideals of service and stewardship of American democracy. In fact, they’re actively wrecking American democracy.
Nor can these elite graduates claim they don’t know any better. Most third-graders can distinguish a lie from the truth.
No, these scions of the most prestigious halls of American academe are knowingly and intentionally abetting the most dangerous attack on American democracy since the civil war.
Whatever did they learn from their rarefied education? Obviously, zilch.
The core of a good liberal arts education is ethics. The central question is the meaning of a good society. This has been the case since the 18th century, when most of America’s prestigious institutions of higher education were founded.
Adam Smith, the progenitor of modern economics, didn’t call his field economics. He called it “moral philosophy”, and thought his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments more important than his The Wealth of Nations.
Edmund Burke – Irish statesman and philosopher, and godfather of modern conservatism – didn’t advise that people in public life seek power above all else. He argued that they owe the public their “judgment and conscience”.
There is no single answer to the meaning of a good society, of course. It is the pursuit of it that draws on one’s judgment and conscience. This is why higher education has advanced the role of reason in human affairs and stood for the Enlightenment values of democracy and the rule of law.
But this new crop of Republican pretenders hasn’t learned anything of the kind. They are practitioners of a much earlier and more cynical set of ideas: that might makes right, that the purpose of human endeavor is to gain power, and that ambition and treachery trump (excuse the verb) all other values.
I can’t help wondering: what do they see when they look in the mirror each morning? And what do they tell themselves after a day of deceit?
Any of them who tries to justify the despicable means they are employing by telling themselves they can do more good by gaining or keeping power is under a dangerous illusion. As the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin once said, “If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.”
These products of the best education America has to offer are betraying the core values of America.
They deserve only shame.
'While women of all races experience more poverty than men, Black women account for 22.3 percent of women in poverty, yet only make up 12.8 percent of women in the United States.' (photo: InTheseTimes)
Those who claim to be “pro-life” should also advocate for a healthcare system that guarantees support for Black mothers and babies most at-risk due to the overturning of Roe.
The politicians gutting abortion rights likely don’t understand the pain of holding a friend as she sobs on the bathroom floor, assuming it’s the worst menstrual cycle of her life, only to discover that she is experiencing a missed miscarriage and her life is at stake. But I do.
I also understand that seeking emergency care as Black women in Louisiana can feel painful and frightening, leading countless Black women to simply “tough it out” at home. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R‑La.) recognizes this healthcare disparity, as well. Recently, he shared in an interview that the high maternal mortality rate in Louisiana wouldn’t be as bad if you simply discounted Black women altogether. He went on to say that, “For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”
Getting specific about those “whatever” reasons would require acknowledging both endemic racism and the racial wealth gap in Louisiana. Even Louisiana Right to Life, a well-known anti-abortion group, has reported that, in 2021, 65 percent of abortions were performed on Black women in the state. Unfortunately, they don’t include statistics regarding the institutionalized racism that contributes to an increase in Black women seeking abortion services: Among the top reasons Black women choose abortion are lack of access to financial and educational resources, fewer support systems and life-threatening health circumstances.
In Louisiana, 75 percent of Black children lack financial security. More specifically, 41 percent of Black children live below the federal poverty line, and the 34 percent who do live above federal poverty still often can’t afford basic expenses.
In response to the overturning of Roe, one Louisiana resident, anti-abortion activist Charles Carpenter, called abortion a “curse that has been upon this land.” Ironically, the reproductive rights of women are being characterized as a “curse” on Louisiana rather than the history of slavery and sexual violence in the state that has disrupted Black women’s bodies and autonomy for generations. With the banning of abortion, the fate of poor Black women — those who face the most health complications from pregnancy—is once again being decided by wealthier white men who make up the state’s political class.
While women of all races experience more poverty than men, Black women account for 22.3 percent of women in poverty, yet only make up 12.8 percent of women in the United States. Poverty is a major contributor to maternal death and closely correlates with higher infant mortality rates. Therefore, protecting unborn Black babies must include protecting under-resourced Black women who already are parents or will become parents, including expecting Black mothers who are three times more likely to die from health complications due to pregnancy.
Since Louisiana’s anti-abortion political commentators and elected officials, including Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, call themselves “pro-life,” they should also be advocating for universal, equitable healthcare systems as part of their agenda. And the same should apply to anti-abortion activists nationwide.
Those who consider it a moral imperative to protect the lives of unborn children should find it necessary to support the well-being of over 3 million Black children (a number likely to increase) born into poverty across the U.S. by supporting universal healthcare policies.
Contrary to popular anti-abortion beliefs, equality does not begin in the womb. The United States is one of the worst developed countries for children living in poverty in the world, and systematic inequality creates a layer of multigenerational poverty uniquely experienced by Black families well before children are born.
Experts agree that funding mechanisms set in place by a universal healthcare system would make higher-quality care possible. In the United States, universal healthcare could begin to dismantle health-based racism by encouraging the funding of anti-racist initiatives that allow Black women to receive the same higher-quality care and equal access to reproductive education as white women.
Impoverished Black women also often have limited access to diapers and other care items that babies need to be healthy, but in countries like Taiwan where there is universal healthcare, formula and diapers are covered as part of care.
Are anti-abortion Republicans (most of whom are white political conservatives or conservative Christians) ready to advocate for universal healthcare that will support all children, especially those born into financial crisis?
In most cases, the answer would be no, with only 25 percent of Republicans supporting universal healthcare while being three times more willing than those of other political parties to eradicate Medicare. Among elected GOP officials, there is no consideration for the racial wealth income gap that has existed since slavery, especially in the American South. And reparations are still being pushed off the table.
While universal healthcare is considered a “radical” idea among the U.S. political establishment, it is somehow less radical to mandate what women can do with their bodies while ignoring how deeply entrenched societal racism is in our country—racism that leads to poorer health outcomes for potential Black mothers and newborn Black babies.
As reproductive justice activists continue taking to the streets and political offices to protest the fall of Roe, we should also challenge narratives that remove responsibility from anti-abortion supporters when it comes to providing care for Black mothers, who will be more in need under strict abortion limitations. One way to do that is to push strongly for a truly universal healthcare system.
Last year, the State-Based Universal Health Care Act of 2021 (H.R.3775) was introduced in Congress which would offer funds to states in order to compel them to provide 95 percent of residents with comprehensive, affordable healthcare plans within five years. While the bill isn’t perfect, it’s a start to supporting racial equity and health justice nationwide.
As church bells rang in Louisiana and across the country in celebration of the Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling, bells should have also rang in support of universal healthcare that would better protect Black women in poverty, and all those who will suffer the consequences of Roe ’s demise and the resulting abortion bans.
Health Care in the US is a national disgrace.
COVID displayed its failures.
Poorly educated Americans who believe the World stops at our oceans ignore the rest of the World at their peril.
Like many big US employers, Amazon has struggled to hire and retain workers of late. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Public Amazon registries could reveal enough information to steal the identity of someone who hasn’t been born yet.
Identity Theft Registries
Amazon requires that certain information be provided when setting up a registry. For a wedding registry, Amazon requires the first and last names of both partners, the wedding date, the number of guests attending, and a mailing address. The default share setting is to make the registry searchable not only on Amazon but also via the third-party wedding planning website The Knot. This has led to confusion from Amazon wedding registry users over how The Knot received their registry details. Similarly, when creating a baby registry, Amazon asks for a first and last name, expected due date, whether the baby is the parents’ first child, and a mailing address. The default visibility setting is also set to public and to appear on pregnancy and parenting websites The Bump, What to Expect, and Baby Center.
Anyone can search for a public registry (even without an Amazon account) with just a name or further specifying a date and location. In addition to the list of desired products, wedding registries show the names of both partners, the event location, and the event date. Baby registries return either the name of the upcoming baby or the names of the parents, their city and state, and the expected due date.
At first glance, only wedding registries for weddings happening between 2020 to 2032 and baby registries with due dates between 2020 to 2023 can be searched for. However, there are ways to bypass the date restrictions to access registries from years prior. In the case of multiple results, wedding and baby registries display the top 100 matches, and if no date parameters are entered, search results may contain entries outside the default date ranges. For example, even though Amazon only lets you select dates from 2020 onward, if you don’t specify an exact range when searching a common name, you could get results from, say, 2008.
Perhaps the more critical vulnerability in Amazon’s date range search, however, is that the fields can be modified using the developer tools functionality available in browsers like Chrome and Firefox. A cursory search with modified date fields brought up wedding registries dating as far back as 2004, and baby registries dating back all the way to 2006. So someone could discover the details of a registry set up for a present-day 16-year-old. Who knows how this information could be weaponized in two years, once such a teen becomes a legal adult?
(Widely) Shared Secrets
Knowledge-based authentication, known as KBA, is a form of identity authentication favored by service providers such as financial institutions that relies on shared secrets: information that is only known to you and your bank, email provider, or other service. For example, if you lose the password to your bank account, you can regain access by entering information that most people likely don’t know about you, like your mother’s maiden name or your date of birth.
Security questions like this have been around for a while. Banks have used mother’s maiden name as a form of identity authentication since at least 1882. But today these so-called secrets are inevitably shared much more broadly than account holders anticipate, resulting in harrowing cases of identities getting stolen with personal details used for authentication.
Using multiple Amazon registries could reveal massive amounts of information not just about living people but even of a baby yet to be born. A wedding registry would show the mother’s maiden name, and a birth registry would list the projected date of birth, location, and either the expected child’s or the parents’ names. Should the baby not be born on their expected due date, there’s always the Amazon birthday gift registry to crosscheck. The location and date of the birth can, in turn, be used to deduce a partial Social Security number.
Using newborns for identity fraud is not a new phenomenon. The practice of adopting a deceased baby’s identity was popularized in Frederick Forsynth’s 1971 novel “The Day of the Jackal,” in which an assassin trawls small parish graveyards to locate a dead child whose identity he could assume in order to apply for a passport in their name.
While the technique of taking over the identity of a dead child is still used today, Amazon’s public baby registries have made it far easier to target those who haven’t been born yet. Identity thieves no longer need to peruse musty county registrar offices for birth certificates when they can just search for registries online.
Privacy Measures
While there are copious other ways to find personal information sprinkled throughout the internet, such as on social media profiles and genealogy websites, your Amazon registry doesn’t need to be another.
Because Amazon registries are public by default, users have to manually toggle the privacy settings either to “shareable,” which makes a registry accessible only via a direct link, or “private,” making it visible only to the creators. Another option to mitigate data exposure is to fudge the expected due date, so Amazon doesn’t display the actual date.
Also take into account that alongside the treasure trove of personal information public registries afford identity thieves, the products themselves pose an additional security risk. Anyone could browse a gift registry to see which products have known vulnerabilities to exploit, such as baby monitors that allow remote access to their video feeds.
Once a registry’s purpose has been served, there’s little reason not to delete it, rather than leave it lingering for 16-odd years, as some users have inadvertently done. While a wedding registry is straightforward to delete, Amazon’s steps for deleting a baby registry are unclear, with step one cryptically instructing to “Go to your .” Perhaps the best preemptive solution is not to use a faulty, privacy-eroding service in the first place.
Palestinians inspect their house after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. (photo: Fatima Shbair/AP)
‘Fragile’ truce holds in Gaza after three days of Israeli bombardment that killed at least 44 Palestinians.
The truce began at 11:30pm local time on Sunday (20:30 GMT) despite a flurry of Israeli air raids and Palestinian rocket attacks up until the last minute.
While both sides had agreed to halt the fighting, each has warned the other that it would respond with force to any violence.
“This ceasefire is holding,” said Al Jazeera’s Safwat al-Kahlout, reporting from Gaza City.
“Local government offices have announced they will reopen their doors for the public, while universities have also announced they will reopen for students. The municipality of Gaza and other municipalities have also announced they will send their equipment to remove the rubble and try to do an initial assessment of the destruction.”
Later on Monday, Gaza’s sole power plant restarted after fuel trucks passed from Israel into the Palestinian enclave. The facility had shutdown on Saturday, days after Israel’s closure of the goods crossing.
Israel on Friday launched its heavy bombardment of Gaza, flattening buildings and striking refugee camps across the territory. The Israeli military said it has been targeting members of the Islamic Jihad, including the group’s senior commanders, but according to Palestinian officials, almost half of the 44 people who died have been civilians.
At least 350 Palestinian civilians have also been wounded.
Islamic Jihad responded by firing hundreds of rockets into Israel, but most were intercepted or blown up. Israeli emergency services said three people in Israel were wounded by shrapnel, while 31 others were lightly hurt.
The fighting was the worst in Gaza since an 11-day war last year that killed at least 250 people in the impoverished coastal enclave and about 13 people in Israel.
Prisoner release
Sunday’s truce was mediated by Egypt, with help from the United Nations and Qatar. The secretary general of Islamic Jihad, Ziad al-Nakhala, said one of the key agreements was an Egyptian guarantee that it would work towards the release of two of the group’s leaders who are being held by Israel.
“The Islamic Jihad lays down its conditions. First, to unite all the Palestinians. Second, we demand that the enemy release our brother who has been on hunger strike, Khalil Awawda, and third, to release Sheikh Bassem al-Saadi,” al-Nakhala told reporters in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Egypt issued a statement saying it is “exerting efforts to release” Awawda and “transfer him for treatment” and is working for the release of al-Saadi “as soon as possible”.
There was no immediate comment from Israel.
Al-Saadi’s arrest last week in the occupied West Bank was one of the key triggers of the latest escalation. Following his arrest, Israeli forces launched what they called “pre-emptive” raids on the Gaza Strip to prevent any retaliatory attacks. Islamic Jihad’s commanders, Taysir al-Jabari and Khaled Mansour, were killed in attacks on Friday and Saturday, respectively.
Israeli forces also arrested 19 more members of the Islamic Jihad in the occupied West Bank.
“As far as Israel is concerned, this operation is over, ” said Al Jazeera’s Natasha Ghoneim, reporting from West Jerusalem. “For the Israelis, the objective was to neutralize Islamic Jihad, with most, if not all senior leadership being killed as well.”
Ghoneim said the Israelis have also created a divide between Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the larger group that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas has fought four wars with Israel since taking control of the enclave in 2007.
“There was a concern that if this operation was protracted and the death toll continued to rise, that perhaps Hamas might enter the fray. It appears for now that has not happened, with Hamas remaining on the sidelines,” Ghoneim said.
‘We haven’t slept for days’
In Gaza, news of the truce brought dozens of people to the streets in celebration. One resident, Nour Abu Sultan, told the AFP news agency earlier in the day that she was awaiting the declaration of the truce on “tenterhooks”.
“We haven’t slept for days [due to] heat and shelling and rockets, the sound of aircraft hovering above us … is terrifying,” the 29-year-old said.
The United States and the UN also welcomed the truce.
US President Joe Biden thanked his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for his country’s role in brokering the ceasefire, and called for investigations into civilian casualties, which he called a “tragedy”.
UN Middle East Envoy Tor Wennesland underscored his commitment to “do all we can” towards ending the escalation, ensuring the safety of the civilian population, and “following up on the Palestinian prisoner file”.
“The situation is still very fragile,” he said in a tweet. “I urge all parties to observe the ceasefire.”
Despite the halt to the fighting, Palestinians in Gaza said they cannot live normal lives because of Israel’s 15-year siege.
Approximately 2.3 million people are packed into the narrow coastal enclave, with Israel and Egypt tightly restricting the movement of people and goods in and out of the enclave and imposing a naval blockade, citing security concerns.
“People in Gaza don’t get to go back to anything like normal because they are still living under Israel’s siege that is a form of silent violence against every man, woman and child in Gaza, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 15 years,” said Ali Abunimah, the director of The Electronic Intifada, a website that focuses on Palestinians under occupation.
“So unfortunately, it is fragile. This is going to happen again. I can’t tell you if its going to be in a day, or a week, a month or a year. But it’s going to keep happening because Israel enjoys total impunity for its crimes against the Palestinian people, and not just impunity, but full and active support. Remember it was bombing Gaza with weapons provided by the US, EU and Canada, who all stood by Israel.”
He added: “And these are the same countries that are sending billions of dollars to Ukraine supposedly to resist occupation and invasion, but here they are helping Israel perpetrate occupation, invasion and terror against a civilian population.”
Venera Meshveliani, 86, is an internally displaced woman from Akhaldaba, Abkhazia who witnessed her husband being killed during the conflict 30 years ago. (photo: Valeria Mongelli/Al Jazeera)
Thirty years after the war in Georgia’s breakaway territory of Abkhazia, victims are still waiting for justice.
“I can never forget the sound of soldiers’ trampling feet and the foul, damp smell of the school building we were held hostage in. Everything I witnessed and experienced there was genocide,” said Meshveliani, an 86-year-old ethnic Georgian who hails from the Abkhazian village of Akhaldaba.
Most countries recognise Abkhazia as Georgia’s land but Russia and a few of its allies view the territory as a state of its own.
“Every night they would humiliate us by stepping over us. They would then take the younger girls outside and rape them,” Meshveliani told Al Jazeera from her one-bedroom apartment in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.
“Many of the young girls raped were also my students. I used to be their mathematics teacher in the village before the war. How am I to forget the brutalities they had to experience?” she said, tearing up.
“There was one girl from the fifth grade who was bleeding all over and grabbed my feet and asked me if it was worth living. Just as I tried to convince her to pull through, another young girl was brought back to the school building after being raped and looked like she was going to faint from all the trauma.
“She begged for water and one short but stern-looking Russian soldier, whose face I can still remember, climbed up the windowpane above the young girl, urinated into her mouth and said: ‘Here’s your water. This is what Georgians deserve.’ It’s been more than 30 years but these criminals have not yet been prosecuted.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the conflict Georgia-Abkhazia conflict intensified with Abkhazians keen to establish autonomy from Georgia and protect their identity and culture.
“Before the war broke out, everything was very peaceful in our region. Our village Akhaldhaba was really beautiful and we were all rich but also hard working. But there were people in Abkhazia who were pro-Russian and they had begun planting seeds of hostility against Georgia before the war broke out,” Meshveliani said.
The Kremlin supported Abkhazia’s demands and tensions soared into what became the deadliest post-Soviet era conflict, which began in August 1992 and lasted for about a year, between ethnic Georgians in Abkhazia and separatist Abkhaz and Russian forces.
According to an unpublished report by Georgia’s prosecutor’s office, the conflict killed about 5,738 people.
More than 200,000 people, mostly ethnic Georgians, were displaced and they continue to live outside the region.
Abkhazia’s declared independence from Georgia in 1999 remains unrecognised by Tbilisi and frictions are ongoing.
Moscow recognised Abkhazia as independent after the 2008 Georgia-Russia war and signed an agreement with Abkhazia to take control of its frontiers in 2014.
But Meshveliani said geopolitical tensions have blocked a pathway that could see the war crimes of the early 90s addressed.
“My husband was killed right in front of my eyes. I also remember one house towards the edge of my village where the owners of the house had been killed and their heads had been cut off and kept on the dining table. Don’t such brutal monsters deserve to be punished?” she said.
‘The world has not yet termed these crimes as genocide’
According to Malkhaz Pataraia, the head of the Tbilisi-based platform Abkhaz Assembly, which advocates for displaced Georgians from Abkhazia and South Ossetia (another disputed region Georgia considers as its territory), “the aggressor” has not been identified correctly by the Georgian government and the West.
“Our government has been cautious of the Kremlin but right after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West also believed diplomatic dialogues would work with the Kremlin. This delayed severe punishments against war crime perpetrators,” Pataraia, who is also an internally displaced ethnic Georgian from Abkhazia, told Al Jazeera.
While the United Nations Observers’ Mission in Georgia, Human Rights Watch and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have recognised the crimes ethnic Georgians in Abkhazia had to face as “ethnic cleansing”, Pataraia is frustrated that the world has not yet termed these crimes as genocide.
“In three documents of the OSCE, the war crimes that occurred in Abkhazia are referred to as ethnic cleansing. As a lawyer, I can tell you that phrases like ‘ethnic cleansing’ are just politically correct terms to use because they have no normative grounds,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Only genocide has normative grounds because there are international conventions for victims of genocide and that guarantees justice to victims of war crimes.
“But after Russia’s full-blown invasion in Ukraine, many things have changed and shifted in the world. And people have left their motives for political correctness and they’ve started properly naming things for what they actually are. So this might lead to the world recognising what happened in Abkhazia properly,” he said.
While two national investigations have been opened by Georgia to deliver justice to victims of war crimes from Abkhazia, Georgian government officials claimed that Moscow was not cooperating and discontinued the case.
This made many, like Mkshinvalli, feel as though their trauma was destined to be forgotten.
“Until this day, it really hurts me that we (ethnic Georgians) are ignored. I encourage every internally displaced person to write and speak out about what they have gone through because that is the only way our perpetrators will be prosecuted,” Mkshinvalli said, as she showed this reporter a diary where she has documented everything she experienced.
More than 190km (118 miles) from Tbilisi, in the former Soviet Union spa town of Tskaltubo, 68-year-old Suliko said: “I came to Tskaltubo in September 1993. Everything in my [Abkhazian] village was horrible. I had to flee. Our entire village was surrounded for three days but we managed to take our children and escape.
“My uncle, who was disabled, was burned alive in his house. My mother also died in this war and she has no grave … I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It has been 30 years and nothing has changed for us.”
Nodar Gurchiani, a 77-year-old who fought in the army against Russian soldiers in the Abkhazian war, chipped in.
“Most of us have been living in wretched living conditions for all these years. I feel like a guest living in this settlement in my own country,” he said.
Al Jazeera contacted Georgia’s current Prime Minister, Irakli Garibashvili, for comment, but had not received a response by the time of publishing.
As the 30th anniversary of the onset of the conflict approaches on August 14, Tamar Sautieva, a social worker who fled Abkhazia as a three-year-old, called for equality within the wider Georgian society.
She currently lives with her family in a settlement for internally displaced people in Tbilisi.
“When I first came to Tbilisi, schools refused to take us in because we were IDPs [Internally Displaced People]. The stigma towards us still exists. Some also think that the government has done us a favour by giving us housing facilities and consider us a burden to society,” she told Al Jazeera.
Tamar Tolordava, 31 and an assistant professor at Georgia’s Ilia University, said: “Sometimes it feels like we are refugees in our own country. As young IDPs we’re keen to fight for our rights and tackle the stigma. I’m hopeful that with everything happening in Ukraine, our own society will wake up and acknowledge our trauma.”
On August 7, members of the Abkhaz Assembly, the Georgian political party European Georgia, local media outlet Tabula Media and NGOs Voter Education Society and Liberty Institute will launch a campaign in Tbilisi to raise awareness about this sense of discrimination and call for those behind war crimes to be brought to justice.
“Before Bucha in Ukraine, there was Abkhazia in Georgia. We feel with war crimes in Ukraine getting investigated, it is a good opportunity for the world to rename what Russia did to Georgians in Abkhazia as ‘genocide’,” Pataraia told Al Jazeera, referring to the Ukrainian town where Russians allegedly committed atrocities.
While she is aware that justice could still take years, Meshveliani is also participating in the campaign.
“Even while being held hostage, I was positive we would make it out alive. Many people tried killing themselves but I managed to stop them. I also protected children by putting them in sacks and sitting on them so that they would be hidden and wouldn’t be attacked further. All of them have now grown up and are still alive. That makes me happy,” she said.
“Today, the West seems to have woken up so I’m hopeful that from this year our cases will be spoken about and they might actually call this genocide.”
A resident of the former North Sewerage estate in Kariobangi, Kenya, demolished by the Kenyan government in 2020. (photo: Jaclynn Ashly)
Kenya’s outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta presided over the worst wave of evictions in the country’s history. On the eve of the country’s general election, nothing seems set to change.
“I can’t think about that day without crying,” says Gitau, who is in her seventies. More than two years ago, government demolitions flattened her home in Kariobangi, an informal settlement located about ten kilometers from the city’s central business district.
When Gitau remembers her neighborhood, the Kariobangi North Sewerage estate — or simply the sewage estate, where hundreds of families had established themselves over almost three decades on about twelve acres of land, a rare smile takes over her face.
“I was very happy to be in that place because it was mine,” Gitau says, sitting on a stool in her small one-room home in another area of Kariobangi, where she moved following the evictions. A ray of sunshine enters from outside, illuminating her tear-streaked face. “No one could ask me for rent or why I was there. The community was like one big family. If I ever ran into problems I could immediately go to my neighbor and ask for help. I loved that place because we were united as one.”
But on this morning, during one of Kenya’s worst rainy seasons, Gitau’s life would change forever. About five bulldozers arrived in the area at around 5:30 AM, along with hundreds of police officers. At the time, there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew enforced throughout the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gitau was inside her small home, made from iron sheets, with her disabled son, who is now forty-five-years-old and cannot live independently.
“I was sleeping at the time,” she says. “I heard people screaming and a lot of noise. So I woke up and ran outside. That’s when I saw bulldozers crushing homes around me. I can still hear the noise of the metal being flattened under the excavators.”
“We weren’t given any warning,” she adds. “I tried to grab some things, but then we had to run. The bulldozers crushed everything.” Her eyes become blurry with tears as she recounts the chaos.
“Life has become too hard,” she continues. “Before 2020, I was happy. After 2020, I’ve been miserable.” By the end of the evictions, which continued for days, around eight thousand people, many of whom were women and children, were displaced, becoming homeless overnight.
While forced evictions are a common occurrence in Nairobi’s impoverished neighborhoods, demolitions on this scale, causing a humanitarian crisis, are rare. Their frequency, however, is on the rise.
Less than two weeks after city authorities demolished the Kariobangi sewage estate, they also carried out forced evictions in the Ruai informal settlement, removing more than a thousand people. Last year, some seventy-six thousand people were displaced from Mukuru kwa Njenga, another informal settlement situated between the city’s industrial zone and international airport.
According to Patrick Njoroge, program manager at Akiba Mashinani Trust, a group that works for slums to be improved and integrated into the city fabric, under President Uhuru Kenyatta’s outgoing administration the city has experienced “the worst evictions in the history of this country” — often coinciding with planned developments catering to the city’s elite minority.
These mass evictions are just the beginning for displaced residents, who must start from scratch to rebuild their lives. Years later, those brutally evicted from the Kariobangi sewage estate are still grappling with the trauma of the demolitions, which overturned their entire lives.
“I Was Happy”
Gitau was one of the first residents of the Kariobangi sewage estate. She worked for three decades for the city council, now the city county, as a gardener and caretaker of Uhuru Park and City Park.
According to Isaak Abdi Aden, the chairperson of the Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers self-help group, one of the community collectives that managed the area, in the 1980s the city council provided 378 workers with plots on the estate, where several large septic tanks that drain much of the waste in Nairobi are located, so they could establish farms to help supplement their incomes. The workers planted maize, beans, and various vegetables both for subsistence and to sell at the markets.
“After work each day, we would all come to our farms and cultivate our small plots,” Gitau remembers. “And we started building a community.” Once Gitau and the other workers retired, they organized themselves into self-help groups to obtain land allotment letters from the city council in 1996.
This is when Aden united with the retirees to form the self-help group, of which he would become chairman. After receiving allotment letters, they began to move to the piece of land, building makeshift structures with iron sheets. Some, like Gitau, built additional homes to rent.
Residents made sure to invest in one another, spending their money within the community. They also practiced table-banking, a microlending practice in which group members take turns to lend and borrow from one another. Over the years, the small community grew to include thousands of people.
Seventy percent of Nairobi’s population lives in informal settlements that make up just 5 percent of the city’s residential area. Homes in these areas are often made of corrugated tin sheets and lack access to adequate sewage, electricity, or water systems.
Despite the poverty, all the former residents of the Kariobangi sewage estate remember their community fondly. “It was a place where people who are poor came together,” says Ubah Isaak, Aden’s thirty-year-old daughter. “We had churches, mosques, and small schools. Everyone was friendly and supported each other. It was a humble place to live for the poor.”
Gitau was able to build additional makeshift homes on one of her plots, which she rented out to eighteen people, each paying two thousand Kenyan shillings (about US$17) per month. She also sold her fruits and vegetables at the markets. “I was content with my life,” Gitau says. “I was able to afford educating all my grandchildren and I could eat directly from my farm. I invested everything into that land.”
After receiving the allotment letters, residents were given lease agreements and by 2019 individuals began receiving land titles for their respective plots. For those living in informal settlements, possessing land titles or leases is a rarity, with most residents organizing themselves through informal communal land arrangements. Life, therefore, was secure and peaceful for the sewage estate residents, who believed their documents protected them from violent evictions affecting the rest of the informal settlements.
In Nairobi, however, the increasing price of land means no poor residents are safe from violent land grabs, even when they have obtained ownership documents for their plots. These demolitions are part of the “struggle to control Nairobi,” says George Kegoro, the former executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), and have become increasingly “big and brutal” over the years.
“As pressure for land increases, the value of the land goes up,” Kegoro explains. “There’s always an element of greed behind these demolitions and a feeling of poor people not deserving a place to live and that land should be available to do high-end economic activity. . . . Inherent in that, then, is corruption because the only way to access that land is through the use of violence through the state.”
“Lost Everything”
Aden tells me there were “rumors” spreading that the village may be demolished. In response to these rumors, Aden and other community leaders, with the assistance of the KHRC, went to the courts to obtain a legal injunction.
“We felt safe after that,” Aden says, from the living room of his current home in Korogocho, another informal settlement. “But it didn’t matter to this government.”
The demolitions were particularly painful for Aden. Being the leader of the community, he was forced to stand by and watch hundreds of homes and structures crushed under the weight of bulldozers, suspected to be the property of the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS); he was powerless to stop it. “We were running up and down showing the police the court order,” remembers Aden, who also rented to about ten tenants — his sole source of livelihood. “But there was nothing we could do to stop it.”
It was also less than two weeks into the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. When the bulldozers pummeled over his home, “I was so shocked; I couldn’t stand,” Aden recounts. “I grabbed a stick to help me balance myself. I started just asking for water because I couldn’t hold my fast. I didn’t know where I was. My tongue was not working. I couldn’t see. It was only darkness.”
People were screaming, frantically running to and from their homes to collect as many of their possessions as they could before the bulldozers reached them. Some were desperately trying to locate their children. Elderly residents fainted upon seeing their homes destroyed, some of whom had to be carried out of the pandemonium by other residents.
One woman who attempted to salvage items from her home was picked up inside the mouth of the bulldozer, almost crushed to death. Residents’ goats, chickens, and rabbits scattered in various directions; some of them were run over by bulldozers and killed.
“It was like watching a horror movie,” Aden tells me. “Everyone was asking, ‘Chairman, what do we do? Where should we go?’ And I couldn’t even speak. Some people weren’t wearing shoes. I felt like I had failed my whole community. Our country failed us and even the courts failed us.”
“I died on that day,” Aden adds, diverting his eyes to the ground. “It’s just that God did not take my body. But in every other sense I died. That was the last day of my life. The night before, we had a home and community. Then in the morning we were homeless — without even a change of clothes. We returned to zero.” Aden was admitted to the hospital for a week following the demolitions, overcome with shock, and remained bedridden for weeks.
“We weren’t prepared for it,” Aden continues. “If we had been given some formal notice then we could have taken our things and planned to go elsewhere. But there was no warning. It came abruptly.” Forced evictions without adequate consultation and the provision of alternative housing or compensation are illegal in Kenya.
Kevin Mukoya, twenty-four, was at his stall where he irons clothes in nearby Korogocho when he heard about the demolition. He ran as fast as he could back to the sewage estate, which took him about ten minutes. He had lived there for ten years, since he arrived in Nairobi from his village in western Kenya in search of work.
“When I got to the house I jumped inside to try and grab as much as I could,” he says. “But when I was inside, the bulldozers hit the house and everything collapsed on me.” The bones in his right leg were crushed and other residents had to frantically pull him out from the rubble. When he arrived at the hospital, doctors were forced to amputate his leg.
Mukoya has continued his business ironing clothes with a few other youths, but “now I have no future,” he tells me. “I was working to build up something better for myself. But now without a leg everything has become much harder and my future looks even bleaker.”
About three hundred of the sewage estate’s displaced residents, many of whom were elderly, women, and children, established a tent settlement on the rubble of their homes immediately following the demolitions, sleeping outside in the rain and cold, relying entirely on charity. After about a month, the police arrived in the middle of the night and evicted them once again, burning their tents and firing tear gas at them.
“It was inhumane what they did to us,” says Gitau, who resided in the tent settlement with her disabled son. “I don’t like to speak about this government. I never hated anyone. I never experienced much anger in my life. But now I feel furious; I feel so much hatred inside me every time someone brings up this government. I’ve never experienced pain like this before.”
Some evicted from the tent settlement were rescued by concerned citizens and provided shelter; but others were forced to continue sleeping on the streets for weeks. Peter Kyalo, forty-three, slept on the cold pavement outside with his wife and two children, now ages fifteen, thirteen, and nine, along with a group of other evictees.
“It was scary,” he tells me. “We were left just out in the open with no protection. At night the men didn’t sleep so we could guard our wives and children.” Displaced residents who spoke to the media began receiving calls from anonymous numbers threatening to kill them if they continued speaking out.
At the time, it was reported that the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC) was behind the evictions, carried out to make way for the Kariobangi Sewerage Treatment Plant, which forms part of the city’s urban development plans. It is still unclear, however, who gave orders for the evictions and on what legal grounds. But “you cannot have that scale of violence against people without high levels of government ordering it,” Kegoro says, adding that it is also not clear what development is being planned in that location.
More than two years later, the land of the sewage estate, having once hosted a thriving community, remains completely vacant, with a twelve-foot-high perimeter wall erected around its grounds. During a recent visit, I witnessed this space being used by the government to burn excess money, sending toxic smoke throughout Kariobangi, making it hard for residents to breathe.
“You see how our government treats us,” says thirty-six-year-old Joyce Mwangi, who led me to the roof of a tall apartment building so I could view the grounds of the sewage estate. “We are suffering with no money here, but then they decide to come here to burn their money and poison us. Our government does not see us as human beings.”
Mwangi, a mother of a three-year-old boy and eighteen-year-old twins, worked for years as a house cleaner in Oman. When she returned to Kenya in 2015, she invested all her savings into purchasing a plot of land at the Kariobangi sewage estate, which she then built additional homes to rent out.
Following the demolitions, her husband abandoned her, unable to deal with the stress of losing their entire livelihood. Forced to raise her children alone, Mwangi now relies on sporadic house work, such as cleaning and washing clothes. It is often not enough to survive.
“They have done nothing with that land since the eviction,” Mwangi says, peering down at the massive piece of vacant land that she once called home. She begins coughing and pulls her T-shirt over her face as the wind directs the black smoke emanating from the pile of burning money in our direction.
“It makes me so sad and angry,” she continues. “All of this pain and they are not doing anything with that land. It’s just sitting there. What was the point of destroying so many peoples’ lives and then not even using the land for years?”
Mourning a Community
Years later, the displaced of the Kariobangi sewage estate continue to struggle; some have been reduced to begging and others continue to suffer from post-traumatic stress.
According to Njoroge, the mental, economic, and social impacts of such violent evictions remain a permanent fixture in the lives of those displaced from the city’s informal settlements. “The first thing people suffer from after evictions is the breakage of that social fabric that existed before,” Njoroge tells me. “People live together; they support each other and do things together. After evictions, everyone goes their own way and those support systems are severed.”
“Then a lot of people’s livelihoods are disrupted,” he continues. “People become beggars overnight. We have a lot of cases of people building up rental homes or had their own businesses and then overnight it’s completely wiped away. They have to rebuild from scratch without any compensation or support.”
Gitau says she and her son are now entirely reliant on charity to survive. “If I knew the government was going to steal that land, I wouldn’t have invested my whole life into those plots,” Gitau tells me; streams of tears return to her face. “And now I’m an old woman. What am I supposed to do now?”
“They stole not just my life, but the futures of my children and grandchildren,” she continues. “They have impoverished us for generations. We can’t even think about tomorrow. We can only think about today and how we will get food. This government took everything from us.”
In the morning, Gitau cannot bring herself to wake up or get out of bed. Sometimes if she’s able to get her hands on sleeping pills, she takes them in the morning so she does not have to be awake throughout the day.
“I still have nightmares about that day,” she says. “I’m just waiting for God to take me back now. I’m looking forward to it because everything I worked for in my life was taken — and by my own government. I have nothing left to live for.”
Even those who need just a small amount of funds to reestablish their businesses have been pushed into crippling poverty — saving money is nearly impossible. Kyalo was renting a unit in the Kariobangi sewage estate and was running a small business frying chips. But all of the equipment, which he could have salvaged if there was an official eviction notice, was destroyed.
Kegoro says that ensuring there were no official warnings before the demolitions was a strategic act. “They knew if they give any warnings then people will organize politically or legally to resist the eviction,” he tells me. “You also can’t give warnings without accounting for who is behind the demolition; so the decision not to warn people is also about maintaining the secrecy of who is exactly driving the evictions.”
It is not the first time Kyalo’s life has been radically changed owing to government politics. In 2007, interethnic violence fueled by allegations of electoral manipulation led to as many as fourteen hundred people being killed in the span of fifty-nine days, while six hundred thousand people in the country were internally displaced.
Kyalo, who is of the Kamba ethnicity, was attacked by a group of Luo youths, brandishing machetes. “They slashed me all over my body,” Kyalo recounts. “Then they chopped off my arm.”
At the time, he was working at a tire repair shop. After the attack, he was no longer able to work. “Around that time, I started frying chips,” he tells me, sitting beside his wife on a couch at his current home in Embakasi West. “And the government came and took that away too.”
Kyalo says it would cost about fifty thousand Kenyan shillings ($428) to restart his chips frying business. But having lost everything in 2020, and backed up with months of unpaid rent in his current unit, Kyalo cannot find the funds for the initial investment.
“This government has made my life so difficult up until now,” Kyalo says. “It was because of them that people started fighting each other over politics and I got my arm chopped off. Then when I finally rebuild myself they take everything from me again. Our lives would be much better if we didn’t have a government.”
Mary Kaswii, Kyalo’s wife, is terrified over the impacts these experiences will have on her children. “They still remember that day,” she tells me. “It’s not normal for children to see their own government shoot tear gas at them and take their home from them.”
According to Njoroge, government demolitions disrupt the lives of children, with some being left out of school for extended periods of time. Schools are often destroyed in the demolitions and documents are commonly lost in the chaos. Losing livelihoods and homes also makes it so parents are no longer able to afford school fees.
Following the demolitions in Mukuru kwa Njenga last year, there are still children who have been unable to return to school. “After these evictions, people’s lives are completely distorted,” Njoroge says.
Yunis Njeri Mwangi, fifty-one, has not slept in peace since the 2020 evictions.
Njeri, a mother of five children, had rented a place at the sewage estate for about eight years and ran a kiosk in the community, selling oil, flour, milk, and other basic food items. Like the rest, she spoke lovingly about the community at the sewage estate. She was able to salvage just a table and a few chairs before the bulldozers reached her home.
“That experience was traumatizing for me,” she says. “I still have a lot of fear. I feel like everything I have can be taken from me at any moment. Even at night, if I hear any kind of commotion outside, I’ll immediately wake up and think it’s the government coming.”
“Sometimes when I’m outside the house, I feel this anxiety inside myself . . . that maybe when I come back to my home everything will be gone and demolished. I’m very scared because what happens if the government comes for us again?”
According to Aden, at least ten people from the sewage estate have died since the evictions, mostly owing to high blood pressure, which residents say is caused by the unfathomable stress of losing their homes and livelihoods. Njoroge says premature death is very common following government demolitions, especially among the elderly. While two of the recently deceased from the sewage estate were elderly, the rest of them were not, Aden says, and were in good health before the demolitions.
“The stress of coming home and seeing everything you own and worked for in your life demolished becomes fatal over time,” Njoroge tells me. “I’ve seen several cases of someone looking at their demolished home and just dying on the spot. He faints from the shock and never wakes up.”
One elderly man from the sewage estate has not been able to speak a single word since the demolitions. “He is not alive,” Ubah says. “But he’s also not dead. He’s just there. He never speaks and he has to be spoon fed. Before the evictions he was fine.”
“It took us more than a year to forget what we saw that day,” Ubah adds. As Kenya’s general elections are fast-approaching in August, Ubah says no one from the sewage estate has any intentions of voting.
“There are many who say they will burn their identity cards because they no longer want to vote or even to be Kenyan,” Ubah explains. “We will never vote again. When the demolitions came we cried to our president, to our governor, to our MPs, and no one heard us or tried to help us. Why should we have any hope in this country?”
Like the others, Aden is still reeling from his loss. “We were there for twenty-six years, with documents,” he says, shaking his head in frustration. “And it still didn’t matter. Since my forties, every single thing I had, I invested in that land. And now if I die today, what do I have to leave my children? Nothing.”
“There’s no point in having laws in Kenya because if you are rich and powerful then you don’t need to follow them,” he continues. “It makes us feel like we’re not even part of this country.”
Ubah interjects: “There’s no justice for the poor in Kenya.”
Patients rest on beds arranged inside a makeshift dengue ward in a hospital in Lahore, Pakistan, on Oct. 17, 2021. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
New research finds that more than half of infectious diseases known to affect humans were aggravated by climate change.
During a 2014 visit to his native Colombia, heavy rains caused the worst flooding his hometown had seen in decades and boosted the mosquito population. A mosquito bit Mora, transferring the chikungunya virus and making him a patient during an unprecedented outbreak in the region.
His joints ache still today. He blames a warming world.
In a study published Monday, Mora and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii canvassed tens of thousands of studies to analyze the global impacts of climate change on infectious diseases that affect humans. They determined that nearly 220 infectious diseases — 58% of the total studied — had become bigger threats because of climate hazards.
“Systems have been evolving for millions of years and now humans have come along and changed things,” Mora said. “We are punching nature, but nature is punching us back.”
The study, which ultimately analyzed more than 3,200 scientific works, is one of the most thorough examinations of climate change’s overall impact on diseases worldwide.
“It’s only in the recent past of infectious disease research that we really focus in on climate change as a driver of infectious disease,” said Jessica Leibler, an environmental epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health who wasn't involved in the research.
Fifty-eight percent “seems like a really high number,” she said, “but it reflects the reality that infectious diseases are driven by what’s going on in our environment.”
The research is not without limitations. Scientists often have a hard time quantifying how much climate change is contributing to disease outbreaks, since it’s an indirect process.
Climate hazards also diminished some impacts of infectious disease. For 16% of diseases, these hazards reduced the ailments’ impact or produced mixed results.
Climate hazards bring people and animals closer together
When Mora and his team examined the effects of 10 climate hazards on 375 infectious diseases, they found more than 1,000 ways that climate change spurred disease transmission. Rising temperatures were the biggest driver of pathogenic diseases, followed by precipitation, floods and drought.
Most often, infectious diseases were spread to humans from animals such as mosquitos, snakes, birds or rodents.
Voles, for instance, depend on snow cover for winter habitat, Mora said. But diminishing snowpacks have sent the creatures seeking shelter inside people’s homes, where they have been documented transmitting hantavirus.
“Climate drives habitat change and disruption around the world. That also brings humans into contact with animal species in ways that we were not in contact with them historically, or haven’t been in the recent past,” Leibler said. “Our recent pandemic is an example to the extent that the leading hypothesis is that bats might have played a role.”
Rising temperatures have also increased the habitat ranges for creatures like ticks, fleas and mosquitoes, growing the footprint of infections like West Nile virus, Zika and dengue fever.
“Mosquitoes are obviously the big one that cause a tremendous amount of mortality internationally,” Leibler said.
Other climate-linked diseases spread directly to humans through food, water or air. Fecal pathogens like E. coli or salmonella, for instance, can enter drinking water after a flood or hurricane, and rising temperatures may increase their chance of survival.
“There’s a good deal of evidence that as temperatures rise, it’s more likely that different sorts of pathogens will be present in drinking water globally,” Leibler said.
Climate hazards even put direct stress on the human body and make people more vulnerable to infection.
“What happens with warming countries in particular is that drought, because it undermines nutrition and increases malnutrition, compromises our body’s ability to fight infection,” said Amir Sapkota, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health. Sapkota was not involved in the research.
Mora said heat waves could be pushing some viruses, through natural selection, to tolerate higher temperatures. That’s bad news, he said, because one of the human body’s key weapons against a viral invader is heat from a developing fever.
Scientists worry about a ‘Pandora’s box’ of new pathogens
Mora’s study also raises concerns about the potential for new diseases to spread.
In the Arctic Circle, for instance, ancient pathogens in the bodies of animals frozen beneath permafrost have begun to re-emerge with some nasty effects. Through genetic analysis, scientists traced a 2016 anthrax outbreak in Siberia to buried prehistoric animals exposed during a heat wave.
“Melting permafrost may expose pathogens that are frozen in time,” Sapkota said. “We don’t even have any idea of what they are and what they would be like if they were to infect us today.”
Mora said it’s possible that rising temperatures in the Arctic could open a “Pandora’s box” of new pathogens for which human immune systems haven’t had exposure.
Scientists are also worried about the potential for new viruses to spill over from animals to humans.
“With drought, what happens is animals may start to move over larger areas in search of food, so that brings this opportunity for what we call this viral spillover event,” Sapkota said. “The same thing goes with regards to humans encroaching on their area.”
Mora’s study found that some disease-carrying creatures are becoming more prevalent or developing new advantages in a warmer world. So scientists said it’s important to increase surveillance in areas where humans and animals closely interact.
“One question that comes to mind is: What if that new viral spillover event is something very unique?” Sapkota said. “It’s as efficient as the coronavirus in terms of spreading from one person to another, but as efficient as Ebola virus in terms of killing people.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.