26 November 22
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Peace is broken; lives are shattered.
Again we see the pictures and learn the names of those who have been slaughtered.
“Authorities are trying to determine a motive.” But the broader narrative is already known.
Those who feed the hate, stoke the vitriol, and profit off of our divisions hide behind meaningless expressions of thoughts and prayers. For them, there is no pause for reflection, no sense that we can do better.
Anger, waves of anger, sweep over a deep trench of hopelessness.
We have mourned before, and we surely will again.
A cycle repeats. The words we uttered for the last tragedy could be reprised for this one, and likely the one to come.
In what sane world do we accept a national impotence in the face of unending bloodshed? None.
Why do we demonize people for how they express their love for others? Or for what they look like? Or for how they pray?
Why is celebrating our common humanity not enough?
What do we tell our children? How do we teach them?
Hate is learned, and it is being taught.
If we are honest with our history, we know that hatred has been a constant in our national story. But so too have attempts to rise above it, to make progress toward a more just and equitable nation, to strive for that “more perfect union.”
We celebrate acts of heroism. We find support in our collective grief. But we should never accept this murderous hostility to our diversity. Our national strength is rooted in our differences. We are all at our best when we support each other.
Far too many continue to live in fear because of who they are. This fear is not an accident or unintentional. There are powerful people in this country who base their power on the ability to frighten.
Cultivated terror is a poison that infects our society. Once unleashed, it is impossible to control. It easily explodes in violence, as it did in Colorado Springs. There will be another set of charges to mark, another court case to cover, another verdict to await. But we can already pass a verdict on a society that allows this to continue.
Completely eliminating cultivated hate and violence is not possible, but we can drastically reduce it — if only enough Americans unite to make it happen.
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A woman walks on a street during a blackout in Lviv on November 23. (photo: Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP/Getty Images)
Nine months after Russia invaded its neighbor, the Kremlin’s forces have zeroed in on Ukraine’s power grid and other critical civilian infrastructure in a bid to tighten the screws on Kyiv. Officials estimate that around 50% of Ukraine's energy facilities have been damaged in the recent strikes.
France is sending 100 high-powered generators to Ukraine to help people get through the coming months, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said Friday.
She said Russia is “weaponizing” winter and plunging Ukraine’s civilian population into hardship.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, arriving Friday on a visit to Kyiv, said a promised air-defense package, which Britain valued at 50 million pounds ($60 million), would help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s bombardments.
“Words are not enough. Words won’t keep the lights on this winter. Words won’t defend against Russian missiles,” Cleverly said in a tweet about the military aid.
The package also includes 24 ambulances and 11 other emergency vehicles, some of them armored.
“As winter sets in, Russia is continuing to try and break Ukrainian resolve through its brutal attacks on civilians, hospitals and energy infrastructure,” Cleverly said.
Russian officials have claimed they are hitting legitimate targets. But the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Friday expressed his shock at the depth of civilian suffering caused by the bombing, amid broader allegations of abuses.
“Millions are being plunged into extreme hardship and appalling conditions of life by these strikes,” Volker Türk said in a statement Friday. “Taken as a whole, this raises serious problems under international humanitarian law, which requires a concrete and direct military advantage for each object attacked.”
The U.N. humanitarian office also chimed in with its concerns. “Ukraine is turning increasingly cold without power, without steady water supply and without heating,” Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the office, said Friday.
He said the global body and its partners were sending hundreds of generators to Ukraine to help the government there in its efforts to keep people warm and maintain essential services, such as health care. The World Health Organization said it is sending generators to hospitals.
Cleverly's visit came a day after European officials launched a scheme called “Generators of Hope,” which calls on more than 200 cities across the continent to donate power generators and electricity transformers.
The generators are intended to help provide power to hospitals, schools and water pumping stations, among other infrastructure.
Generators may provide only a tiny amount of the energy that Ukraine will need during the cold and dark winter months.
But the comfort and relief they provide is already evident, as winter begins in earnest and power outages occur regularly. The whine and rumble of generators is becoming commonplace, allowing stores that have them to stay open and Ukraine’s ubiquitous coffee shops to keep serving hot drinks that maintain a semblance of normality.
Despite strong wind, rain, sub-zero temperatures at night, icing and broken power lines, more than 70% of Ukraine’s electricity requirements were being met on Friday morning, the country’s state power grid operator Ukrenergo said in a statement.
The electricity supply has been at least partially restored in all regions of Ukraine, and the country’s energy grid was once again connected to that of the European Union, Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi said on Friday.
Kudrytskyi added that, despite that progress, about half of Ukrainian residents continue to experience disruption. He said all three of Ukraine’s nuclear plants located in areas controlled by Kyiv have resumed operation.
“In one to two days, nuclear power plants will reach their normal scheduled capacity, and we expect that it will be possible to transfer our consumers to a planned shutdown (regime) instead of emergency (blackouts),” Kudrytskyi said on Ukrainian TV.
Ukrainian authorities are opening thousands of so-called “points of invincibility” — heated and powered spaces offering hot meals, electricity and internet connections. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said late Thursday that almost 4,400 such spaces have opened across most of the country.
He scoffed at Moscow’s attempts to intimidate Ukrainian civilians, saying that was the Russian military’s only option after a string of battlefield setbacks. “Either energy terror, or artillery terror, or missile terror — that’s all that Russia has dwindled to under its current leaders,” Zelenskyy said.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian officials and energy workers continued their push to restore supplies after a nationwide barrage Wednesday left tens of millions without power and water.
Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said Friday morning that heating was back on in a third of the capital’s households, but that half of its population still lacked electricity.
Writing on Telegram, Klitschko added that authorities hoped to provide all consumers in Kyiv with electricity for a period of three hours on Friday, following a pre-set schedule.
As of Friday morning in Kharkiv, all residents of Ukraine’s second-largest city had had their electricity supplies restored, but more than 100,000 in the outlying region continued to see interruptions, the regional governor said.
In the south, authorities in the city of Mykolayiv said that running water was set to start flowing again after supplies were cut off by Russian strikes on Thursday.
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AARP is benefitting from the privatization of Medicare and the denial of care to seniors. (photo: Sarah L. Voisin/WP)
The state of affairs lays bare a conflict inside AARP, the major advocacy organization for Americans 50 and older, over how to approach the regulation of Medicare Advantage, the for-profit version of Medicare.
On one hand, AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, collects enormous amounts of revenue from Medicare Advantage insurers to supplement huge executive salaries (the nonprofit’s CEO made $1.3 million in 2020). On the other hand, the organization is expected to advocate for the best interests of their 38 million members — and the 28.4 million Americans now covered by Medicare Advantage plans, or nearly half of all Medicare beneficiaries.
“The AARP makes money through its own Medicare Advantage plans,” said Don Berwick, an administrator of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Obama administration who has emerged as a prominent critic of the program. “It would be understandable that it would try to protect one of its major income sources.”
AARP had a chance to call out problems with Medicare Advantage denying care to patients — arguably the most important issue facing its members enrolled in Medicare Advantage — when CMS, the federal agency that oversees Medicare, released a request for comments about the program at the beginning of August. But in its resulting August 30 letter, AARP hardly touched on care denials, instead recommending modest increases in transparency on issues like racial equity and telehealth funding — while championing the expansion of the privatized insurance program.
“Throughout the current public health emergency, we have supported the expansion of supplemental benefits in [Medicare Advantage] to help alleviate the unprecedented health care crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic,” noted the letter.
Meanwhile, AARP has been reaping the financial benefits of its own Medicare Advantage plan, which it has been offering in partnership with the for-profit insurance giant UnitedHealthcare since 2003. Starting in 2021, AARP also launched a lucrative partnership with the major Medicare outsourcing firm Oak Street Health, which is a participant in the ACO Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health (REACH) program that privatizes Medicare benefits for seniors without their consent, as reported by Kaiser Health News in June.
In 2021, AARP earned $814 million in “royalties” for its health care work, according to a recently released financial statement reviewed by The Lever. That figure is more than double what the organization collects in dues, and is 20 percent higher than 2018.
“At the direction of the third party insurance carriers, the plan pays AARP, Inc. a portion of the total premiums collected for the use of its intellectual property, which is reported as royalties in the consolidated statements of activities,” AARP explains in its latest tax filing.
Representatives of AARP did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“There’s A Big Game Being Played”
AARP’s motto is, “To serve, not be served.”
But that position hasn’t prompted AARP to sound the alarm on the privatization of Medicare benefits, even after an April report from the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) found that 18 percent of claims denied by Medicare Advantage plans should have been covered.
AARP has also refused to cut ties with UnitedHealth, its Medicare Advantage partner, even as evidence has mounted that the insurer isn’t focused on empowering consumers. In 2017, for example, the insurance company was sued by the Justice Department for overbilling Medicare. AARP’s standalone Medicare prescription drug benefit program has also been racked with high premium increases, making it one of the most expensive national plans on the market, a recent investigation from the Wall Street Journal found.
In AARP’s August letter, the advocacy organization also called for slightly expanding the information Medicare Advantage plans provide on their practices for denying care. “We are also supportive of language around enrollee protection standards that will establish a collaborative process between beneficiaries, providers, and CMS to ensure that denials of prior authorization requests no longer produce obstacles to needed care,” read the letter.
But these recommendations were far less expansive than those advocated by the American Hospital Association (AHA), the leading national hospital lobbying group. Referring to Medicare Advantage plans’ routine denial of care that would have been covered by traditional Medicare, AHA pointedly noted in the aforementioned August 30 letter that “we strongly urge CMS to require [Medicare Advantage plans] to align medical necessity and coverage criteria with Traditional Medicare rules so that Medicare patients have equal access to care regardless of coverage type and to reduce the unnecessary delays and burdens associated with inappropriate or excessive use of prior authorization.”
And while AARP calls for more information on Medicare Advantage plans to allow consumers to shop more effectively, they fail to provide that information themselves on their website.
Susan Rogers, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), pointed out that AARP’s website contained essentially no independent information on Medicare Advantage. “If you go to their website and search for Medicare, the first information up there is Medicare Advantage,” she said. “Nothing about traditional Medicare. Nothing. If you trace their funding you’re not surprised by their position at all. That makes them part of the problem.”
AARP has likewise been silent about the massive expansion of Medicare Advantage augured by the Trump administration launching the “direct contracting entities” or DCE, program, which under President Joe Biden has now morphed into the ACO REACH program. This program involuntarily assigns seniors to privatized health care plans without their informed consent, and has been panned by a host of advocates like PNHP and progressive leaders like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). Amazon and major private equity firms have made major investments to try to cash in on this scheme.
In fact, as part of AARP’s new partnership with Oak Street Health, the ACO REACH plan provider is promoting itself as a “trusted primary care provider by AARP.” Meanwhile, Oak Street has disclosed that it is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its marketing practices.
By neglecting to educate its members on the risks of Medicare privatization, AARP is doing its members a disservice, said Berwick, the former CMS administrator.
“There’s a big game being played — the Medicare Advantage money machine,” he said. “Insurers are making an enormous amount of money, and it’s a hidden cost to taxpayers. Beneficiaries don’t actually see what’s being taken from them. If they did understand it they would be very concerned.”
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Greta Thunberg. (photo: Getty Images)
The lawsuit comes as Sweden’s new right-wing government faces mounting criticism over lacklustre climate goals.
The lawsuit, symbolically submitted to the Stockholm district court during a protest in the city on Friday, had previously been filed electronically to another Stockholm court, according to the organisation behind the lawsuit, Aurora.
“There has never been such a large-scale case in the Swedish legal system”, Ida Edling, a member of Aurora, told the AFP news agency.
The legal action, which has been in the works for two years, comes as Sweden’s new right-wing government faces mounting criticism over lacklustre climate goals.
Moa Widmark, a 19-year-old student, said she was taking part in Friday’s demonstration because “the climate crisis is worrying and scary – we’re headed for a catastrophe.”
Previous lawsuits
While the lawsuit is a first in the Swedish courts, six Portuguese youths have taken Sweden and 32 other countries to the European Court of Human Rights, accusing them of failing to adequately address the climate crisis.
“If we win, there will be a verdict that says the Swedish state is required to do its share of the global measures needed for the world to meet the 1.5-degree target”, Edling said.
In recent years, a growing number of organisations and citizens have turned to the courts to criticise what they claim is government inaction on the climate.
In December 2019, the Dutch supreme court ordered the government to slash greenhouse gases by at least 25 percent by 2020, in a landmark case brought by an environmental group.
In a similar case in France, more than two million citizens took the French state to court for failing to act against climate change.
In a report published earlier this week, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute said the average temperature in Sweden had risen nearly 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, twice as fast as the global average.
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Herschel Walker at a rally in March. (photo: Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Sen. Raphael Warnock and former football player Herschel Walker will face off one more time in December.
Once again, Georgia is holding a runoff after neither Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) nor his opponent, former football player Herschel Walker, got more than 50 percent in November’s general election. The stakes are high, if not quite as high as they were in 2021: Democrats already won 50 seats and kept the Senate majority, but gaining another seat could increase their power on different committees and hedge against potential losses in 2024.
There are some notable differences, though. Because of a new state election law that went into effect last year, there are key changes to the logistics of the election and who can vote in it. Those updates, ultimately, could impact participation, reducing the amount of time people have to engage in early voting and mail-in voting.
Here’s what to know about the effects of the new election law, the stakes of the runoffs, and where things currently stand between the two candidates.
When is the Georgia runoff?
The runoffs will take place on Tuesday, December 6, and results could be available within one to two days, depending on how close it is. This past November, Georgia was able to announce the outcome of the Senate race a day after the general election. The state has expedited how it processes mail-in ballots compared to 2020, a change that could help get results sooner compared to past elections.
Early voting will give voters a chance to participate before December 6 as well: It will be available in all counties between November 28 and December 2, and was available in a handful of counties as early as November 22. Georgia’s Secretary of State website offers information about when each county will kick off early voting and where voters can go.
Voters can also participate in the runoff by mail. To do so, they have to submit an application for an absentee ballot to their county election office by Monday, November 28. Voters can submit these applications online, via email, mail, fax, or in-person. They’ll then have to send these ballots back or drop them off so that their county election office receives them by 7 pm on December 6, the day of the runoff.
The timing of this year’s election marks a change from how things were conducted in 2021, when there were nine weeks between the general election and the runoff. This year, there’s just four weeks, the result of a new law signed in 2021 that oversees how the state holds elections. In 2021, there were three weeks of early voting, compared to the week or less many counties will have in 2022.
That change could affect voter participation, particularly among Democrats, who are more likely to use early voting and mail-in options, the Associated Press reports. “For voters who are registered and planning to vote, the biggest effect will be the fewer number of early voting opportunities they have and the constricted timeline for absentee voting,” University of Georgia law professor Lori Ringhand told Vox.
Who can vote?
In 2022, only voters who were already registered to vote prior to the general election are able to do so.
This is also another difference from 2021, when new people were able to register specifically for the runoff election. That year, more than 75,000 new voters registered after the deadline had passed for the general election, in time to weigh in on the runoffs.
The new election law, SB 202, specifies that voters need to register at least 30 days before an election to be eligible to participate in it. So between that and the shortened window between the two races, those who haven’t registered yet don’t have time to do so before the runoff.
Those who are already registered, however, are able to participate in the runoff even if they didn’t vote in the general election.
Where does the race stand now?
The race between Warnock and Walker is expected to be close. (It’s the only statewide race in the runoff election, though some counties could have other races at the local level.)
Warnock had the edge in the general election and could well have it again in the runoff, though both face the challenge of getting their voters to turn out for the second time in less than a month.
In the general election, Warnock secured 49.4 percent of the vote, Walker secured 48.5 percent, and libertarian candidate Chase Oliver secured 2.1 percent. A mid-November AARP poll, one of the few conducted after the general election, had Warnock four points ahead among likely voters.
Those leads, however, are still narrow, and each candidate still has different factors going in their favor.
Warnock, an incumbent senator with solid approval ratings in-state, has benefited from a deluge of scandals Walker has faced, including allegations of domestic violence and claims that he paid for two women’s abortions. (Walker has denied that he paid for the abortions.)
University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock also theorized that Republicans could see declines in turnout because Gov. Brian Kemp, who won most Republicans and many independents, would no longer be at the top of the ticket.
Walker, meanwhile, is a well-known football star in the state and is likely getting a boost from Georgia’s Republican lean and backlash people may be experiencing toward the Biden administration over issues like inflation.
What are the unique challenges of a runoff?
The biggest challenge posed by a runoff is typically getting voters to head to the polls for a second time.
“Both sides risk heavy attrition of their November voters, and the side that does the best job reminding voters to return to the polls will likely be the one that wins,” Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie told Vox.
According to Bullock, Georgia has seen anywhere between a 10 to 40 percent drop-off in voter participation in past runoffs. The 2021 elections were a best-case scenario: Roughly 10 percent fewer voters participated in those relative to the general election that year.
Prior to 2021, runoffs had favored Republicans because they were able to turn more of their voters out, per FiveThirtyEight. That dynamic, however, shifted that year, with Democrats seeing gains among their voters.
This year, it’s still unclear which party will be more successful, though both have invested heavily in the election. According to NBC News, Democrats have thus far outspent Republicans on ads, pouring in $17 million to the GOP’s $5 million.
Organizers including the New Georgia Project Action Fund have also been canvassing heavily on the ground, with upward of 400 canvassers using everything from text and phone banking to more traditional door-knocking to reach voters.
“At this point, it’s really a turnout game. We are focused on voter education. We’ve been knocking on people’s doors since March, so they are very familiar with us,” says James Mays, a field director with the New Georgia Project Action Fund.
What are the stakes of this election?
Unlike 2020, Senate control is not up for grabs since Democrats have already won the majority.
That doesn’t mean this election isn’t still extremely important. As Vox’s Ellen Ioanes explained, there’s a lot at stake if Democrats are able to pick up a 51st seat:
If Warnock keeps his seat, Democrats won’t have to depend on Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a tie-breaking vote, and they would have more leverage over Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), the more conservative members of the party, in order to get legislation passed.
With 51 votes, Democrats would have solid majorities on congressional committees, which are currently split down the middle. That would give them the power to confirm judicial nominees more quickly and swiftly approve measures that could be contentious. Any gains Democrats make this cycle could also help blunt potential losses they might face in 2024, when the Senate map will be much less favorable to the party.
Beyond the balance of power in the Senate, organizers also note that this election sends a message about the values and issues that Georgia stands for. Recently, for instance, Walker used an anti-trans ad describing how trans athletes should be barred from sports competitions, to try to make the case for his candidacy.
“What we’re asking people to say, to make a choice about the kind of Georgia they want to live in, the kind of representation they want in the Senate and the direction that they want the United States to go in,” says Keron Blair, the chief of field and organizing at the New Georgia Project Action Fund.
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Somalis watch U.S. soldiers in their multipurpose vehicles in position at a Mogadishu airport, January, 1992. (photo: Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images)
Since the 1990s, no government has been able to control the whole of Somalia’s territory. Lurid news reports about piracy and terrorism obscure the fact that big powers like the US have repeatedly intervened in the country’s affairs and worsened its condition.
But news reports about terrorism and piracy have obscured the fact that Somalia is very much a part of the world system. From the Cold War to the “war on terror,” outside intervention by the world’s most powerful states has played a major role in worsening the Somali crisis.
Elizabeth Schmidt is a professor emeritus of history at Loyola University Maryland. Her most recent book is Foreign Intervention in Africa After the Cold War. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
Daniel Finn
How did the postcolonial Somali state emerge after the period of British and Italian rule, and what were the main legacies of colonial domination for Somalia?
Elizabeth Schmidt
When Somalia got its independence in 1960, it was a very strained union of the British and Italian colonies in northern and southern Somalia. The colonial boundaries were retained after independence, which resulted in millions of ethnic Somalis being located in neighboring countries, notably Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. As a result, ethnic Somalis waged campaigns against neighboring countries trying to bring their so-called lost populations into the independent state of Somalia. It created a lot of conflict.
“The colonial boundaries were retained after independence, which resulted in millions of ethnic Somalis being located in neighboring countries.”
Daniel Finn
What were the main ethnic and clan identities that could be found in Somalia at the time of independence?
Elizabeth Schmidt
Within Somalia, most of the people were considered to be ethnic Somalis, who share a language, a culture, and a religion. You had one main ethnic group that was fairly homogenous, yet there were divisions among clans. There were different clans in the Italian and the British colonies, but also within each of those former colonies. Again, this resulted in a lot of conflict. There were also ethnic minorities, and they were heavily discriminated against in Somalia.
Daniel Finn
How did Siad Barre come to power at the end of the 1960s, and what were the main policies that his government set about enacting?
Elizabeth Schmidt
Mohamed Siad Barre was a general in the Somali Army, and he overthrew the previous government. Somalia’s second president was assassinated and then there was a military coup in 1969. Siad Barre announced right away that Somalia would pursue a Soviet-style scientific-socialist agenda, which began with a massive public works program.
Somalia did make significant strides in development, especially in the rural areas. There were mass literacy campaigns. Primary education was extended and became more widely available. Public health was a big achievement in the rural areas — just the basics, but still more than they had before — and economic development. These policies were considered quite progressive by leftists, while the United States worried about Somalia’s burgeoning relationship with the Soviet Union.
Daniel Finn
What was the impact of the revolution in neighboring Ethiopia during the 1970s on Somalia’s foreign policy and its relationship with the USSR?
Elizabeth Schmidt
The Ethiopian revolution that took place in 1974 overthrew what was essentially a feudal society. The military regime which took power in Ethiopia did not immediately declare itself to be Marxist, but it eventually embraced that label.
The United States was extremely concerned about what was happening in Ethiopia — even more concerned than it was about Somalia — so it suspended its economic aid. Ethiopia had been a close US ally under its feudal leader Haile Selassie. The Soviet Union then became the main source of Ethiopia’s military and economic assistance.
Meanwhile, Somalia’s relationship with the Eastern Bloc began to fray. The United States came in, hoping to use Somalia as a bulwark against the even more radical, Marxist Ethiopian government. The Soviet Union tried to have it both ways, being involved with Somalia and with Ethiopia at the same time.
But Somalia invaded Ethiopia in 1977, trying to capture the territories of the Ogaden that contained a lot of ethnic Somalis. Of course, that infuriated the Soviet Union, which had wanted to create a sort of union of socialist states in the Horn of Africa, bringing Somalia and Ethiopia together. If it had to pick between them, however, it was going to pick Ethiopia.
Somalia was widely seen as the aggressor nation. When the African colonies gained their independence, they agreed to minimize conflict by accepting the colonial boundaries, however irrational they might be. Somalia was violating this principle of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the forerunner of today’s African Union. Moscow abandoned its alliance with Somalia and gave its full support to Ethiopia.
Daniel Finn
How did the United States deal with the regime of Siad Barre at the time of the Ogaden war and afterward?
Elizabeth Schmidt
The United States hoped to use Somalia to thwart Soviet encroachment in the Horn. But it didn’t want to be open about its support for Somalia, since most African countries considered Somalia to be the aggressor state that was violating OAU principles. The CIA hired an arms dealer that supplied US-made weapons, and other agencies coordinated the flow of weapons through third-party states. It wasn’t until after the Ogaden conflict was settled in 1978 that the United States began openly supporting Somalia, which it now did with a vengeance.
Daniel Finn
What were the main internal challenges to Siad Barre’s rule during the 1980s?
Elizabeth Schmidt
By the mid-1980s, Somalia was in dire straits. The cost of the Ethiopian war, combined with corruption and mismanagement, had run the economy into the ground. It was in a downward spiral, and this had clearly dissipated the development achievements of the previous decade. Combined with very onerous taxes, that stimulated unrest in the rural areas.
This is where Siad Barre’s general tactics came in when he was in crisis. He brutally repressed the protests, generating real hatred for his regime. He imprisoned his critics, or killed them, or drafted them into the Somali army, and then collectively punished their clan members. He encouraged clan rivalry — divide and rule — and his own clan increasingly dominated the regime.
In 1989, the clans that had suffered from harassment or discrimination united in their opposition to Siad Barre’s rule. There was also another force fighting against the Barre regime, the Islamists, who had been brutally repressed. These two groups — the clans that had suffered discrimination and the Islamists — united against the dictatorship.
Daniel Finn
When the central government in Mogadishu collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, what forms of authority took its place, and how did the people of Somalia experience that period?
Elizabeth Schmidt
The central government collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, which was also the end of the Cold War, and that wasn’t a coincidence. With Moscow weakening politically and economically, the United States didn’t feel like it needed Somalia any more as a regional policeman in the Horn. It expressed a newfound concern about Siad Barre’s human rights abuses.
Obviously, the United States had been well aware of what Siad Barre was doing beforehand, but they chose to turn a blind eye to it because they wanted to use him as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union was no longer there, the United States began decrying human rights abuses and suspended economic and military aid
Without the massive US support that he had been getting since the late 1970s, Siad Barre was an easy target. In January 1991, the warlords and their clan-based militias overthrew the regime and Somalia essentially collapsed into chaos. Southern Somalia fractured into fiefdoms ruled by rival warlords who clashed with the resurgent Islamist movement. State institutions disintegrated and nongovernmental actors had to provide services, to the extent that services were provided at all.
It was the Islamist organizations in particular that played a critical role in this regard. They restored law and order to the war zones. They reestablished basic social services like health care and education. That was very much welcomed by the Somali population.
Daniel Finn
What impact did the US-led military intervention in that period have on Somalia?
Elizabeth Schmidt
In 1992, the United States launched a multinational military intervention, backed by the UN. When I say “multinational,” I mean that it was dominated by the United States, with a sprinkling of troops from other countries to allow it to claim the “multinational” label. We’ve seen this pattern repeated in US policy elsewhere.
The mission of the 1992 endeavor was to ensure the delivery of humanitarian relief to the Somali people. The idea was that the disaster in Somalia was going to create instability in the Horn, and that wouldn’t be good for anybody. In 1993, another UN mission permitted US-led forces to disarm and arrest Somali warlords and militia members.
This was quite different from just having armed troops line the road from the airport to allow the relief supplies to get in. But there wasn’t a lot of publicity about the change, so many people assumed that it was the same humanitarian mission as it had been the previous year. The United States and the UN favored one warlord over another, while the one they really opposed was a man by the name of Mohamed Farrah Aidid. It became their goal to arrest him, disarm him, or kill him.
Civilians were caught in the crossfire, and many were killed in US airstrikes. This included clan leaders, religious leaders, intellectuals, and businessmen who were meeting to discuss a UN peace proposal. These were clearly people who were considering joining forces with the UN, but an airstrike ended up killing them.
These massacres of Somali leaders and civilians caused a tremendous backlash in the Somali population. They began to direct their retaliatory attacks, not only against the US and UN troops, but against any foreigner. Journalists and relief workers were targeted, and many withdrew from Somalia. US troops in turn started to consider most Somali civilians to be a possible threat and treated them accordingly. The relationship between the US troops and Somali civilians was increasingly poor.
The climax of these developments came in early October 1993, when US Army Rangers and Delta Force troops, hoping to capture or kill Aidid and his top lieutenants, raided some of the known Aidid compounds in Mogadishu. Aidid’s forces shot down two Black Hawk helicopters, which crashed into children in the crowd below. As a result, angry crowds attacked the soldiers who had come to rescue the survivors. Eighteen US soldiers and hundreds of Somali men, women, and children were killed in the violence that followed.
Daniel Finn
Following the US withdrawal from Somalia in the 1990s, there was a renewed interest in what was happening in the country after the 9/11 attacks, as the United States launched its so-called war on terror. How did the new development of US policy affect conditions in Somalia, and what factors lay behind the growth of the group Al-Shabaab?
Elizabeth Schmidt
In 1994, having stirred up a hornets’ nest, the United States hastily withdrew its troops from Somalia. As we have seen elsewhere in the world, the United States expects to be able to engage with opponents in various conflicts, but it doesn’t think that Americans should pay the price with their lives. If too many Americans are dying, then the United States withdraws and thinks about other ways of accomplishing its goals.
However, Al-Qaeda began to emerge elsewhere in East Africa, and this gave rise to new concerns. The bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were a case in point. This was followed by the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001. This resulted in the United States increasing its collaboration with Ethiopia, Somalia’s long-term nemesis, which did not bode well for US relations with Somalia.
Meanwhile, Somali Islamist groups had gained significant popular support by providing essential social services, including schools, medical care, and courts that brought some law and order to the war zone. The United States ignored the reasons for the appeal of Islamism in Somalia.
Certainly, some of it was religious: most Somalis were Muslims, although their brand of Islam was less conservative than that of the Islamists, who believed that religion should govern all aspects of life. Somalis have historically followed a more open and tolerant brand of Islam. But the Islamists were the ones providing badly needed services, so people turned to them.
The United States viewed all conservative Muslims as terrorists and jihadists, which was an erroneous assumption. Very few Islamists supported violent extremism. Because of this mistaken perception, the United States decided to collaborate with Ethiopia and set out on a violent campaign to stamp out Islamism in Somalia. It also banded together with Somali warlords and imposed a new government on Somalia in 2004.
This corrupt regime was dominated by the clan of one warlord, and it marginalized the rival clans, including the ones that controlled Mogadishu. It purged the parliament of opposition members. This new government, which had been imposed by outsiders, only survived with the protection of Ethiopian troops. It wasn’t even able to enter Mogadishu, the capital city, and had to establish an alternative capital in the much smaller city of Baidoa.
Two years later, in 2006, the United States backed another warlord coalition to counter Islamist power. It also supported an Ethiopian invasion and an occupation that lasted until 2009. The intervention by Ethiopia precipitated a domestic insurgency. Just as we saw in Iraq, a foreign invasion stoked up an insurgency where none had existed before.
In the case of Somalia, the domestic insurgency was led by Al-Shabaab, which means “The Youth.” It originated as a youth militia that was organized to protect the Islamic courts. These were the courts that had brought law and order to the war zone: yes, they were sharia courts, but no, their practices did not include cutting off hands, which is what many in the West associate with sharia law.
They were courts based on religious principles, and Al-Shabaab had been organized to support them, but it wasn’t violent at that point. It was the foreign invasion and occupation that turned them into a militia that was organized to expel the foreign occupiers.
We always hear about Al-Shabaab as being affiliated to Al-Qaeda. True enough, it is today, but it didn’t affiliate with Al-Qaeda until 2012, whereas the invasion had been launched in 2006. For six years, it was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda, although Al-Qaeda proclaimed its support for the insurgency. Again, it was the foreign invasion backed by the United States that brought Al-Qaeda into Somalia.
By 2007, Al-Shabaab had taken control of large parts of central and southern Somalia, and this prompted the UN, the African Union, and neighboring countries to intervene, so the foreign intervention was only getting stronger. The United States didn’t send its own troops, but it worked in the shadows, launching a campaign of low-intensity warfare against Al-Shabaab operatives, deploying private contractors — in other words, mercenaries — and special forces to train and accompany Somali and African Union troops in combat operations.
This so-called low-intensity warfare included US airstrikes and drone attacks, which targeted Al-Shabaab leaders. Those leaders were quickly replaced by others: the attacks would cut off the head of the hydra, but a new head would grow, so they did not take care of the problem. If anything, they kept up the flow of new leaders coming from the grassroots of Al-Shabaab. The group increasingly focused its attention on the West, targeting aid workers, journalists, and Somalis who worked with them.
In 2012, outside forces once again imposed a new political dispensation. Although it was mediated by the UN and backed by the international community, it was disavowed by large segments of Somali civil society, which had little input into the process. It was another case of outsiders trying to determine Somalia’s future, while not allowing Somalis to speak for themselves about what their grievances were and what kind of post-conflict society they wanted to see. None of the groups from civil society were involved in the negotiations, and none of their initiatives were taken seriously.
Al-Shabaab was driven from Mogadishu to areas further south, but as it left, it focused on new targets. Instead of targeting the outsiders in the capital, it began to target unprotected, so-called soft targets — government offices, schools, hotels, and restaurants. It launched attacks across the border into Kenya and other countries that had supplied troops to the African Union intervention forces. The conflict was expanding beyond Somalia rather than diminishing.
Today, as a result of foreign intervention, Al-Shabaab maintains its powerful foothold in Somalia in the absence of any functioning state apparatus. There was a new president elected in May 2022 after a protracted political crisis. The factors behind it were much like those behind the crises of other governments: favoritism, corruption, mismanagement. The previous president had refused to hold elections.
The central government is still not providing basic services. There is no coherent national army, and the security forces, like the civilian administration, are riven by clan-based factions who fight each other rather than Al-Shabaab. According to polls that have been carried out, few Somalis believe that the new government will behave any differently from the succession of governments that preceded it. They expect it to go on catering to corrupt elites rather than the majority of Somali citizens, and ignoring the grievances that ignited the insurgency.
Meanwhile, the United States is continuing to wage a shadow war. The nature of the war has changed. The number of boots on the ground has decreased. It was the Obama administration that escalated the use of drone strikes to kill Al-Shabaab targets, rather than using US special forces and military contractors. The engagement of the United States in Somalia has dropped from the consciousness of most US citizens because Americans aren’t dying. They didn’t really pay attention to what the Obama administration was doing, which was creating even more hostility toward the United States.
Daniel Finn
As things stand today, how would you assess Somalia’s long-term political and developmental prospects?
Elizabeth Schmidt
I would say the situation is pretty bleak. Most Somali civilians had no input into the peace initiatives brokered by outside actors. From agricultural cooperatives to women’s groups, youth groups, and trade unions, the grassroots peace-building efforts have been sidelined by more powerful forces, and the interests of foreign governments and Somali elites have once again prevailed over those of ordinary citizens.
Unfortunately, it appears that the administration of Joe Biden is going to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors Barack Obama and Donald Trump by defaulting to the failed military policy of endless war. Until that stops, Somali citizens will continue to suffer the consequences.
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A grain of gold after being processed with the aid of mercury. (photo: César Araújo/Amazonia Real)
Presented before the United Nations Human Rights Council on Sept.20 by Marcos Orellana, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, the report calls for an end to mining, exporting and trading mercury, as well as a ban on the use of mercury in small-scale gold mining.
“An estimated 10 million to 15 million people were directly engaged in small-scale gold mining in 2017, including an estimated 1 million child workers and 4.5 million women,” the report says. “It generates up to 20% of the global gold supply annually, equivalent to approximately 500 tons, with a market value of almost $29 billion annually.”
Orellana, who teaches international environmental law at George Washington University in the U.S., found that the demand for mercury used in small-scale gold mining stems from three key regions: South America (39%), East and Southeast Asia (37%), and sub-Saharan Africa (21%).
Most small-scale gold mining in South America is centered in the Amazon. In Brazil, it has gone “big scale.” According to MapBiomas, a research collective that tracks land use changes through satellite imagery, small-scale gold mining in 2018 overtook industrial mining in scale, covering 107,800 hectares (266,000 acres) in 2020, 94% of it in the Amazon.
The Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) estimates there are more than 450,000 artisanal miners, or garimpeiros, in Brazil. More than 20,000 operate illegally inside the Yanomami Indigenous Territory alone.
Small-scale gold mining not only destroys vast areas of forests, leaving moon crater-like wasteland in its wake. The most devastating aspect, for both miners and people worldwide, is the use of mercury to extract the gold from the ore.
Also known as quicksilver, mercury is liquid at room temperature. When heated, it evaporates into the atmosphere or washes away into rivers, lakes and oceans, contaminating fish and thus entering the food chain.
The Minamata disaster
In the 1950s, mercury caused one of the 20th century’s most notorious industrial disasters, in the Japanese town of Minamata. A petrochemical company, the Chisso Corporation, had for years been dumping waste containing methylmercury in the local bay. This form of bacteria-bound mercury wound its way up the food chain, and eventually led to widespread deaths, birth defects, and neurological problems among the local population.
The response to the disaster spawned the Minamata Convention on Mercury (MCM) in 2013, which aims to protect human life and the environment from mercury pollution. Ratified by 128 countries, including Brazil in August 2018, the treaty regulates the production, import and export of mercury, as well as products containing mercury.
“It’s time to turn off the mercury tap,” Lee Bell, mercury policy adviser at the International Polluters Elimination Network (IPEN), said in a press release following the publication of Orellana’s report. IPEN is a global network of more than 500 NGOs dedicated to eliminating toxins and pollutants from the environment. It served as a major source of information for Orellana’s report linking mercury, small-scale gold mining and human rights.
“There is no legitimate reason to mine mercury and sell it on the global marketplace,” Bell said. “We know that nearly all of it is being directed to small-scale gold mining and deposited directly into the environment, contaminating waterways, fisheries and poisoning communities. We must immediately stop the international mercury trade to end the human rights abuses from small-scale gold mining.”
While the MCM has largely been hailed as a step in the right direction, the convention has a number of loopholes, experts say. Certain countries requested an exemption on the use of mercury in such products as batteries, lamps, cosmetics, thermometers, and dental fillings, which use mercury amalgam.
Contamination in Bolivia
While the European Union and the U.S. have banned mercury exports, numerous other countries continue to profit from the trade. In South America, Bolivia is the leading importer of mercury.
According to the Bolivian Center for Documentation and Information (CEDIB), up to 200 metric tons were imported into Bolivia in recent years. Most of it is used in small-scale gold mining, not only in Bolivia, but also in neighboring countries.
“With the high price of gold and availability of new technology, small-scale gold mining is running out of control,” Carmen Capriles, a founding member of Reacción Climática, an NGO that aims to raise awareness of climate change and environmental degradation, told Mongabay by phone from La Paz. “More and more gold is won, and it is the Indigenous people who bear the consequences. My fear is that it is not this generation but the next that will be worst off.”
From 2019 to 2021, Reacción Climática contributed to the study “Gender, Chemicals and Waste,” which includes a chapter on the use of mercury by artisanal gold miners working in Bolivia’s Beni River.
Capriles and her team took 65 hair samples from Indigenous women in the Eyiyo Quibo and Portachuelo communities, and found mercury levels of 3 to 32 parts per million (PPM). The maximum safe level set by the World Health Organization is 1 ppm, while the recommended level is a maximum of 0.58 ppm.
“Contaminated mothers will pass the mercury to their unborn babies through the placenta,” Capriles said. “There is a grave danger that future babies will be born with neurological problems or birth defects.”
Mercury in Indigenous Brazilians
There hasn’t been a full-scale study into mercury use and contamination in Brazil. Sporadic surveys, however, point to an increasingly perilous situation, especially since the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro has adopted a hands-off approach to small-scale gold mining.
In 2019, the Indigenous Research and Training Institute (Iepé) participated in a survey in Amapá state, taking fish samples from various locations across the Amazonian state. It found mercury in all 428 samples, 28.7% of them in excess of 1 ppm.
In 2021, Iepé took 34 hair samples from women in the municipality of Vila Nova in Amapá, and found 68% had mercury levels above the WHO’s safe limit.
“We just completed a study of fish markets in 18 cities across the Amazon,” Decio Yokota, the Iepé media coordinator, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We are still analyzing the data, but our preliminary results confirm the trend of high mercury levels in fish.”
In 2020, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a federal research institution for biological sciences, partnered with WWF Brasil to test samples from Indigenous Munduruku communities in the Amazonian state of Pará. They found that 60% of the participants had mercury levels above the WHO limit. All 88 fish samples taken as part of that study were also contaminated with mercury.
According to the Orellana report, a similar study among the Indigenous Yanomami of Roraima state, who have been deeply affected by small-scale gold mining in their territory, was blocked by Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai. Under Bolsonaro, the agency has adopted several measures deemed against the interests of the country’s Indigenous peoples.
Bolsonaro also issued a presidential decree in April 2019, just a few months after taking office, in which he abolished the National Commission for Chemical Safety (CONASQ), among hundreds of other multi-stakeholder councils. Created in 2000, CONASQ was tasked with improving the management of chemical substances in the country, including implementing the Minamata Convention. It consisted of 22 representatives from the public, private and nongovernmental sectors.
Experts say the legitimate use of mercury for dental applications is often exploited to distribute mercury for artisanal gold mining. In February 2018, IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency, seized 430 kilograms (950 pounds) of mercury at Quimidrol, a chemical company in the southern state of Santa Catarina. Having sold 6.8 metric tons of the chemicals in the three previous years, Quimidrol was Brazil’s largest importer of mercury, according to IBAMA. Officially, the mercury was labeled as being for dental use. But IBAMA found Quimidroit had used a shell company in the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso to distribute the metal to gold miners in the region. The address used by the shell company turned out to be the location of a grocery store.
Iepé and Fiocruz contributed information for Orellana’s report, with Fiocruz also drafting a set of recommendations to address rising rates of mercury pollution. These include regular testing of hair samples from at-risk communities, mandatory notification of chronic contamination, establishing a protocol for primary care and a risk management plan for affected communities, and ample monitoring of mercury contamination in fish.
A ‘national challenge’
On Oct. 10, the Brazilian Society of Sciences (ABC) published the report “Contaminated by Mercury: Why do we need an action plan?” The report notes that while Brazil’s Constitution prohibits mining on Indigenous lands, there has been “a systematic invasion of garimpeiros” in recent years “without the state fulfilling its role” of upholding the Constitution.
The result has been the deaths of Indigenous people and environmental destruction, as well as the widespread contamination of ecosystems with mercury, the report says.
It also calls for an updated mercury inventory, given that the last one was carried out in 2016, before the Bolsonaro presidency, and was published in 2019. That inventory estimated the amount of mercury emissions ranging from 69 to 913 metric tons.
Preliminary studies presented at the CONASQ working group on mercury in 2018 estimated that up to 221 metric tons of mercury were used in small-scale gold mining in Brazil.
With the explosion in small-scale gold mining under Bolsonaro, mercury emissions today are likely to be much higher.
The ABC calls mercury contamination a “national challenge” that demands mobilization at all government levels, the private sector, and social and research organizations to implement some of the recommendations listed in its report.
They include resuming Brazil’s active participation in the Minamata Convention, updating the mercury emissions inventory, replacing products and processes that rely on mercury with alternatives, and, last but not least, instating a “ban all illegal mining.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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