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Disparity between rescue responses has sparked debate in Pakistan about double standards
Like thousands of others across Pakistan, Majeed, a law student from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, grieved at funeral prayers without a body to bury. At least 350 Pakistani citizens were on the overcrowded craft, the interior minister, Rana Sanaullah, confirmed on Friday.
There is little hope Majeed’s cousins will ever be found or brought home. The family are tormented by rising evidence that European authorities knew the boat was in trouble but did not intervene.
Yet as they began their mourning, a vast operation, involving craft from several countries, was getting under way. Its target was five men, also lost in the depths of the ocean, but on a trip they had chosen as an adventure, not one they were driven to make out of desperation. Two of them were also Pakistani citizens, but from the opposite end of the social scale to Majeed’s cousins – businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman.
The contrast between two tragedies at sea, the scale of efforts to rescue those in danger, and the global media response to both stories has stirred debate inside Pakistan about national and international inequality, and the different values put on human lives.
“We were shocked to know that millions would be spent on this rescue mission,” Majeed said. “They used all resources, and so much news came out from this search. But they did not bother to search for hundreds of Pakistanis and other people who were on the Greek boat.
“This is a double standard … they could have saved many of the people if they wanted, or at least they could have recovered the bodies.”
“It’s not the fault of five men that hundreds of people died off Greek shores. But it is the fault of a system where the class disparities are so huge,” said one senior journalist at a major Pakistani outlet, who asked not to be named. “When people point that out, it is misunderstood as hatred.” She said local media coverage of the migrant deaths may also have been curtailed by fatigue from reporting years of death and trauma from violence and natural disasters at home.
Still, the scale of the Mediterranean tragedy was hard to grasp. With more than 300 deaths, the toll exceeded any terror attack in the country’s history, Sanaullah said.
Pakistan’s often slow-moving authorities said they had arrested 14 suspects in connection with alleged human trafficking, and the country had a day of national mourning.
That did little to console grieving relatives. Abdul Karim, 36, a shopkeeper from a village near the de-facto border with India in Kashmir, lost a cousin and uncle on the boat.
“It’s sad that a submarine carrying five rich people was given much more consideration, coverage and importance than the migrants on the Greek boat,” he said. “Millions of dollars must have been spent to rescue the rich, but for the poor, there’s no such opportunity. Even the Pakistani government was not paying any heed to the issue.”
Arsalan Khan, assistant professor of anthropology at Union College, New York, said intense media coverage in Pakistan and beyond of the Dawood family gave them a humanity in loss that was not granted to those who died in the Mediterranean. “The response to the Titanic sub has been much more empathetic and full of grief,” he said.
“Such differences create the impression that it is the latter who are more deserving of empathy and compassion.” They highlight the unequal values assigned to different human lives, consciously or unconsciously, by society and governments, he added.
Improvements in safety may prevent another tragedy like the Titan implosion, but the flow of people towards Europe in unseaworthy vessels is unlikely to stop without profound changes to the economic system that drove hundreds to gamble – and lose – their lives on a journey they knew was extremely dangerous.
“I know one thing: poor people would take this deadly journey again as they are living in misery in Pakistan and economic conditions are unbearable,” said Majeed. “The governments would do better to stop this, rather than drowning them in the open sea.”
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Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner Group mercenaries. (photo: KXAN)
The march on the capital by Wagner troops led by Yevgeny Prigozhin and the late-night deal that eventually halted it severely dented Putin’s reputation as a leader who is willing to ruthlessly punish anyone who challenges his authority. That may open the door for others who are unhappy with Putin’s two-decade grip on power, especially after his ill-fated invasion of Ukraine.
Under terms of the agreement, Prigozhin will go into exile in Belarus but will not face prosecution and his forces won’t either. Neither Putin nor Prigozhin has been heard from since the deal, reportedly brokered by Belarussian President Aleksander Lukashenko, was announced Saturday night.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the weekend’s events as “extraordinary,” recalling that 16 months ago Putin appeared poised to seize the capital of Ukraine and now he has had to defend Moscow from forces led by his onetime protege.
“I think we’ve seen more cracks emerge in the Russian façade,” Blinken said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It is too soon to tell exactly where they go and when they get there, but certainly we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead.”
It was not yet clear what the fissures opened by the 24-hour rebellion would mean for that war. But it resulted in some of the best forces fighting for Russia in Ukraine being pulled from the battlefield: Prigozhin’s own Wagner troops and Chechen ones sent to stop them.
But Ukrainians hoped and some analysts suggested that the Russian infighting could create opportunities for their army, which is in the early stages of a counteroffensive to take back territory seized by Russian forces.
“These events will have been of great comfort to the Ukrainian government and the military,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Another question is what will happen to Prigozhin-owned Wagner, in general. The military contractor has deployed forces in several countries where they are believed to fight for Russian interests.
Under terms of the agreement that stopped Prigozhin’s advance, Wagner troops who didn’t back the revolt will be offered contracts directly with the Russian military, putting them under the control of the military brass that Prigozhin was trying to oust.
The deal appears to be a “hasty” arrangement designed to protect Prigozhin and safeguard his money and his family, Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
“What we don’t know is if he saved Wagner,” O’Brien wrote in his online newsletter. “It’s not clear how many of his mercenaries are coming with him to Belarus, or how many will be forced to now sign contracts with the Russian military.”
In their lightning advance, Prigozhin’s forces on Saturday took control of two military hubs in southern Russia and got within 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Moscow before retreating.
In a scene that plays into Putin’s fear of a popular uprising, video taken by The Associated Press on Saturday in Rostov-on-Don showed people cheering Wagner troops as they departed. Some ran to shake hands with Prigozhin, who was riding in an SUV.
The regional governor later said that all of the troops had left the city. Russian news agencies also reported that Lipetsk authorities confirmed Wagner forces had left that region, which sits on the road to Moscow from Rostov.
Moscow had braced for the arrival of the Wagner forces by erecting checkpoints with armored vehicles and troops on the city’s southern edge. About 3,000 Chechen soldiers were pulled from fighting in Ukraine and rushed there early Saturday, state television in Chechnya reported. Russian troops armed with machine guns put up checkpoints on Moscow’s southern outskirts. Crews dug up sections of highways to slow the march.
By Sunday afternoon, the troops had withdrawn from the capital, and people swarmed the streets and flocked to cafes. Traffic returned to normal and roadblocks and checkpoints were removed, but Red Square remained closed to visitors. On highways leading to Moscow, crews repaired roads ripped up just hours earlier in panic.
Anchors on state-controlled television stations cast the deal ending the crisis as a show of Putin’s wisdom and aired footage of Wagner troops retreating from Rostov-on-Don to the relief of local residents who feared a bloody battle for control of the city.
People there who were interviewed by Channel 1 hailed Putin’s role.
But the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War warned that “the Kremlin now faces a deeply unstable equilibrium.”
The “deal is a short-term fix, not a long-term solution,” wrote the institute, which has tracked the war in Ukraine from the beginning.
Prigozhin had demanded the ouster of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom Prigozhin has long criticized in withering terms for his conduct of the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. had intelligence that Prigozhin had been building up his forces near the border with Russia for some time. That conflicts with Prigozhin’s claim that his rebellion was a response to an attack on his camps in Ukraine on Friday by the Russian military.
In announcing the rebellion, Prigozhin accused Russian forces of targeting the Wagner camps in Ukraine with rockets, helicopter gunships and artillery. The Defense Ministry denied attacking the camps.
A possible motivation for Prigozhin’s rebellion was the Russian Defense Ministry’s demand, which Putin backed, that private companies sign contracts with it by July 1. Prigozhin had refused to do it.
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A staff member at Alamo Womens Reproductive Services reacts after just hearing the news that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. (photo: Gina Ferazzi/LA Times)
For many abortion providers, working in a clinic isn’t just a job—it’s a calling. But clinics are businesses, too, and in the 15 states that have banned almost all abortions, business has been turbulent.
Pittman had worked at Hope Medical Group, one of the last abortion clinics in Louisiana, for thirty years. She’d started there as a part-time counselor in 1992; by 2022, she was running the place. She’d gone to the Supreme Court to defend her clinic and won, successfully striking down a Louisiana abortion restriction in 2020.
Two years after that victory, she watched as the Supreme Court dismantled her life’s work by overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. She went back to court to try and fend off Louisiana’s cascade of abortion bans, but a month after the overturning, the clinic had to close. Louisiana had outlawed nearly all abortions.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Why are you bothering? It’s inevitable that you have to close your doors.’ And I knew,” Pittman said. “But at the same time, the staff and I also knew that every day we kept the doors open was another day we could help some patients. So that was our goal. We fought for as long as we could.”
For many abortion providers, working in a clinic isn’t just a job—it’s a calling. It has to be, in order for it to be worth the emotional toll, the stigma, and the very real threats of violence. But clinics are businesses, too. They need money to stay open. And, for abortion clinics that once operated in the 15 states that have now banned almost all abortions, business has been turbulent.
When Roe was first overturned, money gushed into abortion rights supporters’ coffers. People seemed to love to rage-click the “donate” button: More than 60 percent of Americans think that overturning Roe was a “bad thing,” according to polling released last week by Gallup, which also found record-high levels of support for abortion access. The 2022 midterms also proved that, at the ballot box at least, abortion rights could be a winning issue. People voted to keep abortion rights even in some of the most crimson parts of the country.
But over the last year, the river of cash has ebbed and flowed. When abortion hits the news, it increases—although it doesn’t quite hit the records set when Roe first fell. And when the lack of abortion access starts to feel like the status quo, the donations dry up.
At least 24 abortion clinics closed altogether due to the overturning, while another 33 have stayed open but ceased providing abortions, according to data collected by Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College.
In total, between March 2022 and April 2023, at least 91 facilities have stopped offering abortions.
At least five of those clinics—not including Pittman’s—packed up and relocated to other, friendlier parts of the country. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the abortion clinic at the heart of the case that overturned Roe and the last abortion clinic in Mississippi, moved to New Mexico.
So did Whole Woman’s Health, a network of abortions clinics whose victory in a 2016 Supreme Court case had, like Pittman’s case, once seemed like a sign of better things to come for abortion rights supporters. Whole Woman’s Health was once the face of abortion in Texas. Now, the network has closed down its four locations in the state. Financially, it felt impossible to stay open without providing abortions.
“That’s like having a dermatologist where you say, ‘You don’t get to do any dermatology other than exams.’ There’s no other medical provider that’s expected to stay open when they’re blocked from doing the care they’re trained to provide,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Woman’s Health, told VICE News last summer, after Whole Woman’s Health announced it was relocating to New Mexico. She’s already tried to keep clinics open through abortion restrictions so onerous that clinics could no longer function. “We have tried all of these things in the past and found out that not only was it not sustainable, but we had to support those clinics from other sites. And now I don’t have that flexibility.”
Marva Sadler, who used to lead clinical services for the Whole Woman’s Health clinics in Texas, wrestled for months with the question of whether to relocate with Whole Woman’s Health to Albuquerque, New Mexico—where the network has now opened up a new location—or to one of the network’s other clinics. She’s moved across Texas four different times so that she could keep working for Whole Woman’s Health, but she was always within driving distance of her family.
“I have more roots in Texas than just the work—family, children, grandchildren, elder parents who we’re taking care of,” Sadler told VICE News in October, as she weighed the decision. “What part of those roots am I able to cut, if I did need to relocate?”
“As much as the public and the women need me, my family does as well,” she added.
For some of the clinics that are staying behind in the post-Roe South, it’s become all too clear that the financial math doesn’t exactly add up.
“We have lost so much money over the last year, but we’ve also helped probably close to 400 patients,” said Robin Marty, operations director at West Alabama Women’s Center. The former abortion clinic now offers birth control, helps people handle miscarriages, and provides gender-affirming health care, among other services. “And does that compare to the 2,500 that we used to do a year? No, but every single one of those patients is somebody who would not have been able to get care without us.”
Marty quite literally wrote the book about life in a post-Roe world: In 2019, she wrote Handbook for a Post-Roe America. But, she admits, she got some of her predictions wrong. Marty thought more abortion providers would stay—not to perform abortions, but to offer other kinds of reproductive and maternal health services.
“I thought that there would still be a network and there is no network in the South and it’s breaking my heart,” Marty said. “We know that patients are leaving some of these red states, blue states, in order to get abortions. But what happens when they come home? What happens when they come back and they don’t have a place that they can go face-to-face in order to do any sort of follow up?”
The pivot away from abortion, Marty acknowledges, has been unbelievably rough. She had imagined that it would take about three months to transform into a full-scale reproductive health clinic, but, she told VICE News, the logistical and administrative hurdles have proven incredibly hard to surmount. (“I’ve never been more wrong about anything in my life,” Marty said. “Three months is nothing.”) In one year, the clinic has made about $25,000 in patient income—which doesn’t even cover two weeks’ worth of costs at the clinic, Marty said.
In Texas, just two independent abortion clinics pivoted to provide reproductive health care, according to Kathy Kleinfeld, administrator of the Houston Women’s Reproductive Services clinic. Every other independent clinic closed. (Independent clinics are clinics that don’t belong to Planned Parenthood. Although the words “Planned Parenthood” might be synonymous with abortion within political circles, indie clinics in fact provide the majority of abortions in the United States.)
The cost of keeping Houston Women’s Reproductive Services open was extraordinarily high. The clinic moved from a 5,000-square foot space down to a space with just 800 feet. They used to have 12 staff members and three physicians; now, they have three staffers and one medical director. Those who remained on staff took pay cuts.
Texas has banned almost all abortions, but people still call, every day, asking for them. And people come in all the time after getting out-of-state abortions. Kleinfeld recently treated a woman who returned to Texas only to find out, in Kleinfeld’s clinic, that her medication abortion did not work and that she was still 13 weeks pregnant. Now, that woman will have to travel out of state again.
“It was very traumatic for those patients to have traveled, only to find out that they have to go back,” Kleinfeld said. “The stigma, the fear, the anxiety—all of that has escalated to a sometimes-paralyzing level for people faced with a pregnancy that they cannot, do not want, to continue. Somebody has to be their lifeline.”
In the nine months following the end of Roe, there were nearly 66,000 fewer abortions in states with abortion bans, according to research from the Society for Family Planning. Although the number of abortions in states without bans rose, researchers estimated that they didn’t increase enough; people may have been self-managing their abortions, or simply going without.
Kleinfeld feels confident that her clinic will continue to soldier on. Right now, Marty has enough money to keep the clinic open for about four to five more months.
“When the state doesn’t want to help you and when the federal government seems to think that they can’t do anything… that’s when I have to turn to foundations. That’s when I have to turn to individuals and beg for money,” she said. “And that’s all I do now. I beg for money in my sleep.”
Because many independent clinics are not non-profits, they have to pay taxes on donations; for that reason, some clinics don’t necessarily want direct donations. The website for Red River Women’s Clinic, an abortion clinic that once operated in North Dakota before moving to Minnesota last year, lists out other ways that people can support the clinic, from paying for staff’s meals to helping escort patients in and out of the building.
At the top of that list is a link to the clinic’s GoFundMe.
On June 23, 2022—the day before Roe fell—Tammi Kromenaker, clinic director for Red River Women’s Clinic, closed on the building that would become her clinic’s new home in Minnesota. That same day, someone called Kromenaker to ask if they could set up a GoFundMe to help pay for the clinic’s upcoming move.
“I was really actually kind of dismissive. I was like, ‘Yep, sure. Great,’” Kromenaker recalled. “So we bought the building, June 23. They overturned Roe v. Wade, June 24. By August 6, we had reached $1 million in the GoFundMe.”
In the 10 months since, the GoFundMe has only raised another $13,000. But that fundraising has still made it possible for Kromenaker to pay off the loan she took out to buy her new building, as well as hire more administrative staff.
“I have no way, at this point, of separating out the GoFundMe from our operational dollars to be able to tell you how we're doing, because the GoFundMe is such a cushion right now,” Kromenaker said.
There’s just one ongoing national fundraising campaign dedicated to independent clinics: Keep Our Clinics, a campaign by Abortion Care Network, a membership organization for indie clinics. In 2021, Keep Our Clinics distributed $350,000 to independent clinics. That number, unsurprisingly, exploded in 2022, when the campaign gave $4.6 million. So far in 2023, indie clinics have asked Abortion Care Network for $2.5 million in aid, and the organization has so far been able to dole out $1.3 million.
“We’re nowhere near the fundraising capacity or the major recognition of a Planned Parenthood or a NARAL or anything like that,” said Erin Grant, Abortion Care Network’s co-executive director. (Despite receiving a $275 million gift from MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, last year, Planned Parenthood is currently in the midst of layoffs.)
After the Court overturned Roe, Pittman raised $16,695 in a GoFundMe that had just one goal: opening a new clinic, as close to Louisiana and the South as possible, where she could still provide abortions to the same people she used to help at Hope.
Once Pittman found a new clinic, she and her clinic’s assistant administrator moved, leaving their families behind in Louisiana to take care of their houses. (Pittman asked that VICE News not publicize the location of her new clinic in order to minimize protests ahead of opening. Last year, a woman set an abortion clinic on fire in Casper, Wyoming, before it could open.) She gets homesick sometimes. But then she thinks about how she felt at the end of a day working at Hope, when she would watch patients walk out after their procedure. They were always so relieved.
“That’s what made me get up in the morning, is being able to see the patients leaving us and being ready to go out and move forward,” Pittman said. “Just seeing the relief on the patients, when you tell them, ‘You’re here now, we’re going to take care of you, it’s going to be okay.’ That makes it all worthwhile.”
Now, Pittman is only waiting on a license to fling open the doors of her new clinic.
“We were just so angry. And you make all these threats when you’re angry. Mine was, ‘Well, whatever it takes, I’m going to do it.’ But we held up our end of the bargain,” said “So we’re here.”
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Delaware politicians want to get out the vote to corporations. (photo: Hunters Race/Unsplash)
One person, one vote? Well, if corporations are people, it only makes sense that those corporations get the right to vote.
Delaware is one among only three states that allows nonresidents to vote in local elections. And roughly sixty years ago, it altered its state code to allow municipalities with populations exceeding one thousand to establish “home rule charters” that, among other things, empower them to determine voting eligibility.
It all sounds innocuous enough. What, after all, could possibly be wrong with extending the franchise? Some cities in Delaware already allow nonresident property owners to vote in their elections. But under a new proposal backed by Seaford’s mayor and currently making its way through the state legislature, municipal voting rights would also be extended to nonresident owners of limited liability companies, corporations, and trusts.
In other words, businesses and corporate entities themselves would become eligible to vote.
“These provisions,” the bill’s text reads, “shall be construed in accordance with the principle of ‘one person/entity/one vote.’”
What that anodyne phraseology expresses is an essentially pre-democratic idea of governance. According to this logic, which would have been perfectly at home in many societies before the American and French revolutions, property rather than personhood is the preeminent source of political and social legitimacy. For his part, Seaford’s mayor, David Genshaw, has defended the idea on stakeholder grounds.
“These are the people we’re trying to attract to our community that we’re asking to invest, to hire,” he told a local TV network. “Why wouldn’t we want to give them a right to vote? I find it hard to believe, who wouldn’t want that to happen? These are folks that have fully invested in their community with the money, with their time, with their sweat. We want them to have a voice if they choose to take it.”
Officially, of course, corporate entities aren’t getting more voting power than individual citizens. Under the legislation, Seaford residents who also own businesses would not receive two votes. But nonresident business owners would, in effect, because they would also retain the right to cast a ballot wherever they live — a blatant violation of the principle “one person, one vote” and strongly favoring affluent people who own businesses.
The real problem, however, is the idea of extending voting rights to private entities in the first place. For one thing, the whole concept is wide open for fraud.
In one Newark referendum several years ago, a single local property manager voted some thirty-one times (once for every LLC he controlled), prompting its city council to ban the practice of artificial entities casting votes. Even if such cases of fraud could somehow be regulated away, the extension of voting rights to abstract entities at all would represent a Trojan horse for the final replacement of democracy by legally enshrined class rule.
Its potential implications are made especially vivid if we consider the case of Delaware itself. “The State of Delaware,” boasts the appropriately named corp.delaware.gov, “is a leading domicile for U.S. and international corporations. More than 1,000,000 business entities have made Delaware their legal home.”
Indeed, according to the public interest group Common Cause, there are currently more registered businesses in the state than there are actual people — meaning that, if scaled up statewide, corporate entities (or rather, those who own them) would collectively wield greater political clout than citizens.
Genshaw himself inadvertently gave the game away when defending the proposal to reporters: “I mean, Walmart is not going to participate in a local election. They could, legally, I suppose, once the charter change is made, but the intent from the start is to allow local people to vote who are already participating locally in other ways.”
America’s political system is already awash with organized money, and its democracy has already been hideously contorted by private interest groups that have successfully normalized the idea that money equals speech. The proposal currently being debated in Delaware, versions of which have already become law in a number of other towns, reflects the logical and dangerous end point of such a view: that property conveys special authority, and that those who own it have greater moral worth than their fellow citizens.
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Tulsa's Greenwood District in 1921 after a white mob razed the predominately Black community. (photo: bswise/Flickr)
Viola Ford Fletcher and her family fled a murderous white mob 102 years ago – today she’s still demanding accountability
“This” refers to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob descended on the neighbourhood of Greenwood, home to a business district known as Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people and looting and burning businesses and homes. Thousands were left homeless and living in a hastily constructed internment camp.
For most Americans it is the stuff of history books and museum exhibits, as foreign and faraway as Charles Lindbergh or the Wall Street crash. For Fletcher, it is a childhood scar that never went away.
Now 109 and still dressing to the nines with earrings and bracelets, she is the oldest living survivor of the massacre. In 2021, the year of its centenary, “Mother Fletcher” and her brother, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, testified to the US Congress to push for reparations and travelled to Ghana, where they were treated like royalty.
Now Fletcher is thought to have become the world’s oldest author with Don’t Let Them Bury My Story, a memoir that recounts the impact of the massacre on her life and advocates for racial justice. “I’ve enjoyed life so far, so I think if I can do it at this time, I should,” she says.
Her debut book tour took her to New York for the first time (“I think all the people in the United States is in New York!”) and then on an Amtrak train for the first time (“That was really history for me, I thought it was very nice”) to Washington, where on Juneteenth she is resplendent in white and speaking to the Guardian from a wheelchair in the cavernous atrium of a business hotel.
She is joined by an attentive grandson, Ike Howard, 56, chief foundation officer of the Viola Ford Fletcher Foundation, which operates in the US and Ghana. His “constant prodding” persuaded Fletcher to overcome her fears and tell her story, he says, and they wrote the book together with Van Ellis, now 102, contributing a foreword.
Fletcher was born before the first world war on 5 May 1914 in Comanche, Oklahoma. Her parents were sharecroppers before moving to the prosperous Greenwood neighbourhood of Tulsa. On the night of 31 May 1921, she was a carefree seven-year-old girl with a favourite toy – a rag doll – and future full of possibilities. Then she was woken by her family and told they had to leave at once.
She recalls: “I remember seeing people running and being shot, falling dead, houses burning and noise – guns shooting. We were advised to get out of town before we were all killed. So my mother and father gathered six children and we were loaded into a horse-drawn cart and we got out of town safely.”
There are some things that time doesn’t heal, at least not completely. More than a century later, Fletcher speaks about living through the massacre every day and not being able to sleep at night. Howard explains: “At midnight, she’s awake. Three o’clock in the morning, she’s awake. She goes to sleep when the sun is high in the sky.”
The family was forced to move from farm to farm and Fletcher lost her chance at education beyond the fourth grade. She recalls: “They would sharecrop. We wasn’t able to go to school. The days we should be in school was time to harvest a crop or something. The family kept moving from one neighbourhood to another. I didn’t know where we were going. Being a child, they didn’t tell us everything. We had to follow.”
Fletcher married her husband, Robert, in 1932 and moved to California to work as an assistant welder in the shipyards during the second world war. “During the war time, when my brothers were in service, I worked at a shipyard and helped build ships. I worked there until the war was over.”
Later she and Robert returned to Oklahoma, where Fletcher became a domestic worker serving white families (she did not retire until was 85). She gave birth to two sons and a daughter and now has more than 20 great-grandchildren. Her life has spanned a century of civil rights struggles, with all their victories and setbacks.
Fletcher was 94, for example, when Barack Obama was elected the US’s first Black president. She recalls: “It was wonderful to see that. Before then I probably didn’t notice about the presidents and all of that. I should know all the presidents but I don’t. But with that one I naturally learned that this was our first.”
Two years ago Fletcher travelled to Washington for the first time to ask that her country acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921. She testified to a House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee considering legal remedies and received a standing ovation. She laughs: “I enjoyed it. There were portions I didn’t quite understand but I guess I said something that they wanted to hear.”
There has never been any direct compensation from the city of Tulsa or the state of Oklahoma for massacre survivors or their descendants. Racial disparities, compounded by gentrification and urban planning, persist in Tulsa today.
Last year a judge in Oklahoma issued an order allowing Fletcher, Van Ellis and another survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, to continue seeking damages under state nuisance laws. The lawsuit argues that, in the years after the massacre, city and county officials actively thwarted the community’s effort to rebuild in favour of overwhelmingly white parts of Tulsa.
Let us have our day in court. If we win, we win. If we lose, we lose. But at least the situation will be reconciled to some degree
Viola Ford Fletcher’s grandson Ike Howard
Howard, sporting a colourful T-shirt and gold chain necklace, comments: “Now the court case hangs in the balance because the judge hasn’t given us a decision. On her 109th birthday we were in court. I don’t think the judge knew that it was her birthday but you would take that personal: they burn down your house, they run you out of town, then they have a court date on your 109th birthday.
“It makes it feel like they’re waiting for you to die so the case can just go away. We’re stronger together so it would be wise just to go ahead. Let us have our day in court. If we win, we win. If we lose, we lose. If we settle, we settle. But at least the situation will be reconciled to some degree.”
Also in 2021, Fletcher made her first trip to Africa. She and her brother met the Ghanaian president, Nana Akufo-Addo, as well as the vice-president, three kings and a group of ambassadors. They were granted royal Ghanaian names and subsequently citizenship. She says: “I was looking to see who could be some of our ancestors.”
Fletcher, who still lives in Tulsa, and her brother, based in Denver, Colorado, make a formidable team. Van Ellis, who served in an all-Black battalion during the second world war, has been at her side throughout the book tour. Wearing a grey suit with blue pinstripes and an “Army veteran 1939-1945” cap, he comments: “We always stuck together. You have a family and you stick together, you can always make it through.
“She and I went through all this. We went through 1921: I was only five months old: that was a bombing. I served in the United States army: that was a bombing. I was in the 234th AAA gun battalion down in Burma. I survived that bombing so I would call myself blessed.”
But like his sister, Van Ellis was robbed of school and career opportunities by the massacre; he has previously said his family were “made refugees in our own country”. He eventually became a handyman in Oklahoma City, working odd jobs in construction and as a painter and plumber.
He reflects: “If I had lived in Tulsa I would probably had a chance to get a good education and a decent job. But we had to work from sunup to sundown to make a living and feed our families.”
For decades, Van Ellis recalls, the massacre was a taboo subject in Tulsa, unspoken by neighbours, untaught in schools and uncommemorated by any memorial. “We were taught not to talk about it. They said, ‘Don’t talk about it. If you talk about it, your family is liable to get killed. Your dogs, your cats.’ You could not talk about. I don’t know why but that’s what they said. ‘Don’t talk about it.’”
He was relieved when the conspiracy of silence came to an end and the city began to confront its past, including a search for the unmarked mass graves of victims and visit by Joe Biden for the centenary. “You have to live. You can’t stop. You have to keep going ahead. Do your best in the world,” Van Ellis says.
Having fought for the US overseas, he hopes the book will play at part in achieving justice at home after all these years. “This is a new world to me – I didn’t think it would ever happen. It’s exciting and it’s history. Let the world know. It’s been 102 years so I’m proud I’m living to tell about it.”
Van Ellis, who has seven children, 10 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the country he served. “I saw little changes but it could be better. I saw some changes and I think I’m going to get better. I love America and I love people in America.”
And he fully intends to live for another 28 years. His secret? Spinach. Van Ellis, a palpably indomitable spirit, paraphrases: “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man / I’ll eat my spinach and fight to the finish / I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!”
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Mourners at the funeral of a Palestinian who was killed by Israeli troops in an Israeli raid, in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank. (photo: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)
This week, Israel has launched several attacks on Palestinians with weapons used in the conflict for the first time in nearly 20 years, including deploying U.S.-made Apache helicopter gunships inside the West Bank and firing a targeted assassination aerial strike. Jewish settlers have also raided Palestinian villages in the West Bank, attacking residents and setting fire to homes and vehicles. Mariam Barghouti, senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, calls the attacks “an intensification to completely take over Palestine.” She adds that the growing violence is reflective of the leadership of Israel’s minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently called for the renewing of Defensive Shield, a military operation which used similar weaponry in 2002 that has been condemned for “crimes against humanity.” This all comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has agreed to accelerate the process for approving new settlements in the West Bank despite criticism from the United Nations, European Union and United States.
On Tuesday, two Palestinian gunmen shot dead four Israelis near an illegal settlement in the West Bank. Settlers responded by attacking Palestinian villages, setting fire to homes and vehicles. One school was set on fire. Settlers were caught on video tearing out pages from multiple copies of the Qur’an after they raided a mosque in the West Bank village of Urif.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Israel carried out its first targeted assassination aerial strike in nearly 20 years. The drone strike killed three Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy.
This all comes as the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has agreed to accelerate the process for approving new settlements in the West Bank, despite criticism from the United Nations, European Union and the United States.
We’re joined now by the Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti. She’s a senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss. She usually is based in Ramallah but is joining us from New York City today.
It’s great to have you with us, Mariam. If you can talk about the escalating violence right now in the West Bank?
MARIAM BARGHOUTI: Thank you. It’s good to be here again, Amy. Thank you for having me.
Right now what we’re seeing is an intensification of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the collective. So, it’s not just being intensified at the level of attacks towards Palestinians, but it’s increasing in size. And this is reminiscent of what we have seen in 2021, when Israeli settlers rampaged through the Old City of Jerusalem, as well the cities in heartland Palestine, such as Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa, chanting “Death to Arabs.” And that’s what they have been doing now, is killing Arabs. We’ve had almost 700 Palestinians killed since those chants began in 2021.
And right now what we are seeing is a joining of forces, once again, between Israeli settlers in uniform, such as the army and Border Police, and Israeli settlers in civilian clothing, but also armed, attacking Palestinians under the false, manipulated discourse that this is a response to a Palestinian militant operation. This is not a response to that. This is the status quo. This is the daily norm. We saw it happen in 2015, when an entire Palestinian family in Nablus, near the location where the most recent arson attack happened, en masse, an entire family was burned in Duma, including an infant, just a few months old, and his mother and father, leaving the last remaining child in the family, who was 3 at the time, orphaned.
So, what we’re seeing is an intensification to completely take over Palestine. And it’s not just Palestine in the sense of the West Bank. This is Gaza. This is heartland Palestine in Jerusalem. And right now you’re seeing attacks, exactly the same way Israeli forces have attacked Palestinians in the West Bank, happening in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. So, Israel is moving full force to do exactly what Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister of Israel, called for in terms of Huwara and Nablus, and that is wipe it out. What they are doing right now is wiping it out.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs said it was appalled by the attacks on Palestinians by the Israeli settlers, adding, “We call [for] Israeli authorities to immediately stop the violence, protect U.S. and Palestinian civilians, and prosecute those responsible.” There are many also Palestinian Americans who are living there, as well, right? Can you talk about the State Department’s response? Did that surprise you?
MARIAM BARGHOUTI: It did not surprise me. The U.S. State Department has rarely interfered or intervened on behalf of Palestinian American citizens in order to push forward for justice. More than a year later, in the assassination of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year, who was also killed by an Israeli sniper shot in Jenin, still did not receive accountability. And come the dozens of others that were killed who are American citizens, and zero accountability. Anyone that was arrested in the Israeli military, known for torturing and mistreating their political detainees, the U.S. did not interfere.
I think that the words, that the language that they try to push forward as though they are truthfully and sincerely representing American citizenry, as they claim, is false. What we see is the U.S. arming Israel continuously and consistently. What we see is the U.S. vetoing any potentials or opportunity for actually holding Israel accountable. I have never heard of asking the butcher to be told to give themselves judgment and accountability. I have never heard of that dynamic except in this.
AMY GOODMAN: During the raid in Jenin, Israel deployed U.S.-made Apache helicopter gunships for the first time inside the West Bank in nearly 20 years and also carried out its first targeted assassination aerial strike in the West Bank for the first time in 20 years. They have done that in Gaza more recently. Can you talk about the significance of this, and what difference it means when groups in the United States, particularly Jewish groups, put pressure on the U.S. government around the issue of weapons that Israel uses coming from the United States?
MARIAM BARGHOUTI: Thank you for asking that. It’s really important to recognize that, just recently, the current minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was actually denied service in the Israeli military because he was considered a terrorist and a threat to national security, is now the minister of national security, has called for a renewed military operation called Defensive Shield. Now, Defensive Shield was a military operation in the early 2000s, between 2002, 2003, that took place mostly between Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah in the West Bank, and they blew up homes, wall to wall. That is how they moved through cities. And it was considered to be one of the most destructive and tragic military operations to have hit Palestinians in the West Bank. And Israel is being — was investigated, and it has shown, the evidence, that Israel has committed crimes against humanity and war crimes during these operations.
A few months ago, Itamar Ben-Gvir called for Operation Defensive Shield 2.0, basically. So, that’s the significance of using that drone for the first time in 20 years, because the last time it was used was 2006, where they targeted the young fighters at the time. And now those born in 2000, 2002, ’03, ’04, ’05, at the peak of Operation Defensive Shield, have grown up, and they have seen no change, and they try to confront back. And now Ben-Gvir is asking to kill those, the children that grew up under nothing but war, who are mostly refugees, on World Refugee Day. Almost 80% of those killed in the last two years were refugees, in the refugee camps.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli settlers rampaged through Palestinian towns in the West Bank Wednesday, killing at least one person, critically injuring another, torching buildings and cars. This is a resident of the town of Turmus Ayya.
TURMUS AYYA RESIDENT: [translated] Dozens of settlers came here, around 200, 250 settlers. They tried to enter the courtyard. They set the cars on fire. They started shooting towards the house, using live bullets and stones, and they damaged the balconies. There were almost 14 family members at home, including women and children. But, thank God, there were no injuries. They tried to open the doors, but they were closed.
AMY GOODMAN: Mariam, if you can talk more about what the Israeli government — how the Israeli government responds to Israeli settlers rampaging?
MARIAM BARGHOUTI: So, the Israeli government arms and provides protection to Israeli settlers rampaging. They send in military forces with the settlers in civilian clothing, who are armed, as well, in order to facilitate ease of movement across Palestinian towns and villages. What happened in Turmus Ayya was preceded in a similar occurrence just a few months ago, and it was preceded by a mass arson attack in Huwara near Nablus also a few months ago. So this is not an anomaly. It’s not the exception. It’s the norm.
And this is why it is important for especially Jewish voices in the U.S. to continue tackling this issue, where their name and their beliefs is being used to perpetuate crimes against humanity and to also benefit the weapons trade industry. It’s not just the U.S. providing weapons to Israel. It is the U.S. and Israel tag-teaming to test those weapons on Palestinians. They have turned the Palestinian demographic into lab rats.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with Mohammad al-Tamimi, the 2-year-old Palestinian child who was recently shot dead by Israeli soldiers. You have written about this and the personal effect it has on you covering this kind of brutality. Tell us about him.
MARIAM BARGHOUTI: Mohammad al-Tamimi was a 2-year-old boy who was killed as Israeli soldiers chased other Palestinian youth, firing bullets at the car near the village of Nabi Saleh in Ramallah. Mohammad was next to his father when the shooting happened. And as we know, as I have seen from testimonies and documentation, Israel does not discriminate, indeed, between child or adult, civilian or noncivilian, combatant or noncombatant. The father was injured. Mohammad, who was 2, was killed.
And you need to understand that his mother is this young woman who I’ve known when she was a child, who has helped protect adults from Israeli arrests, who grew up in Nabi Saleh watching one death after the other — this is a small village — and could not protect her 2-year-old son. I don’t know what that does to a mother. I don’t know what that does to a young mother. And I don’t know what that does to a mother living under consistent trauma.
That’s what happened with Mohammad al-Tamimi, who was 2. And that’s what happens to dozens of Palestinian families. And it’s not to discourage us, but it is to empower us and make us say, “No. Yeah, we refuse this dynamic and reality. Not at our tax dollars.”
AMY GOODMAN: Mariam Barghouti, I want to thank you for being with us, a senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, based in Ramallah, speaking to us, though, today from New York City. You mentioned the idea that Palestine is a lab. Coming up, we speak with the author Antony Loewenstein about his new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. Back in 30 seconds.
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Several train cars in the Yellowstone River after a bridge collapse near Columbus, Mont., on Saturday, June 24, 2023. (photo: Matthew Brown/AP)
The derailment and collapse into the Yellowstone River, near Billings, involved as many as eight cars, with those carrying molten sulfur and asphalt described as "compromised."
Some of those fears may have been allayed by evening as rail officials said two cars known to be carrying sodium hydro sulfate, which can burn, irritate and cause shortness of breath, had not entered the Yellowstone River below the failed bridge that used to span the waterway.
There was no release of hazardous materials from those particular railcars, said Andy Garland, spokesperson for Montana Rail Link.
But an unspecified number of other cars containing molten sulfur and asphalt had been “compromised,” he said in a statement.
Officials would continue to monitor the derailment site, he said.
No injuries were reported, officials said.
As many as eight cars had derailed, Columbus, Montana, Fire Chief Rich Cowger told NBC affiliate KULR of Billings.
Billings said it would shut down city water system intakes fed by the Yellowstone River for the time any pollutant would need to pass and end up downstream, according to a statement.
Billings, a city of nearly 110,000 people, has a clean supply of drinking water in its system, including storage tanks that are full, it said.
Laurel, Montana, suspended its intake from the river and temporarily shut down its water treatment plant Saturday morning, but a few hours later it reconnected its supply and restarted treatment, officials said in a statement.
Laurel officials visited the derailment site and investigated the water system, according to the statement.
Water treatment plants in Yellowstone County were working as normal as officials monitored the river for any signs of contaminants, county officials said in a statement.
“At this time there have been no reported negative impacts to Yellowstone County,” its government said in an afternoon statement.
The derailment and bridge collapse happened about 6 a.m. near the community of Reed Point, according to officials in Stillwater County, which abuts Yellowstone County. The bridge over the Yellowstone River was described as a rail bridge in the statement Saturday.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement Saturday evening that it is sending an investigative team to the derailment site. The Federal Railroad Administration is leading the inquiry, the NTSB said.
It was not immediately clear if the collapse or derailment happened first or what caused either.
Asphalt contains carcinogens and has been linked to some forms of cancer. Molten sulfur can cause serous thermal burns upon contact and will form toxic and flammable gases when reacting to hydrocarbon, a compound at the heart of fossil fuels.
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