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The Russia-linked mercenaries worked with Mali’s longtime U.S.-backed military to kill and loot with impunity, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.
The Malian soldiers committed the atrocities in four villages in the center of the country, according to telephone interviews with 40 people knowledgeable about the abuses, half of them witnesses to the violence. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that foreign, non-French-speaking armed men whom they described as “white,” “Russians,” or “Wagner” participated in most of the attacks.
In December 2021, the Malian junta reportedly authorized the deployment of Wagner mercenary forces to fight Islamist militants after close to two decades of failed Western-backed counterterrorism campaigns in exchange for almost $11 million per month and access to gold and uranium mines. Since then, Wagner — a paramilitary group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot dog vender turned warlord — has been implicated in hundreds of human rights abuses alongside the country’s military, including a 2022 massacre that killed 500 civilians.
Human Rights Watch’s new findings add to the grim toll.
“We found compelling evidence that the Malian army and allied foreign fighters linked to the Wagner group have committed serious abuses, including killings, enforced disappearances and looting, against civilians during counter-insurgency operations in central Mali with complete impunity,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, the senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “The failure of the Malian authorities to identify and prosecute those responsible will most likely only fuel further violence and crimes.”
The U.S. has poured billions of dollars in military assistance into Mali and its neighbors over roughly two decades — enabling human rights abuses by providing weapons and training to militaries that have terrorized civilians, according to the United Nations, human rights advocacy groups, and the U.S. State Department. U.S.-trained military officers have also repeatedly conducted coups, including the putsch-leader who toppled Mali’s governments in 2020 and 2021. While the coups triggered restrictions on U.S. aid, Pentagon officials have pointed to Wagner’s growing influence across Africa as a reason to keep the money flowing.
Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at International Crisis Group who advised on U.S. activities in Africa for the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel from 2020 to 2021, noted a fundamental flaw in America’s reliance on security assistance to cement relationships with allies. “It would make more sense for the U.S. to rely on a broader toolkit to responsibly engage with foreign countries, especially ones like Mali experiencing conflict and instability,” she told The Intercept. “It really shouldn’t be the case that the U.S. considers its influence severely weakened because it can’t provide military equipment or training to a certain country.”
The new report documents atrocities committed during joint missions by Malian and Wagner soldiers from last December to late March. On February 3, for example, dozens of white camouflage-clad fighters and at least one Malian soldier flew into Séguéla village on helicopters. Residents said that no Islamist militants were present in the village that day. Despite this, the soldiers went door to door rounding up men, beating people, and stealing their money and jewelry. “There were almost only white Wagner soldiers, they led the whole operation,” said a witness. “They were heavily armed, masked, and wore camouflage uniforms and spoke a language we did not understand, but which was not French.”
The language barrier exacerbated the violence, according to residents. “Some of us did not comply with their instructions because we didn’t understand what they wanted, and so the soldiers beat us even harder,” one victim told researchers. “They beat us with an iron bar. I was beaten on my back and buttocks.”
The white soldiers arrested 17 men and took them away. Survivors found the corpses of eight of them, and five other men, about 40 miles from Séguéla. The victims appeared to have been bound prior to their execution, according to a video that was verified by Human Rights Watch and reviewed by The Intercept. Some were apparently killed by gunshot, while others appeared to have had their throats slit. The researchers are not publishing the video to protect the witnesses.
On March 6 in Sossobé village, Malian troops and white fighters assaulted people and killed five civilians, according to witnesses. Locals said that the Malian and white soldiers arrested 21 men and took them away in helicopters, never to be seen again. On March 23, foreign soldiers and pro-government militiamen beat people and killed at least 20 civilians, including a woman and a 6-year-old child, in Ouenkoro village. The armed men also arrested 12 civilians who were taken to an army camp in the town of Sofara where they were tortured, according to the report.
The government of Mali disputed Human Rights Watch’s findings and touted its “promotion and protection of human rights,” but stated that due to the allegations, it had opened an investigation into potential war crimes and crimes against humanity.
These latest atrocities, as well as earlier abuses, were committed on behalf of a military junta that first took power in August 2020 when Col. Assimi Goïta — who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces, participated in U.S. training exercises, and attended a Joint Special Operations University seminar in Florida — overthrew Mali’s government. Goïta took the job of vice president in a transitional government charged with returning Mali to civilian rule but soon seized power again, conducting a second coup in 2021.
The coups triggered prohibitions on many forms of U.S. security assistance, but American tax dollars nonetheless continue to flow to Mali. The U.S. provided more than $16 million in security aid to Mali in 2020 and almost $5 million in 2021, according to a State Department spokesperson named Jennifer who refused to provide her last name. The department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism is currently waiting on congressional approval to transfer an additional $2 million to Mali.
Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, has argued against the constraints on military aid following coups. “Recent coups d’etat have triggered U.S. restrictions that hinder AFRICOM engagement, forcing those military regimes to double-down on their dependence on Wagner,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee this spring. “Although well intended, U.S. coup restrictions can inadvertently incentivize the most at-risk African countries to dig themselves deeper into the mire of militancy and corruption.”
Langley failed to mention that U.S.-trained officers have conducted at least 10 coups in West Africa since 2008 including Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, 2022), Gambia (2014), Guinea (2021), Mali (2012, 2020, 2021), and Mauritania (2008). AFRICOM did not reply to questions about Langley’s stance and the many U.S.-trained putschists but did acknowledge “limited communications” with Mali’s ruling junta “to discuss the need for them to keep to their promise to hold credible, transparent elections.” Most recently, said spokesperson John Manley, an AFRICOM official met with Mali’s prime minister and defense minister in October 2022.
This spring, Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, told The Intercept and other reporters that Wagner’s “presence and their activities run counter to a safe, stable, and secure Africa.” He failed, however, to mention that it was the U.S.-mentored Goïta who struck a deal with Wagner in late 2021. Nor did he acknowledge that the Sahel’s security challenges increased as the U.S. deployed elite commandos to, and poured military aid into, Mali and its neighbors, and far predate significant Russian involvement in the region.
AFRICOM did not respond to questions about any steps taken to counter Wagner’s influence in Mali. The State Department says that the U.S. will “continue to support Mali in achieving its goals of peace and economic development.”
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Activists protesting Cop City. (photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis)
The Atlanta City Council—and the state more broadly—cannot define “loss” or “victory” for everyday people
Despite Atlanta residents testifying for almost 15 hours during public comment the same day (and another seven hours weeks before) with overwhelming opposition to funding the facility, the City Council members voted 11 to 4 to pass the budget, with roughly another $40 million dedicated to it over the next three decades. This was more than double what officials initially said it would cost.
“We know that safe communities are not heavily policed, they are heavily resourced,” Rehana Lerandeau, an Atlanta resident and member of the group Critical Resistance, told the City Council. “We also know that you cannot train the violence out of policing. Policing at its core is a violent institution.”
The affirmative vote — which also flies in the face of an Emory University survey conducted in the spring showing a plurality of Black Atlanta residents oppose the project — represented significant forward movement towards Cop City’s completion. It was undoubtedly a massive blow to #StopCopCity organizers in Atlanta and beyond who have been fighting for months to stop the project from sucking up sorely needed public funds and further aiding in the militarization of police departments both locally and around the country.
However, the decidedly tough loss was also a masterclass in what it means to lose strategically — to accept defeat at one stage of a campaign while celebrating, and foreshadowing, its significance to a much larger and longer struggle.
In Chicago, where I live, organizers will recall the parallel #NoCopAcademy campaign from 2017 – 19, which fought the construction of a $95 million police training facility in the majority Black west side neighborhood of Garfield Park. After an 18-month struggle – during which I was one of the core organizers – attempting to block multiple votes approving the project’s budget and zoning, we ultimately lost the final vote on March 13, 2019, when the Chicago City Council approved the contract with multinational conglomerate AECOM to build the academy by a 38 to 8 margin.
This marked the end of the campaign and it was a devastating loss, but it also represented a massive shift for our city and our social movements in our efforts to defund and abolish police. During the final vote, hundreds of local residents, many of them young people, took over City Hall for hours. They participated in public comment but they also chanted, sang and danced in the halls. The 8 “no” votes were a huge achievement for our campaign, especially given that it was the largest block of council members we’d ever gotten to oppose the project, and because that configuration of the City Council under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel voted in step with the mayor’s office more than 90% of the time.
But there were even more significant victories coming down the pike that we had no way of predicting. In the aldermanic elections that closely followed the final vote for the cop academy, many of candidates who supported our campaign either kept or won their seats, creating a crucial leftward shift in the City Council from which poor and working Chicagoans continue to benefit. And no one could have imagined that a global pandemic and the subsequent murder of George Floyd would lead to one of the largest protests in U.S. history, with millions of people calling for the defunding of police only a year after campaigns like ours had helped foreground the issue and make the demand plausible.
Chicago organizers walked into that #NoCopAcademy final vote knowing we would lose. But accepting defeat, and accepting defeat on the state’s terms, are two very different things. We understood that it didn’t just matter that we lost, it mattered how we lost. Going out with massive, noisy, and joyous resistance wasn’t just about setting the tone for the day, it was about laying the foundation for future battles — ones that ended up having a much wider impact than any of us could have known on that afternoon in 2019.
In a similar fashion, on the day of the vote last month, #StopCopCity organizers didn’t merely show up to Atlanta City Hall en masse, they transformed it into their own vision for their city. Participants offered free childcare, passed out masks to ensure COVID safety, and communed over hot food that was brought in by continuous waves by volunteers who made sure as many local residents as possible had the opportunity to make their voices safely heard. Knowing full well that City Council members would vote with Atlanta’s 1% and not the constituents who elected them, many of those giving public comment chose not to address the corporate shills, but instead to speak directly to their fellow residents:
“Not a single member of this body is worthy of being addressed today, but you, the people of Atlanta, are worthy of being addressed today,” said Eva Dickerson, turning away from the City Council and to the audience. “I am a teacher, a farmer, and a neighbor, and Atlanta I love you. I believe in you so deeply. Do you remember 2020? When we took this city? When we took these streets? … This is our city. We do not answer to any of these cowards. They answer to us.”
Though not every speaker identified themselves as a police or prison abolitionist, many articulated abolitionist dreams for their neighborhoods, clearly stating again and again that resources were what were needed to keep their communities safe, not more racist policing. Moreover, when the Atlanta City Council did approve the budget for Cop City – including a defensive Michael Julian Bond, who rode his father’s civil rights legacy into public office – organizers were prepared. They immediately announced a new Week of Action against the compound and introduced a referendum that would halt construction, which voters could petition to get onto the ballot this fall. The maneuver was characteristic of a campaign whose genius has always been about creating multiple points of entry for people from across the political spectrum, and supporting a wide range of tactics to achieve its abolitionist ends.
June 5, 2023, like March 13, 2019, was also a lesson in taking losses in stride, not only because we should expect them when directly challenging wealthy and entrenched institutions of violence, but because one “no” vote delivered by an undemocratic sham of a body should propel us into new action, not demoralize us into apathy.
While many Atlanta residents were appalled to see their leaders vote in favor of a project with such resounding disapproval from the public, the resulting disillusionment was itself a form of victory. Locals there, especially those who may not have been previously politically engaged, are collectively learning the same thing we learned in Chicago during the #NoCopAcademy campaign: If we accept that the state does not actually represent the interests of everyday, ordinary people, that it is not actually the democratic apparatus it has fought to convince us it is, then the state is equally incapable of delivering true justice – true victory, true liberation – to everyday people.
The state cannot define “loss” or “victory” for everyday people. A city council cannot give it or take it away. We define these things for ourselves through struggle, through relationship building, through the envisioning and enacting of our own liberation on our own terms.
Victory in Chicago has looked like the recent election of progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson. This is not because individual elected officials are the key to winning abolition, but because Chicago choosing the candidate with a clear platform of funding social programs instead of the same old law-and-order fear mongering of rival Paul Vallas proves that abolition as a narrative is winning – a direct result of campaigns like #NoCopAcademy. It is becoming common sense in our city that the constant ratcheting up of policing and incarceration is not addressing the root causes of violence, and that social programs and the meeting of basic needs are what create real public safety.
We do not yet know if the #StopCopCity campaign will be successful in shutting down its destructive target in Atlanta. But we do know it has revealed the craven nature of local leaders to a much wider audience. We do know they have radicalized a new generation of organizers in Georgia, and built real bonds of solidarity with other abolitionists around the country and world. We know they have given thousands of people accessible entry points into anti-police and anti-militarist organizing. And while we may not know what battles lie ahead, we know that all of these achievements provide the necessary foundations for future victories – victories which only we can imagine and define. We know that, no matter what happens on the local scale, abolitionist organizers have already won a shifting tide of public opinion in the direction of a demilitarized future.
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A Ukrainian soldier walks in a trench in his infantry position in the direction of Vuhledar in Donetsk Oblast on July 26, 2023. (photo: Diego Herrera/Anadolu Agency)
"They were everything to him," Nikiforova said of their 13 and 15-year-old sons. "They've grown up so much this year – he wouldn't recognize them."
Her husband, Kostiantyn, was already deployed on the Marinka front in Donetsk Oblast when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. He went missing about a month later, on March 21.
The town of Marinka, which had endured war since 2014, saw some of its worst fighting in the early months of the full-scale war.
Nikiforova said her last phone call with her husband was a day before he disappeared. She couldn't reach him the next day, so she kept calling until someone finally picked up the phone.
But it wasn't her husband who answered.
An unknown man, who Nikiforova assumes is a Russian militant judging by his accent, suddenly began yelling on the phone, threatening that she would never see her husband again.
"It felt like something tore inside me. Such an intense fear," Nikiforova said.
Kostiantyn was not on the list of killed or wounded. Instead, his name was added to Ukraine's growing list of missing soldiers.
To this day, Nikiforova has very little information about what may have happened to her husband – a fate shared by more and more Ukrainians.
Nearly a year-and-a-half into the full-scale war, thousands of relatives are enduring an unbearable wait, not knowing whether their loved ones were killed or captured by Russian forces on the front line.
Ukraine doesn't provide the official count of dead, injured, or missing soldiers, with each category believed to be in multiple thousands.
Social media in Ukraine are filled with posts from people looking for family members and friends.
Desperate to hear anything, relatives have filed hundreds of appeals to the military and various branches of law enforcement, begging them to speed up the search.
Like many others, Nikiforova began her search, as she was frustrated by the lack of information about her husband, with whom she was together for nearly 20 years.
She eventually discovered that her husband had been driving an infantry vehicle in a small column on March 21 when Russian artillery targeted them. While his vehicle was the only one that remained undamaged, it seemed that he spotted something and abruptly left the wheel of his vehicle, one of his fellow soldiers told his wife.
Nikiforova thinks her husband might have been trying to save wounded soldiers, even though, as a driver, he was not supposed to leave his vehicle.
As a former emergency service worker, "it's in his blood" to help others, Nikiforova said.
Nikiforova was informed that other service members had seen a video of her husband being captured by the Russians, giving her hope that he might be alive.
But she is desperate for a clear answer.
"Sometimes it's just unbearable, and I want to cry, but I can't cry because I have to hide it all from our children," Nikiforova said.
Viktoriia Tsymbaliuk, a representative of Ukraine's coordination headquarters on the treatment of prisoners of war, told the Kyiv Independent that finding missing soldiers is complicated because the Russian side rarely gives any information.
The National Information Bureau, which helps relatives find information about their missing relatives, adds all soldiers who didn't return from combat to its list and waits for the Russian side to confirm their status through the International Red Cross, according to Tsymbaliuk.
Russia rarely cooperates.
Tsymbaliuk said that there are thousands of Ukrainian soldiers held in dire conditions in Russian captivity without being allowed to talk to their relatives, which violates the Geneva Conventions. According to international humanitarian law, POWs must be allowed to send and receive correspondence.
The Russian side isn't returning the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers either, forcing desperate relatives to cling to any hope that their loved ones might still be alive.
The unbearable wait
Nikiforova's story is not unique.
For Kateryna Medvechuk, 27, whose husband also went missing in March 2022, it has taken a toll on her health. She began experiencing heart problems and is about to undergo a third surgery since her husband, Dmytro, went missing.
"My heart just couldn't take it all, I'm on medication," Medvechuk said. "I need to make it until he returns."
Between hospital visits, Medvechuk never stopped looking for her husband. Even when she was going to the hospital daily, she would go to the draft office after each visit to see if there was any information about Dmytro.
Her husband never told her where he was deployed, but she thinks it was either Bakhmut or Marinka in Donetsk Oblast.
And while she has filed dozens of appeals to law enforcement and called her husband's commanders and fellow soldiers many times, Medvechuk only knows that he came under Grad rocket fire during a combat mission.
"I won't give up, and I'm ready to do everything possible so that he returns sooner," Medvechuk told the Kyiv Independent in her hometown Tetiiv in Kyiv Oblast, where the couple planned to raise children after finishing the reconstruction of their house.
"He's all that I have."
Marina Fareniuk, 25, whose cousin also disappeared in Marinka in March 2022, admits she is counting on a miracle.
Her cousin, then 23-year-old Oleksandr, was severely wounded by tank fire on the noon of March 23, his comrade told Fareniuk. The others had to flee because Russian forces were approaching, so they couldn't evacuate Oleksandr.
While Oleksandr's injury was said to be critical, Fareniuk insists that "anything could have happened." She suggested Russian forces might have captured him and given him the medical treatment he needed.
A commander proposed that the family go through the courts in order to at least receive a death certificate, but they refused to do so until they saw the body.
"I believe that Sasha (short for Oleksandr) is alive, it's possible that he has no memory, and when he remembers who he is, he will return," Fareniuk said.
"Or maybe, after all, he will return from (Russian) captivity or from a hospital."
"Maybe he is just walking somewhere in a nearby city, I think everything is fine with him... He is somewhere, and we will find him, or he will find us," Fareniuk said.
More missing than killed
There are thousands of cases like this from every front line, as it's extremely difficult to track what has happened to soldiers who suddenly go missing during a combat mission.
From fierce battles near Kreminna, Luhansk Oblast, to fighting in Kherson Oblast in the south, more soldiers go missing as Russia's war rages on.
On the Bakhmut front, where the longest and bloodiest battle of Russia's war against Ukraine has raged, multiple Ukrainian soldiers interviewed by the Kyiv Independent said that there are more missing than killed in their battalions.
Soldiers usually go missing due to being captured by Russian forces or because their bodies couldn't be evacuated due to fierce fighting – especially if the territory fell to Russia.
Without a body, it's difficult to assess if a person was killed on the basis of reports from witnesses alone.
For Yelizaveta Diachenko, 24, whose cousin Mykyta went missing on June 12 near Bakhmut, the morning starts with checking with volunteers and hospitals to see if there has been any news about him.
Diachenko said her cousin, with whom she was very close, was drafted in May and, after a month of training, was deployed near Bakhmut in an assault unit.
"Everyone wants victory at someone else's hands – it doesn't work like that, I will go," Diachenko remembers Mykyta saying before going to the Donbas.
Diachenko says it has been a nightmare trying to piece together what may have happened to Mykyta, with people offering varying accounts or providing no information about what happened on his last assault operation.
When Diachenko first called a commander who was with Mykyta during the assault, she was initially told that her cousin was "evacuated, 100 percent," but then he later said that he had gotten mixed up with another soldier, and Mykyta might not have been evacuated.
And after some time, the same commander called her in the evening and said Mykyta was "99.99 percent killed," and there was no point in looking for him anymore.
"I was in hysterics, and I was crying, all at the same time" when hearing the words for the first time, Diachenko said. But then she said "some inner confidence" grew that Mykyta was still alive, despite the commander's words, and she still expects his return.
"We believe that he's in (Russian) captivity. I never thought that we could say this, but I hope that my cousin is in captivity," Diachenko said, shaking from crying.
Meanwhile, Natalia Bozhenar, a mother of three who moved from the Russian-occupied Luhansk to Kyiv Oblast, is also desperate to receive official confirmation that her eldest son, Dmytro, is in Russian captivity.
She received a Viber video call late at night on March 9, 2022, showing Dmytro in front of a white wall, and she heard a voice behind the camera say, "We will let him go when the war ends."
However, Ukrainian law enforcement have told her that the video call cannot be a confirmation of her son's POW status.
"I really want him to have the strength, the courage to survive this and return home," Bozhenar said.
The mother remembers the fear in her son's voice during brief phone calls in the early days of the full-scale war. Dmytro joined the army in April 2021 at the age of 19 and was deployed in Bakhmut. She remembers his exact words: "People are being killed, adult men are crying."
"We love him, and we're waiting for him," Bozhenar said.
Legal limbo
As of today, nearly half of the Ukrainian soldiers who returned from Russian captivity were considered missing, according to Tsymbaliuk. The authorities have said that over 2,000 have returned home since the start of the full-scale war.
However, if the soldiers don't appear on the prisoners-of-war lists provided by Russia, the missing soldiers, their relatives, and the state are stuck in limbo.
Relatives of missing soldiers can continue to receive the salary of their loved ones unless their death is confirmed after a body is identified – in which a one-time Hr 15 million (about $400,000) state guarantee is offered, according to Tsymbaliuk.
She added that they could also receive psychological and legal assistance.
For many, this uncertainty of not knowing if the soldiers are dead or alive continues for months.
Thirty-two-year-old Kateryna, who is part of an intelligence team deployed on the Bakhmut front, said the procedures are tough for families, and without a body, they can't receive compensation – even if a soldier's comrades saw him killed in front of their eyes.
"If the body hasn't been evacuated or if there is nobody, then accordingly, there can't be compensation, even though everyone knows where he is and how he was killed," Kateryna said, referring to the one-time state guarantee that relatives of killed soldiers can receive.
For the state, until a death certificate is issued, the missing soldier is considered alive.
Denys, a mortar battery commander with the 58th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade, said there needs to be confirmation of a battlefield death before saying anything to the family, no matter the number of witnesses.
He admitted that it was a "controversial topic" but said he believes the relatives should only be told confirmed information, as the situation is complex, with several cases of people considered officially dead eventually found alive.
Tsymbaliuk said that she tries to be positive even though, realistically, not all missing Ukrainian soldiers are in Russian captivity.
She explained that relatives struggle to take in the harsh reality of the war and cling to the chance that their loved ones are alive. Even when a body is returned and confirmed, they may ask for a second DNA test, insisting there may have been a mistake.
Witnesses on the battlefield
For soldiers on the battlefield, witnessing their comrades suddenly disappear is another pain. They say that one of the toughest moments on the battlefield is not being able to help wounded comrades and evacuate them due to heavy Russian shelling.
Sometimes, soldiers see the bodies of their friends but have to leave them behind.
Serhiy, a 37-year-old heavy machine gunner with the 93rd Mechanized Brigade – a unit that has been fighting on the Bakhmut front since the beginning of 2023 – said he still can't stop thinking about his comrade Mykhailo, who has been missing since March.
"I can't find him, and he's someone I ate from the same plate with," Serhiy told the Kyiv Independent after returning from the Bakhmut front line.
Serhiy said he had looked for Mykhailo, an experienced soldier, everywhere. In his last conversation with Mykhailo, Serhiy remembers his comrade saying, "Everything is good," and that he planned to go home in a week to get married.
It's nearly impossible to look for missing soldiers, a group of soldiers with the 5th Separate Assault Brigade deployed near Bakhmut told the Kyiv Independent in late May.
Oleksandr, a mechanic/driver with the 5th, said that the number of men in his company has fallen from 130 to 30 since it was deployed in the Bakhmut area in February and that, along with killed and wounded, a lot of men are missing.
And much like the relatives, soldiers cling to the hope that their missing comrades are not dead but being held in captivity.
Mechanic Ruslan from the 5th Separate Assault Brigade said he can never get used to the reality of the war, in which you might never see your comrades again.
"When your friends are gone, it's scary. When you're sitting and chatting with them, and then they're gone," Ruslan said.
"We never forget them."
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An image from a televised presidential debate in 2020. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a quiet “Yay!”? And no, we’re not counting the guy who sounds like he’s performing elaborate mental dance moves to persuade himself nor anyone who is paid to say so. According to a recent report in The Times, Biden’s fund-raising thus far doesn’t exactly reveal a groundswell of grass roots excitement.
Instead, most Democrats seem to view what looks like an inexorable rematch between Biden and Donald Trump with a sense of impending doom. My personal metaphor comes from Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia,” in which a rogue planet makes its way through space toward an inevitable collision with Earth. In that film, the looming disaster symbolized the all-encompassing nature of depression; here, the feel is more dispiritedness and terror, as if we’re barreling toward either certain catastrophe or possibly-not-a-catastrophe. Or it’s barreling toward us.
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Musican Sinead O'Connor. (photo: Michel Linssen/Redferns)
Polarizing Irish singer-songwriter was unlikely pop superstar, though mental-health issues persisted throughout her career
O’Connor’s family confirmed the singer’s death in a statement to Irish news network RTE. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” No cause of death was provided.
Already a rising star in the late Eighties, O’Connor shot to fame in 1990 when her version of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U” became a Number One hit. Her Celtic-tinged vocal style, marked by breathy swoops that were by turns soothing and abrasive, would echo throughout the Nineties, influencing singers such as Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette, who said O’Connor’s music was “really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote Jagged Little Pill.”
Though her singing was passionate and sensual, O’Connor avoided the clichéd images that often straitjacketed female rock stars of that era. She was neither a girlish sexpot nor a hippie free spirit nor a posturing tough chick, and her fiercely idiosyncratic personal style — shaved head, emotionally ambiguous facial expressions, loose outfits — helped younger female artists discover new ways to reinvent themselves.
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born on Dec. 8, 1966, in Glenageary, County Dublin, Ireland. Her parents separated when she was eight, and Sinéad, along with two of her four siblings, went to live with her mother. O’Connor would later claim that her mother, who died in a 1985 car accident, physically abused her. She sang about the effects of this abuse on her 1994 song “Fire on Babylon,” and consistently advocated for abused children throughout her life. “The cause of all the world’s problems, as far as I’m concerned, is child abuse,” she said in 1991.
Fellow musicians recognized O’Connor’s gifts early on. When she was 15, she co-wrote “Take My Hand,” the first single for the soon-to-be successful Irish rock band In Tua Nua. In 1984, she and Colm Farrelly formed Ton Ton Macoute, and the group made a name for itself on the Dublin rock scene. But O’Connor outshone her bandmates and was soon signed to Ensign Records. She moved to London and co-wrote “Heroine” with the Edge for the film Captive. U2 were early supporters of O’Connor’s music, but she alienated them by dismissing the band as “bombastic” and defending the violent tactics of the Irish Republican Army. She also shaved her head. “[The heads of Ensign] wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair,” O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991. “And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there couldn’t be any further discussion.”
The recording sessions for O’Connor’s debut album got off to a rocky start. She clashed with her initial producer, industry veteran Mick Glossip, firing him, scrapping the initial recordings, and badmouthing him to the press. O’Connor convinced her label to let her produce the album herself, with recording assistance from drummer John Reynolds — who was also the father of O’Connor’s first son, Jake, born during this time. When The Lion and the Cobra came out in 1987, it went gold, was critically lauded, and earned O’Connor her first Grammy nomination. The track “Mandinka” became a modern rock hit. O’Connor, who was among the first rock musicians to embrace hip-hop, also crossed over to urban audiences with a remix of “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” that featured MC Lyte.
But it was O’Connor’s 1990 follow-up album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, anchored by her haunting rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” (a song he originally wrote for his side project, the Family), that would make the singer an international star. The album was heavily inspired by O’Connor’s mother. “The songs on this record were really about her,” she said in 2009. “Even the fucking title I got from having a dream about her, and in this dream she said to me, ‘I do not want what I haven’t got.’ In my mind, even ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was me thinking about her.” A critical success that also went double platinum, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got seemed like the start of a long, unpredictably great career. But O’Connor’s music would never again be this popular, or this celebrated.
In 1990, O’Connor became nearly as well-known for her unyielding public actions as for her music. She refused to appear as a musical guest on an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by misogynist comic Andrew Dice Clay. That summer, she would not allow a New Jersey concert venue to play the U.S. national anthem before a performance; in response, some radio stations stopped playing her music and Frank Sinatra threatened to “kick her in the ass.” Along with Public Enemy, she boycotted the 1991 Grammy Awards to protest the first Gulf War. But her most controversial act was yet to come.
In 1992, O’Connor released her third album, Am I Not Your Girl?, a collection of lushly orchestrated cover songs, mostly jazz and pre-rock pop standards, that puzzled critics and fans alike. That October, shortly after the album’s release, she was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War,” the lyrics modified slightly to protest sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and as she sang the word “evil,” she showed a photo of Pope John Paul II, which she then ripped apart. Saying “Fight the real enemy,” O’Connor then flung the scraps at the camera. The audience responded with silence.
The public response was explosive, ranging from fierce outrage to dismissive mockery. Joe Pesci, SNL‘s host the following week, threatened O’Connor, saying, “I would have gave her such a smack.” Even Madonna (perhaps a little envious that an equally skilled pop provocateur might upstage her) called O’Connor’s actions inappropriate, and parodied the act on SNL in 1993. Just two weeks after her SNL performance, O’Connor took the stage at Madison Square Garden to perform “I Believe in You” at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, where she could barely be heard over the roars of the audience, which was split between supporters and detractors. Defiantly, she again sang “War.”
With her new album foundering on the charts and the public outcry becoming a distraction, O’Connor took some time off — according to some reports she’d retired. In 1994, she released Universal Mother, which included an astounding version of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” but the album struggled commercially and her career never stabilized. The only other music O’Connor would release in the Nineties was the Gospel Oak EP in 1997. Meanwhile, her personal life stayed in the news. She and Irish journalist John Waters engaged in a nasty public dispute over custody of their daughter, Roisin (O’Connor’s second child). Then, in 1999, O’Connor was ordained as a priest in a splinter Catholic sect, the Latin Tridentine Church, as Mother Bernadette Mary.
In 2000, O’Connor signed with Atlantic Records. Her debut for the label, Faith and Courage, sounded like an attempt to regain commercial relevance, but with its too-broad range of producers — from Wyclef Jean and Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs to Dave Stewart and Brian Eno — it came off as unfocused. O’Connor regrouped musically with the 2002 collection of Irish folk, Sean-Nós Nua, and an even more successful collection of reggae classics, Throw Down Your Arms, with Jamaican superproducers Sly and Robbie, in 2005.
O’Connor continued to record, releasing the albums Theology (2007), How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? (2012), and I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss (2014). But the world paid more attention to her public statements than her art. In 2013, O’Connor wrote a much-discussed “open letter” to Miley Cyrus, “to send healthier messages to your peers … they and you are worth more than what is currently going on in your career.”
O’Connor had long been critical of Prince, who penned “Nothing Compares 2 U,” telling Rolling Stone in 1991 that meeting him “spoiled the song completely for me. I feel a connection with the song, but the experience was a very disturbing one. At the moment I really don’t like the idea of singing the song. I need to get to the stage where I can separate the writer from the song — which I suppose I always did before. But I’m just very angry with him.” After Prince’s death in 2016, she called the late superstar “a longtime hard drug user.”
O’Connor was believed to have suffered from mental-health issues for years. On The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007, O’Connor said she’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and that she’d attempted suicide in 1999 on her 33rd birthday. However, she reappeared on the program seven years later to say that she’d gotten several second opinions and believed she’d been misdiagnosed. O’Connor posted what appeared to be a suicide note on her Facebook page in November 2015, lashing out at her family members. When she disappeared during a biking trip in suburban Chicago in May 2016, there were widespread fears for her life. A yearlong stay in a trauma and addiction-treatment program followed in 2020.
O’Connor’s legacy enjoyed a resurgence in recent years with a memoir and an acclaimed documentary, but just as quickly tragedy struck as the singer revealed that her 17-year-old son, Shane, died by suicide in January 2022, just days after he went missing from an Irish hospital’s suicide watch. O’Connor’s own death came 18 months after that of her son.
Irish President Michael Higgins said in a statement Wednesday, “My first reaction on hearing the news of Sinéad’s loss was to remember her extraordinarily beautiful, unique voice. What was striking in all of the recordings she made and in all of her appearances was the authenticity of the performance, while her commitment to the delivery of the song and its meaning was total.”
Higgins continued, “What Ireland has lost at such a relatively young age is one of our greatest and most gifted composers, songwriters and performers of recent decades, one who had a unique talent and extraordinary connection with her audience, all of whom held such love and warmth for her… Sinéad O’Connor’s voice and delivery was in so many different ways original, extraordinary and left one with a deep deep impression that to have accomplished all she did while carrying the burden which she did was a powerful achievement in its own way. Her contribution joins those great contributions of Irish women who contributed to our lives, its culture and its history in their own unique but unforgettable ways.”
In 1991, following the national-anthem incident that drew the ire of Sinatra, O’Connor told Rolling Stone, “It’s not like I got up in the morning and said, ‘OK, now let’s start a new controversy.’ I don’t do anything in order to cause trouble. It just so happens that what I do naturally causes trouble. And that’s fine with me. I’m proud to be a troublemaker.”
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) speaks at the Hands Off Budget rally in Washington, D.C. on May 24, 2017. (photo: AFGE)
Israel’s naked attempt to enforce an unflagging pro-Israel consensus, as it did in stoking backlash against Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s sensible recent comments that the country is a “racist state,” may work in the short-term. But the future belongs to Palestine.
Chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Jayapal joined other liberal House colleagues this month in addressing a Netroots Nation conference. There, Palestinian American protestors confronted Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who is a Jewish liberal Zionist who also supports Palestinian rights. But the demonstrators viewed her support for Zionism and a two-state solution as an inadequate response to the mass killings of Palestinians (over 150 this year) and the quashing of their demand for political rights and justice. They disrupted the proceedings, chanting pro-Palestinian slogans, declaring Israel a racist state.
In an attempt to defuse their anger, Jayapal addressed them:
As somebody that’s been in the streets and participated in a lot of demonstrations, I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination.
A political uproar ensued, in which both Republicans and Democrats attacked Jayapal for her remarks. But the political climate has shifted since then: the Israeli Knesset’s passage of right-wing antijudicial legislation this week despite mass protests brought forward staunch pro-Israel journalist David Rothkopf to support Jayapal in the Daily Beast:
A week ago, only nine people in the U.S. Congress dared stand up to the lie that Israel was not a racist state. This despite decades of denying fundamental human rights to Palestinians in territories over which it asserted power simply because they were Palestinian.
Rothkopf’s comments are a reminder that despite the backlash faced by Jayapal, the Democratic Party is increasingly riven by a rising tide of opposition to Israel and Zionism itself. The Israel lobby may police speech concerning Israel and spend tens of millions to defeat “errant” Democratic candidates, including Jews, Muslim Americans, and African Americans, but it cannot undo the damage done by Israel itself. Israel’s naked attempt to enforce a pro-Israel consensus may work in the short term, but the future belongs to Palestine.
Progressive House Democrats have been increasingly willing to buck the lobby. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez successfully (but temporarily) blocked a $750-million appropriation for Israel to buy Iron Dome missiles. The ensuing backlash from the Israel lobby forced her to apologize for her role and to support the funding. She clearly was intimidated, threatened, and cowed into submission by extremely powerful pro-Israel forces, which angered progressive Democrats.
Since that imbroglio, US-Israel relations have reached a nadir. Last week, former US ambassadors to Israel during Democratic administrations Martin Indyk and Dan Kurtzer called for eliminating US military aid to Israel. These are no radicals: they are members of the US foreign policy elite with deep ties to the Israel lobby. This sort of break would have been unthinkable in any prior period in US-Israel relations, vindicates Ocasio-Cortez’s opposition to military appropriations to Israel, and strengthens congressional efforts to curtail or eliminate such support.
Both representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have publicly declared support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and a one-state solution. They are the first House members who have ever taken such a stance. Despite the Israel lobby mounting pro-Israel candidates against them, they have both won reelection.
A recent Gallup Poll found, for the first time in the history of its polling, that more Democrats support Palestine than Israel, a sea change in the views of rank-and-file Dems. Despite the massive efforts of the Israel lobby to combat this rising sentiment, Israel’s racism, mass violence, and ethnic cleansing have made clear to most Democrats that it is no longer worthy of support.
This declining US support isn’t lost on the Israeli government, especially the far-right ministers of the most extremist government in the country’s history. The destruction of a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus has increasingly driven Israel into the hands of the most extremist elements of US politics, including Trump Republicans and Christian evangelicals. But the rejection of Trumpism highlighted by the 2020 election of Joe Biden and an increasing erosion of support among young evangelicals confronts Israel with the prospect of running out of domestic allies.
The gradual abandonment of moving in lockstep with Israel will embolden political leaders in other countries to recalibrate their own relations with Israel. This will include a far more robust and critical approach to Israeli transgressions in global bodies like the United Nations Security Council and International Criminal Court. Such international intervention is the only way to bring radical change to Israeli policy.
Jayapal Strengthens Congressional Opposition to Israel
Jayapal has taken party criticism of Israel to a new level. While rank-and-file House members like Tlaib may call Israel “a racist state,” no member of the Democratic House leadership has ever dared do so. Until now.
As leader of the Progressive Caucus, Jayapal has the clout to promote its agenda among more conservative House Democrats. She has wielded that power carefully and been leery of being too far ahead of the party consensus. This is all the more proof that she is aware of the changing mood in the party and ready to acknowledge it publicly with her statement about Israel being a racist state.
After she faced a fierce backlash, she “clarified” her remarks, saying she intended to say that Israeli government policies were racist, but not that “Israel as a nation is racist.” It was a distinction without a difference.
When the policies of a nation for nearly a century are marked by the ethnic cleansing of nearly one million indigenous Palestinians (the Nakba), followed by systemic discrimination against its remaining Palestinian minority, and occupation of Palestinian lands in defiance of international law, it is the nation itself that is and has been racist.
The media were quick to label her subsequent statement as an apology or retraction. It wasn’t. That Jayapal refused to back down suggests confidence that her original remarks reflect the views of a growing number, if not the majority, of Democrats.
Jayapal Caves on Apartheid Vote
Jayapal did, however, cave to pressure after the GOP majority took advantage of the controversy, putting forward a nonbinding resolution that declared Israel was not an apartheid state. Among the aye votes was Jayapal. She decided to throw a sop to the Israel lobby over a meaningless congressional resolution, keeping her powder dry for the fights she views as actually important.
But her vote was an unnecessary abandonment of principle. It served as a reminder that progressive politicians will compromise their values under the illusion that doing the wrong thing is justified by doing it for the right reasons. The resolution was an empty gesture, not only because it had no impact on US foreign policy but because almost everyone except the Israeli government and its global apologists know that Israel is a racist apartheid regime “from the river to the sea.”
Still, overall, Jayapal’s actions suggest that the unflaggingly pro-Israel consensus within the Democratic Party is over. Israel maintains a massively wealthy and powerful lobby that is happy to repeatedly justify an incredible range of human rights abuses against Palestinians, but its days of impunity will soon be over.
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A fish swims near coral showing signs of bleaching at Cheeca Rocks off the coast of Islamorada, Fla., on Sunday. (photo: Andrew Ibarra/AP)
‘This is definitely the worst bleaching event that Florida has ever seen,’ one veteran researcher said, as a marine heat wave shows few signs of ending
As a blistering marine heat wave persists off the coast, a full-blown emergency is unfolding along the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States.
“If it remains this hot for the next six weeks, we are going to see a lot more coral mortality out there,” said Lewis, director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Keys Marine Laboratory.
Already, scientists have reported widespread coral bleaching along parts of the roughly 360-mile-long reef, the third largest on the planet. If the heat drags on, they say, a massive coral die-off could follow, with grave consequences for fish and other ocean organisms that depend on the reefs, tourism, commercial fishing and part of the state’s very identity.
“This is definitely the worst bleaching event that Florida has ever seen,” said Andrew Baker, who directs the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami. “We knew something like this was going to happen at some point, we just didn’t know when. We still managed to be surprised by the magnitude of this event and how early it came in the season.”
In a summer that has scorched both land and sea, the precarious future of Florida’s corals offers the latest example of what stands to be irretrievably lost as the world grows ever hotter. Corals can survive high water temperatures, but not for long periods of time, making the arrival of excessive heat so early in the season such a troubling development.
Lewis’s lab, with its temperature-controlled, seawater aquariums, is providing refuge to more than 1,500 coral specimens that have been harvested from offshore nurseries and parent colonies, in hopes that they can be returned to the sea when the water finally cools.
Day after day, Lewis has seen researchers emerge from their underwater missions shaken by the magnitude of bleaching that they have seen. “It’s emotionally draining,” she said.
Figuring out how to help the corals survive the current predicament is difficult and uncertain work. But also critical, Baker said, because this moment is one that could leave a lasting scar up and down Florida’s coastline.
“A bleached coral can recover,” he said, “but a dead coral does not.”
‘Literally off the charts’
How early the heat wave arrived is what has proven most unsettling to scientists who study and try to preserve Florida’s imperiled corals.
The corals have endured past incidents of bleaching, a process in which stressed corals expel their symbiotic algae, known as zooxanthellae, and turn pale or white. The frequency and severity of such events has increased since the 1980s, and one of the last significant bleaching events off the Florida Keys took place in 2014.
That summer, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, high water temperatures in the Keys triggered bleaching that damaged or killed a third of elkhorn coral at seven federal monitoring sites in the Upper Keys.
But unlike now, that event spanned August into September, when summer was giving way to fall and waters would naturally begin to cool.
“This time, we still have the hottest months of summer ahead of us,” Lewis said. “I’ve seen it before, but not this early.”
That’s also partly what worries Derek Manzello, an ecologist and head of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program. He said the state has experienced eight coral bleaching events since 1987, but typically they haven’t occurred until at least mid-August. This time, water temperatures began to spike earlier this month.
“So we are a full month ahead of when we have historically seen heat stress manifest in Florida,” Manzello said. Meanwhile, he added, “The magnitude of the heat stress is literally off the charts.”
Corals comfortably grow in water temperatures between 73 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. When water temperatures are too warm, corals push out the algae living in their tissues, triggering a bleaching event. They cannot tolerate high temperatures for long periods.
For now, many corals off South Florida are suffering through extraordinary temperatures with no end in sight.
On Monday evening, a buoy in Manatee Bay, about 40 miles south of Miami, posted a temperature of 101.1 degrees at 6 p.m. For comparison, the “ideal” temperature of a hot tub is 100 to 102 degrees, according to jacuzzi.com.
But that reading was merely one of multiple extreme temperatures in South Florida’s offshore waters. To the southwest, a buoy near Johnson Key topped out at 98.4 degrees. The average of the two dozen observation locations in and around Florida Bay was around 96 degrees during the early evening — even higher than air temperatures.
In Key West, ocean temperatures are sitting at 90.5 degrees — well above the monthly average for the area of 87.4 degrees. Water samples off Vaca Key were showing water temperatures at 93.4 degrees as of Tuesday, according to NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center.
Underwater, that reality has led to a slow-motion disaster.
Ocean temperatures are now so elevated that “it’s likely becoming an existential threat for even the hardiest of corals on Florida’s coral reef,” Phanor Montoya-Maya, a restoration program manager at the Key Largo-based Coral Restoration Foundation, said in an interview.
In the Lower Florida Keys, the group said, it has observed “significant coral mortality” at sites including Sombrero Reef, Cheeca Rocks, Horseshoe Reef, Newfound Harbor and Looe Key. It also reported “100 percent bleaching” in the Looe Key Coral Tree Nursery, home to roughly 6,000 corals.
“We are seeing extensive coral bleaching and mortality due to these elevated water temperatures,” Montoya-Maya said. “Reefs and nurseries in the Upper Keys are showing early signs of thermal stress, with corals beginning to pale — the first sign of bleaching.”
Out of the five levels on NOAA’s alert scale for corals, current conditions are categorized at the most extreme category, known as Alert Level 2. The harrowing conditions are projected to remain for the next 12 weeks, the agency has said.
“And the big problem here is, the impacts that a coral experiences are a direct result of how long they are exposed to the stress, and how severe that stress is,” NOAA’s Manzello said.
Jesse Senko, a marine conservation biologist and professor at Arizona State University, said that while the El Niño climate pattern that has developed this summer typically fuels hotter ocean temperatures, the current marine heat wave was almost certainly made more severe by climate change.
“The worry now is that we’re hitting a tipping point,” Senko said. “Once this becomes the norm and you have multiple summers like this, it could be catastrophic for most of the world’s coral reefs.”
‘You realize what is being lost’
In recent decades, healthy coral cover in the Florida Keys has fallen by more than 90 percent due to a range of stressors, including disease, heat stress and damage from boats and storms.
That deterioration, along with the prospect of worsening climate change, has led the federal government, universities and nonprofits to ramp up efforts to protect, salvage and restore the reef.
It’s also why the ongoing heat wave is particularly disheartening to scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying and preserving Florida’s corals.
“It’s upsetting because you realize what is being lost,” said Baker, of the University of Miami.
He likened the situation to a forest fire raging through an old growth forest. As heat stress threatens to destroy corals that have blanketed the ocean floor for thousands of years in some places, so much else would disappear along with them.
“The reefs provide the ecosystems that support fishing, diving, tourism, jobs,” Lewis said. “In that respect, the reef is very important to the economy of Florida.”
The reefs also provide a first line of defense against storms and hurricanes, buffering powerful waves before they arrive on shore.
“An underwater sea wall,” is how Baker, whose work focuses in part on helping corals be more resilient to warming water, describes it. “In Florida, we are very flat, and there’s a tremendous amount of built infrastructure. Reefs are really protecting all that.”
For all those reasons, Baker said, “Florida is the coral restoration capital of the world. Or it was.”
Numerous labs spread throughout the Keys, academic researchers around South Florida and the Tampa Bay region, scientists at the Florida Aquarium and others have spent years working to preserve the corals that remain and undertake creative solutions to help the reef survive in a hotter and more acidic ocean. Government agencies from NOAA to the Defense Department have helped fund such efforts.
But amid the current, crippling heat wave, the work of restoration has temporarily taken a back seat to the urgency of trying to protect and salvage what remains.
At her lab on Long Key where she has spent more than two decades, Lewis spends these days surrounded by hundreds of threatened coral specimens in her triage unit, where staffers clean the tanks, maintain water temperatures and ensure corals have the food they need.
“We are going to save as many corals as we can, so we can maybe build better and stronger corals in the future,” she said, “so that they are more resilient and resistant to the current climate.”
She knows that just a few miles away under the water, the situation is dire. But like her colleagues that keep diving beneath the surface, she holds fast to the hope that better days lie ahead.
“I refuse to think all is lost.”
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