Category Archives: Government Oppression

What the goddamn hell is this? Cyril Lionel Robert James, lanky cricketer and budding journalist in colonial Trinidad, was unhappy as he scoured libraries in Port of Spain for a decent book on Frances former colony Saint-Domingue. The young writer could find only the likes of Percy Waxmans The Black Napoleon. In those pages, he learned the rebel general Toussaint Louvertures

face was decidedly homely. He possessed a forbidding prognathous jaw. His lips were thick, his nose broad and flat, with nostrils wide and open. His voice was high-pitched, nasal, and none too pleasant.

Though sympathetic to Toussaints struggle against the French colonial ruling class, the Australian writer Waxman couldnt look past race. His book proved a radicalizing moment for the young Trinidadian. I was tired of hearing that the West Indians were oppressed, James recalled decades later, that we were black and miserable, that we had been brought from Africa, and that we were living there and that we were being exploited hence his goddamn hell.

Cyril had the additional choice of The French Revolution in San Domingo, widely distributed by Houghton Mifflin in 1914, by one T. Lothrop Stoddard a future Klansman from Massachusetts who lamented the erasure of the finest of European colonies from the map of the white world.

With few exceptions, this was the territory until Cyril moved to England, made his name as C. L. R. James, and wrote, among much else, a 1938 book on the Haitian Revolution that has yet to be surpassed in English.

The Black Jacobins became, and in some ways remains, the most penetrating psychological study of Toussaint. It shaped the history from below of E. P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and countless other historians. A masterpiece of plot and sentence, the book has gripped novelists and playwrights for generations. It is little surprise to hear from the novelist Madison Smartt Bell that The Black Jacobins made him infected by Bloomian anxiety of influence, along with the usual Oedipal striving as he plotted his own Haitian epic.

These qualities of The Black Jacobins assert themselves in a recent wave of books from Duke University Press, part of an ongoing series that sets a high bar for a new generation of James readers. The setting behind The Black Jacobins, Jamess formative years in England from 1932 to 1939 when he found Marxism, joined pan-African and pan-Caribbean movements, wrote widely on politics as a world war brewed, and became an authority on modern imperialism finally get proper exploration in Christian Hgsbjergs biography C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain.

Jamess composition of The Black Jacobins ,one of many elements in Hgsbjergs excellent and economical study, is the centerpiece of another: Rachel Douglass Making the Black Jacobins, a treatise that lavishes Talmudic scrutiny upon the textual evolution of his book across editions. This reverence provides the theme of a third volume, The Black Jacobins Reader, a collection of essays outlining the wide influence enjoyed by Jamess work often justly, very occasionally not in history departments and private lives (among them, Bells) to the present.

Jamess place in the canon did not need restatement, but one of his attitudes, as these three books show, might have: his reading of the revolution in Saint-Domingue as a dispute of class more than color. At the time, this interpretation was almost without precedent. James is plain: The race question is subsidiary to the class question, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.

This argument derives from the racial complexity of slavery in Saint-Domingue. No less than 128 shades of skin had names in Frances colony a situation James calls a cross between a nightmare and a bad joke. When revolution struck the island, these castes dispersed into factions. James notes the corrosive race feeling operating among and against them, but he takes a tall perspective as these groups coalesce, concluding it was economic station, not skin, that guided their allegiances.

For instance: the free, mixed-race gens de couleur demanded equal rights from the colonial government but wished to keep their slaves. The slave-owning grands blancs tended, begrudgingly, to side with them. Mulattoes and big whites, James explains, had a common bond property. So too with the landowners of African descent, many of them slavers: this was no question of colour, but crudely a question of class, for those blacks who were formerly free stuck to the Mulattoes. One of the black revolutionaries and soon the countrys first emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had been owned by such a black slaveowner. On the other side, James calls Dessalines and Toussaints troops labourers. Which they were. The new government was to be rooted in the preservation of the interests of the labouring poor.

Was the plantation slave really a proletarian? No at least not for anthropologist Sidney Mintz, who has posed this question in a different context. Enslaved people in themselves, not simply their labor, were the commodities in that economy. Oedipally, Bell finds that James is at his least convincing when he tries to hammer the Haitian Revolution into the Marxist mold. Bells main evidence is a bombshell about Toussaint that was unearthed long after James wrote: the famous Black Spartacus was in fact a freeman when revolution arrived and had owned slaves himself. One more uncomfortable fact: the racial retaliation waged between Dessalines and the vicomte de Rochambeau in the final stretch of independence does not help the class case.

Despite exceptions like these, by taking up the class question, James was not wrong. It helped him solve some major problems that dogged historians of his era. We still benefit from his solutions.

Jamess insistence on class debunked the race war tack of Stoddard and his racialist (and racist) predecessors, whom Hgsbjerg and Douglas do us a service by describing. The idea that colonial plantations foretold the hierarchies of industrial labor has helped Jamess successors examine more critically the economies that underlay slave revolts. Scrutiny of those economies leads to certain conclusions about the actors who made them work. To call a slave a laborer grants her a dignity rooted in material reality. We start to see in that worker, like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers to whom James likens her, an essential agent in the creation of wealth. Intent accrues to this agent. Surely she understood her role in that creation and saw revolt as a deliberate and most basic means of disrupting it.

This kind of thinking informs Annette Gordon-Reeds recent argument that America still owes Haiti for bankrupting Napoleon in a failed war of recapture, forcing him to sell his claim to the Louisiana Territory, and doubling the size of the United States. To speak of debt in such a chain of events assumes some level of deliberateness by the workers who were able to upset the geopolitical balance. The idea that people long dismissed as chattels in fact acted on calculation and strategy is now rightly dominant in scholarship and owes much to Jamess perspective. Or when Julius S. Scott, in his magisterial study The Common Wind, elaborates how slave and other disfranchised groups spread news of revolution across Saint-Domingue, he echoes Jamess premise that unequal access to rights and wealth was the revolutions prime mover.

One does not need terms like class or labor to humanize an enslaved human. But for James and his many inheritors, the failure of racism alone to explain their oppression demands a broader explanation.

Of course, modern terms such as these (which fill Jamess history) turn a book about the past into a book about the present. From where James sat in the 1930s, Toussaints revival of the plantation system explained the tightening grip of Joseph Stalin, another revolutionary turned despot, whose firing squads James invokes in the proem to his work. Such is our age, and this book is of it, James laments, embracing the presentism that historians rotely shun but have never quite learned to escape. Both Toussaint and Stalin lost sight of their people.

In the Duke Reader, Selma James, C. L. R.s fellow activist and former spouse, suggests that her husbands eventual split with Trotskyism stemmed in part from the shared tragedy of Toussaint and Stalin: James not only breaks with the vanguard party but identifies and analyzes the corruption in the new governing class, of which Toussaint was an example. It is a great virtue of The Black Jacobins that it can hold both a devotion to primary sources of the Napoleonic theater as well as a sensitivity to the rumblings of a new global order.

The primacy of labor concerns was not lost on Jamess audience, as we learn elsewhere in The Black Jacobins Reader. In the 1960s, Detroit labor leaders circulated copies of his book. An interracial Black Jacobins reading group sprung up in a Pennsylvania correctional facility. When Hgsbjerg and Charles Forsdick, the volumes editors, quote a letter to James from Martin Luther King Jr recounting a conversation about your excellent piece of work, I noted the postmark: two weeks before Kings debut speech on the National Mall, where he would envision historians of the future and urge that the present inequalities transcended skin. God is not interested merely in freeing black men and brown men and yellow men, King declared, but God is interested in freeing the whole human race.

Jamess most devoted reader happened to be his actual student. Before becoming the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, an office he would hold for twenty years, Eric Williams was Jamess pupil at Queens Royal College in Port of Spain.

Williams was partially deaf (the result of a soccer injury) and wore Coke-bottle glasses (the result of too much reading). Shy but brilliant, he won the sole island scholarship for his class and set off for Oxford. Williams and James happened to reach England the same year, in 1932, and one imagines the young prime minister trotting behind his teacher.

The education was mutual, however, as Hgsbjerg and others now agree. We learn from Douglas that Williams researched substantial portions of The Black Jacobins and wrote certain lines of it himself. Their collaboration would permanently alter our approach to the slave trade.

It happened along these lines: Jamess emphasis on economic systems led him to some evidence that Britain might have been changing its mind about maintaining slavery as a result of disappointing performance in the West Indian economy. In 1776 the American colonies had seceded from England, and Adam Smith had complained about plantation economies in The Wealth of Nations. These events, among others, made James suspect that something about the old mercantilist system began to fail Britain. This must have been why Britain moved to steal Saint-Domingue from France in the 1790s, when unrest tore that colony. It was Britains final (and epically failed) bid to regain West Indian relevance.

James made an elegant suggestion in The Black Jacobins but left the question there. Williams took the baton. The year James published The Black Jacobins in London, in 1938, Williams submitted a DPhil dissertation that fleshed out his mentors suspicions in rigorous economic detail. (In later years of bitterness, James claimed to have scrawled the idea for Williams on the back of an envelope.) Published in America in 1944, Capitalism and Slavery ignited a long-running academic controversy. A new edition this year a small miracle for a work of strict economic history almost eighty years old asks us to consider the legacy of a book that virtually invented the modern study of abolitionism.

Williamss conclusions were two. First, slave plantations produced such wealth that they funded Britains industrial revolution. Second, these plantations had fallen into depression by the 1770s. This depression would last into the next century. Many factors were to blame for it: American secession, soil exhaustion, competition between beet and cane sugar, the rising bankruptcy of the planter class. To Williams, the biggest culprit was the outdated system of mercantilism, whose protectionist duties and state subsidies obliged Britain to buy from its colonies rather than on the open marketplace.

Each of these settings, in Williamss telling, convinced the highest levels of government that free labor and comparative advantage rather than slavery were the way of the future. The sterile rocks of the British West Indies (Williams pulls many such indictments from the mouths of the periods spectators) became much less important than Britains other territories. One such territory was East India, where workers cost a penny a day. Another was the new industrial town that the slave money had funded, many of which were cropping up across Britain in the early 1800s, where children could be employed in the next boom.

Using historical import and export data, Williams argues that slave plantations became less and less profitable in these years. Abolition, it appeared to him, was a good way to end this tired system. It was no coincidence that British entrepreneurs turned to new business ventures in the 1780s and 90s just as celebrity abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson gained their first ground in Parliament.

Though his detractors have called the connection circumstantial rather than causal, Williams pointed out the fact that Britains first era of civil rights was also that of its debut on the free market. He read the major antislavery advancements during that era (namely, abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1833) as Britains slow shift toward free trade more than signs of pure philanthropy. These advancements culminate, in Williamss view, in the removal of duties on imported sugar in 1846, an act that finally allowed slave sugar from Brazil and Cuba to overtake the British planters who had been limping along in Jamaica and Barbados.

Britain had nothing against West Indian slavery, in other words. She just knew her strengths lay elsewhere.

If it was true that slavery died a natural death, as Williams claimed in this chronology, rather than one brought about principally by antislavery activism, a devastating conclusion awaited Britains abolitionists. William Wilberforce and his Saints in Parliament, who agitated for the major abolitionist reforms, were thought to have battled tremendous odds to effect Gods will. Theirs seemed a triumph of good over evil. And they were never more deified (as Hgsbjerg and Douglas make clear) than at the centenary of their 1833 emancipation act, during James and his students first year in England, when the Saints were declared in hundreds of tributes as having bestowed conscience upon British industry. But if the market favored abolition anyway, as Williams now argued, the Saints merely confirmed the adoption of a new free market, casting a cloak of humanitarianism over economic policies that were all but inevitable.

Abolition, Williams concluded, was an economic convenience. And Wilberforce, resting soundly in Westminster Abbey, had reaped the credit ever since. (If nothing else, Williamss indictment of the Saints, though it descends to the ad hominem, gives a crash course in historical grudge-holding.)

Williamss grim determinism here which casts some of the bravest activists in civil rights history as workings in an unthinking grandfather clock of economics is as unpleasant today as it was upon publication, at the peak struggle against Nazi Germany. The severity of his judgment attests to the piousness of that centenary moment, as well as to the misplacement an islander must have felt in its midst.

The elegance, rigor, and shock of Williamss slender volume made him required reading for decades. He was among the first to connect plantation capital directly to empire now an historical starting point. And his decline thesis, as it came to be known, quickly dominated discussions of slavery.

His decline theory, that abolition only became possible when Britains plantations naturally declined in profit, shaped some very incisive and some very cynical takes on the Saints and the white-savior complex. And when anyone questions a governments pretensions to humanitarian intervention as commentators on Haiti have had occasion to do in abundance this summer, after the assassination of President Jovenel Mose renewed discussions of the false philanthropy and economic subjugation that has plagued that island the questioner owes something to the diffusely influential muckraking of Capitalism and Slavery.

Protesters swarmed from the other side, notably Roger Anstey and the American economic historian Seymour Drescher. In 1977, the latter produced Econocide, now a classic with its own reissue in the last decade, which seemed finally to put Williamss argument to bed. Though Drescher was less persuasive against Williamss first claim, that the industrial revolution could not have taken off without the profits generated from slave plantations, his evidence against Williamss decline theory has stuck. Using many of Williamss own sources, Drescher argued that British plantations were in fact still profitable when Parliament passed the two major bills: abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1833. To Drescher, these reforms were deliberate acts of self-harm to a booming industry. Adam Smiths vision of a free market was indeed on the rise in the early nineteenth century, but the emergence of that free market did not require the abolition of slavery.

Critics of Williams rejoiced and still do. Most scholars tend to accept Dreschers findings against the decline theory of abolition (though not all). After Williams, however, there was no going back to the old arguments that humanitarianism alone brought about the end of British slavery. To restore credit to the Saints would reek of the nationalism exhibited by Reginald Coupland, a hagiographer of Wilberforce and one of Williamss supervisors at Oxford. The doubt had been sown by Capitalism and Slavery: If the market didnt gain from abolition, then who did?

In his much-read hegemonic thesis, David Brion Davis suggested that abolition gave government a new means of domestic control: a new class hierarchy premised on the idea of freedom. Then came Thomas Haskells clever market thesis, contending that the rise of contract law and other industrial principles like punctuality and consequentialism created a new species of bourgeoisie to whom the crime of slavery became intolerable. More recently, Christopher Leslie Brown, formerly Daviss student, used the concept of moral capital to explain how, with or without decline, abolition gave activists the clout they needed to push other agendas. Though a diplomat between Williams and the Econocidals in Dreschers camp, Brown echoes the former when he reveals, with great tact, how the moral capital of abolition provided a sham justification for the partitioning and monetization of Africa by British colonists.

Each of these theories upholds Williamss basic premise that abolition brought with it some market gain. And the sophistication of these views of history comes straight from the soil Williams and Drescher had tilled in their debate. Each marries two major poles of historiography the great man with the impersonal historical force. In this marriage, it is possible to concede victory, for example, to James Stephen, author of the crucial Foreign Slave Trade Bill of 1806, while questioning his animating wish to stem the torrent of French ambition. Was this an ingenious bribe to anti-abolitionists in the House, or a simple endorsement of empire?

A compromise like this dilutes the enlivening rage of Capitalism and Slavery, but it also heightens certain conundrums about the past for which Williams had limited time. A balance of morals and markets has resulted in the judgements of generations of historians following his book. In this, Williams and his successors approach the vast problem of slavery in the era of human rights by revisiting a challenge posed by Karl Marx: that people make their own history not under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. Who acts in history, great men or the economy?

James would work this problem into his portrait of the laborers of Saint-Domingue. They took matters into their own hands, but they responded to forces of economic oppression that had long preceded them: Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realisation, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.

So too, for Williams, with the centuries-long rise of the free market: These economic changes are gradual, imperceptible, but they have an irresistible cumulative effect. Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware of the ultimate results of their activity. The historians working after James and Williams have pulled these interested parties, moneymakers, and abolitionists alike further into the light of conscious action.

In the 1960s, the two men fell out in public. Williams was now the populist founding father of Trinidad, having fomented the Peoples National Movement with soapbox-style lectures on colonial history at Woodford Square in the capital. Clad in dark sunglasses, a black suit, and a prominent electric hearing aid, Williams now seemed like a prophet with X-ray vision into the inner workings of imperialism.

This reputation owed much to his legendary dismantlings in Capitalism and Slavery, and much to his old teacher. James had helped him rise, having edited the partys newspaper and served as something of an historical conscience. Author of that liberation manifesto The Black Jacobins, James had built a through line from the greatest uprising of the colonial West Indies to the independence movements now sweeping through the 1950s. He gave weight and precedent to the new struggle. But in time James decided the party excluded hundreds of thousands of Trinidadians of East Indian descent and pursued a timid economic program. With the aim of uniting Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian workers, he quit, and when he started his rival Workers and Farmers Party, Williams placed him under house arrest.

They never reconciled, and both men died in the 1980s. Their political clash cut short one of the great intellectual partnerships in Caribbean history.

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CLR James, Eric Williams, and the End of Slavery in the Caribbean - Jacobin magazine

When he was first elected in 2013, Kenyas President Uhuru Kenyatta, along with his running mate, William Ruto,was awaiting prosecutionat the International Criminal Court. They had been indicted for crimes against humanity in relation to the post-election violence that rocked Kenya following the December 2007 elections. Once in power, the duo set about an ultimately successful campaign using the resources of the state to intimidate witnesses and to frustrate the court into dropping the charges against them.

Now in the final year of his final term, it appears Kenyattaplans to end histenure the same wayhe started it:withthe countrythrowing anothertantrumon the international arena and trying to bully another international court.

Just days before the International Court of Justice is due to deliver its judgment in a maritime border dispute filed by Somalia, the Kenyan foreign ministryannouncedthe country was withdrawing its recognition of the Courts compulsory jurisdiction declaring it would no longer be subjected to an international court or tribunal without its express consent. In doing so, Kenya becomes one of a number of UN member states, including the US, that have withdrawn from the ICJ.

The withdrawal is the latest step in Kenyas drive to impose its will on Somalia and to prevent international adjudication of the dispute over a narrow 100,000sq km (38,200 sq miles) triangle of sea shelf that is thought to contain significant deposits of oil and gas. After five years of attempts by both to negotiate a compromise, Somalia eventually filed the case in 2014, occasioning a hissy fit from the Kenyatta administration.

In 2019, Kenya recalled its ambassador from Somaliaafter it claimed the Somali government auctioned off oil and gas in the disputed area at a conference in London, despite the fact that Kenya itself had sold mining licences to international companies in the triangle. The country also threatened to close camps housing hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees and to force them back across the border, warning that the patience of the people of Kenya is not infinite.It engaged in a series of actions, including barring Somali officials from entering the country and stopping direct flights from Mogadishu to Nairobi in an effort to arm-twist Somalia into withdrawing the case.

Meanwhile, at the court itself, things have not been going well for Kenya, which in 2017 lost its challenge to the ICJs authority to rule on the case on the basis that the two countries had previously agreed to settle the matter out of court. Earlier this year, Kenya refused to participate in the oral proceedings after the court rejected its application to delay the hearings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was after the ICJ had granted three previous requests for delays that held up the case for more than a year.

The desperate moves to stop the case going forward have been perhaps an indicator of theweaknessof Kenyas case. Clearly, Somalia seems the more confident of the two about its prospects at the court, which is expected to hand down a verdict on October 12.

Kenyatta seems to be dusting off his playbook from his battle with the ICC, where he made history as the first sitting head of state in the dock. At the time, Kenya was engaged in acynicaleffort to get the UN Security Council to defer the prosecutions,threatening to withdraw from the Rome Treatythat set up the court and trying to engineera mass walkout by African countries, accusing the court of race-hunting.

This was coupled with a campaign at home to find and silence prosecution witnesses and withhold cooperation with the court, which led to the collapse of the cases. The campaign against the ICC was peppered with half-truths about the nature of the prosecutions undertaken by the court (many of which had been initiated by African nations), unsubstantiated claims that Kenyan authorities were conducting investigations into Kenyatta and Ruto, and falsehoods about the Kenyan constitution not allowing the prosecution of the president, which it most clearly does.

Similar efforts have been launched against the ICJ. There have been claims by Kenya that the presence of one of the ICJs 11 justices, Abdulqawi Yusuf, a former president of the court and a Somali citizen, on the bench would necessarily bias the case. Further, an alarmist and patently false narrative has been propagated in the Kenyan press and on social media that a Somalia win would effectively render Kenya a landlocked country.

But perhaps most pernicious is the amoral, cynical and transactional direction in which Kenyatta has driven Kenyas relationship with international institutions. When facing opposition to his ICC machinations at home from organised civil society, at the UN General Assembly his administration was one of the few which opted to vote against a historic resolution recognising and protecting the role of human rights defenders.

At the African Union, not only has he undermined the consensus against impunity for public officials, but he has also cynically beenpushing the casefor Israel to be accorded observer status, despite its oppression of the Palestinians. And with the ICC and ICJ, he is exporting hiscontempt for domestic courtswhen they do not give him what he wants.

In the end, undermining international institutions comes at a price. The obstreperous performances at the AU, UN and The Hague fractured many relationships that have taken (and will take) years to mend. Further, flawed and limited as the international order may be, it does provide an important framework for holding states (and the elites who run them) to account and for resolving disputes between them without resort to a dictatorship of the strongest. By limiting state action, international institutions help to entrench international law and norms that can protect not just states, but, more importantly, vulnerable human beings within them.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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Kenyas cynical offensive against the ICJ - Al Jazeera English

New Delhi : Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut will meet Congress Leader Rahul Gandhi and discuss about Lakhimpur Violence. Plans afoot for joint opposition action on Lakhimpur. The Lakhimpur incident has shaken the world for many. Eight people have been killed.

Citing the detention of Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi and restriction on movement of political leaders to meet farmers, Raut said he would meet Rahul Gandhi later in the day as there was a need for a joint opposition against the oppression meted out by the government in UP.

Taking to Twitter, the MP wrote, #LakhimpurKheriViolence has shaken the nation,@priyankagandhi has been arrested UP govt, opposition leaders are being restricted from meeting farmers. There is need for joint opposition action against oppression by Government in UP. Meeting @RahulGandhi at 4.15 pm today. Jai Hind!

#LakhimpurKheriViolence has shaken the nation,@priyankagandhi has been arrested UP govt, opposition leaders are being restricted from meeting farmers. There is need for joint opposition action against oppression by Government in UP. Meeting @RahulGandhi at 4.15 pm today !

The Shiv Senas mouthpiece Saamana, which is edited by Raut, has also questioned Modis silence on the Lakhimpur incident. In an editorial, the Sena said Modi was a very sensitive and emotional person, while adding that it was surprising that he had not offered condolences to the families of the people killed.

It says, There have been many occasions where the Prime Minister was seen getting emotional over the issues of the poor. It is surprising that the sensitive Modi has not expressed condolences to families of the farmers who were crushed to death

Modi is on a visit to UP attend to participate in a three-day urban conclave event in Lucknow and other government programmes, including handing over keys of PMAY-U houses to 75,000 beneficiaries.

Meanwhile a Trinamool Congress delegation comprising MPs Kakoli Ghosh, Sushmita Sen, Dola Sen and Pratima Mandal is said to have met the families of the deceased farmers with Sushmita alleging that not only were farmers run over on Sunday leading to deaths of four, shots were also fired.

Congress leaders Priyanka Vadra and Deepender Hooda, meanwhile, remain in preventive detention at Sitapur guesthouse near Lakhimpur Kheri.

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Need for joint opposition action against oppression by Government in UP: Sanjay Raut | HW English - HW News English

The Myanmar peoples struggle against dictatorship has undergone a long journey since the February 1 military coup in the country. As an activist who has been fighting against fascism and standing for peace and the rights of oppressed minorities for 10 years, I believe we are now in a better place than ever before to come together as a nation to resist ethnic nationalism, destructive political polarisation and the militarys attempts to scare us into submission.

My own views on what an anti-fascist revolution in Myanmar could and should look like have also changed in the eight months since the coup.

During the Aung San Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracys (NLD) five-year rule between 2015-20, I devoted much of my activism to speaking out against their abandonment of democratic and human rights standards and failure to promote peace in areas of the country populated by ethnic nationalities, where conflict between ethnic armed organisations and the military has been ongoing for more than seven decades. I even boycotted the November 2020 general election, which delivered the NLD a second sweeping victory.

So when the coup happened, I initially was not sure where I should stand. While I was disturbed and angered by the militarys power grab, I did not want to put my support behind the NLD, ignoring its past treatment of minority communities, political opponents and activists. But I ultimately decided that the coup is more than a political dispute between the NLD and the military it represents the forceful suppression of the peoples will, and should be resisted.

I demonstrated from February 6, the day anti-coup protests began in Yangon, through the second week of March, when the junta added my name to its arrest warrant list for seditionand raided my house and office. My family and I narrowly escaped. Knowing that our lives were in danger, my wife and children fled the country, and I took shelter in the territory of an ethnic armed organisation.

Having been sued twice during the NLDs term in power for supporting ethnic struggles for self-determination and rights, I believed that I understood the perspectives of oppressed minorities in my country.

But staying in their villages, where I listened to peoples stories and learned about their daily realities and struggles, I realised how superficial my understanding of ethnic issues in Myanmar had been.

Although I had a conceptual awareness of what it is like to live as a small-scale farmer in an area affected by civil war where children commonly walk for hours to get to school, and it can take days to walk to the nearest clinic it was very different to witness first-hand the toll of war on communities.

Since the coup, fighting between the military and armed resistance groups across the country has displaced at least 230,000 civilians, many of whom fled military air strikes and heavy-weapon attacks. I have passed close to clashes and seen the remnants of landmine explosions. I have also visited displacement camps where people are struggling to meet their basic needs.

But none of this is new for ethnic minority communities in Myanmar. Indeed, Burmese soldiers have been tormenting these communities for decades looting and burning their villages, conducting arbitrary arrests and committing acts of sexual violence against them. My hosts told me that they rarely build strong houses, because they know that they may need to flee at any time.

Despite standing with oppressed ethnic minorities in my country for over a decade, I only realised the depth of their suffering,andmore clearlyunderstood why so many of them see armed resistance as their only option, after this experience.

As my own perspective has shifted, so, too, has the direction of the national protest movement.

In mainland cities where most people are from the ethnic Burman majority, protesters had initially focused on freeing Aung San Suu Kyi and elected officials, pressuring the military into accepting the results of the election, and convening parliament.

But as the military began terrorising people in urban areas, it opened peoples eyes to the rights abuses other ethnic groups have long been facing. As a result, protesters started broadening their ambitions.

Many from the Burman majority began apologising for their prior ignorance or denial of the militarys atrocities against non-Burman ethnic people, including the Rohingya, and calling for justice.

As ethnic armed organisations took a leading role in protecting fleeing dissidents and fighting against the regime, urban youth began trying to learn about ethnic political struggles too.

By the end of March, the leading protest groups were demanding an overhaul of the military-drafted constitution and the establishment of a federal democracy, in line with the calls ethnic nationalities have been making since long before the coup.

With few alternatives, the people have also started to increasingly see armed resistance as the only way to overthrow the junta, and have joined forces with ethnic armed organisations and formed new civilian defence forces and urban guerrilla movements.

On May 5, the National Unity Government (NUG), a body of elected lawmakers, activists and members of civil society in exile who are operating a government in opposition to the junta, announced that it had established a Peoples Defence Force (PDF) as a precursor to a federal army, bringing armed resistance groups under a central command.

And on September 7, the NUG declared a nationwide peoples defensive war against the military junta, calling on all citizens across the country to join in a necessary revolution for building a peaceful country and establishing a federal union.

Now, we face a critical juncture in our revolutionary journey, and I worry that the peoples strength and unity may diminish if we cannot continue to build trust and maintain communication between the predominantly Burman resistance groups and ethnic nationalities.

For the revolution to succeed, we must continue our efforts to come together over a shared vision that benefits not only the Burman majority, but also promotes the self-determination and rightsof other ethnic people within the country.

The NUG must do its utmost to engage withthe countrys diverse ethnic communitiesandplace non-Burmans in leading roles, and its PDF must join forces with ethnic armed organisations and sincerely commit to their political objectives.

It is also imperative that the NUG initiate a national apology process for the atrocities and inhumane treatment committed by successive governments towards minorities, including the Rohingya.

The majority must create an inclusive platform and collaborate with all ethnic people to build together a new federal democracybased on freedom, justice and equality.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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The coup united the people of Myanmar against oppression - Al Jazeera English

In recent months, the governments effort in ramping up the vaccination rate has been achieved with commendable success. The Malaysian government has then announced for the relaxation of SOPs after taking into account the positive development that more than 50 per cent of adult population in the country have been fully vaccinated. It is hoped that the unveiling of the relaxation of restrictions for fully vaccinated individuals can help to revitalize the business sector.

The governments relaxation of SOPs essentially provides differentiated treatment or privileges for the fully-vaccinated people to go to the malls, enjoy restaurant dine-ins and attend prayers at houses of worship. Some retail operators have allowed only fully vaccinated people to enter their premises to kick-start the retail industry. Such policies may be effective in persuading at least some unvaccinated people to get the jabs, but they also attracted criticism and controversies, including potential law suits against the government for discrimination.

Promoting Social Responsibility

While vaccination is strongly encouraged in Malaysia, it remains voluntary. Some are ineligible for vaccination due to medical reason while some may see vaccination as a form of oppression. The carrot and stick approach may not be able to convince everyone to get vaccinated.

Faced with the pandemic which has caused economic sectors to remain stagnant for almost two years, the governments hands are tied and the only option left is to treat the vaccinated and unvaccinated differently to contain the spread of Covid-19. Many countries, including Malaysia, have introduced forms of Covid-19 vaccination certificates or vaccine passports which allow the vaccinated group more freedom and work opportunities than unvaccinated people. In the future, vaccination and jobs may even go hand in hand, especially for workplaces which are frequently inflicted with Covid-19 infections due to workers not taking the jabs. Employers, however, will need to be careful not to discriminate against unvaccinated workers or they risk industrial relation claims.

The differentiation in policies for the vaccinated and unvaccinated is necessary from the public health standpoint as the nation marches towards a sense of normality. The intention is not to discriminate or restrict personal freedom but to promote social responsibility to protect the unvaccinated people, including children.

From a public health perspective, policies which only provide freedom of movement for the vaccinated would be beneficial because it is undeniable that government has the obligation to protect lives. Any interference with personal freedom or rights by the government must be in accordance with the law. In such dire Covid-19 circumstances, the preferential treatment provided under such policies can be justified and should be considered lawful.

The freedom to travel, work, socialize and engage in social activities will only be increasingly determined by ones Covid-19 vaccination status.

Differentiated for the Greater Good?

In Malaysia, as the economic sectors are slowly opening up again, life for the vaccinated will slowly return to some level of normalcy. However, it remains unclear how life would play out for the unvaccinated in a long run. The divide between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is likely to become even deeper without a comprehensive policy in place.

It may be interesting to probe into the situation in Singapore. According to Singapores Covid-19 Phase Advisory published on 19 August 2021, mask-off services such as massage parlours, spas and saunas are only allowed for fully vaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are not allowed to dine in at food and beverage establishments unless they have a negative pre-event Covid-19 result from an approved test provider.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. The government needs to curtail some personal freedom and rights in order to save lives and the economy. Some may have succumbed to the differentiated policies and gave up on the primacy of personal choice so they could resume activities like dining out and social gathering. Though many individuals are still unhappy about the trend toward differentiating between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, it will not change the fact that aspects of daily life will only be increasingly difficult for people who are not vaccinated against Covid-19. Having said that, for those who are not vaccinated for medical reasons, the government should try to facilitate their inclusion because they may not be given access to social activities so long as the virus remains prevalent.

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Privileges for those Fully-Vaccinated in Malaysia - Is this a form of Discrimination? - Lexology

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Grenville Phillips II

Dear unvaxxed Barbadians:

Congratulations. You have been selected for persecution. Please do not be alarmed. From the historical record, every generation had a set of persons who experienced oppression. It is simply your time.

Please do not blame yourself you did nothing wrong.Whenever politicians mess up, they look for a group to blame to divert attention from their mistakes. The Government rejected good advice, resulting in our low economic growth, and a record number of COVID-19 cases. You, the unvaxxed, are simply a convenient target.

The division is completeHistorically, politicians targeted persons with different ethnicities, religions, and political views. It would normally take years to coach political supporters to oppress the targeted group. The rate at which the current oppression is being achieved is alarming. The Governments massive public relations efforts cannot explain this unprecedented rapidity.We are now dangerously divided into the vaxxed and the unvaxxed. People of all ethnicities, religions, ages, sexes and political views comprise both groups. The main thing that separates the two groups, is the threshold of knowledge required before a critical decision is made.

Two types questionsTwo types of questions have been asked by Barbadians.The first type was in the category of, will it hurt?. The Governments public relations response was, Are you afraid of a little juck? That answer was sufficient to convince many Barbadians to be injected.

The second type was, is it safe? The Governments public relations response was to claim that the mRNA and DNA type injections were the same as what Barbadians were given as children, and willingly took as adults. Tragically, that answer was the lie that deceived many into getting injected.

The truth and the lieThe truth is that the mRNA and DNA injections are new technology. The rapid spread of COVID-19 meant that the normal long-term clinical trials, which are necessary to identify long-term side effects, were never done.

The injections were approved for emergency use only. That is completely understandable.The Governments responsibility was to simply tell the public the truth. Each person could then decide whether they wanted to risk the known consequences of getting COVID-19, or the unknown consequences of taking the injections. There is no deception with that approach.

Radical and radicalsThe secret agreement with Radical Investments Ltd, which even the Minister of Health and Wellness claimed that he did not know, is alarming. Radical claims that it was a US$10M scam, while the alleged scammers claim otherwise.

What the Government appears to have confirmed, is an agreement to pay Radical US$24 for each injection. Do these injections not cost US$3 each? The Government keeps reminding Barbadians that procuring injections is like the wild west an unregulated environment where we must go outside of normal channels.

All radicals embrace an end-justifies-the-means philosophy.That is a reckless philosophy, where the normal collateral damage is safety.

More scrutiny or lessGiven the Radical fiasco, is it not entirely reasonable to request at least basic scrutiny on the manufacturing quality of the injections? This is the great divide. Expectedly, the unvaxxed say yes.

Interestingly, the vaxxed generally say no.I wrote an open letter to Mr David Ellis, requesting the basis on which the imported injections were declared safe. If they came through COVAX, then COVAX manages a quality inspection of the manufacturing facilities.

Dumping garbageIf they did not come through COVAX, then there are independent international agencies that typically certify such manufacturing plants. Manufacturing plants that fail to meet basic quality standards may, in this wild west environment, off-load their sub-standard products on countries that do not know any better.

I simply asked whether the Sinopharm injections Barbados obtained, came through COVAX. If they did not, I asked whether the Government received the critical quality certificate from the manufacturing facility. It seems that no one thought to verify whether the manufactured injections were safe and they have the gall to talk about hesitancy.

Give me honesty, or give me . . .If they would give me an honest answer, then I would probably take the traditionally developed Sinopharm. I think that it has significantly lower safety risks than the mRNA and DNA types. So why is the Government withholding that critical information that can immediately remove my hesitancy?

The Governments public relations response to COVID-19 never made any logical sense to me. But this last insult forced me to analyse evidence that was hiding in plain view. Now, for the first time, everything makes perfect sense.

To be continued next week in Part 2.

Grenville Phillips II is a Chartered Structural Engineer. He can be reached at [emailprotected]

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#BTColumn Open letter to the unvaxxed (Part 1) - Barbados Today

In extreme circumstances like a pandemic, governments often introduce regulations that promise a better quality of life for their citizens. The story of Yeonmi Parka North Korean defectorprovides great insight into the concepts of freedom and oppression by governments.

Through her book and interviews, Park describes the vast differences between North Korean and Western societies.

The supreme leader Kim Jong-Un is portrayed as a god and the citizens of North Korea are fed propaganda in limited vocabulary, which narrows their thought process. For example, Park describes not knowing the concept of romantic love since love in North Korea was only to be directed to Kim Jong-Un.

Parallels can be drawn to George Orwells 1984, and the concept of newspeak, a condensed vocabulary that restricted thought

This demonstrates how oppressed people in North Korea are, compared to Canada, where mask mandates indoors are considered a form of oppression by some.

Some people are tired of COVID-19 and willing to give up certain freedoms, while others disapprove and question their governments actions. While both perspectives are valid, we forget the choice between the two is a privilege. Manylike Park formerlydon't have the freedom to express their opinions or choose how they live.

We should exercise our freedom of speech to question harsher actions taken by the government. We should exercise our ability to question authority. For example, vaccine passports are being pushed on the Canadian public, but we should be wary of these, considering the government's history with sensitive data.

A recent story reported that theCanadian military surveying social media to collect data and test propaganda without informed consent during the pandemic. If the military sees COVID as an opportunity to test propaganda, citizens cant be certain the new regulations arent similar experiments.

Vaccine mandates can also cause an unnecessary divide. In the US,the majority of unvaccinated persons are people of colour due to hesitancy and lack of easy access. Consequently, we can ask if its moral to only permit vaccinated people at certain venues, or force private businesses to follow such regulations.

Yeonmi Park describes how it only took three generations for North Korea to become a dictatorship. Hence, we should be skeptical of government regulations, especially when it invades our right to privacy.

While we cant say who is right or wrong, we must practice critical thinking in our everyday lives, so we dont end up in a society where we blindly follow people in power.

Dharmayu is a second-year Health Sciences student and The Journals Graphics Editor.

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To avoid the fate of North Korea, we must learn to be critical of our own government - Queen's Journal

For the past five years there has been conflict in the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, with no solution or end in sight. There have been political, social and cultural differences and antagonisms for several decades. But the current conflict began in 2016 when lawyers and teachers started protesting over the increasing use of French in the legal and educational systems in these regions, known as Anglophone Cameroon.

The government of Cameroons poor handling of the crisis contributed to its escalation into an armed conflict. Thousands have been killed, are living in the bush, or have fled to other parts of the country (becoming internally displaced persons) or in neighbouring countries as refugees. The warring parties did not heed the UN secretary generals call for a global ceasefire to focus on ending the conflict in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, the conflict continues to have a negative impact on all aspects of life, particularly the livelihoods and health of citizens in the battleground regions of the north-west and south-west. Access to already inadequate health services has been reduced. More insights about how the conflict is affecting the health of citizens are needed to understand the situation and propose solutions.

We set out to understand how the conflict was affecting the key determinants of health. These include poverty, particularly in contexts where there is no universal healthcare and where the cost of living continues to rise.

As is the case in other conflict and war situations, it was difficult to collect public data. So we examined tweets to understand what topics were being discussed.

In 2019, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in the country was 21.4 million out of a population of around 27 million people. Data for phone usage is expensive, and internet access is not reliable. Hootsuite, a social media management platform, reported that approximately 23% of the population 6.21 million people were internet users. And of these, 4.3 million were active on social media platforms.

This report estimated that there were fewer than 125,000 Twitter users in the country. Nevertheless, we believe examining the use of Twitter can provide insights about the crisis because social media can provide short descriptions of the issues that people are facing.

Our use of Twitter to gather information isnt novel. Scholars are increasingly using social media to collect data about conflicts. But we have not found many studies exploring health and the social determinants of health using this approach.

We used the descriptions shared on Twitter to provide a more visible and robust picture of health related issues. This approach can help identify health challenges and how theyre affecting citizens.

We collected and analysed 1,868 tweets posted from 1 October 2016, the month when the conflict began, to 1 September 2019 to understand what people were discussing. The tweets were from everyday citizens, the government, news outlets and nongovernmental organisations that were communicating with people in Cameroon and abroad to draw attention to the effects of the crisis on citizens and, in some cases, what actions had been taken by the government.

Our focus was on the social determinants of health, often used to understand public health issues. These are the non-medical factors that influence the health of people. They include:

policies and systems such as social, economic, employment, education and health policies and systems

social attitudes and practices related to inclusion and discrimination

factors influencing daily life in other ways such as housing, food, and cultural policies and practices.

Our findings showed that Twitter was being used to share information and to call for action. Analysis of tweets revealed eight distinct themes:

neglect from government related to health

education

loss of employment

increased poverty

housing and homelessness

social exclusion and oppression

women and gender inequality

health services.

People felt neglected by the government. There were negative tweets and criticisms of the governments neglect of its citizens and lack of support during the crisis.

Tweets also referred to failures in the education system. Most schools in the north-west and south-west regions have remained closed for years with teachers and students staying at home due to insecurity. Several tweets called for schools to reopen.

Tweets also referred to a deterioration in work opportunities. Some businesses were closed, resulting in job losses for thousands of people. Many who were still employed either went for several months without pay or received salary cuts.

There was also evidence of poverty increasing because of the conflict. Despite these impacts, some tweets reported that the government was discouraging humanitarian support.

Thousands of people lost their homes and were displaced. Several villages were either burned down or seized by the military or non-state armed groups. Hundreds of thousands of people were internally displaced within Cameroon or fled to neighbouring countries as refugees.

People experienced social exclusion and oppression. There were tweets about the lack of human rights and the prevention of freedom of expression. Childrens rights were violated, with references made to child trafficking, slavery and a decrease in basic education.

Women and girls were very vulnerable. Sexual violence and rape increased. Some pregnant women were forced to give birth in unsanitary conditions with minimal supplies.

Health services were difficult to access. The fighting resulted in the destruction of some hospitals and clinics. Some nongovernmental organisations provided services to the vulnerable population.

Our findings highlight two important points. The first is the need to develop and implement effective systems to collect data in regions and circumstances where conventional methods of data collection are limited.

The second is the various inequities that are affecting the citizens of Cameroon amid the ongoing political conflict.

Using Twitter to collect data demonstrates the importance of identifying new ways to actively explore the social determinants of health in understudied regions and situations.

In addition, our results have highlighted several disparities that have resulted from, or have been exacerbated by, the consequences of the conflict that continues to negatively impact the citizens of Cameroon.

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We turned to Twitter to understand conditions on the ground in Cameroon - The Conversation Africa

by Brian Hioe:EnglishPhoto Credit: Brian Hioe

GROUPS RALLIED today in front of the legislature to call attention to the Chinese governments authoritarianism and to call on the Taiwanese government to take stronger action for Hongkongers in need of assistance. The rally took place today because October 1st is Chinese National Day.

The rally began at 7 PM, with a stage set up in front of the Legislative Yuans Qunxian Building, as well as a number of tents. Temperature checks and registration took place for members of the public to enter the area where the rally was taking place, with a crowd limit of 300 enforced. Under current COVID-19 regulations set by the government, only outdoor events of under 300 participants are allowed. Similarly, there were some concerns about security expressed by organizers, in light of attacks on Hongkongers that have taken place in Taiwan, such as paint being thrown at singer Denise Ho during a visit to Taiwan or the Aegis restaurant set up to help Hongkongers having chicken feces thrown at staff. The event was also live streamed for those unable to make it in person.

Among the groups that jointly organized the rally were the Hong Kong Outlanders and Taiwan Hong Kong Association, groups resisting Hongkongers in Taiwan. The Economic Democracy Union, Taiwan Association for Human Rights, Covenants Watch, Human Rights Network for Tibet and Taiwan, Students for a Free Tibet, Taiwan Labor Front, Taiwan Forever Association, and Taiwan New Constitution Foundation were among the other participants. These groups include mainstays of Taiwanese civil society, as well as groups representing Tibetans in Taiwan.

Around 200 were in attendance, with more participants arriving around half an hour after the rally began. Though as part of COVID-19 regulations, participants were also asked avoid coming in full gearreferring to full protest gear, as used in Hong Kong protests to defend against tear gasa group of participants arrived wearing black clothing, masks including V for Vendetta masks, and carrying Hong Kong independence banners.

Speakers from Taiwanese human rights organizations called on the Taiwanese government to provide more concrete measures to assist Hongkongers, seeing as while the Taiwanese government vets Hong Kong protests that apply for asylum, this is in many respects not enough. More long-term measures to assist Hongkongers are still lacking, such as with regards to the fact that Hongkongers have difficulty renting apartments or applying for cell phone contracts without residence IDs, and it remains opaque as to the paths for Hongkongers to obtain residence in Taiwan.

Otherwise, speakers pointed to Chinas efforts to infringe upon media freedoms in Taiwan through United Front tactics, the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation through online platforms, and by financially influencing Taiwanese media outlets. One of the protest demands was also that the 2022 Beijing Olympics not take place, given Chinas human rights violations against Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and other places.

Tibetan activist Tashi Tsering, who lives in Taiwan, carried a Tibetan flag during the rally. In a speech, Tsering touched on his experience of exile as a second-generation Tibetan born in India, and drew comparison to the situation facing Hongkongers. Similarly, Tsering spoke of attempts by the Chinese government to extinguish Tibetan culture and religion.

Burmese activist Koko Thu, who currently resides in Taiwan, and was a participant in the Burmese democracy movement in 1988 was another speaker. In comments, he discussed the shared struggle for democracy internationally, giving the event something of a Milk Tea Alliance framing.

Indigenous singer-songwriter Panai also performed, singing a song that was written by her then-sixteen-year-old daughter in 2016 or 2017. Panai commented that many of the issues brought up by speakers returned to the nation-state and that, while Taiwan may view itself as a progressive nation, issues such as those faced by Indigenous regarding sovereignty issues that it is not necessarily so. Panai also sang Glory to Hong Kong, one of the best-known songs to emerge from the 2019 Hong Kong protests and sometimes referred to as the national anthem of a future Hong Kong, in Cantonese.

A number of politicians, too, were present. This included the cohort of Taipei city councilors that won office in 2018 with backgrounds in post-Sunflower Movement activism, Lin Ying-meng, Meredith Huang, Sabrina Lim, and Miao Poya, who brought up recent events such as the removal of the ROC flag from the AIDA World Championship because of complaints from China, and criticized newly elected KMT chair Eric Chu for a letter to Chinese president Xi Jinping after his election victory in which he promised to maintain the 1992 Consensus. Liao Yu-hsien of the NPP was also present, speaking in Taiwanese Hokkien.

Legislators that spoke at the event included Chen Jiau-hua of the NPP, independent Freddy Lim, and Hung Sun-han of the DPP. Taiwan Statebuilding Party chair Shinichi Chen spoke by video, with much of the party in Taichung to prepare for the recall vote against its legislator Chen Po-wei. Lim was particularly emphatic in calling for support for Hongkongers, stating that this would make Taiwan stronger, and that Taiwan should seek to assist others much as how it had itself been assisted.

The event closed with a speech by academic Wu Rwei-ren. Wu called on the crowd to understand history of Chinese oppression of ethnic minorities and its attempts to carry out settler colonialism. To this extent, Wu discussed the larger history of actions by the Chinese Communist Party since the establishment of the PRC, and criticized the social divide between urban and rural residents it maintains. As such, Wu directly addressed leftists the world that idealize China, commenting that China was the real revolution betrayed.

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Rally in Support of Hongkongers, Other Groups Facing Oppression from China Held to Mark Chinese National Day - New Bloom Magazine

Late in the summer of 2001, a fourteen-year-old named Gigi Ibrahim left her home in Cairo with her father and sister to start a new life in the United States. They moved in with family members in Anaheim, California, and Ibrahim enrolled as a freshman at a nearby Catholic school. She was in her second week of classes when a group of mostly Saudi hijackers committed the 9/11 attacks, provoking a national spasm of grief and vengeance that would mark Ibrahims introduction to life as an American adolescent.

The day after the towers fell, stern F.B.I. agents upended the Ibrahims house while the family watched in dread. Terrorist tip lines were flooded with calls that week from jittery Americans. Among the anxious callers were the familys neighbors, who, the agents explained, were concerned that a U-Haul had recently been parked outside their house, and that Ibrahims uncle sometimes walked up and down the block late at night (morning in Cairo), carrying on animated phone conversations in Arabic.

At school, where she was the only Muslim in her class, Ibrahim was asked to stage a schoolwide presentation to explain Islam. Before that I was just Egyptian, but then I became the Muslim-Egyptian girl. And my family is not even very religious, she said. Thats when I realized: my life is going to be different just because of who I am.

Tensions only increased, she said, as politicians began to discuss the coming war in Afghanistan as a righteous campaign to stop medieval-minded Muslims from oppressing millions of women. The war against the Taliban would not be pure retributionthe invasion was also extolled as a liberation. The rhetoric was, like, These Muslims beat women and kill them. Were going to go liberate them, take off their burqas, take off their hijabs, Ibrahim said. This is where this anti-hijab sentiment started.

The irony, for Ibrahim, was that the speeches and headlines about rescuing Muslim women in Afghanistan fed the suspicion and slights that she, a Muslim-American teen-ager, had to bear at home.

I confess that I have always chafed at American talk about womens rights in Afghanistan, finding it, even when well-intentioned, self-congratulatory, especially in the context of a military invasion. But all the effort and money spent after 9/11 did create a generational widening of possibilities for Afghan girls and women. Girls schools opened to eager pupils. A sweeping law criminalized violence against women. A network of shelters allowed women to escape domestic tormentors, despite the objections of religious conservatives, who derided the shelters as brothels and tried to bring them under government control.

The gains made were serious and significant, Heather Barr, of the Womens Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, who has worked on Afghanistan since 2007 and lived in the country for six years, said. It may all be swept away now, but a couple months ago I couldve said to you that Afghan women have achieved genuine progress.

Barr was critical of U.S. shortcomings but said the picture was complicated. The U.S. government spent liberally on womens rights, she said, but diplomats were reluctant to devote political capital to the difficult task of pressuring men in the Afghan government to support womens advancement. And too often, she said, the deeds of newfound allies were swept under the rug. With one hand youre writing a large, generous check, and with the other youre shaking hands with war criminals whose crimes include violence against women, she said.

And yet, as a generation of girls made their way through school, as women found jobs in offices that had once been male-only, there spreadtenuously and unevenly, but undeniablya sense of possibility. The question now is whether, given how abruptly those opportunities were yanked away, they constituted another form of cruelty.

Did we believe in it? Yes, we did, Hosna Jalil, the first woman appointed to a high rank in the Afghan Interior Ministry, said. I believed my presence in the Afghan government was hugely because of the presence of the international community. Otherwise, I wouldve been kicked out the next day.

Its an embarrassment to say the international community is forcing my government to accept me, she added. But, yes, it mattered.

Jalil was nine when the United States invaded Afghanistan. Her mother, a doctor, quickly realized that the Talibans ouster might mean that her daughter could go to school. Until then, Jalil had been enrolled in furtive tutoring under the supervision of an educated neighbor; she was coached to hide her notebook on the streets and to lie if confronted by the Taliban. Another tutor, who taught her English, was eventually arrested for ties to the Taliban; the basement of the house where the course was held was revealed to be a warehouse for weapons. Jalil still finds those revelations hard to grasp; he was her teacher, and he was kind to her.

Having been a rising star in a government that looks, in light of its speedy collapse, like a stage set, Jalil now lives in Washington, D.C., and watches Afghanistan from a distance, bitterly reassessing the behavior of everyone involved. Shes watched as the Taliban has settled into powerbeating female protesters, abolishing the womens-affairs ministry, and summoning boys, but not girls, back to secondary school. Jalil said shes pained not only for Afghan women but for the Afghan men who backed their struggle. I couldve grown up with burqa, with the life style under the Taliban regime, and I wouldnt have had any expectations, she said. To give someone a sweet and then take it back, its very painful. For all these little girls, millions of people, to take it backits very painful.

The central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women, President George W. Bush said in 2001. First Lady Laura Bush used the same words that year in an impassioned radio address, and described the Taliban threatening to pull out womens fingernails for wearing nail polish.

But Bush could never credibly claim to be waging war on behalf of oppressed women, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, a human-rights group, told me. The United States had already shown itself willing to fight for womens rights where we have enemy status and be silent about womens rights where we are friendly, Whitson said.

Despite all the talk of Afghan women, Bush had far less to say against Saudi Arabia, a country that arguably rivalled Afghanistan both in responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and in the repression of women. The kingdom had been home to Osama bin Laden, as well as fifteen of the nineteen hijackers. Saudi-funded mosques in countries around the world have long been accused of spreading extremist ideologies. Saudi officials have strenuously denied any involvement in 9/11 and have repudiated bin Laden, who was forced into exile, but leaked and declassified U.S. documents have fuelled speculation about financial and logistical links between Al Qaeda, the hijackers, and people in or around the Saudi government.

Meanwhile, Saudi women lacked custody and equal inheritance rights, and couldnt vote or drive a car. Male guardians dictated whether they could study abroad, get a job, travel, or even leave the house. Men had the de-facto right to beat or rape their wives and a legal entitlement to file complaints of disobedience against female family members.

Loujain al-Hathloul was among the activists who fought tirelessly for womens freedom. In 2018, Hathloulwhod already been detained in the United Arab Emirates, forced back to Saudi Arabia, and banned from travelwas among roughly a dozen of the kingdoms most prominent womens-rights advocates who were imprisoned.

The following month, Mohammed bin Salman, the young crown prince, granted women the right to drive. The announcement was a public-relations coup for bin Salman, garnering glowing writeups around the world. But the arrests made it look like a cynical double action: make a show of letting women drive, but imprison the women who asked for this reform.

American Presidents have long shielded and supported Saudi Arabia, eager to foster Saudi military coperation and maintain access to oil, but Donald Trump was unusually effusive and undemanding. Bin Salman is a friend of mine, a man who has really done things, Trump said in 2019. Especially what youve done for women... its like a revolution in a very positive way.

That same year, according to Hathlouls family, the Saudi government offered her a choice. She could walk free, but only if she appeared in a video denying that shed been tortured. Hathloul refused. Her family members say she has been sexually harassed, tortured, and held in solitary confinement. (The Saudi government has denied the allegations of torture and disputed the familys account of the offer to release Hathloul.)

Lina al-Hathloul, Loujains sister, believes that the Trump Administration bears responsibility for her sisters detention. Pressure from the United States could have curbed bin Salmans crackdowns, she said; instead, he was coddled. They gave him a carte blanche, she said. He could do anything. Among those things was the imprisonment of Loujain.

Just after Joe Bidens election, Hathloul was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison, under a counterterrorism law. Then, after Bidens Inauguration, she was released, with restrictions including a travel ban and a prohibition against talking to journalists. The family now hopes that the United States will pressure Saudi Arabia into abandoning the charges. Lina al-Hathloul feels that the Biden Administration has a moral obligation to intervene.

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The Inconsistency of American Feminism in the Muslim World - The New Yorker