Israeli aggression in Gaza has led to a ripple effect on Iraqi politics. The past year’s growth in proxy aggression between Iran and the US has unearthed sentiments in Iraq critical of both powers. Amidst the increasing influence of Iran-backed political and military forces in the region, citizens express heightened aversion to American policies. Israeli aggression in Gaza has led to a ripple effect on Iraqi politics. The past year’s growth in proxy aggression between Iran and the US has unearthed sentiments in Iraq critical of both powers. Amidst the increasing influence of Iran-backed political and military forces in the region, citizens express heightened aversion to American policies. Dia al-Azzawi Jenin (2002) Acrylic on paper Artist Iraq AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 26 Oct 2024 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Occupation and Osmosis In May 2024, a homemade bomb was lobbed into a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant in Baghdad. The next day, masked men stormed another KFC, trashing the American fast-food chain due to its perceived support for Israel. For months before this, mortars targeted the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, and American troops in the region faced over 160 attacks following October 7, 2023. And since that same date, over hundreds of miles of Iraqi roadways, enormous billboards have been erected featuring U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu splattered with blood. They are captioned: “Desecrators of Allah’s People.” In Iraq, disdain for anything associated with the U.S. is not new. But from recent attacks on Baghdad’s KFCs to the U.S. embassy, a new motivating factor seems to have emerged: the situation in the Gaza Strip , which has exacerbated tensions and changed regional dynamics. Gaza is hundreds of miles from Baghdad, but thanks to the war’s atrocities made visible by the internet, many Iraqis are outraged ; at the Israeli government for committing them, but also at the U.S. government for arming and funding them. “The Gaza war is having a significant impact on Iraqi politics,” says Lahib Higel, the Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Iraq. Higel notes that before Israel's war on Gaza, there had been a year-long truce during which Iran-backed militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), agreed to stop attacking U.S. bases in Iraq to support the stabilization of the newly established Iraqi government. However, the truce was broken because of America's unconditional support for Israel, which led to a series of militia attacks against the U.S. military across Iraq. “The Gaza war was the ignition [of the attacks]. But these Iran-backed groups also used the escalation to revive the pressure on the Iraqi government to expedite a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.” Experts like Higel argue that the tiny Gaza Strip has become geopolitical tannerite. After a rocket attack against the American embassy earlier this year, a PMF leader issued a statement claiming that his militias wouldn’t stop as long as “Zionist crimes continue in Gaza and the American occupation continues in Iraq.” “My grandfather hated Iran. My father hates America. I hate them both,” says Ali, our 21-year-old Iraqi taxi driver, as he races down Route Irish at breakneck speed. Route Irish is the notorious road connecting Baghdad International Airport with the city, a route once laced with crude explosives and infested with heavily-armed insurgents waiting to ambush coalition forces. But today it’s mostly quiet—except for Ali’s rickety cab, which blares Iraqi rap while he scrolls through TikTok. “There’s a lot of talk these days about Iran or America and which country Iraq will align itself with,” he explains. “I really don’t want either. America wants our oil and resources, and Iran just wants us as a puppet. I say fuck them both. We Iraqis want to build this country for us . Not for the Iranians or the Americans. But then again, if I had to choose, I would choose Iran. The Americans destroyed my country, and now they’re helping Netanyahu destroy Palestine.” It is dusk, and the sun slips away beneath the murky brown haze hanging over downtown Baghdad. “See those? Get used to them. They’re everywhere,” Ali points out the dozens of murals and billboards along Route Irish depicting solemn portraits of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, assassinated right there on Route Irish by a 2020 Donald Trump-issued drone strike, captioned, “The Blood of Our Martyrs Will Not Be Forgotten.” “Iran and America both want control over my country,” Ali glances at another Soleimani mural outside the cab, “but Iran already has it.” The most obvious example of Iranian influence are the many armed Shia militias, backed by Tehran, which roam Iraq under the umbrella of PMF. Furious over U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the PMF has responded with a litany of attacks against the Americans. However, when Iran ordered the PMF to disengage, the militias obeyed. According to Slovenian International Relations expert Dr. Primož Šterbenc, this is largely because Iran isn’t interested in a wider war with Israel and the U.S., thus explaining why it ordered the PMF to stand down—for now. Nonetheless, despite hesitation on the part of the Biden administration amidst hawkish cries for retaliation against Iran, the U.S. Navy is deploying warships to deter Iran in case of war. Šterbenc argues that, when it comes to the scenario of wider conflict between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, “the Iraqi Shia militias themselves are aware…they would end up being militarily greatly weakened. However, the situation will still remain unstable as long as Israel's ultra-brutal military operation against Gaza continues, because the Iraqi militias will want to show their solidarity with Gaza through military actions.” Earlier this month Iran fired 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel. And since then, Iran-linked militias in Iraq have been ramping up action against Israel as well, springing roughly 40 attacks — consisting of an assortment of missiles, drones and rockets — in the past two weeks. Iran's influence, Šterbenc explains, has been very visible in recent months through Tehran’s ability to curb attacks by Shia militias on American targets in Iraq. On January 28 this year, when a Kata’ib Hezbollah drone—a militia part of the PMF— killed three American soldiers at the Tower 22 base in Jordan, Ismail Al Kani, the commander of Iran's Al Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, quickly arrived in Baghdad and pressured Kataib Hezbollah to announce a suspension of its attacks on American targets. The PMF didn’t officially exist before 2014, back when it was nothing more than a ragtag umbrella group of various Shia militias. It was not particularly organized, nor very influential. Then came the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which began seizing huge chunks of land it was declaring as part of its new Islamic caliphate. The Obama administration was reluctant to get tangled up in Iraq so soon after it had withdrawn all American troops in 2011. As officials deliberated in Washington, and after ISIS seized the city of Mosul, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa , calling for Iraqis to join together, take up arms and fight ISIS to save their country. Shia militias united to wage war against the Sunni jihadists, and thus, the PMF was formed. “I thought ISIS would take Baghdad,” says Sawada al-Nassif, a Baghdad resident and mother of four. “I was telling my husband we should leave the country, go to Jordan. But then the PMF started fighting ISIS and won back our country.” From The Land of [Sad] Oranges, 1973, by Dia al-Azzawi, inspired by the works of Ghassan Kanafani Today, the PMF is an auxiliary to the official Iraqi military; its fighters are paid equal salaries and benefits to military personnel and it is widely considered Iraq’s second army. Now, the PMF is also a leading political force after winning 101 out of 285 provincial seats in Iraq’s December 2023 elections. Because Sunnis are minorities in Iraq, and as the predominantly Shia PMF gain a stronger foothold in Iraqi politics, some Sunnis aren’t too happy. “Under Saddam (Hussein), we Sunnis at least held more political power than (Shias),” said Omar al-Dulaimi, a Sunni resident of Fallujah. “Now we are losing influence in government while still being the minority. I don’t like it.” With ISIS now driven into dormancy, the PMF is focused on its political aspirations. Among those is to see the expulsion of U.S. troops from Iraq. The American military has lingered in Iraq since ISIS roared back to life in 2014—and it remains at the invitation of the government in Baghdad. Higel states that the Gaza war has not developed in Washington's favor in Iraq, however, putting tremendous pressure on the government from the PMF to end the American presence in Baghdad. Experts, including Higel, agree that the PMF operates as an extension of the Iraqi state. In 2016, the government designated the PMF as an ‘independent military formation' within the Iraqi armed forces. For Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, it's a political tightrope act: balancing his government's relations with the United States, and the PMF, some of whose militias have been designated as terrorist groups by the U.S.A. “You’re American,” says Ahmed, an Iraqi friend of mine, as we sipped tea on Baghdad’s crowded Mutanabbi Street. “I know you’re American. You know you’re American. Nobody else should know you’re American.” Ahmed quietly advised me to keep my nationality under wraps. But why? Because of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003? Ahmed said no. “Your country has kept Israel’s genocide alive,” he said. “Normal people here won’t hold that against you specifically. But the militias outside Baghdad, well, it’s possible they might.” Ahmed also reminded me that ISIS had launched several small attacks in the last week, and outside Baghdad, I may be at a higher risk. But when myself and my European colleague, at a PMF-run checkpoint outside Baghdad, encounter one of these militias ourselves, things go differently than how Ahmed had prophesied. “You are American?” asks a bearded PMF militant with an assault rifle, as he studies the passport I hand him through a cab window. I nod and admit that I am. He looks me up and down, before asking if I work for the government. No, I answer. “Good,” he nods. “I don’t like your government.” In the Iraqi city of Najaf, a local scholar, Rajab al-Hasen, stands on the side of the road and explains the recently-erected signage. One image features an expressionless face of President Biden, flecked with fake blood, peering down at rubble-strewn Gaza. About twenty meters down the road from that sign is another one, featuring not Biden, but Netanyahu. “This sort of imagery and messaging is all over Iraq, from north to south,” al-Hasen explains. “None of it was here before Israel began its genocide in Gaza. That war has really changed things around here.” Even at the height of Iraq’s civil war and its bloody sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis over a decade ago, a shared disdain for Israeli politics remained a uniting belief. “We are familiar with war and occupation,” says activist Naseera el-Sham. “Iraqis can empathize with Syrians, Yemenis, Afghans, but most of all Palestinians.” Iraqi society’s aversion to Israel is not a belief inherited from Iran. In 1948, 1967 and again in 1973, Iraq partook in wars against Israel. Even after the 2003 regime change which ousted Saddam Hussein from power, Iraq’s official position on the state of Israel didn’t change. Natalia Reinharz, an Israeli lecturer on foreign policy based in Jerusalem, says that Gaza hasn’t shifted what has been Iraq’s mainstream position on Israel. What it has done, she argues, has given Iran an in. “The United States has stubbornly stood by Netanyahu’s side for a year of barbaric war,” Reinharz says. “Not only will the war hurt Israel in the long term, but it's a critical foreign policy mistake from the Biden administration.” “If Washington wanted to retain influence not just in Iraq, but within the Arab and Muslim states, it would have reined Netanyahu in by now. But they haven’t, and that has made Arab states more open to exploring alliances to nations other than the U.S.” Meanwhile, the U.S. presidential election casts a long shadow. Iranian historian Kazem Ershadi echoes Reinharz’ sentiment, and adds that “a lot will depend on whether the U.S. and Iran will continue to negotiate behind the scenes with the help of Oman. Iran would need to agree to limiting its uranium enrichment, and the U.S. would need to relax economic sanctions against Iran. In other words, it may be possible for the U.S. and Iran to find a balance in Iraq, but not very likely against the backdrop of Gaza.” From The Land of [Sad] Oranges, 1973, by Dia al-Azzawi, inspired by the works of Ghassan Kanafani But common ground between the U.S. and Iran seems like a pipe dream, especially now. Gaza has been a rubble-strewn warzone for over a year, Israel has invaded Lebanon, and tension with Iran has, again, crescendoed so much that whispers of an all-out regional war permeate every conversation regarding the Middle East. Israel keeps on erasing previous red lines, barreling closer to a reality that consists of bombs raining down in Tehran, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to pour billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry into Israel. Netanyahu – Israel’s longest-serving prime minister – is well-aware that U.S. support won’t wane, and so he keeps his foot on the gas. He also understands that the U.S., while busy with an election, will not resort to any measure drastic enough to force his hand. (Israel attacked Lebanon, and it did so without first getting approval from the country that underwrites most of its national security, the United States). “The timing of Israel invading Lebanon is, at the very least, curious,” Reinharz says. “Biden is clearly an ultra-Zionist who will not, no matter what, rein Israel in. But I still think that, despite this, Netanyahu and his far-right government would prefer Donald Trump in the Oval Office. I think he timed this escalation with the U.S. election for a reason.” Reinharz argues that a Trump administration would greenlight virtually any course of action Netanyahu wants to take, however radical, including the official annexation of the West Bank. “Trump’s campaign is partially bankrolled by (Miriam) Adelson, a Zionist billionaire who has donated millions to Trump. She’s helping Trump fund his campaign because she wants Israel to have the West Bank, without a Palestinian Authority or any peace accords. And she knows Trump would let that happen.” Reinharz and I first met in Jordan. We were sipping tea on a rooftop in Amman, listening to the day’s final call to prayer echo through the city. She took a long, slow drag of her cigarette, then predicted, with unnerving accuracy, what is happening now. “You watch,” she told me, her voice dripping with cynicism. “Netanyahu would rather have Trump than Biden. I bet he will escalate the war in the fall, when the polls are tight. Netanyahu will make it messy, and he will make sure the average American voter knows it's messy over here. That way blame is cast on Biden, and Trump can position himself as the anti-war, solution-bearing candidate. It’s what Netanyahu wants—Trump. Watch. You’ll see.” Dr. Šterbenc added that a Trump victory in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections could “change everything.” That’s because Trump would likely govern in the interests of Israel, like Biden does now and like Trump did as president, while pressuring Iran even more. After May 2018, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA—also known as the Iran nuclear deal—and began his “maximum pressure” policy towards Iran. Trump crippled the Iranian economy after slapping over 1,500 sanctions on banking, oil exports and shipping, and assassinated Soleimani in 2020, who was in Baghdad fighting ISIS at the time. “Trump could greatly increase tensions and consequently convince the Iranian authorities that they must develop nuclear weapons,” Šterbenc said. “Trump ripped up Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal, so this is more possible than ever. This would then be exploited by Israel with accusations against Iran, escalating the possibility of full-blown regional war.” Mustafa al-Tamimi sits on a blanket with his wife, Fatima, and their three children on the banks of the Tigris. It is a warm, breezy Friday evening in May, and the young family is one of many who have gathered along the river for a communal celebration. I ask Mustafa what they are celebrating. “We are celebrating life,” he says as though it were obvious. “In Iraq, we know death, and so we appreciate life while it's still here.” Mustafa and his family aren’t particularly religious, but still identify with Islam’s core tenants. “Islam teaches us to love people, whoever they are. So, for me, I love the Palestinians. I also love the Israelis, the Americans, and, of course,” he smiles at his wife, “I love Iraqis.” Mustafa’s opinion is in the minority, he thinks. “The world doesn’t think the way I do. Look at Palestine. Look at Gaza. Let me ask this: if Gaza were in France, the U.S. or Israel, and instead of Palestinians in Gaza, it were French, Americans or Israelis, then do you think the bombs would still be falling? Would children be starving to death? No. The war would be over.” He tears up, though only momentarily, while we discuss Gaza. “They are saying Iran is gaining strong influence over Iraq, much more influence than the Americans,” he said. “I think this is true. It seems like the reality I am seeing every day. And so what if it is? At least Iran isn’t in on the genocide.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 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Reportage Iraq Baghdad Iran Palestine Gaza Warfare Human Rights Violations Shia Popular Mobilization Forces Zionist Zionism Israel USA Martyr Imperialism Militias Sunni Shia/Sunni Conflict Occupation Military Occupation Neo-colonialism War on Terror Axis of Resistance Najaf Religious Conflict Necropolitics Colonization New Middle East Middle East Middle East Geopolitics Globalization Colonialism Conflict Complicity Islamism Modernization Postcolonialism War On Iraq Militarism Collaborationism Discourses of War War Crimes Islamophobia Geopolitics US Imperialism United States Iran Nuclear Deal Soleimani PMF ISIS Obama Administration Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani Jordan JCPOA Genocide Foreign Policy Settler Colonialism Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In 'Daha Rupaychi Note', Hamid Dalwai tells the story of Kareem, a poor clerk journeying from Mumbai to his Konkan village for Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi. Amidst nostalgia and hardship, Kareem witnesses his village’s stark poverty, confronting the harsh realities of his people’s suffering. Through his act of charity and the symbolism of the titular ten-rupee note, Dalwai blends personal, literary, and political ideologies, exploring themes of communal harmony, economic reform, and the complex interplay of religion and identity within the socio-political landscape of post-independence India. · FICTION & POETRY Translation · Maharashtra In 'Daha Rupaychi Note', Hamid Dalwai tells the story of Kareem, a poor clerk journeying from Mumbai to his Konkan village for Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi. Amidst nostalgia and hardship, Kareem witnesses his village’s stark poverty, confronting the harsh realities of his people’s suffering. Through his act of charity and the symbolism of the titular ten-rupee note, Dalwai blends personal, literary, and political ideologies, exploring themes of communal harmony, economic reform, and the complex interplay of religion and identity within the socio-political landscape of post-independence India. Vinay Ghodgeri, The Two Pontificators (2022). Ink, digital painting. Ten Rupee Note The story begins and ends with a bus ride. Kareem, an impoverished clerk living in Mumbai, decides to visit his village in the Konkan to celebrate both Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi. While his journey there is filled with both nostalgia and anticipation, his return is marked by a different set of emotions. As his aunt remarks, “everything is upside down in the village,” where everyone is impoverished and unemployed, and the starving can do nothing “except sit and wait hopefully for next year’s harvest.” Confronted with this catastrophic state of affairs, he gives away his scant savings in a “pathetic charity session” until he is left only with the titular ten rupee note. “Daha Rupaychi Note” was my first encounter with the Marathi Muslim journalist, writer, and reformer Hamid Dalwai . Written when Dalwai was just twenty years old and printed in the Marathi-language “Dhanurdhara” magazine on November 8, 1952, the story was his first published work. In a recent documentary directed by Jyoti Subhash and featuring Naseeruddin Shah, Husain Dalwai—Hamid’s brother and Congress politician—reminisced on its publication, recalling that the entire family had gathered under the dim light of a streetlamp to read it together. Despite his young age, his earliest work rings with the earnest idealism, unambiguous moral clarity, and straightforward, laconic prose that would characterize much of his later writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. Brusque and unambiguous in its endorsement of communal harmony, economic reform, and village uplift, “Daha Rupaychi Note” reads propagandistically at times, blurring the borders between literature, praxis, and even autobiography. Through this hybrid form, the interplay between Dalwai’s personal life, creative instinct, and political commitments is laid bare. Like his protagonist, Dalwai was born and raised in a working-class Ratnagiri family before moving to Mumbai in search of work. This migration story is a familiar one: my grandfather, also a Kokani Muslim, came to Mumbai in the 1940s as an officer in the merchant navy. Like Dalwai, he was of a literary bent, writing and translating between Marathi, Urdu, and English. He, too, was charming and mercurial, his disarmingly light eyes quick to anger and quicker to laughter and brandished his acerbic wit with a typical Konkan sting. If they ever met, I imagine Dalwai would have quickly adapted my grandfather’s sardonic catchphrase, “ naseebach gandu tar konashi bhandu. ” But whereas my grandfather spent those heady decades of independence hopping between port cities in Japan, Thailand, and the Soviet Union, Dalwai hopped between political organizations, from the Rashtra Seva Dal to the Samyukta Socialist Party. Frustrated by their timid stances on communalism, he eventually carved out his own political spaces by establishing the Indian Secular Society (1968) and the Muslim Satyashodak Samaj (1970); the latter modeled after Jyotirao Phule’s anti-caste reform society. Through his organizing and writing, his ultimate goal was to modernize Indian Muslim society by, in his own words, “creating a small class…of liberal and secular Muslims.” Dalwai is difficult to categorize and perhaps for that reason, he has been largely forgotten by historians, literary critics, and the public. On the one hand, he was, indisputably, a Marathi thinker. The landscape and rituals of the Konkan coast—its “distant green hillocks” and its “auspicious sounds of cymbals and mridanga”—were firmly imprinted in his literary and political consciousness. Influenced by his Marathi-medium education in Chiplun, he wrote exclusively in Marathi and encouraged Indian Muslims to embrace their regional languages rather than chasing after Urdu, Persian, or Arabic; when interrogated about his linguistic preferences, he quipped that his own Marathi-inflected Urdu, adulterated by Mumbai slang, would cause a “proper” Urdu speaker from Lucknow to collapse on the spot. His Maharashtrian contemporaries, from the humorist and performer P.L. Deshpande to the playwright Vijay Tendulkar, praised his tenacity and courage, with the former naming Dalwai as “one of the greatest enlighteners in that series from Jyotirao Phule to B.R. Ambedkar,” and, with characteristic fulsomeness, remarking that “when I say that Hamid was my friend, I feel it might come across as self-promotion: that was the extent of his greatness.” Yet, Dalwai is near impossible to locate in contemporary histories of Maharashtra, which, depending on their ideological predilections, have long sought to portray the state as the great bastion of resistance to Islamic rule, the progenitor of polemical politicians from Tilak to Ambedkar, or the financial center of independent India. In a historiography dominated by analyses of Marathas, Hindutva, and, increasingly, at long last, anti-caste mobilization, the history of Maharashtra's Muslims remains peripheral. On the other hand, Dalwai both identified with and critiqued a different lineage: that of Muslim reformers from Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In Muslim Politics in Secular India , a collection of his essays translated by Dilip Chitre in 1968, Dalwai compared the trajectory of Hinduism and Islam. Whereas the trajectory of Hindu modernism, he argued, progressed from Raja Rammohan Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru, the “process of Muslim modernization was arrested” when Iqbal and Jinnah’s embrace of “Islamism ultimately led to anti-Hinduism.” For Dalwai, these reformers fell short on several counts: they promoted an “obsession with [the Muslim community’s] minority status,” encouraged a “tribal…collectivist loyalty,” and ignored the unique plight of Muslim women. Indeed, Dalwai is perhaps most well-known for his attempts to remedy this third issue; on April 18, 1966, he led a group of seven women in India’s first march against triple talaq and polygamy, and in favor of a uniform civil code (UCC). Here, we may note that nearly sixty years after his march, from the controversial Shah Bano case to the BJP’s inclusion of a UCC in its 2024 manifesto, many of these issues remain deeply contested. Yet, unlike Sir Syed, Iqbal, or Jinnah, Dalwai’s idea of modernization demanded militant and uncompromising secularization. Clean-shaven on principle—at a speech in Solapur, he joked, “if I were in power, I would compel all Muslims to shave off their beards”—and adamant that he be cremated rather than buried, Dalwai was branded a kafir by his orthodox contemporaries. His dedication to Muslim reform was borne more from an accident of birth rather than any deep religious commitment: “I don’t pray, neither do I fast. I believe the Quran was not made by God, but rather by Muhammad,” he declared in an interview. “I am a Muslim by birth and a Hindu by tradition.” In “Daha Rupaychi Note,” we catch an early glimpse of this iconoclastic brand of Islamic secularism. The twin celebrations of Ganesh Chaturthi and Eid dictate the story’s pacing: they precipitate Kareem’s arrival in the village; they prompt his existential reckoning, and they frame the central tension of the narrative. Dalwai’s reclamation of Hindu tradition is also, perhaps, revealed through Kareem’s references to the Ramayana. By drawing parallels between Sriram, his closest friend who “embodied Gandhi’s call to ‘go to the village’,” and the Rama of legend, Dalwai intimates familiarity with Hindu mythology and suggests at least some amount of faith in its teachings. Here, we must underscore the complex, multivalent nature of Dalwai’s religious and regional identities: as a Marathi Muslim, his perspectives on secularism, socialism, and language politics were shaped by his negotiation of the two strands of thought I have traced above. His marginalization, then, constitutes multiple, overlapping disappearances: of Muslim thought from Maharashtrian history, of Marathi thought from Indian Muslim history, and of the Islamic secular from discourses of religion, nationalism, and modernity. As Kareem sets off from Chiplun, he is overwhelmed by emotions, his heart “darkened with despair.” Caught between the financial allure of Mumbai and the moral imperative to remain in the village, negotiating between the festivals of his birth and his tradition, he chooses to remain hopeful for the future of the Konkan. How many times did Dalwai make this same journey, his thoughts consumed by these same anxieties? How many times did my grandfather? I’ve never set foot on the red soil of his native land, never peered out into the Arabian Sea from that lush coastline dotted with jackfruit and cashew trees and since his passing more than two decades ago, any tether binding me to the region has unraveled. In any case, the Konkan of his—and Dalwai’s—time is long gone. Perhaps it is a fitting tribute to both men that his son, in the spirit of “Daha Rupaychi Note,” would go on to marry a Hindu woman and raise a family where, like Kareem and Sriram, we celebrate both Ganesh Chaturthi and Eid. Ten Rupee Note by Hamid Dalwai Translated by Ria Modak After spending a year in the noisy chaos of Mumbai, my mind drifts to my village in the Konkan. I remember the uninhibited, idyllic days of my childhood, and feel the temptation to meet old friends and relatives. Every summer, I take a week or two off to visit the village, setting foot on the boat from Ferry Wharf to Dabhol. This year, however, I was too consumed by work to make the journey. A few months later, though, I managed to negotiate a vacation; my aunt had sent a message telling me to come home for Eid. Besides, it had been many years since I’d been back to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi. I decided that I would go, and booked an S.T. bus. At the Chiplun motor stand, a couple hours from Ratnagiri, some friends came to greet me. We traveled the rest of the way together, cracking jokes and chatting about nothing in particular to pass the time. Once we arrived at the village, they drank their tea and dispersed, promising to come see me again. I made my way to my aunt’s house. She lived alone, and we were very close. Since I was a child, my visits would incite a flurry of overexcitement: what shall I cook? What shall we do? Where shall we go? Even now, nothing has changed: how long will you stay? What shall we plan for Eid? Eventually, tired of her chattering, I interrupted: “Chachi, why haven’t I seen Sriram anywhere? He didn’t even come to meet me at Chiplun.” “Arrey ho! Did I forget to tell you? He’s lost everything. The farm, the land, everything has been auctioned off. But what’s to be done?” she said. “But why doesn’t he come to Mumbai then? Why is he wasting his time in this village? ‘Social work… social work…’” Kareem scoffed. “We might die of starvation, but we must still commit ourselves to social work. I don’t understand.” She let out a sigh. “I’ve told him so many times, but he always repeats the same thing: ‘we shouldn’t only look out for ourselves, kaki.’” Tears shone in her eyes. I was taken aback. I’d run into so many acquaintances from the village in Mumbai, but none of them had told me about Sriram’s condition. It’s true that we’d stopped writing letters to each other as the months passed. As I became increasingly caught up with work, I suppose I’d taken Sriram’s situation for granted. “Look, this is everyone’s story in the village. Everything is upside down. You lot who’ve gone and built a life in Mumbai, why will you remember your home in the village? You don’t even know who’s alive and who’s dead here. You haven’t sent a penny in four months. At least you haven’t settled down yet—there are some people who haven’t returned in five or ten years. Who will take care of their houses?” the old lady went on. Staying in Mumbai, my mind had become an emotionless machine. How could it be that I’d never once thought about the economic state of my village? Today my aunt had opened my eyes, and I turned inwards. The thick fog shrouding my mind evaporated. I let go of the day-to-day tedium of my clerical life, and the formality of my city sensibilities melted away. But what good could come from thinking? I’d renounced any golden dreams of idealism and ambition and was wandering in the lonely desert of pragmatism. For 120 rupees a month, I scribbled nonsense and passed it off as clerical work. I lived with a friend and ate my meals at a cheap mess. I couldn’t imagine ever having enough money to get married. The next day, I was awakened by a pair of raucous voices. At first, I didn’t pay attention, but once I heard my name, I perked up. An old woman said, “He hasn’t remembered me once in so many days. Has he returned from Africa with bags of cash or what?” Quickly, I got up and left. I didn’t see who had come. Only after my aunt explained did I begin to understand that the woman was having money problems for Eid. I felt terrible, but then my aunt prodded me: “Why are you feeling bad? This is everyone’s reality. How many people can you possibly help?” Then she took 100 rupees from me, buying what she needed for the house and paying back her debts with the rest. I felt as though she was getting even with me for not having sent money these past few months. From that day onwards, there was a line out the door. At any given moment, someone or the other came complaining of financial distress, expecting money. My tongue sat heavy and numb in my mouth. They came reluctantly, nursing their shame and hesitation, losing their courage as they asked favors. I’d only come with 200 rupees: of that, 100 had gone to my aunt. Of the rest, 90 were given here and there. Finally, I put an end to this pathetic charity session. I wanted to return to Mumbai, after all, and needed to set aside money for the return fare. Everyone I’d given money to had done me a favor at some point or the other. I was satisfied that, at the very least, those debts were paid. But my satisfaction didn’t last long. Ganesh Chaturthi came at last. In the old days, the village would ring with the auspicious sounds of cymbals and mridanga. But today, I heard nothing. Confused, I asked my aunt, who replied: “Arrey baba, how can people celebrate with nothing in their belly? The old days are gone. Two days before the Gauri Visarjan, there’ll be some dancing and that’s it, the festival will be over.” I felt like I’d been stabbed in the stomach with a sharp knife. Poverty hadn’t just made our daily life miserable: it had cast a dark shadow on our celebrations, our happiness, and our enthusiasm. I had no doubt that Eid, too, would be similarly dark. Eight days passed, but Sriram, my closest friend, still hadn’t come to see me. If anyone embodied Gandhi’s call to ‘go to the village,’ it was Sriram. Though he’d once settled in Mumbai, he had kicked aside his lucrative job in the city and instead devoted himself to uplifting the village. Finally, I went to see him the day before Gauri Visarjan. Standing in the corridor, his face lit up with joy when he saw me. At once, he enveloped me in a tight hug and cried out to his wife, “Hey, look who has come!” Coming out with a handful of ash from cleaning up, she said, “O Chakarmani! When did you come? Yesterday or what? Made it a point to come see us as early as you could manage, hm?” Ignoring the sarcasm dripping from her voice, I said, sagely: “If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.” “Enough is enough! Please don’t bore us with the same old phrases. I’ve been telling him, ‘that friend of yours has come, go and see him,’ but he always repeats the same thing…” Catching a glimpse of her husband, she fell silent. I couldn’t wrap my head around the situation, but Sriram explained. “Don’t be flustered, my friend. I told her that Kareem has come from Mumbai. His pockets are overflowing, everyone must want a piece of him. The poor must be going to see him again and again. How could I go at such a time? He’d think that I’m just after his money, too.” Sriram laughed loudly. His laughter pierced my heart. The poverty of the village, the sheer decline of the Kokan was all revealed to me through that laugh. I said, casually: “Listen, if you’d come to ask, would it really have been so terrible?” “That’s what I told him,” his wife jumped in excitedly. “There’s always some problem in the house. I told Sriram, ‘go to Kareem bhai and bring back 10 rupees.’ At least let the kids enjoy the festival. But he refuses. ‘Forget the money,’ he says. ‘I won’t go see him until Eid is over.’” “Kay re, when I came last year the situation didn’t seem so bad,” I said. “True, for two reasons. Firstly, you used to come in the summer. Even though the harvest wasn’t so bountiful, at least people had some grain in their hands. Besides, farm work was in full swing. There might not have been much money, but people could at least find some seasonal work. Now there’s no grain and no labor, either. What else can the starving do except sit and wait hopefully for next year’s harvest? And the other reason is that this poverty has been slowly getting worse over time. Today, you’re witnessing it, all at once, in its barest form. Planting his eyes on a distant green hillock, he said in a subdued and determined voice, “All this must change Kareem. It must be changed . We must give up our narrow, selfish attitudes. Capitalism is the culmination of our social structure and the naked form of our reality; it is our legacy. This situation isn’t any one person’s fault, but at the same time, it’s not any one person’s responsibility. We must reject this futile idea that we alone can enact meaningful change. We must work for everyone, for society at large. Last year I’d said, ‘let’s store some grain from the harvest for communal use.’ Nobody listened to me. Someone would’ve benefitted by now, wouldn’t they? But nobody has any sense of community wellbeing!” And he stopped for a while. I too was eager to give him an earful. Taking his silence as my cue, I said, “Really, Sriram. Why do you insist on working in this village? Haven’t you seen what kind of people live here? Why bother struggling for them in vain?” “Nahi re!” Placing his hand on my shoulder, he continued. “This work will bear fruit one day. I have faith in it. And consider for a moment if I decided to leave everything behind. What would happen to the work I’ve started, to the hope that’s been built up? I can’t turn back now.” Then, squeezing both my hands lovingly, he asked me, “Is everything okay with you? When are you going to get married?” I replied with a wry smile, “I’m okay. I’ve been eating at a mess and sleeping at a friend’s place, but he just got married, so I’ve had to move out. An acquaintance of mine knows someone who owns a building, so with his permission I’ve been sleeping in a room under the staircase. Where could I possibly fit a wife?” Then I asked him gently, “Do you really need money?” “If you put it like that, well then yes. But why should I make your life difficult?” Taking out the last ten rupee note from my pocket, I forced it into his hands. I drank my tea, bade farewell to his wife and child, and returned home. Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi came and went, and the day of my return to Mumbai drew closer. Both festivals had fallen short of my expectations. There was no warmth in people’s celebrations. They were just going through the motions, performing rituals with an emotionless formality. I couldn’t bear to see any more, and decided to return to Mumbai as soon as possible. Suddenly, I remembered I had no money. I needed ten rupees to return to the city, but couldn’t understand how to get them. Finally, I brought up the subject with my aunt. Angered by my ill-timed munificence and diminishing funds, she said, coldly: “Where will the money come from now? You’ll have to borrow from someone and just pay them back when you return to Mumbai.” The idea didn’t sit well with me, and I gave no answer. The next morning, while I mulled over the situation, confused, Sriram came and, to my surprise, placed a ten rupee note in my hand. Without letting me say anything, he explained, “If you were in trouble, why didn’t you just tell me, baba? Yesterday, kaki came to me and everything became clear. Aren’t you leaving tomorrow?” I took the note from his hand and looked closer. It was the very note that I’d given him! There was an unmistakable stain near the watermark where I’d spilled some ink earlier. “But this money was for your celebrations! Isn’t it the same note that I’d given you?” “That’s true enough. But on the very evening you’d come to see me, I got the money I needed from someone who owed me, and I was set. What business is it of yours?” The next day when the S.T. bus to Mumbai set off from the Chiplun motor stand, my heart was darkened with despair. I couldn’t stop thinking about the grim future of my village. I thought to myself, “won’t this situation ever change?” But then again, why not? Against the depressing backdrop of poverty, hunger, and unemployment emerged Sriram’s strength, patience, and courage. Why not, indeed! Just as Sri Ram released Ahalya from her curse, transforming her from hexed stone back into a beautiful woman with a brush of his foot, this Sriram too will surely rescue our Konkan. My mind filled with happiness and hope, I landed in Mumbai that evening.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Translation Maharashtra Hamid Dalwai Muslim Marathi India Fiction Journalism Writer Reform Economy Borders Community Literature Working Class Migration Family Urdu English Political Will Anti-Caste Organizing Liberalism Secularism History Literary Criticism Regional Languages Linguistic Marathas Hindutva Maharashtra Muslim Modernization Civil Society Militant Disappearance Religion Nationalism Ten Rupee Note Mumbai Konkon Village Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 17th Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? · FEATURES Essay · Mauritius Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both the government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could be made to endure following the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? On the Walk by Sabrina Tirvengadum Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. Then, when slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Fruit by Sabrina Tirvengadum This pattern continued with indentureship. Upon the expiry of their indenture contract, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation, or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 3rd Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. · THE VERTICAL Features · Peru For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. Photograph courtesy of Tania Wamani. Police repression against Andean Indigenous Quechua-speaking women from Puno occurred in the capital city, Lima, during the demonstration for justice for the civilian victims killed by the police during the protests in Puno in January 2023. Lima's Forsaken For 24 days , Mariano Isacama was missing. Calls to the indigenous leader’s phone suddenly stopped going through on June 21, following threats he had been receiving through WhatsApp messages. The 35-year-old was a spokesperson for the Puerto Azul community, which is part of the broader Kakataibo indigenous group in Peru’s Ucayali province. He worked with the Kakataibo federation, FENACOKA, one of many indigenous-led organizations across Peru that aims to provide self-governance for communities. Coworkers quickly filed complaints with the police and human rights prosecutors against people they suspected of involvement and launched search parties. Isacama, like many leaders in Peru’s native communities, was not facing abstract threats. In the past nine years, 35 indigenous leaders have been killed in the country amid threats from various organized criminal groups. Leaders face near constant harassment for their public positions defending the environment. Illicit trades have grown around these native communities, so leaders are routinely threatened to either turn a blind eye or participate. Almost none of the murder cases have led to arrests or support for impacted families and communities. What happened to Mariano Isacama “They had time to find him alive,” said Herlin Odicio, a Kakataibo leader who helped search for Isacama, incessantly filing complaints with the state for weeks. “Unfortunately the justice officials did nothing in that respect.” Odicio had been working with Isacama for a while. The two would attend conferences and workshops together, or if one couldn’t go, the other would represent the Kakataibo community. Isacama’s deep involvement with the work made him a target. On July 10, more than two weeks after his disappearance, 40 members of La Guardia Indígena’s Kakataibo division arrived to search. As an autonomous, fluid structure that has gained support among Latin America’s indigenous communities in the past two decades, La Guardia Indígena attempts to train communities to protect themselves in ways the governments won’t. They carry out patrols and build strategies to confront armed violence through collective and grassroots action. The volunteer program is neither a political body nor an armed resistance organization, but rather a loose mechanism that’s been adapted and replicated within communities across Latin America. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. In Ucayali, they put together teams to head into the woods to look for Isacama. While they were searching, threats to the search party themselves were reported from nearby non-native settlers. Isacama’s body was found on July 14, hidden away in the wilderness. “We’ve already identified suspects,” Odicio said, “We hope the justice system will do its duty, which we’ve pushed for. If they don’t, and they do the opposite, the justice system we have as indigenous people is going to be something very different.” Odicio himself has been facing threats for years, and lives on the run as a result. In 2020, he was approached by cocaine producers and asked to ignore planeloads of the drugs flown off makeshift runways on his community’s land. He rejected the money, making him a target. His continued advocacy work and public profile as an environmental defender further puts him at risk. He reports having to change his location constantly, moving his family between cities and homes, and routinely receiving threatening messages—even from other members of the community. “Emotionally, I’m not doing well,” he said, after four years of living under threat and reflecting on Isacama’s murder, “It’s complicated, you know? But what else can I do? Keep working, that’s it.” How militarism gave way to cartels In recent years, lethal threats facing Peru’s indigenous leaders have grown into a crisis as various illicit trades in the Amazon and Andean regions flourish under state negligence. Indigenous leaders, local journalists, and human rights researchers have all documented growing cases of cultivation and transportation of cocaine, illegal logging and mining , construction of unplanned roads that facilitate these extractive programs, and the violence and corruption necessary to keep these operations functional. These problems started several decades ago in the wake of a shifting political and economic reality within the country. Peru’s government spent decades centralizing its population and economic policies around the capital of Lima. Rural areas struggle under neglect across the country, but in the particularly remote indigenous communities in the country, this has evolved into a crisis. Ángel Pedro Valerio, president of the indigenous organization Central Ashaninka of Río Ene (CARE), noted that the problem has grown over the past 40 years. Valerio’s Ashaninka community is located in VRAEM, a region that’s become defined by cocaine production, poverty, and the presence of the Shining Path militant group. “Inside our communities, since the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, the Ashaninka people and the entire central region of the rainforest have suffered from terrorism,” Valerio said. “Many of us have had family members disappeared or killed. This political and social problem hasn’t gone away.” During an era of violence between the Shining Path and the central government, areas like Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) were particularly hard hit. They were caught in the crossfire between a communist group accused of brutal attacks on civilians (including children) and a military run by dictator Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights violations. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024, several months after being released from prison for medical reasons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lima’s population exploded as the armed conflict drove people away from Peru’s provincial areas. According to official state inquiries , Fujimori’s government was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and executions, including the killing of journalists and children , all under the guise of fighting terrorism. Civilians in rural areas were the most at risk, so many fled to the capital . In 1993, Lima had six million residents. In 2024, the city’s population is about 11 million –nearly one-third of all Peruvians live there. In the aftermath, rural areas were broadly left without infrastructure or police presence, as all modernization efforts focused on the capital. While skyscrapers fill the wealthier neighborhoods of Lima, infrastructural basics characterize much of the rest of the country. A 2023 United Nations report highlighted how hundreds of thousands in Peru live without basic nutrition, education, and healthcare. Earlier this year, a report in Infobae showed that 92% of the country’s high schools lack basic resources. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. VRAEM, though, has become defined by poverty and neglect. It’s known to be the home of what’s left of the Shining Path. “In recent years, the presence of illegal coca leaf growers has grown exponentially,” Valerio said of VRAEM. “They’re coming to invade the territory of native communities and those of us who live there can’t do anything about it. They’re opening large farms and deforesting the area, contaminating the water and the environment, degrading the soil. These coca leaves take a lot of chemicals to grow.” He pointed out that each time his organization files a complaint about threats from narcotraffickers, the state refuses to take action. He adds that state inaction puts them at greater risk. “Many of our brothers mention that they can’t file complaints because if they do, the first thing that happens is more threats,” Valerio said. “They brand us snitches and send us a warning.” A prosecutor’s vision In Lima, the central prosecutor’s office attempted to address this problem after years of neglect. In late 2023, they announced funding secured through the European Union to launch three task forces or workshops which would oversee environmental crime, human trafficking, and assassinations of indigenous leaders. “These problems have certainly grown because of a lack of attention from the central government,” said Jorge Chavez Cotrina, who oversees the attorney general’s division on organized crime. “Because the problem isn’t just to fight organized crime through police and prosecutors and the courts, but also has to be addressed by the executive branch. That is to say, before taking corrective actions we also have to take administrative actions—as in, prevention is key.” Cotrina said the three teams are mainly focused on partnering with indigenous leaders and working on building trust in the state by sending more officers into the field, participating in training programs, and sponsoring events. He said they’ve dismantled organized crime networks and opened investigations into murder cases of indigenous people. He argued, however, that this work is complicated by the lack of funds the central government provides them, pointing out that of the $3 billion budget his office was officially granted, they’ve only been disbursed $80 million. As a result, he said, they lack staff, forensic equipment, judges, and the ability to reach native communities that are the most remote. On top of that, Cintora points out that the problems can’t simply be addressed through arrests, and that prevention must consider economic development and increased governmental presence in the area. The centralized perspective of the government can exacerbate the problem by creating easier conditions for organized crime to flourish. Late last year, Peru passed a so-called “anti-forest law” swiftly denounced by activists, indigenous organizations, and leading environmental groups. The SPDA, a Peruvian legal watchdog and environmental NGO, declared that the law would openly promote and legalize deforestation in the Amazon, while putting local agriculture and communities at risk. Their legal opinion showed that the country would be violating its own laws by allowing this through and ensuring Peru's failure to meet international commitments regarding climate protection. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. “The legislature definitely has put in place a series of regulations without knowing the reality,” Cintora said. “When someone writes a regulation from their desk without knowing the reality, these are normally well-intentioned. But when you explain to them the reality, it’s counterproductive. And that’s what’s happening with issues like deforestation, illegal mining and the environment…The idea instead should be to call upon the rural communities that can give their opinion on regulations that would affect their territories.” A balance in trust Leaders like Odicio and Valerio remain skeptical of the state. Cintora’s vision is to work alongside communities, so they begin to trust police and prosecutors with time. “Our job is to gain their trust,” Cintora said, “and through these task forces, we’re having many meetings with different communities in the Peruvian Amazon, and we are on the right track.” One case took prosecutors and police a decade to resolve . In 2014, in the small town of Saweto, four indigenous leaders were killed. The case didn’t go to trial until 2022, when the state eventually won convictions against four men they accused of being involved. In 2023, those cases were declared null by a regional judge. For many in Peru’s activist communities, this signaled an important lesson: even in the rare case that the state seeks a conviction in these murders, the courts can’t be trusted. Only in April 2024, did the case finally go to the Superior Court of Ucayali and the sentences were restored. Cintora saw the case as a win, as it affirms faith in the prosecutor’s office for native communities. Despite funding problems, he hopes that this kind of work can make a difference in restoring collaboration with these communities. “With the small amount of resources we have, we do what we can,” Cintora said, “because we can’t sit around crying that there’s no money.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Peru Lima Indigenous self-governance Ucayali Rural strategic underdevelopment VRAEM Valle de los Rios Apurimac Ene y Mantaro Shining Path Central Ashaninka of Río Ene Kakataibo Militarism Cartel Drugs Cocoa Plant Amazon Rainforest Andres Mountains Trade Route Illicit Trading Forced Disappearance Free Speech Militant Anti-Forest Law Journalism Execution Underdevelopment Development Filmmaking Photography Human Rights Activism NGO Agriculture Climate Change Deforestation Community Security Climate Security European Union Human Trafficking Assassination Whatsapp Puerto Azul Conflict Justice La Guardia Indigena Volunteer Program Latin America South America Protest Search Party Aviation Transportation Logging Mining Construction Violence Corruption Politics Economy Poverty Terrorism Disappearance State Sanctioned Violence Policing Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 18th Nov 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. "Self-Portrait" (2016), digital print, courtesy of Latifa Zafar Attaii. Artist Kandahar AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 26 Jun 2025 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION The Captive Mind Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli , the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars. When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults. The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war. I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning. Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings. How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food. We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again. Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “ Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side? ” This would make everyone laugh. Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated. My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future. But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin ’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list. In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission. In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them. At one point in the story my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem: Caged in the dark night I was, A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was. Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture, Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse. Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies; My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy. My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure. In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit, Wild cries like groans set off. That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem. I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea, Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness. Clamor rose on the podium of the universe. An adventure rose to heaven’s home; With red monsters, black too, that flowed. At every step they roared with anger. I knew not then who stepped near– To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body, But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me. And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh, But for each bone breaking, I cry. The Soviets invaded , and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism. In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally. I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.” My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor. We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern whose light he read under. In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death, I remember feeling pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice. They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival. In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire. I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was . And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too. And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too. This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance. War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order , what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction. At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me. While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it. Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words. The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried. In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt . How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over. It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me. So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive. There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition. And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason. In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind . He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan. Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either. When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong. Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions. Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them. “Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask. Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.” My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not. Untitled , Latifa Zafar Attaii (2016). Thread on Digital Print. When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn. In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine. I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive. I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become. The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it. There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind , Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman : a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman , one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies. Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.” Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not. “Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter. For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines. In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported. Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live. I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story. Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid. When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?' To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021 . But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing. The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives. One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried. Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day. One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood. I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it. It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why. I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas. Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you. No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed. But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.” My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar. I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine. Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive. Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game. But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line. But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing. Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty. But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it. I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun , I end with the punchline: In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven. In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains. My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Kandahar Afghanistan Storytelling Family invasion Kabul Communist Era Hafizullah Amin Taraki's Communist Party idealism poetry trauma exile diaspora Afghan diaspora education language ketman dark humor Discourses of War War War on Terror Colonialism US Imperialism Imperialism Decolonization Colonial Oppression Colonization Memory Dossiers of memory Islam United States Pakistan Pashto Absurdity Dehumanization Human Rights Violations US withdrawal 2021 Mujahideen Literary Literary Activism Literature & Liberation Afghan literature Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Wielding terror and fear in the absence of credibility, extrajudicial detention is a defining strategy of political terror. In this comprehensive survey of the tactics of illegal detention employed by the American, Israeli, and Assad regimes, enforced disappearance emerges as the swan song of decaying empires on the brink of collapse. · FEATURES Essay · Syria Wielding terror and fear in the absence of credibility, extrajudicial detention is a defining strategy of political terror. In this comprehensive survey of the tactics of illegal detention employed by the American, Israeli, and Assad regimes, enforced disappearance emerges as the swan song of decaying empires on the brink of collapse. Jacobo Alonso, Periplo - Safe Migration (2024). 18 laser-cut modules of polyester felt, 300cm each. Damnatio Memoriae In his Prison Notebooks , Gramsci describes the interregnum of a dying civilization as it gives birth to a new state order. “Now,” he writes, “is the time of monsters.” In our time of monsters, enforced disappearance reemerges as an extrajudicial tool for “extraordinary” times. Such Orwellian simplicity belies the systematic practice of one of the worst crimes of the twenty-first century. Millions of people across the globe have disappeared in political terror schemes as part of a practice that has only increased over the last few decades, tied to the wars of the current era. Enforced disappearance is a crime distinct even from arbitrary detention or mass incarceration–rather than leveraging the known carceral architectures of the state, enforced disappearance relies on parallel hidden networks created to remove someone entirely from visibility. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance formally defines the practice as: the “arrest, detention, abduction, or any other form of deprivation of liberty” by state or para-state agents followed by the state’s “refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” There are no exceptions to this protection under international law. The practice of enforced disappearance, when widespread or systematic, constitutes its own independent crime against humanity. While kidnapping by the state is deemed extrajudicial—exceeding boundaries of the law and the ordinary—the state, in emergency, engages in the conspiracy to kidnap with impunity. Total wars waged by imperial powers abroad, dictatorial regimes within, and occupying powers against indigenous populations deploy enforced disappearance as a defining strategy of political terror. Three contemporary cases exemplify, even define, each horrific model: the U.S.’s global war on terror, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In each case, the carceral architectures of the state or occupying power expanded grossly in wartime settings to conduct systematic disappearance campaigns against tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Such campaigns were inevitably, and by design, tied to a litany of other crimes including torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and extrajudicial killing. Collectively, they represent among the worst cases of enforced disappearance in this century. An Archipelago of Disappearance: the U.S. Global War on Terror In 2001, the United States launched its ‘global war on terror,’ initiating a new mode of warfare for the many imperial wars and military campaigns fought thereafter, including the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the expansive military campaigns undertaken in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Southeast Asia. As part of this global war, the U.S. developed a conglomerate of overseas carceral architectures to facilitate the capture and detention of individuals across territorial borders or even arenas of war. The physical infrastructure of these architectures were created in tandem with new legal arguments inventing new categories of persons—i.e., the “unlawful combatant”—to systematically deprive those taken of their fundamental rights and protections. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these structures took on more traditional forms of carceral architectures under foreign military occupation: military detention camps, internment facilities, and converted prisons run by U.S. and coalition forces. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, overwhelmingly civilians, were captured and held indefinitely without charge. One report puts the total number of Iraqis arrested in the first five years of the invasion alone at 200,000, of whom 96,000 spent time in U.S.-run prisons and camps. Their capture under the new “unlawful combatants” regime stripped them of age-old prisoner of war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Arbitrary detention, torture, abuse, and sexual violence were widespread and systematic in these prisons, cemented in infamy by Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan. ‘ De facto’ disappearance, first termed in a 2004 ICRC report , was endemic to the mass detention campaigns undertaken by U.S. forces, who rarely informed the detained individual or their family where or how long they would be taken. Beyond the localized carceral architectures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States, as part of a broader war aim superseding delineated boundaries and war zones, created new extraterritorial carceral architectures to facilitate the forcible disappearance of hundreds of Muslim men and boys. Perhaps no site symbolizes this more than the notorious penal colony in Guantánamo Bay. Yet it was not the only one. Between 2001 and 2009, the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program ran a transnational network of covert prisons, known as black sites, for the secret detention and brutal torture of men captured in the “war on terror.” Euphemisms served as a doublespeak to conceal a secret disappearance scheme of an unprecedented transnational scope. “Rendition” was the act of enforced disappearance, “detention,” secret and incommunicado, and “interrogation,” simply torture. The locations of the secret prisons remain classified. Information that has been declassified is enough to paint a macabre network of torture sites across the world. Some sites were run entirely by local “host” nations, some collaborated with local security forces, and others remained under exclusive American control on foreign territory. Men captured and transferred to CIA custody were “rendered” across black sites, in what a Guantánamo defense lawyer once described as an “international criminal enterprise” of human trafficking between foreign “torture pits.” According to the U.S. Senate report on torture, at least 119 men were known to have been held in the CIA torture program. Torture in the black sites, authorized by secret legal memos written by the U.S. Department of Justice, took on perverse and methodical forms including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, walling, sodomy, mock executions, and pure human experimentation. At least one detainee died in CIA custody; no exact number is known. An untold number of individuals died in U.S. custody elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there is Guantánamo, the most infamous and enduring piece of the extraterritorial carceral architecture created in the U.S.’s global war on terror. A prison island—or, more accurately, an American penal colony on Cuban territory—the military detention camp encompassed the most diverse population of Muslim men and boys captured by U.S. or allied forces and disappeared across seas. Nearly eight hundred men from 48 countries were held in Guantánamo. When the prison first opened in 2002, only the nationalities of prisoners were disclosed. In 2004, the U.S. began revealing the names of the men and boys held, propelling efforts by international organizations, monitoring groups, and civil society to represent the men and contact their families. Testimony by survivors reveal the physical and psychological torture endemic to the first several years of the camp. Two decades of domestic and global backlash, litigation, and advocacy campaigns forced the release of most of the men. Twenty-seven prisoners still remain , including sixteen approved for transfer and three “forever prisoners.” Each carceral site or network in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, or undisclosed locations across the world did not operate in isolation. Rather, they formed parallel and at times intersecting networks under the U.S.’s global war on terror. Many Muslim men captured and held in the U.S. military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, or tortured in CIA black sites, for example, were sent to Guantánamo. For many, the revolving door between carceral institutions across nations continued even after release. In this era, the U.S. pioneered powerful models of war and propaganda to conceal and acquit a disappearance and torture campaign amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law. Their proclaimed success foretold models others sought to follow. "Apátrida / Stateless" (2024), performance, isothermal emergency flag, 210x180cm. Courtesy of Jacobo Alonso. Annihilation and Enforced Disappearance in Syria Post-2011 Enforced disappearance has deep roots in Syria, practiced for decades under the Assad regime of both father and son—Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. Political dissidents, activists, and their relatives were routinely disappeared in secret intelligence and military prisons across Syria. These numbers first climaxed in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the reign of Hafez al-Assad, when tens of thousands of Syrians were disappeared in a systematic campaign culminating in the Tadmur prison massacre of 1980 and the Hama massacre of 1982. By then, Syrian prisons had gained a reputation for depravity, torture, and extrajudicial killings in an Arab world dominated by carceral states. The regime, entrenched in permanent ‘emergency’ doctrines and past successes quelling rebellion, was primed to respond existentially to any threat to its rule. In March 2011, a popular revolution arose in Syria, as Syrians joined the wave of Arab revolutions unfolding in the region. The response of the son mimicked the father: a total campaign of arrests, indiscriminate killings, siege, and collective punishment. In post-2001 fashion, Bashar borrowed the discourse du jour of an existential ‘war on terror’ necessitating extreme violence to ensure internal state survival. The results of the ensuing war were catastrophic: at least 350,000 Syrians were killed , 14 million displaced , and 155,000 forcibly disappeared . In this war, enforced disappearance became a primary tactic of state political terror and collective punishment. An integrated military-intelligence regime targeted civilians for mass arrest and torture. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were kidnapped during protests, at military checkpoints, schools, hospitals, and from their homes, held incommunicado, and subject to horrific physical and psychological torture, including rape and sexual violence. The carceral architecture of the state expanded vastly to absorb the sheer volume of detainees. Military field courts issued interminable prison sentences and thousands of extrajudicial death sentences in secret trials lasting minutes. Sites like Tadmur military prison, closed in 2001, were reopened in 2011 to hold new populations of prisoners. The disappeared did not vanish in the fog of war. Smuggled documents, photos, and testimonies by survivors, defectors, and witnesses alike prove a meticulous record of the regime’s own systematic disappearance scheme. As early as 2014, the ‘Caesar’ photographs revealed over 28,000 pictures smuggled out by a military forensic photographer tasked with documenting the deaths of those killed in regime detention centers. The pictures evidence a perverse organizational scheme run by the state with bodies clearly marked by torture. State documentation and witness testimony elsewhere further uncovered the secret network of military hospitals, military-intelligence branches, ad-hoc detention sites, and prisons responsible for directing the arrest, torture, and killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In 2016, Amnesty International collaborated with Forensic Architecture to create the first 3D model of one such site: the infamous death chambers of Saydnaya Military Prison, where a then-estimated 13,000 prisoners were executed. Silence imposed on prisoners held in Saydnaya became a crude weapon of torture by the regime. Digital reconstruction of Saydnaya relied on architectural and acoustic modeling based on interviews with four survivors in a counter mapping effort that sought to break down both the physical and psychological architecture of silence imposed by disappearance. It was a powerful disruption to a structure that, until mere weeks ago, was impervious to time or human cost. The regime, backed by an impunity ‘won’ territorially in a war of annihilation, began issuing hundreds of death certificates for prisoners disappeared years earlier. Families who received the certificates were denied access to their bodies or any other means of verification. Enforced disappearance became its own phenomenon in Syria, spurring countless UN reports and proposed mechanisms that were all but paralyzed in achieving any resolution or accountability. In November 2023, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling against Syria, recognizing enforced disappearance as a violation of the Convention Against Torture, but fell short of ordering specific measures such as providing information of detainees’ whereabouts or allowing access to independent monitors. Elsewhere in Europe, former Syrian detainees and families of the disappeared pursued new avenues of accountability to bring individual perpetrators to account. In 2020, the first trial dealing with state torture in Syria took place in Germany against two former state officials who were convicted of crimes against humanity for their role in overseeing torture, sexual violence, forced imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings. As the fight for Syria’s disappeared stagnated, a Syrian rebel offensive launched in late November radically shifted the territorial status quo, culminating in the overthrow of the Assad regime ten days later. The liberation of each city was marked by the liberation of each prison within it, a metaphor physically upended by the breaking of each cell door. Once at Saydnaya, excavation teams worked for days to secure the release of the remaining detainees, some in levels below ground, captivating a nation scrambling to find their loved ones. Even now, the fate of over 100,000 detainees remains unknown . Enforced Disappearance As Genocide: Gaza After October 7 In Palestine, carcerality fundamentally underpins Israel’s settler-colonial project. Military occupation and an expansive apartheid regime form the larger prison within which the physical carceral architecture organizes the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Since 1967, over 850,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned under the auspices of the Israeli military judicial system, the central mechanism of the occupation ruling over the West Bank and Gaza. Under this system, civilians are routinely arrested and tried according to an expanding set of Israeli military orders in military courts at a conviction rate of over 99%. Hundreds more are held indefinitely without charge or trial under administrative detention. It is a system bound up in innumerable individual human rights violations—arbitrary detention, fair trial violations, torture, forced deportation, the systematic prosecution of children—amid larger war crimes and crimes against humanity. One of them is the crime against humanity of apartheid. International human rights organizations and UN reports all describe dual legal regimes—military courts for Palestinians and civilian courts for Israeli settlers—that systematically privilege one racial group over another in a broader policy of domination and control under an apartheid regime. Other war crimes include the widespread prosecution of Palestinian civilians in military courts, the intentional deprivation of their right to a fair trial, the deportation of the occupied population to prisons and detention centers in the occupying power, and torture . Enforced disappearance comprises yet another feature of the Israeli carceral regime. Disappearance predates the creation of the military judicial system in 1967 and continued as an intermittent practice over the next several decades, often disguised by a patchwork of legal frameworks. In 2002, the Israeli Knesset passed the Unlawful Combatants Law , modeled after its U.S. post-9/11 predecessor , to retroactively legitimate the indefinite detention of Lebanese hostages. Three years later, the same law was applied to Palestinians from Gaza, enabling periods of secret and indefinite detention constituting de facto disappearance. More sinisterly, it laid the legal and structural groundwork for the total war on prisoners waged today. In retaliation to the breach of Gaza’s open-air prison on October 7, the Israeli regime issued a series of orders dramatically expanding its carceral architecture as it launched its genocidal war on Gaza. Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons were cut off from almost all outside contact as conditions drastically deteriorated, prisoner abuse escalated, and Israeli occupation forces ramped up arrests across the occupied territory. Emergency amendments to the 2002 Unlawful Combatants Law broadened the scope of secret detention, which Israeli authorities immediately leveraged against the Gazan population. New secret military detention camps were erected exclusively to detain Gazans: Sde Teiman in the south and Anatot near Jerusalem. Elsewhere at Ofer Military Prison, Gazan detainees were cordoned off to open-air tent camps and the secret wing of Section 23 , held incommunicado, and hidden even from the larger Palestinian prisoner population. Beyond the known existence of these three sites, Israeli occupation forces disappeared thousands of Gazan men, women, and children across makeshift military barracks, settlements, prisons, hospitals, and open fields. The new clandestine regime served as an appendage to Israel’s larger carceral architecture. Whistleblower reports and testimonies by former detainees point to an integrated network of horrific torture camps across Palestine’s occupied geography. Among them, Sde Teiman stands as an emblem of the torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees, acquiring the same diseased colonial reputation of Abu Ghraib. Palestinians held in Sde Teiman are kept blindfolded in barbed wire ‘pens,’ starved, severely beaten, and subject to interrogations and torture that include electrocution, sexual violence, rape, waterboarding, and medical experimentation. In an adjoining ‘field hospital,’ injured Palestinian detainees were tied to hospital beds and practiced on by medical staff. Elsewhere across Israeli prisons and detention camps, Palestinian prisoners were subject to the same practices of torture, starvation, and deliberate medical negligence. The crime of enforced disappearance is central to the larger crime of genocide, a conclusion outlined months ago by Palestinian human rights groups and echoed in Amnesty’s latest report . Disappearance, like genocide, is practiced methodically: the population of Gaza is physically tagged, catalogued, and, if not forcibly displaced or killed , disappeared to unknown sites. Numbers accounting for the full magnitude of these crimes are still unknown, ranging between the tens and hundreds of thousands. They are, at the time of this writing, enduring crimes of no known boundaries. In October 2024, shortly after Israel launched its full war on Lebanon, a new amendment to the Unlawful Combatants Law designated two new military camps for detention in the north, prompting concerns they may be used to hold Lebanese detainees. This is the circular expansion of a law that first sought to legitimate the enforced disappearance of Lebanese detainees twenty-two years ago and which commandeers the legal architecture of disappearance today. The fate of the disappeared and detained remains central to ceasefire negotiations and emerging forums of accountability. "UN-Safe Migration" (2024), Polyester felt and laser cut fabric installation. Courtesy of Jacobo Alonso. The disappeared, in their absence, loom large over the present. Impunity granted to one political terror scheme emboldens another, cementing permanent states of emergency and creating varied national, transnational, and extranational architectures of disappearance. They are examples of a twenty-first century reality with the potential to produce even more destructive results, leveraging evolving surveillance technologies and age-old carceral traditions. It is an inevitability readily taken for granted; an inevitability, too, that serves the fear intended by these schemes. And yet, the enormity of resources required to sustain the secret disappearance of tens of thousands of people ultimately fail under their own grandiosity. The secrecy and structures of such crimes are untenable, even as they undeniably produce incalculable human loss. Our current moment only proves their frailty. Across the globe, the edifices of once horrific sites are being quietly shuttered by the state or actively dismantled by popular forces in the face of enduring local and global resistance. As Guantánamo turns twenty-three this month, another eleven Yemeni detainees held without charge were transferred to Oman, leaving only fifteen men remaining. In Palestine, the fight for tabyeed el-sujoun —to ‘cleanse the prison walls’—is carried on across all fronts by resistance groups, civil society, and transnational coalitions, including prisoners’ coalitions in the U.S. The breaking of prison doors in Syria, inspiring renewed efforts in places like Egypt , now beckons the daunting task of what comes after. New modes of documentation, accountability, and rehabilitation seek to tackle the crime of disappearance, with a particular focus on the survivors and families of the disappeared. The future of these structures, whether carcerality may emerge in new forms, will always remain a threat to the hard-won achievements of the present. Nevertheless, a rupture of a sort has begun, and the seam must be unraveled to its end. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Syria Enforced Disappearances Disappearance Dissent Discourses of War Forced Disappearance Guantanamo Bay Gitmo Alienation Archive of Absence Archive Assad Regime Israeli Regime Sedneya Sednaya Prison Sde Teiman detention carcerality 9/11 post-9/11 world order prisoner's coalitions Hama War on Terror War Crimes CIA Abu Ghraib unlawful combatant Muslim Invisibilizing Muslims West Bank Gaza Palestine fair trial unfair trial Unlawful Combatants Law Anatot Nageb Ofer Military Prison Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 22nd Jan 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

KOKOKO!, an experimental music collective from the DRC, has navigated political censorship and the country’s struggles with energy exploitation to create a sound that electrifies the present. Using repurposed household materials as instruments and makeshift cables for amps, they fuse French and South African house with Congolese folk to produce innovative live and stereo listening experiences. Their latest album, BUTU— “the night”—calls on audiences to bear witness to the cacophony of Kinshasa after dusk as a commentary on the political state of Congo at large. · BOOKS & ARTS Review · Congo KOKOKO!, an experimental music collective from the DRC, has navigated political censorship and the country’s struggles with energy exploitation to create a sound that electrifies the present. Using repurposed household materials as instruments and makeshift cables for amps, they fuse French and South African house with Congolese folk to produce innovative live and stereo listening experiences. Their latest album, BUTU— “the night”—calls on audiences to bear witness to the cacophony of Kinshasa after dusk as a commentary on the political state of Congo at large. BUTU (2024) album cover. Image courtesy of KOKOKO! Lights Out in Kinshasa At a show in Kinshasa, electric wires glow red and drip from the ceiling. Massive grooves do not relent. Then, the amp explodes. Still, electronic group KOKOKO! and their audience are undeterred. “When this happens, nobody panics,” KOKOKO! producer and keyboardist Xavier Thomas tells me over Zoom. “We just rewire some things; maybe we don't tell people how long it's going to be. Then, the gig comes back at full intensity.” The duo came together in 2017, when Thomas aka Débruit, who is French, traveled to Kinshasa to work on a documentary about the city’s performance art scene. While there, he met Makara Bianko, a Congolese musician who was putting on daily live music performances, at the time, that lasted for hours and involved dozens of dancers. Thomas, Bianko, and a number of other musicians began by playing at a block party inside a building that was under construction. They had such a great time that they decided to form a group together. KOKOKO! Image courtesy of the artists. A video they released shortly afterwards featured snippets of their songs. In it, the group explained how they fashioned instruments out of everyday objects like detergent bottles and tin cans because they love electronic music but don’t always have access to instruments to make the music in conventional ways. KOKOKO!’s experimental production approach garnered so much attention that they were invited to go on a 12-stop tour of Europe before even releasing a single. They went on to tour the US, release their critically acclaimed 2019 debut album, Fongola , and play shows like Boiler room and NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series. KOKOKO! make a maximal, frenetic, and innovative blend of punk, trance, Congolese folk, and bits of Kwaito – a genre of house music that originated in South Africa. Makara Bianko, who is the vocalist and band leader, sings with propulsive, declarative wail delivered in “fast short loops.” And Débruit, who has been DJing French house music (combined with musical influences from Turkey, Tunisia, and of course, The Congo) for over two decades, takes production credits for his signature squirming basslines, blaring, distorted synths, and booming percussion. Though, it’s not just the intensity of KOKOKO!’s performances that causes the equipment at their shows to glow and burst at shows. The Congo produces a number of resources that are used to make technology like smartphones, batteries, and laptops. 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined in the country. Citizens rarely benefit from these resources or from the prosperity possible from its sale. On the contrary, a quarter of the country’s population of 111 million people. Interviews with over 130 people led Amnesty International to report that entire communities are being forced to leave their homes as mining companies expand operations. “The cables we were using were really cheap,” Thomas says in his diagnosis about the exploding amplifier. “I would take a plug apart and it would be just one thread of metal instead of a bunch of braided ones. The people in the Congo produce so many resources, but most can’t benefit from them.” It’s how people living in Kinshasa adapt to and resist this neglect that inspires KOKOKO!’s new album BUTU , which means ‘the night’ in Lingala. Scientists estimate that the Congo River that runs next to the city generates around 100,000 MW of electricity—enough to power the entire country of France. Locals, however, confront frequent power cuts as energy is largely sold outside of the country. According to the World Bank, only 19% of the country’s citizens have access to electricity. Due to its location near the equator, night falls early and quickly in the city. So, in the sudden, consuming darkness, the sounds of daily life—cars whizzing down the street, people finishing off their last errands of the day before heading home, churches competing with nearby clubs for passerbys’ attention — are amplified. “Kinshasa is never quiet,” Bianko says, “there is always somewhere to go party, always a performance, whether it’s in everyday life and how people act to be resourceful or the way people dress. People in Kinshasa do everything to stand out from the chaotic and difficult backdrop of the city. Everyone wants to be one special character out of 18M.” In capturing the night, KOKOKO! also bring a sense of mystery into their music. On opener “Butu Ezo Ya,” Bianko welcomes the listener into his world: “The night is coming /Come in enter all of you / The darkness is coming / Come enter and witness it.” As the chanted vocals layer and wind through field recordings of car horns grinding synth, you feel swathed in the falling night and all the disarray and excitement it will bring with it. The forthcoming details of the night are never specified, but you know they will be notable enough to warrant witnessing together. KOKOKO! Image courtesy of the artists. It appears that this communal witnessing serves as a political tool, too. The citizens of the DRC face intense censorship from the government. The government regularly shuts down the internet, especially during election periods. They can also criminalize journalism without stating any specific reasons, and in 2021 banned songs that were critical of the government. BUTU shares frustration at this political reality with the listener. There are moments of explicit critique: one song is titled “My country doesn’t like me” but most of the lyricism is opaque to avoid censorship. “Here in DRC, sometimes we need to disguise some meaning. Either the story is about something else but the message is the same, or we use words that sound similar to forbidden ones. We can’t really talk openly so it’s for the listener to discover.” “Mokili” begins with a handful of chanted imperatives: “Leap! Makes you jump! Grab it! Defeat him! Help! Open!” that transition into a melody about the world turning upside down. As with “Butu Ezo Ya,” it’s unclear if the words are sung with a sense of excitement or dread. Sonically, KOKOKO! pushed their production forward with Butu to capture this sense of political overwhelm. “We wanted the rolling rhythms, the music loops, and Macada’s powerful voice to be almost overwhelming,” Thomas says, “We wanted the music to have lots of information, lots of rhythms, and lots of vocals.” Fongola had a raw, improvised feeling that’s been replaced with lusher, more cohesive electronic production on KOKOKO’s latest album. While the earlier compositions relayed a sense of verve and spontaneity, the songs on BUTU build into tidal waves of emotion. On “Telema,” the call and response vocals enliven an already propulsive backdrop of grumbling synth and drums that surge forward like a forest fire. “Mokolo Lukambu” spotlights the honeyed undulations of Bianko’s vibrato, which relays a tangible feeling of longing. These burning, fluorescent songs are so poignant because of their multivalence. With BUTU , KOKOKO! celebrate the beauty of their city and lives while protesting the inhumane conditions the government imposes on them there. They keep playing even as the amp explodes, inviting us to bear witness, all while keeping the dance alive.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Review Congo Music KOKOKO! BUTU Arts Experimental Music DRC Censorship Politics French South African Live Music Production Bandcamp Instruments Recycled Materials Fongola Debut Boiler Room NPR Tiny Desk Punk Trance Folk Kwaito House music Turkey Tunisia Synth Percussion Technology Natural Resources Cobalt Environmental Science Migration Performance Resist Congo River Lingala Energy Electricity Equator State Government Narrative Banned Music Journalism Criminality Critique Kinshasa Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 17th Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Sudan’s ongoing war, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has devastated the country, displacing millions and crippling public services. Civilian-led groups, particularly the Resistance Committees (RCs) and professional unions, continue to provide humanitarian aid despite severe repression, learning from the rich history of Sudanese unions active since the 20th century. Today, emergency committees and medical unions work tirelessly to support war victims, exemplifying resilience amid chaos. Their struggle highlights a stark contrast between civilian solidarity and military destruction. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Sudan Sudan’s ongoing war, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has devastated the country, displacing millions and crippling public services. Civilian-led groups, particularly the Resistance Committees (RCs) and professional unions, continue to provide humanitarian aid despite severe repression, learning from the rich history of Sudanese unions active since the 20th century. Today, emergency committees and medical unions work tirelessly to support war victims, exemplifying resilience amid chaos. Their struggle highlights a stark contrast between civilian solidarity and military destruction. Hashim Nasr, Boxed (2022). Digital photograph. Through Thick and Thin On April 15, 2023, one of Sudan's most brutal wars erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). This signaled a collapse of the alliance between two-armed factions. Even before the April fallout and subsequent war, their armed alliance had brought nothing to the Sudanese people but bloodshed and death; the alliance staged the military coup in October 2021 that terminated the civilian-military power-sharing agreement known as the Transitional Government which was installed in the wake of the December Revolution in 2018 . The Transitional Government (2019-2021) was composed of both military and civilians, with a rotating presidency that started with the military. The December Revolution was primarily led by millions of youths, particularly women, called the “Resistance Committees” (RCs). Although lacking in direct organizational links with the existing civilian groups, the RCs coordinated their mass protest actions very closely with them, particularly the Sudanese Professional Association . Remnants of Sudan’s Islamist military dictatorship (1989-2019) comprised two factions that had each previously attempted to seize power in the country. Working together, on June 3rd 2019, they enacted the most heinous massacre . Hundreds of peaceful protesters were brutalized, raped, drowned, and killed. On June 30th, 2019, under the combined leadership of civilian groups, millions of Sudanese took to the streets, demanding accountability for the massacres and a full transfer of power to civilians. The military eventually relented, resulting in the civilian-military power sharing agreement in August 2019. This illegitimate and violent political transformation has led to the ongoing war which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, over 12 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), and over three million refugees in neighboring countries. As the war has intensified since April 2023, the total repression of civilian activism has destroyed health, education, municipal and other civilian infrastructure, and deepened the economic crisis. In immediate response to the war, Sudan’s Resistance Committees (RCs) have morphed into Emergency Committees (ECs), while abroad, Sudanese communities collectively mobilize resources to save lives and restore livelihoods destroyed by the war. There are now numerous humanitarian, educational, and professional activities, both inside and outside Sudan seeking to help those most affected by war. Although repression inside Sudan and the lack of formal status outside Sudan limits this organizing, the collectives nevertheless strive to implement what they can. They continue to play a major role in organizing assistance and representing the Sudanese people at humanitarian and ceasefire negotiations mediated by international entities. With unwavering determination, the humanitarian aid effort by Sudan’s civilian bodies shines amidst the darkness of this horrific war. With the disintegration of the state apparatus and the collapse of public services, the RCs face highly complex challenges. Attempting to regroup and organize their membership, they continue to provide services to millions of displaced Sudanese people. Thus, a stark contrast emerges. While the military forces continue their war against each other and on the country’s resources, civil forces race to save what can be saved. These civilian forces continue amidst severe repression, killing, forced disappearances, illegal detention, torture, rape, and ethnic cleansing. The History of Trade Unions in Sudan As a central organizing force, political parties, civil society organizations, professional associations, and trade unions draw upon a long tradition of highly active political engagement that started before Sudan’s independence in 1956. Sudan has had union organizations since the early 20th century. In 1908, forest workers under British-Egyptian colonial rule, announced a strike demanding better wages and working conditions. In 1947, the first union of railway workers was established. As a result of the pressure exerted by the union movement, colonial authorities conceded the right to union organization. A labor law was issued in 1948, granting the Sudanese union movement legal status. By becoming a primary force in resisting and changing authoritarian regimes, however, the movement became a target of colonial oppression. One of the earliest decisions in subsequent military coups was the dissolution of existing unions, confiscating their properties and funds. By mobilizing their members, the unions quickly regained their strength and ability to lead. The Front of Associations (a coalition of professional, labor, and farmers' unions) led the October 1964 revolution , dominating a seat majority in the first transitional government, before being overthrown by infighting. Led by the Union Alliance, unions played a prominent role in the April 1985 uprising and the downfall of the Jaafar Nimeiri dictatorship regime. Omer Al-Bashir’s regime in 1989 resisted workers’ attempts at unionization—seeking to dismantle and control them by dismissing employees through the Public Interest Law. The labor movements, however, were ceaseless. Following the successful Sudanese Doctors Union strike of November 1989 , several professional associations organized strikes and protests in 1994 and 1996. They also continued efforts with regional and international organizations to isolate the military regime and its façade of regime-friendly unions. Therefore, during the 30 years of the Islamist military dictatorship, trade unions and associations operated through professional bodies which were strategically founded to counter the regime’s compliant civilian bodies and trade unions. In 2005, following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the military dictatorship and the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), Sudan witnessed a relative expansion of political space and public sector workers showed increased interest in unionization. Medical bodies inside and outside Sudan organized networking and coordination. Lawyers' organizations confronted repressive laws and defended public freedoms. Journalists exposed and documented violations, defending freedom of expression. Teachers gathered to address wage issues and demanded educational reform. The Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) served as the unifying platform leading the Revolution for the downfall of the Islamist dictatorship regime, especially when the-then SPA joined political and civil society organizations to create the opposition platform called Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) . The 2019 post-revolution transitional phase represented a glimmer of hope. Institutions were being rebuilt, preparing the country for a democratic transition . Most professional bodies sought to gain legitimacy by organizing member elections. Some of them, like the Sudanese Journalists' Union (SJU) and the Sudanese Doctors Union (SDU) succeeded in completing free and fair internal elections. Many believe that the October 2021 coup was staged by SAF and RSF precisely due to the rising tide of organized and elected professional associations and trade unions. The Birth of the Sudanese Professionals Association Actual collaboration among opposing union factions began with the rise of popular resistance against the Inqaz or the NCP regime, especially after South Sudan's secession and the 2010 election and following economic collapse. Professional and other civilian groups started organizing their bases to hold democratic grassroot union elections. They also worked to establish effective union alliances to challenge the regime's policies and its monopoly over power and political decisions. This culminated in the formation of what was then known as the Sudanese Professionals Union in 2012 (later called the Sudanese Professionals Association or SPA in 2013) through joint coordination between the Teachers' Committee, the Sudanese Journalists Network, the legitimate Sudanese Doctors' Union, and the Democratic Lawyers' Association. The SPA page on Facebook , which played a crucial role in the December 2018 Revolution, was created towards the end of 2012. Starting approximately in 2016, the professional forces that eventually formed the nucleus of the SPA continued expanding their coalition as an anti-Inqaz political front. They continued to link their presence to specific labor demands, gaining more support. Simultaneously, civilian unrest and discontent with the Inqaz regime was boiling under the surface until it exploded. First, in September 2013 (heavily repressed by the Inqaz/NCP regime) and then, more successfully, between 13 December 2018 and 6 April 2019. Importantly, these peaceful mass protests started by RCs in the city of Mayirno (Sennar State) spread to the RCs in Atbara (River Nile State), Damazin (Blue Nile State), before blazing across Sudan.This rising tide of protests was mutually-synergistic between the SPA and the RCs movements. The SPA and RCs quickly adjusted their demands from merely raising the minimum wage and protesting against the rising cost of living, to instead calling for continuous marches aiming to entirely overthrow the Inqaz/NCP regime. Taking the lead in the December Revolution, the SPA and the RCs participated in developing the charter of the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) on 1 January 2019 which adopted the RCs and SPA slogan of “freedom, peace, and justice.” These efforts culminated in the fall of the tyrant Omar al-Bashir on 11 April 2019 and continued throughout the transitional period that followed. Unfortunately, when the SPA’s constituent bodies began union-building processes, their lack of recent practical experience in union work and managing political conflicts, led to the disintegration of the FFC, with disruptive impacts on the SPA and other civilian bodies. The political alliances represented by the FFC began disagreeing on priorities. The RCs wanted to prioritize the creation of the Transitional Legislative Assembly; however, other political parties and professional associations did not see it as a priority. These disagreements deepened and widened, negatively impacting the civilian front. On August 30, 2022, in a historic step, Sudanese Journalist Union announced the successful election of their first post-Inqaz committee, followed by the Sudanese Dramatists Union. The Sudanese Doctors Union was reestablished in March 2023—just weeks before the war broke out mid-April 2023. The Resistance Committees: An Inspiring Experience The initiation and driving force behind the December Revolution is attributed to the most recent type of civilian body in Sudanese politics the RCs which also included the Coordination Committees of IDP camps in Darfur. RCs are unique grassroots organizations formed at the neighborhood level, which expanded to cities and different Sudanese states. They deliberately retain their horizontal nature and firmly reject hierarchical leadership, in order to avoid infiltration by the authorities or political factions. The presence of RCs has played a decisive role in keeping the flame of the revolution alive. The RCs formulated a comprehensive political vision, embodied in the “ People's Power Charter .” The Charter’s first draft was released for discussion in January 2022, underwent public discussions, and was revised in March 2022. Despite prevailing political divisions among FFC’s political forces and the military coup's control of power, the RC’s People’s Power Charter generated a significant amount of debate. The RCs played a more significant role in the political scene, surpassing the leadership of traditional civilian bodies (parties and unions), by supporting but also holding accountable the transitional government, and working within local governance structures. Undermining Inqaz/NCP supporters at the state level, RCs took on the responsibility of monitoring the flow of commodities such as flour, gasoline, diesel, and cooking gas. They contributed to resolving the transportation crisis, power outages, and other artificially created crises. This led to defeating the Inqaz regime’s black marketeers. The War: Massive Responsibilities Throughout the transition period, a widespread civil movement spread—undeterred by the October 2021 coup. Instead, professional unions and RCs regarded themselves as a primary tool of people power in the civil-military conflict. The union bodies, led by the preparatory committee of the newly formed Sudanese Doctors Union (SDU), established Emergency Rooms, communal shelters for IDPs, communal kitchens, and neighborhood mutual aid under the leadership of the RCs. These Emergency Rooms continue to provide life-saving food, water, medicine, and urgent supplies to millions of war-affected people, as well as the millions of IDPs fleeing the war. Similarly, the SPA’s constituent professional unions have intensified their efforts towards denouncing the war, calling for peace, providing basic humanitarian aid, exposing and documenting gross human rights violations and war crimes, defending activists detained in war zones, and organizing campaigns to stop the war and aid those affected, both inside and outside Sudan. Some professional unions have also begun envisioning the required reconstruction, recovery, and reform needed in their respective sectors once the war stops. Civilian Testimonies Shedding light on the experiences of workers’ unionization and the efforts of the medical and humanitarian emergency, offered here are the accounts of two prominent contributors. They reflect the significant efforts exerted by civilian forces amidst the ongoing war. Activist Moez Elzein is a project manager at the Al-Ayam Center for Cultural Studies and Development and a founding contributor to the humanitarian Emergency Rooms (ERs). Elzein is currently based in Kampala, Uganda, where he recently sought refuge from the horrors of the war in Sudan. He explained that since the outbreak of the war and collapse of public services, groups of RC members, professionals, and young men and women, began establishing ERs in war zones across Sudan. Inspired by the concept of “Nafir” (a mobilization call to humanitarian action, significant in Sudanese culture as voluntary and cooperative work during humanitarian disasters), they vowed to keep their work free of political affiliations and biases, which helped the idea to evolve and attract more volunteers. Elzein pointed out that ERs began their work with the idea of mutual aid rather than humanitarian aid. The idea started spontaneously among Sudanese through financial transfers to support those affected by the war, followed by the idea of ERs. Moez's words reveal the organizational capacities and experience these young people possess, developing a Coordination Council for Grassroots Work of ERs which is the largest indigenous civilian coordinating body operating across Sudan since the war began. This Council was formed based on the local governance system of Khartoum State, the most populous state in the country, with approximately eight million inhabitants according to the latest census projections from 2018. Initially, seven central ERs were formed for the seven localities, along with grassroots rooms for residential neighborhoods under them to ensure coordination and networking based on the administrative structure between administrative units, grassroots rooms, local ERs, and central rooms. Elzein indicated that the Council would evolve into a national council after including Sennar, Darfur, and other regions, thereby linking humanitarian intervention to grassroots work and local governance. Elzein describes how the ERs in Khartoum consist of 130 grassroots rooms in neighborhoods, in addition to seven central rooms. In Sennar, there are 15 grassroots rooms in neighborhoods and around seven central rooms, as well as one room in El-Suki. He noted that women's emergency rooms have also started to appear in eastern Sudan, as is the case in Gedaref and Kassala States, and there are 200 grassroots ERs in different Darfur states. Regarding how these rooms fund their activities, Elzein says, “the rooms initially received support from Sudanese people through bank transfers as donations, in addition to support from some international organizations. However, after the decline in capabilities due to the ongoing war and the worsening conditions of millions of Sudanese, the primary reliance now is on donors like the Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF).” Sudanese national organizations in turn, distribute funding to ERs, alongside other international organizations. Currently, the ERs depend entirely on funding from foreign organizations. Elzein continues, “there is a disparity in the number of participants in the rooms, depending on the population size in different areas and the level of interaction, even within Khartoum. For example, there are differences in the ability to communicate with various parties. Some rooms can communicate with SAF or RSF commanders in their areas, such as Karari in Omdurman and East Nile, to ensure safe passage of some food supplies needed for central kitchens or to secure the release of detained activists or residents of neighborhoods, while some areas lack this capability due to the hostile nature of the forces in control or due to pre-conceived aversion by grassroot activists to any coordination with neither SAF nor RSF.” For Elzein, one of the most significant challenges facing ERs is the repressive targeting and human rights violations faced by their members at the hands of both RSF and SAF. He adds, “in areas controlled by SAF and RSF, youth workers in emergency rooms have faced repeated arrests and severe human rights violations such as torture and beatings. Three weeks ago, one of the key workers in the emergency rooms in Eastern Nile State was arrested and falsely accused of killing a member of RSF.” Dr Hiba Omar was interviewed within the context of writing this article, to better understand the role of the medical ERs. Omar is the elected President of SDU’s Preparatory Committee and one of the prominent leaders of SPA. She has been repeatedly arrested and displaced. She says, “When the war broke out, the SDU was only a month old, and the Preparatory Committee was elected to perform specific tasks, including drafting a constitution, compiling a membership register, calling for a full general assembly, and holding free and fair union elections. We found ourselves faced with the daunting task of providing medical services to thousands of war victims after many hospitals shut down and were attacked by airstrikes and indiscriminate military attacks on them.” She recounts the details of the first hours after the war broke out, “I went to East Nile Hospital in the Al-Haj Youssef neighborhood in Khartoum and worked there for three consecutive days due to the severe shortage of staff. While we were working inside the hospital, it was bombed by SAF aircraft and then it was evacuated. So, I moved to the Ban Jadeed Hospital in a nearby area, but found it had closed. This situation, along with reports of many hospitals being out of service, prompted us to think about establishing medical ERs. We called on the RCs to support and assist us, and then we formed the first ER at Ban Jadeed Hospital.” She continues, “The war was very intense and was raging in the center of Khartoum State. This war violated all international humanitarian conventions and laws of war, with no regard for the neutrality of medical services and facilities nor protection of health workers. In fact, they were specifically targeted by both sides of the war. The expansion and intensity of the war and the targeting of hospitals, and the use of some health facilities as military platforms led to the loss of the ER’s capacities and the inability of patients to reach them, in addition to the killing of many medical staff and emergency room workers, the evacuation of patients, and the destruction and looting of hospitals.” Omar adds, “There were great difficulties in getting medical staff to hospitals, so most resided inside the hospitals, and we worked to fill the shortage due to the inability of some doctors to reach hospitals by training volunteers from RCs in medical services. The RCs provided oxygen and intravenous fluids in dangerous areas under shelling and bombing, as well as meals for patients and staff, and also transferred patients and the injured to other hospitals.” In her testimony as a doctor who witnessed the horrors of this war, Omar indicates the importance of the civil society organizations to the medical aid effort, “as a union, we contributed alongside Sudanese medical diaspora bodies such as SAPA (Sudanese American Physicians Associations) to securing critical information for the Sudanese Medical Council amid the shelling and battles; first transferring it to Al-Jazirah State and then after clashes broke out there, transferring the equipment containing the information to the Northern State in order to protect the interests of more than 10,000 doctors. The Council is responsible for training, certificates, and appointments of doctors and their specializations.” This major collapse caused by the war led Pmar Hiba, and her SDU colleagues, to work with other union bodies to establish the “Union Front,” and to expand it to include all workers in various fields who have been facing difficult conditions since the outbreak of the war, primarily the suspension of their salaries by the state for over a year and a half. “Addressing all these issues is almost impossible without stopping the war and, therefore, besides our work on professional issues, we continued work with other union bodies to achieve our shared struggle to stop the war, demand accountability, restore the revolution, and collectively defend workers' rights. We represent a broad sector of the Sudanese people together, and our positions express a large base that rejects the war, stands against its crimes, seeks justice, redress for the victims, the restoration of professionals' roles, and the enhancement and improvement of their conditions.” Continuous Work Despite the War After nearly a year and a half of horrific war, amidst the destruction caused by the military and militias allied with warring parties in Sudan, civil revolutionary forces are rising. These forces are working inside the country’s conflict areas as well as outside Sudan, where millions of Sudanese have sought refuge. Many are working to build bridges of communication with similar unions in host countries. Some have successfully traced their members dispersed in different countries as well. Various groups have started organizing training courses to enhance their capacities to deal with the war and its aftermath, while some unions are preparing to assess the scale of the destruction and thinking of how to reestablish a peaceful transition to democracy. Others yet, have begun documenting the violations and war crimes committed against civilians—and legally classifying them. Meanwhile, most unions are quietly working to provide as much assistance and support to their members by facilitating financial donations from Sudanese people worldwide and communicating with organizations that help and support refugees and professional advocacy groups. They are also negotiating with authorities in some asylum countries to ensure their members’ welfare and safety. In conclusion, the Sudanese civilian bodies such as the SPA, Resistance Committees and professional unions continue their decades-old tradition of democratic grassroot organization and advocacy for democratic freedoms despite the war. The collective experience they accumulated during the December Revolution continues to drive their commitment and inform their decision-making. They remain resolute that wars and military coups will never dent their resolve to create a free, peaceful and just. The December Revolution’s slogan, “Freedom, Peace and Justice” remains a beacon of hope for Sudan.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Sudan Egypt Armed Forces Resistance Movement Resistance Resistance Committees Unions Medical Union Healthcare Community Civilian Solidarity War Sudanese Armed Forces Rapid Support Forces Military Coup Power-sharing Transitional Government December Revolution of 2018 Sudanese Professional Association Islamist Massacre Protest Political Dissidents Political Violence Violence Internally Displaced Persons Refugees Repression Civilian Activism Civil Society Infrastructure Dictatorship Emergency Committees Sudanese Diaspora Mobilization Humanitarian Aid Organizing Ceasefire Negotiations Trade Union Independence Colonialism 20th Century Railway Workers Colonial Oppression Front of Associations Coalition Labor Farmer Union Alliance Jaafar Nimeiri Omer Al-Bashir Public Interest Law Sudanese Doctors Union Strike Economy Grassroots Movements Inqaz NCP Regime South Sudan Secession Democracy Teachers Journalists Lawyers Doctors Facebook Social Media Civilian Unrest Sennar State River Nile State Blue Nile State Peoples Power Charter Flow of Commodities Monitoring Civilian Testimonies Cultural Studies Census Al-Ayam Center for Cultural Studies and Development Moez Elzein Activist Human Rights Violations Human Rights Youth Workers Torture Emergency Room SDU Preparatory Committee Hiba Omar Airstrike Khartoum State Sudanese Medical Council Al-Jazirah State Hope Conflict Revolution Advocacy Freedom Peace Justice Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 23rd Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Over the past decade, Maldivian families, drawn by a distorted vision of religious idealism, have burrowed anew in ISIS-held territories across the Middle East. Widowed mothers and orphaned children have quickly become victims of the abuse and deprivation rampant in IDP camps like Roj in Northeast Syria. As religious extremism continues to unravel the Maldives’ social fabric, the nation must reckon with the Maldivian women and children left to suffer under appalling conditions abroad. · FEATURES Essay · Maldives Over the past decade, Maldivian families, drawn by a distorted vision of religious idealism, have burrowed anew in ISIS-held territories across the Middle East. Widowed mothers and orphaned children have quickly become victims of the abuse and deprivation rampant in IDP camps like Roj in Northeast Syria. As religious extremism continues to unravel the Maldives’ social fabric, the nation must reckon with the Maldivian women and children left to suffer under appalling conditions abroad. "Anyhow" (2025), oil on canvas. Voices of Roj “Nothing is nurturing about this camp,” Hajer said. “It does not educate us. It does not rehabilitate us. It breaks us, and it is breaking our children.” Hajer and her daughter are among roughly a hundred Maldivian detainees in Syria’s Roj camp, where they have lived for years under conditions that grow more degrading with each passing season. The al-Hol and Roj camps, run by the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)—the civilian authority linked to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—hold about 42,500 people, mostly wives, female relatives, and children of ISIS suspects. The urgent humanitarian and moral crisis faced by Maldivian women and children, along with others detained in camps like Roj, remains largely ignored, dismissed, or buried beneath layers of political hesitation and bureaucratic neglect. Recent global developments have only worsened the outlook. The re-election of Donald Trump in the US has accelerated aid cuts and diplomatic disengagement , contributing to a chillingly uncertain environment for repatriation efforts. The Maldivian government, like many others, has struggled to articulate a coherent policy for the return and reintegration of its citizens, leaving families in a state of indefinite limbo. Detainees remain voiceless, with little to no support from their countries of origin, caught in the legal web of global counterterrorism frameworks and domestic laws that need to balance humanitarian needs and national security risks. Hajer married Abdel in 2015, not knowing she would soon become a widow in a war zone. Immediately after their wedding, the couple left for Turkey and crossed into Syria without informing their families of their ‘exact’ plan. A year in, Abdel, Hajer’s husband, was killed in a safe house. Hajer was reluctant to discuss her circumstances in detail, an understandable decision given the gravity of her current situation and the threat to her mental and physical well-being. Now, she describes camp Roj as an “ open-air extortion prison ,” where detainees are forced to rely on remittances from relatives abroad to survive. Scorching 50 degree summers, sandstorms, and strong winds create constant health threats, especially for women and children. Water is often unavailable for days at a time, and electricity, when it comes, must be paid for and rarely lasts more than eight hours a day. Medical care is unaffordable and inadequate, even for the most basic needs. For the children born in war zones, this is all they know, but they are not immune to its psychological effects. Nights bring added danger. With no lighting, children are afraid to use distant toilets, resulting in bedwetting and other behaviours brought on by emotional trauma. Children are, too, being sexually abused and harassed. Hajer said children are “anxious, afraid, and broken.” They live under the constant shadow of fear, with their lives persistently at risk. In 2022, two Egyptian girls aged 12 and 15 were brutally killed in the annex of Al-Hol camp, their throats slit and their bodies discarded in an open septic tank. In another case, armed men shot dogs in front of children as an intimidation tactic. In a separate incident, women were dragged from their tents, beaten with iron rods, and soaked with freezing water. Rape and sexual violence are widely documented in these camps, used not only as a method of domination but as a weapon of war to instil fear, punish, and exert control. Victims include both women and adolescent girls, most of whom remain silent out of fear of stigma or retaliation. Their children returned from the ordeal sobbing and shaken, with no degree of normalcy to their expressions, no language to articulate the fear drawn into their young faces. Mothers like Hajer, along with other women in the camp, try to impose structure where none exists, often instinctively adopting young children who have been orphaned. They attempt to teach the children to read, ration food and water, and invent games from scraps of plastic and cloth. However, these efforts are frequently undermined by the suspicion of camp authorities, where even the slightest semblance of self-organisation is viewed as evidence of radicalism. UN Women revealed in May 2025 that nearly half of women’s organisations providing frontline support in crisis zones may shut down within six months due to funding shortfalls. The devastating conditions in the camps are only one part of a broader and more entrenched problem. To understand the barriers to repatriation and reintegration, it is necessary to examine not only policy failures and diplomatic stances but also the supposedly ‘measured’ political calculations that have driven prolonged inaction. Religious idealism The Maldives is better known for its year-round tropical allure and luxury tourism, but beneath the surface, rising religious extremism is destabilising social cohesion locally and its image internationally. Since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, a concerning number of Maldivian men, women, and children have left the country to join conflicts in Syria, raising alarm about the growing influence of extremist ideologies. To some extent, it is a microcosm of the political extremities the world is experiencing. This trend not only threatens domestic stability but also carries broader implications for national security, tourism, and the visa-free international mobility enjoyed by Maldivian passport holders to 93 countries and territories . While many, like Hajer, embark on what they perceive as a spiritual journey to atone or reconnect with their faith, the motivations behind such departures are rarely straightforward. In the Maldivian context, daily life for many is marked by economic hardship, generational overcrowding, and limited opportunity, conditions that can push individuals toward radical paths in search of purpose. For some, it’s less about religious doctrine and more about dignity: a desperate bid to reclaim identity, agency, and purity in a world that seems to have left them behind. Faith, in this light, becomes more than a spiritual pursuit; it becomes a lifeline in the face of stagnation, social pressure, and the slow erosion of hope. Not everyone who left, however, can be considered a victim. Some left disillusioned with the government’s narrow or politicised interpretation of Islamic identity. In contrast, others were drawn by the promise of raising children in a more devout Islamic environment, one that, for many Maldivians, differs significantly from their own more moderate and diverse religious practices. Many were also misled by promises of employment, stability, and community, rather than out of allegiance to extremist ideologies like ISIS. Countless Maldivian men were radicalised by recruiters who preyed on legitimate grievances. Children, by contrast, had no choice at all, making their right of return particularly urgent. To take children away from their homes and communities and into a war zone under the banner of an extreme and violent version of Islam is a profound and tragic distortion of the core values most Maldivians hold dear. As highlighted by the UN’s experts on children and armed conflict and on counterterrorism and human rights, children associated with armed groups are victims first and foremost—entitled to protection, rehabilitation, and reintegration, not punishment or indefinite detention. This search for ‘nirvana’ can be understood through a theoretical lens that synthesises Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital. Turner’s notion of liminality, being in an in-between state, detached from the structures of ordinary social life, offers a framework for understanding how religious journeys serve as rites of passage. For individuals like Hajer who hail from ethno-religious nations like the Maldives, this spiritual mobility represents a space where old identities are suspended, and new, sacred selves are potentially formed. These movements are not merely about faith. It is about negotiating one’s place in a rapidly shifting social order. At the same time, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital—the recognition, honour, and legitimacy one accrues through cultural or religious alignment—helps explain how religious idealism in the Maldives becomes a strategy of social navigation. When economic capital is scarce, and social mobility is limited, adherence to visible forms of piety can serve as a form of distinction. Religious idealism thus functions both as a means of personal salvation and as a public signal. In a context where modernity collides with tradition and where the state has a contested relationship with Islamic identity, personal piety can become a performative yet significant attempt to assert agency and reclaim moral clarity. In the Maldives, religious transformations are not only personal decisions but are situated within broader geopolitical anxieties, state governance, and the moral economies of globalisation. In this light, Hajer’s journey is not an anomaly but part of a patterned response to the contradictions of postcolonial modernity, where religious idealism emerges as both an escape and an embrace, a refusal of the present and a reimagining of what life could mean. A disturbing example of this rising extremism occurred in 2022, when Islamic fundamentalists stormed a government-organised Yoga Day event in Malé, attended by public officials and foreign diplomats. The attackers shouted religious slogans, destroyed property, and attempted to assault participants, claiming yoga contradicted Islamic beliefs. Investigations revealed the protesters had obtained flags from the office of an opposition political party. Incidents like this reflect a broader pattern of growing intolerance, politically fuelled extremism, and the weakening of moderate voices. This climate of hostility has also had deadly consequences for those who dare to speak out against it. Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, a reporter for the independent media outlet Minivan News (later the Maldives Independent), was abducted and forcibly disappeared after receiving repeated death threats from Islamic extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda. His journalism, personal blog, and social media accounts criticised religious fundamentalism and violent extremism. Despite a decade of advocacy and demands for justice for “Moyameeha”, no perpetrators have been held accountable, leaving Rilwan’s family without closure and sending a chilling message to others seeking to challenge extremist views. Political context Following the dismantling of ISIS in 2019, Kurdish authorities assumed control of former ISIS-held territories, imprisoning male fighters and confining women and children to detention camps. Maldivian nationals initially held in Al-Hol were subsequently transferred to Roj camp, where 11 women and 33 children, along with six other individuals and their uncounted children, remain, according to direct reports from detainees. The conditions in Roj emphasise the ongoing diplomatic and humanitarian challenges faced by inhabitants, especially in the context of the Maldives’ ambiguous stance on repatriation, despite Turkey asserting administrative authority over Kurdish-controlled zones and expressing willingness to repatriate foreign nationals. The current Maldivian government has not made contact in months to verify the health or legal status of its citizens or to initiate repatriation procedures. This inaction contrasts with earlier efforts under former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, whose administration approved an open budget through the People’s Majlis (parliament), trained personnel, and authorised the return of several individuals, including six adults and their children. Of these, five were released from the National Reintegration Centre (NRC), and children were sent to live with extended families within six to eight months. Under the current administration of President Dr Mohamed Muizzu, despite campaign promises and meetings with returnee families, no concrete updates have followed. This has raised suspicions of deliberate obfuscation, possibly to avoid exposing domestic recruiters or politically sensitive ties. The Maldives also lacks a comprehensive and systematic reintegration policy. Current efforts fall short of addressing the complexity and depth of religious fundamentalism. Existing initiatives focus narrowly on apprehended violent extremists, while broader patterns of extremism, often embedded in spiritual discourse, online spaces, and social networks, remain largely unaddressed. There is no consistent, nationwide framework; instead, the issue is treated selectively and reactively. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism driven by foreign influence, internal vulnerabilities, and successive government’s failure to curb the spread of extremist ideologies has allowed fundamentalist Islam to dominate and fuel growing support for Salafi-Jihadism , further complicating efforts to counter extremism. The effects of the one-sided limit to freedom of expression in the country are elephantinely apparent: extremists are free to spread hate as long as it is laced with religion, shunning those promoting equal rights in an open, inclusive and just society. Civil society, which could play a vital role in prevention and rehabilitation, is constrained by limited protections and lacks the operational space to act meaningfully. NGOs and civil society actors are cautious of speaking out, often only doing so under conditions of confidentiality due to fear of reprisal and lack of state protection. Targeted attacks in the past, such as MP Dr Afrasheem Ali’s assassination, the enforced disappearance of journalist Ahmed Rilwan , and the brutal killing of Yameen Rasheed, have created a climate of fear and silenced people who dared to speak out. Moreover, the unlawful de-registration of the Maldivian Democracy Network in 2019 has set a dangerous precedent for local human rights groups. State institutions such as the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) provide only rudimentary public messaging that does not align with contemporary radicalisation dynamics. Donor-funded programs, including those under USAID, are frequently framed in a way that often oversimplifies the issue with superficial messaging, such as ‘be good to your neighbour,’ failing to address the deeper ideological and structural drivers of extremism. The approach taken tends not to see the forest for the trees. In reality, state-led programming on countering violent extremism is not functional at a meaningful level. Both the government and society appear to be in denial about the scale of the problem, further complicating efforts to reintegrate returnees especially amid widespread public hostility and fear. The legal framework governing these issues was clearly defined in 2018, where under the Maldives’ Anti-Terror Law (2018) , travel to designated war zones without prior government approval is criminalised and punishable by five to seven years of imprisonment. Syria, by presidential decree, is officially recognised as a war zone. Before this legislation, however, it was relatively easy for Maldivians to travel abroad to join ISIS or affiliated groups. The state’s delayed or selective approach to repatriation emphasises the tension between legal obligations, political considerations, and international diplomatic responsibility. Personal stories, such as that of Hajer, bring the human cost of these political and legal entanglements into sharp view. Quiet recruitment and blind spots Efforts branded as ‘whole-of-society’ initiatives in the Maldives are poorly conceptualised and often superficial, lacking the depth and nuance required to counter extremism meaningfully. Public education campaigns have failed to equip families and communities with the tools to identify early warning signs. In many cases, families mistook increased religiosity for spiritual growth, unaware that it could signal a more profound ideological shift toward extremism. Compounding this is the government’s failure to build public trust or support for reintegration initiatives. Without a national dialogue or sustained public outreach, returnees are often placed back into hostile or unsafe environments, such as victims of domestic abuse being returned to the same communities, resulting in re-traumatisation and failed reintegration. The state has provided no clear communication regarding where returnees are held, under what conditions, and for how long which has instigated suspicion and public resentment. These shortcomings are accelerated by the state’s inability to address extremism within its own institutions, particularly prisons and mosques. A 2019 report by Transparency Maldives revealed widespread and well-organised recruitment networks operating within the prison system, often more effective than community-based recruiters. One-on-one interviews with inmates exposed the extent to which recruiters wield control and influence behind bars, using religious narratives and psychological manipulation invoking guilt to indoctrinate others. Mosques have also become spaces of quiet recruitment, especially among disaffected youth, including those awaiting GCSE results. Tactics employed include offering communal meals, job promises, and a sense of belonging through social events. Academically inclined individuals are groomed for technical roles, while others are positioned as ideological foot soldiers. Despite the seriousness of these dynamics, civil society engagement has been inconsistent and largely ineffective. For example, after a brief focus on prison recruitment into extremism during the 2022 National Human Rights Day, there has been no meaningful follow-up or public reporting. The lack of a coordinated, transparent, and informed approach across both community and institutional spaces continues to leave critical vulnerabilities unaddressed, undermining any sustainable counter-extremism strategy. Return and reintegration While Maldives has an ambiguous stance on the repatriation of the victims, its silence is louder. The absence of consistent public communication, the lack of a formal repatriation policy, and the visible deterioration of previously initiated reintegration mechanisms all indicate a system that is either unwilling or unable to confront the realities of return. The NRC, once a promising facility has now become emblematic of institutional neglect. Initially designed to provide trauma-informed, phased rehabilitation for returnees, starting with psychological assessments and skill-building programmes, the NRC saw moderate success with the first batch of returnees. Children were able to access safe spaces and basic routines, and families received some level of structured support. However, this fragile system quickly crumbled under the weight of poor planning, untrained staff, inadequate community sensitisation, and shifting political priorities. The location of the centre next to Maafushi jail also stigmatises it and options for an all-round holistic space are few. The second group of returnees, which included over 20 individuals, arrived to find a drastically underprepared NRC. Staff shortages, a dearth of leadership, and inadequate infrastructure resulted in inconsistent care and oversight. While the first group benefited from relatively humane conditions and structured support, the second group faced bureaucratic delays, limited communication with the outside world, and deteriorating mental health among detainees. These discrepancies have led to deep resentment and perceptions of injustice among returnee families who had consistently fought for their return. Worse still, the blurring of lines between victims and potential perpetrators, particularly during the early police evaluations, led to significant safety concerns. Vulnerable women and children were placed in close proximity to individuals not yet cleared of extremist affiliations. This created an environment ripe for intimidation, blackmail, and re-traumatisation, undermining the very premise of reintegration as a protective and rehabilitative process. It is not easy for the NRC to employ capable personnel, as the role involves working with vulnerable individuals and carries significant risk and responsibility. Civil society groups, which could have provided supplementary support, were kept at arm’s length due to state mistrust and opacity. Reintegration in the Maldives is not a coordinated, strategic process; it is an afterthought shaped by a legal and institutional system that often operates with duplicity and discrimination. Without clear policy guidelines, adequate staffing, or genuine community preparation, the state is setting returnees up for failure. The uneven application of laws and the classist biases embedded within the Maldivian legal system further undermine efforts as reintegration becomes another arena where privilege dictates outcomes. Reintegration cannot be reduced to short-term containment, bureaucratic box-ticking, or campaign promises. It must be a long-term, holistic approach with sustained community sensitisation that confronts inequalities rather than enables them. Abandoned by the state? Nowhere is the failure of reintegration more visible or more tragic than in the lives of the children affected by this crisis. For those who have been brought back to the Maldives, the conditions they return to are often far from restorative. For those left behind in conflict zones like Roj Camp, still clinging to hopes of repatriation from their country of origin, the situation is even more dire. The NRC, while initially framed as a place of rehabilitation, unfortunately functions more like a detention facility. This reality has drawn sharp criticism from the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) and mental health professionals, particularly regarding the presence of children within such a setting. These concerns are not merely symbolic. Detaining children, even for reintegration, violates their rights and places them in an environment that accelerates existing trauma rather than alleviating it. Children require environments that are safe, caring, and psychologically secure. The NRC, with its history of surveillance, limited freedom, and uncertain status for its occupants, does not offer such conditions. Mental health practitioners have warned that exposure to these institutional settings, especially without proper safeguards or child-focused services, risks deepening emotional distress and delaying recovery. The long-term psychological effects on children subjected to such environments are significant, including increased risk of anxiety, attachment disorders, and chronic trauma. For those still stranded in conflict zones, particularly in camps like Roj, the cost of inaction is even higher. These children, some born in Syria, others taken there as infants, have lived through war, witnessed violence, and endured years of neglect. They are not stateless in a legal sense, but are emotionally unanchored and existentially adrift. Their developmental years unfold in conditions marked by fear, deprivation, and the constant threat of violence. Hajer, like many others, is not a product of ideology alone but was shaped by the very society that now hesitates to bring her home. Her fate was as much a response to her environment as it was a consequence of her circumstances. In an increasingly religiously conservative state, where both fundamentalists and liberals find themselves alienated, the space for belonging is shrinking. Both ends of the political spectrum feel excluded—one for not conforming, the other for questioning. The inequality and alienation that drove them to leave is the same one that prevents them from returning. The economic hardship and political instability that drove families to the margins remain unaddressed. The longer the Maldives delay their return, the greater the risk that these children will interpret their abandonment as deliberate. This sense of betrayal, of being forgotten or judged for choices they never made can become a powerful source of grievance. Left unaddressed, it could fuel a new cycle of political violence. The very young people the state claims to be protecting may, in time, come to see that state as the reason for their suffering. This is not a hypothetical risk. Extremist ideologies often root themselves in personal trauma, as well as a perceived loss of identity or dignity. For children growing up in camps with little to no education, healthcare, or hope for reintegration, the appeal of groups that offer purpose, belonging, or revenge can be dangerously persuasive. The moral argument is clear: no child should bear the consequences of their parents’ decision. The legal argument is equally compelling: as a signatory to multiple international conventions, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Maldives must ensure that these children are protected, repatriated, and rehabilitated in a child-sensitive and rights-based manner. Continuing to delay their return is not just a policy failure; it is a human rights violation and a reflection of our lack of shared humanity as a nation. More dangerously, it is the planting of seeds for future instability. “I hope this helps us,” Hajer reiterated, echoing her hopes for repatriation that extended far beyond the confines of Roj Camp as she chose to lay bare their current status, risking her life. It is a question that demands an answer not just from policymakers, but from the entire nation. The new governing administration in Syria does little to clarify the fate of those stranded in camps like Roj, offering no substantial legal framework or accountability for the displaced, leaving them in a dangerous limbo, neither protected nor prosecuted. The cost of waiting is not merely diplomatic or logistical. It is deeply moral. Each day that passes without action compounds the trauma of those stranded abroad and deepens the wounds of those returned without proper support. It signals to children that their suffering is invisible, and to families that they are disposable. It risks turning victims into future threats, not by nature, but by neglect. The Maldives must confront the uncomfortable truth: silence is not neutrality, it is complicity. The time to act is not when conditions are perfect but when humanity calls. And its calls are reverberating. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Maldives Syria Extremism Women and Children Gender Violence Civil Society detention Internally Displaced Persons Roj Camp Northeast Syria Vulnerable Populations children's rights open-air prison symbolic capital religious transformation prison abuse Salafi-Jihadism Counterterrorism Department extremist recruitment government betrayal geopolitics Anonymity anonymous Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 8th Sep 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. "Khai Hoa" (Bloom) by Hoai Phuong. Artist Hong Kong Fizza Qureshi 22 May 2025 nd · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Shifting Solidarities Building inclusive organizing networks is a fraught endeavor in Hong Kong. For the last five years , residents involved in demonstrations and community events have had to work around the government’s crackdown on civil liberties. For South Asians, the situation is more complex. In addition to dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 policies and the recent National Security Law ( NSL )—specifically implemented to intimidate dissenters—they also have to contend with the implicit racial biases of fellow organizers. It wasn’t until 2023, when people started protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, that organizing practices began shifting, with efforts to learn from South Asians’ years of work in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. While there is still plenty of room for progress, 2023 marked a promising moment of intersectional coalition building in Hong Kong’s political history. In 2019, the government proposed the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment), a bill regarding extradition that allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial to a number of countries, including the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Macau. In the months that followed, more than a million people took to the streets to protest , citing concerns that the bill would expose people in Hong Kong to China’s judicial system. Protestors clashed with the police, and in the aftermath , faced immense repression; hundreds of activists were exiled, unions were dismantled, and residents left the territory in mass numbers. Amidst the turmoil, citizens found solace in one another, with the term “Hong Konger” becoming a unifying marker of identity for many dissenters. Despite this burgeoning camaraderie, ethno-nationalist tendencies persisted. The newfound sense of community excluded the city’s historic South Asian citizens —a group that came to the region as early as the 1800s, when the British colonized the city. Initially arriving as soldiers in the British army, South Asians eventually became central to setting up key administrative and educational institutions within the territory. However, today, Hong Kongers of South Asian descent still face institutionalized discrimination rooted in a colonial racial hierarchy, colorism, and language segregation. Adnan Muhammad is a Pakistani-Hong Konger who founded a Palestine solidarity group called United For Palestine (UFP) in 2017. Reflecting on his experience organising around Palestine in Hong Kong, he said, “We always felt like we were operating within silos [because] most of the people who came to our events were either Pakistani or Indian, or Muslim [from diverse backgrounds].” Adnan added that during the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests , South Asians and other minority communities could not partake because of the language barrier; most protest materials were in Cantonese. If they did participate, they became “easy targets” for the police due to their ethnicity, the institution's deeply rooted racist attitudes , and, notably, discriminatory “stop and search” practices. This is an observation that Alison Tan, a food designer and organizer, made , too. The Hong Kong-based designer stated, “People have a bit of a mind-your-own-business mentality in Hong Kong, especially in public, but during the demonstrations, you could see people actively looking out for each other,” adding, “Yet, when there were instances of police aggression towards South Asians, no one seemed to step up.” The organizing networks established in 2019 largely dissipated the following year when the pandemic hit. The government imposed 6pm curfews, movement tracking mobile apps, mask mandates, and restrictions on gatherings. In public, an air of self-censorship took root. Citizens felt that they couldn’t have open conversations about the ways these laws were negatively impacting them. The NSL, passed in 2020, made dissent along with community organizing even more difficult. It allowed the Hong Kong government to prosecute individuals with crimes of secession (trying to break away from China), subversion (threatening the government’s power), terrorism (acts of violence), and collusion with foreign organizations. Each of these crimes was vaguely defined—no one really seemed to know what would count as a transgression. By instituting this law, the government was effectively cracking down on civil liberties, including the freedom of speech. Despite the intensity of censorship, Hong Kong citizens did not lose their fervor for dissent. When Israel launched a genocidal attack on Palestine following the events of October 7th, organizing networks slowly began springing back into action. Citizens still didn’t have freedom of assembly, so events started out as small-scale, community-based, and non-confrontational gatherings. Nevertheless, organizers were resolute and made an effort to be intersectional. Following the cancellation of a Palestinian film screening at a community arts studio, solidarity efforts intensified. The events that were previously semi-public went completely underground. During this time, Alison remembers seeing South Asian and Middle Eastern communities taking the lead in filling a crucial gap in people’s knowledge about Palestine. “Most Chinese Hong Kongers do not care, and do not know [about Palestine]. We just don’t have an insight into the way faith, for example, plays a role in the struggle.” For Alison and Adnan, this knowledge gap exists because there has been little exchange and solidarity between movements for Hong Kong’s liberation and those located outside the region. In the past year, however, efforts by groups like United for Palestine have converged their goals with those of other organizing collectives. Under UFP leadership, people joined messaging groups made by South Asian Muslim youth that disseminated information about teach-ins and prayers being held in mosques that helped spread awareness about the history of the Palestinian cause. There were communal events, tucked away from the public eye, where people gathered to talk about grief, frustration, and their commitment to justice. Reflecting on these shifts, Adnan felt that even though their collective began operating in Hong Kong in 2017, “It was only after October 2023 that our efforts began reaching people beyond South Asian and Muslim communities, and people from other communities began to take an interest.” Vera, a Chinese Hong-Konger whose artist studio is located in a diverse neighborhood consisting of Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, and Chinese residents, shared that his studio’s support for Palestine has brought him and his colleagues closer to their South Asian neighbors. “X, a Pakistani kaifong , who often plays chess with me, visited our space and saw Palestinian flags. Since then, he’s been cooking for us, saying Palestinians are like his brothers and sisters.” This again represents a rare instance of solidarity between communities who live alongside each other but don’t always have common ground to meaningfully interact with one another—a divide that's frequently reinforced by systemic factors, including language differences. At a community mutual aid event in March 2024 that raised 48,000 HKD in donations for Palestine, South Asian students put up a stall selling keffiyehs, mehndi, and other solidarity materials alongside other Hong Kongers who sold miso soup, zines, and second-hand clothing. The event also featured a halal vegan-friendly spread of foods and learning sessions about Islam’s role in the resistance and the Palestinian struggle against colonization. The fundraiser, centered around honoring and learning about Palestinian culture, ended with a moving performance of a song, “My mouth was made for speaking,” by a Hong Kong singer, drawing powerful links between the struggle for Palestine’s liberation and Hong Kong’s own struggle against imperialism. This is not to say that there has not been pushback. Events that have taken place more publicly have been shut down and censored under the pretext of ambiguous complaints. While official reasoning remains unknown, pro-Palestine organizers speculate that the government seeks to avoid friction with pro-Zionist lobbies and maintain a politically neutral—or rather, a conflict-free—environment within the city. Of course, choosing to remain indifferent to a genocide is akin to implicitly siding with the oppressor. In August 2024, after almost a year of community-based events for Palestine, some organizers were able to host a public exhibit showcasing Palestine solidarity posters at Hong Kong’s premier Art Book Fair, “BOOKED,” at Tai Kwun Contemporary. However, two days before the fair was due to begin, the exhibition was canceled without any clear explanation from the management. Pivotally, organizers remain resilient and tactful. Within two days of the exhibition at BOOKED being canceled, they secured an alternative venue and utilized solidarity networks to gather a large number of attendees. Jason, a photographer who has been running a leftist reading club in Hong Kong for the past year, believes this was only possible because efforts related to Palestine revitalized networks of organizing that had been previously quashed. “There was a lot of energy in the city that dissipated [after 2019], and now people have a reason to come together again.” Alison, who was also at the event, said, “Palestine has really brought people from all walks of life together in a really powerful way.” It is hard to say whether these efforts make a dent in the powerful apparatus of settler-colonial regimes that seek to occupy Palestine. But within their own context, these newly formed relationships are allowing communities in Hong Kong to chip away at divisions along racial and ethnic lines.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 FIZZA QURESHI is an urban planner, researcher, and organizer whose work focuses on urban development, informality, and design histories in South and Southeast Asia. She is a co-founder of the Karachi Bachao Tehreek and previously led a political reading group in Hong Kong. HOAI PHUONG is a painter specializing in Oriental art. Currently residing in Italy, Phuong is an activist and organizer advocating for a free Palestine. Phuong co-founded the “Water for Mawasi” fund, which provides potable water weekly to displaced Palestinians and supports other local charities. Phuong also runs a blog called “Tho Palestine,” where she translates works by Palestinian poets and writers, along with news about Palestine, for the Vietnamese community. Reportage Hong Kong Civilian Solidarity Civilian Activism Activism Activist Advocacy Pakistan Free Speech Freedom Palestine Protest Mass Protests Civilian Unrest Liberation ideology Muslim Islam Organizing Ethno-nationalism Liberation Struggle Diaspora South Asia Muslim Organizing Public Space Geography Politics of Ethnic Identity Social Change Tai Kwun Contemporary National Security Law Hong Konger United For Palestine Protest Materials Cantonese Language Language Segregation China Police Action Freedom of Speech BOOKED Multi-ethnic Solidarity Networks Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Sophie Neak, Hang On, no.18 (2015). C-print photograph. Artist Phnom Penh AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 25 Feb 2025 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Paean to Mother Nature In Cambodia, activists are facing a crackdown on their fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The state is particularly targeting those advocating for environmental and labor rights, and as civil society space continues to shrink and tolerance for dissent wanes, the government is increasingly resorting to arrests to silence perceived opposition. “We have fallen deeply in love with nature, and we don’t want it to be destroyed by corruption. People’s livelihoods depend on natural resources, and they don’t want to lose their land, their home, their culture. We understand them, we feel the pain, so we want to protect them. Our lives are inspired by nature, and that motivates us to take the risk of standing here.” These are the words of a young activist from Mother Nature Cambodia , a youth-led environmental rights organization that launched in 2012. He requested to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. Since the organization’s launch, its members have campaigned on a raft of environmental issues in Cambodia, leading to multiple arrests, members being jailed, and authorities attempting to silence their voices. In July 2024, 10 young Cambodians were sentenced to between six and eight years in prison, convicted on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king. Three of them, including Spanish co-founder Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson , who was deported for his environmental activism in 2015 and permanently banned from re-entering Cambodia, were sentenced to eight years in jail and fined USD2,500. The others were handed six-year terms. Five, including Gonzalez-Davidson, were sentenced in absentia. Ahead of the verdict at Phnom Penh Court of First Instance, 26-year-old Long Kunthea, who has already been imprisoned for her activism, told a group of supporters who had gathered around her that she would not be silenced, encouraging her peers to remain undeterred. “May you all not be hopeless but continue your work in protecting the environment, your rights, your land. Although we are in jail, we will be strong. They can only arrest our bodies, but they cannot arrest our will and conscience,” she said. The sentencing has been condemned by various international organizations, who are lobbying for the release of those imprisoned. “The verdict is devastating for the 10 activists, who face between six to eight years in prison for their efforts to protect Cambodia’s environment,” said Bryony Lau, the Deputy Director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, in a statement in 2024. “It also sends an appalling message to Cambodia’s youth that the government will side with special interests over the environment every chance it gets.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Research, Montse Ferrer, said in a statement that the convictions were “another crushing blow to Cambodia’s civil society,” adding, “Mother Nature Cambodia is a renowned activist group that has brought attention to environmental degradation fuelled by long-standing corruption in the country. “Instead of listening to young leaders at the forefront of the environmental movement, the Cambodian government has chosen to jail those that dare to speak out. The government has shown time and time again that it will not tolerate any dissent.” Attempts to silence the defenders Since 2012, Mother Nature Cambodia has lobbied on environmental issues from illegal sand dredging and lake-infilling to pollution and protesting against mega hydropower dam projects. The organization has successfully campaigned to halt the Chinese-led construction of a mass hydropower dam in Areng Valley in southwest Cambodia, that threatened the Indigenous community, as well as the delicate ecosystem of the area. Mother Nature Cambodia also played an instrumental role in ending illegal sand dredging operations in Koh Kong. Mother Nature’s philosophy has resonated strongly with Cambodian youth keen to protect the environment for future generations. The environmental defenders, however, have also repeatedly been targeted by authorities. “The main environmental issue is the corruption in the systems, and these diseases are getting harder to solve because environmental crimes are happening all over the country under development projects,” a member of Mother Nature anonymously told SAAG. However, the arrests and intimidation have failed to dampen spirits, instead fuelling members’ determination to continue their mission. “We must empower and mobilize youth in the country to speak up. They must speak up against repression as we continuously demand an end to devastating actions against nature. We stay focused, resilient and innovative,” he said. “People’s voices are needed to lobby the government to give our friends back their freedom. We won’t stay silent if our friends are still not free. We, Mother Nature Cambodia, are demanding power for the people, not the regime.” In September 2023, Mother Nature Cambodia became the first Cambodian organization to win Sweden’s Right Livelihood award for its “fearless and engaging activism to preserve Cambodia’s natural environment in the context of a highly restricted democratic space.” Fighting for the disappearing rights of workers It’s not only environmental activists whose voices are in danger of being silenced. Recent years have seen a targeting of Cambodia’s union leaders, who have been peacefully advocating for workers’ rights amid claims of human rights abuses, unfair dismissals and wages, and mass layoffs. On September 16, trade union leader Chhim Sithar, 37, was released after serving two years in Prey Sar, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Sithar is the head of the Labour Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU) and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. Sithar led a year-long series of peaceful protests that started in December 2021 against the mass layoff of 1,329 employees at NagaWorld—a casino giant in Phnom Penh—during the pandemic. Hundreds of workers took to the streets outside the casino in protest of the dismissals, with LRSU demanding 365 union members be reinstated and that all those who lost their jobs receive fair compensation from the Malaysian-owned casino. In May 2023, Sithar was sentenced to two years behind bars (having already served almost two years), for incitement to commit a felony, while eight other union members were handed lesser suspended sentences or monitoring orders. “They were convicted for simply exercising their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, protected by both the Cambodian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by Cambodia in 1992,” UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said in a statement . “The rights to peaceful assembly and association include the right to hold meetings, sit-ins and strikes, and the right of individuals to interact and organize among themselves to collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend common interests.” Cambodian authorities have maintained that citizens have the right to exercise freedom of speech and hold peaceful gatherings, as stated in the law, and arrests are only made when laws are broken. Khleang Soben, LRSU Secretary General, joined 70 Cambodian civil society organizations and many international organizations, including Amnesty International, HRW, and the US Department of State, in lobbying for Sithar’s release while she was in prison. “Until now, I’m curious about why she was detained as this is a labor dispute between workers and the company,” she told me. “But they accuse worker representatives of inciting social chaos. For me, it’s too much and unexpected that they turn the victim into the perpetrator. It’s very unfair.” In April 2024, Sithar’s “fight for democracy and respect for human rights” earned her the Swedish government’s annual Per Anger Prize, which celebrates courage, capacity to act and engagement. “She is a vital source of support for Cambodian women who are forced to work under appalling conditions. They are demanding to have their voices heard and their rights respected at their places of work,” the judges said. Sithar’s case is one of a series of targeted attacks by authorities. Despite this, Soben remains determined to ensure Sithar’s voice is not silenced, and pledged to continue the fight for the rights of her members. “Recently, we’ve seen the arrest of many youth and union activists. Saying I’m not afraid isn’t completely true. But I won’t give up as it’s a valuable job that benefits many Cambodians,” she said. “Union work is undervalued and it is unsafe when we stand up for workers and refuse to undertake activities that exploit the labor force and workers' interests. We will continue our nonviolent demands until there is a solution. Even if I am scared, it won't stop me.” Yang Sophorn, President of the 16,000-member strong Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union (CATU), also came under fire during the NagaWorld protests. On 4 August 2022, authorities accused her of conducting illegal activities and threatened her with an unspecified punishment for supporting the ongoing strikes. “We know that when we work in this field, there are a lot of people who are not happy with us, but we still do it for the sake of our members and to fight for their rights. The reason we continue this work is because of love, passion and wanting to help people in need,” she said. “It’s an injustice” “I’ve had violence committed against me and been arrested many times, but I still take on the challenge because I work for the rights of people. I’m not involved with politics, only labor rights. I suffer and have a lot of pressure to stop, but I have no choice. I have to promote the rights of workers,” Ath Thorn told SAAG. The former president of the Cambodian Labour Confederation (CLC) , a role he served for 18 years until May, and president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union (CCAWDU) , Thorn has spent the majority of his working life fighting for the rights of garment factory workers. He launched CCAWDU in 1997 while working in a factory, in response to the unfair treatment he witnessed from his employer. “I saw and experienced a lot of labor abuse, violations and cheating on the ground. There was nobody to respond to these problems. So, I established the trade union to address the challenges and negotiate with the employer.” During his time serving as union leader, however, he has been the victim of multiple legal actions and arrests, violence, threats, and intimidation. “As an independent, democratic trade union, we work to promote workers’ interests and benefits, and the authorities and companies abuse us,” he said. “Some of us are arrested and charged, violated and discriminated against, beaten and dismissed without pay. So, there are a lot of cases against us, and a lot of pressure and challenges.” A 2022 HRW report, ‘ Only “Instant Noodle” Unions Survive: Union Busting in Cambodia’s Garment and Tourism Sectors , based on interviews conducted between March and June 2022, found “widespread violations of workers’ rights to register, form and join independent unions at garment factories, a casino and other places of business.” On May 7, Mam Rithy, Vice President of CLC, became one of the latest voices to be silenced when he was detained after Phnom Penh Municipal Court convicted him for “inciting to commit a crime” and “disbelieving a court decision”. The charge against the well-known advocate for the labor rights of Cambodian factory workers was in relation to a video he posted on Facebook on February 24, 2022 commenting on the arrest of a female union leader in Sihanoukville in relation to a Chinese casino. The 35-year-old was handed a 1.5 year prison sentence and a two million riel (USD480) fine. “Vuthy has now been in jail more than four months and did not expect to be detained for long. It’s really tough for him and an injustice,” Thorn said. While the threats to these activists remain real, it has only served to strengthen their fight. “The arrests only make people get mad at the violent injustice to innocent people without any sense,” a Mother Nature member stated. “We have to strengthen our mental health and capacity-building to keep inspiring more people to become defenders. The more they arrest our members, the more defenders rise up. We will always be here, fighting for environmental justice.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Phnom Penh Climate Cambodia Mother Nature Unions Environmental Science Environmentalist Youth Youth Protest Censorship Ecology Labor Policy Movements Climate Security Community Security Freedom Free Speech Labor Rights Civil Society Civilian Activism Corruption Natural Resources Mother Nature Cambodia Anonymity Imprisonment Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson Deportation Banned Phnom Penh Court of First Instance Hope Political Will Human Rights Watch Amnesty International Dissent Hydropower Dam Hydropolitics Areng Valley Indigenous Spaces Ecosystem Koh Kong Future Generations Empowerment Silence Disappearance Worker Rights Prey Sar Labour Rights Supported Union Khmer Employees Peaceful Protest Monitoring Victimization Targeted Attack State Government Narrative Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union CATU NagaWorld Protests Injustice Violence Political Violence Cambodian Labour Confederation CLC Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union CCAWDU Garment Factory Labor Abuse Arrest Threats Intimidation Union Busting Capacity-building Environmental Justice Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel. · FEATURES Profile · Petropolis Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel. Prithi Khalique, antage of Baitul Awal. Acrylic painting and graphic artwork, 12 x 8 inches. The Ahmadis of Petrópolis The Baitul Awal mosque is a surprise. Located in Petrópolis, Brazil, a mountain city of about 300,000 , a little more than 40 miles outside Rio de Janeiro, the mosque's expanse belies its unconventional setting. A handsome white structure that rises from a fringe of gardens, it sits halfway up a mountain slope with houses hanging off. A sign says that it belongs to the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. When you assume its vantage point, looking in the direction it faces, you see a shallow valley that blurs into the Serra dos Órgãos mountain range. Brazil may not be a country known for its Muslim population, but it is where enslaved Muslims from West Africa led one of the most important revolutions against slavery in the Americas in 1835. Roughly around the same year—sources vary—Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in Qadian, Punjab, then part of British India. In 1889, Ahmad established a new Islamic movement called the Ahmadiyya Jamaat and declared himself its first caliph. One year prior, slavery was finally abolished in Brazil. The fifth and present caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, has governed the Ahmadiyya community since 2003. Wasim Ahmad Zafar, an Ahmadi Muslim imam and missionary from Rabwah, Pakistan, organized the construction of the Petrópolis mosque. He has lived there with his family since 1993; before this, he was posted in Guatemala. Among Islam's heterogeneous adherents, Ahmadi Muslims distinguish themselves by explicitly subscribing to a missionary ethos, sending emissaries around the world to proselytize. Despite having outposts in virtually every country of the world, they make up only about 1% of Muslims. “The Ahmadiyya Jamaat isn’t another school of thought,” Zafar said in an interview. We spoke in Urdu after lunch at his home. “Our school of thought is Islam.” According to Ahmadi Muslims, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was sent to unify the Muslim community in response to its fragmentation during the late colonial period. They view him as the messiah and mahdi, a ruler prophesied to arrive in the end times to integrate a variegated global faith. Although they preach nonviolence, they have been subject to violent persecution from many other Muslims. Meanwhile, the community has also experienced a fracture, with the 1914 separation of Lahori Ahmadis. “In the whole world, there is only one Muslim community with a caliph,” Zafar said. “And to have a caliph, this assures us that Allah Ta’ala is with our community.” There is a disconnect between how a large number of Muslims perceive them—as foreign to Islam—and how they perceive themselves—as torchbearers of its essence. Ahmadi Muslims regard their centralization under a living caliph as evidence of divine sanction and yearn to bring others under the umbrella. The community even has a motto: "Love for All, Hatred for None." The Baitul Awal Mosque, located in Brazil's Petropolis. Courtesy of the author. This April, following Eid ul-Fitr, Zafar and his family hosted the 30th jalsa salana , or annual assembly, at the mosque. It was presented as an inter-faith exchange, with speakers including a Jewish woman leader, Black Buddhist monk, Umbanda priest, and representative of the civil police. His sons, Nadeem, Ijaz, and Takreem, alternately emceed, translated speeches into Portuguese, and sang Urdu ghazals, and the woman sitting in front of me teared up. Zafar presented a single red rose to every speaker. Afterwards, the women of the family served a meal in the garden that they had prepared. I spoke to Zafar's youngest daughter, Aila, a dentistry student who had invited her friend, an Indigenous biologist-in-training who talked about the jewelry she makes out of insect wings. For our interview a few months later, the women cooked another meal. Zafar's wife, Anila, and their daughters-in-law, Nida and Maria, brought chicken curry, chickpeas, pulao, parathas, salad, fruit, and gajar ka halwa to the table. They served it in their home, which is situated next to the mosque. Zafar pinched red chili powder from a bowl and sprinkled it over his plate. He had just returned from a jalsa tour of sorts: from Virginia, to Toronto, to the global Ahmadiyya headquarter s in the town of Islamabad in Surrey, England, where 43,000 guests had joined. In keeping with the Ahmadi motto, outsiders are encouraged to come as they are to the mosque. This stands in contrast to the majority of mosques, which police women's dress, yet can also feel geared towards conversion. “Some time ago, a women’s group came, with girls too. It’s obvious that non-Muslims will be without dupattas, with bare heads. I uploaded photos of them like that and some Muslims messaged me saying that I did something wrong allowing these women inside,” Zafar said. “So I responded to them with love, saying that if we don’t allow someone inside and don’t show them the beauty [of our faith], how will they realize it?” The first time I went to the mosque, the weekend before Ramadan, I was wearing a jumpsuit covered with red zebra stripes. No one seemed to mind. I was struck by the hedge in front landscaped to read “Paz,” or peace, and the second-floor library with copies of the Qur'an translated into 60 languages as widely ranging as Bhojpuri and Russian. Select copies of the Qur'an written in multiple different languages housed at the Baitul Awal Mosque. Courtesy of the author. Ijaz, Zafar's middle son and a civil engineer who aims to improve Petrópolis' resilience to landslides, led a tour of the mosque, showing the visitor apartments built into it. His youngest son, Takreem, brought freshly brewed chai and biscuits from the house. He said that he wanted to be a missionary like his father and perhaps go to Africa. For the Zafar grandchildren, the third generation here, the garden is a playground. Switching between Urdu and Portuguese, they run around looking for hummingbirds and butterflies. As of 2024, Zafar said that there are approximately 53 Ahmadi Muslims in Brazil. He claimed that the community used to be larger, but many professionals moved on to Canada or the US for work. His missionary activity in Brazil involves traveling — he has visited all 26 states — and using political platforms to increase awareness of Islam as a religion of peace. Several Brazilian converts appear to be married to members of his extended family who are based in the country. The community's small numbers in Brazil do not seem to deter Zafar. "Our work isn’t to bring people in, unless their hearts are in it,” he said. Since its beginning, the missionary tradition has been a fundamental aspect of Ahmadi Islam. The earliest overseas Ahmadiyya mission dates to 1913, in London. By 1920, missions had spread to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China, West Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, according to historian Nile Green . For many communities around the world, the Ahmadiyya community was their first introduction to Islam. I wondered if, and how, this family in Petrópolis thought about the damage evangelical missionaries have historically wrought in Brazil, from incursions into Indigenous territories to pro-Bolsonaro pentecostalists in favelas. Green notes how the multiplicity of religious organizations that emerged in South Asia at the turn of the twentieth century worked in a competitive religious marketplace, borrowing methods from Christian evangelicals and contributing to the “ market production of sectarianism. ” Ahmadi Muslims made a point of building mosques in their new territories and taking advantage of the technologies available to them, founding and distributing newspapers to disseminate their beliefs. Newspaper articles tend to follow Zafar's travels. After the interview, he pulled out a binder to show me Portuguese clippings he has collected about the community since the 1990s. "The media here is so good,” he said. "They write what we believe, even when it’s different from what they believe.” But he added, "In freedom, they [Brazilians] have gone very far. And they don’t want any prohibitions. With affection and love, we want to show them that freedom happens within a limit. If you go outside of the limit in the name of freedom, then it will not be freedom.” He drew a parallel with the need for traffic rules while driving. "This is a simple matter that we’re trying to teach them. It will take time, but with love, we’re guiding them.” This kind of paternalism is perhaps intrinsic to the missionary project, regardless of religious tradition. A clipping from a local newspaper covering the Ahmadi community in Brazil. Courtesy of the author. Zafar opened the mosque in 2016, having begun the process in 2005. It took a long time to get permission from the Petrópolis city council to build it, because the neighborhood it is in was zoned as residential. Designed by a Pakistani architect, its construction was funded by the Ahmadiyya community. "We do dua that Allah brings faithful people to our masjid and it fills up," Anila Zafar told me. Pakistan has the world’s largest population of Ahmadi Muslims. Here, the competitive marketplace of Islamic variants has hardened into institutionalized persecution of non-Sunnis. Declared non-Muslims by the constitution in 1974, Ahmadi Muslims are forbidden from basic Islamic practices, such as saying salam, playing the adhan from their mosques, or referring to their mosques as such . They have to identify themselves on their documents, which leads to discrimination at school and work, affecting livelihoods and economic mobility. In recent years, they have again lost the right to vote , as well as, Zafar chuckles at the absurdity of this, to carry out qurbani , or sacrifice animals for the hungry, on Eid ul-Adha. The latter contributes towards zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. Most gravely, they face a constant threat of arbitrary arrests and detention by the state and state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence, disappearances, and murder just by virtue of their interpretation of Islam. Zafar was born in Rabwah, Pakistan, in 1959, the city created post-Partition as a home for the Ahmadis . When he was a teenager, he began the seven-year-long process of missionary training, where he had a scriptural education in the Quran and hadiths, as well as in how to cultivate qualities important to a missionary such as patience and restraint. His family is originally from Qadian, the birthplace of Ahmadi Islam, and his grandfathers on both sides converted. While he acknowledges his pain at the mistreatment of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, this also shores up his faith: "We forget that any prophet meets disbelief and resistance from the people,” he said. His preferred method of arbitration lies in the spiritual realm, even though he engages with the political sphere in Brazil—a duality ingrained in the Ahmadi Muslim approach. When we first met, he had just returned from Brasilia, the capital, where he said he had been providing a Muslim perspective on Palestine. Although the Ahmadiyya caliph has released statements in support of Palestine , pointing to the Ahmadi Muslims who live and have suffered in Gaza, the community continues to maintain a mosque in Haifa, Israel . "I've heard of it, but I've never seen it," Anila Zafar said. "There is one in every country…We have a presence everywhere." There does not seem to be a point at which the community will boycott Israel, closing their center or reducing their missionary presence there. What does it mean to be a persecuted Muslim minority with a missionary presence in Israel, supportive of Palestine but also conveniently painted by Israel as the “ good Muslims ”? "If there is oppression in Palestine, if all this is happening in Pakistan, should I gather a group here, go on the road, bother people, what’s the use of that? If I break some car windows here, will that have any use? That’s why this isn’t what the Ahmadiyya community does. If we have certainty in our hearts, that there is God, and Allah Ta’ala loves us, then what else do we need?” Wasim Zafar asked. He referred to an incident in Pakistan in 2010 in which Ahmadi mosques were attacked and over 90 Ahmadis were massacred. Following that, he stated, there were no Ahmadis on the roads protesting because of their motto. They chose peace, he said. To him, the conflicts that have affected Muslim states are further proof of their dividedness. According to Zafar, the fate of places like Palestine and Iraq, and the reason for their experience of oppression, has been the lack of unity among Muslim states. The reason the Arab countries have not been able to handle Israel is also a result of their lack of unified leadership. This focus on division within the Muslim world echoes the position of the global Ahmadiyya leadership, departing from mainstream clerics in places like Pakistan and the United States who frequently point to empire's excesses to explain contemporary crises. The German immigrants who initially settled Petrópolis recreated an alpine community in the subtropical Serra dos Órgãos mountains. Similarly, the Zafars and the community they have built have rooted themselves here, bringing with them perceptions, leanings, and desires from their homeland. Anila Zafar leads the women's wing, which was meeting the afternoon I was there. "Women can understand what other women say better," she said. She closed her words with a Portuguese-Urdu-Arabic mashup: "Vamos fazer dua.” Let’s make dua. It may not be surprising after all that there is an Ahmadi Muslim mosque in Petrópolis. The city, named after the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, is associated with exiles. Probably the most famous is Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who overdosed on barbiturates along with his wife Elisabet, upon realizing that they could not leave behind the horrors of war in Europe, even when in the mountains of Brazil. Their house is now a memorial to exiles. Petrópolis is also synonymous with its many house museums. There is of course the Brazilian royal family's summer palace , comprising a dual escape: from Napoleon in Europe and from the heat in Rio. Then there is the Franco-Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont's house without a kitchen. Finally, just down the road from the mosque where the Zafars live, there is the House of Seven Errors, whose right and left sides are purposely incongruous—not unlike the curious intersection of a community persecuted at home, while willingly serving as missionaries abroad. Among this list of house-museums and exiles, settlement and flight, lies the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Profile Petropolis Brazil Ahmadi Ahmadiyya Baitul Awal Mosque Persecution Religious Conflict religious divide Pakistan Lahore Punjab Ahmadi Association of Islam Brazil Ahmadi Association of Islam pacifist pacifism Jalsa sectarianism messianic faiths Islam extrajudicial violence Extrajudicial Killings syncretism religious syncretism Atlantic forest diaspora missionary missionary faith dawa market production of sectarianism Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Mirza Masroor Ahmad Ahmadiyya Jamaat Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 21st Jan 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: