On the Transitional Justice Act in the Maldives, the fractious political climate and repression, as well as the legal mechanisms and practices to seek accountability for past atrocities committed by the state. Could the volatile nature of Maldivian politics render the Act meaningless? INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 11 · On Maldives' Transitional Justice Act AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR On the Transitional Justice Act in the Maldives, the fractious political climate and repression, as well as the legal mechanisms and practices to seek accountability for past atrocities committed by the state. Could the volatile nature of Maldivian politics render the Act meaningless? SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Maldives Transitional Justice Transitional Justice Act Ombudsman Local vs. National Politics Human Rights International Law Legal Regimes Human Rights Violations Reparations Survivors State Repression Militarism Military Coup Abdulla Yameen Mohamed Nasheed Assassination Attempts Ibrahim Mohamed Solih Legal Frameworks People’s Majlis Power Dynamics Housing State Violence Humanitarian Crisis Maldivian Democratic Party Malé Prosecutions Witness Protection Police Action Rehabilitation Reintegration Tourism Islamist Government Progressive Party of Maldives SAAG Chats 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. DISPATCH Live Maldives 7th Jul 2021 A discussion between lawyer, writer, activist, and Senior Editor Mushfiq Mohamed & Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on the fractious political climate of the Maldives, repression, and the legal mechanisms and practices to seek accountability for past atrocities committed by the state detailed by the Transitional Justice Act, which passed in December 2020. What is the current political climate of the Maldives, and why should South Asians everywhere pay attention? How does the recent legislation comport with political realities? What would enforcement in today’s Maldives look like? As Mushfiq wrote in Himal : “When it comes to implementation, the elephant in the room remains: why would survivors feel comfortable seeking reparations when some of the perpetrators of atrocities hold high-level government positions?” 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 Next Up:

SOCIOLOGIST Nida Kirmani NIDA KIRMANI is the Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at Brandeis University. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Minor. She is a leading feminist public intellectual who has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies in India and Pakistan. She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Manchester in Sociology. Her book, Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality , was published in 2013 by Routledge. She is currently working on on urban violence, gender, and insecurity in Lyari in Karachi, Pakistan. SOCIOLOGIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

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. 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. Artist Petropolis Sana Khan 21 Jan 2025 st · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION 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. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 SANA KHAN is a writer and editor living in Rio de Janeiro. A former Asian American Writers' Workshop fellow, her writing has been nominated for Best American Essays and Best of the Net. PRITHI KHALIQUE is a visual designer and animator based in Dhaka and Providence. 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 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:

WRITER Noor Bakhsh NOOR BAKHSH belongs to Balochistan. He is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at York University. He has worked as a visiting and ad-hoc lecturer in various public and private universities in Balochistan. He is interested in the anthropology of violence and resistance; enforced disappearances, politics of photographs; digital activism, and hashtag ethnography; South Asia; Baloch and Balochistan; and Balochistan and Pakistan. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” COMMUNITY Quintet AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Brooklyn Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse Jazz Music Classical Music Experimental Music Vocals Hammered Dulcimer Drums Guitar Electronics Composition Contemporary Music Shamisen Alternative Jazz Love in Exile On Becoming House of Waters GRAMMY Periphery Emily Dickinson Atahualpa Yupanqui Protest Song 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. DISPATCH Live Brooklyn 25th Apr 2024 The closing set from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, capped off two stimulating panels and marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. The performance by the quintet of Priya Darshini (vocals), Shahzad Ismaily (piano, drums/percussion, synth, guitar), Moto Fukushima (bass, shamisen) & Max ZT (hammered dulcimer), and Chris Sholar (electronics, ableton) ushered in new emotional registers, and another period of interpretive possibilities for SAAG, as reflected upon by Darshini. Their set showcases many of the songs from Darshini's debut album, as well as songs about hope and solidarity, and a showstopping rendition of a composition of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers." Event Photography courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer © Josh Steinbauer SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What Does "Solidarity" Mean? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 2: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance 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 Next Up:

WRITER Nidhil Vohra NIDHIL VOHRA is a writer, filmmaker, and a Cinema Studies and Peace & Conflict Studies student at the University of Toronto. His work has been published in NDTV , The Tribune , and The Varsity . WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

JOURNALIST Aruna Chandrasekhar ARUNA CHANDRASEKHAR is an independent journalist and a writer from India, currently at the University of Oxford. Her interests in work dwell on themes of corporate accountability, climate change, indigenous rights and resistance, environmental law, energy, conflict, gender and public health. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times , The Guardian, New Internationalist, BuzzFeed, and many other outlets. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

The occupation of Afghanistan demonstrated that climate catastrophe is a crucial feature of imperialism, not a bug. THE VERTICAL Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan The occupation of Afghanistan demonstrated that climate catastrophe is a crucial feature of imperialism, not a bug. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 OP-ED AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Aerial satellite map of the city of Kunduz, where a Kunduz Trauma Center operated by Médecins Sans Frontières hospital was bombed by a US Air Force gunship in October 2015. The former site of the MSF Trauma Center colored in yellow can today be seen in satellite images as a vacant plot filled with debris. Courtesy of Kamil Ahsan using ArcGIS. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Aerial satellite map of the city of Kunduz, where a Kunduz Trauma Center operated by Médecins Sans Frontières hospital was bombed by a US Air Force gunship in October 2015. The former site of the MSF Trauma Center colored in yellow can today be seen in satellite images as a vacant plot filled with debris. Courtesy of Kamil Ahsan using ArcGIS. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Op-Ed Afghanistan 16th Oct 2022 Op-Ed Afghanistan Environmental Disaster Radiation US Imperialism War Crimes Climate Change Geography Urbanization International Law Internationalist Perspective Drug Enforcement Agency DEA Daisy Cutters Munitions Normative Frameworks Structural Frameworks Policy Torture GIS-based technologies Helmand Valley Development Project HDVP Surveillance Regimes Militarism Military Operations Taliban Media United States Memory Nationalism Human Rights Violations Human Rights Hindu Kush Bagram Heroin Hashish Opium Marshall Islands New Mexico Japan Hiroshima & Nagasaki Drone Warfare Predatory Drone Infertility Disease Generational Damage Kunduz 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. EVERY EMPIRE is unique but most empires share many discernible structural features and operational modes. Normative patterns of imperial conduct include transgressing geographic, cultural, political, legal, and other kinds of boundaries while generating new circulations of people, ideas, technologies, and practices. Historically, empires leverage inequalities and, in so doing, tend to commit crimes. In the modern era, Afghanistan has been arguably the primary victim of imperial war crimes. Since 2001, these crimes have been perpetrated by a large number of colluding and competing international actors and a wide assortment of local collaborators and proxies. It is historically rare for an empire to be held accountable for criminal conduct, and it is a bitter irony that empires present themselves as peace-loving and law-giving while imperial history can be read as repeating litanies of unprosecuted criminal conduct. Through information management predicated on censorship, propaganda, and manipulation of individual states and multinational institutions that may or may not constitute legal conduct, empires work hard to immunize themselves against their own criminality. The International Criminal Court indictment of the US and other actors for crimes against humanity in March 2020 was diluted in September 2021 after the Taliban returned to power to now make it practically impossible for the US to be investigated and held to account by the ICC. The ICC was the last and only internationally recognized authority willing to publicly pursue US imperial war crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. US imperial authority was horrifically predicated on perpetual jet bombing, wanton drone assassination, incessant helicopter night raids, routine abductions and extrajudicial killings, and systematic renditions to black sites in the country. All this occurred across a globally dispersed imperial regime of torture predicated on illegal human trafficking and conscious legal obfuscation, through chains of contractors and subcontractors working covertly across national boundaries. Rapidly emerging GIS-based technologies through which US imperial violence against the people of Afghanistan occurred—involving drones most notably—inherently challenged and transgressed established laws regarding war, military occupation, and universal human rights. U.S. Central Command movement across Kabul of a white Toyota Corolla on Aug. 29th, 2021. Mapping, central to U.S. defense companies and military, tracks an individual car. Today, former defense officials at companies like Janes and Quiet Professionals deploy the same data to ostensibly track and protect refugees. (CENTCOM/via Military Times) Here I highlight the environmental impact of the US-led international so-called “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and call for accountability and remedial action from the US and its allies for criminal negligence of the uniquely precious and life-sustaining natural resource base of the country. The US engagement of Afghanistan’s natural resources began during the Cold War in the context of the Helmand Valley Development Project involving large dams and related canals, roads, airports, and new bureaucracies and administrators organized to provide a perennial supply of water to new agricultural lands where nomads were to settle and produce cash crop exports such as cotton in the south of the country. The HVDP not only failed due to a lack of basic initial soil and groundwater surveys, but the over-salinated soil became usable for little else besides poppies that transformed Afghanistan into the world’s largest exporter of hashish, opium, and heroin in the 1980s. During this decade while the CIA was covertly funding and arming the Mujahideen, the US Drug Enforcement Agency facilitated the processing and global marketing of Afghanistan’s bountiful opiate harvests. One result of the extensive CIA financial and military provisioning of the Afghan mujahideen was the extensive landmining of mountain passes and valley pasturelands between market settings and strategic locations in eastern Afghanistan especially. The ICC was the last and only internationally recognized authority willing to publicly pursue US imperial war crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. Beginning in October 2001, a twenty-year monsoon rain of US bombs fell on Afghanistan. Older well-tested munitions such as daisy cutter bombs designed to destroy forests in Viet Nam were used to decimate gardens, orchards, and farms in Afghanistan, while innovative new bunker buster bombs devastated underground water channels, overland canals and dams, and mountainous habitats. This vengeful imperial desire to obliterate single individuals from Tora Bora in December 2001 to the “Mother of All Bombs” in April 2017, to the ‘final official’ drone bombing of an innocent family in August 2021, and the hundreds of thousands of US bombs throughout this imperial occupation, have done irreparable harm by depositing depleted uranium into the soil and groundwater to such an extent that Afghanistan now joins Fallujah, Iraq, the Marshall Islands, New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki as locations where US munitions have left radiation poisoning and high concentrations of eternally disturbing birth defects among humans and animals in their wake. Deadly chemicals have long blighted the waters and wider ecosystems surrounding many hundreds of military bases in the US. Similarly, the habitats surrounding what were hundreds of military bases in Afghanistan have been forever tainted by deadly toxins, but this environmental assault is amplified seemingly irremediably by the noxious burn pits used by these bases to incinerate everything from paper to human waste to military equipment including full vehicles. These bases were found throughout Afghanistan, from mountain hamlets in the north to the ever-expanding Shindand base in the southwest near the Iranian border to Bagram in the lushly watered northern third of the Kabul valley. During the American imperium, Bagram was a city of its own, defined by a perpetually flaming and smoldering football field-sized burn pit. The toxicity emanating from these burn pits circulated near and far from the bases, resulting in inescapable disease and infertility across the biological spectrum of organisms from insects to fish, crops, plants, trees, animals, birds, and humans. Afghanistan now joins Fallujah, Iraq, the Marshall Islands, New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as locations where US munitions have left radiation poisoning and high concentrations of eternally disturbing birth defects among humans and animals in their wake. The US military operates primarily on fossil fuels and, as a result, carries one of the largest carbon footprints in the world. Nowhere is the air pollution resulting from military aircraft and diesel-fueled wheeled vehicles more evident than in Kabul, which regressed during the US imperial presence in the country from near-pristine air quality in 2001 to having among the world’s worst air pollution during the US occupation. The hyper-urbanization of Kabul from a city of roughly half a million inhabitants in 2001 to more than five million today has occurred without a sanitation system, while unregulated private wells have depleted the city’s water supply and are also being undermined by climate change-induced deglaciation of the Hindu Kush. From lack of water to radiated water, from toxic air to poisoned soil, the fully unrestrained US imperial military conduct in Afghanistan has resulted in an environmental catastrophe that requires accountability and restitution from all international powers that have contributed to what is now genocidal famine and environmental ruin, much of which did not occur within the boundaries of international law and ethical conduct. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics 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. DISPATCH Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. 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 Next Up:

Vast amounts of disinformation have emerged in Manipur amidst the current crisis. This is not solely because of the internet ban, but also its unequal use: privileging access to businesses and media close to power for nationalist ends, mostly in the valley. FEATURES Chokepoint Manipur AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Vast amounts of disinformation have emerged in Manipur amidst the current crisis. This is not solely because of the internet ban, but also its unequal use: privileging access to businesses and media close to power for nationalist ends, mostly in the valley. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Reportage Manipur State & Media Technology & Majoritarianism Tribal Conflict Kuki-Zo Meitei Indigeneity Scheduled Tribes Politics of Ethnic Identity Constitutional Recognition Social Media Disinformation Internet Crackdowns Media Landscape Internet Blackouts Kangpokpi Unverified Information Gender Violence Newsclick The Print Imphal The Guardian Deccan Herald India Today Nikkei Asia Meitei Leepun Churachandpur RSS Viral Clips Twitter Narratives State Government Narrative Majoritarianism Indigeneous Spaces Politics of Indigeneity Ethnically Divided Politics AFSPA Sister States Modi Meitei Peoples Local vs. National Politics Caste Tribes Northeast India 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. DISPATCH Reportage Manipur 3rd Oct 2023 On the morning of July 19, 2023, my phone kept alerting me to WhatsApp messages, as it had done during the previous three months following the eruption of violence along ethnic lines in India’s northeastern state of Manipur. This time was different. It was a video accompanied by the following message: “If your blood doesn’t boil seeing this barbaric and inhuman treatment of fellow human being by Meitei goons, your conscious [sic] is equally morally dead. Period.” Before I could open it, other messages started pouring in, asking if I had watched the video. Others warned against circulating it over social media and messaging apps. Meanwhile, the 26-second clip of two women being paraded naked on the streets by a mob of men—groping and molesting the two while walking through paddy fields—had already gone viral. The incident recorded in the clip, however, was over two months old. On May 3, after the state’s highest court recommended that Manipur’s dominant Meitei community be included among the country’s Scheduled Tribe—a constitutional list that guarantees affirmative action for those included—the state’s hill tribe groups carried out mass rallies in protest. The same day, an attempted arson of a Kuki war memorial and the fire set on Meitei villages by unidentified individuals led to state-wide clashes between the Meiteis and the Kuki-Zo tribes. The two women, belonging to the Vaiphei community that is part of the larger umbrella of Kuki-Zo tribes of the Northeast, were assaulted by the street mob a day later. In some ways, these conflicts in Manipur demonstrate the Indian republic’s complicated politics of ethnic identity and claims for constitutional protection. Demands for affirmative action by regionally dominant groups is not unusual in India, as seen with the Pateldars in Gujarat, Marathas in Maharashtra, and, more recently, the Pahadis in Jammu and Kashmir. With regards to the Meiteis, who converted to Hinduism in the 18th century, its socially weaker sections already had access to the constitutionally defined Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Classes, and Economically Weaker Sections. These categories enable access to affirmative action as well as select government grants and scholarships. The demand to also be included among the Scheduled Tribes was initially a fringe cause within the Meiteis, with the Hindu Brahmins (the priestly caste at the top of the Hindu caste pyramid) of that community least open to the idea of being degraded to the status of a ‘Hao’ (tribal people). However, the project gained steam with the revival of the indigenous Meitei faith Sanamahism in the last few decades. The return to their indigenous roots has emboldened their belief that they were short-changed by the government, which didn’t recognize them as a ‘tribe' after Manipur was annexed by the Indian Union in 1949. The crisis has been further compounded by internet restrictions in place since May 4. Far from the state government’s stated intention to control “the spread of disinformation and false rumours through various social media platforms,” lack of access to the internet has resulted in a flood of fake news and rampant disinformation, where genuine footage documenting violence has often been depicted as ‘fake’, and where unverified rumors have been deployed to instigate sexual violence. In a civil conflict where the state government has unabashedly shown its loyalty to the majority ethnic community and the federal government has maintained the status quo, both physical carnage and the information wars are far from even-keeled. In this, Manipur has proved to be another troubling illustration of the Indian authorities’ habit of curbing internet access in regions seeing widespread conflict, where a choked information ecosystem has helped the powerful and hurt the politically weaker sections facing majoritarian violence. Background of the May violence In the months leading up to the May violence, a concerted campaign was already being led by Manipur’s Chief Minister Biren Singh, who hails from the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), against the minority Kuki-Zo tribes, who were peddled as the key culprits of the underground drug industry and portrayed as ‘illegal immigrants’ from neighboring Myanmar. Although the Kuki-Zo tribes make up only 16 percent of the population, Singh had been stoking majoritarian Meitei sentiments of the tribes’ “sudden” decadal growth, particularly in the wake of the refugee crisis from coup-hit Myanmar, with no recent census data to back it up. This is despite the neighboring state of Mizoram, where the dominant population has stronger ethnic ties to the Chin refugees, bearing a much greater brunt of the refugee population. In light of the Meitei’s dominant demographics (they are over 50 percent of Manipur’s population) compared to their relatively smaller territorial spread (they occupy roughly 10 percent of the state that is in the valley), the chief minister preyed on the community’s insecurity over limited resources and supremacist notions of cultural superiority. By all accounts, viral, unverified social media messages and rumors of Meiteis being beaten, killed and raped in the Churachandpur hill district in part triggered the attacks in the valley. Subsequently, civilians, senior government officials, politicians, and judges belonging to the Kuki-Zo tribes from the valley were targeted. This led to retaliatory attacks on the Meiteis in the hill districts, although in much smaller numbers compared to officials and families from the tribes in the valley. Internet connections across the state of Manipur were switched off a day after violence broke out, which has killed more than 180 people thus far—with casualties growing by the weeks—and displaced more than 70,000 from their homes and localities, reducing them to ghost towns. A police complaint filed on May 18 in response to the public assault against the two women furnishes some details about the incident. An armed mob of up to a thousand persons belonging to Meitei youth organizations entered the B.Phainom village in the hill tribal district of Kangpokpi, where they vandalized and looted personal property. Seeking to escape the violence of the mob, five residents of the village, including the two women, fled to the forests; they were later rescued by the state police, only to be apprehended by the same mob that snatched them from police custody. “All the three women were physically forced to remove their clothes and were stripped naked in front of the mob,” the complaint noted, adding that “the younger brother who tried to defend his sister’s modesty and life was murdered by members of the mob on the spot.” Even before the video of the attack on the two women in Kangpokpi appeared on social media, the incident had been reported by two online news portals—on June 1 by, Newsclick , and on July 12 by The Print —as part of the coverage of the sexual assaults during the Manipur violence. However, it was finally the graphic video that brought national attention to the state like it hadn’t in the last three months. Kaybie Chongloi, a Kuki journalist based in Kangpokpi District where the incident took place, told me that no one knew of the existence of the video until the previous day when a driver noticed Meitei men watching it on their phones. “He had asked them to share the video via Bluetooth, and that’s how we got to see it for the first time,” said Chongloi. By the next morning, he added, the video had been widely shared across WhatsApp and social media platforms. It also compelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi to finally break his silence on Manipur, almost three months after the violence, calling the crime “an insult to the entire country.” Skewed media landscape Since the outbreak of violence in early May, a steady stream of photo and video footage has appeared on social media, showing private residences and villages being burned down, even capturing the collusion of state police in these incidents. Meanwhile, pieces of disinformation have been shared by verified Twitter handles of socially influential figures with global platforms. This includes, for example, Licipriya Kangujam, a young climate influencer managed by her alleged ‘con man’ father , and Binalakshmi Nepram, a women’s rights activist and recent scholar-at-residence at Harvard University. On May 4, soon after the violence started, Kangujam shared the video of a burning residence saying “illegal immigrants are burning the houses of our Meitei indigenous community in Manipur”. Hours earlier, however, Tonsing S, a Kuki-Zo scholar at Michigan University, had already shared the same video, showing a Kuki-Zo residential locality in the state capital of Imphal, from where his family had recently been displaced. Kangujam has also shared videos showing disruption and mayhem, which she squarely blamed on ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘poppy cultivating’ Kukis. Meanwhile, although seen advocating for peace on national television, Nepram has also been culpable in spreading misinformation, with a clear prejudice against the Kuki-Zo tribal groups. This includes sharing fake news on landmines allegedly placed by an armed group in a Manipur village, despite the information being debunked as false (reverse-image lookup found that the photos used in the story were from Jammu and Kashmir). She has not yet removed the tweet. More generally, Meitei-owned outlets and journalists from the community, who dominate the media landscape in the state, have been accused of being compromised , heavily toeing the state line, which is against the Kuki-Zo tribes. Apart from the accounts of these well-known personalities, several blue check-marked accounts have surfaced on Twitter since May, thanks to Elon Musk’s new policy on paid accounts which abandons its previous verification process, which have furthered disinformation campaigns. Take, for instance, a right-leaning website with the twitter handle @dintentdata that shot to limelight during the Manipur violence ostensibly as a “fact checker”. Its origins and ownership are unknown but the account has toed the Manipur state government’s narrative, as illustrated in a thread that called Kukis “illegals” migrating from Myanmar who had weaponized themselves to target the Meitei community. In the initial weeks, the running narrative on illegal immigrants and the Myanmar crisis dominated the coverage of the violence in mainstream Indian media outlets like Deccan Herald and India Today as well as in international publications like The Diplomat and the Washington Post . Unequal internet ban As I reported for Nikkei Asia in July, vast amounts of disinformation have emerged from the Manipur crisis not only because of an internet ban but due to its uneven nature: it has offered privileged access to businesses and media close to power, mostly in the valley. Dedicated internet services remained selectively available to particular businesses in the valley and government offices, with the approval of the home department. Notably, in the midst of an internet ban, members of Manipur-based right-wing Meitei groups, such as Meitei Leepun and an armed militia, Arambai Tenggol, have been posting inflammatory hate speech on their social media accounts. “Refrain from creating chaos at Imphal, we can no longer attack them here,” announced Korounganba Khuman, the militant leader of Arambai Tenggol, on his Facebook account. Written in Meitei Lon, he added, “We have a plan, which you'll hear about in two days’ time. Let's work together on this. Let us fight with all our might for our land and identity.” No action from the state government has been initiated on such open invocations of violence against the Kuki-Zo communities. Meanwhile, Meitei Leepun’s founding leader Pramot Singh went on national television (in an interview with veteran journalist Karan Thapar in The Wire ), threatening to “blow away” the tribals from the hills. In the past, Singh has been associated with Akhil Bhartiya Vishwa Parishad, the student wing of the Hindu nationalist militant outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Both groups—Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun—have been openly endorsed by Chief Minister Singh and Leishemba Sanajaoba, the titular king of Manipur and a member of the upper house of the parliament. On July 25, Manipur state authorities lifted the ban on broadband services while retaining several severe restrictions. This included blocking social media websites, virtual private network (VPN) services and WiFi hotspots, while allowing for the physical monitoring of subscribers by concerned officials. Those seeking to access the internet under these conditions were required to sign an undertaking agreeing to the enforced monitoring by officials. After nearly five months of ban, mobile internet access was resumed by the state government on September 23, only to be soon suspended for the next five days amid protests after photographs showing the allegedly deceased bodies of two missing Meitei students surfaced online. The state government confirmed their death in a statement, but their bodies remain missing at the time of the publication of this story. A marketing professional from Imphal Valley, who asked not to be identified, said that in the early days of the internet ban, people were resorting to all sorts of loopholes: machine SIM cards used for digital payment (apps like Paytm and Google Pay), Vodafone VPN ports, and international E-SIMs like Airalo . “People would use SIM cards bought from other states, since Vodafone sim cards sold out in Manipur very fast at a going rate of INR 2000,” he said, speaking from an undisclosed location in the Northeast that he and his family have moved to temporarily. The IT company where his wife works had put her on leave during the shutdown weeks and was threatening layoffs to employees who wouldn’t come online. Sources from the area told me that local broadband providers in both the hills and the valley did not comply with the government order to switch off internet services. SAAG has accessed a copy of a state-government order that notes the “misuse of additional connection on whitelisted/reactivated” internet lines and reports of “accessibility of internet facility” in the Kuki-majority Churachandpur area. No such order was issued against any centers in the valley, even though the government eventually put a curb on all these loopholes. For five years, India has been leading the global record for the highest number of Internet shutdowns in the world with at least 84 cases recorded in 2022 , far higher than the war-hit Ukraine, which saw 22 shutdowns imposed by the Russian military after their invasion of the country. According to Software Freedom Law Centre ’s internet shutdown tracker , India has seen a total of 759 shutdowns since 2012, with Jammu and Kashmir experiencing the majority of the bans, and Manipur featuring fourth on the list. In June, a joint report on internet shutdowns in India, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Internet Freedom Foundation , a digital rights advocacy group in India, found that the Indian authorities’ decisions to disrupt internet access were “often erratic and unlawful”. The report cited a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology report that concluded, “So far, there is no proof to indicate that internet shutdown [sic] has been effective in addressing public emergency and ensuring public safety.” Meenakshi Ganguly, the HRW South Asia director, told me that while authorities have the responsibility to contain the spread of incitement to hate or violence, and to combat disinformation, simply denying internet access can end up further stoking fear and divisiveness. “Without access to credible information, internet shutdowns risk the spread of rumor-based retaliatory attacks, perpetuating the cycle of violence,” she said. Missing outrage The role of fake news and disinformation in instigating violence, including sexual assaults, against tribal women in Manipur has been well-documented . However, despite videos of these incidents floating online after the breakout of the violence, neither local nor national media reported on it or verified and pursued these leads. Several weeks before the infamous Kangpokpi video of the two women being paraded naked was out, another clip of a Kuki-Zo woman begging Meitei women to let go of her was doing the rounds. Speaking in Meitei Lon, the Meitei women are seen instigating men to rape 29-year-old Nancy Chingthianniang, who was later interviewed by the UK-based Guardian , a few weeks before her video went viral again. She lost her husband and mother-in-law to the mob. Chingthianniang herself was beaten black and blue until she passed out. Seeing the video of herself instantly triggered her. “I felt scared like I was back in that moment even though I was not raped,” she told me over the phone. When asked how she felt about these videos of herself and the women paraded being circulated online, Chingthianniang said it was for the better. “Hoi ka sa, eh; I'm glad that it’s out,” she said. “Now people know what these Meira Paibis (Meitei civic activists known as ‘women torchbearers’) really did to us.” While the public responses to the viral Kangpokpi video was welcomed by the Kuki-Zo community, especially as it led to the swift arrest of at least seven of the accused, the heinous crimes against the community have not seen similar reactions. On July 2, two weeks before the Kangpokpi video was released, photos and footage of a severed head perched on a fence went viral on WhatsApp groups, shocking members of the Kuki-Zo community. The head belonged to David Thiek, a resident of Langza village in the foothills of the Churachandpur tribal hill district. He had been defending his village on the day when an armed militia from the valley attacked it. Thiek’s head was severed off and his body burned down to ashes, the remains of which were draped in the traditional shawl of the Hmar tribe that he belonged to. A few days later, Sang Tonsing, a 24-year-old social worker from the Kuki-Zo community living outside Manipur, saw the screenshot of a photo posted by a Twitter account titled ‘Nongthombam Rohen Meetei’ (now deleted) with the caption, “Killing of meetei by kuki militants [sic]”. The photo showed a man, his face digitally obscured by red brush strokes, holding a machete in one hand and a severed head in another. A copy of the photo downloaded from Twitter shows a time stamp of 5.45 p.m. on July 2, 2023. Suspecting the severed head to belong to Thiek, Tonsing and a group of other social-media savvy friends attempted to verify the photo, beginning with reverse image verification on Google and TinEye. The photo appeared original. Tonsing then began scanning the local Meitei news channels, particularly Mami and Elite TV, since these channels had extensively covered the chief minister visiting the Meitei-dominated Bishnupur district in the valley, bordering the Kuki Zo villages that were attacked. That is when he noticed the same outfit as was worn by the man in the photo: a dark-teal-colored full-sleeved t-shirt paired with brown track pants and a camouflage tactical vest. “There was no way that another person could be wearing the same exact outfit,” he said. But that wasn’t their only lead. The person seen on the news clip, whose outfit matched with that of the assailant in the photograph, was eventually tracked on Facebook. He was identified as Mairembam Romesh Mangang, the public relations officer or the security detail of S Premchandra Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of Manipur’s legislative assembly who represented the Kumbi constituency. Tonsing said that they instinctively thought to check the accounts of those associated with the MLA of Kumbi, since it was close to Langza village, where David was killed. “Secondly,” he added, “Kumbi is known to be a hotspot of Meitei insurgent groups where politicians conduct their financial dealings with underground groups.” The screenshot is now part of an investigation into the incident where members of the Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun are among the accused. SAAG reached out to Premchandra Singh, the MLA of Kumbi, who did not respond to the request for comment. (This piece will be updated as and when he responds.) While Tonsing and his friends may have made a plausible case of identification, what remains unexplained is why that photo was leaked online. His guess is one of three scenarios: one, someone from one of the Meitei-run WhatsApp groups carelessly uploaded it; two, there may still be whistleblowers among the Meitei groups who want the truth out; and three, which he thinks most likely, is that this was an attempt to manipulate the narrative in their favor as victims rather than perpetrators of the crime. Either way, he’s certain that more videos would surface once the internet ban is fully lifted. “Nowadays everyone’s got a smartphone and they are filming videos when they go to burn villages. Since these are mobs of 5000-odd people, they can’t control what people are shooting”, said Tonsing. Meanwhile in the valley, there have been news reports, albeit unverified, of missing Meitei individuals being tortured and killed in viral clips. In early July, hours after two cousins—27-year-old Irengbam Chinkheinganba and 31-year-old Sagolshem Ngaleiba Meitei from Kakching District—had gone missing, a video began circulating which showed two men being slapped and kicked, before being shot from behind. A BBC report noted that another video showing the shooting of a man surfaced two months later. While neither of the videos has been independently verified, the families of the missing two have identified the two men in the videos as Chinkheinganba and Ngaleibav. Similarly, the parents of a young teenager , who went missing along with her friend near the hill district, have identified their daughter in a clip that showed a girl being beheaded, allegedly by Kuki assailants. However, when SAAG checked the video, the perpetrators were speaking in the Burmese tongue, and not any of the languages or dialects native to Manipur. Videos connected to both of these disappearances surfaced only after the clip of the naked Vaipehi women made headlines. In our post-truth era, the conflict is not limited to violence in the buffer zones, but is also a war of perceptions on social media where fake news, morphed footage, and decontextualized information often seek to compound the confusion. Majoritarian manipulation Manipur is a state now divided like never before. Ethnic fault lines have always run deep, sometimes deeper and thicker than bloodlines despite enough instances of intermarriage between communities. The murder of a 7-year-old Kuki boy in early June, alongside his mother and his maternal aunt, en route to a hospital through the valley is emblematic of this. Even though the boy’s mother and maternal aunt belonged to the Meitei community, the mob made up of Meira Paibis and other Meiteis did not spare them and set the ambulance on fire after the murders. Local media operating out of Imphal and dominated by journalists from the Meitei community —or owned by politicians of the same community—did not report this incident, just as they ignored several other stories like the seven rape cases registered to date . Forget the tyranny of distance between New Delhi-based national media and Manipur, newsrooms based in the valley often don’t go and cover neighboring hill districts. In the present crisis, where Manipur’s Chief Minister Singh stands accused of orchestrating the violence against the Kuki-Zo community, with the majority-controlled media not covering the hills, and given only a partial lift on the internet blackout, the scales are tipped heavily against the minority tribes. In early September, in a report on the media coverage of the violence, the Editors’ Guild of India lamented how the Manipur media had turned into “Meitei media” and held the internet ban responsible for the media being overly reliant on the state’s narrative. Shortly after, two police complaints under sections of defamation, promoting enmity, and criminal conspiracy were filed against members of the Guild’s fact-finding committee. Meanwhile, rather than working to gain the confidence of the Kuki-Zo communities as their political representative, we instead find the chief minister getting into a late-night spat on Twitter, asking a Kuki-identifying user if they are from Manipur or Myanmar. As violence continues unabated in the “ buffer zones ” between the hills and the valley, where both communities live in relative proximity, rumors and disinformation remain rampant on both sides. In the din of contrasting narratives laying the blame exclusively on the other side, Spearcorps , an official Indian Army account on Twitter, has emerged as a neutral line for updates on the clashes. After days of speculation over the women-led civil-society group Meira Paibis aiding armed rioters to attack tribal villages by creating road blockades, the Spearcorps posted a tweet noting that “Women activists in #Manipur are deliberately blocking routes and interfering in Operations of Security Forces.” The post went on to appeal to “all sections of population to support our endeavours in restoring peace.” This new normal is especially significant in a state that has a long history of confrontation with the Indian Army, which stands accused of many human-rights excesses through the application of a special martial law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Naturally, the dominant Meitei community, its representative media and the state government see the army as biased in favor of the tribal groups, and accuse the armed forces of assisting Kuki "militants" . When I spoke to a source in the army who has been monitoring the security situation in Manipur, he argued that the neutrality of central security forces was evident in their assistance in the speedy evacuation of Meiteis from the hill districts. The only time that the local media had ever portrayed them in a positive light, he said, was when they reported the “rescue” of five Meitei civilians from Kuki “militants” (notably, Meitei attackers are often called ‘miscreants’ in these reports). “Except that it was the Kukis who had handed over the Meitei civilians to us in good faith,” he told me. But that detail never made it in any of the Meitei-run press. With such opportunities for solidarity that could have led to a ceasefire on violence and retaliatory attacks now looking increasingly remote, we find the strengthening of the Kuki-Zo tribes’ resolve to settle for separate administration away from the Manipur government. To be sure, the disturbing video of the Vaiphei women may have led to police action after weeks of inaction, and it has alerted the country and the world to the scale of violence. But on the home front, the civil war is nowhere near an end. In turn, it only fueled the war over narratives, where Manipuri social media was suddenly filled with posts asking Meitei women to come out with stories of their defilement. On August 9, the first police complaint of a Meitei woman alleging sexual assault was filed in the valley, in which the complainant said she was assaulted by “Kuki miscreants” on May 3, when Meitei houses in Churachandpur were being burned down. “The delay in filing this complaint is due to social stigma,” the complaint said. In the midst of all the suffering and counter narratives, Prime Minister Modi only took cognizance of the video, which he called “an insult to society,” while undermining the scale and context of the conflict in Manipur by equating it to violence in states like Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Despite the terrible cost that the two tribal women had to pay with their dignity for Modi—and the rest of India—to finally take notice and speak up, he maintained his position as a BJP star campaigner rather than the leader of a democracy. Apar Gupta, an advocate who founded Internet Freedom Foundation, was apologetic in his tone as many have been while talking to me about Manipur, which happens to be my home state. Beyond the scale of violence that the viral video alone has revealed and the sore lack of access to relief and medical aid for the internally displaced, he sharply questioned whose interest the internet ban had served. “I believe beyond this individual specific instance, the internet shutdown has served the function of contouring our media national narrative,” said Gupta. “Manipur is burning, but we don't care.” ∎ 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 Next Up:

The Revolution won’t materialise / out of your mere thoughts. FICTION & POETRY Skulls K Za Win The Revolution won’t materialise / out of your mere thoughts. This is the final poem, dated 23.02.2021, by K Za Win (1982–2021), who was shot dead by Myanmar security forces at a protest in Monywa on 3 March 2021. Revolution will be in bloom only when air, water and earth— all the nutrients are in agreement. Before the Revolution opened out, a bullet blew someone’s brains out, out on the street. Did that skull have a message for you? Faced with the devil is this or that statement relevant? In the dharma of dha you can’t just wave the sword. Step forward and cut them down! The Revolution won’t materialise out of your mere thoughts. Like blood, one must rise. Don’t ever waver again! The fuse of the Revolution is either you or myself! First published in Adi Magazine , Summer 2021, t his poem appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 "Skulls" by Hafsa Ashfaq. Mixed-media, digital illustration & acrylic on paper (2023). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Poetry Myanmar Military Coup Dissident Writers Revolution Spring Revolution Pogroms Picking Prison Incarceration Military Crackdown Politics of Art Adi Magazine Monywa Posthumous Burma Histories of Revolutionary Politics K ZA WIN (1982-2021) was a land rights activist and a Burmese language teacher in addition to a poet. In 2015, he marched with students along the 350 mile route from Mandalay to Yangon for education reforms until the rally was shut down near Yangon and he along with most of the student leaders were arrested and jailed. He spent a year and one month in prison, after which he published his best-known work, a collection of long-form poems, My Reply to Ramon . In the 2020 election, he said he didn’t vote for the National League for Democracy, whose policies he was very critical of, but when the NLD won by a landslide and an election fraud was alleged as an excuse for the 2021 military coup, he was on the frontlines of the anti-coup protests. He was shot dead by Myanmar security forces at a protest in Monywa on 3 March 2021. Poetry Myanmar 4th Apr 2023 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

"The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." COMMUNITY Indentured Labor & Guyanese Politics "The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Guyana 11th Oct 2020 Interview Guyana 2020 Guyanese Election People's Progressive Party Cold War Politics Black-Indian Tensions in Guyana Cheddi Jagan Black Solidarities Forbes Burnham Coolitude Fictional Essay Khal Torabully Avant-Garde Destabilizing History Irfaan Ali David Granger Ethnically Divided Politics Indentured Labor Labor Indo-Caribbean Georgetown 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. The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5