YANGON, Myanmar — Security forces in Myanmar opened fire and made mass arrests Sunday as they sought to break up protests against the military’s seizure of power, and a U.N. human rights official said it had “credible information” that 18 people were killed and 30 were wounded.
That would be the highest single-day death toll among protesters who are demanding that the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi be restored to power after being ousted by a Feb. 1 coup.
“Deaths reportedly occurred as a result of live ammunition fired into crowds in Yangon, Dawei, Mandalay, Myeik, Bago and Pokokku,” the U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement referring to several cities, adding that the forces also used tear gas, flash-bang grenades and stun grenades.
“We strongly condemn the escalating violence against protests in Myanmar and call on the military to immediately halt the use of force against peaceful protesters,” its spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani was quoted saying.
Hkun Lat—Getty ImagesA protester washes his face after riot police fired tear gas in Yangon, Myanmar, on February 28, 2021.
An Associated Press journalist was taken into police custody on Saturday morning while providing news coverage of the protests. The journalist, Thein Zaw, remains in police custody.
The Democratic Voice of Burma reported that as of 5 p.m. in Myanmar, there had been 19 confirmed deaths in nine cities, with another 10 deaths unconfirmed. The independent media company broadcasts on satellite and digital terrestrial television, as well as online.
DVB counted five deaths in Yangon and two in Mandalay, the largest and second-largest cities.
It registered five deaths in Dawei, a much smaller city in southeastern Myanmar that has seen tens of thousands of protesters nearly every day since the coup. Witnesses said Sunday’s march was also large and people were determined not to be driven off the streets.
Confirming the deaths of protesters has been difficult amid the chaos and general lack of news from official sources, especially in areas outside Yangon, Mandalay and the capital of Naypyitaw. But in many cases, photos and video circulated showed circumstances of the killings and gruesome photos of bodies.
AFP—Getty ImagesA protester, injured after being shot at with live rounds, is transported to a makeshift medical centre in Mandalay in Myanmar on Feb. 28, 2021.
Gunfire earlier had been reported during protests in Yangon, as police also fired tear gas and water cannons while trying to clear the streets. Photos of shell casings from live ammunition used in assault rifles were posted on social media.
Initial reports on social media identified one young man believed to have been killed. His body was shown in photos and videos lying on a sidewalk until other protesters carried him away.
In Dawei, local media reported at least three people were killed during a protest march, supported by photos and video. Photos on social media showed one wounded man in the care of medical personnel.
Before Sunday, there had been eight confirmed reports of killings linked to the army’s takeover, according to the independent Assistance Association of Political Prisoners.
The Feb. 1 coup reversed years of slow progress toward democracy after five decades of military rule. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party would have been installed for a second five-year term in office, but the army blocked Parliament from convening and detained her and President Win Myint, as well as other top members of Suu Kyi’s government.
On Sunday morning, medical students marched in Yangon near the Hledan Center intersection, which has become the gathering point for protesters who then fan out to other parts of the city.
Videos and photos showed protesters running as police charged at them, and residents setting up makeshift roadblocks to slow their advance. Some protesters managed to throw tear gas canisters back at police. Nearby, residents were pleading with police to release those they picked up from the street and shoved into police trucks to be taken away. Dozens or more were believed to be detained.
“The world is watching the actions of the Myanmar military junta, and will hold them accountable,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Live ammunition should not be used to control or disperse protests and lethal force can only be used to protect life or prevent serious injury.”
Security forces began employing rougher tactics on Saturday, taking preemptive actions to break up protests and making scores, if not hundreds, of arrests. Greater numbers of soldiers also joined police. Many of those detained were taken to Insein Prison in Yangon’s northern outskirts, historically notorious for holding political prisoners.
According to the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, as of Saturday, 854 people had been arrested, charged or sentenced at one point in relation to the coup, and 771 were being detained or sought for arrest. The group said that while it had documented 75 new arrests, it understood that hundreds of other people were also picked up Saturday in Yangon and elsewhere.
LONDON — A World War II-era plane flew Saturday over the funeral service of Captain Tom Moore to honor of the veteran who single-handedly raised millions of pounds for Britain’s health workers by walking laps in his backyard.
Soldiers performed ceremonial duties at the service for the 100-year-old Moore, whose charity walk inspired the nation and raised almost 33 million pounds ($46 million.) Captain Tom, as he became known, died Feb. 2 in the hospital after testing positive for COVID-19.
The private service was small, attended by just eight members of the veteran’s immediate family. But soldiers carried his coffin, draped in the Union flag, from the hearse to a crematorium and formed a ceremonial guard. Others performed a gun salute, before a C-47 Dakota military transport plane flew past.
“Daddy, you always told us ‘Best foot forward’ and true to your word, that’s what you did last year,” Moore’s daughter, Lucy Teixeira, said at the service. “I know you will be watching us chuckling, saying ‘Don’t be too sad as something has to get you in the end.’”
A version of the song “Smile,” recorded for the funeral by singer Michael Bublé, was played, as well as “My Way” by Frank Sinatra, as requested by Moore. A bugler sounded “The Last Post” to close the service.
Moore, who served in India, Burma and Sumatra during World War II set out to raise a modest 1,000 pounds for Britain’s National Health Service by walking 100 laps of his backyard by his 100th birthday last year. But his quest went viral, catching the imagination of millions stuck at home during the first wave of the pandemic.
His positive attitude – “Please remember, tomorrow will be a good day” became his trademark phrase – inspired the nation at a time of crisis. Prime Minister Boris Johnson described him as a “hero in the truest sense of the word.″
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July in a socially distanced ceremony at Windsor Castle, west of London.
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This version has been corrected to show the C-47 Dakota was a military transport plane, not a jet.
Sylvain Hugelis one of the world’s foremost experts oncrickets of the Indian Ocean Islands. So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly.
But the emails fromBrian Fisher, an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing.Nearly 80%of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein.“If you want to be able to keep studying your insects, we need to increase food security, otherwise there will be no forest left,” Fisher wrote.
His proposal was insect protein. More than two-thirds of Madagascar’s population already eat insects in some form, usually as a seasonal snack. If there were a way to turn that occasional snack into a regular meal by making it easily available, it could help ease pressure on the island’s threatened forests. Crickets, which are high in protein and other vital nutrients, were already being farmedsuccessfully in Canadafor both human and animal consumption. Surely Hugel, with his vast knowledge of Indian Ocean crickets, could help identify a local species that would be easy to farm, and, more importantly, might taste good?
For Hugel, his scientific curiosity competed with squeamishness. He knew that crickets were healthy, and that they were high in protein, iron and vitamin B-12. But the psychological barriers were equally high. He started with a roasted, salted cricket. It took three attempts before he could relax enough to actually taste, chew and swallow the cricket. To his surprise, it was good. Really good. Three years later, he laughs at the memory of his first foray into entomophagy. “It changed my life,” he says via video chat from his home in France.
Insects are now a regular part of his daily meals. He spoons cricket powder over his morning yogurt, sprinkles larvae over his salads like bacon bits, and fries up frozen crickets for supper. It also changed the direction of his academic research. While he is still discoveringnew cricket species, he now regularly publishes papers on thenutritional value of edible insectsand findings about best farming practices.
Meanwhile, the cricket farm he helped Fisher launch is up and running in Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, producing several pounds of ground cricket meal a day. The protein-packed, fiber-rich powder is now being used by international aid agency Catholic Relief Services for country-wide famine relief projects, as well as in school lunch programs and tuberculosis treatment centers where patients often struggle to get adequate nutrition.
Andy IsaacsonSylvain Hugel, a cricket specialist, collects specimens in the Menabe Antimena dry forest area in Madagascar on Nov. 22, 2019.
In June, Valala Farms, named after the local word for cricket, will expand onto an even bigger campus, with 25,000 square feet dedicated to cricket cultivation (enough to produce 31,000 pounds of powder each year, or about 551,000 meals), as well as an educational program to train future cricket farmers. The attached research center is tasked with identifying which of Madagascar’s 100 or so edible bugs have the right combination of taste, healthiness and farmability. “For me entomophagy is the very solution for Madagascar,” says Hugel. “There is no way to save the forests without taking care of the people who live near them, and that means giving them food security.”
A six-legged solution to world hunger
In seeking to protect Madagascar’s forests, Fisher and Hugel may have found a solution to one of the world’s most pressing problems. The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]saysthat agricultural production worldwide will have to increase by 70% in order to feed a global population expected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050. Yet agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of natural destruction, threatening 86% of the 28,000 species most at risk of extinction, according toa new reportby the UK-based policy institute Chatham House and the UN environment program.
Demand for animal protein in particular is increasing the strain on the environment: 80% of the world’s farmland is used to raise and feed livestock, even though animals only account for 18% of global calorie consumption. Decreasing meat production, says the report, would remove pressure to expand livestock operations while freeing up existing land to restore native ecosystems and increase biodiversity.
There is a sustainable alternative to going meat-free, the FAO says:edible insects. Grasshoppers, crickets and mealworms are rich in protein, and containsignificantly higher sources of minerals such as iron, zinc, copper, and magnesiumthan beef. Yet pound for pound they require less land, water and feed than traditional livestock. Insect farming and processing produces significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. Not only do insects produce less waste, their excrement, called frass, is an excellent fertilizer and soil amender.Agnes Kalibata, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ special envoy for the2021 Food Systems Summit, says that farming insects could provide an elegant solution to the intertwined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and malnutrition. “Insects are 60% dry weight protein. I mean, honestly, why wouldn’t we use them?” she says. “But we have to be able to put them in a form that is acceptable to different cultures and different societies.”
Just as in Madagascar, there are technical and cultural barriers to overcome before bugs compete with beef (or any other meat) for space on the global dinner plate. While two billion people, mostly in Africa, Latin America and Asia, already eat insects, in Europe and North America bugs are more likely to be associated with filth, not food. But attitudes are starting to change. Canada’s nationwide grocery chainLoblaws has been stocking locally produced cricket powder since 2018, and in January the European Union food safety agencydeclaredyellow mealworms safe for human consumption, allowing producers to sell insect-based foods throughout the continent. Analysts at Barclays Bank nowestimatethat the insect protein market could reach $8bn by 2030, up from less than $1bn today. Still, that’s a fraction of beef’s$324 billion.
Andy IsaacsonLemurs in Kirindy Forest, a private reserve along Madagascar’s west coast that has suffered profound deforestation in recent years, on Nov. 23, 2019.
In order to compete, manufacturers will have to figure out how to successfully market bugs to consumers. The sustainability halo and health aspects may be enough for some, but are unlikely to work on a wider scale, saysCortni Borgerson, an anthropology professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “You can’t just say, ‘this source of protein you’ve been eating all your life? Well you can’t have that anymore. Here’s another source, and it’s got six legs instead of four.’ That will never work.” The goal, she says by video chat from New Jersey, should be “to find something that people would rather be eating, or would like just as much.” In other words, insects have to taste at least as good as what they are meant to replace.
In the taste stakes, crickets still come up short. Fried and dusted with chili lime or nacho spice, they don’t taste much different from say, corn nuts or extra crispy shrimp. In powder form, it has a mild, nutty flavor and is best used like a protein boost, sprinkled over porridge, stirred into a vegetarian chili or folded into banana bread batter. Devotees say they can’t get enough, but even they admit that crickets may have a hard getting past that most damning of descriptions—a meat alternative. Madagascar, however, has a better contender: the bacon bug.
A bug fit for a taco
Thirteen years ago, while working on her PHD dissertation in Madagascar’s Masoala Peninsula, Borgerson encountered a problem. Locals in the UNESCO World Heritage Site were eating lemurs and other endangered animals to add protein to their otherwise spare diets. In search of sustainable substitutions, she canvassed residents about other meats they liked to eat. Chicken and pork often came up, but so did an unfamiliar item: sakondry. When Borgerson asked what it was, a few of the locals came back with a plate piled high with plump fried bugs. As a Midwesterner with a rather tame palate, to Borgerson the idea of eating them was appalling. But her prohibition against refusing a meal soon kicked in, she recalls. To her surprise, they were delicious, with a taste and consistency not unlikecubes of pork belly she would fry up back home—“crunchy on the outside, with that fatty meatiness of bacon in the middle.” Even her kids like it, she says, “which is saying a lot for American children.”
The villagers loved sakondry, but the bug wasn’t always easy to find. The solution to stopping lemur hunting, Borgerson realized, was not “four legs bad, six legs good,” but rather, how to make something the villagers already wanted to eat easier to get. Sakondry had never been studied, so Borgerson started working with entomologists like Fisher and local conservation groups to figure out the insect’s life cycle and feeding habits. Once they discovered the ideal host plant, a kind of native bean, the villagers started planting it among their crops and along local pathways. With a ready supply of tasty protein growing just beyond the front door, villagers had less reason to go to the forest to hunt. Two years on, says Borgerson, who plans to publish a paper on her findings, lemur poaching in the area has gone down by 30-50%.
Farming insects is not the only solution for Madagascar’s threatened forests, says Tiana Andriamanana, Executive Director of the Malagasy conservation organizationFanamby. Education and stronger environmental protection laws are equally important. But it’s a start. “We need to consider alternatives. The number of people in Madagascar, in the world, is growing. We can’t continue to eat meat at this rate, but we don’t all want to be vegan either.”
Sakondry’s taste profile seems tailor-made for the American palate; Borgerson recommends it as a filling for in tacos. Yet she is not suggesting that midwestern ranchers switch from bulls to bugs anytime soon. Instead she is pointing to what will reduce overall meat consumption globally: not prohibition, not guilt, but finding alternatives that are equally delicious. “You want to make it easier for individuals to make the choices that they would rather be making,” she says. In Masoala, that was sakondry. Other communities and regions have different preferences and, especially in drought-stricken areas, needs. That’s where Fisher, the ant-specialist-turned-cricket-farmer comes in.
Andy IsaacsonA staff worker harvesting mature adult crickets at Valala Farms in Antananarivo, Madagascar on Nov. 20, 2019.
Though he set out to save forests, Fisher’s cricket powder is doing more to alleviate famine and improve nutrition in Madagascar. His production facility is in the country’s urban center, far from the forested regions where locals struggle to find alternatives to hunting and clear cutting grazing grounds. To really have an impact, he says, farmed insects not only have to be as good as meat, they also have to be easy to grow, and hyper-local. At the Valala Farms research center, scientists, biodiversity specialists and entomologists are working together to identify the most promising edible insects for each climatic region, and figuring out how to farm them at scale. His goal, he says, is to develop an “insect toolkit” that can be adapted to local needs, whether it’s protein powder to address malnutrition, a meat alternative, grubs for a chicken farm, or something that can turn brewery waste into an additive for depleted soils. “We are trying to take advantage of 300 million years of insect evolution,” he says. “We want that whole spectrum in our toolkit so that we can go and offer solutions wherever we go, in Madagascar and across Africa—wherever you have poverty combined with malnutrition and biodiversity issues.”
And why stop in Africa — or Earth, for that matter? People are so quick to imagine themselves going to other planets if things get really bad here on Earth, he says. “But what would you eat on Mars? You would have to design systems to produce protein, and insects are the most efficient.” He pauses his rapid-fire delivery to make a mental note: “I should write a proposal to NASA to do research on what insect would be the most efficient for converting protein in space travel.”
The hatching of a trend
It may be a while yet before sakondry are sent to space. In the meantime, entomophagy advocates say a cultural shift is already in the works, particularly among the young and adventurous urbanites who will be setting food trends for generations to come. “It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s never going to 100% replace meat, but those of us who are health conscious and environmentally aware have already started making that transition,” says biologist Jenna Jadin, who wroteCicada-licious, a cookbook featuring cicada dumplings and other treats, just in time for the2004 hatchingof Washington D.C.’s 17-year cicada cycle (the next hatching is this summer. Get your skillets ready).
The cookbook was semi-satirical, penned in part to demystify the phenomenon. At the time the idea of eating bugs was outrageous. These days, her localorganic grocery storehas a whole aisle dedicated to insect products: chocolate-covered mealworms, cricket pasta, peanut butter-cricket balls and a line of cricket chips calledChirps. And one of America’s most famous chefs, José Andrés, has been servingchapulines, sauteed grasshoppers, at his Mexican restaurant Oyamel since 2004.
Food culture does change. Five hundred years ago, Italians thought tomatoes werepoisonous. In the 1800s, Americans considered lobsters to be trash food andfed them to prisoners. Few cultures ate raw fish 50 years ago; now sushi is ubiquitous. Insects are likely to follow the same trajectory, says Fisher, who suggests salt-roasted crickets served with beer as the ideal “gateway bug.” The sustainability factor, the health aspects, those are the angles that will make people want to try edible insects, he says. The rest is easy. “If it’s done right, they will keep coming back for more, because it tastes really good.”
The language of diplomacy rarely allows for a true sense of emotion or urgency. But reading between the lines of the latest report commissioned by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the body representing the 197 member nations of the Paris Agreement to minimize a global average temperature rise this century—the message is clear. The world has precisely ten months to get our act together if there is to be any hope of staving off a climate catastrophe by the end of the century.
If member nations are to achieve the Paris Agreement target of limiting global temperature rise above preindustrial levels by 2°C—ideally 1.5°C—by 2100, they must redouble efforts and submit stronger, more ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions, according to the report. The document tabulates the national climate action plans [NDCs], of each member nation. The NDCs, which were due at the end of 2020, are essentially blueprints laying out emission reduction targets for each country along with plans detailing how they will meet those stated goals.
So far, the plans all coming up short. The report shows that while the majority of the 75 nations that have submitted NDCs increased their individual commitments, their combined impact puts them on a path to achieve only a 1% reduction in global emissions by 2030, compared to the 45% reduction needed to hit the 1.5°C temperature goal. “This report shows that current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris Agreement goals,” said Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change. “While we acknowledge the recent political shift in momentum towards stronger climate action throughout the world, decisions to accelerate and broaden climate action everywhere must be taken now.”
Another report will be released prior to COP 26, the global meeting on Climate Change, currently scheduled for November in the U.K., giving stragglers time to catch up, says Espinosa. “It’s time for all remaining parties to step up, fulfill what they promised to do under the Paris Agreement and submit their NDCs as soon as possible. If this task was urgent before, it’s crucial now.”
The former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, who also served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and is now Chair of The Elders, was scathing in her assessment of the commitments made by some of the world’s biggest polluters and did not hesitate to single out countries by name. “Major economies need to ramp up their ambition – starting with the U.S., where expectations are high for an emissions and finance pledge to make up for lost time. Others like Japan, Canada, Korea, New Zealand and China, have committed to net zero goals by mid-century, but we are still missing their promised new near-term plans to get there,” she said in a statement released ahead of the report.
Robinson was particularly withering when it came to Australia’s commitments, noting that it was not enough for the country to “repackage a plan that was already inadequate five years ago. The good news is there is still time for radical improvement if Australia wants to keep pace with their major allies and trading partners.”
The clock is ticking for Australia, as well as everyone else.
As a queer Nigerian looking to meet others like them, Matthew Blaise joined Clubhouse in December 2020. The networking app was soaring in popularity despite still being in beta mode, and Blaise, who identifies as nonbinary, hoped it could become a place where they could have meaningful conversations with their peers. Much of their work as a rights activist involves curating safe spaces for Nigeria’s LGBTQ+ community, often on social media.
Clubhouse allows users to converse using audio rather than video. Moderators and featured speakers discourse on an online stage, and if audience members want to add to the conversation they can raise a virtual hand. In a world socially isolated by the pandemic, the platform has proved a massive hit. Although it currently operates by invitation only, it has garnered more than two million users and its early success has given it a valuation of $1 billion.
The app initially served “as a safe haven,” Blaise, 21, tells TIME—describing it as a place where their community could gather, “holding space for each other.” But they have encountered a spate of homophobic chatrooms on Clubhouse in recent weeks. Many of them purport to be LGBTQ+ friendly, only to trap and heap abuse upon users who unwittingly wander into them.
For queer Nigerians, this is a sadly familiar tale. The community is frequently targeted on social media like Twitter and Facebook—and even on the gay hook-up app Grindr, where homophobes have been known to pose as potential dates or sexual partners, luring unsuspecting users into meetings that turn into assaults or robberies. Some users are outed to their families. Lesbians have also reported cases of blackmail after meeting with those they came into contact with online.
Now the fear is that the world’s hottest networking app is also becoming a hostile place for queer Nigerians before it even fully launches.
The dangers of being LGBTQ+ in Nigeria
Safe, private, virtual spaces matter a great deal to queer Nigerians because of the bigotry the community faces in real life. Nigeria’s 2013 Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act criminalizes gatherings of LGBTQ+ Nigerians, and public displays of affection between members of the same-sex risk hefty jail terms. Police harassment can be both overt and underreported.
In August 2018, Nigerian police raided a birthday party in Lagos, arresting 57 men. Most were later charged with the “public show of same sex amorous relationship with each other in hidden places,” and police accused them of hosting an initiation gathering for queer men. Shortly after the arrests, police set up a press conference exposing the identities of the arrestees.
Against this backdrop, social media, by affording the option of anonymity, has made it easier for queer Nigerians to band together and raise awareness of their plight. In response to the murder of a gay man in March 2020, for example, Blaise and fellow activists Ani Kayode Somtochukwu and Victor Emmanuel created a Twitter campaign under the hashtag #EndHomophobiainNigeria. The hashtag trended on Nigerian Twitter for a few days, providing an important insight into how institutionalized homophobia harms queer Nigerians. Using the hashtag, a number of queer Nigerians were able to share their daily experience of homophobia and allies had an opportunity to lend their voices to the call for change.
While none of those calls had any legislative effect, Somtochukwu tells TIME that it was a necessary moment of awareness. “We thought it important to encourage queer people to use the hashtag to share their own stories, so that becomes clear that this wasn’t an isolated incident, and that violence like this was a part of our everyday lives.”
“Social media is very important, not only in documenting the lived experiences of queer people in Nigeria but to also help us express ourselves and find a safe space to grow our voices,” Somtochukwu says. He describes it as “a very important tool for facing the challenges of state oppression that Nigerian homosexuals face, because it is harder for them to target people when it’s online.”
Stefan Heunis / AFPA young man holds a sign questioning LGBTI killings during a march marking the National Day of Mourning, aiming at commemorating all the lives lost to violent killings and mass displacement in the country, on May 28, 2018 in Lagos.
Finding community, targeted by bigotry
At first, the community had high hopes for Clubhouse. Blaise organized several queer-focused rooms on the platform, with discussion topics including the role of allies in advancing LGBTQ+ rights, and the dangers of human rights activism that excludes queer Nigerians. (The latter was evident in the violence the community faced during the #EndSARS protests against police brutality during the fall of last year.)
Although Clubhouse is not accessible to all Nigerians in the LGBTQ+ community—besides being invite-only, it is also only available to iOS users—the ones who are able to use it say it has brought them together.
“It’s made me feel closer, more connected, and less alone,” says Ada, a 24-year-old genderqueer lawyer who only gave her first name out of fears for her safety.
Clubhouse has also helped those living overseas. Based in London, Dan Yomi is a gay Nigerian and founder of Living Free UK, an organization that assists LGBTQ+ Africans and refugees. He says he can talk on Clubhouse with his peers back home as though he were on a group call with a bunch of friends. “Having these spaces has been fantastic and makes meeting and being with other queer Nigerians easy,” he says.
But the app has been accused of lax oversight, which critics say has fostered instances of misinformation, misogyny and racism. In the past month, a number of chatrooms have been set up that target Nigeria’s LGBTQ+ community with misleading titles. One such forum, aimed at users in Nigeria’s capital, was called “Abuja LGBTQ what’s up!” Yomi entered the discussion on Feb. 4 to find that the moderators were religious conservatives.
In a recording shared with TIME, one moderator can be heard declaring that he is proudly homophobic as other moderators laugh. “I am telling you that you, do you hear, you are not coming up [to the stage], and it is going to pain you as I am saying that I am homophobic.”
A queer Nigerian cleric living in London, Reverend Jide Macaulay had also been lured into the room. He was questioned about what it means to be gay and Christian and his theological responses were mocked.
Macaulay, 55, says the experience left him “shaking at the thought of what these people can do with their homophobia.”
Adds Yomi: “Sometimes, it gets exhausting seeing these rooms exist without accountability.”
The app says it keeps temporary recordings from rooms whose moderators have been reported, if they are reported in real time; users can also report past incidents, but Clubhouse doesn’t have access to audio from expired rooms. Clubhouse says reports submitted will be reviewed and investigated, with potential disciplinary actions ranging from warnings on first offenses to permanently disabling offending accounts. However, while harmful conversations can be flagged, some users say the procedure on holding offending users accountable is unclear, and that such individuals can still be seen on the app despite Clubhouse’s promise to take action.
People interviewed for this story said they had reported offending moderators through the app but have not received feedback. They tell TIME they want Clubhouse to address their concerns. Other users have asked for the ability to make accounts private and for rooms featuring people they have blocked to be hidden from view. They’re also calling for Clubhouse to do more to recognize malicious users based on the rooms such individuals enter and create. London-based Yomi insists that a campaign against hate speech would also be a strong move. Clubhouse did not respond to requests for further comment from TIME on its community guidelines.
In the meantime, queer Nigerians look out for themselves as best they can, risking abuse for the chance of a close, human connection.
“Finding a community on Twitter is one thing,” says Ada, “but the Clubhouse queer community for me is a lot more personal because there, I get to listen, hear their voices, their laughter, and sometimes their pain.”
(BAGHDAD) — A U.S. airstrike in Syria targeted facilities belonging to a powerful Iranian-backed Iraqi armed group, killing one of their militiamen and wounding a number of others, an Iraqi militia official said Friday.
The Pentagon said the strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack in Iraq earlier this month that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops.
The Iraqi militia official told The Associated Press that the strikes against the Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, hit an area along the border between the Syrian site of Boukamal facing Qaim on the Iraqi side. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak of the attack. Syria war monitoring groups said the strikes hit trucks moving weapons to a base for Iranian-backed militias in Boukamal.
“I’m confident in the target that we went after, we know what we hit,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters flying with him from California to Washington, shortly after the airstrikes which were carried out Thursday evening Eastern Standard Time.
The airstrike was the first military action undertaken by the Biden administration, which in its first weeks has emphasized its intent to put more focus on the challenges posed by China, even as Mideast threats persist. Biden’s decision to attack in Syria did not appear to signal an intention to widen U.S. military involvement in the region but rather to demonstrate a will to defend U.S. troops in Iraq.
The U.S. has in the past targeted facilities in Syria belonging to Kataeb Hezbollah, which it has blamed for numerous attacks targeting U.S. personnel and interests in Iraq. The Iraqi Kataeb is separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that monitors the war in Syria, said the strikes targeted a shipment of weapons that were being taken by trucks entering Syrian territories from Iraq. The group said 22 fighters from the Popular Mobilization Forces, an Iraqi umbrella group of mostly Shiite paramilitaries that includes Kataeb Hezbollah, were killed. The report could not be independently verified.
Defense Secretary Austin said he was “confident” the U.S. had hit back at the “the same Shia militants that conducted the strikes,” referring to a Feb. 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition personnel.
Austin said he had recommended the action to President Joe Biden.
“We said a number of times that we will respond on our timeline,” Austin said. “We wanted to be sure of the connectivity and we wanted to be sure that we had the right targets.”
Earlier, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. action was a “proportionate military response” taken together with diplomatic measures, including consultation with coalition partners.
“The operation sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel,” Kirby said.
Kirby said the U.S. airstrikes “destroyed multiple facilities at a border control point used by a number of Iranian-backed militant groups,” including Kataeb Hezbollah and Kataeb Sayyid al-Shuhada.
Further details were not immediately available.
Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, criticized the U.S. attack as a violation of international law.
“The United Nations Charter makes absolutely clear that the use of military force on the territory of a foreign sovereign state is lawful only in response to an armed attack on the defending state for which the target state is responsible,” she said. “None of those elements is met in the Syria strike.”
Biden administration officials condemned the Feb. 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out. Officials have noted that in the past, Iranian-backed Shiite militia groups have been responsible for numerous rocket attacks that targeted U.S. personnel or facilities in Iraq.
Kirby had said Tuesday that Iraq is in charge of investigating the Feb. 15 attack. He added that U.S. officials were not then able to give a “certain attribution as to who was behind these attacks.”
A little-known Shiite militant group calling itself Saraya Alwiya al-Dam, Arabic for Guardians of Blood Brigade, claimed responsibility for the Feb. 15 attack. A week later, a rocket attack in Baghdad’s Green Zone appeared to target the U.S. Embassy compound, but no one was hurt.
Iran this week said it has no links to the Guardians of Blood Brigade. Iran-backed groups have splintered significantly since the U.S.-directed strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Baghdad more than a year ago. Both were key in commanding and controlling a wide array of Iran-backed groups operating in Iraq.
Since their deaths, the militias have become increasingly unruly. Some analysts argue the armed groups have splintered as a tactic to claim attacks under different names to mask their involvement.
The frequency of attacks by Shiite militia groups against U.S. targets in Iraq diminished late last year ahead of Biden’s inauguration.
The U.S. under the previous Trump administration blamed Iran-backed groups for carrying out multiple attacks in Iraq.
Trump had said the death of a U.S. contractor would be a red line and provoke U.S. escalation in Iraq. The December 2019 killing of a U.S. civilian contractor in a rocket attack in Kirkuk sparked a tit-for-tat fight on Iraqi soil that culminated in the U.S. killing of Iranian commander Soleimani and brought Iraq to the brink of a proxy war.
U.S. forces have been significantly reduced in Iraq to 2,500 personnel and no longer partake in combat missions with Iraqi forces in ongoing operations against the Islamic State group.
It was not long ago (on the calendar, at least) that either name could summon, if not profound discomfort, at least a hint of the queasiness that swept over Theo Padnos as he sat in front of a TV in southwestern Syria the morning of Aug. 20, 2014. At the time, Padnos was a prisoner of al Qaeda, the terrorist group that commanded the attention of the entire world back when a radical religious ideology was considered the major threat to life as we know it. But that morning, Padnos watched in real time as Osama bin Laden’s creation lost top billing.
In his new book Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment, the writer sets the scene: After almost two years in tiny cells, with occasional breaks for torture, the American journalist is enjoying a measure of freedom. Padnos had just spent days in in a Toyota Hilux with the burly head of al Qaeda in Syria, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, driving across the country at the head of a 60-vehicle convoy. Behind them were the oil fields al Qaeda had just lost to a rival millennialist terror group that had not even existed when Padnos was first taken captive: ISIS, or the Islamic State. Ahead of them was Syria’s border with Israel, where Padnos is to be set free. A Gulf State had promised to pay a huge ransom—Padnos says he was told 11 million Euros—in exchange for the American, and Abu Maria planned to be there. On the drive, the emir would stop to hand commanders fistfuls of cash from the shopping bag under Padnos’ jump seat.
“He had sold me through Qatar, and he wanted to deliver the goods,” Padnos says by phone from his home in Vermont. “An honorable businessman. They paid, and he wanted to make sure that the product was delivered on time and in good condition.”
In a villa near the border, Padnos finds himself holding the TV remote in a room where a half dozen Al Qaeda commanders are looking at their phones, idling the morning away playing video games. Only Padnos watches the big screen, and what he sees gives him pause. A young American man wearing orange is kneeling in the sand beside a man dressed like a ninja. The man holds a knife. “American journalist James Foley killed in Syria,” the screen reads.
Padnos changes the channel. Then changes it again. No luck. It’s on every station, and soon on the phones of his own captors, who spend the rest of the day alternately admiring the execution video and murmuring glumly among themselves. “The world, they felt, had passed them by,” Padnos writes. “Their old colleagues…had made a hit video. It had transfixed the world.”
Released as promised four days later, Padnos numbers himself among the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose lives were transformed by the Global War on Terror, which al Qaeda provoked with the attacks of 9/11. If it’s like has not been seen again, just wait, Padnos advises: “They are adept, the terrorists are adept at coming up with some kind of performance, some kind of drama which will bring up our conflict with Islam.”
“The underlying anxiety between the two cultures is still there. We still don’t understand them and they still don’t understand us,” he warns.
Padnos would know. Now 53, he has spent sizable chunks of his adult life not only in the Muslim world, but among young Arab men in thrall of conflict. His first book, Undercover Muslim, recounts his time in Yemen, where he learned Arabic amid disaffected young men preparing for jihad. As he recounts both in Blindfold and, in Theo Who Lived, the surprisingly light-spirited documentary about his captivity, he came to know his subjects a little too well. In one of the makeshift prisons where he was held, his neighbors were captured ISIS fighters. Other jails he shared with civilians who got crossways with the powers that be. One night he listened to a friendly old man slowly die alone in the next cell after a bout of torture.
Padnos understood his captors as thugs who believed they were something exalted. “Our terror is a sacred thing,” goes one of the hymns sung by fighters who told themselves that harsh enforcement of simple rules would hasten an apocalyptic confrontation with the West. The fighters drifted from group to group, which were headed by old friends: The al Qaeda chief who gave Padnos a lift across Syria had gone to school with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who founded ISIS and dubbed the territory it controlled a “caliphate,” or Sunni Muslim religious state. Padnos explains that labels mean little: “Long before they declared a caliphate [in June 2014], long before Baghdadi got on the Internet and they overran Mosul, there was a functioning caliphate in the northwest corner of Syria. Already in 2012, people were living as if Baghdadi was the caliph. It’s like an invisible thing, it’s psychological. There are no signs, there are no borders. No, you’re coming into a state of mind. All the locals kind of know it’s there. But I didn’t.”
Padnos’ account of his capture may be the most excruciating reading in a book with a fair amount of torture. Intent on getting something published but disdainful of the journalistic pack clustered in a Turkish border town, he fell in with a couple of young Syrians who airily offered to take him into their country for a couple of days at no charge. Padnos was looking not for news but to see enough for “a literary travelogue, a bit like Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, a bit like George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. This,” he writes, “was the butterfly I had chased over the precipice.”
At some cellular level, he knew he was placing his trust in the wrong people. As they stood facing the border they would sprint across, Padnos describes how “a dread more powerful than any I had encountered during all previous voyages to Syria washed over me. I ignored it…” A few hours later, his new friends slapped handcuffs on him, and the beatings began.
The al Qaeda affiliate that held him, known as the al-Nusra Front, was the only “Islamic army” in Syria at the time, and was mostly focused on fighting the Syrian regime. One proof: It possessed only one orange jumpsuit (the uniform infamously worn by prisoners the U.S. held at Guantanamo), so when it came time to make hostage videos, Padnos and his fellow prisoners had to take turns climbing in and out of it.
What the al-Nusra Front did have was ties to Qatar, an immensely rich Gulf kingdom that, crucially, also plays host to a massive U.S. air base. On one level, that duality reflects the abiding tensions within many Muslim nations. On a more practical level, it gave Qatar incentive to cut a hostage deal that benefited both al Qaeda and at least one American family. The U.S. citizens known to held by ISIS—journalists Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig—all met brutal ends. In fact, Foley spent time in the same cell Padnos had occupied “maybe a month or so” earlier, he realized, after comparing notes with Foley’s roommate there, the French journalist Nicolas Henin.
If—or, as Padnos assures us, when—Islamist terror makes its spectacular return, Blindfold will be a handy reference. A lot of it reads kind of like the literary travelogue he thought he might manage in a two-day jaunt across the border. Padnos is an engaging personality. At a key crossroads on the convoy across Syria, the prisoner was designated as traffic cop, and embraced the part to the honks and waves of the passing parade; when they weren’t beating him, even the jihadis seemed to like him.
“I have discovered tranquil domesticity,” the former hostage reports. “It ain’t bad in Vermont with bike and dog and lovely Significant Other. I cook. I ride. I am finishing the novel I wrote in jail about a crazy right wing insurgency in America.”
On a hot summer day last August, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was pacing up and down her empty apartment in Minsk, the capital of Belarus in Central Europe, her life—and her country—in turmoil. With her husband in jail, she had sent her two small children out of the country, to safety, and she now faced a stark choice, bluntly handed to her by the nation’s hard-line security forces: flee into exile herself, or face arrest. “I had a couple of hours, but I could not pack anything, because I was so overstressed,” she recalls. “It was a shock. I was not prepared for this.”
Indeed, it is hard to imagine how Tikhanovskaya could have prepared for the jolting transformation of her life. Within the space of a few months, she emerged from obscurity to become the leader of Belarus’ biggest revolt in decades, determined to bring down President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the former Soviet republic with an iron hand for more than 26 years as what many call Europe’s last dictator—thanks largely to the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Until last year, Tikhanovskaya, now 38, was a full-time mother, planning to pick up her earlier career as an English teacher. Then last May, the government arrested her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, thwarting his run for President in August elections, in opposition to Lukashenko.
With no political experience, Tikhanovskaya jumped in to replace Sergei as a candidate, campaigning alongside the wife of another jailed activist and the female campaign manager of a third. In Lukashenko’s mind, the three women—who were barely adults when Lukashenko came to power in 1994—barely seemed like a threat. But Tikhanovskaya, a soft-spoken neophyte appointed as leader by the group, exhorted the crowds to oust Belarus’ strongman in the August vote. Her presence was electrifying. Thousands of women thronged to hear her, clutching flowers and draped in the opposition colors of red and white.
When Lukashenko declared he had won—claiming more than 80% of votes—people poured into the streets in outraged fury. Tikhanovskaya had reason to believe her own vote was around 75%. The estimate was based partly on voters who photographed and uploaded their ballots to a platform built by activists, in anticipation of election fraud.
Lukashenko responded by dispatching heavily armed security forces who beat protesters with truncheons and rifle butts, and hauled them into miserable, jam-packed prisons. Amid the upheaval in August, Tikhanovskaya slipped across the border into Lithuania, where she now lives in exile with her children, ages 10 and 5, plotting the downfall of her nemesis, Lukashenko. She spoke to TIME in December, during a visit to Brussels.
Lukashenko has likened his beleaguered presidency to the last days of the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1991. His foes are tools of foreign governments, plotting a “blitzkrieg coup,” he told his supporters on Feb. 11: “We must endure no matter the cost.” The cost has been severe. Outraged by Lukashenko’s actions, the European Union is preparing its fourth round of economic sanctions against his officials. More than six months of protests have left Belarus’ economy on its knees, and even a $1.5 billion bailout from Russian President Vladimir Putin last September has not succeeded in stabilizing the country.
Emil Helms—Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty ImagesBelarusian opposition politician Svetlana Tikhanovskaya participates in a march organized by the organization Friends of Belarus Denmark on Oct. 23, 2020 in Copenhagen.
On Monday, Lukashenko met Putin again in Sochi, Russia, to ask him for another $3 billion, according to Russia’s Kommersant newspaper—a loan that could open the way for Putin to have a far greater hold over Belarus. Opposition leaders predict that could further ignite protests, as people see their country increasingly in the pocket of Russia—perhaps one reason Lukashenko has denied asking Putin for financial help. “People don’t want to give up independence to save Lukashenko’s ass,” says Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian journalist and adviser to Tsikanovskaya. Yet the country’s ruler now badly needs Putin’s help. “Lukashenko is cornered,” he says. “He doesn’t have a choice.”
Protests have simmered down in recent months, but activists say they plan to return with full force in the spring, despite the mass arrests. Tikhanovskaya estimates about 33,000 people have been detained since August, in a country of just 9.5 million. More than 900 face criminal charges, some of which carry 15-year prison sentences, according to Viacorka. “People are being tortured, in violence and chaos,” Tikhanovskaya says. “It is so scary, you cannot even imagine.”
At the risk of arrest, demonstrators send photos and videos of beatings, and details about where to demonstrate, to Nexta, a channel set up on the encrypted platform Telegram. “It is very dangerous for them to send this information,” says Stsiapan Putsila, 22, Nexta’s founder, who is based in Warsaw. “But their will to share the information is more significant.”
Tikhanovskaya says the past months have left her feeling drained, as she attempts to piece together, among the dozens of activists who have fled Belarus in recent months, a political force capable of collapsing a decades-old government. Called the Coordination Council, it now acts as a kind of government in waiting, with Tikhanovskaya as its leader. “We have been sleeping for 26 years,” she says. “We thought after every election, there would be a rise of people, but it was brutally cracked down on.” This time, however, she sees a profound shift. “People have started to feel that we are a nation,” she says. “They started to feel proud of this fact.”
Yet the task of knitting together a political opposition from outside the country is daunting. Sighing deeply, she says, “I feel so emotionally exhausted.”
Months on, she is still anguished by the choice she made that August day, as she paced her empty apartment in Minsk. She says she has been unable to quell the thought that security police might have tricked her into believing she was about to be jailed, simply in order to force her into exile. “Sometimes I doubt I made the correct decision,” she says.
If the Belarus leader believed banishing Tikhanovskaya would end her threat to his rule, he was wrong. From her headquarters in Vilnius, Tikhanovskaya and other activists have spent months plotting how to force Lukashenko out of power, and to seek help from Western officials. After finding her voice as a candidate in her home country, Tikhanovskaya says she has had to learn from scratch, on the fly, how to become a politician capable of negotiating with international leaders from exile. “It is so difficult to understand and realize that on your decisions, so much depends,” she says.
One key strategy, forged in regular talks with U.S. and E.U. officials, is to push for far tougher economic sanctions on Lukashenko and his government than those the bloc has so far approved. A separate effort is under way in Washington. After Tikhanovskaya consulted with U.S. State Department officials, Congress passed sweeping legislation in late November, saying that it would not recognize Lukashenko’s government, and backing Tikhanovskaya instead. U.S. Treasury officials say they intend listing the global assets of Lukashenko and his aides—a possible prelude to sanctions.
Forcing out Lukashenko will take even tougher action, however, given Putin’s billions in aid. Some hope that as Lukashenko becomes increasingly hated at home, Putin might pull back. “Lukashenko is totally dependent on Putin’s support, but how long Putin will stay with that support, nobody knows,” says Andrius Kubilius, a former Prime Minister of Lithuania, who heads a group of E.U. lawmakers supporting Tikhanovskaya. “When Putin stands beside Lukashenko, his popularity at home goes down.”
Lukashenko is already isolated. Since pushing Tikhanovskaya abroad, the embattled President has largely holed up in his capital trying to stamp out the protests. All the while, Tikhanovskaya has zipped across Europe, meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders. In Brussels in December, she and other Belarus activists were feted in the European Parliament, where they were awarded the E.U.’s human-rights honor, the Sakharov Prize. Standing at the podium in the vast Parliament chamber, Tikhanovskaya told lawmakers that a “wall of fear held us back for almost three decades.” That wall has now disappeared, she told them. “Everything has changed. We are bound to win.”
Her words brought loud applause from the E.U. politicians. “She is like Lech Walesa,” says Robert Biedron, a Polish member of the European Parliament, referring to the former Polish President, who led the country’s anti-communist revolution in 1989 and won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I know the role Walesa played for Polish society,” Biedron says. “And Svetlana is playing that same role in Belarus.”
And yet, despite her fast rise as a leader, Tikhanovskaya says she does not envision herself as the next Belarus President. She is painfully aware that her husband—the original presidential rival to Lukashenko—sits in a solitary cell in a Belarus jail, while she commands the attention of world leaders.
Tikhanovskaya says she is focused on ousting Lukashenko. Decisions about her own political future, she says, will come later. Should Lukashenko face trial? That question has two answers, she says. “As a person I cannot forgive his crimes,” she says. “But for the future of Belarus, he can leave for Russia, or wherever, or stay in his house.” Tikhanovskaya knows that decision would likely face strong criticism back home, after months of protests. “But if you have to think globally, sometimes you have to take such decisions,” she says, already sounding—after half a year in politics—like a seasoned leader.
