Daily Brief Audio Series
About the only good thing that can be said about authoritarian regimes is they make no secret of their basic nature. Even when they try to throw on the trappings of democracy, they are almost always so bad at it, it fools no one.
The latest example comes from Cambodia, where this week we’re seeing that classic authoritarian favorite: transferring power from father to son.
After almost four decades in power, Prime Minister Hun Sen is passing the torch to his eldest son, Hun Manet. It’s as obvious as it was unsurprising – this transition has been in the works for years.
The announcement came a few days after the ruling Cambodian People’s Party took all parliamentary seats in a national show they called an “election.” That word has to be in quotation marks, because it wasn’t really a contest. There was no serious competition allowed. Hun Sen was boxing alone in the ring.
In the run up to this “election,” Hun Sen used every repressive tool at his disposal to rid Cambodia of all political opposition. The government harassed and even arrested members and supporters from the only serious possible competitor, the Candlelight Party.
We’ve seen it all before. In the 2018 “election,” Cambodia’s politicized courts simply dissolved the main opposition party ahead of time.
Uncompetitive elections and the handing of power from farther to son – the most textbook of authoritarian moves – would be almost comically cliché, laughable even, if the reality in the country weren’t so tragic.
People in Cambodia suffer under draconian laws, and authorities use arbitrary arrests, government-controlled judicial harassment, and violence to silence dissent. Politically motivated mass trials have been held for opposition members and human rights defenders. Cambodia still holds more than 50 political prisoners.
Its authoritarianism is as brutal as it is obvious.
The Most Serious Women’s Rights Crisis in the World, Daily Brief July 26, 2023
Daily Brief, July 26, 2023.
A wave of recent international media attention on the Taliban’s closure of beauty salons in Afghanistan has too often missed the point.
My colleague and women’s rights expert, Heather Barr, sets folks straight:
“This isn’t about getting your hair and nails done. This is about 60,000 women losing their jobs. This is about women losing one of the only places they could go for community and support.”
Since taking control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have crushed the rights of Afghan women and girls. The list of Taliban abuses against them is long and grim.
They have banned girls and women from education above the sixth-grade level. They’ve banned women from most employment. They’ve imposed severe restrictions on women and girls to travel and even leave their homes. They’ve banned women and girls from competitive sports.
The Taliban have also completely dismantled the system that had been developed to respond to gender-based violence in Afghanistan. That’s actually a key reason why the closure of beauty salons is so devastating: It was one of the last havens for mutual support among Afghan women.
The Taliban have also been conducting a brutal crackdown against women who have protested against these abuses. This includes the torture of these women.
This all adds up to the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world.
There’s been international concern about these abuses – and many others by the Taliban – but much of this concern has been weak and uncoordinated so far. Even two years after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, many governments still seem at a loss as to what to do about the Taliban’s thuggish barbarity generally and their crimes against women specifically.
One possibly hopeful move that could change things came in March with the UN Security Council mandating an independent assessment of the international approach to the country.
It seeks to address “human rights and especially the rights of women and girls,” along with other key issues the international community is trying to deal with. Remember, Afghanistan is also one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The independent assessment should provide recommendations for an integrated and coherent approach among key international actors, in a report to the Security Council in November.
If it does its job well, the independent assessment should both help restore global attention to the situation in Afghanistan and propose concrete steps for holding the Taliban and other abusers accountable.
To be successful, it must undo the fact that, as my colleague Heather Barr says, “Afghan women and girls and others suffering under Taliban repression feel abandoned by the world.”
When a new government comes to power, you expect it to make changes, but you don’t expect it to erase history – especially not your family’s history.
And yet, this is exactly what is happening in Italy today: The government is removing parents from their children’s birth records.
A state prosecutor in northern Italy has ordered the cancellation and reissue of some birth certificates for no other reason than that they aren’t in line with the new government’s ideology.
Authorities are sending letters to 33 people, telling them they are being retroactively removed from the most fundamental record of their child’s birth. Their family history is erased and rewritten.
Only the “gestational” parent will be on the new document. If you didn’t actually carry the fetus inside you before the birth, you don’t count.
This radical rewriting of history will not affect all “non-gestational” parents equally, however. Tens of millions of men who never carried a child or gave birth are spared.
The government’s intolerant ideology is focused on a small minority of parents in this case: lesbians. The revised birth certificates are being issued listing the name of only one of the child’s parents, the gestational one, not both.
Along with the Kafkaesque, the psychological trauma of the authorities deciding to write you out of your child’s life and the reissue of these documents has grim, practical consequences, endangering access to medical care and education.
The government is tearing up Italy’s international obligations, too. The right to create a family is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Italy has ratified all of these, yet the government now ignores them.
The latest move by the state prosecutor in northern Italy will affect “only” 33 couples, but it’s clearly part of the government’s general direction. It follows the government’s January order for state agencies to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples.
It’s a relatively small minority of people, but hate-driven political movements always focus on punishing small minorities as hate targets. The political program of this government (and others in Europe) is to whip up anger against minorities – refugees, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks – and try to transform that artificially intensified anger into electoral success.
And you can’t build up public anger and then not follow through with policies to match. Inevitably, the politics of hate demands others be sacrificed and their rights crushed.
But, of course, punishing minorities never solves any of the real problems voters have in their day-to-day lives. So, to distract voters from that eternal truth, the politicians hit those hate targets harder and find new targets to lash out at. The attacks on human rights mount.
If their supporters just stopped for a second and thought about it, maybe they would ask why their fellow citizens are being written out of history. And then ask – simply in their own interest and the interest of their own families – who’s next?
But the constant drumbeat of political hate rarely pauses to allow such reflection.
“I was at the market when the shooting started,” said a 28-year-old man describing events in the village of Ouenkoro, Mali.
“I saw three military helicopters flying low, one of them firing. People fled in all directions. I took my motorbike and rode as fast as I could. I saw two people falling on the ground behind me, shot from the helicopters.”
Malian armed forces are committing serious abuses like this in village after village in their military operations against Islamist armed groups. The military has summarily executed and forcibly disappeared civilians, as well.
They are not acting alone, however.
Foreign fighters are assisting Mali’s armed forces in these operations – and taking part in the abuses, too. They’re white men who don’t speak French, and witnesses to their destruction describe them as “Russians” or “Wagner.”
Yes, Moscow’s malevolent military machinations apparently reach all the way to Mali. A new HRW report offers further evidence of the Russia-linked Wagner Group operating in the country.
The mercenary outfit under Yevgeny Prigozhin is, of course, better known both for its long-running brutality in Ukraine and a short-run insurrection against Moscow in June. But Prigozhin has acknowledged Wagner’s presence in Africa, and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has a admitted at least twice the Wagner Group “provides security services” to Mali’s government.
What these “services” look like can be seen in the assault on the village of Séguéla, Mali, in February. Survivors describe how a large number of “white” foreign fighters in uniform carried out the attack, which resulted in beatings, looting, and the arrest of 17 men. Eight of their bodies were later found.
The overall situation in Mali is made more worrying by the impending withdraw of the 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, at the request of Mali’s government. One part of the UN mission has been to monitor human rights violations.
The future absence of that international attention may please both Mali’s forces and its Russian allies – and also their enemies, the abusive Islamist armed groups. But it will do nothing to help Mali’s long-suffering people.
The undeclared international competition to see who can abuse migrants and asylum seekers most brutally has a new entry from the US.
Officials in Texas are deliberately pushing people, including children, toward razor wire and into dangerous river currents, knowing they will be injured and may die.
An email from a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper medic details recent events at Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande river at the border with Mexico. First reported by the Houston Chronicle this week, the email describes horrific scenes.
In temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 C), Texas National Guard soldiers pushed back a four-year-old girl, who then passed out from heat exhaustion.
A 19-year-old pregnant woman got caught in razor wire and had a miscarriage.
Some 120 people, including young children and nursing babies, were stranded between the razor wire and the river. A Department of Public Safety shift command officer told troopers not to provide aid.
The placement of razor wire is central to the story. The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard have put razor wire in areas where it is easier to cross the river, driving people to attempt more dangerous crossings.
The trooper’s email highlights how five people drowned near Eagle Pass. One was a mother with two kids. She and one child were pulled from the river and declared dead soon after. The second child was never found.
The illegal pushbacks and associated horrors at the border, apparently now under investigation by federal authorities, are the latest in a series of escalations under Operation Lone Star in Texas. The state program has led to injuries and deaths and consistently violated the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, as well as US citizens.
Inhumanity has become so commonplace, it’s not even recognized for what it is.
I doubt any Texas official comes home in the evening and thinks much about how they helped drown two babies and forced a toddler to drop dead from heat exhaustion. They don’t think like that because it appears they don’t see the victims as human at all.
If they saw a migrant child first and foremost as a child, there’s no way they would push that child toward razor wire or into raging currents. They surely wouldn’t do that with their own children or their neighbor’s children.
But on the job, these officials have lost the connection to any sense of morality they may have in other parts of their lives. Dehumanizing rhetoric from leading politicians has surely helped push them in this mental direction. Matching state policies provide formal approval and encouragement from above to move from dehumanizing thoughts to inhuman actions.
The result is, what individual officers should see – what any normal person would see – as horrific abuses against children become for them just another day on the job.
This disconnection of the individual from their own sense of morality is so often at the heart of systematic human rights abuses, particularly those against migrants and asylum seekers today. Not only in Texas, but around the world.