Daily Brief Audio Series
There’s hopeful news from Senegal, which may finally be turning the page on three years of political unrest.
With the swearing in of Bassirou Diomaye Faye as president last week, the country has a new opportunity to get back on track.
It’s been an incredible few weeks for Faye. Less than a month ago, he was still in prison on a bogus charge related to a Facebook post. That was in the context of the former government’s crackdown on the opposition, which included the forced dissolution of Faye’s political party last year.
On March 24, he won the national election in the first round of voting, and now, age 44, he’s Senegal’s youngest ever president and Africa’s youngest elected head of state. It marks a kind of generational shift. As BBC News notes: “In a region where a large majority of the population are under 30, his victory offers hope to those young people frustrated by a lack of economic opportunities, with old elites seemingly clinging to power.” Faye has named a “breakaway government,” with his key backer and mentor, Ousmane Sonko, as prime minister. Sonko was also released from prison just last month, caught up in the anti-opposition crackdown.
This whiplash reversal in Senegalese politics hopefully marks the end of a period of violent turmoil. Over the past three years, the government under former President Macky Sall responded to rising opposition with delaying tactics and brutal force. Dozens were killed in protests, and over 1,000 were arrested for legitimate opposition activities, like Faye and Sonko.
The upheaval also rocked Senegal’s reputation as a stable democracy in a region blighted by military coups.
Now, there’s hope the country will reverse its democratic decline – if Faye and Sonko put protecting and promoting human rights at the core of their efforts.
With the lessons of the past three years of state crackdown fresh in everyone’s mind, the importance of things like defending freedom of expression and freedom of assembly should be obvious.
There also needs to be accountability for past abuses. Security forces have quite literally got away with murder in recent years, and that needs to stop.
There’s an international dimension to all of this, as well. If the new leadership makes human rights a priority, it would not only help the people of Senegal but also be a signal for west Africa generally – a beacon of hope for people in a troubled region.
The government took hundreds of thousands of children away from their families. They did so systematically and with violence. Authorities often then subjected these children to forced labor; starvation; and sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. They sometimes even killed these kids and buried them in unmarked graves.
All this happened in the United States of America.
For a century and a half, the US federal government ran a system of so-called “Indian boarding schools,” operated in collaboration with religious institutions. There were 408 such boarding schools designed to remove children from their families, separate them from their communities and land, and try to overwrite their culture.
The stated intent of the program, which ran from 1819 to 1969, was to take an Indigenous child, “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Ongoing research is revealing the extent of the abuses. Many of the deaths were covered up. However, the US Department of the Interior says the number of children killed is likely to be “in the thousands or tens of thousands.”
Yet, like other grim aspects of US history, even recent history, the Indian boarding school system remains unknown to many Americans today.
Some folks are trying to change that.
Boarding school survivors and Native advocates have been working with US Congressional lawmakers to push forward federal legislation that would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to examine the full range of abuses in the boarding school system.
The new federal commission would document the impacts of boarding school policies, hold public hearings to collect testimony from survivors and descendants, and examine the locations of missing children. It would aim to provide a list of recommendations for further healing.
This is all long overdue for so many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because this is not ancient history; it’s in living memory. The legacy of this cruel and murderous system continues to be felt by Indigenous people in the US today: intergenerational trauma, higher rates of poverty, and loss of language, land, traditions, and culture.
It’s time for the United States to face the truth about this dark chapter in the country’s story.
Historians will surely long debate just what exactly was the point of no return for authoritarian rule in Hong Kong.
Some may say it was inevitable Beijing would renege on its promises and impose its iron grip after the UK handed over the territory to China in 1997. Others may argue the British only allowed representative institutions in the final years of their colonial rule, so traditions of democracy and human rights were not well enough established to later thrive.
But either way, in March 2024, it’s clear Hong Kong is fully under Beijing’s authoritarian boot. The city lost its last vestiges of fundamental freedoms yesterday, when the Beijing-controlled Legislative Council in Hong Kong passed a new security law. Unanimously and with no amendments, of course.
The “Safeguarding National Security Ordinance” is truly draconian. The new law expands police powers,and weakens due process rights. It punishes peaceful speech and civil society activism with long jail sentences.
In the words of my expert colleague Elaine Pearson: “Now even possessing a book in Hong Kong critical of the Chinese government can mean years in prison.”
Most disturbingly, perhaps, the new law’s provisions apply not only to Hong Kong residents and businesses inside the territory but anywhere in the world. In short, the authorities can use this law to silence dissent both in the city and globally.
The new ordinance will deepen the repression already known under the National Security Law, which Beijing imposed on the city in 2020.
That previous law dismantled the Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement by detaining and prosecuting elected representatives and thousands of peaceful protesters. It eliminated civil society groups and independent labor unions, and shuttered the most popular pro-democracy newspaper.
The extensive and prolonged efforts of Beijing to stamp out any hint of democracy and respect for human rights in Hong Kong ironically reveals exactly what China wanted to hide: many people in Hong Kong are against Beijing’s authoritarian rule.
Many Hong Kong citizens have consistently opposed these kinds of draconian measure for years. As early as 2003, half a million people marched against them. And as China’s crushing grip closed in, many used the only free vote they felt they had left, voting with their feet: some 100,000 have fled the city.
Some historians may argue Hong Kong was simply transferred from one empire to another, like a pawn in some geopolitical game. But that thinking, like the imperial mindset itself, ignores the people who live there and what they have wanted for themselves.
The unavoidable truth is, many people in Hong Kong have fought bravely for democracy and human rights. And yes, things look rather bleak now, but their spirit and their quest for freedom will one day serve as a torch for a brighter future.
Banditry and insurgency are plaguing northern Nigeria from east to west, and a fresh wave of mass kidnappings seems to show authorities are unable to protect people.
Just yesterday, more than 87 people were reportedly abducted in Kajuru community in Kaduna State.
On March 9, criminal gangs known as “bandits” attacked a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso village in Sokoto State and kidnapped 15 children as they slept.
Two days before that, bandits abducted 287 students, including many girls, at the government secondary school in Kuriga town, in Kaduna State.
On February 29, more than 200 internally displaced people were abducted, many of them children, in the Ngala Local Government Area of Borno State. The perpetrator in that case is believed to be the Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram.
It’s a spate of truly alarming attacks. The overall insecurity it reveals is frightening, and it’s hard to even imagine the terror the abductees – so many of them just kids – must be suffering and the overwhelming distress of their families worrying about them back home.
It’s not exactly new, of course, such mass abductions have been a problem across northern Nigeria since Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014. That atrocity sparked the #BringBackOurGirls movement, which received massive international attention.
Still, the recent wave of mass kidnappings is shocking, and the key question remains: where are the authorities? Why can’t they protect people from bandits and insurgents?
Government security forces say they are working to obtain the safe release of those abducted. Bandits sometimes demand ransoms be paid, but authorities are loathe to do so, not wanting to reward banditry and encourage even more. Security forces also highlight the difficulties reaching the remote forest areas where the victims are being held.
Assuring their safe release is essential, of course, but Nigerian authorities also face what’s perhaps an even greater challenge: preventing more kidnappings, particularly of vulnerable students, without frustrated security forces engaging in abuses against those they are rescuing, as they’ve done in the past.
Ultimately, what may be most critical in ending these horrific mass abductions in northern Nigeria – and stopping the abuses seen in security forces’ responses to them – is, as my expert colleague Anietie Ewang says, holding the perpetrators to account. If people keep getting away with such horrific crimes, these horrific crimes will keep happening.
Are you a brutal dictator short of cash or maybe just looking for a side hustle? Is crushing your critics not having the economic benefit you’d hoped for? Would you like to get paid more for your repression?
The European Union is offering huge piles of cash to authoritarians just like you! We’ve got mountains of money – big notes, small notes, sacks of coins – all to help you strengthen your hold on power and continue your repression for decades to come!
Just pick up the phone and call EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on 1-800-BLOCK-MIGRANTS. That’s 1-800-BLOCK-MIGRANTS. Call now! Operators are standing by!
Join the EU’s many satisfied customers, like Egypt’s autocratic leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. EU Commission President Von der Leyen and friends handed him EUR 7.4 billion yesterday. And all he has to do in return is repeat some blah blah about a “comprehensive and strategic partnership” and – most importantly – prevent migrant departures toward Europe.
And Egypt is not alone. Mauritania and Tunisia have also walked away smiling from the EU’s ATM for autocrats. It’s very simple: you promise to stop the migrants, you get the cash.
How are you supposed to stop them? EU leaders don’t care! Do whatever you want! Are you worried about so-called “European values” of democracy and human rights? Well, don’t be!
In Egypt, authorities wrongfully arrest and mistreat migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. They deport them to Eritrea, an even more repressive country. They also reportedly deported Sudanese asylum seekers back to Sudan, where there’s a war raging. None of this stopped the EU handing al-Sisi the money. It’s almost as if mistreatment of migrants is the whole point… Wink, wink.
Plus, if you act now, the EU will throw in at no extra cost to you a free set of silences about other horrific human rights abuses in your dictatorship.
After yesterday, you can bet Brussels won’t be saying much about the al-Sisi regime’s long list of crimes since he took power in a 2013 coup. Massacring protesters, jailing and torturing thousands of critics and opponents, grossly unfair trials, crushed media, the courts an obedient arm of government repression.
So, dictators of the world, what are you waiting for? Billions of euros could be yours! Call 1-800-BLOCK-MIGRANTS today!
I know: it’s not funny. These so-called leaders of Europe are behaving in the most appalling manner. They fear and despise desperate people fleeing war and oppression so much, they are literally paying brutal dictators to abuse them just so the desperate people don’t reach Europe. It’s not funny at all, but their disgusting inhumanity deserves to be mocked.