Daily Brief Audio Series
Attacks by armed militants in Dagestan on Sunday killed at least 19 people and left many wondering both why and what’s next.
The gunmen – apparently supporters of Islamic State (ISIS) – hit the two largest cities in this region of Russia’s North Caucasus. In Derbent, they slit the throat of a 66-year-old Russian Orthodox priest and set fire to a church. They also torched a synagogue. In Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, they attacked a church and a police checkpoint near a synagogue.
When the smoked cleared, at least 15 law enforcement personnel and four local residents lay dead, dozens were wounded, and at least two questions immediately sprung to people’s minds.
First, how could this have happened yet again? How could the authorities have apparently been caught by surprise and fail to prevent this coordinated attack, despite other recent incidents of mass violence?
November witnessed antisemitic mob attacks in Dagestan and other regions of the North Caucasus. These included the takeover of the Makhachkala airport by a mob hunting for Israeli passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv; an attack on a hotel after false rumors it was housing “Israeli refugees”; and an arson attack on a Jewish community center under construction.
Then, in March, there was the horrific attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, claimed by ISIS, in which militants killed at least 140 people.
Attacks keep happening, and people keep getting killed. Russia’s security apparatus seems to have taken its eye off the ball at the very least. Many experts suggest the ongoing failure to address domestic threats is linked to security services spending too much of their time and resources on Russia’s atrocity-filled invasion of Ukraine.
The second question is, what are the authorities going to do now? If history is any guide, things don’t look good.
Russia has been facing militant Islamist insurgencies in Dagestan on and off for more than two decades. Security services have responded with abuses of their own: abductions, forced displacement of local residents, and torture.
After the concert hall massacre in March, Russian authorities not only tortured at least two suspects, they shared recordings of it. It was as if they were taking pride in torture.
As my expert colleague Tanya Lokshina has detailed, security services also followed up with abusive raids against Central Asian migrants, who have furthermore been targets of xenophobic violence in public.
In the wake of the latest militant attacks in Dagestan on Sunday, we can hope Russia’s authorities will have learned by now that illegal abuses haven’t worked to stem militancy – that preventing attacks beforehand would be more effective than torturing people afterwards.
Hope dies last.
Twenty-something years ago, I took my first trip to the Xinjiang region of China.
One day, I wandered up a dry gorge in the Flaming Mountains outside the city of Turpan to visit a set of caves carved into a cliff face centuries ago and decorated inside with colorful Buddhist murals. I was the only tourist there, and as I walked alone along the pathway from cave to cave, everything was perfectly silent – apart from one thing.
An old Uyghur man was playing a dutar, a traditional two-stringed instrument with a long neck, a kind of lute that’s at the heart of Uyghur musical culture. He sat on a stool, plucking away, sending notes ricocheting against the rock and out into the narrow valley below. It was haunting and timeless, connected to a tradition that stretched back ages.
It was made poignant by everything else I’d seen in Xinjiang on that trip and a subsequent one a couple years later: the local culture was fast disappearing.
The cities of Urumqi and Kashgar, for example, were being rapidly reshaped. Block-by-city-block, traditional buildings in their mud-brick tans, so indicative of central Asian architecture, were being torn down and replaced by modern low-rises of metal and glass.
A very few traditional buildings would be allowed to remain, it seemed back then – a madrassa and a mosque, perhaps – just enough to have an iconic local image for postcards, but nothing else.
The trend of cultural erasure intensified years later with the Chinese government’s “Strike Hard” campaign that aimed to “break their lineage, break their roots.” The result has been crimes against humanity, including mass detention, forced labor, and cultural persecution against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
In some parts of the province, entire Turkic families have been forcibly disappeared or torn apart, with the adults detained and the children held in state-run “orphanages” that aim to stamp out their culture and identity.
Another part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Uyghur culture in Xinjiang has been the changing of hundreds of village names that have religious, historical, or cultural meaning for Uyghurs. Authorities impose new village names reflecting crude, even offensive, propaganda – “Happiness” or “Harmony,” for example – or straight-up Communist Party ideology.
One place in the long list of village name changes stands out for me. There’s a village that was relabeled “Red Flag” in 2022. It used to be called “Dutar” – after the musical instrument.
You’re told your country doesn’t exist. You’re told your language doesn’t exist. Your teacher has been taken away and tortured.
The classroom where you’re sitting is in the same school building, in the same village, in the same region – but your world has been turned upside-down since Russia’s military occupation began.
Children have been prominent victims of Russia’s atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine. This includes being subjected to mass child abductions by Russia, which made Vladimir Putin himself the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.
Russian treatment of Ukrainian children in schools under occupation adds to the ever-growing list of Russian abuses, as a new report focusing on the occupied-then-liberated Kharkivska region of Ukraine details.
Russian authorities are suppressing the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian educational curriculum. They are using Russian as the language of instruction and imposing the Russian curriculum, filled with anti-Ukrainian propaganda denying the very existence of the people to whom pupils and students belong.
In short, Russia is using the education system to carry out Russification and political indoctrination in its occupied territories.
Such measures violate the laws of war. These require an occupying power to restore public order and services in an occupied territory, including to facilitate the proper education of children. However, it must respect the laws in force in the territory before the occupation. Occupiers are prohibited from imposing their own laws, including laws on education.
It also flies in the face of other international human rights standards, including the prohibition against propaganda for war, a child’s right to mother-tongue education, and parents’ right of choice regarding their children’s schooling.
Furthermore, Ukrainian children under Russian occupation have to undergo military training as part of the imposed school curriculum.
Occupying authorities also demand secondary schools in occupied Ukrainian territory to share the names of students ages 18 and older. Russian authorities deem them eligible to be drafted into the armed forces – where they might then even be forced to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.
Teachers and other school staff who try to resist these imposed changes have faced vicious retaliation. Russian authorities have used threats, coercion, detention, and torture against them, including brutal beatings and electric shocks. Russian authorities have also threatened parents whose children were learning the Ukrainian curriculum online.
There are an estimated one million school-age children in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The occupiers deny them their right to education, as guaranteed under international law.
Let’s start with a statement of moral clarity we can all agree with: slavery is bad.
Chattel slavery in the US, for example, in which enslaved people were treated as the property of their owners for life, bought and sold like cattle, was particularly horrific. It meant centuries of forced labor, rape, and torture for millions of Black Americans.
This is no more than a statement of the obvious. It’s hardly controversial.
Unless you’re in a public school in the US state of Florida, where teaching the truth about slavery can get you into trouble with the authorities.
As one educator from Miami puts it, the law in Florida allows schools to teach slavery, “but not the bad parts.”
Instead, new state history standards require teachers to say ludicrous things. For example, they’re supposed to teach that enslaved people gained valuable skills, and so the institution of slavery benefitted enslaved Black Americans.
It’s beyond preposterous; it’s deeply insulting. It’s as if someone breaks your right arm and then tells you, hey, but you’re going to learn the valuable skill of using your left arm more, so you should really thank me.
And, of course, Florida’s censorship of school curriculums doesn’t just try to rewrite the history of slavery. It covers up or distorts other critical aspects of US history along racial lines, too: terror lynchings, segregation, and the civil rights movement. It also downplays the cultural and scientific contributions of Black Americans.
Florida is probably the worst case in the US when it comes to such educational censorship. It’s home to the harshest curriculum restrictions and the most banned books.
But Florida is not alone. As a new report points out, there’s a national crisis of educational censorship in the US. More and more US states have been passing laws restricting classroom discussions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and US history.
What all this leads to – apart from breeding ignorance, of course – is fear. The new report details teachers afraid to tell the truth and students terrified of the consequences. Teachers describe being reprimanded for violating the new laws and policies, and there are reports of teachers being investigated and fired.
Black students in Florida’s public schools say they feel demoralized, unseen, and unheard, same as LGBTQ students feel, confronted by Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” law. The discrimination in information devalues their lives and experiences – at the same time, it pumps up others.
The Proud Boys, a militant white supremacist group, attends school board meetings across Florida, wearing clothes with violent messages and making hateful remarks. It’s designed to intimidate local officials, parents, and students.
Clearly, educational censorship in Florida, and in the US generally, is not simply about hiding the nation’s past; it’s about reshaping its present and future. It’s about trying to indoctrinate children with an ideology of ignorance. Saying the white supremacy of yesterday was just fine and dandy, gives a pass to the white supremacy of today.
It’s a pack of lies with an ugly political motivation at its core.
Primary and secondary education in the US is largely controlled by state and local governments. However, it’s clear here, the federal government needs to be doing a lot more to address school censorship that promotes discrimination and fear.
Ask people what they think about the term “universal human rights,” and I bet you’ll find the word “rights” is less problematic for many than the word “universal.”
Folks don’t generally take issue with the idea that they have fundamental freedoms, or human rights, themselves. But it’s often trickier to convince them that everyone else also has those same rights.
It’s the old us-versus-them problem. When it’s me, my family, and my friends, it’s easier to empathize than when it’s someone else, particularly someone not like me, my family, and my friends. In a war, these feelings get amplified, and people too easily deny the rights of victims if they are seen as enemy rather than ally.
We can see this on a grand scale in a strain of US political thinking about the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The US is not one of the 124 member countries of the ICC. Still, both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have supported the court in specific cases. The US government has even assisted with the arrest of suspects wanted by the court. The Biden administration has recognized the court’s key role in addressing atrocity crimes in Ukraine and Darfur, Sudan.
When it comes to the ICC looking into Israel’s actions in Gaza, however, the approach shifts sharply among US politicians (Republicans and Democrats, including Biden) who want to be seen supporting Israel.
We saw this even before ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for five leading figures, three from Hamas and two from the Israeli government. In April, twelve US senators threatened to sanction Khan if he pursued cases against top Israeli officials.
After the warrant applications were announced, the US House of Representatives passed a bill aimed at imposing sanctions against the ICC, its officials, and those supporting investigations at the court involving US citizens or allies. Biden has so far opposed the current bill, but it is now under consideration in the US Senate.
Apparently, for some US politicians, international law should apply to some perpetrators, but not to others; some victims deserve justice, but not others.
It’s an assault on the very concept of universality. As I’ve said many times before: If you only care about war crimes when your enemies commit them, then you don’t really care about war crimes, do you?
But there is some hope in this story, as well.
Ninety-three member countries of the ICC have declared their “unwavering support” for the court in the face of these and other recent threats. They reconfirmed their backing for the court “as an independent and impartial judicial institution” and their commitment to defending the ICC, its officials, and those cooperating with it from any political interference and pressure.
It’s an encouraging sign of universal principles over politics.