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LGBTQ

Russia’s New Queer Purge

Foreign Policy, August 6, 2024

In March, a little-known volunteer organization dedicated to “reviving the religious and secular unity of the Russian people” escorted agents from the Internal Affairs Ministry and the Russian National Guard on a raid in the remote city of Orenburg, a city of 500,000 near the Kazakh border.

Their target was a bar called Pose, which was locally famous for its drag shows. The volunteer organization, called Russian Community Orenburg, posted videos of the raid online, highlighting people in skimpy outfits, asking attendees why they were in a “faggot bar,” and showing clubgoers cowering on the floor as agents conducted their search.

“This is not [a scene from] the decaying West, this is from within the ranks of a country that is at war for a third year,” the group lamented when it posted the video online.

Conservatives in Orenburg had been outraged about Pose since it opened in 2021, according to the Russian outlet Mediazona, and a local media outlet published a sensationalist article about the club, complaining that laws like Russia’s longstanding “gay propaganda ban” did not give local law enforcement the tools to shut it down. That law, enacted in 2013, only bans materials made available to minors and carries light penalties.

The agents in Pose that night were armed with a major new weapon in Russia’s long crusade against its queer citizens. Last November, in a secret proceeding sealed to observers, Russia’s Supreme Court decreed the “international LGBT movement” to be an “extremist” organization, adding it to a list of banned entities that includes terrorist groups and the political operation of the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny. The decision is so broad that it can potentially be used against anyone who has—or simply “promotes”—a “nontraditional sexual orientation,” including people who are not LGBTQ but support queer people’s rights. People convicted under the law face up to 10 years in some of Russia’s harshest prisons, where queer people fear sexual violence or worse.

“This is not a decision to punish you for a few years. This is the death penalty, and it’s clear for everybody,” one longtime activist said, referring to the harsh conditions in Russian prisons. (The activist asked not to be named due to security concerns.) “We will not have a chance to survive there.”

Pose’s owner and two of its employees are now awaiting trial. A court announcement on Telegram notes they are accused of “being persons with nontraditional sexual orientation … who also support the views and activities of the international public LGBT association banned in our country.”

Others close to the bar are now living in fear. Only one regular Pose patron would agree to speak with me, and he said his friends had mostly stopped communicating with one another, afraid they could be discovered. Several had left the city or the country. He thinks he should maybe leave the country, too, but doesn’t have a passport or the money to go into exile, nor a safe place to flee to.

Pose, the patron said, “was my whole life. It was the only place where they accepted me.”

* * *

Homophobia became a major part of President Vladimir Putin’s political strategy in 2013. That’s when the Duma passed a national version of the “gay propaganda law.” The legislation was domestically useful to Putin, who was seeking to reinforce his political support by cozying up to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The law, which went into effect just before Russia was due to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, provoked an international outcry, and Putin detected homophobia could also be a tool of foreign policy. His government leaned into the controversy, portraying Russia as a defender of traditional values against a degenerate West that had lost its way. Kremlin allies also began using it in a more targeted way in Ukraine, where an oligarch close to Putin ran an ad campaign warning closer ties to the European Union would force the recognition of same-sex marriages. His decade-long strategy has used homophobia to try to drive a wedge between Eastern Europeans and the West, as well as to delegitimize fundamental notions of human rights and democracy.

To some Russian LGBTQ activists, it was inevitable that the Russian government would double down on going after queer people following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Swiftly, the Russian government made a broad effort to dismantle the last spaces for opposition to his regime. Other steps have included shuttering Russia’s remaining independent media outlets and effectively banning any speech critical of the war or of Putin.

The organization Coming Out, which held an eight-day annual public event in St. Petersburg as recently as 2021, decided to move its whole team outside the country almost as soon as Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders.

“A few weeks after the war started, I understood that things were not going according to the plan,” said Aleksandr Voronov, Coming Out’s former director, who led its relocation to Lithuania. “I understood that they were going to start looking for new enemies.”

Putin also justified the war partly as a crusade against the LGBTQ movement, which he initially derided in a speech announcing the full-scale invasion as part of a Western plot to “destroy” Russia’s traditional values. Then, in September 2022, he referred to the movement as “satanic” in a speech illegally annexing four Ukrainian regions.

As the war continued, the regime’s propaganda machine pushed outlandish stories, rushing a state television crew to an LGBTQ center in decimated Mariupol that it claimed was “practically under the direct patronage” of U.S. President Joe Biden. Russian lawmakers also responded, expanding the gay propaganda ban in November 2022 and enacting a draconian anti-trans bill in 2023 that would outlaw gender confirming medical treatment, prohibit people from changing their gender on legal documents, and prohibit trans people from adopting children.

“A special military operation is taking place not only on the battlefields, but also in the consciousness, in the minds and souls of people,” said Aleksander Khinshtein, a member of the Russian parliament and an author of the updated gay propaganda law, in a speech to the Duma in October 2022. “LGBT today is a tool of hybrid warfare. And in this hybrid warfare, we must protect our values. We must protect our society and we must protect our children.”

Despite many threats to Russia’s queer movement—the original gay propaganda law, a state requirement that forced many LGBTQ organizations to register as “foreign agents,” growing vigilante violence—Russia’s queer movement had remained vital throughout most of Russia for most of the past decade. (A notable exception is Chechnya, where local officials have detained, tortured, or murdered dozens of queer people.) Queer organizations continued to work and even hold major public events like St. Petersburg’s long-running QueerFest, a multiday festival of LGBTQ-themed talks and exhibitions ending with a large public concert. But the extremism designation is far more dangerous than any previous threat.

Part of the danger comes from the court’s secrecy around the ruling. It not only closed the proceedings, but also barred LGBTQ organizations from participating when they tried to challenge the Ministry of Justice’s petition. Technically, any group the government seeks to declare extremist has a right to respond to the allegations against it, but the Ministry of Justice brought its petition against the “international LGBT movement,” which meant no specific organization would have standing to respond. And even when a group of LGBTQ activists formed an organization called the International LGBT Movement in an effort to intervene, the court refused to allow them to participate.

In fact, the Supreme Court never officially made the order public. It only reached LGBTQ activists in their lawyers when prosecutors in the city of Nizhny Novgorod attached it to their filings in a case against a woman who was arrested for wearing rainbow-colored earrings. (The six-color pride flag and other LGBTQ symbols were banned by the order, and the court sentenced the woman to administrative detention, despite the fact that the woman’s earrings were not discernible pride symbols—they had seven colors and were shaped like frogs.)

Olga Baranova, who has been executive director of an LGBTQ community center in Moscow since 2015, told me that the movement is now backpedaling after years of encouraging people to come out. They used to believe visibility would gradually make Russian society more supportive of LGBTQ people. Now it’s just dangerous.“We’ve worked all these years just to be [out] and to be in the mainstream. And now we just say, ‘Okay, stop, stop, stop!’” Baranova said. Most people she knows who were visibly out have left the country, Baranova said—as has she—and she and other activists now advise people living in Russia to stay in the closet for their own safety.

Natalia Soloviova, chair of the Russian LGBT Network, a federation of more than 20 queer organizations from across the country, called the decision “absolutely horrifying,” but said that even despite it, the reality is that most queer people are not able or don’t want to flee Russia. The war has made it harder for LGBTQ people to reach countries that promise the most safety to LGBTQ refugees—like the United States or members of the European Union—because those countries have radically restricted visas for Russians. Georgia, which allows Russians to enter without visas, has become an important haven for Russian dissidents of many kinds in the past two years. But Georgia’s ruling party has advanced its own laws attacking LGBTQ people, one of many initiatives to bring the country closer to Moscow’s orbit.

Still, Soloviova estimates a significant exodus, with “hundreds” going abroad. Almost 40 percent of the Russian LGBT Network’s member organizations have relocated at least some members of their team abroad, generally visible activists or people in senior management. And many other queer people have been displaced internally, fleeing threats in their hometowns for larger cities where their pursuers are less likely to find them. Baranova acknowledged that if queer people all either leave the country or live in the closet, as she and others counsel them to do, “the movement will expire.”

Soloviova is one of those who’ve left the country. She first spoke to me in April from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, but has since left Georgia. (She feared that country’s new propaganda law and also knew of three queer Russians who were attacked on the street.) She is from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk—Russia’s third-largest city—and said she’d never thought she’d live outside Russia until the extremism designation.

“We’ve worked all these years just to be [out] and to be in the mainstream. And now we just say, ‘Okay, stop, stop, stop!’” Baranova said. Most people she knows who were visibly out have left the country, Baranova said—as has she—and she and other activists now advise people living in Russia to stay in the closet for their own safety.

Natalia Soloviova, chair of the Russian LGBT Network, a federation of more than 20 queer organizations from across the country, called the decision “absolutely horrifying,” but said that even despite it, the reality is that most queer people are not able or don’t want to flee Russia. The war has made it harder for LGBTQ people to reach countries that promise the most safety to LGBTQ refugees—like the United States or members of the European Union—because those countries have radically restricted visas for Russians. Georgia, which allows Russians to enter without visas, has become an important haven for Russian dissidents of many kinds in the past two years. But Georgia’s ruling party has advanced its own laws attacking LGBTQ people, one of many initiatives to bring the country closer to Moscow’s orbit.

Still, Soloviova estimates a significant exodus, with “hundreds” going abroad. Almost 40 percent of the Russian LGBT Network’s member organizations have relocated at least some members of their team abroad, generally visible activists or people in senior management. And many other queer people have been displaced internally, fleeing threats in their hometowns for larger cities where their pursuers are less likely to find them. Baranova acknowledged that if queer people all either leave the country or live in the closet, as she and others counsel them to do, “the movement will expire.”

Soloviova is one of those who’ve left the country. She first spoke to me in April from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, but has since left Georgia. (She feared that country’s new propaganda law and also knew of three queer Russians who were attacked on the street.) She is from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk—Russia’s third-largest city—and said she’d never thought she’d live outside Russia until the extremism designation.

* * *

Even today, key details about the Supreme Court order remain secret. For example, the order refers to a list of 281 individuals and 40 organizations considered part of the outlawed movement, but no one knows who is on those lists.

“The hardest thing here is that you have no opportunities to protect yourself,” Soloviova said. “You never know if you’re going to be prosecuted or not, and you will know only when the police come to your house directly and get you to prison directly.”

The charges in Orenburg are the first to reach court, but police appear to be flexing their new muscles across the country. In February alone, Mediazona reported several raids on “private parties” and a night club. LGBTQ activists told me they knew about several other similar incidents but didn’t want to share details, fearing publicity would put those involved in greater danger.

The arrests in Orenburg are just the beginning, worries Stanislav Seleznev, a lawyer with the Russian human rights organization Net Freedoms Project. Regional security officials generally have quotas for making significant arrests, and now LGBTQ people are an untapped pool of so-called “extremists” that can help them reach their goals.

“I’m compelled to assume that we are currently witnessing a model process that will be spread as much as possible all over the Russian regions,” Seleznev said. “Many more people are in a very dangerous situation now.”

Additional reporting contributed by a Russian reporter who asked not to be named, fearing that this article could lead to their arrest under the extremism law.

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ

Putin Is Showing Us What Homophobia Looks Like as a Weapon of War

The New York Times, March 15, 2024.

Oleksii Polukhin.

Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay. Mr. Polukhin gave a detailed account of his detention to Projector, an Odesa-based human rights organization. He also confirmed the details to me in a series of interviews.

It was May 2022, just 10 weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Polukhin lived in Kherson, a southern city of around 250,000 people that the Russians conquered with blinding speed in the war’s early days. Mr. Polukhin, rail-thin and then 22 years old, was on his way to take pictures of a May 9 “Victory Day” parade organized by the occupying forces, which he planned to send to a network sharing information from occupied territory. He had been keeping close track of the locations of Russian checkpoints, he said, but this new one caught him by surprise. He was forced to unlock his phone for the soldiers, where they discovered L.G.B.T.Q. Telegram channels, including one that he ran.

Mr. Polukhin recalled one of the guards calling him an anti-gay slur and forcing him to strip naked on the street. (This is a common practice by Russian forces, nominally to search for nationalist tattoos.) After he was dressed again, Mr. Polukhin said that the soldiers took the opportunity to humiliate him further, calling over a random passerby to ask what should be done with gays in his city.

“I think that all of them should be killed,” Mr. Polukhin said the man responded.

Once they’d had their fun on the street, Mr. Polukhin said the soldiers forced him into a vehicle and beat him, called him homophobic names and demanded he give up the names of other queer Khersonians. They drove him blindfolded on a roundabout route before dumping him at a detention center, which Mr. Polukhin guessed had been a Ukrainian police station. He said he was left to stew for a time in a holding cell with four other prisoners, who told him the guards had said he was gay.

A Russian soldier soon appeared with a red dress. “Wear it or we will beat you to death,” Mr. Polukhin recalled the soldier saying. He did his best to act unafraid, asking the soldier if he could also have a pair of matching high heels. Then he was taken for questioning, the first of about five times he would be interrogated during a detention that lasted just over two months.

The beatings weren’t the only form of inhumane treatment Mr. Polukhin was subjected to. Once, he said, Russian soldiers forced him to swallow pieces of a Ukrainian flag several days in a row. The Russians demanded he name other pro-Ukrainian and L.G.B.T.Q. activists; he said they had several names of L.G.B.T.Q. activists they’d already identified and wanted him to give up their locations. Mr. Polukhin said that they pressed him for the location of the offices of L.G.B.T.Q. organizations, one of which was raided two days after he was taken into custody.

Mr. Polukhin later learned he was held in a detention center at 3 Teploenerhetykiv Street, one of Kherson’s most infamous detention centers. Torture appears to have been common in facilities across the city, Ukrainian and international war crimes investigators have since documented, including waterboarding, electrocution and sexual violence that ranged from electrocution of the genitals to sexual assault.

Mr. Polukhin did not want to discuss with me many details of what he experienced. But he described the detention center as an environment where Russian guards coerced sex from detainees, such as requiring that they submit to sexual acts in exchange for the right to shower. Iryna Didenko, who oversaw sexual violence prosecutions in Ukraine’s office of the prosecutor general until late last year, told me Mr. Polukhin is one of 200 victims in a case against seven Russians currently in a Ukrainian court. That case involves alleged abuses including illegal detention, ill treatment and torture. Ms. Didenko said prosecutors are still working to bring charges in Mr. Polukhin’s case that would also include sexual violence.

I first interviewed Mr. Polukhin in January 2023, six months after he was released from detention and just two months after Ukrainian forces drove the Russian occupiers from the city. I was then a senior research fellow focused on queer people in conflict at the L.G.B.T.Q. human rights organization Outright International. Mr. Polukhin was the first queer survivor of Russian mistreatment I was able to speak to about the experience.

But it is now becoming clear that his story is just a first glimpse of Russian persecution of L.G.B.T.Q. Ukrainians. During a visit to Ukraine last fall, I also interviewed a lesbian who said she was twice detained and tortured by Russian soldiers, including almost being forced at gunpoint to have sex with another woman for her captors’ amusement. I also heard about a group of men who were pulled off a bus by a Russian soldier who found intimate pictures of two men on a cellphone and threatened to execute them before another soldier intervened.

These stories are among those documented in a new report released on Friday by Projector and Insha, an L.G.B.T.Q. organization in Kherson, with support from Outright. (I collaborated with Projector in my role at Outright.) This work is just beginning, Projector’s director, Vitalii Matvieiev, told me. There are 30 additional allegations not included in the report, including multiple reports of rape, because Projector is still working to verify them. Projector is also preparing affidavits for survivors like Mr. Polukhin to submit to the International Criminal Court, which it hopes will investigate whether Russians violated international law by targeting queer Ukrainians.

Investigators have a chance to build a case in Ukraine unlike anything ever before seen under international law: that persecuting L.G.B.T.Q. people constitutes a crime against humanity. The targeting of queer people in conflict — such as ISIS making a spectacle of executing men accused of homosexuality by throwing them off buildings — has received much attention in recent years, but no international tribunal has ever held that this kind of persecution violates international law.

Jurists have done painstaking work to make clear how existing international law gives the court the power to investigate persecution on the basis of sexuality and gender identity. It is time to use it. Regardless of whether investigations lead to prosecutions, queer Ukrainians deserve to have their stories preserved so that no one can ever deny how their community has been a casualty of President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical ambition.

Vitalii Matvieiev, director of Projector, at the Odesa Commercial Court of Appeal.

In the past decade, Mr. Putin has taught the world a master class on using homophobia as a political weapon. Now he is showing us what homophobia looks like as a weapon of war.

Mr. Putin embraced a so-called gay propaganda law passed in 2013 to help shore up his flagging popularity at home, part of a rebrand of his political persona as a champion of the Orthodox Church, and a Kremlin ally backed an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. campaign in Ukraine to try to drive the country away from closer ties with the European Union. Mr. Putin personally leaned into global controversy around the law before the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, a chance to dismiss concerns about human rights and pluralism as the ravings of Western degenerates.

The Kremlin doubled down on this strategy when it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian state media spread outlandish stories about L.G.B.T.Q. people — for instance, that a queer community center in Mariupol was “practically under the direct patronage” of President Biden and the U.S. Congress. Mr. Putin himself sounded increasingly unhinged as his invasion bogged down, describing the attack on Ukraine as a holy war against the West’s “reverse religion of real Satanism” in a September 2022 speech announcing that Russia would annex Kherson and three other regions.

(The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told me that Russia’s domestic anti-L.G.B.T.Q. actions are “a different story” from Mr. Putin’s rhetoric surrounding the war in Ukraine and that conflating the two would be like “trying to put separate stories into one basket.” He did not comment on the allegation that Russian soldiers have abused L.G.B.T.Q. Ukrainians. Russia’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to questions about the allegations in this essay.)

The war was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state with its own culture and history, which the Ukrainian government has argued amounts to genocide. There is evidence that Russian forces are committing many other crimes in the process: the mass killings of civilians, as in Bucha; the forced deportation of children, for which Mr. Putin has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court; and widespread sexual violence against both women and men. All of these allegations must be investigated and punished.

But international law must also recognize that Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine is an explicit attack on L.G.B.T.Q. people and name that as a crime, too. While Russia is far from the first state to persecute L.G.B.T.Q. people — Nazi Germany is estimated to have sent thousands of queer people to concentration camps — it is the first superpower to deploy homophobia as a major justification for invading another country.

International law has never punished L.G.B.T.Q. persecution as a crime. In the case of World War II, for example, the Allies not only did not mention such persecution in charges against Nazi leaders but also allowed West Germany to leave in place Hitler’s law against homosexuality when they purged other Nazi provisions from West Germany’s books. L.G.B.T.Q. people have been persecuted in many modern conflicts, in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. While there was some effort to highlight these situations — the United Nations Security Council discussed queer persecution in informal hearings on ISIS in 2015 and on Afghanistan and Colombia in 2023 — it has so far been toothless.

But things could be different in Ukraine.

The top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, issued a groundbreaking policy paper in 2022 arguing that L.G.B.T.Q. persecution should be tried as a form of what international law calls “gender persecution.” Written by Lisa Davis, a special adviser to the prosecutor, the paper states, “At their core, gender-based crimes are used by perpetrators to regulate or punish those who are perceived to transgress gender criteria that define ‘accepted’ forms of gender expression manifest in, for example, roles, behaviors, activities, or attributes.”

But Mr. Khan’s office will have to prosecute someone for L.G.B.T.Q. persecution to find out whether this argument holds up in international court. “Gender persecution” has been controversial since the treaty creating the court was negotiated in the 1990s, and only now, two decades into the court’s existence, are the first gender persecution cases in progress in The Hague. Prosecuting gender-based violence is often challenging because victims may be reluctant to come forward. That can be especially true in cases involving queer victims. Even if they have left the region and are somewhere safe to come out, there are risks of retaliation against extended family at home.

That’s what makes Ukraine so important for investigators. While many Ukrainians remain hostile to queer rights, L.G.B.T.Q. people have been highly visible in Ukraine’s war effort, leading to real progress toward the protection of L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Ukrainian law. Ukraine is the first conflict in which L.G.B.T.Q. people are likely to be victims of persecution in an environment where they could be protected if they come forward.

That doesn’t mean finding these cases will be easy. Many people refused to be interviewed by Projector, fearing the Russians’ return or retaliation against relatives in occupied territory. Victims may also be discouraged by the fact that the Ukrainian judicial system simply doesn’t seem to have the capacity to investigate the sheer volume of war crimes allegations. An association of some of Ukraine’s leading human rights organizations reviewed a sample of Ukrainian war crimes cases and found that 50 percent were never investigated.

L.G.B.T.Q. people have an added concern. “We know from our experience and from the experience of our clients,” Mr. Matvieiev said, “that sometimes when you go to a police station and you want to place a statement or tell them about a case, and it is related to your sexual orientation, what you get is discrimination or homophobia.”

Queer Ukrainians’ distrust of law enforcement may be justified, suggested Gyunduz Mamedov, the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, who established the department’s war crimes and sexual violence divisions. Mr. Mamedov said he ordered investigations of L.G.B.T.Q. persecution in Crimea after Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, but no one from the community would cooperate with them.

“We didn’t have a methodology or experience of that kind of investigation,” he said. “Frankly speaking, I think we were not psychologically ready” for that work.

Are prosecutors psychologically ready to do it now? I asked him.

“I am not certain of that,” he said.

The prosecutor who led Ukraine’s sexual violence unit at the time of my visit, Ms. Didenko, acknowledged that law enforcement must work harder to build trust. (Ms. Didenko has since been promoted to deputy director of the prosecutor’s department of international legal cooperation.) She said her office had done a lot to make it safer for victims to report, including running special training sessions for prosecutors to preserve the “human dignity” of survivors and working with nongovernmental organizations to build community trust.

To make things even more complicated, many of the reported victims of sexual violence by Russian forces in Ukraine are men, while resources to support sexual violence victims tend to target women. Men fear a different kind of stigma when reporting sexual abuse and that may be compounded for gay men, who may worry that others may think they deserved it — or, perhaps even more horrifying, that they enjoyed it. “Practically, in every case, there is a sexual abuse,” Ms. Didenko told me. “The law enforcement system was not ready to recognize all the signs of the abuse.”

Even within the queer community, people have been afraid to confide in one another, said Albina Yermakova, an Insha employee who stayed in Kherson during the occupation. “In the L.G.B.T.Q. community there was a certain paranoia,” she said. “You never know who will be taken to the basement,” she added. “You couldn’t be sure what could you handle yourself under torture — how could you be sure about your acquaintance?”

Albina Yermakova.

Projector is now preparing affidavits from Mr. Polukhin and other victims to submit to the International Criminal Court. Their accounts pose a challenge to international law: Is persecution on the basis of gender identity or sexuality even a crime?

Mr. Khan, the court’s third chief prosecutor, is the first to say he believes that it can be. But international law moves at a glacial pace, and its standards lag far behind many people’s expectations of it. No one has ever been convicted under international law for persecuting women on the basis of their gender, for example. That may change soon. A judgment is expected any day now in a case out of Mali concerning the alleged persecution of women while the city of Timbuktu was controlled by Al Qaeda-affiliated groups from 2012 to 2013.

But it will be a major breakthrough if Mr. Khan’s team successfully brings someone to trial for persecuting L.G.B.T.Q. people. Even seriously investigating cases of L.G.B.T.Q. persecution would be a big step forward.

Whether the court pursues these charges against Russian forces for violence against L.G.B.T.Q. Ukrainians hangs on many factors that have nothing to do with the horrors victims experienced, like broad legal strategy, the quality of evidence and how far up the chain of command accountability can be proved. Either way, prosecutors — as well as the press and the community of human rights groups — must work to seek out stories like Mr. Polukhin’s precisely because there are so many barriers that prevent victims from coming forward.

The time has come to treat L.G.B.T.Q. persecution as a crime against humanity. This won’t stop that persecution from happening, just as the World War II tribunals did not bring an end to genocide. Perpetrators believe homophobia will not only let them get away with their crimes but also rally people to their cause. Charges will be a clear signal that queer people belong in a democratic world — and that the demagogues using homophobia are the ones who should be considered pariahs.

Without condemning the motivation of this violence, you don’t get to the logic that drove these crimes in the first place. And the failure to name the injustices of the past encourages persecution in the future.

That, ultimately, is why war crimes tribunals matter at all. A century of experience shows they don’t seem to deter future atrocities, nor are they effective tools for punishing wrongs after the fact. War crimes tribunals can never make victims whole. They can’t bring back the dead, erase the scars or wipe away the memories that haunt survivors. Even when prosecutions are successful, only a handful of perpetrators are usually convicted, and such trials often take so long that the convictions feel like far too little, far too late. Perpetrators often escape justice for all kinds of technical, legal and political reasons that have nothing to do with the horrors for which they’re responsible. And no punishment can ever match the crimes.

But prosecuting and investigating crimes against humanity has a value that far exceeds the years perpetrators may serve behind bars. Law not only punishes crimes, it is also a tool for setting the world’s standards of right and wrong. In the wake of war, tribunals provide a forum for defining the values a society will uphold in peace. Investigations and trials give victims a chance to engrave their experience in the historical record so that no one can deny what happened to them. We cannot condemn crimes we do not name.

The world recognized this fact in the first modern war crimes tribunals, the ones following World War II in which persecution of a particular group — Jews — was tried. And look at the history that followed: Naming the Nazi genocide led to countless actions to ensure the world never forgets the Holocaust; institutions were built to document and preserve the stories of survivors around the world; the U.N. adopted the Genocide Convention, laying the groundwork for prosecuting similar crimes in the future; and offices were eventually created in many governments to combat religious persecution and antisemitism in particular.

World War II also showed what happens when we leave victims out. As many as 200,000 women and girls are estimated to have been forced into sexual slavery by Japan in the Pacific, for example, but this was not charged at the Tokyo war crimes trials that began in 1946, and the mass rape of women would not be treated as a serious crime under international law until the 1990s. L.G.B.T.Q. people were among the first victims under Germany’s Nazi regime; they were not publicly recognized as Nazi victims by a German leader until 1985, and West Germany convicted around 50,000 men before its law criminalizing homosexuality was abolished.

The U.N. initially recognized that international law might someday need to punish the persecution of a broader range of groups when it first proclaimed genocide a crime in 1946. “Genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns,” the General Assembly declared in a 1946 resolution, “whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds.” The phrase “any other grounds,” though left out of the full treaty on genocide two years later, is a reminder that justice must always evolve.

There are significant differences between the targeting of L.G.B.T.Q. people and the genocide of a religious or ethnic group. But many campaigns against queer people we see now around the world — in countries at war and at peace — seem to have what Maria Sjödin, executive director of Outright International, has described as a “genocidal ideology aimed at eradicating L.G.B.T.Q. people from public existence.” Russia and other governments are not only imprisoning, torturing and killing queer individuals, or encouraging their citizens to do so on their own, but also attacking queer cultural and political institutions, silencing speech about queer history and rights and going after L.G.B.T.Q. people’s allies.

The stories we remember from the past are the foundation upon which peace is built. And that matters far beyond Ukraine at a time when anti-democratic forces are trying to erase queer people in many parts of the world. If the world forgets how homophobia was turned into a weapon in this war, what hope is there that queer people will be included in a democratic peace?

Categories
LGBTQ Refugee Rights

Gay Couple Struggles to Stay Together as War in Ukraine Rages On

Originally published by Rolling Stone, June 22, 2022.

Russian bombs brought Stepan and Maxim together. Now Russian bombs have driven them apart.

The men, now both in their early thirties, were living almost 20 miles apart in the eastern Ukrainian region called the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists went to war in 2014. They likely would not have met if not for a bomb that exploded in Maxim’s yard, blowing all the windows out of the house he shared with his parents. The family scraped by for a month sheltered in the basement without water or electricity. But they finally decided to leave until peace returned. (Stepan and Maxim requested their real names and other identifying information be withheld for the safety of themselves and their relatives.)

That’s how Maxim wound up close enough to Stepan that they could see each other on Hornet, a gay hookup app.

“He was looking for sex. Like me,” Stepan tells me. But a quick fuck was out of the question because they both lived with their families. They took long walks together, and the two men quickly grew close.

“Instead of sex, we decided to love each other,” Stepan says.

Maxim tried to call things off when the time came for his family to go home. But their feelings were more powerful than logistics. For three months, they would both spend half an hour on the bus to reach a town equidistant from their homes, constantly worried about making it somewhere safe before curfew. When a friend in that town told Stepan she wanted to sublet her apartment, the men leapt at the chance to move in together. They’ve been a couple ever since.

“Without the war, without the situation, we probably [would] never meet each other,” Stepan says. The relationship “is one thing that Putin gifted to me.”

But the specter of Putin has haunted their relationship. Russia has been stoking homophobia in the region ever since Russia enacted its so-called “gay propaganda ban” nine years ago. Stepan and Maxim knew the dangers firsthand: They’d narrowly escaped a run-in with Russian agents in the Donbas after separatists took control of their region, and left to build a new life in a town inside the Ukrainian territory called Kramatorsk.

That life was shattered this February, when bombs fell on the city in the first barrage of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. They would be safest from Russian bombs — and from Ukraine’s draft — if they left Ukraine. They even had a free place to stay in an EU country, offered by one of Stepan’s programming clients.

They drove to Ukraine’s far-western border with the EU, but they couldn’t simply cross the border. One of Ukraine’s first acts when the war began was to bar men of fighting age from leaving the country. There was an exception to this rule, however: People with serious health conditions could get what’s known as a “white ticket,” a document declaring them “unfit for military service” and allowing them to cross the border. Stepan qualified for a white ticket based solely on his HIV status. But Maxim, who is HIV-negative and has no other major health issues, did not.

Stepan could leave, but Maxim would have to stay.

* * *

Before Putin blew up their life together, the couple were allowed a few years to enjoy life together.

After fighting in 2014, their town was under control of one of the “people’s republics” declared by the separatists, who set up Kremlin-backed governments and engaged in a long standoff with Ukrainian forces. Stepan wanted to leave, perhaps to move to Kyiv. But Maxim didn’t want to be so far from his family and friends. So they lived quietly, always careful about who knew they were gay. Many queer people fled the new regime, and the fear that queer people might be targeted seemed to come true in 2015, when the one gay club in the region was raided by separatists, who beat and robbed the patrons.

Stepan and Maxim had no problems for nearly two years. Trouble arrived on a perfectly ordinary morning in December 2016. A taxi was waiting downstairs to take Maxim to visit his parents, he kissed Stepan goodbye as he opened the apartment door. In the hallway stood four men with guns already drawn. They wore no badges nor did they identify themselves as they barged into the apartment. The whole situation was so surreal they didn’t immediately understand the danger — Stepan remembers asking the men to take off their muddy shoes so he wouldn’t have to clean up after them.

They told him to shut up and began searching the apartment. Two men opened wardrobes and scrolled through their computers. Another man inexplicably busied himself rifling through trinkets on a shelf. The fourth, the unit’s apparent leader, told them they were investigating a tip that someone in the building was selling information to the Ukrainian government. They were suspected because he couldn’t understand why two men from different cities were living together without their families.

He finally got the picture when they found text messages on Stepan and Maxim’s phones filled with heart emojis and “I love you’s”.

“Oh, they’re faggots,” Maxim remembers one of the soldiers saying.

Stepan doesn’t remember them speaking quite so harshly. He remembers one of them said mockingly, “They love each other!” But the leader came to their defense. “Don’t touch them. This isn’t our problem.”

The men were gone as suddenly as they arrived. All Stepan and Maxim’s experience told them the encounter should have ended very differently, and there was no reason to believe they would ever get so lucky again. Now there were at least four men who could come back and blackmail them at any time. They started packing their things immediately, and left the separatist-controlled part of the Donbas within a few days.

They settled in Kramatorsk, a small city a few hours away under the control of the Ukrainian government. They believed they were safer there — “In Ukraine, for sure I have rights,” Stepan says. Ukraine had indeed taken some steps to protect LGBTQ rights — including adopting a rule banning employment discrimination as part of a suite of human-rights protections required for a closer relationship with the EU. But it took a long time to shake the feeling that danger could be waiting just outside their apartment.

“It made me crazy,” Stepan tells me. For a year, he compulsively checked the peephole before opening his front door to make sure no one was waiting to ambush them. But eventually that subsided. Stepan worked as a freelance programmer for clients abroad, while Maxim had a job in IT. They were still careful about who they told they were gay — Stepan didn’t even feel comfortable telling the doctor at the clinic where he got his HIV treatment. (The doctor teased him knowingly when he said Maxim was his brother.) But they had a close circle of friends.

“It was a happy life,” Maxim says, adding they were even talking about buying an apartment this past winter. “Good thing we didn’t.”

* * *

The first blasts were felt in Kramatorsk around 5 a.m. on Feb. 24, the first moments of the war. Putin gave a speech that night justifying the war as necessary, in part to protect Russia from LGBTQ rights. He was fighting to defend Russia’s “traditional values” against attitudes “contrary to human nature” pushed by the West, he said.

Stepan again wanted to leave right away, but Maxim dragged his feet. First, the trip to western Ukraine seemed too long, then he worried it wouldn’t be safe for two men to travel alone. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had ordered all men ages 18 to 60 to register for military duty, and they were worried they could be stopped at a military checkpoint and mobilized for duty. While many LGBTQ people enthusiastically enlisted, many other queer people, like Stepan and Maxim, didn’t believe the military would be a safe place for them because of widespread homophobia. They were afraid they would be targeted as gays if Russian-aligned troops captured their town. Stepan and Maxim also didn’t want to take up arms for another reason: Maxim’s parents supported the Russian side, so did Stepan’s brother. Facing their loved ones across the front lines seemed unbearable.

Their ticket out came on March 5, when they learned a caravan was leaving from eastern Ukraine to the safer regions in the west. They volunteered to drive a mother and daughter, making it far less likely their car would be stopped at a checkpoint. They traveled for four days until they made it to a city on Ukraine’s western border with the EU.

That’s when I meet them, at a shelter for displaced LGBTQ people when I visited in mid-March, where they were wrestling with an impossible decision: stay together in precarious hiding, or separate so Stepan, at least, could have some stability and continue to earn a living.

They shared a small room with seven other gay men — and five cats — everyone sleeping side by side on mattresses on the floor. The building was never intended for people to live in, and now there were more than 20 people staying there with just a single shower and toilet among them; the unfinished basement pulled double-duty as a kitchen and bomb shelter. All the residents were gay men or trans women with male documents, and the whole building was on edge as they strategized with volunteer case workers about how to get white tickets and leave the country. Residents couldn’t even go for a walk to clear their heads or get some privacy. Police were on the lookout for draft dodgers.

(Full disclosure: The international LGBTIQ rights group OutRight Action International, where I’m a senior research fellow, is providing support for this shelter.)

Stepan was struggling to keep up with his work, which gave him some sense of normalcy along with critical income. One night, as his roommates turn their room into a makeshift hair salon, I watch Stepan huddle in the corner over his laptop. The chaos around him made it impossible to do his job. And he couldn’t figure out a way to explain to his client why he couldn’t just come to the apartment he’d offered in Europe.

“I don’t know how to say that I can’t go without Maxim,” Stepan says. “If I said something [like], ‘I can’t go without [my] wife,’ he [would] say, ‘It’s OK, Stepan. Let’s stay [in Ukraine].’” But Stepan doesn’t want to tell his client that he’s gay, or HIV-positive, or get into any of the other personal details such a conversation would require.

The decision felt so impossible that Stepan and Maxim couldn’t even discuss it when I met them. I thought they would be wrestling with the question for weeks or even months. But Stepan tells me later that they reached a decision a few nights after I left when he broke down crying uncontrollably.

“I didn’t know what to do. I want to be with Maxim; I wanted to leave this stupid shelter,” Stepan says. “I have to save my work.”

So Maxim told him to go. “There is no reason to stay in the shelter because of me,” he said.

Stepan took their two cats and went.

Maxim stayed in the shelter as long as he could, one of a handful of people who have been stuck there for several months. Some who had no way to cross gave up and went home to places like Kyiv, where the fighting had subsided for a time. But that’s not an option for Maxim. Russia bombed the main train station in Kramatorsk when it began a new campaign focused on eastern Ukraine in April, and the region is too dangerous to return to. He’s rented an apartment and dreams of crossing the border.

“I’m holding on,” he says.

In a way, Stepan envies Maxim, who at least has had other people around him to occupy his time.

“I am alone, here — I’m totally alone,” Stepan says during one of our Zooms. He is safe in the EU, but he has basically no human contact except with clerks at the store. He’s in a small city where he doesn’t speak the language, so making local friends is hard. He avoids other Ukrainian refugees because he doesn’t want to explain that he is HIV-positive and that’s why he isn’t in the army. He has no direct contact even with the client who gave him the apartment — they communicate only online.

He is filling up the table in the apartment with gifts he buys for Maxim — a Harry Potter bag, a Friends mug — and imagines that “one day [Maxim] writes me that he crossed the border and I [can] give him these things.” They’re making plans to get married; Stepan learned of a Utah county that will perform weddings via Zoom. They are making plans to have a proper wedding in Denmark, like another couple they met at the shelter — some day.

Stepan says he’s under no illusion that it will be soon.

“I hope that one day Maxim will come here. Of course, I’m waiting for him,” Stepan says. “But … now I understand that it’s possible that he [will] never come here, and probably this war will [last] some time, and after that I will come to Ukraine to him.”

For now, Stepan says, “I really miss him every day, every hour — every moment.”

Categories
LGBTQ Refugee Rights Transgender Rights

Trans People Leaving Ukraine Face Danger and Transphobia. This Organization Is a Safe Haven.

Olha Poliakova. Photo by J. Lester Feder.

Originally published by Teen Vogue, June 1, 2022.

Olha Poliakova first realized something was wrong at 5:20 a.m. when her cat leapt from his usual sleeping spot on her shoulder.

As Poliakova entered consciousness, she was vaguely aware of a loud boom outside. She thought a truck driver had taken a shortcut through her neighborhood. “What an asshole,” she thought. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour, but her martial arts class started at 7:30, so she figured she might as well start her day. Before her coffee was ready, she heard another crash outside — and another, and another.

There was no news online, but Poliakova didn’t need the internet to tell her what she already knew: The war had begun. The bangs were the sound of Russian rockets slamming into targets around her hometown, Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. She recognized the sound from when she’d supported Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines fighting Russian-backed separatists in 2014. Though she considered it at the time, Poliakova stopped short of enlisting herself because of her lack of military experience. She eventually developed PTSD because of her work. She didn’t want to be in a war zone again.

Poliakova, who now leads a feminist and LGBTQ rights organization called Gender Stream that focuses on promoting inclusivity and diversity in the police and military, wasted no time as soon as she realized missiles were falling that morning, February 24. Poliakova called other members of Gender Stream and told them to get to her place right away. For Poliakova, the rockets outside triggered more than her need to flee — she and fellow members of Gender Stream left their homes carrying the bare minimum and not knowing if they’d ever return. They piled into Poliakova’s small Nissan Juke — four humans, Poliakova’s cat, and a Russian toy terrier named Semion. So many Ukrainians were heading west that it took four days to drive hundreds of miles east from Dnipro to a region at Ukraine’s western tip called Transcarpathia.

Some Gender Stream members went across the border to start shelters for LGBTQ refugees inside the European Union, but Poliakova stayed in Transcarpathia, running a shelter for LGBTQ people displaced by the war who did not want to leave the country — or were not allowed to.

At the beginning of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued an order forbidding men ages 18 to 60 from leaving Ukraine and ordering them to register for military service. (Women are not universally subject to conscription in Ukraine but they can join the military voluntarily.) While many LGBTQ people did so enthusiastically, some gay men and trans people don’t feel serving is an option. Like many straight people, those without military experience worry they will be forced to put their lives in danger without being able to contribute to the fight. Some queer people worry about homophobia and transphobia in the Ukrainian military. Some said they were afraid of being singled out if captured, given President Vladimir Putin’s crusade against LGBTQ rights.

Poliakova and her team arrived in Transcarpathia to find that an emergency LGBTQ shelter in the region was filling up with people who couldn’t leave. The shelter’s manager, a Ukrainian staffer with a European LGBTQ organization supporting Ukraine’s queer movement, asked Poliakova if Gender Stream could take on the work of helping displaced people with male documents navigate the military bureaucracy and the border patrol.

“I didn’t know that [this task was] impossible, and said ok,” Poliakova told Teen Vogue. “If we need to do that, we will do that.”

Read the full story at Teen Vogue.

Categories
LGBTQ

“People Are Not Coming Back to the Closet”: The Fight for Ukraine Is Also a Fight for LGBTQ Rights

Vladimir Putin’s assault on LGBTQ rights made him a hero to the global far right and a pariah in Ukraine. As the invasion enters its second week, queer Ukrainians are fighting back.

Image may contain Human Person Electrical Device Microphone Clothing Apparel Sleeve Suit Coat Overcoat and FingerPortrait of Olena Shevchenko, courtesy of Olena Shevchenko.

Posted originally in Vanity Fair, March 4, 2022.

On the seventh day of the war, Olena Shevchenko posted a message of despair on Facebook.

Shevchenko, who leads the LGBTQ organization Insight, was not just voicing the heartbreak of watching her city destroyed, feeling the bomb blasts in downtown Kyiv. Or fearing what the prospect of Russian occupation might mean for her and other queer activists. It sounded like she had lost faith, questioning whether all the tools she had used over years of fighting for LGBTQ rights, Ukrainian self-determination, and democracy had proved futile.

“I do not know what will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, the only thing I know is that this world has been fucked up, international structures are not effective,” she wrote. “There is no system that can stop this shit.”

LGBTQ people have been at the center of the tug-of-war over Ukraine’s future from the moment Vladimir Putin launched his crusade to pry it from Europe.

I first met Shevchenko in the fall of 2013, when I came to Kyiv to write a story headlined “The Russian Plot to Take Back Eastern Europe at the Expense of Gay Rights.” That was a big moment in both Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine was on the verge of signing a formal political-association pact with the E.U., a step Putin and his allies in Ukraine were doing their best to derail. Russia was preparing for weeks in the international spotlight with the Olympic Games in Sochi around the corner. And global LGBTQ rights advocates had been hammering Putin for months, following Russia’s enactment of its so-called “gay propaganda law.”

At first the Kremlin seemed surprised that the outside world cared so much about the gay propaganda law, which technically restricted providing information about “nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors. But Putin quickly recognized the controversy as an opportunity. It was a chance to globalize a culture war to Russia’s advantage, portraying Russia as the champion of “traditional values” in a global showdown against democratic Western nations that had lost the plot in an endless quest for “human rights.”

Ukraine was already the proving ground for this strategy by the time I met with Shevchenko that November.

“Now the fight [is] between East and West, Russia and Europe—Ukraine is the field of the battle,” she told me at the time.

Billboards went up across Kyiv that fall saying, “Association with the EU means same-sex marriage,” funded by the Putin-aligned oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk. (Medvedchuk was under house arrest for charges of treason when Russia invaded Ukraine. An adviser for Ukraine’s interior ministry said Sunday that he’d escaped, though Medvedchuk’s lawyer denied this.) Protesters picketing against closer ties with the E.U. carried signs showing stick figures engaged in anal sex and chanted slogans like “v Evropu cherez zhopu,” a Russian rhyme that literally translates as “Go to Europe through the ass.”

This figurative battle became a literal one at lightning speed. Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, pulled out of talks with the E.U. toward the end of November and announced his intention to join Russia’s customs union instead. Protesters transformed Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square—in the heart of Kyiv into the “Euromaidan,” the epicenter of protests that were eventually attacked by riot police. Shevchenko was on the barricades, organizing women’s self-defense forces, and she celebrated when Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 and replaced by a pro-European government.

When Russia invaded Crimea in Ukraine’s south in 2014 and Russian-backed separatists launched a war against the Kyiv government in Ukraine’s east, Insight and other LGBTQ organizations opened shelters for people fleeing conflict. The years since have not been easy for LGBTQ rights supporters. There has been some progress: The government barred employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and rules were reformed to make it easier for transgender people to change their legal status. But hate crimes are sadly common, and LGBTQ events and community centers have frequently been attacked. A women’s march Shevchenko helped organize was targeted by far-right thugs in 2018, and the police responded by arresting her.

Which is why it was significant that Volodymyr Zelenskyy shouted down an anti-LGBTQ heckler several months into his presidency in 2019—something that would have been hard to imagine for a president years earlier. His government proposed hate crime legislation that covered LGBTQ people in 2020.

The perseverance of Ukraine’s LGBTQ movement was an important signal that Russia’s culture war was failing in one of the places where it began. Activists in neighboring countries have battled attacks from anti-LGBTQ politicians, often pushed by forces aligned with the Kremlin. Opposition to LGBTQ rights helped forge an alliance with Russians close to Putin around the world, including in the United States—this is part of what drove much of the social-conservative movement in the United States to embrace Putin.

“Putin doesn’t threaten our national security, Obama does,” wrote the communications director of a U.S.-based social-conservative organization in a 2014 article defending Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

If Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine, it calls into question the fundamental principles of human rights and democracy upon which the E.U. and the global LGBTQ movement have been built. What good is a decade of building a human rights infrastructure or working toward European integration when bombs are falling on your neighborhood, or people cannot buy food, or a disabled person can’t even find a way down from their top-floor apartment to flee the fighting?

“​​Now it’s like the whole international system is crashing,” Shevchenko told me. And in Ukraine, as we’ve seen in Afghanistan, Syria, and countless other conflicts around the world, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups face special vulnerabilities in getting to safety. Earlier this week, armed men broke into the offices of the LGBTQ organization Nash Mir, beating four activists sheltering there.

Many queer Ukrainians are serving in the Ukrainian military, but many trans people—who are elligible for a medical exemption from the order that all men ages 18-60 remain in the country—are being blocked at the border by Ukrainian officials who see an “M” on their official documents, according to reports from many NGOs assisting them.

Queer communities in neighboring countries have mobilized to help Ukrainians fleeing conflict—raising funds, setting up shelters, trying to troubleshoot problems at the border. But LGBTQ people’s rights have been under attack in several of Ukraine’s neighboring countries, and there is a palpable fear that the situation could grow worse if Russia expands its ambitions.

And LGBTQ activists are deeply concerned for queer folks in Russia, where there is a growing expectation that Putin will impose some sort of martial law and they will be hunted along with other opponents of his regime.

“We’re working to shelter refugees while worrying about becoming refugees ourselves,” said one activist in Moldova, where Russian-backed separatists have claimed independence for a region along Ukraine’s southwestern border. “It’s just two hours for Russian troops to reach our capital.”

For now, Kyiv stands. Though a million Ukrainians are estimated to have fled the fighting, some 42 million people remain; many LGBTQ activists are staying to fight, and some who were abroad are returning.

One of those is Lenny Emson, director of Kyiv Pride, who was outside the country when fighting began.

“We’re helping each other, we’re staying together…People are not coming back to the closet,” Emson told me Thursday while making plans to go back. “We’re continuing to fight. So for right now, the question is how to survive—the question is how to keep our people alive.”

And Shevchenko is still in her apartment near Kyiv’s central station, where thousands of panicked civilians have had to fight their way onto trains. Shevchenko told me she has no plans to leave—in fact, most of her team is staying, not just in Kyiv but throughout Ukraine. And that’s true for many LGBTQ activists on the ground.

“I will stay,” Shevchenko said, in order to keep assisting where she can and fight if she must.

When I asked her why she hadn’t made a plan to escape should Kyiv fall, she said, “Because somebody needs to stay.”

Categories
Far Right Women's Rights

Italy Is Ground Zero For The War On Women — Which Is Why These Far-Right Groups Are Meeting There

An alliance of far-right Italian politicians, Putin-affiliated Russians, and anti-LGBT activists from the US are gathering in an Italian city at the heart of the war on women.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on March 28, 2019, at 6:00 a.m. ET

VERONA, Italy — Brian Brown made his name fighting against marriage equality in California, and his National Organization for Marriage once had a budget in the millions. But his stock plummeted as the Supreme Court allowed same-sex couples to marry nationwide with the support of the majority of Americans. His annual “March for Marriage” in Washington was so poorly attended that progressives gleefully shared pictures of empty grass around its rallying point on the National Mall.

But now he’s back.

This weekend Brown will be in the spotlight again, as the World Congress of Families (WCF) conference that he organizes heads to the Italian city of Verona. Billed as a gathering to “defend the natural family as the only fundamental and sustainable unit of society,” the event will be held over three days in a 17th-century palazzo. Brown is due to speak on the same program as one of Europe’s most influential — and divisive — politicians, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of the far-right Lega party, who has become infamous for anti-immigrant rhetoric and his bullying Facebook persona. Other speakers include a minister of the far-right Hungarian government, a Nigerian anti-LGBT activist, and the Russian-aligned president of Moldova.

Behind all this is an alliance of conservative activists that connects a group of Russians close to Vladimir Putin with far-right Italian politicians and major players of the United States’ religious right. At a time when the fallout from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has some questioning whether concerns about Russian interference in Western politics were overblown, the WCF is a reminder of the many ways Putin has helped turn the politics of the West on its head. A social conservative movement that has lost much of its popular support has looked to Moscow to find new channels to power.

After a few years of meetings in small former communist capitals, the meeting in Verona gives the WCF a chance to return to the West with the backing of a party that is at the forefront of a right-wing European alliance. The location is significant: The small city an hour west of Venice has become ground zero for a new assault on women’s rights under Salvini’s Lega party.

Verona’s local government recently declared the city to be “pro-life” and diverted funding to anti-abortion groups, a measure that has since been introduced by local governments across Northern Italy. The former deputy mayor of Verona, who now serves as Italy’s family minister, wants to undo language in Italy’s constitution guaranteeing the right to an abortion, and is seeking new measures to prevent gay couples from becoming parents. Another local lawmaker has proposed that people be allowed to adopt fetuses as a way to stop women from getting abortions. And a senator from a neighboring region is seeking to overhaul divorce laws to weaken protections for women and abuse victims.

All these initiatives have been made possible by the political earthquake that made the Lega party Italy’s dominant political force in 2018. Salvini is not a committed social conservative — in fact, he’s a divorced former communist. But he was seeking support from the same Moscow circles that were cultivating ties to the Western religious right, and he has since welcomed Catholic fundamentalists into his party as he seeks to unite the Italian right behind him. Italy is the clearest test of whether the same formula that brought the religious right back to influence in the White House can work in Western Europe.

But former members of the Lega party view Salvini’s courting of the religious right as a calculated and cynical move. Flavio Tosi, a former mayor of Verona and one-time rival to lead Salvini’s Lega party, told BuzzFeed News that Salvini recognized that neofascist groups had been “orphaned” by Italy’s major parties, and went after their supporters.

And so, just like immigrants, Salvini finds feminists and other social progressives to be useful political targets.

“He understood he had to find the enemy.”

When it was first launched in the 1990s by a trio of obscure historians and sociologists, the World Congress of Families styled itself as an academic conference focused on reversing declining birth rates in the West. Over the years, its biannual forums featured everyone from early childhood education experts to anti-pornography crusaders to wannabe European royalty.

It also drew a number of major figures from the US religious right as it grew into a hub for anti-abortion and anti-LGBT groups around the world. Its importance grew during the years that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were promoting LGBT and women’s rights around the world. It was especially helpful to Brown — just as he was being defeated in his years-long crusade to stop marriage equality in the US, he began plotting to go international. Brown did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Brown’s organization chose Verona after it passed unprecedented anti-abortion legislation in 2018. Known by the name of its sponsor, Alberto Zelger, the legislation funds what are known in the US as “crisis pregnancy centers” to divert women away from having abortions. While these centers are common in the US, they broke a taboo in Italy. Italians voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion legal in 1981, but now government money was being used to stop women from accessing the procedure.

The Zelger law, which has already been introduced in dozens of other local governments across Northern Italy, is especially alarming to reproductive rights advocates because Italy’s strong legal protections for abortion access are also being undermined by a growing movement among doctors to refuse to perform the procedure on religious grounds. Earlier this month, the leader of an Italian gynecological association warned that the shortage of abortion providers was reaching crisis levels because so many universities were now refusing to even teach the procedure.

Italy’s courts have also recently dealt some shocking blows to women’s rights. Earlier this month, a court reduced a man’s sentence for killing his wife, citing his “anger and desperation” about her relationship with another man. In another, a rape conviction was tossed out in a case where judges had doubted the alleged victim because she appeared “too masculine” to be an attractive target.

On the national level, women’s rights activists are especially alarmed by a revision of the divorce laws proposed by a senator from the Lega party, which a United Nations human rights official has warned could dramatically reverse protections for women and victims of domestic abuse.

“It’s just a way to put women back in their place,” said Giulia Siviero, a journalist from Verona who is also a spokesperson for a feminist coalition called Non Una di Meno that is organizing protests against the WCF meeting.

Siviero sees Italy as a proving ground of what happens to women’s rights when an opportunist nationalist wins power. Salvini was elected in 2018 with a campaign featuring Trumpian anti-immigrant rhetoric, but he gained just over 17% of the vote and was forced to partner with a larger party to take control of government. He is now the most popular politician in Italy with his party supported by 1 in 3 Italians, and his best path to power is to consolidate as many factions on the right as possible.

“It’s common ground in ideology. They come together on immigration issues and on women’s bodies — they fit together ideologically,” Siviero said. “It’s as if Lega created a sort of tank where all these parts could come together in one big pot.”

When asked whether he was trying to defend the “Christian family” during a right-wing forum last summer, Salvini responded, “Not for me — I’m divorced.” But he’s also happy to portray himself as a champion of Catholic fundamentalists. When he was sworn in as deputy prime minister last June, Salvini held a rosary in his hand, a gesture that shocked even some members of his own party for crossing well-established rules in Italian politics about the boundaries between religion and politics.

He is now one of the greatest heroes to the global right and the greatest villains for the left. “Italy is now the center of the universe of politics,” Steve Bannon has said of Salvini’s rise to power.

The unofficial leader of Lega’s religious right is a former deputy mayor of Verona and member of the EU Parliament, Lorenzo Fontana, who asked Salvini to be a witness to his wedding. Fontana’s longtime spiritual mentor is reported to be a priest who believes homosexuality is “a rebellion against God” caused by the devil.

Flavio Tosi
Flavio Tosi

“I know that Salvini doesn’t give a shit about the rosary — I told you he’s cynical,” Flavio Tosi, the former Lega mayor of Verona who was once Fontana’s mentor, told BuzzFeed News. Tosi said that the Lega wasn’t interested in fundamentalist causes until Fontana got close to Salvini.

Salvini’s spokesperson, following questions about allegations that he was backing social conservative causes out of political expediency, said in a WhatsApp message: “Non-existent controversies. We protect Italian families. But divorce, abortion, equal rights between women and men, freedom of choice for all are not in question.” Fontana’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Salvini, whose favorite way to communicate with the public is by livestreaming on Facebook, excels at the kind of chauvinism that excites people who hate feminism. In 2016, he mocked one of Italy’s most senior women politicians by saying a sex doll was her “double.” Italian police are now conducting an investigation of another incident, in which a 22-year-old woman received hundreds of insulting messages after Salvini posted a picture of her online carrying a sign during a protest against Salvini that read “Better a slut than a fascist.”

“What a lovely lady ?,” he tweeted.

“Is Salvini a convinced fundamentalist Catholic? Absolutely not. He is a sexist,” said Siviero, the feminist coalition spokesperson. “But he goes along with people who represent that other world that he does not completely believe in, and so seals the relationship between the extreme right and Catholicism.”

WCF leaders have been thrilled to embrace Salvini despite his often abusive rhetoric toward women and immigrants. “Proud to be in #rome with Italian Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini,” Brown tweeted after a meeting late last year.

What’s scary, Siviero said, is that these ideas are “contagious.” Whether or not the more radical proposals from Lega to roll back women’s rights become law, they’re “planting a seed” that is giving marginal right-wing factions new life. These include neofascist groups in a country where the ideology has been outlawed since World War II.

But at this conference, unlike the ones held in Eastern Europe, Siviero said the WCF will face a backlash. Non Uno di Meno is holding four days of protests, including an international conference featuring the founder of the Argentinian feminist organization that inspired them. And the leader of Lega’s coalition partner in government has denounced the conference, saying the group has “medieval views on women.”

At the center of the web of alliances that connects the WCF to Italy sits a little-known Russian named Alexey Komov with connections to major powers in Moscow.

Komov first became known to Western religious conservative circles about a decade ago, billing himself as “a Christian family advocate and professional marketing and real estate consultant and entrepreneur.” Komov was “very eager” to play a leading role in the WCF, a former American member of the organizing committee named Austin Ruse told BuzzFeed News, but his first bid to bring the conference to Moscow was rejected because it was half-baked.

The group accepted his bid for the 2014 WCF when he returned with the backing of some powerful Russian oligarchs, including an investment banker named Konstantin Malofeev. They started planning a 2014 summit to be held in the Kremlin, which they promoted as the “‘Olympics’ of the international Pro-Life movement supporting the Natural Family.”

The Moscow summit came at an extraordinary moment. All eyes were on Russia, with the Winter Olympics due to be held in Sochi in January 2014. The lead-up to the Games was upstaged by a global showdown over LGBT rights. Putin, who had been in power since 1999, had begun to cast himself as the defender of Orthodox values against the hedonistic West, namely through a campaign to demonize homosexuality, epitomized in the passage of a law banning so-called gay propaganda. Major players in the US religious right — who came of age with a Cold War mindset that saw Russia as godless enemy — were suddenly wondering if Putin were the counterweight to the Obama administration they’d been waiting for.

Soon, Komov began pushing the limits of even what some American organizers were comfortable with. Ruse said his organization and other prominent WCF sponsors nearly walked out of an October 2013 planning meeting because Komov wanted to include Scott Lively, an anti-gay activist from Massachussets who played a key role in inspiring Uganda’s infamous “Kill the Gays” bill and the author of a book that suggested gay people were responsible for the Holocaust. Komov also went on a spectacular rant during a press conference in Washington in early February 2014, suggesting hundreds had been murdered to cover up the true story of John F. Kennedy’s assasination and questioning whether al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

When Russia seized Crimea in February 2014, it suddenly seemed like a bad idea to be openly aligned with the Russians. The US government slapped sanctions on Malofeev, who was funding seperatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine at the same time he was backing the WCF. The WCF ultimately took its name off the Moscow conference, but many of its key players attended the meeting, which was hastily rebranded.

A spokesperson for Malofeev declined to comment for this story, writing, “We do not comment on rumors and conjectures distilled from unknown resources to us by journalists.”

Dozens of Komov’s emails about the meeting were leaked in 2014 by a group of hackers, which showed that Komov was involved in another one of Malofeev’s major projects — building relationships with far-right groups throughout Europe. In one note, Komov called one of Italy’s best known neofascist leaders a “friend.”

The leak included an email from Brown, in which he told Komov, “the Forum was amazing and all of this press will work to the greater benefit of the pro-family worldwide movement if we respond properly.”

Komov forwarded this email to Malofeev with the note, “The empire strikes back :)”

Brown has denied that the Russians held sway over the WCF, telling BuzzFeed News in the summer of 2018 that he had “absolutely never been asked by [his] Russian associates, friends, or Alexey Komov to do something that would undermine the United States.”

“I think it’s sad there’s an attempt to paint all Russians as somehow anti-American and not united with us on family,” he said. Komov did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Komov had begun courting Lega from the moment Salvini took control of the party. He was invited to address the 2013 convention in which Salvini was selected as party secretary. And he has a leadership role in an organization that was instrumental in brokering a meeting between Salvini and Putin in 2014. Salvini has since proved a key ally to Russia in the EU, working to undo sanctions imposed by the bloc. There are also new allegations from the Italian magazine Espresso that the Russian state oil company was looking for ways to funnel cash to Salvini’s party.

The Verona conference brings these relationships full circle.

Verona is a “perfect match” for the WCF, Brown wrote in a fundraising email last year, shortly after the event was announced. “Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini will welcome us to his wonderful country with arms wide open.”

“We’ve never been more effective than we are right now,” he continued, “and we intend to do even more in the coming year.”

Categories
Far Right Human Rights Refugee Rights

This Small Town Was Once A Progressive Fairy Tale. But In 2018, It’s Living A Far-Right Nightmare.

A crumbling medieval village was rebuilt by a mayor who welcomed immigrants with open arms. That’s made him a target of Italy’s populist government, and a reluctant hero of the left.

Last updated on November 10, 2018, at 12:21 p.m. ET

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on November 10, 2018, at 9:32 a.m. ET

RIACE, Italy — Domenico Lucano just wants the world to leave him alone.

Lucano is the mayor of a tiny medieval village, near Italy’s southern tip, that he saved from extinction by welcoming hundreds of refugees. Today he’s in demand from progressives around the world, a symbol of the resistance to the global rise of the far right and anti-immigration sentiment. On Saturday, he was a star speaker at a rally of tens of thousands of people against anti-immigrant legislation in Rome.

But he’s not enjoying the attention.

“Enough! Everybody wants my attention — I might as well kill myself at this point!” Lucano shouted through a scratchy apartment building intercom when BuzzFeed News tracked him down one evening last week. “Everyone is using me… Nobody ever cared about the refugees and now, here you are. I am bitter. About everything.”

Lucano’s town, Riace, started welcoming the refugees sailing to Italy more than 20 years ago. But he really grabbed international attention at the height of the refugee crisis in 2016. He was celebrated by Fortune magazine as one of the “World’s Greatest Leaders,” visited by countless reporters, and praised by the pope. More than 300 communities in Italy and beyond now run their own programs to integrate immigrants on what’s become known as the “Riace model.”

“Everyone is using me… Nobody ever cared about the refugees and now, here you are. I am bitter. About everything.”

But his life’s work is about to be erased by the star of Europe’s nationalist movements, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. Salvini became Italy’s dominant politician by using social media to turn the country’s politics into a constant shouting match over immigration, and has permanently cut off funding for Riace’s programs. He’s on the verge of passing sweeping anti-immigrant legislation that could gut similar initiatives across Italy and lead to thousands of deportations.

Salvini pounced on Riace in October, just after prosecutors presented charges against Lucano including mishandling town contracts and “facilitating illegal immigration.” Lucano’s allies say the prosecution is politically motivated and a judge tossed out the most serious allegations. But the court barred Lucano from entering Riace, using a provision usually reserved for cases of Mafia corruption or harassment.

“I wonder what … all the do-gooders who want to fill Italy with immigrants are thinking now,” Salvini said when posting the news on Twitter.

Italy’s left was shattered by the last election, and there are no credible politicians on the national stage who can take Salvini on. Many are looking to Lucano to fill that void. But Lucano doesn’t want to be a martyr for the left. And he couldn’t out-shout Salvini if he tried — the minister has more than 3.5 million followers on Facebook, while Lucano has scarcely posted to social media in the past three years.

When he finally sat down for an interview, the calls only stopped coming when his cellphone died. He lost his temper with one caller, who wanted him to attend a rally later this month 300 miles away.

“I am not angry with you — I am angry with myself,” he quickly apologized. “I am just sick of it all… I know everyone is trying to help, I understand who you are.

“I am called elsewhere, but Riace is failing.”

Lucano briefly slept in his car after being sent into exile, and is now staying in a bare-bones apartment in a nearby town.

His office is a kitchen lit by naked lightbulbs and his desk is a dining table covered by a cloth decorated with farm animals that seems to be straight out of the 1950s. The only food in sight when he spoke with BuzzFeed News was a partly eaten tray of cookies and a bottle of greenish-white citrus liqueur, which — ever the good host — he offered even as he vented his frustration in a mix of Italian and the local dialect.

“I am tired… You see how I live — my bedroom is a disgusting mess,” he said. “I am ashamed to show it to you. This is it, what you see. I have no means.”

“I am called elsewhere, but Riace is failing.”

Riace is in even worse shape. A crowdfunding campaign is underway that has raised almost $350,000 for the town, but it needs more than $2 million to avoid bankruptcy. And hundreds of immigrants relying on the program have no money for food or rent. Their children have stopped going to school because there is no gas for the school bus.

Lucano spoke to BuzzFeed News just after returning from a rally in Milan, an event he’d forgotten about until just hours before he had to be at the airport. The rally had left a sour taste in his mouth, even though he seemed moved that it had brought together factions that hadn’t come together for 20 years. He didn’t say what had upset him, but it might have been that Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala of the center-left Democratic Party, hosted Lucano and then immediately posted an interview on the party’s website saying Italians become racist when “immigrants touch our needs and opportunities.”

He was missed while he was gone. One of Italy’s most respected anti-racism activists showed up in Riace after driving six hours from Sicily. He’d come to invite Lucano to the big protest against Salvini’s policies in Rome. A pair of vacationing environmental activists from Germany also wandered into town to offer their support. Even Lucano’s 92-year-old father, Roberto, said he couldn’t get his son on the phone after he abruptly canceled a lunch date when he remembered he had to fly out the day before.

Roberto is proud of his son, saying he’d always had a passion for social justice. As a teenager, Roberto remembered, the boy had turned down a soccer prize because he believed credit should go to his entire team.

When asked about this story, the mayor said that his morality was shaped even then by a feeling that “we were close to a global revolution.” He keenly remembered the US-backed coup that overthrew Chile’s socialist president in 1973, when he was just 15. Lucano said he is still guided by the words of Che Guevara, “We, unfortunately must feel on our own skin any injustice and humiliation that may happen to any other human being.”

He initially hesitated when asked whether he was so tired that he thought he could quit.

“I do not know — I don’t know anything,” he said, slumping over a pile of folders containing reports of the investigations against him. “I involuntarily became the symbol of the Italian left.”

But he soon recovered his energy and his composure, and his thoughts began to come out in long speeches that referenced radical priests, Malcolm X, and the Beatles. He explained that though Guevara’s words had given him his mission, he had always worried he might not be strong enough to bear the burdens of others.

“It was such a beautiful project and in the past two years it’s gone to shit,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out what happened.”

Calabria, the region where Riace lies, has always taught people to treat migrants with empathy, Lucano said, in part due to the long tradition of Calabrians crossing oceans looking for work. The numbers who settled in the US helped popularize a regional dish, spaghetti with meatballs. Calabria is said to have been visited by Homer’s Odysseus and at various times sheltered wandering sailors from Greece, Africa, and the Middle East.

There was no grand plan when he decided to begin working with refugees, he said. “I did whatever came naturally to me.”

One of the newer arrivals now depending on Riace is Evelyn Samuel, a 28-year-old from Nigeria’s Delta State, part of a region that has seen decades of fighting over the region’s oil supplies. She spent six years working in Libya before it became too unstable and she decided to get on a boat for Italy with her months-old baby. She was settled in Riace 10 months ago after being rescued at sea by a boat operated by an NGO.

“I don’t know where to go,” Samuel said tearfully in English, calling Lucano by the Italian word for mayor, sindaco. “Salvini don’t like sindaco. Salvini don’t like black [people]. And sindaco like black [people]… Salvini now is chasing us away. ”

Confusion has spread as the program collapsed, and some of the immigrants believe Lucano is to blame for the funding being shut off. Many direct their anger at his partner, a refugee from Ethiopia, believing she manipulated Lucano into playing favorites among the refugees, putting the whole program in danger.

With Lucano in exile, “It’s kind of a desperate situation — no one can fill that void,” said Bahram Arcar, who arrived with the first group of refugees in Riace 20 years ago. He now works for the collective Lucano created to run refugee programs. But with the program out of money, he too will have to leave since he has no way to support his family.

“It was such a beautiful project and in the past two years it’s gone to shit,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out what happened.”

Arcar arrived in Riace with a group of around 200 refugees in 1998, on a boat that landed on a nearby beach after a dangerous eight-day voyage from the southern coast of Turkey.

They were part of an exodus from Kurdistan, fleeing a civil war between Kurdish factions and efforts by Saddam Hussein to retake a region of northern Iraq that became independent after he was defeated in the Gulf War that ended in 1991. Their arrival in Europe sparked a crisis inside the EU that has many parallels with the one faced by the bloc today, but the players were reversed. Italy, with urging from the Catholic Church, championed the cause of the refugees, while Germany questioned whether a southern European country with such a porous border should be allowed into the EU’s newly created free travel zone.

Lucano, then a teacher in Riace’s school, said the geopolitics were far from his mind when he first heard about the Kurds’ arrival from the local bishop. When the Kurds lost their shelter at a local church, Lucano called his aunt in Argentina and other relatives overseas to ask for permission to put them up in the houses they’d left behind. He’d lined up shelter for 100 people within a few hours, sometimes in houses that had stood empty for 50 years. They sometimes had to break in — keys had disappeared from hiding places on rotted windowsills or crumbling walls — and they scrounged candles for light.

It felt like fate had brought them there, Lucano said. He recalled one of the Kurds telling him, “We are people without a home, and we arrived in a place made of houses without people.”

“We are people without a home, and we arrived in a place made of houses without people.”

Most of the Kurds eventually left to join family in Germany. But Lucano, Arcar, and a few others decided to create a collective, called Future City, to welcome other refugees. They planned to restore buildings, set up apprenticeships with artisans in local workshops, and run small hotels they hoped would draw visitors interested in “ethical tourism.” Soon they got the town involved in a national program called SPRAR focused on vulnerable refugees — like families with children, people with illnesses, and women at risk of being forced into sex work — that specializes in integrating them into communities.

“We wanted this project to become more famous,” Arcar said. “We thought it was important because it would attract tourism, too, because we wanted to make outside money come in. But I thought — and [Lucano] thought too — that it was going to cause problems.”

Images of Afghans, Ethiopians, and Nigerians saving Italy’s ancient heritage seemed to embody all the best of what immigration could be. Projects like Riace were a welcome alternative to Italy’s main refugee system, CARA, in which immigrants are warehoused in isolated camps and often exploited by organized crime.

It seemed to benefit the town’s original residents, too. The school was saved from closure by an influx of new students, historic buildings were restored, and restaurants and grocery stores reopened. Because state money came irregularly, they created a system of IOUs to circulate in town, printing up a town currency with the faces of Nelson Mandela, Guevara, and local activists killed by the Mafia.

Lucano was elected mayor in 2004 on a nonpartisan slate, and he was reelected in 2009 and 2014. Riace first attracted international attention in 2008, when a famous German director made a short film inspired by its immigrants, and in 2010 Lucano was included on a list of the world’s outstanding mayors.

But he became an international symbol at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, when stories began appearing about him in English. Lucano’s fans always mention his inclusion on Fortune’s 2016 list of the “World’s Greatest Leaders,” where is ranked in between a minister of Africa’s largest country and the philanthropist Melinda Gates.

As Lucano and his allies in the refugee rights community see it, this international publicity painted a target on Riace even before populists took power in Italy in 2018. Inspectors first arrived to audit the program in the summer of 2016, just as the then-ruling center-left Democratic Party was getting spooked by an anti-immigrant backlash. The national government soon moved to tighten restrictions on the NGOs rescuing people from leaky boats trying to reach Italy’s coasts, and it sealed a deal with Libya that it hoped would stop immigrants attempting the crossing.

The audit produced a vaguely worded report implying Lucano may have been playing favorites with government money, though it noted that open bidding was difficult in regions where many contractors are in league with the mob.

A follow-up report found no wrongdoing and praised the program as “a model of hospitality,” but the Interior Ministry kept that report secret while a criminal investigation was underway. It also froze payments to the program in 2016, forcing the town to go into debt to keep the program running.

Lucano told BuzzFeed News they had made mistakes as they expanded the program, allowing new groups to run projects that included “people taking advantage.” But Giovanni Maiolo, head of an alliance of communities modeled on Riace called the Network of Townships of Solidarity, told BuzzFeed News the government’s response was like giving someone who ran a red light a life sentence.

“I would have never imagined we would fall into barbaric racism as such only 80 years after the racial laws of the fascist dictatorship.”

By that time, a prosecutor had also brought sweeping charges against Lucano and 35 others for offenses ranging from corrupt contracting arrangements to “facilitating illegal immigration.” Wiretap recordings of his phone were leaked to the press in which he discussed arranging the equivalent of a green-card marriage for a young Nigerian woman, though full transcripts of the conversation also showed he rejected the idea when the proposed husband demanded she have sex with him.

Requests for comment about the investigation sent to Salvini’s office and local investigators were not returned.

All this was hanging over Lucano’s head when Salvini entered office in June this year. Just after he took power of the Interior Ministry, Salvini posted a video saying Lucano is worth “zero.”

Alfonso Di Stefano of the Sicilian Anti-Racism Forum, an organizer of Saturday’s protest against Salvini’s anti-immigrant legislation, told BuzzFeed News, “Everything is in danger now.”

Salvini is claiming there is a national emergency to bring the legislation to Parliament under special rules, though new arrivals are way down from their peak in 2016. It would dramatically restrict the grounds on which immigrants would be allowed to petition to stay in Italy, and includes a number of other measures to weaken Italy’s asylum laws. Sounding a lot like Donald Trump, Salvini at one point promised the bill would include a provision to impose a curfew on “ethnic stores,” which he called the “haunt of drug dealers and drunks.” He has also pushed legislation making it easier for Italians to buy guns.

“We [have] never reached such a low point,” Di Stefano said. “I would have never imagined we would fall into barbaric racism as such only 80 years after the racial laws of the fascist dictatorship.”

The legislation passed the Senate last week, and it will likely spell the end of programs like Riace by drastically restricting the number of new immigrants eligible for the SPRAR system. Instead of getting support to integrate into the community, even more refugees would be pushed into isolated holding camps. In southern Italy, Di Stefano said, this would be a gift to mobsters, who have embezzled money from camp administrators and profit by serving as brokers who arrange labor on the region’s commercial farms.

If there’s any silver lining, said the Network of Townships of Solidarity’s Maiolo, it’s that Lucano’s arrest has given civil society someone to rally around at “such a black time for human rights.” Though their efforts have only pulled in a fraction of what Riace needs, $350,000 is an unusually successful crowdfunding campaign by Italian standards. And there are other signs of grassroots support for immigrants in Italy. When Lodi, a small northern city, cut many immigrant children from a school lunch program, an online effort raised tens of thousands to feed them for the rest of the year.

“Their faces were different, but it didn’t matter — they were people,”

Lucano is grateful for the support, even though he hates being cast as a David taking on Salvini’s Goliath. But he recognizes that Riace does provide a counter to the “industry of fear for pure political gain” taking hold across the world.

At one point, Lucano broke into a gap-toothed smile and wondered whether Salvini had ever truly listened to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” “John Lennon was one of our heroes back then,” Lucano said, and reminisced about how easy everything was back when they first turned empty houses into shelters.

“Considering how Italy has become today, I would like to try and go back to that simplicity,” he said.

Back when the Kurds arrived in 1998, Lucano had just helped put on a play that imagined Riace down to its final residents in 2020. The town painted a mural of the sea along a road renamed “Utopia Street,” dreaming that those who’d left would one day sail home again. For Lucano, the Kurds appeared as if they were the long-lost residents of Riace who’d simply returned wearing different skins.

“Their faces were different, but it didn’t matter — they were people.”

Categories
Far Right

This Party Wants To Make Germany Great Again After Far-Right Protests That Shocked The World

Alternative for Germany thinks it has a chance to win upcoming elections following an outpouring of anti-immigrant anger in the country’s east, and allegations of Nazi ties may only be working to its advantage.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on September 8, 2018, at 10:21 a.m. ET

CHEMNITZ, Germany — “That is what they’re actually saying: They want you all dead!” the speaker declared, waving his hand in the air for emphasis. “That’s what it’s about!”

He didn’t use the word, but he was implying that a kind of genocide was coming for the German people, engineered by left-wing parties that support Muslim immigration. The speaker’s name was Marc Bernhard, a 46-year-old member of parliament from the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) who had been invited by the city’s local AfD branch for a discussion on the question, “Losing control — can Germany be saved?” He spoke at a breathless pace, as if his mouth could barely keep up with the urgency of his words.

“Their declared goal is to get rid of Germany and the Germans — that’s what their leading politicians are more or less saying,” he said, again aiming his harshest words at the country’s left-wing parties.

Bernhard spoke before an audience of around 150 people, a majority of them men and nearly all over 50, gathered inside a run-down meeting space on the outskirts of Chemnitz. After outrage over the killing of a local man turned into violent protests, the city has unexpectedly found itself at the center of Germany’s immigration debate and an international outcry about a rising far right.

Many Chemnitz residents saw the killing, for which two immigrants were arrested, as evidence that the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have moved to Germany in recent years were a time bomb waiting to explode. And a new analysis of crime data in the local press does suggest a spike in crime in the city’s center, with young immigrants overrepresented among the perpetrators. The more that politicians like Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as the press, focused on the neo-Nazis who joined the protest, the more immigration opponents nationwide argued that crying “Nazi” was simply an excuse for elites to continue ignoring them.

And so for many across Germany, Chemnitz has become a national symbol for people worried that Germany was falling apart — but Bernhard and his party saw a chance to build a movement to make Germany great again.

The events in Chemnitz may be rewriting the rules of German politics, allowing more radical voices into the mainstream and sapping Nazi allegations of their power. The AfD, which has long battled the perception that it is racist and authoritarian, has the most to gain from the crisis. And it knows it.

When Merkel announced this week that she would visit Chemnitz, the leader of the AfD parliamentary bloc, Alice Weidel, posted a video on Facebook demanding that the chancellor fire a spokesperson who first criticized the protests on behalf of Merkel’s government. “Stop smearing your own people with dirt, get rid of the spokesperson, and say sorry to the citizens of Chemnitz and Saxony.”

Otherwise, “you don’t even have to show up in Chemnitz at all,” Weidel said in the video.

The outcry started with concerns about security, but the AfD wants its supporters to understand that much more is at stake. “We’re also losing control of our culture, our traditions, our heritage!” Bernhard said that night in Chemnitz. “It can’t keep going on like this! We have to stay in control of our country.”

The danger is clear, he said. Judges were removing crosses from courtrooms, the festival of St. Martin was being rebranded as a “festival of lights,” and kindergartens were replacing pork with halal meat, he said. Soon, he said, “we won’t be the majority anymore!”

“The only thing you want is … us — the AfD!”

The AfD only won seats in the Bundestag — Germany’s national legislature — for the first time last year, but the 13% of the vote it captured with its campaign against immigration was enough to make it the largest party in opposition to Merkel’s government.

Next year’s elections for Saxony’s state government will give the party its first real chance to enter government. It is now polling at 25% in the state, nearly tied with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and it has a real chance to become the largest party in the state parliament.

The AfD’s rise in Saxony is driven by voters like Bettina Rehnert, one of the most enthusiastic people in attendance for Bernhard’s speech.

Rehnert leapt to her feet to shout down the lone audience member who dared to tell the panelists “there’s too much hatred in your speeches.” She was effusive when she got her own turn at the mic, telling Bernhard, “I’ve followed your speech and I have to agree with you. … We’ve only been taking pointless hits for 3 years. … I know so many people that now want to see action!”

Rehnert, a 57-year-old with blonde bangs falling into her large glasses, told BuzzFeed News that she knew what it was like to be a refugee. Her parents came to East Germany at the end of World War II after being forced to leave modern-day Poland. She took part in the protests that toppled communism in 1989 and began voting for the center-right CDU. She earned a comfortable living in the new capitalist system, running her own architecture business and helping with her husband’s construction firm.

But, she said, she saw that those years were not good for everyone in Chemnitz. The old communist factories were closing, and the city lost much of its population. One of the city’s most striking features today are the stretches of decaying buildings from several long-forgotten boom periods of Chemnitz’s past — socialist apartment blocks, art deco mansions, and 19th-century train stations.

Rehnert became convinced something was wrong as unemployment climbed in the early 2000s, and she thought the refugees who began to arrive in Chemnitz in 2014 — not the economic crisis — were a sign those hard times were coming back.

Official crime statistics don’t show that the city became radically more dangerous in those years — assaults increased some while petty street crime declined — but downtown suddenly began to feel unsafe to Rehnert. She said she remembered a group of immigrant men shouted at her, “Hey, madame … you want to fuck?”

If that’s what they want in Berlin or West Germany, Rehnert said, let them have it. “West Germans feel that the refugees are not so bad as we do because they always had a lot of families of foreigners over there.” They’d had foreigners in Chemnitz under communism, guest workers from Cuba, Vietnam, and Russia, but they mostly kept to themselves and left after a short while.

Activists clash over immigration outside a town hall in Chemnitz, Germany, on Aug. 30.

But she worried the people now coming through Saxony from the Middle East would drain money for schools, and other social services would be diverted to support the new arrivals. And she didn’t understand why they seemed to be mostly men. When her family was forced to leave Poland, they all came together.

“No father would leave his family behind,” she said. “I have to have doubts how desperate [they are] to come here.”

She no longer trusts the news, and said that the television is so filled with propaganda it sounds just as bad as it did when it was controlled by East Germany’s communist government. So she gets most of her information from Facebook.

This brought her deep into a world of conspiracy theories, though she said she is confident she can “self-evaluate” and “draw her own picture.” AfD lawmakers visited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and didn’t show any pictures of war, she said, so she questioned “how big the war over there is.”

Rehnert was at the protest on Aug. 27 that stunned the rest of Germany and the world, with far-right protesters overwhelming the police. She was also at a demonstration that the AfD led the following Saturday, which had been called as a silent march.

But it nearly spun out of control after authorities halted the march to stop clashes with a blockade by left-wing protesters a few blocks away. But even more militant groups gathered on the margins of the march, and participants in the AfD march joined them as tensions mounted. Before the authorities forced the group to disperse, dozens of protesters rushed police and attacked journalists, shouting slogans like “Free, Social, and National,” the motto of a neo-Nazi party called the Third Way.

Renhert said that she had heard that chant before and saw nothing wrong with each of those words on their own. But when reminded that it was an allusion to the Nazi Party — which was officially called the National Socialist Party — she dismissed the comparison.

“I don’t think like that,” she said. “It’s over the top.”

Like a growing number of Germans on the right, she was tired of being reminded of the country’s Nazi past. She’d even read a book — widely dismissed by historians — that claimed Germany wasn’t really to blame for World War II at all. East Germany, unlike the West, never had a youth movement that demanded answers from their elders about what they did in the war.

As far as Rehnert knew, she said, she didn’t know any elders who’d been Nazis when she was growing up, and said, “I don’t know any bad people.” At the protests, the only person she’d seen doing a Hitler salute “was completely drunk” and “doing it by accident,” she said. She’d heard others were “undercover” leftists.

She didn’t feel she or the AfD should have to answer for it regardless of what really happened, she said. She didn’t know a lot about Nazis, she finally admitted, but she didn’t think she had to.

“It’s not our problem, because we are not Nazis,” she said.

Bettina Rehnert

The AfD has pressed its advantage as Merkel and Saxony’s leaders have stumbled over each other to respond to the events of the past two weeks.

The head of Saxony’s state government, Michael Kretschmer, has denounced extremists at the marches, but he also tried to appease locals who feel their concerns about immigrants and crime are being ignored. He made headlines again this week by suggesting that media reports exaggerated the size of violent factions in Chemnitz’s anti-immigrant protests, and disputed reports of widespread violence following right-wing protests.

“One thing is clear,” he said in an address to the state parliament. “There was no mob, there was no hunt, and there was no pogrom in Chemnitz.”

This directly contradicted comments Merkel made last week: “We have video footage of the fact that there [were people hunted down], there were riots, there was hatred on the streets.” The chancellor doubled down on her condemnation of the anti-immigrant protests as she promised to visit Chemnitz soon.

These remarks prompted the video from the AfD’s Bundestag leader Weidel, calling Merkel’s comments “a fully grown government and media scandal.”

The controversy centers on whether the videos posted online from the original round of protests show hetzjagd, a word probably best translated as “hunting people down.” There were several other reports of mobs chasing immigrants and leftists in Chemnitz, and reporters wrote about several others that were not captured on video. Chemnitz police did not release arrest numbers from the first day of protests, but referred to the violence as “rioting” and asked people to submit evidence of specific incidents. Eleven people were charged with assault on the second day and 20 people were injured. Authorities in the state capital, Dresden, say they are investigating 120 complaints filed during the protests, though those range from assault to doing the Hitler salute; it also could include charges against left-wing counterprotesters.

The claim that reports of mob violence were fake news got an unexpected boost late Thursday from Hans-Georg Maaßen, the head of the Constitutional Protection Office, a body created by Germany’s postwar constitution to police extremist parties.

“After my cautious evaluation, there are good reasons for the fact that it is targeted misinformation in order to possibly distract the public from the murder in Chemnitz,” Maaßen told German tabloid Bild, citing the fact that one of the most widely shared videos was posted by an anonymous YouTube user. The incident it showed, however, had separately been reported, and a website run by one of Germany’s most important newspapers posted an interview with an Afghan refugee who said he was the victim.

The Interior Ministry quickly announced that Maaßen had received no special information on the incident, and the Saxony state prosecutor said the video was believed to be real and under investigation. Some left-wing politicians called for Maaßen’s resignation, his comments taken as the latest signal that he was inappropriately sympathetic to the right. He is also facing allegations that he coached party AfD leaders on how to avoid an official investigation following revelations that he had been secretly communicating with party officials.

Andreas Nick, a CDU member of the Bundestag who leads Germany’s delegation to Europe’s top human rights body, told BuzzFeed News that it was past time for the Constitutional Protection Office to step in. The delay was especially alarming in Saxony, where a neo-Nazi terrorist group called the National Socialist Underground drew on a support network as it undertook a series of shootings and bombings across Germany from 2000 to 2007.

“Given both the German experience in the 1920s and the [National Socialist Underground] case, turning a blind eye on the far right by law enforcement authorities is unacceptable,” he said. “AfD has been largely taken over by right extremists for a long time; this can be neither ignored nor denied.”

Even before the events in Chemnitz, the AfD had already accomplished something that Germany hasn’t seen since the Nazi Party first began winning elections in the 1920s.

No other nationalist party since World War II had managed to really expand beyond a base of working-class, far-right voters, said Robert Grimm, a political scientist who leads the German office of the polling firm Ipsos. These voters have defected to the AfD in droves, but so have middle-class voters from Merkel’s center-right CDU, the center-left Social Democratic Party, and the modern descendent of the former East German communist party, the Left Party.

The AfD’s support has only grown, even as it’s moved steadily to the right. It was initially known as the “party of professors,” led by conservative economists opposed to the euro and Germany financing a bailout for Greece’s economic crisis. This faction was pushed out in 2015, and the new leaders rode an anti-immigrant backlash to win seats in the Bundestag in 2017, though the party remained concerned about becoming too close to groups that could have branded it as too extreme.

The events in Chemnitz appear to be pushing the party into a new phase, where it’s now seemingly unafraid to stand shoulder to shoulder with groups it once kept at arm’s length. The anger about immigration is outweighing warnings about extremism for many Germans, and the AfD has learned to deflect criticism by crying “fake news” or — as its members loudly chant on the streets — “lying press.”

The first sign of this new boldness was the AfD demonstration on Sept. 1, which was co-organized with the anti-Muslim protest group Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident). One of its local leaders once called for migrants to be shot, and the AfD’s former national leader forbade party members from working with the group last year.

The decision to work openly with Pegida was just “legalizing something that was happening anyway,” said the state party’s current vice chair, Siegbert Dröse, in an interview this week with BuzzFeed News.

Dröse added that he’d actually opposed the idea of the party marching in Chemnitz because he thought the situation was volatile. But even though the march ended with near-riots and neo-Nazi slogans, the party emerged stronger.

“It didn’t hurt us at all — we’re growing in popularity,” he said.

Dröse said calls for the Constitutional Protection Office to monitor the party only helped it, making its opponents look hysterical.

“So far, all that has done nothing but helped us,” Dröse said.

Although he believes the party needs to focus on gaining moderate support and already has “everyone that we want on the right,” it is not going to shy away from getting support where it finds it.

“I’m certain, by the way, that we’ll succeed next year in Saxony at grabbing the political power,” he said. “Obviously we’re going to [continue to] look for allies.”

Categories
Far Right

The Real Story Behind The Anti-Immigrant Riots Rocking Germany

Rumors that a man was killed while defending a woman from rape have fueled anti-immigrant protests in Germany, with mobs hunting people in the streets. Now the country’s biggest far-right party is planning a march of its own.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on August 31, 2018, at 10:23 p.m. ET

CHEMNITZ, Germany — It didn’t take long for the rumors to spread.

Just hours after a man was stabbed in a small east German city last weekend, thousands of people began sharing accounts on social media that he had been killed by immigrants involved in a rape attempt. Within no time, it was being said there were two dead. Pictures were shared of a group of women said to have been beaten by immigrants.

It didn’t matter that there was no attempted rape, or that much of the rest of these accounts wasn’t true. The anger soon transferred to the real world. Over the next few days, Chemnitz, a town of around 250,000 people in the state of Saxony, would become the center of anti-immigrant protests that produced shocking images of people raising Hitler salutes, and mobs chasing people through the streets.

On Monday, around 7,500 people gathered to protest the death of Daniel H., a 35-year-old German citizen of Cuban descent, in a rally that saw people chant “Chemnitz to the Saxons, foreigners out!” and “We are the people.” This part of Saxony, long a hotbed for anti-immigrant groups and a neo-Nazi underground, had seen right-wing protests and occasional violence before. But this time felt different.

What seemed new — and alarming — was that such a broad range of far-right groups had come together alongside overt neo-Nazis. Much like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, it shook many Germans’ faith that certain lines would never be crossed. When authorities and the mainstream press attempted to counter online rumors with facts, many people became convinced there was a coverup — the truth was what they knew from their Facebook timelines.

Local police were quickly overwhelmed on Monday evening and the city center descended into chaos. Many of the town’s 20,000 immigrants hid in their homes, scared to go outside, as gangs stalked the streets.

A Syrian refugee who works at a local kebab shop told BuzzFeed News he was chased by a group of 10 or more thugs as he was leaving work. He said his pregnant wife, who wears a hijab, is afraid to leave the house even to go to the doctor. He said he didn’t want his name used because he was afraid, and that he now wanted to move out of Chemnitz to somewhere in Germany’s west.

A pizza shop owner, who goes by the nickname Momo and moved to Germany from Tunisia 30 years ago, said he even recognized his own customers in the crowd.

“They treat us like [sacrificial] lambs before Eid al-Adha,” he told BuzzFeed News, adding that he also didn’t want his real name to be published. “They play with us for some years and are all nice, but when the day comes, they have no problem to sacrifice us.”

Pictures of these protests made headlines around the world. But what shocked many was the number of average citizens who rallied behind the protesters, saying they were expressing a righteous fury against immigrants that Germany’s politicians have tried to sweep under the carpet. Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested the violence was a threat to Germany’s post-war constitution, which included provisions designed to ensure Nazism could never return to Germany. “We have video footage of the fact that there was [hunting people down], there were riots, there was hatred on the streets, and that has nothing to do with our constitutional state,” she said on Tuesday.

The furor continues to build into this weekend. Police have been deployed from across the country to prevent more violence, with four separate protests scheduled for Saturday alone. One is organized by Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that now leads the opposition in Parliament. The party’s deputy leader defended the rioting by saying, “It’s legitimate to go berserk after this kind of crime.”

The events of the past week may yet mark a turning point in Germany — a before and after. The left hopes that Germans will recoil in horror at the images of Hitler salutes and thuggish street violence. On the other side, the AfD senses an opportunity: They hope these crowds demonstrate a broader public appetite for their anti-immigrant rhetoric, opening the door for them to make further democratic gains. Crime rates are falling in Germany according to official police statistics, but spokespeople for the AfD push wild exaggerations of the number of murders committed by immigrants, then say that the government is lying about it. Several messages to AfD representatives seeking comment were not returned.

If the German state won’t protect its people, they say, then they will have to take matters into their own hands. Many mainstream politicians, fearful of losing voters to the far right, have either stayed quiet, or offered only limited criticism.

During a town hall in Chemnitz on Thursday, the deputy leader of the state government challenged an angry crowd: “If you realize who you’re actually standing next to, and at last when hatred, fear-mongering, and violence are involved, every single one of you has to decide whether you’re still standing on the right side of the street.”

“How long will this [violence] go on?” shouted back someone from the audience. Another yelled, “Your voters are sitting here — think about it!”

Under Angela Merkel, Germany welcomed more than 1.2 million refugees in 2015 and 2016. Many Germans felt a certain pride in this openness, a stark contrast to rising nationalist movements across the continent. There were even jokes that it was a surprising third act in a global play, in which — after two world wars and the horrors of the Holocaust in the 20th century — Germany was riding to the rescue of liberal democracy.

But, after the events of the past week, there is a growing fear that the backlash against these immigrants could rapidly push the country back toward its darkest past. And this could happen faster than ever before, because false reports whip up fear online at a speed almost impossible to stop, playing into the fears of many voters. It doesn’t seem to matter that the rumors are often broadcast by neo-Nazis and far-right groups that would have repelled the average German just a few years ago.

At the town hall in Chemnitz, many complained that they were being tarred with the brush of Nazism, simply for standing up for their fellow Germans — as they see it. “I was at this demonstration and I was called a Nazi,” said one man. “8,000 people were not Nazis, but the press called those 8,000 people and all Germany Nazis!”

Saxony’s premier, Michael Kretschmer of Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, began his remarks that evening by addressing voters just like this man.

“I’ve met so many people who feel misjudged and come up to me to say, ‘But we’re no Nazis!’ And I know that,” Kretschmer said.

Though he criticised the protests, which he conceded had “got completely out of control,” and pleaded with the audience to wait for the police to release the full account of Sunday’s killing, Kretschmer told BuzzFeed News he felt obliged to respond to people’s perceptions — even if they weren’t based in reality.

“For me it’s the fact that when you walk through the city center, or you go home after work as a [woman] shop assistant, some people say they feel unsafe,” he said. “That wasn’t the case three or four years ago. And now it’s not about the question of what actually is or isn’t, but how people perceive the situation.”

Official statistics say most violent crime is down in Chemnitz, as in the rest of Germany. It’s true that more people are being charged with sexual assault, but that’s because the sexual assault laws were tightened in 2016, not because the country has grown more dangerous for women.

Social media is partly to blame, said Chan-jo Jun, a lawyer who brought a landmark lawsuit against Facebook on behalf of a Syrian refugee smeared online. His litigation helped lead Germany to pass one of the world’s most aggressive laws targeting hate speech last year, but even now false information can still whip up hate online at blinding speed.

“People don’t trust the media; they only believe what they see in their timeline,” Jun said. “Until we get control back of our timeline, people will keep believing fake news. There’s no point in having fact-checkers in the regular media, because people don’t believe them.”

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

One of the engines for pumping out false information about the Chemnitz killing was the Facebook page of a group called Pro-Chemnitz, which has three seats on the local city council and organized the protest on Monday that ended in mob violence. In calling for the protest, it claimed the victim in Sunday’s stabbing was “a brave helper who lost his life trying to protect a woman.” The post is still online.

The group knows just how important Facebook is to its political fortunes. “We are completely social-media based,” said Benjamin Jahn Zschocke, the group’s spokesperson. “If our Facebook page were to be deleted, we would disappear completely.”

Even in death, Daniel H. has become caught up in a vicious online battle.

Nationalists have tried to turn him into an anti-immigrant symbol. But as a Cuban German, he is a poor poster child for the far right’s cause, and in another time might have been held up as a product of multicultural Germany.

Daniel H. — German media customarily does not name victims to protect their privacy — appears to have stopped updating his Facebook page some time ago, but it suggests his politics leaned left. One of his last posts was about a protest that began on Turkish social media, in which men wore miniskirts to protest the rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman. He shared posts endorsing decriminalizing weed and mocking critics of Chancellor Merkel. He once shared a post that said, “Nationality doesn’t matter, an asshole is an asshole.”

After he died, people took to Facebook saying they were his friends and pleading for others not to heed the far right’s message. “I’m asking you for one thing: Don’t let your grief turn into anger and hatred,” one wrote. “Those rightists using this as a platform are the ones we got into fights with because they didn’t consider us German enough. Everyone who has known Daniel H. knows, that this can’t possibly have been his will. Don’t let yourselves be instrumentalized, just mourn.”

The police have released information slowly, but many people have wanted answers at the speed they’ve grown accustomed to online, forcing officials to play a kind of game of whack-a-mole.

Daniel H. was one of three people injured in an altercation early on Sunday morning, they confirmed, but was the only one who died. There was no sexual assault. Two men in their early twenties, one from Syria and the other from Iraq, were arrested on manslaughter charges later that day.

It quickly emerged that one of the accused had been due to be deported because his asylum application was denied, but he was still in the country while this decision was under appeal. One of the accused also had a criminal record that included assault charges and narcotics violations, the German newspaper Die Zeit reported.

Their full names are also publicly known, though only because a prison official in the state capital leaked them illegally. Right-wing figures including a member of the AfD and Pro-Chemnitz immediately posted them online.

No one knows what will happen next in Chemnitz.

Federal authorities and neighboring states have sent police to Saxony to deal with the next protests organized by both the right and left. The showdown in Chemnitz could continue into next week with a concert organized by a left-wing band on Monday night.

But an AfD march on Saturday evening may be the most politically significant, with the party poised to make big gains in Saxony when the state holds elections next year.

In the statement announcing the march, the AfD called Daniel H. “the next, avoidable victim of an irresponsible government policy that accepts the multiple deaths of natives with icy coldness.”

The statement continues, “we want to mourn for Daniel H. and all the dead of forced multiculturalization in Germany,” instructing participants to march silently, dressed entirely in black.

“The cartel media have tried to make Chemnitz, the city of the victims, into a city of the perpetrators,” the statement said. “They will leave no stone unturned to discredit the peaceful protest. Do not give the press representatives the pictures they are waiting for.”

Florian Franze contributed reporting from Chemnitz.

Categories
Far Right

How Rap Became The Soundtrack To Polish Nationalism

There’s a world of rappers who make tracks about World War II, attack the EU, and endorse marches organized by white nationalists. They’re big in Poland, where a new fight over the Holocaust shows how history has become a weapon.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on February 10, 2018, at 12:00 p.m. ET

KRAKOW, Poland — Tadek spent his teens scouring record stores for albums by the Wu-Tang Clan and other hip-hop artists in Poland’s medieval center, Krakow.

Tadek, whose full name is Tadeusz Polkowski, discovered rap in the ’90s when it was still a new import to Poland; communism kept the country closed to Western pop culture until 1989. He started recording his own tracks at 16 under his nickname and became nationally known in his twenties as part of a wannabe gangsta rap–style group that recorded songs with names like “The Hard Life of a Street Rapper.”

So there was an outcry from the mainstream press when Tadek was invited to perform at the presidential palace in 2017 to mark the National Day for the Polish Language, a day historically used to honor Poland’s greatest writers.

The performance looked awkward for everyone involved. Tadek had traded the hoodie he often wore in his videos for a pair of chinos and a mustard V-neck sweater, both of which looked several sizes too large for his willowy frame. He kept his eyes tightly shut, as if trying to block out the rows of dignitaries in suits stiffly watching on.

But Tadek was given this platform precisely because he was no longer the man who’d tossed around phrases like “fuck the police” in his youth. That day he performed a song addressed to his wife — but it turned out to have a surprise message.

“We are getting stronger, the family is getting bigger, without man and woman — the final extinction. Our sons are so great that I want another child,” he rapped, before apologizing at the song’s end, “You have one rival, forgive me — it’s Poland!”

“Everyone who wants to control Poland … wants us to be weaker, wants us to be not proud of ourselves.”

Rappers like Tadek reflect just how deeply the past divides Poland today. He’s reinvented himself in recent years as part of a booming nationalist rap scene. His songs pay homage to the Poles who fought the Nazis in World War II and the communist government that followed, while taking jabs at the mainstream media, liberal politicians, and the European Union. His videos sometimes rack up millions of views on YouTube, and he plans to put out three new albums this year, now supported with a fellowship from the Ministry of Culture.

His trajectory reflects just how much nationalism has transformed Poland in recent years. The 2015 elections were won by an aggressive far-right faction, the Law and Justice Party, known as PiS for short. The PiS government has undermined the courts, refused to accept the refugees required under EU rules, and opened a culture war by claiming Poles have long been fed lies about their history.

Earlier this week, the president enacted a law that makes it illegal to say Poland shared any responsibility for the Holocaust. In World War II, the country lost 6 million people, half of whom were Jews. Lawmakers want Poland to be recognized as a victim of the Nazi invasion, but critics say the law would silence discussion of the way some Poles contributed to the Jews’ deaths.

One of the biggest tests of democracy in Europe is now playing out in Poland — and a drive to rewrite history is at its heart.

“Everyone who wants to control Poland … wants us to be weaker, wants us to be not proud of ourselves,” Tadek said in an interview with BuzzFeed News last month at his apartment overlooking the industrial valley that keeps Krakow smothered in a blanket of smog. “Pride gives people power to do something for your country.”

The night that Tadek’s parents brought him home from the hospital in 1982, he slept through riots outside their front door in which pro-democracy activists clashed with communist paramilitaries.

Shortly before Tadek was born, his father, a poet named Jan Polkowski, was imprisoned for seven months for his role in the pro-democracy Solidarity movement. After communism fell, Polkowski went on to serve in Poland’s newly democratic government and then a right-wing party that ultimately became part of PiS.

Tadek grew up surrounded by the memories of ancestors who’d fought for Poland. His parents hung a portrait of an ancestor who fought in a failed 1863 uprising against imperial rule by Russia. Tadek was told stories about his great-grandfather, who fought the Soviet Union after Poland became independent in 1918. He heard about his grandfather, one of thousands of Polish soldiers who fought the Nazis only to be sent to Soviet gulags by the Red Army as it established a communist puppet government at the end of the war.

So, Polkowski told BuzzFeed News, he was dismayed when Tadek grew into a rebellious adolescent drawn to “the way of expression that was used by black people in slums.” The music “did not talk about the reality he lived in,” he complained, and it seemed like a foreign subculture that “cuts you off from your roots.”

“It was also a rejection of my past,” Polkowski said.

Within a few years Tadek had started a group called Firma, rapping about weed and vodka and girls.

He saw Tadek as emblematic of a generation of young Poles raised under the liberal governments that ran Poland in the ’90s and brought it into the EU in 2004. He said Poland’s liberals only wanted to speak about the dark side of the country’s past and believed that “Polish identity should be dissolved into an EU identity.”

While his father wanted him to learn about Poland’s history, Tadek dedicated himself to mastering the audio equipment he’d inherited from an uncle. He recorded songs to cassette using samples from his PlayStation, recordings for children, and classical composers like Brahms and Beethoven. He was still in high school when he began performing live shows.

“I was fucking scared,” he said when recalling his first performance. “Everyone told me that I was really white in the face onstage.”

Within a few years Tadek had started a group called Firma, rapping about weed and vodka and girls. By the mid-2000s, they were playing around 50 concerts a year.

But everything changed for Tadek as he approached his thirties, when he decided to go on a self-improvement kick — to fight “not to be an idiot,” he said. His father had a library of more than 10,000 volumes, so he asked for some recommendations. And his father gave him books about Polish history.

Recounting this moment in his living room, which is decorated with the emblem of the uprising of Polish rebels that expelled Nazi troops from Warsaw at the end of World War II, Tadek grew angry about how much he hadn’t known about Polish history.

“Jewish people use the Holocaust for a lot of business.”

He discovered a past full of heroes who fought for the country’s independence — and decided their memory should be a resource for Poland today, not something to be ashamed of.

“What’s wrong? Why don’t we use it?” he said. Poland could have followed the model of the Jews, he said, who “built a lot of success on tragical history from years of war.”

“Jewish people use the Holocaust for a lot of business,” he said, like how “when you say something wrong about some Jewish people, it’s [called] anti-Semitism.”

For Tadek and many others, an example of the distortion of Polish history concerns the 1941 massacre of Jews in a village called Jedwabne. That July, a group of Poles herded the town’s Jewish residents into a barn and set it on fire as Nazi soldiers looked on.

Jedwabne was one of dozens of pogroms that broke out as the Nazis marched east across Poland, but a 2001 book by American historian Jan Tomasz Gross about the incident forced the first widespread discussion about how some Poles contributed to the death of Jews. A monument was built in Jedwabne, and two presidents apologized at commemorations a decade apart. But a government examination of the incident concluded in 2003 that Gross overstated the number who died and how many Poles participated. Many nationalists have since dismissed the book as a hit job designed to make Poland look bad.

Tadek claimed that Gross said, “Poles were the biggest killers of Jewish people during the war … that Polish people only wanted Jewish blood during the war.” In reality, Tadek said, thousands of Poles risked a death sentence by helping Jews escape the Nazis.

World War II wasn’t just a Jewish tragedy, he said. Around 2 million of the 6 million people believed to have been killed in Poland were ethnic Poles, and both Hitler and Stalin sought to destroy the Polish state. The Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944 was the largest underground revolt against German forces in any country during the war — there were plenty of stories of heroism, too.

“We were fighting during the Second World War,” Tadek said. “We were the biggest losers.”

Tadek came to believe that powerful interests were trying to keep the truth of the past from Polish citizens.

He pointed to members of the old Communist Party who’d become part of the center-left party that led Poland into the EU, who he believed were trying to keep the party’s crimes buried. Other former communists have become powerful in the media, like Jerzy Urban, who was the press secretary for Poland’s last communist leader and now edits a weekly paper. Many foreign companies are now big players in the Polish economy, including German firms that profited during the Nazi era, such as Allianz insurance.

“If you want someone to be your slave, you don’t want him to be intelligent, smart,” he said. “How the fuck did it happen — people don’t know about the biggest World War II heroes?”

It’s not just the memory of World War II and communism that divides the Poles.

In 2010, President Lech Kaczyński and several other top officials died when a plane crashed in the Russian city of Smolensk as they were traveling to the site where the Soviet army massacred Polish officers at the end of WWII. Competing accounts of what happened that day are so far apart that they exist in entirely separate universes.

The official investigation by aviation experts and the government of liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk established that it was an accident caused by a rushed landing attempt in bad weather. But the leader of PiS — the dead president’s identical twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński — was convinced it had been an assassination by Russia and that Tusk was covering it up.

PiS hammered on the claim, organizing monthly vigils calling for the “truth” about Smolensk, while a new network of right-wing media outlets spread the conspiracy allegations. They claimed Tusk was a pawn of a hostile power, and charged him with treason when he later left Poland to become president of the European Council. By 2015 nearly a quarter of Poles believed there was a cover-up of Smolensk.

That’s the year PiS won a majority in Parliament promising to restore Poland’s pride and to keep out Muslim refugees. And it solidified its power with what opponents say is sustained assault on the media and the historical record.

If you think that the previous government covered up a Russian assassination of Poland’s president, then it’s not a stretch to believe that authorities will lie about anything. And there was a new network of right-wing news sites and social media accounts to convince the public they had long been duped.

“We were fighting during the Second World War. … We were the biggest losers.”

For PiS members, the Smolensk cover-up was part of a much wider conspiracy by pro-European governments to lie about Poland’s history so the country would be ripe for foreign exploitation. They claimed liberals wanted Poles to be ashamed of their past so they would not fight back.

PiS’s Andrzej Duda, who is now Poland’s president, said his liberal predecessor’s apology for the Jedwabne pogrom “destroys historical memory.” A former PiS parliamentary candidate organized a nationwide hunger strike when the education ministry rolled out a more flexible curriculum in 2012 that required fewer hours of history.

Tadek’s first historically themed album came out at the height of this furor. He called it An Inconvenient Truth, because, he said in the title song, it carries a message for “those scumbags that destroy this country from the inside.”

“There is no consent to rob young Poles of knowledge of their ancestors,” he said in lyrics addressed to then–prime minister Tusk in a song about the curriculum overhaul. “Maybe he forgot that he is the prime minister? … Do they love their country or Brussels more?”

The album’s biggest single was about the so-called Cursed Soldiers, Polish units who fought the Nazis and hid in the forests when the Soviets occupied Poland in 1945; they fought until the Red Army finally wiped them all out. It immediately racked up thousands of views on YouTube, and today it has been watched more than 4 million times in various versions. That number is more than one-tenth of Poland’s entire population.

One track told the story of Danuta Siedzikówna, who joined the Polish resistance as a nurse and supported the Cursed Soldiers with medical supplies until she was arrested and executed by communist forces. Another told the story of Witold Pilecki, a soldier during World War II who spent two years organizing a secret resistance inside the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He escaped in 1943 and fought with Polish forces during the 1944 uprising in Warsaw, before being arrested and executed in 1948 as a Western spy by the communist regime.

“Why did they not teach me about you in school?” Tadek lamented. “Today, the media and political elites — as if they are Polish — are constantly striving to deceive history.”

This led to the busiest time of Tadek’s career, when he was playing around 100 concerts a year. He also began working with a Krakow museum dedicated to Poland’s homegrown World War II resistance, and the city’s symphony orchestra organized a concert of classical arrangements of his music. Then came government honors.

Promotional copies of Tadek’s An Inconvenient Truth were distributed by Magna Polonia, a publication that is now a Breitbart-esque online portal run by a group called the National Radical Camp. Known by its Polish initials ONR, it takes its name from a right-wing group that sought an ethnically pure Poland in the 1930s.

ONR members have been convicted under Poland’s anti-fascism law for making Hitler salutes. But in 2010, a procession the ONR co-organized in Warsaw to mark Poland’s Independence Day became the focal point for the growing nationalist fervor and drew thousands.

“You have one rival, forgive me — it’s Poland!”

Tadek endorsed the march in 2012, and said he believed that mainstream media coverage of the event was propaganda by left-leaning stations to make nationalists look bad. Last year’s march saw organizers describe themselves as “racial separatists,” openly use banners with slogans like “All Different, All White,” and give prominent speaking spots to self-proclaimed fascist leaders from other countries.

Tadek distances himself from the overtly racist parts of the movement but seems unaware of its reach. He said he’s never attended the march, but was certain that “most of the people who go … are just normal people.” He seemed surprised when told that its organizers described themselves as “authoritarian” and that some marchers had used racist slogans and banners with a Nazi emblem. These “are things that should never happen,” he said.

The country’s right-wing media, which now includes the state-owned public television network as well as a broadcast empire owned by a powerful Catholic priest, seems to ignore or denies these facts. These details are emphasized by Poland’s major independent broadcaster, TVN, which is owned by a US company and dismissed by the right as a foreign agent.

Some nationalist rappers have zealously embraced their role as propagandists; some even call for violence. A group of rappers from the industrial city of Łódź were reportedly arrested in 2016 with a cache of weapons after releasing a video calling for a “Polish jihad” against Muslim immigrants.

Despite Tadek’s disavowal of the nationalist rap scene’s racist elements, he can’t escape them. When you watch Tadek’s videos on YouTube, the site algorithm quickly suggests tracks by one of the more extreme right-wing rappers, Basti, whose songs include “Stop Islamizing Europe” and who titled one of his albums Hate Speech.

“Our main role is to build good feelings about Poland, not bad feelings about the others,” Tadek said.

But the transformation of history into a weapon by the nationalist movement has helped Poland’s far right radicalize faster than seemed possible even a few years ago, said Dariusz Stola, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

When the museum opened five years ago, he said, “I didn’t expect that you would see neo-fascists … marching in the main street of several cities or present in church with their flags.”

Nationalists were very shrewd to turn every discussion of history into a test of patriotism, he said.

“It’s horrible and it will bring violence sooner or later,” he said. “Someone will die.”