Chris Hedges's Blog, page 631

10 Reasons Why We Should Oppose John Bolton

Let’s not mince words: John Bolton is a warmonger and his appointment to be Donald Trump’s national security adviser is a threat to global security. Bolton advocates a foreign policy that exaggerates threats, belittles diplomacy, shows contempt for international institutions and is quick to use violence. The national security adviser position does not need Senate confirmation, so starting April 9, the hawk of all hawks will be perched at the White House.

Need specifics on why we should oppose Bolton? Here are some. Add your own.

1. Bolton wants to shred the Iran nuclear deal—and bomb Iran. Bolton hates the nuclear deal that was signed under Barack Obama’s watch not only by the U.S. and Iran, but also by Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, and the European Union. Although the deal is working and even Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said it is in our national interest, Bolton calls the Iran deal a massive strategic blunder. On May 12, when Trump is required to re-certify that Iran has been complying with the deal, Bolton makes it more likely that the U.S. will pull out of the deal, triggering a major international crisis. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, says “People, let this be very clear: The appointment of Bolton is essentially a declaration of war with Iran.”

2. Bolton is in bed with an Iranian terrorist organization called MEK, a fringe group that was listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States until 2012 and is still considered a terrorist organization inside Iran. Bolton routinely meets with and accepts payments from the group, which has been responsible for the murder of American soldiers, the attempted kidnapping of a U.S. ambassador, and many violent attacks inside Iran. Bolton considers the MEK a “viable opposition” that he wants to use to overthrow the Iranian government. With Bolton in power, one of the most detested Iranian cults will be treated by the U.S. government as legitimate representatives of the Iranian people.

3. Bolton will jeopardize talks with North Korea. The world breathed a sigh of relief at the announcement that Presidents Trump and Kim Jong Un would meet in May. But with Bolton, that meeting may never take place, or could be disastrous. Bolton says: “Talking to North Korea is worse than a mere waste of time. Negotiations legitimize the dictatorship, affording it more time to enhance its nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities.” Instead of talks, Bolton has called for the United States to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea, a strike that could spark a nuclear war.

4. Bolton hates the United Nations and international law. When George Bush nominated Bolton to be U.N. ambassador in 2005, he proved so controversial to even the Republican-controlled Senate that Bush had to sneak him in as a “recess appointment” when Congress was not in session. It is one thing to be critical of the U.N., but Bolton opposes its very existence. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he once said, adding, “If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference.” More than that, he is hostile to the concept of international law, having once declared, “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”

5. Bolton was a key instigator of the Iraq war and has no regrets. He was a major figure (along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) pushing for the invasion of Iraq. During the Bush presidency, when he was Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, he helped fabricate evidence about weapons of mass destruction that led to the March 2003 invasion. And he is one of the few original advocates for that war who still insist it was a good idea.

6. Bolton provided false information about Cuba. As Undersecretary of State, Bolton claimed that Havana was attempting to develop biological weapons and sell them to rogue regimes. Then he tried to fire two intelligence analysts who challenged his erroneous allegations. Bolton has also urged that stronger sanctions be imposed on Cuba, and put Cuba on his “axis of evil” list.

7. He is no friend of the Palestinians. When he was at the United Nations, he constantly protected Israel by vetoing all U.N. resolutions targeting Israel. Bolton praised Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, breaking with decades of international consensus that the disputed city’s status must be negotiated between the two sides. He opposes a Palestinian state, saying, “I don’t think there are institutions on the Palestinian side that can live up to the commitments of a treaty with Israel … or could resist takeover by terrorist elements.” His solution? Get rid of Palestinians by merging Gaza with Egypt and the West Bank with Jordan.

8. Bolton will create new problems with China. He has been an ardent supporter of diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, and was paid by the Taiwanese government. He advised the Trump administration to reconsider the “One China” policy, an agreement made in 1972 that requires countries to choose between diplomatic relations with China or diplomatic relations with Taiwan. His antagonistic stance toward China could have a negative impact on issues ranging from North Korea and the South China Sea to cyberspace and trade.

9. He hangs out with Islamophobes. Bolton has a decade-long history of associating with anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller, appearing on her internet radio program “Atlas on the Air” and on her video blog. Geller is well-known for her inflammatory public comments about Muslims and the idea that they are trying to impose Sharia law in the U.S. Bolton wrote the foreword to the book she co-wrote with fellow anti-Islamist Robert Spencer called “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.”

10. His white walrus mustache should immediately disqualify him. According to former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, president-elect Trump passed on nominating John Bolton to a senior Cabinet position because he didn’t like Bolton’s signature mustache. With his hairy upper lip, Bolton just didn’t “look the part.” We agree. Trump should immediately rescind the offer in favor of someone with less facial hair.

Are Conservatives Losing Faith in President Trump?

President Trump’s most urgent political problem doesn’t involve Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Vladimir Putin or the hundreds of thousands of voters who marched for gun control. Rather, it’s that his diehard supporters might be starting to realize how thoroughly he has played them for suckers.

On immigration, the issue that most viscerally connects the president with his thus-far-loyal base, Trump got basically nothing in the $1.3 trillion spending bill he signed Friday.

The vaunted “big, beautiful wall” he pledges to build along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico? Trump got 25 miles’ worth of new wall, along with eight miles of new fencing. And the bill specifies that none of this tiny increment can be built using any of the prototype designs Trump so ostentatiously showed off.

The threatened punishment for “sanctuary cities” that show compassion for undocumented immigrants? Not in there. The money to hire 1,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents? Trump got enough for just 100, with the proviso that they all be administrative and support personnel working in offices, not in the field. The 20 percent increase in funding for detention centers that Trump asked for? Congress not only refused to authorize an extra penny, but went so far as to rebuke ICE for overspending its current detention budget.

The results sent conservative pundit Ann Coulter into paroxysms on Twitter, flying uncontrollably into all-caps mode. One tweet read simply: “CONGRATULATIONS, PRESIDENT SCHUMER!”

Coulter referred, of course, to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and indeed this spending bill in many ways reflected Democratic spending priorities more than Republican. Think of it this way: If I told you that the president just signed spending legislation that funds Planned Parenthood but not a border wall, you might wonder for a moment if Barack Obama were still president and this whole ridiculous Donald Trump thing had been just a long, profoundly disturbing dream.

Sadly, it’s real. But aside from his business-friendly tax cut and deregulation policies, Trump has offered little more than symbolic crumbs to his red-meat base. As Coulter wrote in a column: “If you’re a Trump voter, you’re scratching your head wondering what happened to those campaign promises that set him apart from every other Republican.”

Trump obviously didn’t actually mean much of the crazy stuff he said during his campaign, but his racism and xenophobia did seem sincere. On immigration, it’s probably the sheer incompetence of the Trump White House that has caused the president to go back on his word.

On the question of national security, Trump drew cheers at his rallies when he blasted prior administrations for miring us in long-running wars that had drained the country of trillions of dollars without making us any safer. He promised an “America first” foreign policy that ended attempts at nation-building abroad and instead focused resources and attention on domestic concerns.

Yet last week he boasted of having hiked defense spending to record levels. Trump has sent additional troops to Afghanistan and plunged the U.S. military into the Syrian civil war. And as his new national security adviser he is hiring John Bolton, a super-hawk you might remember from the George W. Bush administration. Bolton is the guy with the Yosemite Sam moustache who led the cheers for the Iraq war, saying “we are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction.”

Trump has brutally ridiculed the architects of that war, so he and Bolton will have a lot to talk about. Better that they focus on the past than on the present, because Bolton appears determined to foment dangerous and ill-advised crises with both Iran and North Korea—perhaps at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in a MAGA hat holding up a sign that says, “Start two more wars!”

Trump clearly sees the political peril. He briefly threatened not to sign the spending bill, then caved and signed it, then vowed in a tweet that “I will NEVER sign another bill like this again.” To prevent a recurrence, he has demanded that Congress give him a line-item veto on spending bills and eliminate the Senate’s filibuster rule—neither of which is going to happen. So he will surely be presented with such legislation again.

There’s something Trump is as eager to hide as any entanglements with Russians and porn stars: The man who gave us “The Art of the Deal” couldn’t get Congress to approve a resolution supporting Mother’s Day. Even if he brought flowers.

Russia Responds Quid Pro Quo to Diplomats’ Expulsions

MOSCOW — Russia announced the expulsion of more than 150 diplomats, including 60 Americans, on Thursday and said it was closing a U.S. consulate in retaliation for the wave of Western expulsions of Russian diplomats over the poisoning of an ex-spy and his daughter in Britain, a tit-for-tat response that intensified the Kremlin’s rupture with the United States and Europe.

The Russian move came as a hospital treating Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, said the woman was improving rapidly and was now in stable condition, though her father remained in critical condition.

The Skripals were found unconscious and critically ill in the English city of Salisbury on March 4. British authorities blamed Russia for poisoning them with a military-grade nerve agent, accusations Russia has vehemently denied.

Two dozen countries, including the U.S., many EU nations and NATO, have ordered more than 150 Russian diplomats out this week in a show of solidarity with Britain — a massive action unseen even at the height of the Cold War.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at news conference Thursday that Moscow will expel the same number of diplomats from each of those countries in retaliation.

U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman was summoned to the Foreign Ministry while Lavrov was speaking, where he was handed notice that Russia is responding quid pro quo to the U.S. decision to order 60 Russian diplomats out.

In a statement, Huntsman said there was “no justification” for the move and that it shows Moscow isn’t interested in dialogue with the United States about important matters.

“Russia should not be acting like a victim,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said.

Lavrov also said Moscow will retaliate for the U.S. decision to shut the Russian consulate in Seattle by closing the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.

The Foreign Ministry said the U.S. diplomats, including 58 from the embassy in Moscow and two from the consulate in Yekaterinburg, must leave Russia by April 5. It added that the U.S. must leave the consulate in St. Petersburg no later than Saturday.

The ministry warned that if the U.S. takes further “hostile actions” against Russian missions, Russia will respond in kind.

“We invite the U.S. authorities who are encouraging a slanderous campaign against our country to come back to their senses and stop thoughtless actions to destroy bilateral relations,” it said.

Lavrov emphasized that the expulsions followed “brutal pressure” from the U.S. and Britain, which forced their allies to “follow the anti-Russian course.”

He also noted that the job of the international chemical weapons watchdog is to determine what chemical agent was used to poison Skripal and his daughter, not verify the British conclusions.

Lavrov said that Moscow called a meeting Monday of the secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to discuss the case.

Meanwhile, Salisbury NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital where the Skripals are being treated, said Thursday that 33-year-old Yulia is “improving rapidly and is no longer in a critical condition. Her condition is now stable.”

“She has responded well to treatment but continues to receive expert clinical care 24 hours a day,” said Dr. Christine Blanshard, medical director at Salisbury District Hospital.

Sergei Skripal, 66, remains in critical condition, the hospital said.

Lavrov said that Russia would seek consular access to Yulia Skripal now that she has regained consciousness.

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, was imprisoned after he sold secrets to British intelligence. He was released in a 2010 spy swap and moved to Britain.

Britain says he and his daughter, who was visiting from Russia, were poisoned with a nerve agent developed in Soviet times and that it must have come from Russia.

Police say they were likely exposed to the poison on the door of Sergei Skripal’s suburban home in Salisbury, where the highest concentration of the chemical has been found.

About 250 British counterterrorism officers are working on the investigation, retracing the Skripals’ movements to uncover how the poison was delivered. They have searched a pub, a restaurant and a cemetery, and on Thursday cordoned off a children’s playground near the Skripal home.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday that Britain’s allegation of Russian involvement in the poisoning was a “swindle” and an “international provocation.” She said Russia continued to demand access to investigation materials, which Britain has refused to share.

Zakharova charged that Britain, the U.S., the Czech Republic and Sweden have all researched the nerve agent that London said was used to poison the Skripals.

She said that the Western research into the class of nerve agent, known as Novichok, was reflected in numerous open source documents of NATO members. Britain and its allies have dismissed previous Russian claims that they possessed that type of nerve agent.

___

Jim Heintz in Moscow and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.

Why Focusing on People of Color Will Help the Movement for Gun Control Succeed

Any discussions of gun violence and the regulations needed to curb it are incomplete unless they include an analysis of how racism plays a role. Government data show that “black Americans are, on average, eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white.” Gun violence by police against ordinary Americans also disproportionately affects people of color—a fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has been organizing around for six years. Thankfully there is a strong connection growing between the movement and the burgeoning youth-led push for gun control.

Only a week before the historic March for Our Lives protests that drew more than a million people out on the streets of the nation’s capital and other cities, law enforcement officers fatally shot a 22-year-old black man named Stephon Clark in his own backyard in Sacramento, Calif. The police story of Clark’s killing followed a familiar script: He matched the description of a suspect, and officers shot at him because they thought he had a gun and feared for their safety. After firing 20 bullets into Clark’s body, police handcuffed the dying young man before starting medical procedures to try to save him. Ultimately, Clark was found to have been “armed” only with a cellphone.

Just two days before the March for Our Lives, local activists and residents protested Clark’s killing. They showed up at Sacramento’s City Hall, blocked traffic on Interstate 5 and even delayed the start of an NBA game. They made it clear, as other Black Lives Matter protests have been doing, that there will be no business-as-usual while black people continue to be murdered by police.

Over the past several years, Black Lives Matter has repeatedly attempted to make the case to the American public that black lives need to matter because at present they simply don’t. Clark’s life clearly did not matter to Sacramento police, just as the lives of countless unarmed black men and women have not mattered. Even in the most well-documented and blatantly unjust police killings, such as that of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., authorities have refused to prosecute killer cops. Meanwhile, Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old white man who confessed to massacring 17 people with an assault rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was easily captured alive by police, just as so many other white, male, mass shooters have been.

It was in Florida, where the massacre took place and where the new movement for gun control originates, that Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman six years ago. It was that specific instance of gun violence that gave birth to the now-famous hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter. In the years since the coining of that profound phrase, black activists have led movements all over country, relentlessly drawing attention to how gun violence—by vigilantes as well as by police—affects African-American communities, and demanding justice for victims of that violence.

While the largely white Parkland survivors appear to have been embraced more wholeheartedly by mainstream America for their courageous fight to end gun violence than Black Lives Matter was, the young activists have shown themselves to be critical thinkers. One white student, Jaclyn Corin, said during her speech at Saturday’s rally in Washington, D.C.: “We recognize that Parkland received more attention because of its affluence, but we share this stage today and forever with those communities who have always stared down the barrel of a gun.” Student activist David Hogg called out the media for failing to include the voices of black survivors of the Parkland shooting, even though a quarter of the students at his school are black.

The organizers of the March for Our Lives did a far better job of centering the voices of people of color than the mainstream media did. Some of the most powerful and noteworthy speeches in D.C. were by black and brown speakers, most of them young girls. Yolanda Renee King, the 9-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., demanded a “gun-free world” in the name of her grandfather’s legacy. Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez brought masses of people to tears with a powerful silence during her speech that lasted the same duration as the school shooting. Eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler proudly represented black women and girls who have been victims of gun violence. And 17-year-old Edna Chavez, from South Central Los Angeles, who lost her brother to gun violence, described how she “learned how to duck from bullets before I learned how to read.” And attendees at the march appeared to be a diverse representation of black and brown communities.

Black journalist Jason Johnson, who attended the rally and march in D.C., published an account of it in The Root, titled “Yes, the March for Our Lives Was About Black People, Too—and It’s About Time.” Johnson lauded the Parkland students’ decision to use their privilege to broaden their struggle. “If you have to wrap some Black Lives Matter rhetoric in L.L.Bean and Lululemon in order to get some press coverage and meaningful change, I’m all for it,” he wrote, adding that the speaker list offered a “seamless organic integration of black perspectives and black lives.”

Rachel Gilmer, co-director of Dream Defenders, a black-led Florida organization formed in the wake of the Martin killing, wrote an op-ed in USA Today about how black organizers joined the March for Our Lives. “We shouldn’t conflate the bias in the Parkland students’ reception with the students’ own politics,” she wrote. “They don’t have to be told that they have privilege, and they have been among the most vocal in calling attention to the plight of communities of color.”

Even Lucy McBath, whose 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was killed by a white gun owner, explained why she was “proud” to attend the march: “Inspiring young people—no older than my Jordan was when he was taken from me—are demanding a better future from our leaders and each other.” She drew a critical link between the core intersecting issues, saying “I will march for my son, for [Stephon] Clark and for all the black men and women, boys and girls, affected by racism and gun violence.”

When Black Lives Matter activists challenged the Democratic Party during the 2016 primary elections and insisted that racial justice be an integral part of any progressive electoral platform, their demands and activist strategies often were misunderstood by mainstream Americans. They were even derided for their steadfastness by the so-called liberal adults in the room, including the nation’s first black president, the candidate who might have become the nation’s first female president and her husband, a former president.

So one might have forgiven the young students who now lead the movement for gun control if they too had failed to address the racial aspect of violence in our society. But thus far, they seem to instinctively understand the importance of demonstrating that all lives matter equally to them, even if American society has deemed the lives of people of color to be less worthy than white lives. That understanding is precisely what will help the linked movements succeed.

Voices From a ‘Shithole Country’

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who have been hailed for their courage in pursuit of truth within their countries and elsewhere.

Back in January, the president of the United States infamously declared that a number of the world’s nations—including Nigeria, where I live—were “shithole countries.” Many thousands of people in the U.S., Africa, Haiti and elsewhere had something to say in response. Although I read dozens of reactions on social media in the wake of the remark, I wanted to learn more, so I set out to interview some of my fellow citizens.

In the 11 weeks since the “shithole” explosion, I have collected the thoughts of ordinary Nigerians. But before we get to that, it’s worth considering what Nigerians thought about Donald J. Trump before he slurred their nation.

Nigerians never were warm to the idea of Trump being president of the U.S. For example, before the 2016 election, Michael Adeniyi, former president of the Organization for the Advancement of Nigeria, which addresses the needs of the Nigerian community in the U.S., said: “As secretary of state, [Hillary] Clinton visited many countries in Africa; she understands what goes on in the continent and, in her capacity, dealt with those issues. You can’t compare her with somebody who does not have any affiliation with Africa. I don’t think Trump has ever been to Africa or even knows anything about Africa.”

Yetunde Odugbesan-Omede, a professor of global affairs and political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and Farmingdale State College in New York, projected a Clinton win and said, “Nigerians in diaspora and Africans [who are U.S. citizens] will be voting for Clinton. We have some minority who will vote for Trump, but over 90 percent majority will vote for Clinton.” She added: “Trump’s stance on migration, how he feels about Africans, Latinos, Muslims and other minorities is bad.”

Nigerians’ feelings about Trump didn’t improve after he was elected. Soon after he was sworn in as president, he announced his so-called Muslim travel ban. Although Nigeria—where Muslims make up about half the population—was not one of the countries affected by the notorious restriction, some Nigerians reported being humiliated, detained and even deported upon entering the United States with valid visas in the early days of the Trump presidency.

As if Nigerians didn’t have enough reasons to be wary of Trump after he issued the travel ban, the president reportedly insulted them directly in the Oval Office during a June 2017 meeting about immigration. (Later, the White House denied he spoke the offensive words.) According to a report in The New York Times, Trump was reading aloud from a document given to him shortly before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017 despite the president’s stance on immigration, and Trump did not like what he saw in the papers he was holding. The Times wrote:

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

It is pertinent to point out to President Trump that if he indeed made those comments, or thought so in his heart, among the Nigerians who refused to return to their “huts” after seeing the dazzling lights of American cities are Dr. Olayinka Olutoye, who operated on a baby in utero in Texas; Dr. Bennet Omalu, the first authority to publish findings of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in U.S. football players; Dr. Olurotimi Badero, the world’s first cardio-nephrologist; John Dabiri, biophysicist and professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at Stanford University; and Hakeem Olajuwon, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.

And to counter the often repeated claim that these Nigerians excel in the United States thanks to an enabling environment there that Nigeria lacks, Wole Soyinka was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986; Agbani Darego became the first black African Miss World in 2001 while studying computer science at the University of Port Harcourt; Oluchi Onweagba went from hawking bread on the streets of Lagos to winning the Face of Africa modeling competition in 1998; Femi Kuti, a versatile musician, was nominated for Grammy Awards four times; and singer-songwriter Wizkid rose to global prominence from the Nigerian music scene.

Trump’s “huts” remark, however offensive, was overshadowed several months later by the statement he reportedly made Jan. 11 in the Oval Office during a discussion of U.S. visa and immigration policies. That was when he allegedly called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” and slammed the idea of restoring protections for immigrants from those regions. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president said, according to The Washington Post.

Nigerians, both common people and officials, reacted strongly. Some of those reactions were not what might be expected. One came from Gbenga Balogun, a self-employed Nigerian, who commented on Facebook: “… For me, there is truism in his assertion, especially from the Nigerian angle. The ‘shithole’ comment should be seen as a wake-up call to our politicians and top civil servants, who corner our common patrimony with impunity and turn-around to lord it over us. …”

Some politicians took a similar approach to make political hay out of the Trump comment. Diran Odeyemi, a spokesperson for the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), said, “President [Muhammadu] Buhari laid a very bad foundation for all the bad impressions people have about Nigeria as a whole. So if Trump comes out to say anything bad about us, it is the outcome of what our president has said in the past.” Femi Fani-Kayode, former aviation minister and a vitriolic foe of President Buhari, said: “The bitter truth is that we are a ‘shithole’ country, with a ‘shithole’ government and a ‘shithole’ president. It is left for us to clean up our shit, wash our arse, flush Buhari down the toilet, open the windows, get rid of the stench and make Nigeria a cleaner and better place.”

Those sentiments were both echoed and contradicted in the Truthdig interviews, conducted in person and by email. Here are some excerpts, which have been edited and, in some cases, condensed.

Mr. Tobi, banker:

The shithole comment is a wakeup call for Nigeria. If Donald Trump says we are a shithole country, we should make it known to him that shit business is good business. If someone calls your country shithole, it means you have a lot to offer but you are not doing well to make good use of what you have to offer. It is a message for our leaders to start putting things in place.

For instance, in the environmental sector, we should start recycling our waste. The recent incident in Lagos state where a dumpsite caught fire, if government had put things in place, people would not live close to the dumpsite, people would not build houses and factories there, and there will be a way to harness the energy from the waste and convert it to electricity.

[Trump’s] comment is fair, very fair in my opinion. Anything that happens in Nigeria, we are always comparing ourselves with America. Even though we are using the same democratic system of government, we should remember that it took them years to get to where they are today. We should first put a good system in place in our own country.

Click below to listen to Mr. Tobi’s interview.

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Audio-only.mp3

 

Justus Uche Ijeoma. (Photo by Patience Ogbo)

Justus Uche Ijeoma, attorney:

The shithole comment is not befitting of a world leader of Trump’s stature. However, the statement calls for re-examination and re-evaluation from Nigerian leaders and African leaders at large. When a person passes derogatory comments on you, the first thing to do is to weigh the comment against your reality.

What’s a shithole? A shithole is a place that stinks, a place that is not habitable, a place that is not accommodating. Weighing that with our situation in Nigeria, you can almost forgive Trump. For instance, Nigeria’s economy at independence in 1960 was at par or even better than that of the Asian Tigers. Look at Singapore, Japan and the others today. Compare their economy, literacy level, life expectancy and other markers of development and progress with ours and you have your answer to the question “Is Nigeria a shithole?”

Bukola Aina, fashion designer:

President Donald Trump made a correct statement when he called Nigeria a shithole country. Let’s ask ourselves: Can we sincerely say that our country does not have enough problems to be referred to as a shithole country? For instance, our law favors the rich against the poor. If a poor man steals something little, he will be jailed. But our leaders continue to steal from us without consequences. What are we doing to people who are robbing our nation blind?

President Trump made a correct statement. It is left to our leaders to check themselves. They travel abroad and they see the order in these other countries, but they are not ready to replicate the good things they see in those countries in our own country. Yes, it is true that America’s democracy is older and more sophisticated than ours, but God has blessed Nigeria with enough resources to make good as a country. Our problem is leadership, not how long we have been practicing democracy. …

Musbau Agbodemu. (Photo by Patience Ogbo)

Musbau Agbodemu, human rights activist:

We are deceiving ourselves that Nigeria is practicing democracy when in the real sense we are practicing autocracy. President Trump is very correct. The man is telling the future because Nigeria will soon become a shithole and even worse than a shithole if things continue this way. Some people are feeding fat on our collective wealth. The wealth of the country is not trickling down to the masses, and that’s a sure recipe for disaster.

Ignatius Iginla, shoe trader:

We should not be bothered about what President Trump said about our country. He is not God. Anyone can say whatever they feel like, but it is what God calls you that matters. President Donald Trump is a human being, and he spoke his mind. But Nigeria is a wonderful place. A million Trumps cannot change that.

Click on this video to view Yomi Oygunsanya’s  interview.

Yomi Ogunsanya, lecturer at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan:

It is not for an outsider to tell us that we are a shithole. Unfortunately, that is how we have presented ourselves to the world, and instead of us [being] indignant, we should ask ourselves how we are going to change the situation. It does not really matter if we are just starting. If we are learning the right things and doing the right things, nobody will condemn us or have negative words to say about us or call us shithole. When people say ours is a young democracy, I laugh. … There are many older democracies we can learn from.

In fact, we are more fortunate than them (America) because they did not have others they could refer to and learn from. They were evolving, making all the mistakes and correcting all the mistakes all alone. But we have a long history of democracy in other countries to fall back on, and if we are not doing that, we are just being clever by half.”

Grace Obinna, restaurant owner:

President Donald Trump knows what he is talking about. He is right because Nigerians are suffering. They are dying, and some are begging for food. We can say, yes, America’s democracy is greater than ours, but we are not doing what can make us great. How can we progress like this?

Marcus Isah. (Photo by Patience Ogbo)

Marcus Isah, soccer player:

We have what it takes to be OK as a country. We can feed this country, but Nigerians are hungry. Many Nigerians are relocating from the country. Why? Because there are no jobs. Even those who are employed are not being paid their salaries regularly. Some have not been paid their salaries for one year, two years and upward. But in America, people are being paid per hour of work. Who wouldn’t want to relocate to America? Here in Nigeria, we work like goats from morning til night yet we get nothing to show for it. President Trump is free to call our country a shithole, and we should not blame him. Really, is Nigeria not a shithole?

Former president Barack Obama went to Ghana, but he did not visit Nigeria. That is a black president, so what do we expect from President Trump, who is a white man? President Trump should not have used the word shithole, but I feel he only expressed his mind because he is appalled by what is happening in Nigeria and other African countries and that is why he referred to them as shithole countries. He is angry with our government and leaders because they are not doing what they are supposed to do to make their citizens comfortable, and those citizens are fleeing to America and creating problems for the rulers and citizens of that country. What do you expect him to say? He called us shithole probably because he thinks using such a harsh word will force us to change.

Raymond James, gas dealer:

The “word shithole” is not a good word and should not come from the mouth of a president. That word is not good. How can the president of a country call another country shithole? That is not right. But he said that because of what he is hearing and seeing about our country. His comment confirms that we should change. There is corruption everywhere in this country. Government and citizens need to change now. It’s not a matter of how long we’ve been practicing democracy. It’s the corruption and stealing that needs to end. Let our leaders stop stealing. Let them use public funds to develop our country instead of stealing them and carting them away to Europe and America …

Click on this video to view Mrs. Comfort’s interview.

Mrs. Comfort, businesswoman:

The comment is true. Look at a situation where a civil servant went into a woman’s kitchen to steal yam flour meal and ate it with his family, even without soup. Can you imagine the hardship that family must have been going through? That civil servant’s salary has probably not been paid for months.

Since president Buhari came into power, life has not been easy for Nigerians. Look at the way they are killing Nigerians in the northern part of the country. Trump’s comment is fair.

Emeka, pharmacy owner:

I’m doing well in Nigeria. My business and my family are prospering and doing well so I have nothing really to say about President Trump’s shithole comment. Nigeria is good for me, and I am happy here. My good situation, however, is not because our government created a favorable or enabling environment here. I’m just doing the best that I can against all odds, which is what I think Nigerians should do instead of fleeing to Europe and America and causing the government and citizens of those countries to heap insults on our country and its honest citizens.

Our leaders are horrible, really. But one can do well in spite of the unfavorable situation here. Government can do whatever. I don’t care. I am not bothered. I’m thriving. I’m doing well. Nigeria is not a shithole for me. It’s a land flowing with milk and honey.

Deacon Adebayo Obatugashe. (Photo by Patience Ogbo)

Deacon Adebayo Obatugashe, community leader:

I don’t know if U.S. President Donald Trump has been to any African country. I don’t know what he knows of African countries to make such a statement. His statement is simply a reflection of white supremacy complex. God created us black and we are proud to be black. Unfortunately, we have enslaved ourselves to the white man.

Before the white man colonized us, we had our system of government. We changed it because we want to modernize and follow the ways of our colonial masters. But the Chinese refused to follow the ways of the white man, and look at where they are today. They are even richer than Europe and America.

I feel Donald Trump called us shithole because he wants to satisfy those who put him in power, the white separatists and supremacists. That is his own opinion. It is not a reflection of who we are. I am proud to be black and I am proud to be a Nigerian.

Dammy Ope, businesswoman:

Life is difficult here, no doubt. But President Trump has a bad mouth. Tell him, his mouth is the shithole here. But, frankly, we are the ones that brought the insult on ourselves. He has reasons to call our country a shithole. He occupies a vantage position in the global scheme of things, so I’m sure he knows what he is talking about.

Apart from the corruption and inefficiency of our leaders, look at the fraudulent way some Nigerians behave in other countries. It’s enough to give our country a bad name. I don’t blame President Trump for referring to Nigeria as a shithole. It’s part of human nature to feel bad when people tell us the truth. That’s probably why we feel bad about what President Trump said.

It’s true that America’s democracy is much older than ours. But I don’t think Nigeria can be like America even if our democracy is a thousand years old. And we can never get to America’s level if we keep coming up with the type of leaders we elect. It’s a tragedy for our nation really, to be led by the present crop of politicians that are in power. Even when these ones finish their terms of office and leave, they will be replaced by their family members the way things are going. They are busy scheming for their family members to go into government because that’s where the money is. …

Grace Ibidapo, job seeker:

President Trump surely has diarrhea of the mouth. He shouldn’t have referred to Nigeria as a shithole country. A good leader should talk with more tact and decorum. But can you blame him? The problems that plague our nation are numerous, and they continue to increase by the day. If we continue this way, we cannot make progress whether Trump abuses our nation or not.

I’ll finish with a few choice quotes I found on Facebook.

Natasha Oladokun, Nigerian poet and visiting professor of English at Hollins University in Virginia, @NatashaOladokun: “As a Nigerian, I can honestly say that our air-conditioned huts with fully functioning entertainment systems offer a much better situation than whatever flatulent policies this rancid orange keeps popping out … but that’s none of my tea.”

HENRY Okelue‏ @4eyedmonk: “I am currently in my #shithole, sitting under air conditioning. I came here not on a chariot drawn by mules, but a V6 engine car. Oh, I quickly checked my LinkedIn and found I am more educated than the POTUS. Donald Trump, aint shit{hole}.”

fessus_intellectiva: “It’s a moot point whether or not Trump’s statements were true or not. It’s nothing a President should ever say. It’s like he’s reading from a book titled ‘How to be terrible at foreign relations.’ ”

mask2697: “An uncomfortably large amount of this seems to just be white supremacy in denial.”

Nigerian journalist Patience Ogbo, a mentee in Truthdig’s Global Voices series, contributed to this article.

Fire Kills 68 in Venezuelan Jail; Families Clash With Police

VALENCIA, Venezuela—Distraught families are clamoring for information about detained relatives following a fire that Venezuela’s chief prosecutor says killed 68 people when it swept through the cells of the state police station.

Angry relatives fought with police outside the facility Wednesday after being unable to get any information on casualties from Wednesday’s fire, which townspeople said erupted after a disturbance involving detainees. Officers used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and local officials would confirm only that there were fatalities.

Late Wednesday, Attorney General Tarek William Saab said on his official Twitter account that 68 people were dead and nearly all of them were prisoners. He said the dead included two women who were staying overnight at the station, but he didn’t provide any further details.

Saab said four prosecutors had been named to determine what happened at the state police headquarters in Valencia, a town in Carabobo state about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Caracas.

It was one of the worst jail disasters in Venezuela, where human rights groups complain about poor conditions in prisons and jails. A fire at a prison in the western state of Zulia killed more than 100 inmates in 1994.

With tears streaking cheeks, people waiting outside the station Wednesday said dozens of detainees had been kept in squalid conditions and they feared the worst for their loved ones.

Some people buried their hands in their faces. Others had to be supported by friends and family as they collapsed in despair. Some wept quietly and clutched their hands in prayer.

“I don’t know if my son is dead or alive!” cried Aida Parra, who said she last saw her son the previous day, when she took food to him. “They haven’t told me anything.”

Nearby, National Guard troops wearing flak jackets and carrying rifles slung across their backs walked in and out of the station. Fire trucks and ambulances stood outside. Unused stretchers leaned against a wall.

A Window to Freedom, a nonprofit group that monitors conditions at Venezuela’s jails and prisons, said preliminary but unconfirmed information indicated the riot began when an armed detainee shot an officer in the leg. Shortly after that a fire broke out, with flames growing quickly as the blaze spread to mattresses in the cells, it said. Rescuers apparently had to break a hole through a wall to free some of the prisoners inside.

Photos shared by the group showed prisoners being taken out on stretchers, their limbs frozen in awkward positions as skin peeled off.

Carlos Nieto Palma, director of A Window to Freedom, said officials should be held accountable for failing to address the poor conditions in police station jails. The group said overcrowding has become common throughout Venezuela, with detainees being kept long past customary brief holding periods before being let go or sent to larger jails to await trial.

“It’s grave and alarming,” Nieto Palma said. “What happened today in Carabobo is a sign of that.”

Opposition lawmaker Juan Miguel Matheus demanded that the pro-government leader of Carabobo state inform relatives about what happened.

“The desperation of relatives should not be played with,” he said.

Clashes between prisoners and guards are not uncommon in Venezuela. Inmates are frequently able to obtain weapons and drugs with the help of corrupt guards and heavily armed groups control cellblock fiefdoms.

Ecuador Cuts Julian Assange’s Internet at Embassy in London

Ecuador’s government said Wednesday it has cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet connection at the nation’s London embassy after his recent activity on social media decrying the arrest of a Catalan separatist politician.

In a statement, officials said Assange’s recent posts “put at risk” the good relations Ecuador maintains with nations throughout Europe and had decided as of Tuesday to suspend his internet access “in order to prevent any potential harm.”

Assange has since gone silent on social media.

Ecuador granted Assange asylum in the South American nation’s London embassy in 2012, where he has remained cooped up ever since. Ecuador has repeatedly tried to find a solution that would allow Assange to leave without the threat of arrest, but with no success. He remains wanted in Britain for jumping bail and also fears a possible U.S. extradition request based on his leaking of classified State Department documents.

Relations between Assange and his host nation have often grown prickly.

Ecuador suspended his internet access in 2016 after a WikiLeaks dump targeting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. And while former President Rafael Correa hailed Assange’s work, the South American country’s current head of state has called him a hacker and warned him not to meddle in politics.

As part of an agreement allowing him to stay at Ecuador’s embassy, Assange is forbidden from sending any messages that would interfere with the country’s diplomatic relations other nations.

“He violated that agreement,” said Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs.

She added that Ecuador’s government would be sending a group of diplomats to meet with Assange’s legal team in London next week while also continuing a dialogue with British officials on how to resolve “an inherited problem.”

Assange frequently tweets more than a dozen times a day, sharing news stories and comments that often focus on global politics and digital security issues. In recent days, Assange had criticized Germany’s detention of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. He wrote that the European arrest warrant system “allows an abusive government to persecute its opponents across the whole of the EU.”

He also chimed in about a decision by the United States and more than a dozen European nations to kick out Russian diplomats on Monday following Moscow’s alleged poisoning of an ex-spy in Britain.

“The manner of and timing of Russian diplomatic expulsions is poor diplomacy,” he wrote.

Following Assange’s remarks, a British minister called him a “miserable little worm” and said it was regretful that he remains in Ecuador’s embassy.

Ecuador granted the Australian-born Assange citizenship in December as part of an effort to make him a member of its diplomatic team, which would grant him additional rights like special legal immunity. But Britain’s Foreign Office rejected the request to grant him diplomatic status in the U.K.

Orange County Will Go Against California’s Sanctuary State Laws

The Orange County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to join a federal lawsuit against California’s sanctuary laws, specifically Senate Bill 54, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed last year. Bill 54 prohibits state and local police from notifying federal officials when undocumented immigrants in their custody who may be subject to deportation are to be released. Despite serving as home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants, Orange County has a decades-long reputation as a conservative GOP base and a history of anti-immigrant policies.

The Trump administration, which has taken its case to federal court, hopes to invalidate the law on the grounds that it obstructs federal immigration policy and violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which prioritizes federal law over state law. The case is still pending.

The case is not the administration’s first crackdown on jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration laws. Only days after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order seeking to withhold federal funds from cities that did not fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. That order was struck down by a judge in November.

President Trump tweeted Wednesday: “My Administration stands in solidarity with the brave citizens in Orange County defending their rights against California’s illegal and unconstitutional Sanctuary policies. California’s Sanctuary laws … release known dangerous criminals into communities across the State. All citizens have the right to be protected by Federal law and strong borders.”

My Administration stands in solidarity with the brave citizens in Orange County defending their rights against California’s illegal and unconstitutional Sanctuary policies. California’s Sanctuary laws….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2018

California state Sen. Kevin de León, who wrote SB 54, released a statement aimed at cities that wish to oppose sanctuary laws. It reads: “Pushing a racist and anti-immigrant agenda devoid of facts or supporting legal analysis is a pretty sad use of taxpayer resources, especially when it could result in crippling legal costs for cities that rush to join this dead-end effort.”

Roberto Herrera, a coordinator for Resilience O.C., a Santa Ana-based immigrant advocacy group, says the county’s decision reflects a larger “fear of this progressive wave suddenly taking over Orange County.” He adds: “The political conservative elite are scapegoating and creating false archetypes of undocumented immigrants in Orange County. They are using this fear to push their own campaigns forward.”

Indeed, Orange County has a history of anti-immigrant legislation and connection to such laws. The 1994 statewide ballot measure Proposition 187, also known as the Save Our State initiative, had roots in the county. The proposition, approved by California voters, sought to deny public schooling, health care and other services to undocumented immigrants (the measure was struck down by courts).

The Los Angeles Times writes:

… Costa Mesa passed anti-day laborer ordinances and became the epicenter of the anti-illegal immigration movement during the mid-2000s.

Since then, however, much of the county’s anti-illegal immigration fervor has eased after many of its cities experienced an influx of Latino and Asian immigrants.

But the anti-sanctuary momentum gaining ground in Orange County shows that it remains a place with a very conservative core.

Truthdig columnist Bill Blum says that Orange County’s rebellion against the California sanctuary movement is “a subset of the new, progressive form of federalism that is spreading across the country in response to the reactionary policies of the Trump administration on immigration and environmental regulation. Left without federal safeguards to relay on, liberal states are trying on their own to save what’s left of the social safety net, and protect their most vulnerable residents from the administration’s nativist agenda.”

He has also said: “What we’re seeing now with Orange County is a conservative enclave staging its own mini-uprising against the new progressive federalism of the state as a whole. Where this all ends, legally and politically, remains very much in doubt.”

 

From Identity Politics to Academic Masturbation

Last fall, Alison Phipps, professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, tweeted: “So my students built Lego sculptures to represent intersectionality and they were [emojis “100”, fist, party, purple heart].” Included in the tweet were three images of her students’ work:

 

So my students built Lego sculptures to represent intersectionality and they were

A Look at the Russian Presidential Election From Crimea

Editor’s note: Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, “Does the United States Have a Future?” was published in October 2017. In a talk at The National Press Club in December, Doctorow explored U.S.-Russia relations and their impact on the world.

In this piece, I will share impressions from my mission as an international observer to the Russian presidential election. The event was of historic importance given Russia’s rising standing in the world under the leadership of its front-runner candidate in the election, Vladimir Putin, and it has been covered widely in world media.

What will set this account apart from the rest is firstly the focus on one location, the Crimea, which I visited as monitor within a varied delegation of 43. The Crimea, for its part, had unusually high importance to the Russians and to the world at large, because the election there was rightly viewed as a second referendum on the reunification of Crimea with Russia in 2014, and that reunification or annexation, depending on your point of view, underlies much of the acrimonious confrontation today between Russia and the U.S.-led “international community.”

A little remarked fact underscores my argument for the key importance of the Crimean vote: the precise date selected to hold the presidential election across the Russian Federation, March 18. That is the anniversary of the formal unification, the culmination of the Crimean Spring of 2014, which followed by several days the original referendum approving unification. It will be recalled that the validity of that first referendum has been denied by Russia’s Western detractors, who insist the result was forced by the presence of Russian troops in the streets and an atmosphere of intimidation coming from pro- and anti-Russian demonstrations. The vote in 2018 has taken place in a totally calm situation, which removes all possibility of reservations about validity unless violations at polling stations could be identified. At a minimum, the task of a monitoring group such as mine should have been to watch that issue very closely.How that functioned in practice, what I/we actually saw and did will make up the first part of this essay.

The entire force of international observers who spread out across Russia was quite heterogeneous and I will spend some time in the second half of this essay describing us: who we are, why we and not others were present in Russia for election monitoring work. In this second half, I will also discuss something highly important that other commentators have avoided entirely: the fact that the elections come within the context of an intense political, economic and information war between Russia and the West that has in the past couple of years reached the level of the worst days of the Cold War. Consequently, once we look past the technical aspects of the vote, where there is, among serious professionals, a consensus that these elections were well administered and transparent, we find ourselves back in the midst of tendentious interpretation by both sides to the issue, if not outright propaganda. I will not dodge this question, and I do not expect to receive bouquets from anyone. The task before us will be very simple: to try as best I can to give details about the circumstances of the balloting so that the reader can arrive at an independent conclusion. Without naming names, I will produce my evidence from personal experience on the ground that is missing from media accounts till now given their broad brush approach.

What we saw

The bare facts are that voter turnout in Crimea was similar to turnout in Russia at large, coming to about 67 percent while ballots for Putin exceeded by far the Russian average: about 92 percent for Putin versus the national average of approximately 77 percent for Putin.

What I am about to say to flesh out these bare bones comes from our group visits to 10 polling stations over the course of as many hours. The first two were in the city of Yalta. The next two were in small villages situated along the main highway running from Yalta north and west to the provincial capital of Simferopol. And the last six were in the city limits of Simferopol. The distance we covered was 80 kilometers. Given the poor state of repair of even roads of regional importance in Crimea, the time in transit, had we not stopped along the way, would have been nearly two hours.

Our group of about 20 traveling together was split between two mini-buses, one predominantly French speaking and the other predominantly German and English speaking. Each bus had local chaperones who, together with those of us monitors fluent in Russian could assist our linguistically handicapped colleagues.

Except for the very last polling station which was close to where we had lunch and was chosen spontaneously by our group without objection from our chaperones, all the polling places had been selected by our hosts in advance, which obviously is not the random selection you would like ideally to have in such an exercise. In several stations we were met by television film crews who were expecting us.

However, we were let loose in the polling stations and could speak directly not only with the senior administrator but also with voters, with the volunteers manning the registration desks, with the monitors from the local social chambers and representatives of the candidates, if any happened to be where we were, given that they moved around all day. That is to say we had every opportunity to hear complaints, to remark any peculiar goings-on, such as organized groups of voters showing up together. There were none. We heard of no scandals, and we saw no demonstrations or protesters of any kind around the polling stations. Instead what we witnessed was an intermittent flow of voters arriving, being processed efficiently, casting their ballots and departing.

In this connection, I want to stress that our group seemed to take its responsibilities rather seriously. To be sure, when we started out in the morning we descended on our first polling booths like a group of aliens—everyone attached to their mobile gadgets and texting, arranging travel on line for their next destinations and not paying much attention to where we were. However, that phase passed quickly and my colleagues took an interest in the here and now throughout the rest of our rather long work day. We had the usual group photos outside a number of polling stations taken not only for official record but using our own mobile phones to create personal souvenirs. And we gave interviews to the waiting television crews, though that was only a minor diversion.

The polling stations we visited were for the most part secondary schools. Some were in buildings of the local civil administration. All were serviceable and well prepared to receive the public. Many of the buildings had several stairs at their entrances. Among them some had permanent ramps, as is becoming very widespread in Russia to accommodate those in wheelchairs, parents pushing baby carriages and the elderly or infirm. Where no permanent ramp existed, temporary wooden ramps were installed, obviously at considerable expense and effort in what are otherwise quite poor districts. The Crimea obviously received no infrastructure investments during the 23 years when it was ruled by post-independence Ukraine, and is simply a poor region, however promising its future development may be.

This effort to facilitate voting also had another dimension, what I will call ambulatory ballot collection. Each station had a small sealed plexiglass ballot box which was taken out by volunteers on visits to voters who were too frail or too ill to come down to the polling station. The numbers of such voters were not big, something like 50 or 60 out of polling districts numbering between 1800 and 2500 registered voters. But the symbolic message was clear: that each citizen, each vote counts.

A special welcome was being offered at all polling stations to young people, specifically to those who had just turned 18 and were voting for the first time. They were each given a paper diploma issued by the city elders. Again, the numbers of such cases were tiny, running from 5 to 10 in the districts we visited, but the welcoming hand was visible.

I have mentioned measures taken by local volunteers to raise voter participation. The biggest effort to ensure eligible voters registered and easily found a voting station convenient to them was done at the federal level via the internet resources of the Central Election Committee using online registration and sms communications. In this regard, the Crimea was no different from any other region of the Russian Federation.

The single biggest impression from visiting polling stations was their sophisticated equipment to guarantee transparency, to empower the broad public to do citizen monitoring over the internet and to efficiently record the votes.

One of the first things we would see on entering the polling stations was the row of voting booths, with simple standardized assemble-disassemble frames and light cloth draw curtains for privacy. That was the only holdover from the simple past. Each polling station now had two sets of “eyes”: CCTV cameras positioned to oversee the voter registration tables and the ballot boxes. These cameras fed live images to the internet and could be viewed by anyone in Russia online. Still more important for guaranteeing fair elections were the new electronic ballot boxes that were installed in about half the polling stations we visited, the rest being manual count boxes. The automated ballot boxes are autonomous, meaning they are not connected to the web and so are not subject to hacking. They are topped in effect by self-feeding scanners which automatically record each vote. Unlike purely electronic systems, the new Russian boxes receive and store paper ballots, meaning that if any dispute over the automated count arises, a manual count can always be done later.

A peek into some of the plexiglass ballot boxes on our visits showed up only check marks next to Putin’s name. That was about the only indication, wholly unscientific to be sure, of how sentiment was running.

Otherwise the polling stations were notable for being inviting to the public through their engagement of DJs operating simple loudspeakers blaring pop music at the entrances. One of the tunes that came up in various places was telling: “Crimea and Russia Together Forever!” One polling station had costumed teenage entertainers out in front of the building to amuse and babysit smaller kids while their parents were voting. At another polling station, girls and boys aged 8-10 wearing military cadet uniforms greeted each arriving voter and sent off the departing voters with a hearty “goodbye.” In that same station, retro patriotism also came up in another form, which possibly was spontaneous, possibly organized in advance: an 8-year-old girl reciting quite loudly and with good histrionic training a patriotic poem with the repeated refrain “Russia is Rising!”

Voting day ended in Simferopol on a pronounced patriotic note. There was a free pop concert in the main city square which drew a good-natured crowd of several thousand of all ages and ended in a magnificent fireworks display. During the 10 minutes or so of the fireworks, the orchestra and showmen sang the Russian national anthem, which was lustily supported by the entire audience.

To anyone with a recollection of the Soviet Union, all of this collective jollity and distinctly Russian pop music, which was always rather tame, seems all too familiar. However, it was well-intentioned, and it may be that a substantial part of what was promoted as Soviet models and tradition was always just a variation on Russian national culture.

Our work day ended in a municipal administration building of Simferopol where we held a press conference. Five of us with the best command of Russian, myself included, were assigned places on the dais. There were only a handful of journalists in the room, but questions were pitched to us by a moderator and the proceedings were broadcast live by several television crews. This was in lieu of a group report.

* * * *International Election Observers: who were we?

Russia’s Central Election Commission reportedly issued accreditation to 1,500 international observers whose nominations were put forward by a variety of sponsors, including Russian NGOs, the State Duma and international organizations. Some monitoring was done by diplomats from foreign embassies who requested accreditation, allowing them to visit polling stations and gather information. These monitors would later report only to their respective governments.

I was invited to Russia by a Moscow-based NGO called the Russian Peace Foundation, which entrusted administration of its allotment to a Warsaw based NGO called the European Council for Democracy and Human Rights.The original intention was to invite and accredit 150 individuals from all over the world. In the end, only about 80 monitors arrived in Moscow via this channel, myself included. On the ground, in our Moscow hotel, I saw about half this number, and I never learned where the others may have been lodged. Out of that number only a couple of us were sent to Crimea, where we joined accredited monitors from other pools. We never discussed among ourselves who came from which sponsor group.

In the Crimea-bound contingent, I was the only American, and, one of the handful of fluent Russian speakers. This put me under the spotlight but also heightened my ability to engage the local electoral officials and voters.

The monitors with whom I came into contact, both in my own pool from the Peace Foundation with whom I associated in Moscow and coming from other pools with whom I associated in the small contingent sent to Crimea were all of mixed backgrounds. Some were academics with think tank affiliation, or professional political analysts like myself. Some were elected legislators in their home countries or members of the European Parliament.

The politics of the elected deputies appeared to be mainly from what is called “far Right.” Specifically, I met with a Bundestag deputy from the Alternativ fuer Deutschland, with a French MEP formerly in the Front National and now in a group cooperating with Brexit campaigner and EU skeptic Nigel Farage. There were also a couple of Italian deputies from the Veneto Region said to be members of the Northern League. Though I did not meet with him on the mission, I was aware of the presence in Moscow of one observer coming from the “far Left” party Die Linke. Centrist parties seemed to be absent. Within the contingent sent to Crimea there were also several who fit none of the descriptions above. I have in mind the representative of the President of Pakistan and the representative of the President of Malaysia.

The political convictions of those monitors with whom I spent some time could be characterized as ranging from mildly to extremely pro-Russian. Those who were in the latter category constituted perhaps 10 percent of the total. From our table talk over lunch, I understood that the several very pro-Russian monitors had a latent conflict of interest: they each made some of their professional income in Russia, or, as was the case with one of the Italians, they are developing businesses in Crimea with local partners. From among this sub-group, two were particularly fluent in Russian and presented their propagandistic observations to the local journalists with whom we met in the polling stations and at the press conference. This is how one Crimean newspaper received the choice quotation which it duly published: that “today Crimea is the most democratic place in the world.” An over-the-top assessment that is frankly embarrassing to read.

I would call this case a distortion of the observer mission that was preconditioned by the general background of political, informational and economic warfare being waged between the West and Russia for the past several years. To my knowledge, the Russian Duma had extended invitations to all Members of the European Parliament, but the major centrist parties there opposed sending any representatives to observe elections which they knew in advance would be a sham because of their own ideological anti-Putin prejudices. Thus, who actually came and took part in the monitoring was the result of a self-sorting process. The MEPs and parliamentarians from national legislatures who came did so in the face of moral pressure from the majority of their peers, and they received strict prohibitions in particular against going to Crimea. I saw how one of the French MEPs initially in our Crimea contingent backed out at the very last minute and remained in Moscow to avoid scandals back home.

Propaganda and information warfare on all sides

The fierce political winds in the West against Putin, against Russia directed mainstream U.S. and European media reports on the Russian election campaign for weeks in advance of the vote. The media denounced the process as fake because of the near certainty of the outcome, the re-election of Vladimir Putin. This mind-set even exerted a discernible influence on the most authoritative foreign observation body to come to the elections, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The OSCE contingent was the single largest group of international election observers, receiving 580 accreditations. Within that overall number there was a core group of 60 who were deployed in Russia six weeks before the elections. They met with local election boards, candidates’ representatives and others to build an information base on the elections. Then there were 420 additional short-term observers sent by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. And about 100 accreditations for the election-day mission were issued to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, who were nearly all European MPs in their respective countries.

I wish to stress that the OSCE did not send any election observers to the Crimea. In a statement issued by the United States Mission to the OSCE on March 22, the reasons that evidently also guided the OSCE in its entirety are set out with the crystal clarity of a Cold War blast denouncing Russia’s “invasion and occupation of Crimea,” its staging of “illegitimate elections … [with] frequent and severe abuses, specifically targeting the Crimean Tatar community and others opposed to Russia’s occupation.” Russia is charged with coercing Ukrainian citizens in Crimea to vote in illegitimate elections. The March 18 elections are, per the U.S. Mission, “another attempt by Russia to give its purported annexation of Crimea a semblance of legitimacy.”

Without further ado, I condemn this official U.S. statement as an ignorant, willfully blind rejection of the realities on the ground in Crimea that I and other members of our monitoring team unreservedly established.

As for the OSCE monitoring mission to the rest of the Russian Federation, the various constituent groups mentioned above issued two pages of Press Releases on their findings at a press conference held in downtown Moscow the day after the elections. Given the institution’s credibility, that report has received a good deal of attention in global media.

The general conclusions were summarized at the top of the Releases:

“Russian presidential election well administered, but characterized by restrictions on fundamental freedoms, lack of genuine competition, international observers say.”

On the one hand, the OSCE report gave the Russians, and in particular the Central Election Commission, high marks for the professional administration of the elections as witnessed by their teams in the field on election-day. In particular, the press handout mentions as welcome the accuracy of voter lists and the legal changes that enabled voting in polling stations away from the permanent place of residence, a facility which was used by 5.6 million Russians. Tabulation was also assessed positively.

These bland-sounding compliments have to be put in an historical context to be fully savored.

The background is the 2011 Duma elections which were shown by Russian activists at the time to have been fraudulent due to ballot box stuffing, “carousel voting,” i.e. multiple voting and the shepherding of company employees and civil servants to the polling stations by their superiors. Incidents were reported of voter turnout in some districts exceeding 100 percent of registered voters. These outrages sparked mass street demonstrations that were fanned by encouragement from Western governments and media at the time. The Kremlin took note and instituted several procedural reforms and widespread implementation of CCTV cameras already the next year for the presidential election, which passed without incident and prepared the way for the extensive measures supporting transparency and fair voting that we saw on March 18, 2018. The government also took measures to protect itself and society from the would-be actors of regime change though mass demonstrations: the rules on foreign-sponsored pro-democracy NGOs were tightened, as were rules on public assembly.

On the other hand, the OSCE Press Releases go far beyond the voting mechanisms, far beyond the specifics of this electoral campaign to challenge the entire Russian political culture.

“Elections are a critical part of democracy, but democracy is not only about elections. …[I]mproving the real state of democracy in Russia requires full respect for people’s rights between elections as well,” Marietta Tidei, head of the delegation from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly is quoted as saying on page one of the handout.

The OSCE spokespersons direct attention in particular to limitations on rights of assembly, on free speech in Russia and to media control by the state, with unequal allocation of air time going to the president that short-changed his challengers

Perhaps the most condemnatory remarks in the OSCE Press Release relate to registration of candidates for the presidential race.

“After intense efforts to promote turnout, citizens voted in significant numbers, yet restrictions on the fundamental freedoms, as well as on candidate registration, have limited the space for political engagement and resulted in a lack of genuine competition …”

This was a thinly veiled reference to the rejection of the candidacy application of the famous blogger and corruption-fighter Alexei Navalny, who from the beginning to end was held up in Western media as the only real opponent to Vladimir Putin. This characterization of who was real opposition and who was a “Kremlin project” was itself a highly politicized issue that outside observers would have done better to side-step entirely.

There are several serious problems with the overarching negative analysis by the OSCE, which slotted very nicely into the predisposition of the Western media to trash the Russian elections. Whether by intent or by ignorance, the OSCE authors of the critique of the electoral campaign circumstances acted as the mouthpieces of the opposition candidates, most particularly the Liberal party candidates among whom Ksenia Sobchak was the most visible and vocal. They did not give any thought to counterarguments, which I will present here.

First, there is the issue of applying double standards and expecting the ideal of fair competition for all candidates to the nation’s highest office, when that standard is very rarely if ever met in the West itself. I would name little, neutral Switzerland as one country with credible civic freedoms, campaign and voting procedures. I was about to name here Finland, another small and relatively homogeneous country which always gets high marks on democratic institutions, but then I recalled that a couple of years ago there was a great scandal over abuse of the newly introduced remote voting facility via the internet. That noisy scandal ended in one parliamentary deputy, a party leader and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, being stripped of her mandate for violations. So there can be problems even in Eden.

Then, at the risk of being accused of “what-aboutism,” I am obliged to mention an egregious and relatively recent case of suppression of mass opposition movements in the United States. I have in mind the case of Occupy Wall Street, which broke out in the midst of the Crash of 2008 and was on the point of achieving political traction when it was brutally crushed by police and court actions that blatantly violated constitutional protection of freedom of assembly and speech. No one has ever paid a price for those abridgments of civil liberties which are still enshrined in law and regulations at the local level.

Let me now address the question of Vladimir Putin’s dominance in air time coming from his status and activities as president, not as candidate or debater, which he did not use at all. The OSCE observers ignore that Putin has this dominance 365 days on 365 because he is one of the most widely traveled, most consequential heads of state in the world against whom most any human being in opposition would have a very difficult time. This is precisely why he had the support of 80 percent of the population in polls held repeatedly in the year leading to the elections.

His popularity after 18 years in power is explained not only by being hyper active but by being hyper-productive for the vast majority of the population. In that time in office national GDP multiplied several times and take home pay of the broad population rose 10 times. Under Putin the poverty rate was cut in half. And in the past four years his government restored the nation’s self-confidence over its place as a global leader thanks to the bloodless takeover of the Crimea in March 2014 through perfectly executed psychological warfare in which 20,000 Russian troops from the Sevastopol naval base overcame an equal number of Ukrainian forces on the peninsula with hardly a shot fired and no fatalities. Then came the successful air war against the Islamic State in Syria from 2015 to 2017 that also had negligible cost in Russian military personnel. And finally in the midst of the election, on March 1 President Putin unveiled Russia’s new, state of the art strategic weapons systems which he claimed restored the country’s nuclear parity with the United States. All of these achievements would leave any opposition candidates, however clever, tongue-tied.

Finally, no criticism of restrictions on freedom of assembly or speech can be made in the abstract. They were introduced by the Kremlin in the context of the political war on the country being conducted by the West with especial intensity since the 2014 reunification with/annexation of Crimea. It is indecent to fault the Russians for imperfect democratic institutions when the result of outside pressure has always been to rally the broad public around its leader and to make life very difficult for any opposition.

For anyone with a few gray hairs and recollection of Soviet days going back to the 1960s, the present situation in Russia and the criticism of authoritarianism brings to mind the issues that surrounded the introduction of the détente policy: hard pressure on the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev was known to result in crackdowns on dissent and the rise in the numbers of political prisoners.

Today’s Russia is a far more humane society than the old Soviet Union, but it is a disservice to opponents of United Russia and Vladimir Putin to impose personal and sectoral sanctions as the U.S.-led West has done since 2012, when it introduced the Magnitsky List or accelerated from 2014 to present under the pretext of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. What is surprising is that the country has virtually no political prisoners (Ksenia Sobchak could list only 16 dubious cases when she and other candidates met with Putin in the Kremlin on March 19). During the campaign the candidates were able to express the most outrageous attacks on the government and its policies using false accusations, on live national television without any hint of retribution.

Why was the Russian political landscape devoid of serious challengers? The achievements of the incumbent are only part of the story. Another big factor has been the “vertical of control” that Vladimir Putin implemented at the start of his rule 18 years ago to reestablish state power in the face of disintegration and chaos, in the face of local satrapies run by thieves bearing the title of oligarchs. Without broad reinstatement of self-rule at the regional level through direct election of mayors and governors, there is scant possibility of experienced candidates enjoying popular backing rising to challenge a president. There will be more of the same top-down “parties” and rootless power seekers who ran against Putin in 2018. This question of preparing for democratic succession is the single biggest challenge facing Vladimir Putin in his fourth and last mandate.

My conclusion is that in the discussion about the Russian elections of March 18 everybody is using everybody else to score propaganda points. Nonetheless, even in this reality the monitoring missions served the worthy purpose of keeping the local Russian officials on their toes and encouraging transparency, in the Crimea and surely everywhere else. That is a very good thing in itself.

And I end this report with one more encouraging sign that I heard at our press conference in Simferopol that capped our election monitoring mission. We on the dais were interrupted for a short announcement by the head of the Simferopol government who gave tabulation of voter turnout as of 6 o’clock. He ended his recitation with this statement to the audience: “these elections are by and for us, Russians, not for anyone else.” Now that is a tremendous leap forward in Russian self-awareness and national pride. They have stopped looking abroad for validation. They have grown up.

For a brief overview of my findings as election observer in Crimea, see my March 19 interview with RT on Red Square. For the video recording of our press conference on March 18 in a city administration building of Simferopol which was broadcast live on Crimean television, see here.