Deca's Blog, page 2

Should We See Everything a Cop Sees?

On his first day on the job in the Seattle Police Department, Mike Wagers was invited to an urgent meeting about transparency. It was July 28, 2014, little more than a week after Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island, less than two weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., and police departments around the country were facing a new era of public scrutiny. Wagers, who has a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Rutgers, was the Seattle department’s new chief operating officer, a 42-year-old civilian in jeans and square-rimmed glasses. He’d left his wife and two kids in Virginia and come alone to Seattle, a city he didn’t know — where it rained but cultural norms, he’d read, didn’t allow you to use an umbrella — because the job was what he called “the chance of a lifetime.” Seattle was the first big-city police department in a decade to have come under what is known as a consent decree — police reform by federal fiat — after a string of violent police actions against black, Latino and Native American people were caught on camera in 2009 and 2010. Wagers and his new boss, Chief Kathleen O’Toole, herself just arrived in Seattle, would use the best new thinking and the best new technology to lead the turnaround. And then Wagers would go home.

O’Toole’s eighth-floor conference room, which has views of City Hall and Elliott Bay and the snow-capped Olympic Mountains, was packed with top police and city officials. All eyes were on a lawyer from the city attorney’s office named Mary Perry. A former naval officer in her 60s, Perry was small and soft-spoken and favored pearls, and she was the city’s unrivaled expert in the seemingly mundane intricacies of the state’s Public Records Act. She was briefing the room on the potential fallout from a landmark case she had just argued and lost before the Washington State Supreme Court. The case stemmed from a series of public-records requests by a reporter for the local television station KOMO, Tracy Vedder, who began filing them after the same high-profile incidents that would lead to the consent decree. She asked for user manuals to the department’s new system of in-car dashboard cameras, then for lists of dashcam recordings, then for some of the recordings themselves. After the department denied every one of them, Vedder sued it for violating the Public Records Act.

The act, which dates to 1972, when governments ran on paper and our modern torrent of electronic data was unimaginable, is one of the strongest in the country. Washington State agencies cannot deny requests for records because the requester is anonymous or the request is too broad, nor can they deny requests simply in order to protect an individual’s privacy; instead, agencies must redact only the details deemed sensitive under state code — for example, some addresses, sometimes the face of a minor — and disclose the rest. Before the court, Perry had argued that a different law, the state’s Privacy Act, which allows departments to withhold recordings until related criminal or civil cases are resolved, should take precedent and the Seattle Police should be allowed to broadly deny Vedder’s requests until the relevant statute of limitations ran out. The court disagreed.

As Perry now told Wagers and the officials gathered in the chief’s conference room, Seattle and other departments across the state were operating in a new reality. Only in cases under actual, pending litigation could the police withhold video footage from the people. This presented several problems. The first was logistical and financial: Seattle Police were sitting on more than 1.5 million individual dashcam and surveillance videos, or about 300,000 hours and 350 terabytes total. Before releasing any footage, someone in the department had to review and redact it in accordance with the specific privacy exemptions the state code did have. The process was manual, a painstaking, frame-by-frame ordeal. By one estimate, 169 people would have to work for a year just to fulfill the department’s existing video requests, and the department added 2,000 new video clips daily. Perry feared that the new flood of data, especially but not exclusively video, could bankrupt Seattle if someone requested it all. “It’s like being on the Titanic,” she later told me, “and you’ve got a teaspoon to bail.”

The second problem was privacy. Dashcam videos were already a concern, but Seattle had also been considering using body cameras. In fact, the Police Department was now preparing a small pilot program involving a dozen officers from a single precinct to test the hardware. Any footage that bodycams gathered, Perry warned, would also be subject to the Public Records Act. The department would have even more video to manage and release, but most worrisome was how fundamentally different, and more intrusive, this video would be. Unlike dashcams, bodycams, which are attached to an officer’s uniform or purpose-built glasses, can go into homes and hotel rooms. Unlike dashcams, their default view during an arrest, or during a simple conversation with a victim or witness or informant, is an intimate close-up. Many people think of body cameras as a tool for police accountability, but the primary subject of their surveillance isn’t the police — it’s the public.

“I believe in open government, I really do,” Perry told me, “but I don’t think people have really wrapped their heads around all the implications.” If the bodycam pilot was deemed a success, and the city expanded the program to the rest of its 850 front-line officers, all of them now walking surveillance cameras, what then?

Wagers left the meeting stunned. “I like to think I can walk into a room, take a complex problem and break it down into its component parts,” he says. “This meeting, I walked out thinking: Wow, this is complicated. This is messy.”

In 2011, three years before Wagers joined the department, a 20-year-old programmer named Tim Clemans set the record for consecutive daily visits to Seattle’s Space Needle. “The main reason I go everyday,” he wrote in an online journal documenting his record attempt, “is because on July 7, 2010, I attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge. The Space Needle changed me from a depressed, shy and lazy kid to a happy, outgoing, disciplined young man who has a reason to live.”

Clemans lived with his parents in a small, suburban house south of Seattle, sleeping in a bedroom decorated with a picture of the Space Shuttle and a free calendar from a local Chinese buffet. His bed was a mattress on the floor, and his electronic devices — computers, radios, keyboards — dominated the room. Clemans, who has sandy blond hair and wide blue eyes and walks with the stooped gait of someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer, taught himself to code HTML at age 8. Home-schooled as a teenager to escape bullying, he was editing web pages for a hospital, where a friend from his parents’ church worked, by 14. He taught himself basic JavaScript and CSS, and he learned the programming language Python after he showed up at a mathematics lab at the University of Washington and offered to volunteer in exchange for high-school credit. “I just went there,” he explains. “I’m very impulsive, and I don’t like rules.”

Day 1 of his record attempt was a fluke. He was in the vicinity of the Space Needle and bored, so he took the elevator to the top. Something about being able to see the whole city at once captivated him. The next day, Clemans bought a $50 season pass. He learned of the previous record — 60 consecutive days — and vowed to beat it. He came daily by bus and foot, an hourlong commute, often arriving early and staying late into the night.

The Space Needle blooms out of the grounds of the 1962 World’s Fair, a site north of downtown that is now known as Seattle Center. It is 605 feet tall. You enter through a plaza choked with Korean tourists and Andean flute musicians and Marine marching bands, then shuffle up a ramp to the east, above the gift shop and not far from a lineup of idling tour buses. Before handing over your ticket, you are asked to pose for a photo, then board one of three external elevators. When the elevator starts its ascent and the city comes into view, the people inside either fall silent or gasp out loud.

From the observation deck, you can see mountains in four directions, water in two and, just to the south, a forest of skyscrapers. You also see a tangle of cranes; a city increasingly built by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is booming. There are parks, markets, hidden gardens, tiny houses, tiny cars. Bulk carriers glide into port. Seaplanes land and take off. Helicopters float by. The lights of the radio towers on adjacent Queen Anne Hill, a seeming stone’s throw away, blink on and off. Inside, a giant digital wall displays a shifting collage of visitor selfies, along with tourists’ names and cities of origins. A joystick controls a high-definition camera mounted somewhere on the tower, allowing anyone to pan and zoom in on the unsuspecting people below, like a drone operator.

The Space Needle became Clemans’s office and his sanctuary. He brought his laptop, stuffing it into his backpack along with a toothbrush and toothpaste and self-help and business books, and got online with a wireless card. He exercised by walking laps around the outer deck. He offered to take tourists’ photos, posed with them and answered their questions. He wrote code and blog entries. He stared at the city. It made sense from up there. It had patterns. Even its famously chaotic traffic had a predictable ebb and flow.

“The sun is shining!” reads one blog entry. “I can see Rainier. People are happy. It doesn’t get any better than this.” When he claimed the record on Day 61, he appeared on the evening news. He said he would keep going for a full year, then announced on his blog that he would go for even longer — 1,825 days in a row. He began wearing a black jacket emblazoned with the words “Record Holder” in block letters and spending more of his time talking to tourists, meeting people from all over the world. “It was an enjoyable eight-hour visit,” he wrote in another entry. “I finished reading ‘Personal MBA’ and memorized the five parts of a business and the 12 ways to create value.”

Some days he wrote about his attempts to stick to a routine. Others he dreamed up fanciful lists. “When I own the Space Needle in 2034,” he wrote on Day 107, “I will do the following twenty things.” One: “I will sell tickets for $200 to the very top … for $600 you can also hang off the side.” Two: “Each day the Space Needle will fly a flag. Most days the flag will be the photo of a random lucky guest.” Four: “For $500 you and your spouse can sleep in an elevator.” Sixteen: “I will pay French Spider Man Alain Robert $10 million to climb a leg of the Space Needle once every day for a year.” Eighteen: “I will give the security bag checkers X-ray vision glasses.” Nineteen: “I will personally lead a walking tour for people struggling with suicidal thoughts.”

“This post is for me,” reads the next day’s entry. “I’m struggling to meet my goals like reading and writing computer code four hours a day. However, I’m really good at meeting this one particular goal, going to the Space Needle every day. I’ve been able to do so for 108 days straight for one simple reason: Going to the Space Needle everyday is more important than anything else. I have to do it. So when I’m trying to achieve a goal, I just have to remember it’s more important than anything else.”

After almost 160 days, Clemans had an altercation with a Space Needle employee. Before he could get on the elevator, she asked him to pose for a photo in the booth at the top of the ramp, just like the tourists. He had been asked to do it a hundred times. It was senseless, and it enraged him. “I blew up at her,” he says. Just like that, the world-record holder was banned from the Space Needle for life.

Adrift, he disappeared from public view. He worked on code, dabbled in robotics and considered a career as a paramedic. He was pulled over for reckless driving and hired a lawyer known for his successful dashcam requests and, he claims, the video didn’t entirely match the police report, so the court reduced the charges. He met a woman on OKCupid, getting her attention by suggesting that they go build sand castles together.

One day in September 2014, Clemans was with his girlfriend when he read on his laptop that KOMO had prevailed over Seattle in the state’s Supreme Court in June: Police video had to be released on demand. The Justice Department had just started its investigation of Ferguson, but Clemans’s concerns were closer to home. KOMO posted only snippets. “I was just mad that they were getting all this video but not making it all available,” he recalls. He turned to his girlfriend and told her, “I think I’m going to do police data as a hobby.”

“It was like a D.D.O.S. attack,” Wagers says, comparing Clemans’s first email to a distributed denial of service attack, in which hackers send so much traffic to a website that it crashes. “It was going to seize up the system.” The request was simple, but it was just what Perry had warned about: Clemans wanted every single video the Seattle Police Department ever recorded, everything not tied up in an investigation. That September, Clemans sent similar messages to almost every police department in the state. Worried the police would retaliate if they could find him, he used an untraceable email address: policevideorequests@mail2tor.com.

Some police departments started sending videos immediately, some proposed installment plans and some announced they were delaying their bodycam programs. In Poulsbo, a town of 9,500 people across the Puget Sound from Seattle, the mayor desperately emailed her local state legislator and asked him to do something about the cameras and the Public Records Act.

Unlike its smaller counterparts, the Seattle department did not give its unknown nemesis any footage. Clemans responded by programming a bot. It scraped the department’s website for new case numbers, then automatically requested the corresponding police reports, firing off emails 10 times a day. The more the authorities denied him, the more his appetite grew. He asked the University of Washington for all its records dating back to “the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.” He filed requests with another 60 state agencies, demanding every email they had ever sent — 600 million messages in all, according to a state estimate. The Department of Agriculture informed Clemans it would need 132 years to complete the job.

Wagers decided to try a different approach. At Rutgers, he had been schooled in the reformist ideals of community policing. Like the longtime New York City police commissioner William J. Bratton — whose work when he led the Los Angeles Police Department was the subject of Wagers’s Ph.D. dissertation and who, as it happened, was Chief O’Toole’s boss when he led the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission Police — Wagers liked to quote Sir Robert Peel, the founder of London’s bobbies, who in the early 19th century established an Anglo-Saxon tradition of policing distinct from the militaristic us-versus-them Continental model. Peel taught that good policing was about building and holding public trust. “It’s about engagement,” Wagers told me. “We respond. We engage. It sounds kind of trite, but it’s a different way of thinking.” His new plan for dealing with Clemans, he says, “was like any other response to the community: We engage.”

On Twitter, Wagers followed @PoliceVideo, an account that then belonged to the still-anonymous requester. The next day, the account tweeted at Wagers, asking him why the department was giving PowerPoint presentations to city leaders about the coming bodycam pilot program but not sharing the slides with the public. “Screw it,” @PoliceVideo tweeted when Wagers was too slow to respond. “Putting in the request now. Wish you guys would just publish this stuff.”

But Wagers offered to “do you one better,” and he tweeted a phone number. “Here’s my cell,” he wrote. “I give it out to everyone. Call me & happy to answer questions.” It was 6:57 p.m. One minute later, Wagers’s phone rang. It was Clemans. He still didn’t give his real name — he had been overwhelmed by media interest in his transparency fight — but readily accepted when Wagers invited him to lunch.

The next day, Clemans met Wagers and Mary Perry at Police Headquarters. They ordered a pizza. Perry tried to explain that it was technically impossible for the department to release all its archived video anytime soon. Clemans countered with an idea he had. He called it “overredaction.” If the system was paralyzed by the need for frame-by-frame redactions, he wondered, why not automatically redact everything? That is, instead of jockeying with requesters, painstakingly reviewing each video, blurring out the protected parts and burning the results onto DVD after DVD, the department could just use software to lightly blur everything, then proactively publish each blurred video online. Push, not pull. Viewers would be able to make out enough to know if footage merited a specific records request and a more precise manual redaction, and they would presumably ask for only the segments they thought they needed; and no longer would the department be buried under its own video. He agreed to drop his mass requests if the department would try it out.

In fact, Clemans said, he had stayed up all night writing a very rough version of the overredaction code and printed it out. He showed them what he had done.

The pilot program, set to be rolled out in December 2014, would garner considerable national attention. After Ferguson, expectations that bodycams could reduce police violence and ensure accountability were high. In polls taken over the next year, 87 percent of Americans and 89 percent of Seattle residents supported their use. When President Obama announced an initiative to distribute $75 million so police departments around the country could buy more of them, he declared that the cameras would “enhance trust between communities and police.” A widely cited study by University of Cambridge researchers, undertaken in Rialto, Calif., in 2012 and 2013, found that when officers wore the cameras, use of force dropped by 59 percent compared to the previous year, complaints against the police by 88 percent. By now Wagers understood more about the hidden costs of bodycams — to individual privacy, to the overworked staff of the public-disclosure unit — but he and O’Toole began avidly pursuing a federal grant nonetheless. “If research continues to show that they reduce the use of force, reduce complaints, produce positive impacts,” he said, “then there’s a moral cost to not using bodycams.”

The cameras that Seattle planned to use in its pilot program — which would be worn on patrol by a dozen officers in its East Precinct, their video uploaded to a server at the end of every shift — were from two local companies: Vievu, which was founded by a former Seattle SWAT officer, Steve Ward, in 2007, and its main rival, Axon, a division of Taser that is responsible for the reliable spike in the parent company’s stock after major police shootings. Together the two companies dominate a market that analysts believe will soon be worth a billion dollars a year, with much of the value coming from software and storage. Both Vievu and Axon offered bundles that paired their cameras with editing programs that ran in the cloud, processing them on computers maintained by Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, which are also Seattle-area companies.

But neither bundle came cheap. The millions of dollars that major police departments were beginning to spend on bodycam contracts were millions they weren’t spending on better training or new officers, and neither company had come close to perfecting automated redaction, without which Seattle Police would simply be collecting more footage without any better way to share it with requesters. Seattle needed an end-to-end software fix, Wagers realized, and Seattle was also a city full of programmers. So the day before the pilot program started, he also tried another experiment: With help from Clemans, he held the department’s first-ever hackathon.

The overflow crowd of 80 people was “straight out of central casting,” Wagers says. “Skinny jeans. Hoodies. People who had sued the department. People I know I’d seen on the protest line the previous week.” Clemans demonstrated his overredaction program: the world as if filmed through a beer glass, fuzzy but familiar, in which it was still possible (too possible, some worried) to tell who was tall and who was short and who was male and who was female and who was black and who was white and who was running and who was chasing. It was well received, and several programmers in the room offered to help Clemans improve the algorithm. But Clemans, volunteering his time and his skills, would be the linchpin. The pilot would run for six months, and if it went well, 12 officers would soon become 850.

The next day, on Dec. 20, as TV stations aired reports on the department’s innovative approach to transparency, the bodycam pilot began. Clemans and the department soon developed a rhythm: Some of the videos coming in from the East Precinct were saved to U.S.B. sticks, and Clemans, unpaid and on food stamps at the time, came downtown by bus to pick them up. He processed them on his bedroom computer, tweaking the overredaction program as he went, trying to code in the right balance of concealment and transparency.

Even as he helped run Seattle’s experiment in open government, Clemans continued to receive hundreds of hours of dashcam and bodycam video from other police departments around the state, much of it unredacted. And, just as he had promised to do in his records requests, he was continuing to upload it — unredacted — to YouTube. The first videos he posted show, with perfect clarity, drunken-driving stops from the towns Renton and Tukwila, south of Seattle, and include disturbing footage of a young white man being shocked with a Taser in the dark beneath the tree where he had just crashed his car, the scene illuminated by flashing lights. In another video, two officers rush to help a man suffering from a heart attack on a freeway overpass, saving his life. Others depict foot chases or friendly interactions with homeless people, and they gave Clemans more respect for the police and the difficulties they face every day. “Policing is just really hard,” he says. But he didn’t watch all the footage himself, because he didn’t have time and new projects beckoned.

I watched more than a dozen hours of the video. There were no shootings. Most of it was routine police work, which may be why it was so disturbing to see online. In one set of videos that Clemans posted, a well-dressed white mother of two is pulled over late on a Friday night. She is composed until she fails a sobriety test. Then she pleads for a chance to call the babysitter — according to Facebook, where I found her because the video also revealed her name, she has a young daughter and younger son — before breaking down in loud screams and sobs in the back of a patrol car.

Elsewhere in the state, also on YouTube, a body camera captures the inside of a woman’s home as she explains how her accused stalker has been ignoring a restraining order. A father pleads with two officers to check in on his adult daughter, who he says has intellectual disabilities and has become involved with a man he believes is dangerous. Two college roommates accuse each other of theft and intimidation in their living room. A white woman apparently overdosing on meth, who cries out that she’s pregnant, is restrained and given medical attention. A middle-aged black man opens his apartment door for a group of officers who inform him that he has been screaming all night. Slurring his words, he admits he’s suffering from PTSD and that he has a history of heroin use. He refuses to let them take him to the hospital. He refuses even when an officer reminds him that he has been screaming like this off and on for a month. But now you can hear the fear in his voice. “Am I screaming right now?” he wonders.

One of the first bodycam videos that Clemans uploaded shows a young black woman sitting on a bed in a hotel room. The officer wearing the camera is a disembodied voice but for a fleeting glimpse of his face and torso in a mirror. His manner is professional and sympathetic, and he says he doesn’t want to arrest her. “Will I be charged?” she asks. “Let’s get to that later,” he says. He asks her if she would be willing to talk to a counselor. “So you can get some other kind of job so you don’t have to do this anymore, O.K.?” he says. “Our ultimate goal is that there is no prostitution, O.K.?”

He begins filling out a form — Escort Face Sheet — on a clipboard. She answers every question, sharing the intimate details of her life. She tells him about her relationship with her boyfriend, her clashes with her strict father, her time as a runaway, her drift from strip clubs to Backpage.com escort ads, her few regular johns. She claims she’s new to this work. She explains that she charges per hour or half-hour. She has a dog, she says. She can rely on her parents in times of need, she says. She gives him their street address. She gives him her full name. She shares her private email address and phone number. She shares all this with the camera too.

When the interview is done, she asks about it. Is the image clear? “It’s pretty clear, yeah,” the officer says, but “if the press wanted it, we can redact faces — can blur out the faces and whatnot.” Body cameras are new to his city, and he doesn’t know that what he just told her isn’t entirely true. A lawyer will decide that the video is in no part exempt from the Public Records Act, and the officer will later be shocked to see it on YouTube. He will try and fail to have it taken down. The woman in the video is easy to find in her other internet life. She’s on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, where she chats with friends and posts images of dresses and animals and nail polish. You can visit her parents’ house on Google Street View.

Body cameras can be knocked loose when the police rush a suspect, as the world learned in July when Alton Sterling was killed in Baton Rouge, La. Officers can likewise forget or claim to forget to turn the cameras on in time to record an incident in full, as protesters saw after they forced the police to release the inconclusive, partial bodycam footage of Keith Lamont Scott’s shooting in Charlotte, N.C. But for slow-moving scenes like this one, in the hotel room with the young woman who seems to trust the officer with her privacy, the technology works almost too well. Bryce Newell, an information-science researcher now at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who did his fieldwork in Washington, interviewing Clemans and Wagers and riding along with officers as they tested their new bodycams, gave a clever name to the problem they posed in a society demanding transparency: “collateral visibility.”

One of the first people revealed to the public by Clemans’s transparency quest was Clemans himself. His mass records requests had drawn the interest of local reporters, who started filing requests of their own to the Police Department, seeking his identity. After they got his phone number, Clemans pre-emptively outed himself, embracing the role of tech seer. He published a letter in January 2015 explaining his mission on the website of the Seattle Privacy Coalition. “I pushed the envelope,” he wrote, “so we as a society can once and for all address accurately recording of the truth, who should have access to the truth and what we are to do with the truth.” He told the local news site Crosscut that the Public Records Act did need to be amended. “It’s not going to change until it becomes a massive problem,” he said. He told Seattle Weekly that his experience with police videos had convinced him that certain things shouldn’t be made public. He left the footage on YouTube precisely to make that point. “I don’t think people are going to deal with this until they have an emotional reaction,” he said.

The designated voice of the people in Seattle’s police-reform process is the Community Police Commission, a board of local leaders — black, white, Latino, Native American — that was created as part of the city’s settlement with the Justice Department. It represents the people the consent decree, and body cameras, were most meant to protect. On a cloudy Saturday in January 2015, with the pilot program underway, the commission invited Wagers to a community meeting on the city’s south side to take part in a public discussion of how bodycams would be used and whether, a flier read, “they will, in fact, increase police accountability.”

Wagers stood before the crowd, about a hundred people in all, and gave a brief technical overview of the pilot program. Then an officer from East Precinct demonstrated how the bodycam worked, briefly filming the crowd as he did so. After that, one commissioner, David Keenan, a local lawyer, asked a group of waiting panelists to state, one after the other, when, exactly, the cameras should be on, and to answer a simple question about the evidence they create: Why do we want it? That is, whom does it serve? “Should it only be used if there’s an accusation against a police officer?” he asked. “Should it be used by criminal investigators and by defendants and by prosecutors?”

The growing national welter of contradictory state laws and department policies signals that there is no settled answer. Some allow officers to view it before writing their reports. (That was the central issue earlier this month in Portland, Ore., that caused protesters to storm its City Hall, where police officers met them with bursts of pepper spray.) Some do not. Some treat all bodycam videos as public records; some limit their release. Some mandate a quick deletion of police video; some have no requirements to delete it at all. Some restrict the use of facial recognition software; most allow it. A technology meant for one purpose, once unleashed, is soon used for many others.

One commissioner, Jay Hollingsworth of the Mohegan tribe, the chairman of the John T. Williams Organizing Committee, named for a hard-of-hearing Native American whose 2010 shooting was partly captured on dashcam, answered Keenan’s “when” question simply: Bodycams should always be on. To his right, another commissioner, Jennifer Shaw, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U. of Washington, said that she agreed in theory but that her organization supported the cameras only if they were used exclusively for police accountability. Next, Ron Smith, a detective who then headed the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, said that he was also in favor of bodycams because he believed they would exonerate officers from complaints. But the cameras went into homes and on lunch and bathroom breaks, and officers absolutely had to be able to switch them on and off.

At the end of the table were two activists, Marissa Johnson and Dan Bash. Johnson later became nationally known for leaping onstage at a Bernie Sanders rally, claiming the candidate’s microphone and telling him he needed to do more to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement. “This conversation about bodycams is a complete and utter farce,” she said. Forget the policy details. She did not consent to being recorded at all. She did not trust the police to do the right thing with the footage. Most of all, she did not trust prosecutors to use it to prosecute officers. “Why do I need a home video of my abuse that’s going to be filmed by my oppressor?” she asked.

An uncomfortable silence filled the room. Then Hollingsworth announced that the other panelists had made him change his mind, leaving the two employees of the Police Department, Wagers and Smith, two white men, the only people onstage who clearly supported bodycams. The mood became tense, and members of the crowd interrupted the next speaker and soon assumed control of the room, taking turns denouncing police brutality and glaring at Smith, who was eventually escorted to his car by another officer.

Three weeks later, the commission, the voice of the people, called for Seattle to delay full deployment of bodycams until the state law could be rewritten. “This is a new technology,” the commission said in a news release, “which may have unintended consequences.”

Much of the moral case for bodycams, that they reduce police violence, rests on a single experiment: the 2012 Rialto study that Wagers referenced. Rialto is a city of almost 100,000 people, most of them Latino but with significant black and Pacific Islander minorities, that sits in the desert and sprawl east of Los Angeles. Its population is much smaller and more diverse than Seattle’s, its police force is much smaller and its murder rate is significantly higher. Of its 115 sworn police officers at the time of the study, 54 regularly conducted patrols, and all 54 were issued body cameras courtesy of Taser. For a full year, half of the front-line officers on a given 12-hour shift were randomly assigned to wear their cameras, while the other half served as the control. The data from nearly 1,000 shifts and 50,000 hours of police-public interactions showed that when officers wore bodycams, they were less likely to use batons, Tasers, firearms and pepper spray or to have confrontations that resulted in police-dog bites, and they were far less likely to receive civilian complaints about their conduct.

In an essay published shortly after the White House announced its $75 million in bodycam funding in 2014, two authors of the study, Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland, hypothesized that it was not cameras alone that drove the positive results; it was the fact that before every interaction with a citizen, officers in the trial were required to announce that they were recording. There may have been a “self-awareness effect”: Both parties were reminded at the moment of contact that they were under surveillance and that they should behave accordingly. One question was whether the effect would hold up if officers did not announce the cameras’ presence. Another was whether it would hold up when the cameras lost their novelty.

Ariel and Sutherland also worried about anyone basing decisions on a single study, which, no matter how rigorous, could well be a fluke, “the statistical equivalent of ‘luck,’ ” they wrote. The Rialto sample was small. The notable drop in citizen complaints, for instance, was from 28 in the yearlong period before the study to 3 while it was underway. At least 40 reasonably scientific studies have followed Rialto, but many, according to a recent survey carried out by George Mason University, have yet to be published.

Rialto suggests a drop in the use of force. A study from Arizona suggests a drop in arrests but a rise in citations. A separate Arizona study, along with one from London, suggests a rise in arrests. When Temple University researchers recently sifted through a Washington Post database of 986 deadly shootings of civilians by police in 2015, they found that when officers wore body cameras, civilians were 3.64 percent more likely to die. The increase was more pronounced, 3.75 percent, in the deaths of African-Americans and Hispanics and a barely measurable 0.67 percent in the deaths of Caucasians and Asians. They hypothesized that a different kind of self-awareness was at work: Officers, aware of their bodycams and more certain their use of deadly force would be seen as justified, were less likely to hesitate.

After Rialto, Ariel and Sutherland set out to replicate their influential study on a much larger scale, collaborating with eight large and small police departments covering two million citizens in the United States and Britain. Their resulting analysis of 2.2 million officer hours, published this May, seems to validate their concerns that Rialto offered an incomplete picture. It found that police use of force actually went up by an astonishing 71 percent when officers could turn their cameras on and off at will and went down (by 37 percent) only when they recorded nearly every interaction with the public from start to finish. A second analysis of the same data, published late last month, supports Rialto’s finding that citizen complaints drop significantly, almost to zero, when bodycams are present, while underscoring the authors’ warning that more research is needed to understand how and why and under what conditions. “It may be that in some places it’s a bad idea to use body-worn cameras,” Ariel said in announcing the May results, “and the only way you can find that out is to keep doing these tests in different kinds of places.”

The Seattle Police Department introduced its new YouTube channel, “S.P.D. BodyWornVideo,” on Feb. 23, 2015, less than two weeks after the Community Police Commission warned about unintended consequences in its news release. Featuring footage from the pilot program, with the images automatically blurred and the audio muted, it was a national first, and tens of thousands of people tuned in. The earliest videos were of Seattle’s explosive Martin Luther King Day demonstrations the previous month, and they appeared on the channel as a kind of fever dream. Protesters, rendered in fog and grayscale and digitally stripped of their voices, were mostly unrecognizable as they marched onto a freeway demanding justice for Michael Brown and were arrested and shackled on the ground and then trundled into police cruisers.

The videos didn’t shake the local opposition to bodycams, and they didn’t meet the standards of the state Public Records Act — if asked, Seattle would have to provide more precisely redacted versions — but they met a national need for positive news about the police. The YouTube channel was featured on the “Today Show,” and the department’s innovation was the subject of coverage, some skeptical and some not, by The Guardian, Vice News, “Marketplace,” “All Things Considered” and The New York Times. The tech press couldn’t get enough. One well-reported article in the online publication Backchannel called Clemans “the body-cam hacker who schooled the police.”

Wagers began receiving calls and email from departments around the country. The future of policing, he saw, was now more than ever reliant on what technology the police could afford to buy from companies like those that built modern Seattle. He pledged that Clemans’s code, once completed, would be open-source and freely shared so that smaller agencies, which didn’t have the staff to handle video-records requests, let alone the money for bundled bodycam contracts, could stay on the cutting edge. In one overredaction test, the department processed 2,400 videos in three hours on rented Amazon Web Services computers in the cloud, a task that would have gummed up the public-disclosure unit of the Seattle Police for weeks had the files been redacted manually. The computer rental cost the department $1.20 — 40 cents an hour — Wagers marveled. To meet the demands of the Public Records Act, all Clemans needed to do was get his algorithm to redact only faces and other private details, rather than the full frame.

Clemans was now an employee: The department had offered him a six-month contract at $22.60 an hour. But when the pilot program ended in July, and the question of whether to expand it loomed, he still had not perfected his code. He was trying to solve a problem, mostly by himself, that teams of professional engineers at Taser and its rivals have yet to fully crack. Distracted, he noticed other inefficiencies at Police Headquarters and he felt increasingly compelled to fix them. After visiting the understaffed 911 center, then in the news for its slow response times, he came up with a new idea: a program that automatically highlighted the most pressing calls, allowing dispatchers to be more efficient. But the captain in charge of the 911 center didn’t welcome his intrusion, and he belittled the idea at a tense late-August meeting brokered by their superiors. Clemans, by his own admission, “got really mad.” He swore at the captain. He yelled until he had to be escorted from the building. And just like that, in an echo of his Space Needle blowup, he was exiled from headquarters. He made a threat on his way out: “I’m going to P.D.R.” — public-disclosure request — “the [expletive] out of you,” he shouted.

In September 2015, when Seattle won a $600,000 Justice Department grant to expand the bodycam program to the rest of the police force, which the mayor pledged to more than match, Clemans wasn’t there to help celebrate. He was working remotely, back in his bedroom or hunched over a laptop at the Starbucks he now frequented on the 40th floor of Columbia Center, the tallest building in town, where the views were stunning and free.

Days after the grant announcement, Attorney General Loretta Lynch came to Seattle to declare it a national model for police reform. The federal monitor overseeing the consent decree, who had previously lauded the overredaction experiment when calling for rapid deployment of bodycams, now praised the department’s systematic approach to investigating any use of force — a significant change from the cursory reporting of the past. Wagers, meanwhile, was helping Chief O’Toole to select his replacement. He had by then been in Seattle and away from his wife and children for more than a year.

On Oct. 29, 2015, a week after Wagers announced he was leaving the department, Clemans texted in his own resignation. He no longer believed the department could ever truly be transparent on its own, he told me. His time inside the department, far from co-opting him, had weaponized him after his blowup with the 911 captain: He knew even better which records to request. He wrote a new bot capable of sending the department up to 10,000 requests in 24 hours. He asked for 911 records, “tables & columns of all databases,” all front-facing dashcam video from 2014 and “all computer codes written by Tim Clemans.” Over the next few days, he piled on, requesting “all roll-call notes,” text records from the department’s license-plate scanners, the source codes of key department software and “all Outlook calendars of supervisors, managers & command staff.” He also started building a website where he would publish it all, which he called the People’s NSA. He expanded his demands to include every public record in every format — paper, tape or digital — the City of Seattle had. He soon asked 39 neighboring cities for the same. By the end of 2015, according to a study on public-records requests he obtained via a public-records request, Clemans had filed 2,272 requests to the Seattle Police Department alone, making him again its No. 1 antagonist. One day at her office, Mary Perry showed me a printout of the latest ones, five pages long. “We’re being crippled,” she said. Wagers was on his way home, Clemans was making more demands than ever and she was back where she started.

This summer, I joined Clemans at a Black Lives Matter march in Seattle. He was there to watch the police as protesters demanded justice for Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, whose deaths were captured not by bodycams but by citizens’ phones. His overredaction code was about to be revived. Wagers had taken a job at the Virginia offices of Amazon Web Services, the hidden architecture behind America’s police-video revolution, where he was contacted by a company that wanted to merge Clemans’s software with the website crimereports.com. Now, a prototype was in the works, with support and partial funding from Amazon.

Searching for blurred video of a crime down your block may someday be as easy as searching for a restaurant on Google Maps. But a new state law making footage harder to request in bulk — the Tim Clemans Act, his friends called it — had just gone into effect thanks to the efforts of Poulsbo, the small town that had contacted its state representative. Clemans had also been studying YouTube’s privacy policy, and he would soon decide to remove the videos he posted there from public view. For now, though, he wore his own D.I.Y. bodycam, a cellphone strapped to a chest harness, and was streaming live to the internet as he followed the protesters and the police on a borrowed bicycle.

The protesters gathered outside the department’s East Precinct. An old man, homeless, busking below a mural, quickly collected his things before any violence could break out. But none did. According to the judge who would preside over the latest consent-decree hearing a few weeks later, notably saying the words “black lives matter” from the bench, the department was making steady strides toward an exit from federal oversight: Its de-escalation tactics were a national model, he said, and its use of force was substantially down. He never mentioned bodycams.

As the light drained from the sky, I watched a bicycle officer help Clemans pump up his tires and fix his brakes. Young black women and men took turns at the bullhorn, their voices loud, their demand — stop killing us — clear, and the officers hung back. The only people filming anything were the other activists. Fifteen months after its pilot program ended, Seattle has yet to agree on its answer to the simple question about bodycams: Whom do they serve?

First published in The New York Times Magazine.

Bollywood Goes to War

The Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association is an industry group with no standing to speak for anyone but its members. Yet it made itself widely heard recently, and became headline news, when it banned Pakistanis from working in Bollywood films — “forever.”

Its stated goal was to express solidarity for India’s armed forces, which conducted targeted strikes against Pakistan late last month, after jihadists from the Pakistan-based group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 19 Indian soldiers at an army base in Uri in Kashmir.

The strikes against Pakistan were met with cheers in India. The hashtag #UriAvenged trended on Twitter. On the cable news channel India Today — on a set with maps, sandbags and machine guns — an anchor glorified the reprisals as “the most audacious special forces assault this country has ever executed.”

This isn’t the first time terrorists from Pakistan have hit India. In January, Jaish militants infiltrated an air base in Punjab State, killing seven Indian soldiers. Another Pakistan-based militant group carried out deadly attacks in Mumbai in 2006 and 2008.

And it isn’t the first time India has hit back. It also isn’t the first time that Bollywood, in a surge of misdirected nationalism, has boycotted Pakistanis. But this effort may be its most high-profile, and its most pointless.

I asked T.P. Aggarwal, the president of the producers’ association, how many Pakistanis worked in India’s multibillion-dollar film industry. “Around 12,” he said.

This is what happens after years of relentless antagonism between neighbors. Indians get angry at Pakistanis, generically, rather than at Pakistan’s jihadists, its military or its government. And all manner of opportunists ride that jingoistic sentiment.

The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena is a right-wing party in Mumbai infamous for using violence to intimidate outsiders — typically poor street vendors and laborers it claims are out to steal jobs from locals. After the Bollywood ban, the party threatened to give Pakistani actors “a thrashing” if they didn’t leave the country within 48 hours.

At one time, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena stood out for its brutish behavior. Now it is in lockstep with the government: Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came into power in 2014, India has embraced hyper-nationalist rhetoric.

While invoking the country’s honor, Indian politicians are pandering to their vote banks, in some cases by indulging their dislike of Muslims. One week after the producers’ call to ban Pakistani actors, a local party in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, prevented an Indian Muslim Bollywood star from participating in a play about the Hindu Ramayana epic.

Famous actors are easy prey. They are widely adored but also widely envied, and reliant on their audience to make their films a success. Hence, in India at least, they tend to avoid political discourse. In 2015, when the Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan broke the mold to condemn growing intolerance toward liberal voices, a prominent politician threatened to kill him.

At a press conference last month, another film star, Salman Khan, spoke out against the recent ban. A TV anchor at Times Now, India’s version of Fox News, demanded to know why the star’s Pakistani “friends” didn’t condemn terrorist attacks on India.

The anchor homed in on Fawad Khan, a Pakistani actor and singer popular in India. After noting that Mr. Khan had issued a statement about a terrorist attack in Peshawar, the anchor asked why Mr. Khan did “not say one word” for the Indian soldiers killed in Uri.

The self-defeating nature of these knee-jerk reactions quickly became evident.

Just one week after the Bollywood ban, the producers’ association had to beg the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena not to vandalize theaters screening films with Pakistani actors. “It’s the money of Indians that is at stake,” Mr. Aggarwal, the group’s president, pleaded.

And though all the bluster is meant to pander to the public, it isn’t even an accurate reflection of middle-class attitudes toward, say, the armed forces.

Some fetishize Indian soldiers in Kashmir as “bravehearts.” Some laud the revenge strikes against Pakistan. But their war cries seem to be about territorial interests and symbolism rather than genuine concern for the lives of those who protect our country.

The disappearance in July of a military aircraft over the Bay of Bengal hardly seemed to register then. When the 29 people onboard were declared “presumed dead” last month, the news passed virtually without comment.

The Indian government’s hypocrisy is starker still.

“We are proud of their sacrifices,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared of the soldiers killed in Uri. Yet within days of the retaliatory strikes, the government quietly slashed the pensions of army personnel injured during service.

“ ‘Shocked’ is an understatement to describe what we feel,” a top general told the Business Standard newspaper. “The Ministry of Defense has stabbed us in the back.”

That’s no Bollywood ending.

First published in The New York Times.

Photo by Adam Jones.

Deforestation in Peacetime, Sri Lanka

At a small banana farm outside Eluvankulam, a west coast town in Sri Lanka, 60-year-old Rajah Inguruwatlege recently cleared away at least 10 acres of forest. The land belongs to him, and the action was completely legal. Few in Sri Lanka would begrudge him, even though it scrapes a tiny bit more native tree cover from this verdant island. His biggest problem, in fact, is the roaming elephants—increasingly chased out of their native habitat by deforestation.

“I have an electric fence, but it doesn’t have enough power to keep them away,” he says. “The neighbors haven’t cleared their land so I can’t see them coming. Nobody is making any effort to change it.”

Inguruwatlege was holding a paper tube of dynamite as he spoke. The jerry-built charge—distributed by the national Forest Department—was not intended to hurt the elephants but to create a deep bass explosion that frightens them away and keeps them from trampling the crops. He tries to avoid yelling at the stray pachyderms because he believes it only riles them up. The best strategy, he says, is to ask them politely to leave and keep tossing the dynamite.

This is only one front in the slow-moving push to defoliate Sri Lanka since 2009, when a three-decade civil war pitting the government against a band of Tamil-speaking rebels came to an end. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) were the bloodthirsty inventors of suicide bombing as a military tactic, but they had strict rules against cutting down trees, mainly because the forest gave them cover for guerilla activities. Government forces cleared some patches but were generally reluctant to launch Vietnam-style napalm or herbicide raids against their own land. The war perversely kept Sri Lanka’s trees, if not human lives, in a state of preservation.

In the last seven years of peacetime and an improving economy, however, more farmers like Inguruwatlege hope to expand their holdings, and more small-scale loggers are taking down mahogany trees one by one for a little extra household profit. Collecting household firewood from public forests is legal, which also creates a loophole for those looking to take more than they should. Each individual case of thievery is small by comparison, but the cumulative effect of the post-war prosperity on the forests across the island has been noteworthy. According to a United Nations report, Sri Lanka now has a tree cover of 29.7 percent, down from nearly 70 percent in the early 1800s. Under British colonial rule in the following decades, vast carpets of forest that used to cover nearly three-quarters of the island were cleared to grow the famous Ceylon tea. Less than 1.5 percent of this original growth remains.

About 7,000 hectares (17,297 acres) continue to disappear each year. Satellite photos tell a story of green cover being chipped away by dribs and drabs with no one locus of destruction—much like a case of low-grade measles. Experts cite the small-scale agricultural encroachments as the major cause, followed by big infrastructure projects like a series of dams being built by Chinese companies in the center of the island. A good portion of the “green cover” on the island now comes from artificial growth like coconut or rubber plantations, plus the myriad household gardens that speckle the countryside. They appear lush, but they mask the loss of the giant artocarpus heterophyllus and myristica fragrans that help give habitat to more than 3,500 species of flowering plants and 160 kinds of reptiles.

The deforestation doesn’t just kill other plants and send more elephants wandering. It creates bald patches of soil on the hillsides, which in turn causes landslides and sheets of water cascading through villages during the summer monsoons. Rivers are running slower and lower because of the buildup of sediment in their channels. “What we have is a collective effect of flooding caused by deforestation,” says Ananda Mallawatantri, the country representative for the group IUCN.

What seems clear to the advocates working on the problem is that passing more laws isn’t the answer. A good part of the loss of green cover is happening on private lands like Inguruwatlege’s banana farm, where the government can’t dictate terms. And there are already detailed guidelines on which public lands can be farmed or logged, and under what terms.

“We have excellent deforestation laws in Sri Lanka. They are comprehensive,” says Professor Praveen Abhayaratne, the coordinator of the Federation of Environmental Organizations. “The issue is the implementation on the local level. It’s weak because of lack of capacity, as well as the corruption. The simple answer is to enforce the law. That’s why fixing this problem is so tough.”

Lack of political will can be aggravated by an even more human factor: local officials sympathetic to poor farmers for whom an extra bit of cropland can make a huge difference in feeding their families. An extra half acre of tea, for example, makes a family relatively wealthy. The police are said to rely on anonymous tips from local observers to ferret out land piracy, but neighbors can be reluctant to snitch on one another. Over time, the bald patches add up. “You don’t think one farmer clearing half an acre is going to have an impact,” Abhayaratne says. “But over time, it does.”

At the federal forest department, housed in a sweltering motel-like structure near the national parliament, officials agree that much more could be done to prevent trees from being bulldozed or planed into boards. But they insist they have plans to bring the tree cover back to 32 percent, a goal readjusted from the initial call of 35 percent cited in the UN report. They plan to get there through better monitoring of forest fires, though there is no specific plan to increase the budget for local oversight of illegal land clearing.

“We have the manpower. The military helps us, if necessary,” says Sarath Kulatunga, who as the Additional Conservator General is the second-in-command of the department.

He also denied the frequently levied charge that the government is in the bad habit of strategically “releasing” public forest property for development as favors to local potentates. “Requests are coming,” he acknowledges. “But that’s not a problem. We don’t feel much pressure from politicians. This subject belongs to the president of Sri Lanka.”

The new administration, led by President Maithripala Sirisena, has signaled a cutback in the types of massive, foreign-funded megaprojects—like a useless and empty new airport south of the capital city of Colombo—that were a dismal feature of the previous regime led by Mahinda Rajapaksa. His go-fast development program helped create jobs but raised multiple questions about improper payments and caused the destruction of tens of thousands of old-growth trees.

One of those projects he approved was the massive Sino-Hydro dam near Moragahakanda, part of the reported $5 billion that China poured into the South Asian island following the end of the civil war in 2009. Up and down the valley of the Amban River, which the large gravity dam is built to flood, selected acres of forest have been taken down to accommodate the roads and new settlements created by the project and the anticipated boom in real estate. Command-style irrigation like this is a major historic cause of deforestation, according to the UN researchers.

“When the government changes, the policy changes and few politicians really support environmental goals,” says Chamila Weerathunghe, the chief operating officer of the Environment Foundation Ltd. “Government has to please people to stay in power. They are after short-term gains. Slowly we are moving toward destruction.”

Her foundation is in the business of suing individuals and government agencies that encroach on the forests. To date, they have brought more than 400 legal cases but have not made the kinds of gains that stop the bite-size land grabs that pose the biggest threat.

But in those rare cases involving large-scale defoliators, political pressures can be even more effective than legal challenges. After international environmental groups—and reportedly, the U.S. embassy—mounted a protest, the Dole corporation stopped clearing acreage near Somawathiya National Park to plant more bananas. The project would have displaced approximately 400 elephants. Another project to build new villages for Muslims who were displaced during the civil war was halted by the president last year after newspapers reported the project involved massive deforestation inside Wilpattu Jungle Reserve.

That project is close to Rajah Inguruwatlege’s banana farm on Holcin Road, which is in turn nearby a cleared patch of ground where a small village once stood next to a forest. The inhabitants of that town were almost all killed on a night in July 1996 when a band of LTTE fighters—almost all teenagers—crept in to launch a raid to punish some alleged government informers.

A man named Nihal Hetliarachilaye Appahamy remembers that evening. He was coming home from a volleyball game in a nearby town. Light from the setting sun was on his shoulders as he drank with his friends. When the fighters burst into the house he shared with his wife and two children, he had no choice but to let them tie everyone up. One of the thugs ate the dinner of fried eel on the table; another stole his volleyball uniform. He recognized one of the invaders as a childhood friend. Appahamy was able to burst free from the ropes, grab his three-month-old son and run to a nearby police station for help. When he returned, he discovered his wife and child had been killed.

Bloodthirsty acts like this happened all over the north and central regions of the country during the war, but there is nothing left to commemorate this particular attack except a cleared patch of ground where watermelons will soon be planted. On a recent summer afternoon, a local man named K.S. Rames pointed to where the attack had taken place. One of the only other survivors, a diabetic man with no legs, was allowed to crawl away with a small boy smuggled in the wraps of his clothing.

Rames stopped abruptly in telling this story and cocked his ear toward a remaining patch of trees to the west, where the sound of rustling was barely discernable. Without another word, he rushed over to his three-wheeled rickshaw and scooted it down the path and away from the possible charge of an elephant coming his way. While generally placid, elephants have been known to get upset at provocations and rush toward their aggressors with uncompromising force. These “human-elephant conflicts”—the official term used by the Department of Forests—are fatal to an average of 50 people and 100 elephants every year.

Today, though, this elephant was in no mood for trouble. Rames identified her as a female and watched as she mooned around what remained of the 100-year-old forest on the edge of Inguruwatlege’s banana planation. Her eyes were dark as marbles. The banana plantation would only grow, Inguruwatlege had said, and by the following year he hoped to double the acreage under cultivation.

First published in Sierra.

Colombia’s War Just Ended. A New Wave of Violence Is Beginning.

They killed him on this very road, Liney Maria recalls, pointing to the dusty, unpaved trail that passes her home and continues a quarter mile farther up the mountain. He was shot in broad daylight, right on the main avenue of the barrio de invasión, as informal settlements like this one are called. His death was the third or fourth targeted killing in July; she lost count. Nor does Maria remember meeting the victim very often in life. But the 37-year-old mother is well-acquainted with the fear these murders are meant to instill.

“The things that are happening here, these deaths,” she said, “are causing a lot of concern in the neighborhood.” Families close to the victims have fled, fearing they could be next. The warnings, like the gunshots, are heard loud and clear.

Maria runs a bakery out of her home, raises her three children, and tries not to think about the troubles outside the padlocked metal door that secures her compound. Built with concrete bricks and lit with single dangling lightbulbs in each of its four rooms, hers is among the more permanent buildings in Altos de la Florida. This invasión and a half-dozen other informal settlements line the hills surrounding the city of Soacha. Like 40 percent of the population here, Maria came to Altos after being displaced in Colombia’s half-century-old internal war. She fled her rural home on the coast for the promise of the city — downtown Bogotá sits just 12 miles from Altos.

In the 20 years since she arrived, it has often felt like the tree that overlooks the invasión — the árbol de amor, or “tree of love” — is the only thing rooted on solid ground. Soacha and its environs have swelled from a quarter-million people to an estimated 1 million inhabitants as internally displaced Colombians have arrived. Altos, a neighborhood of 2,500, has been dominated in turn by nearly every armed actor in the country’s recent history — guerrillas, paramilitaries, and countless criminal bands. The only ones who have never controlled Altos are the police.

On Wednesday night, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos proclaimed his country’s conflict “over.” The government has finalized a peace deal with the largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), for the guerrillas to lay down their arms, give up their drug trade, and reintegrate into civilian life. Negotiated over four years in Havana, Cuba, the agreement must now be ratified in a nonbinding national plebiscite and in Congress, where it faces political opposition. Most expect it to go ahead; a U.N. mission is already on the ground to monitor implementation.

But the jubilation 12 miles away in Bogotá — where banners proclaiming “Sí, a la Paz!” (“Yes, to peace!”) line the main roads — seems very far from Altos, which is still contested ground. There are at least three armed groups fighting to control the invasión’s two unpaved main streets, its drug trafficking corridors, and the recruitment of disaffected local boys and girls as young as 10. If those groups have names, no one knows them; if they have an ideology, they’ve haven’t articulated it. All anyone here knows is that when they kill, like they did on that main road, it means there’s a new tussle to run the neighborhood.

No one expects the peace deal to change anything in Altos — or the many more places like it across Colombia. Of course, in many areas, the agreement could bring some relief. For decades, the FARC has dominated the drug trade and controlled swaths of territory; it has forcibly recruited children, seized illegal mines, and carried out all manner of terrorist attacks. But Colombia’s conflict has a multitude of actors, and the FARC is just one. Even if the guerrillas disband quickly and quietly, their illicit economy — and the bloodshed it generates — is too lucrative and tempting to disappear anytime soon.

The reason is on display in neighborhoods like this one, with no water, no public services, and no formal economy. What Altos has is turf — space with no rule of law, ample cheap recruits, and a thriving drug trafficking network. As the FARC lays down its guns and gives up the illegal narcotics trade, new and old armed organizations are scrambling to take over forfeited ground. Unlike the Marxist guerrillas, the majority of these groups have no clear political aims. They prefer buying allegiance over attacking the state militarily, as the FARC has done since 1964. They would rather lurk on the margins and profit from the spaces like Altos that are easy to forget in Bogotá. Most residents of the capital city have never been to Soacha, let alone its invasións.

“This may be the future of crime in Colombia,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). “These groups are hard to fight because they don’t want to fight. They would much rather bribe and penetrate.”

The government has promised to shift resources to fight these other armed groups, now that it isn’t targeting the FARC. But as Colombia’s leaders declare peace and move on, building a new national image and economy, the risk is that the ongoing violence sinks into invisibility, where it will grow sharper and more entrenched — forgotten to all but those who live its daily reality.

There is a story of successful peace in Colombia, and it’s written in places like Olgar Duque’s country home, in the rural mountains of San Carlos municipality 250 miles from Soacha. For years, the lush crops of coffee, cacao, and citrus trees here withered into disarray, as 80 percent of the population fled and armed groups patrolled the dirt highway. Today, nearly all the displaced have returned, and the countryside is productive again. “The tranquility we have now, I wouldn’t trade for anything,” Duque said over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, laid by chickens raised on his farm.

At 34, Duque wears the high leather boots and cane-fiber hat typical of farmers here. But it’s only recently that he had the luxury of agriculture. When he turned 18, FARC guerrillas recruited him to join, as all his high school friends had done; Duque signed up for a two-year military service instead. By the time he finished, anti-FARC paramilitaries had swept through San Carlos. The paramilitaries, begun as local defense corps meant to chase out guerrillas, had quickly turned to the same violent tactics of the enemy — killing, disappearing, and displacing the civilian community. Duque helped his parents flee. “They couldn’t take anything with them, only the clothes on their back,” he recalls now. The family moved to Santiago de Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, and scrambled together a living with odd jobs.

By the late 2000s, Colombia’s military had retaken control of much of San Carlos, and former residents like Duque started to trickle back. He found his home near-collapse and the fields gone fallow; he devoted back-breaking hours trying to rebuild. Then, three years ago, Duque got word that he would benefit from a government program meant to help displaced victims return. The Land Restitution Unit (URT) funded Duque’s expansion from coffee into egg and dairy production. “We are where we were before, or maybe even a little better,” he said.

San Carlos is touted by the government as an example of what is possible after a peace deal is signed. The municipality’s population has almost recovered to prewar levels, and the restitution program has helped more than 300 families. The formula that worked here is roughly the same one being negotiated in Havana: Armed actors give way to police; the displaced return home; and state institutions pour in to help.

“If they sign the peace deal, what you’re seeing here in San Carlos will take place in areas of the country where, at the moment, it is not possible” because of armed groups, including the FARC, said Ricardo Sabogal Urrego, URT’s director.

Residents of San Carlos gather for an event sponsored by the Colombian Land Restitution Unit. (Photo by ELIZABETH DICKINSON)

Sabogal says the next success story could come from Colombia’s most complicated departments (similar to U.S. states) — Meta, Cauca, Nariño — which are also FARC strongholds. If the peace deal is ratified, analysts expect the majority of FARC battalions to disarm. The guerrillas’ military structure will give way to a political party, with the right to participate in elections and some guaranteed seats in Congress. Most members will get amnesty if they speak before a truth commission, and maximum sentences are capped at 20 years.

So alluring are the terms that other armed groups are queuing up for negotiations. The largest of these is the National Liberation Army (ELN), which, at several thousand fighters, is the only other major leftist guerrilla movement with a clear ideology and military structure. The group’s leadership has said it wants talks, though it has shown little willingness to halt activities like kidnapping, which the government insists would be a precondition.

But with the FARC agreeing to a historic peace deal, the ELN may have more to gain by holding onto its guns. It and a range of other nonstate groups are now vying for control of former FARC dominions.

“What happens when you alter the balance of power where organized crime is very strong? When you take out whoever was in charge, there’s a free-for-all to determine who the next [one in charge] will be,” said Isacson of WOLA. “You can see that competition happening where the FARC [was] the big dog before.”

An array of criminal bands — known colloquially as the Bacrim — is now pushing toward guerrilla strongholds, murdering and displacing civilians along the way. Just days before the peace agreement was finalized, María Emilsen Angulo Guevara, the mayor of Tumaco, a municipality with a long guerrilla presence, wrote to President Santos in a plea for help combating a new armed group, “which aspires to continue the extortions and drug trafficking.” Absent help from Bogotá, Emilsen described a “cruel, bleak outlook” for her town.

 

Most Bacrim groups emerged from Colombia’s last attempt to negotiate a measure of peace. In 2003, paramilitary groups agreed to demobilize in exchange for limited immunity. The leaders of the so-called United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) were jailed, and many combatants demobilized. But bits of their lower-tiered networks focused on drug trafficking and illegal mining remained intact. In the lawless pockets of this resource-wealthy country, those armed networks stripped away their political ideologies and doubled down on business.

Today, large groups with names such as the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (also called Clan Úsuga or Clan del Golfo), the Rastrojos, and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL) boast several thousands of members and hold territorial control over key trafficking corridors. Others, like the groups in Altos, are mere bit players in an illicit organized crime network that few can disentangle.

Bacrim groups have been present in roughly 10 percent of Colombia’s municipalities since 2009. Today, they see growth opportunities in the FARC peace talks — for one, the chance to claim pieces of the illicit economy that the guerrillas have long controlled.

Of prime interest are drug trafficking corridors. The FARC has long been one of the largest movers of cocaine through Colombia. Along the country’s nearly 1,400-mile border with Venezuela, rivalries between armed actors have escalated, said Yadira Galeano, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s office in the border town of Cúcuta. “With the conversations in Havana, it has reconfigured the conflict,” she said.

Her office tries to keep tabs on who runs what territory. These days, control is so fluid it’s impossible. “The routes that were controlled by the FARC have started to be co-opted by other groups,” Galeano said. “What they say is that the FARC is selling their routes to all these [Bacrim] groups.”

That may not be all the guerrillas are selling. Weapons, too, may be slipping onto the black market, said Eduardo Álvarez Vanegas, the coordinator for the study of conflict dynamics and peace talks at the Bogotá-based Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP). The FARC is estimated to hold some 45,000 arms, including 20,000 large munitions. At least some combatants may prefer to sell their best pieces and give up rusted guns through the official demilitarization process, meant to take place in the first 180 days of the agreement.

And drugs? Fumigation has slowed for half a decade and was formally halted last year. Cultivation of coca — the raw material of cocaine — rose 39 percent in 2015, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The FARC controlled 70 percent of those crops in the past, and competition to replace the group is fierce. “Everything is dominion and control,” said Rev. Francesco Bortignon, a Catholic missionary priest who has lived and worked along the border with Venezuela for 37 years. “When you’re producing so much, it has to move.”

But perhaps the most urgent hustle in any post-conflict state may be for bodies. Critics of the agreement say other groups are already trying to poach the best, most knowledgeable FARC combatants for their own operations. “There are going to be members of FARC who change to ELN. Others will be recruited to other groups such as the Clan del Golfo,” said Iván Duque, an opposition senator who fears the agreement will be the “midwife of new forms of violence” for years to come.

One possible source of leakage in the demobilization process would come from the thousands of urban militiamen the FARC relies upon to provide support. Some are armed; others have innocuous tasks such as buying supplies. Although the guerrillas have promised to demobilize the militias, many are outside the organization’s disciplined military hierarchy and may not comply. Even among the rank and file, some FARC members will inevitably slip back into crime. A successful demobilization program here will be expected to have a reincidence rate of between 25 and 35 percent, said Sergio Guarín, the coordinator for post-conflict affairs and peace building at FIP. With the FARC’s estimated 7,500 members and 10,000 militia operatives, that could mean thousands of dropouts.

Then there are the FARC battalions that don’t comply. The organization’s “First Front,” which infamously held politician Ingrid Betancourt hostage for more than six years, said this summer that it would continue an armed struggle against the state. Though just 200 fighters strong, the First Front is a giant in the drug trade and has become one of the group’s largest revenue generators.

This isn’t the way the government tells it. Since peace talks began in Havana, Colombia appears quieter than ever. In 2015, homicides, kidnappings, and large-scale acts of terrorism — hallmarks of the conflict in the past — dropped to their lowest levels since 2007, according to Defense Ministry statistics. If a deal is signed, Colombia’s security forces hope they could focus all their strength on organized crime. “We would be left only with the fight against the Bacrim, which is a better situation,” said Victor Bautista, the Foreign Ministry official responsible for border issues, including the illicit economy.

Yet, by the Defense Ministry’s own analysis, many Bacrim aren’t just criminal gangs anymore. On April 22, the ministry issued Directive 15, transferring the fight from the police to the military because, in many cases, Bacrim groups “meet the standards of an organized armed group,” according to the document.

Human rights groups say Directive 15 effectively admits that the Bacrim are party to the armed conflict. Other institutions of the state are now acting on the same assumption. Victims of Bacrim groups are now eligible for government reparations just as those of the FARC are. Child recruits who leave Bacrim groups are able to participate in the same reintegration program.

All the levers of the state seem to be saying that the closer to peace Colombia has gotten, the more powerful the criminal bands have become. “We are in a transition in the armed conflict. One armed group that has always had its dominion today is reducing its actions because of the peace process,” said one human rights lawyer working with the government, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “That means that other groups are gaining force.”

Even in quiet San Carlos, there are whispers of trouble. At a recent government colloquium in the town center, citizens spoke of small-time molestations. One had received phone calls from an unknown person demanding money — an attempt at extortion. Several coffee farmers said armed individuals had stopped their trucks on the highway, stealing the crops inside.

“We are afraid,” said Edwin Lopez, a 31-year-old coffee farmer in San Carlos, whose beans were looted en route to market last November. “In order for Colombia to advance peace, it’s not just what they sign in Havana but with everyone.”

 

This is the pitch Lyda Becerra has seen work time and time again in Altos: You’ve just been displaced from your home, and you’re new here; you’re not studying; you’re traumatized by the conflict. Come with us and you’ll feel better, the armed groups say. You can sell drugs, use them, or why not both?

“These spaces are very easy to convince children and youth to consume,” Becerra said from the Soacha office where she leads Kairós, a local nonprofit. The handful of teenage boys who scurry about offering coffee to guests are former drug-addicted youth from the invasións.

Altos is just one of the hundreds of neighborhoods across this country that are ripe for armed groups. Young men wander aimlessly amid the scattered shacks and cluster in a few dilapidated pubs. Officially, unemployment is around 22 percent, but some 70 percent of the population lives on the informal economy. The “ni ni generation” — ni escuela ni trabajo (neither school nor work) — makes for perfect recruits. Starting from as young as 10, Bacrim groups have today overtaken the FARC and ELN as the largest recruiters of children. Recently, some groups have also moved into the business of child prostitution, according to the government ombudsman.

Once in the ranks of an organization, killing is cheap and careless. Maybe someone refused to let their son join; maybe someone complained to the police, some of whom are on the armed groups’ payrolls, according to Becerra. None of the five targeted killings that took place in Altos in the month leading up to Foreign Policy’s visit on Aug. 2 was reported in the newspapers or is likely to show up in homicide statistics.

A man stands outside in Altos de la Florida, where five targeted killings took place this July. (Photo by ELIZABETH DICKINSON)

Instead, the whispers of trouble are visible on the margins of the conflict. Across Colombia, there were roughly five times more cases of extortion in 2015, at 5,480, compared with 2007, Defense Ministry statistics show. Internal displacement is down, but 1,500 people still flee their homes every month, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That may accelerate if Bacrim groups and the ELN push into former FARC areas.

“[Bacrim-style groups] are already responsible for almost 50 percent of human rights violations, and that will further increase,” said Martin Gottwald, the U.N. refugee agency’s country representative for Colombia. “Their modus operandi is different. It’s not that they’re arriving with big operations and armies and flags; they are actually operating in an invisible manner.”

The Bacrim are at times so indecipherable that even residents under their dominion struggle to understand what’s happening. In 2015, for example, targeted killings of human rights activists rose 13 percent from 2014. Of the 63 total deaths, 51 were attributed to “unknown” actors. Analysts say many of those killed ran up against the economic interests of organized armed groups, for example, by advocating for indigenous land rights or community security.

Their error was simple: They got in the way.

 

As she walked down Altos’s main dirt road recounting the latest murder, Liney Maria spoke quickly. She wanted to excuse herself, she explained: The water truck was coming. If she missed it, another 20 days might pass before it returned. “I have to be ready,” she said as she slipped back home.

The residents here have a joke to explain their lack and poor quality of services. Bogotá’s neighborhoods are divided into six “strata” based on their wealth; higher strata pay more for utilities to help subsidize the lower ranks. Altos, they say, pays strata six (the highest) prices while on the strata map it doesn’t even exist. Maria’s barrel of water would cost 1,800 pesos (63 cents) — nearly three times the price someone with running water in the lowest income strata would pay.

Even if the armed groups here fade away, the second half of Colombia’s peace formula may be out of reach: The state is meant to step up. Much has to be done before the process can even begin. The government faces significant political opposition and divided public opinion over the deal — obstacles that could derail implementation or at least slow down passage of the tax reform needed to fund it. Plus, in the vast majority of areas where the conflict with the FARC and other armed groups persists, it’s not that the government was chased out; it never existed.

Soacha should be a low-hanging fruit. If you left the presidential palace, Casa de Nariño, before morning traffic, Altos would be just a 30-minute drive away. And yet, since it first mushroomed with newly displaced arrivals in the 1990s, no administration has bothered to provide even the most basic public goods, let alone security.

“Altos is a place where the municipality only goes when there is an inauguration or an opening of a new school,” Becerra said. “It’s an act of show.”

How much farther away are the places most affected by this country’s ongoing conflict — the far-flung corners of the impoverished Pacific coast where Maria grew up, the Amazon jungle where armed groups expel indigenous people from their lands, or the chaotic border region where cocaine slips into a transnational pipeline to Europe and the United States. There is Chocó, a neglected coastal department, where more than 6,000 mostly Afro-indigenous people fled in May amid fighting between armed groups. Or Catatumbo, near the Venezuelan border, where two Bacrim groups are fighting to control contraband trade and one in five inhabitants is a victim of armed conflict.

One analysis of the government’s thinking is realism: “They know that there are certain areas where it will be very difficult to implement” the peace agreement, said Álvarez, of the Bogotá-based FIP. “But there are other zones where it can work.”

Yet if the “start somewhere” logic finds footing in places like San Carlos, it stumbles on the unpaved roads of so many places elsewhere, where residents wonder if the state will ever remember — once it has proclaimed peace — to come back for them.

First published in Foreign Policy .

Why reporting on refugee crises requires empathy for mental health issues

Zozan Qerani, 23, a Yazidi Kurd from Iraq’s Sinjar region, had just shared with me her medical records, in which a Greek doctor diagnosed her with depression, anxiety, and episodes of “conscious psychosis,” when she fainted and then started convulsing. This was three weeks ago at a Greek refugee camp. I was talking with Qerani about psychological services for residents when the seizure hit. Later, doctors confirmed that the stress of the interview had likely provoked it.

As the ongoing refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe stretches into its second year, it is nearly impossible to cover the story without talking to sources who are under enormous stress. That often means diagnosing someone’s fitness to speak safely, a role for which most reporters aren’t trained.

But if we don’t ask people like Qerani to talk frankly, and on the record, then the story of more than 600,000 people estimated to be suffering serious mental trauma, including suicide risk, and the strain they’ve placed on medical systems across the continent, quickly becomes impossible to cover. Lacking the kind of eyewitness evidence refugee testimonies provide, there’s nothing to report, and editors and readers will tire of the story.

The scope of the mental health problems among refugees is staggering: at least half of the more than 1.2 million new refugees to Europe needed treatment for depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a September study by Germany’s Federal Chamber of Psychotherapists.

Faced with a 50 percent chance that a source may be grappling with a stress disorder, reporters covering the refugee crisis face a number of ethical quandaries, foremost the need to consider a source’s health, the meaning of “consent” given by someone grappling with mental anguish, and the accuracy of firsthand accounts from people still traumatized by the events they are describing.

“What we’ve learned about people experiencing trauma is you can’t take what they say at face value,” Mike Jempson, director of MediaWise, a UK media watchdog that often works with reporters and sources on covering trauma, told me by phone after I’d returned from Greece.

“It happens every day,” her husband Atoo said matter-of-factly amid her seizure, and Zozan confirmed this later.

In Zozan Qerani’s case, I was asking a person diagnosed with a profound stress disorder to talk about the emotional, violent events that caused that stress. I found myself wondering if a reporter’s standards were enough, or whether my lack of psychological training would cause me to miss something important in the conversation. “You can’t be sure that what you’re hearing is strictly, factually accurate,” Jempson says.

Then I had to verify those events, or at least verify that she believed them enough to cause herself harm. Even more than most people, trauma sufferers’ painful connection to an event can cause them to leave important details out, often without realizing it, even if the subject is not intentionally lying, Jempson says. “You either have to not do the interview, or you have to circumscribe what they say.”

Consent to share information, and communicating what consent means, is also a common problem for those covering the vast refugee story. In a recent summary of its coverage of the migration story, “Covering a Crisis,” Magnum Photo devoted a section of the project website to “Theory and Practice,” discussing the particular challenges of telling these stories. The package quotes the director of Amnesty International’s program on refugees and migrants, Steve Symonds: “We’re very cautious at Amnesty to avoid the use of images where we think people—dead or alive—are robbed of their agency and presented merely as victims. It becomes extremely difficult to engage with someone about what the consequences of giving their image or story might be before they have got to a destination, before they have resolved the circumstance that has driven them to be on the move.”

In Lesbos, the terms of my interview had been established before beginning. I told them I was writing for TakePart, a website published in Los Angeles. Qerani and her husband Atoo, 28, who translated his wife’s Kurdish, are unofficial leaders of a small Yazidi community in a camp of about 900 people. Both had experience speaking to international press, and they knew I intended to ask personal questions, publish their answers, and that a photographer would take pictures of them. They said okay.

But I soon had second thoughts. A few minutes into the discussion, I’d noticed a four-inch scar on Qerani’s wrist, which she had not advertised but also not hidden. She confirmed that it was from a recent suicide attempt. (A doctor familiar with her case, speaking on background, would later confirm the attempt was life-threatening, and not her first.)

Do you stop the interview right there? I felt my questions grow vaguer. But Qerani stuck with it, speaking in detail of her anxiety attacks, and claiming they’d begun after she’d witnessed war crimes in northern Iraq, where her Kurdish town fell to ISIS militias in 2014.

Then, about a half hour into the discussion, she fainted, broke into convulsions, wailed wrenchingly, and tried to strangle herself with her own hands, which her husband pried back one finger at a time.

Who decides who is fit to speak to the press? Even after the seizure, which lasted about 15 minutes, she once more confirmed she wanted to be on the record, agreed I could describe the seizure in the story, and let the photographer shoot pictures of the aftermath of the attack.

Later, the photographer and I talked about how to balance Qerani’s diagnosis of frequent psychotic breaks with her ability to consent, her own agency and right to make decisions for herself, and the incident’s role in the story. Could we leave her out and still report the story?

The value of her story was clear to me. Other than the now nine-month-old German study, which predated the peak of last fall’s refugee flows through Greece, few health statistics exist for Europe’s massive refugee community. Swedish research this past March reached conclusions similar to those of the German investigation, and with nothing new to say, generated less press. The lack of data has made firsthand testimonials by sufferers like Zozan Qerani essential to reporting the ongoing story. We decided to use it.

Even with consent, focusing the story on Zozan—the “bridge figure” approach, in which a single person’s dramatic experience is used to capture a broader problem—gave me pause.

Even so, it was important to know whether Qerani had really thought through her “yes,” when I asked permission to publish private details of her medical condition on a website with a monthly readership of about 10 million, in a language she doesn’t understand. I was also concerned about the fact that her husband, surely not a disinterested party, had acted as her translator and might have downplayed the potential significance of the interview when asking for her consent.

Concerned that she’d regret her decision, I got in touch with the husband Atoo, who speaks English, by instant message. I explained to him once more that I was going to write about Zozan’s illness and detail the attack we’d witnessed.

Atoo said he’d check with her again, and later replied that she’d said she understood and was fine with it. I had to trust him, and I did. I wrote the story, leading with Qerani’s depression after her flight from Iraq.

Even with consent, focusing the story on Zozan—the “bridge figure” approach, in which a single person’s dramatic experience is used to capture a broader problem—gave me pause. Explaining the vast PTSD crisis through one person’s life has become a trope in coverage of refugees and mental health. It’s the only clear way to address a story too serious to ignore, but one that hasn’t changed much in the nine months since the landmark German study, and is a tough sell to editors without a dramatic hook.

The risk of relying on the oft-repeated narrative trick of a sympathetic individual is that it can, paradoxically, dehumanize the problem. A fill-in-the-blank “anonymous refugee facing depression” becomes, rather than a person, a bleak cliché:

“Like many other refugees, Mustafa experienced traumatic events before fleeing his homeland of Syria,” begins a January Al Jazeera America item datelined Berlin, focusing on an anonymous case. The previous October, Vice focused on an unnamed Kurdish man in a Milan resettlement camp, leading with images of a gruesome hanging archived on his cell phone. A June 8 Guardian story on PTSD diagnosis for refugees led with a generalized list of traumatizing refugee experiences—drownings off Greece, torture at home, limbo in Europe— introducing an anonymous man who speaks in horrible detail of his two children drowning off Turkey.

Those anecdotes, while powerful, are weakened by the vagueness of their sourcing, and all go on to say essentially the same thing: the crisis continues. But to the best of my knowledge, the sources in those stories were also more protected than Zozan Qerani, who went on the record but collapsed.

Is it up to the reporter to decide who is really fit to tell their own story? “It happens every day,” her husband Atoo said matter-of-factly amid her seizure, and Zozan confirmed this later. But in hindsight, if you’d told me what would happen, I’d have skipped the interview. That’s not because of guilt. I don’t feel guilty. I feel unsure whether I’m qualified to judge if the experience of the interview harmed her health.

 

The migration story continues. Reporters are going to keep encountering people like Zozan Qerani. A one-in-two chance exists that tapping a shoulder in a refugee camp means a reporter blundering untrained into a therapist’s role. But I’m sure my editor would not have liked how hard I tried to dissuade Qerani—who’d offered precisely the story I’d flown a long way to get, and felt was important, and already largely written—from letting me use her as a character.

Qerani’s collapse became the focus of a 5,000 word feature about a crisis in mental health services for refugees, which included three photographs of her in distress. After writing the story, I contacted the Qeranis again to confirm their participation a third time. I’d heard from a photographer still in the camp that Zozan had been involved in a security incident the day after I’d left. She’d had another seizure.

Atoo replied quickly: “When you write about my wife, think that she represents two or three thousand Yazidi woman,” he said, repeating something he’d said to me a week earlier at the camp. That wasn’t a winning argument, I thought; I wasn’t there to advance his cause. I asked him to think it over with Zozan once more, and asked how she was doing.

The husband again asked his wife again for her consent, which she again gave, he IM’d back. I trusted their answer, and we published the story. I sent it to him. He wrote back effusively that Zozan liked it.

First published in Columbia Journalism Review.

Photo by vintagedept.

The Exxon Investigation

At 9 a.m., ExxonMobil’s shareholders start to file into Dallas’ Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center for their annual meeting. Security personnel check IDs and confiscate phones. Uniformed police stand guard. Everyone passes through metal detectors. Outside is a crowd of protesters hoisting signs – “Exxon Lies, Seas Rise” – while standing beside a 13-foot ice sculpture of #ExxonKnew. Inside the cavernous auditorium, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson stands onstage, his podium framed by two massive pots of white carnations and a pop-up forest of green ferns. Behind him is a beautiful image of a snow-dusted desertscape – Utah, perhaps – with an oil derrick perched lightly atop a rock outcropping. “For many years now,” Tillerson begins, “ExxonMobil has held the view that the risks of climate change are serious and do warrant action.”

On this muggy Texas morning, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, one of the most profitable corporations of any kind anywhere ever, is facing unprecedented pressure. A series of in-depth reports recently revealed that Exxon, a font of climate skepticism in the 1990s and 2000s, had also been on the cutting edge of climate science as far back as the 1970s. It ran its own computer models, built up a team of in-house experts, and understood from the beginning that any effort to stop global warming would mean an effort to reduce fossil-fuel use. As the threat of regulation grew, the company gave tens of millions of dollars to dozens of think tanks and advocacy groups that churned out white papers questioning even the most basic facts of climate change. It took out full-page advertorials in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal with titles like “Climate Change: A Degree of Uncertainty” and “With Climate Change, What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us.”

Last November, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened a fraud investigation, subpoenaing the company for 39 years’ worth of internal memos, e-mails and other documents related to climate change. In March, he announced a new coalition of 17 states and territories that will pursue climate litigation against Big Oil. Members of Congress and both Democratic presidential candidates have called on the Department of Justice to do the same. The FBI is circling. The 70,000-person company, long a symbol of American corporate might, is under siege. This investigation, Al Gore has said, “may well be looked back on as a major turning point.”

Now, in Dallas, Exxon is being confronted by yet another group: its own shareholders. As never before, Exxon’s investors are worried about how global efforts to curtail rising temperatures will hurt the company’s profits. To meet the climate goals of last year’s Paris Agreement, more than two-thirds of global fossil-fuel reserves – $100 trillion worth, according to a Citigroup estimate – would have to remain in the ground. If Exxon believes climate change is real, that warming more than two degrees Celsius could be catastrophic, and that the world is finally serious about averting this disaster, it must also accept that it may never sell tens of billions of barrels of oil currently on its balance sheet. pagebreak

After Tillerson’s opening remarks, Edward Mason, a financial manager who represents the Church of England’s $10 billion investment fund, proposes that Exxon publish an annual study on how meeting the Paris benchmarks will affect the company’s portfolio. Natasha Lamb, with the activist-investor firm Arjuna Capital, suggests the company beat a managed retreat from a future that no longer has a place for oil giants. To each, Tillerson responds calmly in his Texas twang that “the board recommends a vote against this proposal.”

The moment many in the crowd are waiting for, though, when the CEO explains Exxon’s current thinking on climate change, comes after a question from the audience. The temperature projections made by climate models 30 years ago have proved fundamentally correct, a scientist named Mike McCracken says, so what is Exxon doing to plan for the dire warming today’s models project?

“We’re not ignoring the risk that’s out there,” Tillerson says. Climate change could be “catastrophic,” and Exxon must be part of mitigating it. But the people of the world will not – and should not – give up refrigerators and cars and increasing standards of living. “We are grounded in the reality of the day and grounded in the technology of the day,” Tillerson continues. “Just saying ‘turn the taps off’ is not acceptable to humanity.”

In other words, the world will not actually meet the Paris goals. So Exxon will be fine. The auditorium, packed mostly with corporate die-hards, erupts in applause, but the case against Exxon may turn on moments like this. Schneiderman does not have to show that the company injured a specific victim or conspired to hide what it knew about climate science from the public – just that it did not tell its own investors the truth about the risks climate change poses to its bottom line.

Exxon’s history of sowing confusion about climate change is well-documented. Its uncompromising former CEO Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond publicly derided computer climate models as “notoriously inaccurate.” The idea that societies could stabilize the climate by cutting man-made greenhouse emissions, he said in a 1997 speech, “defies common sense.”

New York fraud laws, however, carry a six-year statute of limitations. Raymond retired a decade ago, and under Tillerson, Exxon has dropped almost all of its funding for climate-denial think tanks. Believing some form of climate regulation is inevitable, the company now factors in a theoretical carbon price – $80 a ton – when evaluating the long-term economics of new oil and gas projects. Since the start of the Obama administration, Exxon has also said it supports a carbon tax (which Tillerson views as less onerous than cap-and-trade), and once secretly partnered with another organization to lobby for the tax on Capitol Hill: the Sierra Club. pagebreak

“The best way to say it is that our understanding of the science evolved along with that of the rest of the world,” says Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers. “People focus on the public-policy groups” – that is, the ones Exxon funded that raised doubts about man-made climate change – “while choosing not to focus on the science we supported.” Jeffers notes that Exxon scientists have published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers on climate change, and the company funded the climate-modeling team at MIT with $3.8 million over 19 years. (Although tax filings reviewed by Greenpeace show that Exxon also gave $31 million to climate skeptics over roughly the same period.)

While it’s true Exxon no longer requires the threat of law enforcement to admit global warming is real, the case against Exxon is most significant – a possible “turning point” – because one form of climate denial remains almost wholly uncorrected: Exxon’s stock price.

An oil company’s value rests, in large part, on its booked reserves: the petroleum deposits it has discovered and claimed a legal right to someday produce. ExxonMobil is a reliable blue-chip stock because it has forever grown its reserves, aggressively chasing and booking new deposits the world over. Some of its wealth is tied up in refineries and gas stations and real estate, but it is mostly on paper – that is, mostly in the ground. Meaningful action on climate change threatens to leave these assets “stranded.” “There is arguably no material fact more important to the future value of companies that own massive amounts of carbon-based fuel,” Gore tells me, “than the answer to the question ‘Is global warming real, man-made and a problem that must be urgently addressed?’ ”

There are more than 1.5 trillion barrels of oil reserves on the books of multinationals and petro-states. If we are to keep global warming to two degrees Celsius, only a third of this – more than $25 trillion worth, according to the Citigroup analysis – can be burned. Gore compares these holdings to the junk mortgages Wall Street bundled and sold off at top dollar to unknowing investors, only Big Oil’s exposure is about 20 times bigger. “Subprime carbon assets, they’re not going to be burned,” Gore says. “If companies are offering stock under the assumption that it’s all going to be burned, they are not being candid. The longer these companies represent ‘There’s absolutely no problem with global warming, nothing to see here – move along,’ the bigger the crash is going to be.”

In editorials and public statements, Exxon and its defenders frame the “coordinated attack on ExxonMobil” as a battle over the First Amendment. By prosecuting the company based on past statements and internal communications, the argument goes, activists and attorneys general – the “climate police,” to quote The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page – are criminalizing free speech. To which Schneiderman has a stock response: “The First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to commit fraud.”

The legal strategy against Exxon has been years in the making. In 2012, the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists held a two-day meeting in Southern California to examine whether tactics in the fight against Big Tobacco, which had long suppressed what it knew about the link between cigarettes and cancer, could be deployed in a fight against Big Oil. The tobacco companies were eventually charged with racketeering and agreed to a record $200 billion settlement. A network of pseudoscience think tanks unraveled while the number of smokers in the United States fell toward historic lows. pagebreak

Efforts to hold Big Tobacco accountable finally got traction, the meeting’s participants learned, because state attorneys general got internal documents that revealed a sophisticated disinformation campaign. The tobacco companies hadn’t tried to convince the public that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer – just that the science was unsettled and still being debated by experts. “Doubt is our product,” reads one strategist’s memo, “because it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”

One of the UCS meeting’s organizers, Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the influential book Merchants of Doubt and now a professor at Harvard, underscored the clear parallels with Big Oil: Some of the same industry-funded scientists who once clouded evidence of tobacco’s harms had reappeared – and recycled the same tactics – in the climate debate. It was fair to assume, notes the UCS meeting summary, that “similar documents may well exist in the vaults of the fossil-fuel industry and their trade associations and front groups.”

Schneiderman’s investigation of Exxon would get an assist from two small teams of journalists: Columbia University’s Energy and Environment Reporting Fellowship, led by veteran investigative journalist Susanne Rust, and InsideClimate News, a nonprofit, digital-only publication that got its start trying to stir up what co-founder David Sassoon calls “Digg storms.” Together, the two outfits started a house fire for Exxon.

ICN was the first to publish its investigation, built on documents its reporters received from confidential sources and discovered in libraries including the ExxonMobil Historical Collection at the University of Texas-Austin. Its September 2015 stories on what Exxon long knew about climate change upended the popular image of the oil company. In 1979, Exxon fitted a supertanker with custom-made sensors to measure increased CO2 concentrations in the oceans and atmosphere. In 1982, it hired scientists and mathematicians and collaborated with outside researchers to build its own computer climate models, secretly bolstering the growing scientific consensus about the dangers of unbridled greenhouse emissions.

Columbia’s first story, published in partnership with the Los Angeles Times in October, made clear that Exxon had done more than study the fundamental science of the greenhouse effect – it looked into what benefits climate change could have on new oil exploration. One person quoted in the series was Ken Croasdale, an ice researcher who had worked for Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil. Part of Croasdale’s job was to report to Exxon headquarters on the warming Arctic, where Exxon still holds oil leases. He speculated that the company was “taking a gamble” that it would be able to drill when the ice inevitably broke up. pagebreak

Exxon responded forcefully, noting that both ICN and the Columbia fellowship have received support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which bears the name of the family that founded Exxon but now strongly backs climate action. In a letter to the president of Columbia, an Exxon representative leveled charges of journalistic malpractice against Rust and her fellows, claiming the company was not given a chance to respond to questions – despite an e-mail record showing the opposite. Columbia’s journalism-school dean, Steve Coll, investigated Exxon’s claims, soon rebutting them point by point in a six-page response. As for ICN, Exxon has repeatedly called its journalists – who include veterans of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and PBS – “anti-oil-and-gas activists.” This spring, ICN was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for its Exxon reporting.

Schneiderman cannot rely entirely on what the journalists uncovered – he needs proof of an ongoing fraud within the six-year statute of limitations – but no other attorney general is better positioned to find a smoking gun. Under a 1921 New York statute called the Martin Act, Schneiderman has almost unlimited subpoena power. The act has helped win a series of billion-dollar settlements against Wall Street’s biggest banks over the subprime-mortgage scandal, and perhaps more important, anchored a case of climate fraud against the world’s largest publicly traded coal company, Peabody Energy. After two years of quiet investigation, the coal company was hanged by its internal documents – an unsettling precedent for Exxon, which so far has been forced to turn over some 600,000 documents. “Peabody is the same legal theories,” Schneiderman says. “We found several clear-cut examples of fraud.”

Another aspect of Peabody is worrisome for Exxon’s investors: When it settled with Schneiderman, agreeing to revise its financial statements to reflect the potential for stranded assets and other climate-related risks, coal-fired power plants were already struggling with new federal regulations and a widespread switch to cleaner-burning natural gas. By the time Peabody signed the agreement, its shares were down 90 percent. In April, the coal giant declared bankruptcy. “That’s not because of our case,” Schneiderman says. “But it proves our point. The market is moving from coal very rapidly – and from oil.”

After the votes are tallied in Dallas, Natasha Lamb of Arjuna Capital, wearing a red blazer in a sea of gray and black suits, mills about the symphony lobby with Exxon’s other investors. “There was a change in tenor,” Lamb says of this year’s meeting. “There was a lot more admission by Tillerson that climate change is real – that the science is real.” At the same time, Lamb adds, “Tillerson seems comfortable that there can be outcomes other than a two-degree rise in temperature. That’s where it breaks down. And that’s a frightening view looking into the future.” pagebreak

In 2014, Lamb helped force Exxon to publicly own up to this dystopian view of the future. Lamb’s group had proposed a resolution asking Exxon to do the math on stranded assets in a carbon-constrained world. Exxon tried to strike the proposal from the ballot, Lamb says, but “I persevered.” Exxon’s head of investor relations ultimately cut a deal with her: The company would write a paper on “carbon asset risk” – the first such report by an oil major – if Lamb and her partners would agree to withdraw their proposal.

Exxon’s paper, “Energy and Carbon – Managing the Risks,” previews the arguments Tillerson made onstage. In the coming decades, more people, especially poor people, will want more energy. The world will use more renewables – but also more fossil fuels. A truly low-carbon future will not happen. “ExxonMobil believes that although there is always the possibility that government action may impact the company, the scenario where governments restrict hydrocarbon production in a way to reduce GHG emissions 80 percent … is highly unlikely,” the report says. “We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded.'”

It’s possible that Tillerson’s hoped-for technological breakthrough will magically save us all – and save Exxon’s stock price. It’s possible that Exxon, demonstrably richer and bigger, will out-compete its fossil-fuel rivals, even as carbon constraints begin to pinch – someone else’s carbon assets may have to stay in the ground, but not Exxon’s. It’s possible that Exxon is already a toxic asset, that it is subprime, that it is no longer one of the most valuable companies on the planet because its reserves are already unburnable. All of this is possible.

It’s likewise possible that the future we fear – three or four or five degrees of temperature rise, and with it fire and famine and rising oceans – will come to pass. Exxon, we now know, has chosen to bet on it. Its 2014 white paper, acknowledging that climate change is real, though not a threat to its future profits, is well within the statute of limitations for Schneiderman’s case. The courts will have to decide if this is fraud or just wishful thinking.

First published in Rolling Stone .

Source: The Exxon Investigation

Drowning

Two years after her town fell to the Islamic State, Zozan Qerani visited psychiatrists in Turkey and Greece for help with what she’d seen. Feelings she called depression had started to intensify, causing fainting spells as she moved along the trail to Europe, she said. Last week, at the camp on Lesbos, Greece, where she’s been living since March, a war now 1,000 miles away would once again threaten her life.

Since arriving in Greece by boat three months ago she has suffered seizures while living in a tent at a refugee camp called Kara Tepe. “I fall over, every day,” she said, sitting on a folding chair in front of the tent, which she shares with her husband, Atoo Qerani. An English speaker, he translated her Kurdish. She said she sleeps badly and has nightmares: “I see bad things.”

Zozan, 23, speaks in a whisper and holds her arms around herself tightly, seeming smaller than she is. On her left arm is a four-inch scar from a suicide attempt, one of at least three in recent months, Atoo said. The doctor who treated the self-inflicted wound, an M.D. working with a medical NGO at Kara Tepe, who was not authorized to speak to the press, characterized the attempt as “serious” and said Qerani would have died without treatment.

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Zozan Qerani, a Yazidi from Iraq, sits in her tent at a refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, on June 16. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

Zozan’s psychological challenges date to March 2014, when she was at her home in Siba Sheikh Khidr, a Yazidi town in Iraqi Kurdistan. Before escaping to Turkey, she said, she witnessed summary executions by the Islamic State and “many terrible things.” Asked to generalize about the experience, she offered a mobile phone opened to a Facebook page run by a Yazidi human rights campaign, showing graphic images of murders and beatings in Yazidi villages neighboring hers.

The claims and the images on the site appear consistent with incidents detailed in a U.N. Human Rights Council report released June 15 and based on interviews with 46 Yazidi refugees. “ISIS has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis, [who] are subjected to almost unimaginable horrors,” said the report.

FULL COVERAGE:  The Global Refugee Crisis

The Qeranis have been married seven years. Atoo is an energetic 28-year-old built like a distance runner. Zozan, 23, has the wiry physique and windblown face of a Southern California surfer, down to her bleached-blond hair chopped to a bob. From the right angle, they’re the picture of health. But for the past two years, said Atoo, the couple’s lives have been dominated by Zozan’s illness—diagnosed (according to her medical records, which she shared) by a Greek doctor as trauma-induced psychosis with “conscious psychosis” episodes—which they’ve been trying to treat while in flight from their home.

 

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Now they face an uncertain future in Greece, with a risk of deportation to harsher conditions in Turkey. A March 20 deal between the European Union and Turkey to shut down deadly smugglers’ routes to Greece has largely stopped the stream of boats like the one that brought the Qeranis to Lesbos. But it also blocked travel onward from Greece, trapping Atoo and Zozan and nearly 60,000 more while they await rulings on their asylum claims. “They are saying December now, just to get an appointment to file the asylum papers,” said Stavros Mirogiannis, a Greek former human services officer who runs Kara Tepe for the government of Lesbos. “Not to get a decision. To make the application.” Anyone who arrived after March 20 can’t go forward but can’t go back. The Qeranis arrived nine days too late.

Being in administrative limbo has made it difficult for Zozan to seek treatment for her life-threatening medical condition and is adding to a mental health crisis that has led to suicides and depression and stands to overwhelm the continent’s mental health systems, say aid workers on Lesbos and nearby Chios island. According to UNHCR, 215,380 people have fled war and autocracy by crossing the Mediterranean Sea this year, following a record 1,015,078 last year. The German Federal Chamber of Psychotherapists announced last year that more than 70 percent of refugees who reached Germany have witnessed violence; around 50 percent have experienced violence themselves. That figure holds for 40 percent of children; around a quarter saw violence against members of their family. As far back as 2013, UNHCR found that more than a fifth of Syrians in a refugee camp in Jordan experienced anxiety disorders, with 8.5 percent suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The German study found demand for psychotherapy among refugees just in Germany could be 20 times what is being delivered.

“We see the need for acute treatment right after they arrive in Germany, but also for long-term psychological and psychiatric care,” said psychotherapist Mechtild Wenk Ansohn of Berlin’s Center for the Treatment of Torture Victims, where she runs outpatient services. The Berlin center is currently operating at capacity—500 patients— mostly refugees who passed through the Greek isles before the Turkey deal, she said. Like their counterparts in Greece’s camps, Berlin’s refugees are under additional stress from uncertainty, causing some who had not needed treatment six months ago to present again with symptoms of depression. Ansohn anticipates her staff’s caseload will remain high for years.

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Refugees are housed together in group tents at the Souda camp on Chios, Greece. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

“If these people leave, they go somewhere, and they carry this with them,” said Fenia Tsakona, director of services on Chios for WAHA, an Emirati NGO whose staff includes an Arabic-speaking psychologist, Syrian French doctor Amer Omar. “So if you see on a larger scale what’s going on, all this trauma is passed to everyone. It’s passed to me; it’s passed to Amer; it’s passed to their children.”

“They become stressed; they have an anxiety crisis, depression,” said Irene Kamboura, a social worker with the French international NGO Médecins du Monde who is based full-time at Souda, a camp on Chios housing about 1,000 people. “The referrals to the hospital are more often [than before the March agreement]. Once a week for sure.”

Trained as a social worker, not as a therapist, Kamboura sees about four people a day just to talk. Two other organizations, Praksis and WAHA, rotate psychologists at the site; Kamboura is the only counselor at the camp full-time and receives visits in part because she’s most often the one available, she said.

Statistics on PTSD and other cases in the camps are scattered, said Tsakona, leaving aid workers and the volunteer psychologists to guess at the scope of the problem. “I know the number in my camp,” said Dimitria Ipioti, a Greek registered nurse who runs health services at Pikpa, a specialized camp five miles from Kara Tepe that serves 80 of the most high-risk refugees, mostly children.

If these people leave, they go somewhere, and they carry this with them. So on a larger scale, all this trauma is passed to everyone. It’s passed to me; it’s passed to [the psychologist]; it’s passed to their children.

Fenia Tsakona, director of services on Chios for the Emirati NGO WAHA

Heroin use has become more common in the camps, said Kamboura, and some people come with addictions developed earlier in their journey. Without a source on the islands, some suffer withdrawal. Mostly, though, Kamboura sees mounting desperation and long stays in the camps manifesting as trauma requiring formal treatment.

“People are desperate to leave. Their families are elsewhere in Europe, so they want to go on,” Kamboura said, sitting in the hot tent where she holds sessions. In many cases trauma presents as a physical problem such as shortness of breath, but the camp’s general practitioner refers patients for psychological care: “They go to the doctor because they don’t feel well, their chest hurts, but then they come over here to talk to someone.”

There have been two suicide attempts requiring hospitalization at camps on Chios in June, both unsuccessful, said Tsakona. She arranged for Omar to treat the two people, who returned to the camp after stays of four or five days at Chios’ public hospital. Local hospitals handle the initial response, Omar said, but refugees are quickly sent back to the camps. He continues to see the two who attempted suicide, treating them in their tents and a small medical clinic at the camp.

As part of the Turkey deal, refugees can apply for “vulnerable” status, which allows some psychological cases, as well as single parents with children, unaccompanied minors, people managing chronic disease, pregnant women, and the severely mobility impaired to qualify to live at camps like Souda that have greater support structures, including psychological services.

Three hours away on Lesbos, Zozan Qerani met the standard for “vulnerability,” which allowed her a space at Kara Tepe. But resources are insufficient even in these special camps, and local medical systems—themselves decimated by cutbacks as a result of Greece’s euro crisis—typically have capped psychiatric treatment even for their own citizens, said Ipioti.

Greece’s hospitals do not have the capacity to handle the refugee cases, and neither do the camps, she said. “We can’t support the psychiatric cases, but it is a cap from the government; there are no places for psychiatric cases in the whole of Greece. Neither for the Greek people nor the refugees.”

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Refugee children learn English at the Pikpa camp on Lesbos. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

Until the Turkey deal, the problem was manageable even without support from cash-strapped hospitals. “Before the agreement the most vulnerable used to come [to Pikpa], and most people would move on in one or two days” for points north, Ipioti said. (Such was the case with the Syrian war veterans whose story of escape TakePart published last year.) After the Turkey deal stranded at least 5,000 on Lesbos, Pikpa, which looks like a small children’s day camp, the walls decorated with bright paintings of flowers and the slogan “All Together” in various languages, was insufficient. “The problem is, we have cases [across Lesbos] that need a more peaceful environment, and it’s not possible…. We’re talking about 1,000 people.” Referrals to the more individualized care at Pikpa stopped in mid-June after several transfers provoked suicide attempts among people who had filed requests but were not yet moved.

“It was ‘Why you let him go, and why don’t you pay attention to me?’ ” Ipioti continued. “The problem with these depression cases is keeping them inside [the camp] makes them worse.” The long stays have forced a collapse of the referral system. Demand for trauma evaluations is greater than the supply of volunteer doctors. “There isn’t someone to give them the pills,” Ipioti said.

With hospitalization impossible in the overwhelming majority of cases, even refugees who get access to a qualified psychologist at the local hospital or an NGO often receive only a quick diagnosis and a prescription and are left to self-directed treatment in the camps, she said.

Zozan was prescribed diazepam, which is sometimes used to treat anxiety. She takes it three times a day, but it has not helped, Atoo said. She continues to live in a small tent at Kara Tepe with minimal medical oversight, mostly cared for by her husband.

With drownings continuing across the Mediterranean, worrying about stress among the survivors seems like a luxury. But the strain of months-long stays in refugee camps has started to show in ways that are disrupting daily life and causing tension.

“I don’t like the Muslims,” Zozan said. “I don’t like living here with them.” Her Yazidi religion is a syncretic mix of Zoroastrian and other beliefs. The majority of refugees at Kara Tepe, home to about 875 people—mostly Syrian, Iraqi Arab, and Palestinian—are Muslim. She said she feels “surrounded” by the people she watched murder her neighbors.

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Atoo Qerani. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

Atoo said he recognized that their fellow residents were unrelated to the Islamic State or the Iraqi government and probably victims of militants too. But he found it hard to shake associations between Islam and his wife’s trauma, he said. “After what we’ve been through, it is difficult. It makes you nervous,” he said.

As he was saying that, Zozan fainted, slipping off the folding chair.

“Don’t worry—this happens five, six times a day,” said Atoo, who was on a nearby sofa, close enough to catch his wife’s head as she fell. He lowered her to the ground gently and called for two other Yazidi men by a neighboring tent to lift her to a cushion set up on wooden pallets a few feet away. The couple uses it as a daybed during Zozan’s frequent swoons. “She faints, and then she does scary things,” Atoo said.

Shortly after being placed on the cushion, Zozan, still unconscious, began sobbing in low, throaty wails. She turned on her side and began kicking and screaming. It looked like she was having a bad dream, and the writhing developed into a seizure. Her jaws slammed shut, and her muscles began to contract uncontrollably, curling her limbs and hands.

Atoo climbed on top of her and rolled her onto her back, and a second person leaned on her jaw, attempting to keep her from biting or swallowing her tongue.

Kara Tepe camp is served by several volunteer medical teams, led by Médecins du Monde and Médecins Sans Frontières. Two bystanders, an American college student from Baylor University volunteering in the camp and TakePart’s photographer, Maro Kouri, ran to the camp medical clinic, a group of tents and mobile clinics housed in converted cargo vans about 100 yards away, but doctors there refused to come, telling them the patient needed to be brought to the tent.

“This happens every day,” a doctor on station from MSF told Kouri. Five minutes into the seizure, no medical response had arrived.

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Zozan Qerani rests after suffering a seizure on June 16. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

A young volunteer from the International Rescue Committee, a broad-based crisis response NGO, appeared a few minutes later, saying she had heard of a problem. “Do they speak Arabic? Is there a doctor? What do I do?” said the woman, who gave her name as Yara and said she worked as an Arabic-English translator. She said she had only been at the camp four days and did not know the correct procedures, then left to find a superior. Members of the IRC team came and went for the next few minutes, seeming to lack a plan for responding to medical emergencies.

As Zozan lay on the pallet, her condition worsened with the passing minutes. Still unconscious, she attempted to choke herself, wrapping her hands around her throat and hooking her thumbs into the airway before her husband pried her fingers back and pinned her arms beneath his body. She screamed and began thrashing again, and the seizure abated.

Atoo applied gauze to Zozan’s palms at the base of her thumbs, where her tensed hands had caused her to cut herself with her fingernails, reopening sores from previous attacks. In a minute more, she calmed and slept peacefully.

Atoo believed Zozan recovered faster when awake, so he did something he had done following previous seizures: He got a cup of water and splashed it on her face. She awoke as if to a hypnotist’s finger snap. After orienting herself, she sat up, breathed deeply, and rubbed her muscles, drawing her legs up to her chest.

Atoo stroked her hair. “I’m a very good husband, no?” he said. The bit of clowning worked; Zozan returned a small smile and gave a laugh. She wiped the tears off her face and leaned against Atoo to rest. The episode lasted about 15 minutes.

“They have men with muscles there—they can carry her,” the MSF doctor said later, by way of explanation for not coming to help. Doctors working in the camp are also facing stresses, another MSF doctor in the group added, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not approved to talk to the press. “If there is an emergency, of course we go.”

Losing their homes, losing parents, fleeing, that’s the initial trauma. Then the crossing, the smugglers. Anxiety attacks while they are arriving. [It is] triage in a war zone.

Michael Eder, an Austrian psychotherapist who has been volunteering on Lesbos since winter.

Where mental health treatment is provided for refugees on the Greek islands, records are scant, and few systems exist to track patients if they move camps. Though stuck in Greece, many refugees move within the country. Patients given antidepressive medication on Lesbos may not receive refills elsewhere and manage their own withdrawal later in Athens or beyond.

Each transition presents a fresh trauma.

“Losing their homes, losing parents, fleeing, that’s the initial trauma,” said Michael Eder, an Austrian psychotherapist specializing in trauma, who has been volunteering at Pikpa since the winter. “Then the crossing, the smugglers. Anxiety attacks while they are arriving.” As the boats landed, people often jumped too early or fell in the water, and anxiety attacks made breathing while swimming impossible. They could drown just a few yards offshore. With all the immediate needs for arrivals, Eder said, it is like “triage in a war zone.”

Because of the new bureaucratic delays, doctors now see the same patients for at least a few weeks and sometimes months, and have begun to construct some psychological profiles of trauma resulting from long-term residence in the Greek camps.

One boy of seven had lost his appetite and all but stopped eating, said Kamboura, the social worker on Chios. In that case, after the boy’s father came to her for advice, she began a series of informal discussion sessions with the child, who is from Syria, talking to him about his family and his daily life and simply giving him individual attention amid the crowded camp.

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Alia’a Marastawi looks after her daughter and her niece in a group tent at a camp on Chios on June 17. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

“Now that the people are staying here one, two, three months, they know me,” Kamboura said. “They are like friends. They want to speak with me; they need it. I know exactly their anxieties.”

The boy began eating normally and regaining weight after a month of her informal therapy, she said. She continues to monitor the family and stays in touch with the father, who is awaiting a ruling on his family’s asylum case. They live in a tent about 50 yards from Médecins du Monde’s clinic.

Adults have also exhibited loss of appetite, she said, but for most the stress is showing up in other ways: “They steal things. We give them whatever they need if they ask. But it’s been since March. People have children and feel desperate, and maybe it’s night and they panic and steal.”

 

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She has had to remove most of the diapers, baby formula, and other goods to a remote location because of the thefts. A three-foot gash in the tent wall—made, she said, by someone cutting through to steal things inside—was visible beside her.

Kamboura finds it difficult to offer coping mechanisms when her patients’ fears are justified. There is no indication their cases will be resolved soon; they may well be deported in the end. “And it’s hot during the day, and people are very, very bored. We’re giving out a lot of condoms,” she said.

Mysterious fires are common in the brush beside the sleeping area of her camp, the result of playing with lighters and, perhaps, a sign of frustration. In early June, a fire reached a large barn-like structure hosting about 30 families, who had to flee. The building was destroyed. “The children aren’t sleeping now. They’re scared from the fire,” Kamboura said.

The more the stress builds, the more it feeds on itself. Ahmad Marastawi, 33, a pharmacist from Aleppo, Syria, was swept up by Greek police after the fire. He claimed he was not near the structure when the fire broke out and was freed for lack of evidence after three nights in jail. “People start getting angry at anything. A little thing makes you angry,” he said. “People stay waiting, waiting, waiting, and don’t know what’s in the future. And that’s very complicated for a human being.” He feels his temper is getting shorter. “I control myself,” he said.

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Ahmad Marastawi, 33, is a pharmacist from Aleppo, Syria. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

His wife, Alia’a Marastawi, said she had not been told when Ahmad would be released from jail and feared he could be deported, which was unlikely, but that was not explained to her, she said.

“We went to the jail, and I worried, because Limar”—the couple’s one-year-old daughter—“sees her daddy behind glass; it’s very confusing.”

Like the refugees, Greek residents of the islands have been forced to manage their own uncertainty over the future of the camps—and don’t always handle it well. In June, after some fruit was stolen from an orchard near Chios’ Vial camp, residents blockaded the area with bulldozers, fearful that refugees would start attacking the neighborhood.

“We lock the door. We feel scared because we don’t know. Maybe they become desperate, and hungry and come to the door, come inside the house,” said Maria Kouneli, who lives in the blockaded neighborhood.

An owner of the travel agency where Kouneli works, Michael Kolokythias, said he felt frustration building elsewhere on the island of just over 30,000 residents, now with three refugee camps hosting about 2500. Kolokythias had been an immigrant to Canada before returning to Chios. “I understand being a migrant. We understand. It was raining one day, so I bought 60, 70 umbrellas and handed them out to women with children.” But his business has fallen by 80 percent since the refugee crisis began—Chios, an island of hidden beaches and medieval villages, depends on tourism—and his creditors aren’t letting him delay payments on loans.

“We built businesses, and we faithfully paid our loans, and then this happens and we lose a season. People become very stressed, and it affects us,” he said.

 

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On June 21, the Greek coast guard announced some of its officers and local port officials would be participating in courses on “burnout syndrome– Traumatic Stress Disorder” offered by a Lesbos hospital and a local college.

Other than the refugees, the people most closely watched for psychological stress are two teams of lifeguards who have been patrolling the waters for sinking boats since last year. Often dealing with drownings, including of children, groups from the Spanish organizations Proactiva Open Arms and Proem-Aid, operating out of Lesbos, spent the last year carrying out high-seas rescues from speedboats. They are often the first people refugees see after surviving the crossing.

Both groups require their volunteers to undergo psychological evaluations before and after completing deployments, which range from two weeks to six months. Drawn from professional beach lifeguard services and fire departments, most of the Spaniards arrive with experience and training in trauma cases, and most have experience with violent and life-threatening situations.

Greece, however, has challenged their limits, psychological and physical, according to several members of both teams.

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Lifeguard Manuel “Lolo” Vidal hugs Lyn, a Syrian girl who, after her crossing from Turkey, was terrified of the ocean until Vidal gently escorted her into shallow water and played with her. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

A climate scientist, Manuel “Lolo” Vidal, 50, is one of the few members of the lifeguard teams whose career has not prepared him for the emotional impact of rescue work. “One day, two [refugees] got out of the boat and had heart attacks. Just wham—gone,” he said. “You pick up a child. No legs. You take a baby—its arm is broken in two places.” Even at home, during breaks, the experience on Lesbos disorients him. “When I go home and I’m driving in a roundabout in Seville, I think, maybe I should just stop by Moria [a refugee camp on Lesbos]. Or maybe I should pick up that guy—he looks Pakistani; maybe he needs a ride to town.”

Vidal said he had made his own arrangement with a friend in Seville who is a psychologist; he saw her before and after previous stints in Greece. “Just like you prepare physically, you prepare mentally.”

The shortage of trained mental health staff has resulted in a surprising source of consolation to the rescuers, as many of the camp volunteers are now serving in ad hoc arrangements as amateur trauma counselors. The Spanish rescue teams give swimming lessons to refugee children, many of whom are scared of the water.

“At first, you pick them up and they are like little raccoons, terrified,” said Vidal. “They’ve seen people drown. They lost someone—their mother, their cousin.” He said the swimming lessons helped him cope with what he’d seen. “In theory, this should be a house of horrors. But it’s where you feel the best.”

“All of us have a job waiting for us on a beach, and we chose to be here,” said Anabel Montes, a beach lifeguard for 11 years who is now part of Proactiva’s permanent team on Lesbos. She said she had learned to think of failed rescues in the larger scheme of the team’s successes. “You have to assimilate it,” she said, and reserved her frustration for the political situation, which has limited rescue services to charity-funded NGOs like hers, though larger vessels from the Greek navy, the European border patrol agency Frontex, and several NATO vessels are nearby but not involved in rescues. “They’re politicizing a humanitarian job,” she said, frowning.

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Yara Shlewet, a volunteer with the Palestinian aid group Humanity Crew, teaches English to Arabic-speaking refugee children on Lesbos. (Photo: Maro Kouri)

On June 16, Vidal and a sea rescue team from Seville took about a dozen children to an Aegean beach near Pikpa camp, where discarded life vests and the husks of inflatable smuggler’s boats still cling to Lesbos’s jagged coves. Vidal focused his attention on an eight-year-old Syrian girl named Lyn. With her mother and an infant sibling, Lyn was separated by gun-wielding smugglers from her five other siblings as they all waited on a beach in Turkey to be taken to the smugglers’ rafts.

The other children are now in Germany, according to two aid workers familiar with the case, but Lyn, her mother, and the infant are stranded in Greece.

Lyn had not wanted to return to the water, said Vidal. With the mother’s permission, he took her to the beach. He carried her into a calm part of the Aegean’s mirror-like water and held her above it while spilling drops on her head, a few at a time. Over about half an hour, he added more drops, then handfuls, of water. By the end, the girl was wading with him and splashing.

Several volunteers in the camps spoke of an oddly alluring quality to the experience, and of ambivalence over leaving it—and recognize that the call back to the island is not always rational. “I’m addicted to working with the refugees. I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t,” said Kamboura.

“I was supposed to leave tomorrow,” said Yara Shlewet, 23, a special education teacher from near Haifa, Israel, with the Palestinian aid organization Humanity Crew. Shlewet teaches English and Arabic at Pikpa, where some children have been on the road long enough to miss most of their primary school years. “I’m staying another two weeks, and then, I don’t know. When I’m at home, with my laptop and my air conditioning, I don’t know how that will feel.”

Like the lifeguards, Shlewet has also become an unofficial trauma counselor, speaking often with the parents of her students and listening to the pupils. Members of Pikpa’s mostly Greek volunteer staff do not speak Arabic, which the Palestinian teacher does. “It helps [the students] to see an Arabian person.”

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Though the camps have become semipermanent residences, with skeleton education systems like Shlewet’s reading classes, no system exists for camp teachers to refer students to psychologists. Shlewet said she has brought cases to doctors’ attention on occasions when she encountered children painting disturbing pictures or appearing to lose their appetite. But although Humanity Crew has a psychologist on staff, “there’s nothing formal” organized for referrals from teachers or social workers to mental health services.

Following Zozan Qerani’s seizure, three IRC volunteers suggested she walk to a special area of the camp for women. It offered “tea, comfortable chairs, a quiet space,” one of the volunteers said.

Zozan, still lying on the cushioned pallet, glared at them and shook her head no. “It’s the first time they offer me this. They do this because you are here,” she said, pointing at Kouri, the photographer.

Tea wasn’t going to help, she said. What she wanted was a transfer out of the camp. A limited number of hotel rooms in nearby Mytilene are available for refugees showing acute cases of “fragility,” as determined by the UNHCR.

“To me she is a clear candidate,” said the doctor who treated Zozan after her last suicide attempt and was not allowed to speak to the press. “But it is not my decision; we do not control it. It’s up to UNHCR.”

Of the 5,000 refugees on Lesbos, about 20 percent qualify for UNHCR’s “fragility” designation, allowing them to reside in the Kara Tepe and Pikpa camps—if there’s room. Both are near enough to capacity that any new cases requiring psychological support will soon overwhelm the available resources. Kara Tepe has about 250 spots left, with boats carrying dozens of people still arriving weekly. With an estimated 3 million refugees in Turkey, no end in sight to the Syrian war, and unresolved conflicts continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s anyone’s guess how many will take their chances and try to make the crossing.

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Zozan Qerani tries to break through a police line during U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to Kara Tepe refugee camp on June 18. (Photo: Jodi Hilton/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On June 18, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toured Kara Tepe camp. The Qeranis, who said they learned of the visit an hour earlier, joined a small demonstration on behalf of Yazidi refugees. Ban was ushered with international press to an enclosed area to meet some children and adults living at the camp. The protest of a few dozen people was kept a short distance away, behind a fence. Zozan was at the front, shouting and yelling.

After the meet and greet, the U.N. leader passed the protest, and Zozan lost her composure. In a wire service photograph, she is visible pushing against a police line protecting the visiting dignitaries, screaming and resisting, while attempting to pass Ban a letter Atoo had drafted requesting more U.N. attention for Yazidi refugees. As she hurled herself against the police line, Atoo attempted to cover her mouth, thinking, he related later via Facebook message, that she was overreacting. Stavros Mirogiannis, the camp manager, tried to calm her, telling her the camp residents were a family and at one point kissing her hand.

The soothing failed. Zozan was nervous and agitated and within a few moments fainted. A seizure began, lighter and shorter than the one a few days earlier, and with camp doctors nearby, she received medical attention. She soon recovered and told bystanders, some of whom said they suspected she’d faked the attack—camp doctors confirmed she had not—that she was fine. Ban made no comment about the protest.

As of June 22, the couple’s asylum status and relocation request remained unresolved.

First Published in TakePart.

Source: Why the Refugee Crisis Is Just the Beginning

Drought Selfies and Drought Suicides

When 2-year-old Rutuja playfully tipped over a bottle, spilling water onto the mud floor of the family’s shack, her mother, Nageshwari Rathore, let loose a screech, lunging forward as though to slap the toddler. Ms. Rathore stopped herself, sinking her head into her hands. “You finished it,” she whispered.

The loss wrenched at the 25-year-old. That June morning she had stood in line in the scorching heat for over an hour to collect five liters of water. A government tanker rolls up once a day to the abandoned field where she now lives.

Located in Ghatkopar, a Mumbai suburb, the field functions as a relief camp for 350 families who have left their villages in rural Maharashtra because of a drought, the worst in 100 years. Wild pigs root through the open sewer that runs alongside the Rathores’ tarpaulin shack. When the monsoon arrives, possibly in the next few days, it will flood the camp and force the family out.

Over 330 million Indians — about one quarter of the country’s population — have been affected by the drought. In this western state, where over half the population is dependent on the rural economy, the effects are severe. An average of nearly nine farmers committed suicide every day last year, primarily over debt related to crop failure.

Rural Indians are falling behind even as urban Indians enjoy unprecedented prosperity. And the tragedies that befall the poor benefit the more affluent. Forced to migrate to the cities, displaced farmers have little option but to join the enormous, unorganized labor force that serves the urban middle class as construction and domestic workers.

Trees outside the field in Ghatkopar were festooned with political banners, suggesting that the camp was the creation of a benevolent government. In fact, politicians had to be prodded to visit, according to Abhishek Bharadwaj, a homeless-rights activist. It was only after the media reported the squalid living conditions at the camp that Kirit Somaiya, a member of the state Parliament, came around to distribute cash and grain. Mr. Somaiya then uploaded a YouTube video depicting the camp as having abundant food and supplies.

Shau Chavan, who has been living in the camp for two months, said that government help had increased. In previous years, a local mafia had charged 1,000 rupees a month ($15) — about 2.5 days of the migrants’ daily wages — for a plot of 40 square feet. This year, Ms. Chavan said, the farmers are living rent-free, most likely as a result of government intervention.

If this is what passes for official aid in the richest state of the fastest-growing major economy in the world, then India’s government is short on political will, not means. This year’s drought is extreme, but severe weather is a regular occurrence in India. The authorities had time to plan.

The state government’s relief measures look good on paper, Abhishek Waghmare, a policy analyst with the data website IndiaSpend, told me. The state has poured money into the Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyaan, a water-conservation program to “make Maharashtra a drought-free state by 2019.” But the villages Mr. Waghmare has visited over the past four years still lack basic rainwater collection systems. Government efforts to rejuvenate dormant rivers and ponds are ineffective: Year after year, Mr. Waghmare said, water runs off.

Government failure stems from institutional disregard for the poor. Almost 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas, but the government doesn’t appear to view them as essential to India’s march to modernize. The spiraling number of suicides suggests that farmers’ despair is not resonating with politicians.

Even after eight states declared a drought last year, the government in Delhi failed to increase support for two programs created to act as lifesaving buffers: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which promises every household 100 days of paid employment annually, and the Public Distribution System, which delivers subsidized grains and fuel to the needy.

Government investment in the employment program has decreased since 2014, the year the B.J.P. came to power, and fewer jobs were created than before. Because of corruption in the food program, rations earmarked for the poor are often sold on the black market instead.

Mitigating the effects of a drought doesn’t require much investment. The villagers of Hiware Bazar, in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district, haven’t required official drought assistance in over two decades. They banned bore wells to prevent the water table from falling further and now cultivate vegetables instead of water-guzzling bananas and sugar cane. If the government had only shown similar initiative, the state wouldn’t be in such dire need.

In May, the Supreme Court scolded several state governments for their “ostrich-like” behavior, and demanded the creation of a national disaster mitigation fund within three months. But nothing has happened yet, a principal adviser to the court told The Indian Express this week.

The government’s neglect is rivaled only by its officials’ flippant attitude.

On April 15, Eknath Khadse, the revenue minister of Maharashtra at the time, visited the drought-stricken district of Latur. The water crisis was so severe then that a special train was commissioned to bring water to the area. But Mr. Khadse went by helicopter, even though Latur is readily accessible from Mumbai — which required the construction of a temporary helipad that consumed 10,000 liters of water.

The next day, the water conservation minister, Pankaja Munde, showed up, and tweeted photographs of herself grinning in front of a parched riverbed.

The “drought selfies,” as they came to be known, drew widespread condemnation. They captured perfectly the general reaction of India’s politicians to this disaster. Short on empathy and a sense of responsibility, our leaders see even grave crises only through the lens of their own privilege.

First published in The New York Times.

Photo by AndyRobertsPhotos

Life in Malemaland

1. Ch-ch-changes

Hell is an unwanted bear hug.

Let’s keep this maxim in mind as we wind our way through the EFF’s increasingly detailed municipal elections literature. (If their manifesto is a skeleton, their Radical Voice publication, a volume of which is released every week or so, serves as the internal organs.) Before we get too far though, and before we confuse ourselves into thinking that if the EFF would incrementally tweak our gently microwaved social democracy, we must agree on the following: the party’s local election manifesto is a fundamental reconceptualisation of how the South African state functions, so much so that they’d render the country unrecognisable within an afternoon of running the joint. The current elite consider freedom to be a political condition. The EFF conceive of freedom as an economic edition.

And so: Extreme Makeover: Juju Edition.

The EFF’s whole local governance framework is riveted to the party’s founding literature, which insists that it is their aim to “capture political and state power through whatever revolutionary means possible to transform the economy for the benefit of all, in particular Africans.” While local manifestos are always hitched to national manifestos, the EFF has since its conception viewed governance through a microscope rather than a pair of binoculars, with a focus on reformulating how life is lived at a granular level in township, peri-urban and rural wards. The party doesn’t articulate a grand urban vision, or even express much interest in transforming our cities — you know, those big smoky places where 60% of the country resides. But this is entirely by design: under the EFF, individual wards and their councillors would play an outsized role in the life of every South African citizen. We would be transmogrified into a country of microverses, run by a cabal of middle managers, overseen by the Central Command Team in outer space, AKA Braamfontein.

2. The Revolution Has Been Counselled

At the EFF’s manifesto launch at Soweto’s Orlando Stadium on April 30, and in the supplementary literature that pours from their Apple products, Malema and Company made their expectations very clear to hopeful councillors: y’all are gonna work like pigs. These red-clad Avengers are to make their phone numbers public, keep their mobiles on night and day, hold community meetings at least once a month, refrain from boning any of their constituents in exchange for “services”, educate themselves in all aspects of “mass revolutionary action”, live in the ward, love the ward, “[abolish] his/her ego and his/her attachments to personal success and achievements; s/he is selfless and one with the people.”

Corruption would be instantly eliminated, largely because councillors would be forbidden from either winning tenders or owning businesses in their wards. (Run a spaza shop or tyre retreading outfit near home? Not any more, you don’t.) EFF councillors are meant to function as surrogate parents for all of the ward’s orphans. They are mommy, daddy, nanny, and the saintly visage staring back at you from your EFF home shrine.

The only problem being: acquiring traces of Mother Theresa’s DNA and cloning her would prove a lengthy, expensive process, the budget for which is unlikely to be underwritten by Pravin Gordhan. The EFF is without question a disciplined organisation. Yet with the whole manifesto leaning not on institutional capacity but on the behaviour of individual humans, is the party not asking for the same species of governance chaos that currently bedevils us?

The general IQ/aptitude/stamina of the councillor becomes even more vital when considering the mise en scène of the prospective EFF ward. On top of their already considerable responsibilities, these “People’s Municipalities” would run cradle to grave operations that include burying the poor, building and operating fresh food markets for “locally produced food and other necessities”, mandating that half of all goods sold in the municipality are produced locally and – Malema’s own personal obsession – running crèches and early childhood development centres. There would be a municipal abattoir that would “slaughter, package and trade” meat products, a municipal printing company that would churn out revolutionary literature, a municipal recording studio that would, I’m guessing here, cut album after album of EFF musical encomiums. Industrial parks would be maintained and operated by the municipality, as would all local roadworks and sanitation services.

Oh, and say adios to pit latrines and buckets: everyone gets a big-ass two-bedroom house.

A Revolutionary Councillor is never depressed, bored, and sad; there is always something to do, there are always revolutionary actions to take up and advance.

EFF Local Election Manifesto, Item 5, Section B

3. Municipal Munificence

More critically, job creation would become the municipality’s primary responsibility. No more outsourcing, no more consultants, no more tenders. Everything performed locally, by locals, steered and managed by local ward bosses. “The EFF’s People Municipality will make sure that each and EVERY WARD UNDER ITS CONTROL AND UNDER ITS MUNICIPALITY HAS AN ECONOMIC ACTIVITY THAT EMPLOYS PEOPLE and produces goods and services.” (The caps are theirs.)

Think of this as one huge, systemic local is lekker programme, the only problem being, as we’ve noted, that humans are dumb. There isn’t a CEO in the country capable of running all of these initiatives. The EFF electoral list would need to identify dozens of management geniuses in every ward they control, train them using an operating manual that would rival the Bible in both heft and righteous injunctions, and make sure they run clean, legible books.

In effect, the municipality would be in competition with (or, more accurately, wipe out) the private sector. The EFF has always evinced a loathing for Shoprites and Pick n Pays and Woolworths; the fresh food market would directly compete with both grocery chains and mom’n’pop shops for custom. The idea, I think, is that the municipality would slurp up the bulk of the local economy, kick it back in the form of employment, which would generate tax revenue, which would be kicked back into the local economy.

This is some seriously commie, nationalise-the-atmosphere, Zambia-in-the-1960s, Utopian stuff.

It didn’t work then, Fighters.

How the hell is it going to work now?

And yet we are by no means done with the freebies. The People’s Municipality would operate mobile health clinics and “functioning community health centres” in each ward. Policing would be reconfigured, with Community Safety Workers partnering with the cops to “isolate and arrest criminals in the communities”. The Safety Workers would be employed and trained by the EFF, while CCTV cameras would be installed in all “crime hotspots”, and rapid response teams would roar to the sites of all illicit activity.

What happens when the first Community Safety Worker gets knifed to death with the business end of a broken Black Label bottle? I’ll leave the ensuing legal wrangling to your imagination.

4. Land Lubber

We arrive now at the hub of EFF policy. According to the most recent volume of Radical Voices, “LANDLESSNESS is THE major reason why the black majority and Africans in particular live in absolute poverty, and […] EFF Municipalities will use the Municipal planning function to abolish landlessness.” In summary: White settlers came to the bottom of Africa, stole the land, and used it to perpetuate black poverty through successive iterations of colonialism, culminating in our present neocolonial arrangement. The question now is “the manner in which this illegally and illegitimately acquired land should be transferred to the ownership and for the benefit of the people as a whole”.

As far as the EFF is concerned, because all land in the country was acquired criminally, willing buyer/willing seller initiatives constitute a criminal act. The municipality is the vector through which these crimes will be redressed.

“We will allocate all available land to the people for residential, industrial, religious and recreational purposes, and no one will stop the EFF from doing so,” yells Radical Voices. But what do they mean by “available”? And what are the legal implications of handing out land parcels like food parcels, considering the fact that property rights are enshrined in the Constitution?

Well, lest we forget, the EFF’s National Chairperson, Dali Mpofu, is a pretty good lawyer, and he’s clearly thought this stuff through. In order to justify the use of the municipality to redistribute land, the party has cited Section 151 (4), which states:

“The national or provincial government may not compromise or impede a municipality’s ability or right to exercise its powers or perform its functions”.

If the Constitution assigned the municipality a bunch of tasks requiring land, goes the reasoning, then surely the Constitution would be negating itself if municipal managers didn’t take the land and use it as they see fit?

There are several legal precedents that back up this position, the most notable being Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality v Gauteng Development Tribunal 2008, during which a Constitutional Court judge affirmed that, “‘planning’ in the context of municipal affairs is a term which has assumed a particular, well-established meaning which includes the zoning of land and the establishment of townships. In that context, the term is commonly used to define the control and regulation of the use of land”.

Scoff if you want to, but the EFF has proved that it knows its way around a courtroom. And so People’s Municipalities will “expropriate and allocate land equitably to all residents of the Municipality for residential, recreational, industrial, religious, and agricultural purposes and activities with the principle of use it or lose it”.

This is a tidy little legal parry, one that would be super interesting to test out in court. But that, sadly, is where the details stop. Who gets the land? Is there a version of RDP house lists for those spacious new structures? How would all of this actually work?

And how would this massively intricate programme be bankrolled? Here, again, the pixels get fuzzy. The EFF correctly insists that the conditional grant system – through which local government must apply for funding from provincial or national government – is a recipe for dysfunction. They also correctly note that richer municipalities tend to get better funding, while poorer communities get screwed. All tallied, local government nets about 10 percent of the national budget, which means that under these conditions the EFF’s plans would be untenable without their changing the funding structure at either provincial or national levels. Not impossible down the line. Very unlikely in the short term.

So money must be secured elsewhere. The EFF reminds us that additional cash would come from municipalities that are essentially revenue generators. The party promises to use a minimum of 60% of local budgets on the delivery of services, and to use those piddly conditional grants as efficiently as possible. Weirdly, funds will also be raised “from progressive international partners and [we] will developmentally and effectively utilise the corporate social investment contributions from the private sector.” Um, which “progressive international partners” would those be? And I’m not sure how forgiving the “private sector” will be, considering the EFF is basically rigging their municipalities to destroy business.

In other words, Fighters are going to be waiting a long time for those handouts.

5. Who’s Your (Sugar) Daddy?

A last note, and it brings us back to the unwanted bear hug/Hell maxim.

No question, South Africa’s communities need equal resources regardless of the pigment and pay cheques of their constituents. But Radical Voices has a lot of work to do in the next two months explaining just how this plan would work.

Otherwise, what differentiates all these nice words from poverty porn designed to titillate votes?

The EFF says that they engaged in extensive on-the-ground consultations in building their manifesto. But is this really how South Africans want to live, micromanaged by councillors who double as parents, triple as overlords, and quadruple as owners of every sector of the economy? It leaches the agency from life, all of this municipal oversight. It begs an enormous amount of trust in government.

It infantilises.

The original people of this land roamed free for millennia without a dude in a red overall wiping their asses; there were capitalist strivers in this place long before there was capitalism. Individual agency is in our blood. In my experience, people want fairness and equal opportunity, not a professional nursemaid.

The EFF’s plan is bold, and massive, radical change is necessary. But in its current state, their manifesto appears unworkable. It’s a big, slobbery bear hug without any bank to back it up. The People’s Municipality subjugates the people to the municipality.

We would no longer live in wards, but would instead live under wardens. And I’m not entirely sure South Africans would buy such an arrangement.

 First published at Daily Maverick.

Cairo’s Nerds Scrape Together an Egyptian Tech Scene

At a shared workspace in central Cairo, a 15-minute drive from the Nile, Mohammed Abuelhagag is working on a stem cell incubator. The bottom half, housing the motors, is made of laser-blackened wood. The top, where the stem cells will be grown, isn’t done yet. Sensors to track humidity, temperature, and air quality have yet to clear customs. “Here in Egypt, if you want to make something, it’s like a treasure hunt,” says Abuelhagag, 29.

He’s a regular at Fab Lab Egypt, a home for aspiring developers that’s become an early building block of the country’s tiny but growing tech scene. In the five years since the so-called Twitter revolution drove President Hosni Mubarak from power, startups, incubators, and angel investors have sprung up like shoots of grass after a drought. “The revolution showed me what people can achieve when they work together,” says Hisham Khodeir, a software engineer who helped found Fab Lab in 2012.

When I visit in March, a young couple is slouched on beanbag chairs, watching videos on cell phones. A man fiddles with wiring at a workbench. Aser Nabil, 21, one of the lab’s first members, shows me a wooden drone he’s been working on, then he walks me through the rest of the room: 3D printer, laser cutter, a machine to print circuit boards. Nabil ends the tour at a rack of jigsaws, drill presses, and grinders. “Anything that can cut you, bruise you, or burn you is here,” he says.

Since the revolution, violence and political crackdowns have kept tourists and investors at bay. The country’s bureaucracy can also be punishing, and not just when dealing with customs. The World Bank ranks Egypt 131st out of 189 economies in ease of doing business. “Our regulatory framework is like our archaeology,” says Ahmed El Alfi, a venture capitalist from California who opened a Cairo tech hub called the Greek Campus in 2013.

Education can also be a challenge. When an entrepreneur named Ahmed Shaaban set up Simplex, a company making machines for woodworking and stone carving, he had to literally educate the market. “About half of our customers didn’t know how to use a computer,” Shaaban says.

Then there’s the police. Hobbyists and professionals alike hesitate to carry their tech projects around Cairo, where cops could mistake them for bombs. In February, two interns at a hardware company called Integreight were arrested, possibly because they were carrying chips, and detained for two months. “Somebody once got arrested for carrying a voltmeter,” says Amr Saleh, Integreight’s chief executive officer. Saleh recently built a game featuring a large, red countdown clock. When he brought it to the office, he was careful to keep it tightly wrapped in a bag.

Fab Lab Egypt has twice been visited by men its members presume are police. Both times, they inspected equipment, asked some questions, and left. “In Egypt, you don’t know who came exactly,” says Omar Elsafty, the lab’s general manager.

Yet the country’s challenges also suggest its potential. “When you have a lot of needs, a lot of gaps, a lot of problems to solve, you don’t need to be very innovative,” says Saif Edeen El Bendari, a manager at RiseUp, which organizes annual tech conferences.

Last year the lab started making enough money—through memberships, workshops, and equipment rentals—to pay a few salaries and start setting up in other cities. Some regulars are starting businesses. “A few years ago, people didn’t know what a 3D printer was,” Elsafty says. “Today, they’re building their own.”

Abuelhagag, a former medical student who treated wounded protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011, plans to use his new engineering skills to create anatomical models for future med students. He also hopes to turn his stem cell incubator into a cheap, open source research kit. “Tech, it’s something you can actually have an effect on,” he says. “Maybe this is how you can change the world, finally.”

First published in Bloomberg Businessweek.