I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in June 2015 and joined an INGO (International Non-Governmental Organization) in November 2015. Since then, I have been working in several different organizations. Over the past five years, I have observed inefficient relationships between INGOs operating in Turkey and the Turkish state, leading to negative consequences for the vulnerable people who have been receiving aid. In response to the Syrian civil war which began in 2011, INGOs and local NGOs opened up in Turkey, mainly in southern provinces such as Kilis, Gaziantep, Hatay, and Şanlıurfa. They aimed to address the needs of those who fled from the civil war, many of whom moved to Turkey.
Fruitful collaboration between Turkey and I/NGOs was the precondition for an effective humanitarian campaign. However, this relationship has often proved to be unproductive. The lack of recripocal understanding between humanitarian organizations and the Turkish state, as well as interest-based politics, have negatively impacted the capacity to reach the most vulnerable.
Traditionally, Turkey is not an aid receiving country. For this reason, INGOs that have extensively worked in countries and regions where weak or failed states depend on international aid have not always been able to adapt to the institutional and bureaucratic context of the Turkish state. INGOs have structures, procedures, and rules that have been developed to substitute some of the functions of the state. These functions vary from human resources to finance or security. However, the mindset of INGOs relevant to weaker states often clashed with Turkey’s strong and pervasive state apparatus. For instance, some INGOs were fined for not complying with labor law or failing to register the organization properly.
Essentialism, defined as “the assumption that groups, categories or classes of objects have one or several defining features exclusive to all members of that category”,[1] can explain the approach of some Western INGOs in Turkey. In other words, in the INGOs’ approach, Turkey was yet another failed state in the broad humanitarian space.
Parallel to essentialism, a certain dose of idealism has been followed by INGOs in Turkey, whereby universal humanitarian principles were seen as non-negotiable – i.e. they coud not be compromised for the sake of the relationship with the Turkish state.
Finally, there have been practical difficulties in navigating this complex terrain. For example, delivering aid to SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) and PYD (Democratic Union Party)-held territories proved particularly challenging. Turkey considers SDF and PYD as PKK’s (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) sister organizations, therefore a no-go area in terms of aid. Some organizations were therefore fined by the Turkish state for delivering aid to SDF/PYD/PKK-controlled territories: Mercy Corps, for instance, was forced to shut down its office in Turkey.[2] Opting for a result-oriented approach, other organizations decided to deliver aid to SDF/PYD/PKK-controlled areas through Northern Iraq.
Sadık and Zorba argue that humanitarian diplomacy’s primary goal is saving innocent people.[3] This implies that both international organizations and local NGOs have to negotiate and find a compromise with the hosting state (or other non-state actors) to implement their projects. Moreover, humanitarian organizations have a duty of care for their own staff members, and the security of staff might be challenged in a country such as Turkey where aid delivery is highly politicized.
In Turkey, humanitarian diplomacy is articulated through the complex infrastructure of the Turkish state. Since the state administration is highly centralized and any decision on activities to be carried out in the provinces needs to be approved by the relative ministries in Ankara, a national-level perspective is crucial. Thus, while INGO representatives at the field level should retain their grounded relations, top-level communication should be followed in the capital. Indeed, essentialism and idealism have, at least partly, characterized the work of INGOs in Turkey. This approach clashed with Turkey’s politics of aid both at the higher institutional level and at the field level, making it more difficult to effectivey implement projects and reach the most vulnerable. To reduce institutional tensions and facilitate the realization of projects, context analysis should always be conducted before starting to operate in one particular country. As often argued, “The purpose of context analysis is to allow humanitarians to better understand the socio-cultural, political, economic and geographic factors.”[4]
In my experience of I/NGOs conducting context analysis, there are two common mistakes. Firstly, context analysis should be conducted by a country expert. Most context analyses I have seen were not done by Turkish experts, but rather by staff members working from the organizations’ headquarters. Secondly, the context analysis should not stay on the shelf waiting for the dust. On the contrary, context analysis should be one of the reference documents during each project’s (finance-hr-logistics-program) decision-making process. Although this is not a solution for smoothly navigating difficult institutional environments such as the Turkish state infrastructure, it might set a better starting point.
[1] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griddiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post Colonial Studies: Key Concepts, 96.
I Interviewed Paolo Israel on December 10, 2020, via Zoom, as has become the norm during the pandemic. Our conversation revolved around war and violence in Mozambique, especially the insurgency that is currently raging in Cabo Delgado province. In our conversation we looked critically at Harry West’s take on witchcraft, the limitations of Marxist and post-Marxist views of the insurgency, the ethical conundrums of using data distributed via social media without consent, and the challenges of the double lack of access to a field that has been closed by war and a pandemic.
Paolo is an anthropologist and historian, currently a senior lecturer at the University of Western Cape. He holds a PhD from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris, focusing on Makonde masquerades in northern Mozambique. At present he is working on two projects. The first is a nonfiction book titled The Magical Lions of Muidumbe, in which he blends interviews, life stories, descriptions of dance and anecdotes to provide a panoramic view of a witch-hunt and also society in Muidumbe, where it occurred. The second project is a history of the 1960 Mueda massacre, for which he has studied Portuguese intelligence documents and interviewed several actors.
Paolo Israel interviewing Simon Nshusha, Matambalane, 2014 (picture by Fidel Mbalale/courtesy of Paolo Israel)
A detail about the picture. Paolo is wearing a white necklace, which was tied around his neck during the ritual of kummwangalela (patronage) held for Nyusi during the 2014 elections. This ceremony took place in Muidumbe at all national elections. Anyone who so wished received the necklace from a master of ceremonies (these were always women, the mothers of the initiates), and was obliged not to remove it until the candidate was victorious.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Carmeliza: Thank you for accepting this interview and for giving me your time. I’m going to make this an informal talk and see where it takes us. We can work around your research, your interests. You sent me a particularly good list of these, so we can talk around the issues raised. We will conclude with the violence that Cabo Delgado is experiencing today. Let us begin with life histories. I have read some of your writings. One of those that you sent, an obituary of Simon Nshusha [pictured above], was also published in the weekly Savana. You look at the past from the perspective of lived history, and a lot of your publications are about life histories. Tell me a little bit about the insights that you have gathered through this, and how your work has grown into this specific way of doing anthropology and history.
Paolo: Thank you for the question. I’m interested in life histories and in stories in general. As I mentioned, my academic career has moved between anthropology and history. I would say that probably what keeps them together for me is my interest in storytelling. My research in Cabo Delgado initially tried to re-inject a sense of historicity into the tradition of Mapiko masquerades, which were viewed in terms of the colonial paradigm, as something unchanging, traditional and tribal. That required my reconstruction of the histories not only of the people involved, but also of the masks and genres involved. And some of the latter can be viewed as characters.
Mbangi, the transformation of a crazy mask since colonial times
For instance, one of the masks used dated back to precolonial times—the only mask from those times whose memory I managed to collect. It was called Mbangi, and it was basically a crazy guy. This mask, representing a guy dressed in leaves, was used as a resistance tool against the Portuguese invasion in 1917. Essentially it was used as a decoy to scare and distract the invading soldiers, whom the Makonde would then shoot with arrows. From these beginnings, it moved into a genre of masquerading called Nshindo, which is performed during funerary wakes, where it became just a sort of funny character. And then from there it was transformed again into Neijale, a mask that emerged after independence: a jester who does not go to FRELIMO’s political meetings and goes astray instead.
But then I also became interested in life stories. This was complemented by work that I had been doing on the history of the Mueda massacre [that took place on 16 June 1960]. With people’s life stories I’ve been trying to complement the drier histories that one gets from the colonial archive. You mentioned Simon Nshusha, who was probably the first person to openly, if not directly, ask for independence, provoking the colonial administrator into a fury and revealing the activities of the association he was part of. And Nshusha died just around the time of the first Al-Shabaab attacks in Muidumbe, on the Makonde plateau, this year [in April 2020].
Pedro Seguro, voluntary child soldier of the liberation war
There are two other life stories that I have been working on recently. One is that of my friend Pedro Seguro, who was the former administrator of the Muidumbe district. He was born during colonialism and exposed to the structural oppression of colonialism. And then he went to fight in the liberation war right at its beginning, in 1966. He was sixteen, technically a child soldier; but he and others in his position did not think of themselves as child soldiers because they were not coerced. He proceeded with his studies at the Mozambique Institute,[1] and got caught up in the troubles there. Though it was not his fault, he was sent back to the front. He fought in what were called the second, third and fourth sectors of Cabo Delgado, then went for training in the Soviet Union. He became administrator, and visited Muidumbe just around the time it was occupied by RENAMO in 1991. He fought to reclaim Nangololo, and the village of Muambula, from RENAMO. And then he retired, finally, in 2005. He was my host when I was there. His passion was building houses, which he could not do because his life had been captured by the struggles, by the state.
Seguro built a big house in the village, then a pensão [boarding house] and many more. And then finally everything was burned down in this year’s attack, when the Al-Shabaab got into Muidumbe in April. They threw a bomb into his house, and it exploded inside. I think they made this gesture because it was a big house, and maybe they knew it was the house of the former administrator. In the second attack, Pedro was still there, and he stayed a week in the bush before managing to escape, being brought back to safety by his first son. So his is the life of someone who has gone through three wars in his lifetime. In the long evenings I spent with him, during which we would eat by candlelight, because there was no electricity, he told many anecdotes from the war. He always ended by saying “A guerra não vale a pena” [the war is not worth it]. He said that he did not expect to have to fight another war after the struggle for independence. And now there is a third war. It is very sad, and it gives us a sense of what the province of Cabo Delgado is like.
Conscripted soldiers of the civil war
Another of my friends has a similar story. He was born during the liberation war, and fought in the civil war as a soldier. He was conscripted by force by the state, and then was finally demobilized in 1994. In the last attack on Muidumbe he was forced to stay for two weeks in the bushes. His house burned, his fields were lost, everything was lost. And now he is a refugee in Pemba. These are typical stories at the moment.
Carmeliza: Sometimes the personal histories get forgotten in the statistics. When one says that it is the Al-Shabaab, or terrorists, or insurgents, and then the Defense Forces, these are nameless figures. But when one starts naming the insurgents, because they have names, they have parents, they have siblings in the villages, people know them. Then it takes on another character. One gets a different sense of the violence and the war, wouldn’t you agree?
Paolo: Yes. I also think that we don’t have enough life stories of the insurgents. We don’t even have many refugee life stories yet. I remember when I was at the conference at Pemba last year (2019), there were a few testimonies. We have even fewer from the insurgent side. Sergio Chichava just published one. I think it’s particularly important to try to understand events from that side as well; what leads people down that route.[2]
Carmeliza: I like the life story you told about this Makonde kid who went to the mines and then came back as an insurgent.
Paolo: It’s not entirely confirmed. You get this information from rumors. But it’s one of the stories I heard, about a kid who left at a certain point for the Namanhumbir [ruby] mines (in Montepuez) to work there as a garimpeiro [artisanal miner]. This garimpeiro business is quite old. I remember in 2002, when I began fieldwork there on the streets of Pemba, people were selling all sorts of semi-precious stones. I don’t know exactly what they were, but it was tourmalines and such. There was one mine that was at the border between Meluco and Muidumbe, called Shashasha. My friend and research assistant, who passed away before all of this began, worked there, and he told me a bit how it was. There were foreign people who were illegally overseeing the mine: Somalians, Tanzanians. So, it’s an experience that the kids from the village had before the Namanhumbir mines were found. The story of this kid is that he went there, his family didn’t hear from him for a long time, and then apparently he came back in April as an insurgent. The speculation is why. No one really has an answer. But I think one point is that there’s a sense of oppression from a gerontocracy of war veterans. In Mueda and Muidumbe and the whole Makonde area there were already a lot of pensions at the beginning of the 2000s. After 2005, in the Guebuza era, people were showered with pensions. People who didn’t exist got pensions; forty-year-old people got pensions. Many young people from the new generation, they didn’t want to work the fields because there just wasn’t any hope anymore. Some still had a link to that kind of culture, but then all the opportunities were blocked by this big gerontocracy of war veterans. There were cases of kids who went and stole pensions from their parents. There was a lot of that: hit the old grandma on the head and steal the pension in a very violent way. This could build into that kind of marginalidade [marginality] of village youth.
Carmeliza: Sort of a generational clash?
Paolo: A generational clash, definitely. I wrote about the story of the War of Lions. This happened when I was there, and as much as it was couched in a discourse of witchcraft, and there was a tension between the traditional authorities and the state, it was very much a youth rebellion. So you could already see youth tension in the early 2000s. It is probably some of the same angst that has fueled Al-Shabaab on the coast.
The permanence and naturalization of violence
If I can interject something here about the mines. You can find online a short video of torture in the Namanhumbir mines. Besides people being buried alive, if you look at that video, you can see it’s basically a reeducation camp. Because it’s not only violence going on. What the video showed was these garimpeiros who were made to stand still, with the guards going around and whipping them. And then they were made to say things such as “Eu sou um marginal”: I am a marginal. So there seems to be something about that culture that comes up in terms of histories of violence. I wonder if this is some replication here that has a direct link to the place’s history? That is a working hypothesis for now.
Chicote
If you look at the chicote [whip], the law of the chicote never went away in Cabo Delgado. I don’t know about the other provinces of Mozambique. I remember when a video leaked of a woman being chicoteada [flogged] and everybody was surprised. That has been happening, not every second day, but every week and very often. There are all kind of milicianos [militias] who administer floggings. I think that because of the closer relationship with the liberation struggle, things are more entrenched. It’s my sense, at least, but I don’t have hard comparative data to confirm it.
Chamboco
My research assistant got an inordinate amount of chambocos [clubbing] one time, after being accused of stealing a can of paint—which belonged to me, by the way. When I was away, he was given twenty-five lashes by the policia communitária [community police], which are known there as grupo 12. He ended up pissing blood. That is how it was.
Operacão não pisa pneu [Operation do not step on the tire]
In the 2000s, in Pemba, there was this operation called Operacão não pisa pneu. It was pioneered by Joaquim Nido (the police commander) and José Pacheco (the governor). They cleaned up the streets of Pemba. The meaning of não pisa pneu was that if they caught you loitering about after the informal curfew that was enforced, the police would pick you up and you had to get in the back of a truck sem pisar pneu (which meant without stepping on its tires). They would throw you in.
The curfew was there to crush the criminality in Pemba. And it worked, but it was very violent. So it is part of this genealogy of violence. You have the Montepuez jail massacre,[3] you have Operacão não pisa pneu. Then you have the riots in Mocimboa, which curiously people aren’t mentioning that much. That was a sign things were about to explode.
Carmeliza: I remember Mocimboa as the only place in the country where ethnic tensions come up during elections, even though there’s violence in other places, like for example Gaza. But the violence in Mocimboa and what happened in Montepuez was very particular in terms of consequences and the number of dead.
Paolo: In Mocimboa, there were clear ethno, political and religious fault lines. I was in Muidumbe during the 2005 campaign, and I saw from very close up how everything was completely entangled. What happened is that from Mueda truckloads of Makonde headed to Mocimboa, all with FRELIMO flags, and marched on [majority Mwani] Mocimboa for the last day of campaign. It was really like a conquest march. And then they came back. That was not even a year before the riots, which happened in the aftermath of the first Guebuza election, in 2004. People weren’t happy and there was a riot, a big riot, in Mocimboa in September 2005. But it went a bit under the radar. It wasn’t as bad as the Montepuez case, but more or less the same intensity.
Carmeliza: So there’s a general uprising of the youth and against these old men in power. But the issue with the mines is also interesting. I mean, the violence around them is extreme. Something that people don’t talk about is the youth that come to Montepuez from all over the north of the country. I did five years of fieldwork in Cuamba, and the young men there are disappearing to the Namanhumbir mines. That’s where they go. It seems that even though the Mozambican state isn’t present and has managed to establish a weak unity, people on the ground are establishing their own networks. There are some connections that transcend administrative boundaries. And that takes me on to the issue of forgotten art and alternative geographies. I’m not sure if your masquerades are a forgotten art, because they’re not so forgotten in my opinion.
Paolo: The masks are not forgotten. And it should be said that, oddly enough, they haven’t made it onto the UNESCO heritage list yet. With a Makonde president, that’s rather bizarre. But anyhow, the masquerades are well known. But what I meant by forgotten art, it’s partly a personal consideration, that when you know these places that are now at the center of the insurgency get turned into names that make the international news, they’re obviously framed within a certain discourse of war, as a humanitarian emergency, etc. They become markers on maps of atrocity and war, often misspelled. But each of them is a site of art, of culture, and there’s almost an underlying geography to the province that isn’t a geography of ethnic tension or violence, but a geography of beauty. I could begin with Tufo and Mapiko in Mocimboa. And if you go south, to Mbau. Mbau was the site where in January 2021 the first major defeat by the FDA occurred. There were over 100 soldiers from the Escola de Sargentos de Boane who were attacked frontally by the insurgents. I think twenty-two soldiers died. It was the first military incident where you could see that these people could take on the Mozambican army. Mbau was the birthplace of famous singers called Namwalu and Shambili. They were masters of a singing style in which one voice follows the other. And it’s amazing. These songs are making the rounds now on social media because one of them begins by saying “Why war in Mozambique?” Of course, it refers to the civil war. “What is this war in Mozambique? Where does it come from?”
There was a tradition of masquerading calling Nshindo in which masks would dance through the night and throughout the day—amazing masquerades. In Nakitenge it was the same. In Myangalewa, there were masquerades, songs and timbilas. In Mwatidi, there was a youth mask who went around on a bike, called Naupanga. In Awashi, where the naked woman was killed,[4] there were many dance groups. Each of these places, which are now wastelands, had this kind of deep history of art [see the map at the end of the interview].
Awashi was kind of famous even before this event. Maybe because it’s like a crossroads; you can’t miss it when you go anywhere, you need to pass it. And they sold these roots, ming’oko, that people are eating now to survive. Near Awasi and Nshinda there was this man who sang with the pankwe [traditional zither]. An amazing Pankwe singer. Another amazing pankwe singer used to live around Luchete. He used to wander all those villages, which are now wastelands and the insurgents’ bases, from Mocimboa to Mucojo (Luchete, Naquidunga, Nazimoja). He was a storyteller. I met him once, and I had the good luck to record him. He was a bit crazy, hunchbacked, and he went around the villages. He didn’t have a house and he just improvised these songs on a zither, which he called Iwaya.
An iwaya/magita/magalamponi/pankwe (picture by Rui Assubuji/courtesy of Paolo Israel)
There was one song he sang that was a story of how he was captured by RENAMO people and was basically taken around the province. It portrays a geography of war that looks very much like this war. He was taken around as a slave, and tried to reach the Makonde. There is a war being fought with arrows and guns. The main point is that one should not forget that this province is very rich with art, dance, sculpture and music, and all this is being ignored and annihilated by the conflict.
Carmeliza: Do you feel that this war is destroying art in ways that previous wars did not manage to do?
Paolo: Maybe it will survive the war in some way. But the emptying out that is happening now hasn’t happened in the same way before. Obviously, when there’s war, there’s a strong impact on those forms of expression. The last years of the RENAMO war were the same. People weren’t paying attention to art. But now you have a situation in which from Mocimboa until Awasi, and then up to Myangalewa and the coast, most of the villages have emptied out.
Carmeliza: I want to go into our written exchanges now. When you sent me your wonderful personal trajectory, my comment was that I found it interesting that you didn’t mention Harry West. You mentioned that you respect him and he influences you. For me, you two are the biggest references for Makonde history and anthropology and culture. And I don’t think anyone else has done such profound work. Also, you’ve worked on similar things, but differently. You said that you disagree with some of his readings of witchcraft. I’m curious to hear how you disagree and why.
Paolo: First, I’d like to say that Yusuf Adam needs to be recognized. Yusuf Adam has done a lot of work, so you can’t leave him out of the “Makondologists.” You go to Yusuf’s house and it’s a treasure trove of field notes. I have a huge personal respect for Yusuf. Recently, and this has been blocked by COVID-19, we’ve initiated a project of digitization of all the interviews that the Oficina [de História] team made in 1981,[5] of which 150 survived in the Arquivo Historico and another forty at the Centro de Estudos Africanos.
About West, he did amazing work, and I think he was more systematic than me at the beginning. He was accompanied by Marcos Mandumbwe, who was also amazing. When I began my work, West was the reference figure. His book Kupilikula came out as I was finishing my fieldwork, but I’d read his PhD. I had no intention of working on witchcraft at all because that was his topic. But then in 2002 as I was doing fieldwork, lions began to eat people in the lowlands of Muidumbe, and in reaction to this there was widespread suspicion in the district. Pedro Seguro, the administrator (whose life history we discussed at the beginning), was suspected of being the mastermind behind the lions and of coordinating an international trafficking of organs that these ghost lions harvested. And I was accused of being his foreign buyer.
You can read a lot of things into those events and Harry has written about them. I was there, and I had the fortune to do research with Estevao Mpalume from the Ministerio da Cultura, a local scholar who is amazingly skilled in interviewing. I learned how to interview with him. I’ve been writing about this recently, and just to be able to relisten to those interviews led by somebody who has an amazing skill at asking questions without shame is such a boon. Now I’m able to understand what was going on; at the time I wasn’t. I was just sitting and listening to the translations at the end. Harry came later, with his analysis of this war of lions, about which he also wrote an article, which I think was a bit more secondhand. And I agree with some of his understandings of this event and of witchcraft in general, which can be read as a metaphor for neoliberal predation—the Commaroff argument that witchcraft is a metaphor for popular dissatisfaction with global forces, and that there’s a symmetry between the occult nature of witchcraft and the occult nature of the flows of capital, in this case organs.
What this analysis misses is the violence. I think that if you look at witchcraft as discourse, it’s just talk. But then when it escalates into witch-hunts, which was the case at the time, when twenty-five people got lynched, then you need to have something else that accounts for the violence that takes place. And you need to think about that violence. And the sort of playful, metaphorical, discursive nature of witchcraft needs to be philosophically paused. I think that witchcraft is always both metaphorical and non-metaphorical. It’s always a metaphor when you say that somebody is a witch; you’re always saying that somebody is unsociable or selfish, greedy, envious. You point to some major flaw of the person or you point to some major social crisis.
At the same time, if you discuss witchcraft only as a metaphor, then the metaphor loses its power, because to use it as a metaphor you have to believe in witchcraft in a literal way. And after working on that and after listening again to all the interviews, I think that to work on witchcraft you need to believe in it a little bit. If you take a purely secular approach you’re going to miss out. You need to leave the door slightly open to the possibility of something that’s beyond your understanding.
Carmeliza: I’ll now discuss one thing that you’re now into, and I guess because you haven’t been to the field, a way of following it is by following social media. How has this been? How has it been to not be able to go to the field, partly because of the violence that’s going on so it’s a no-go area and partly because the possibility of an alternative source of information is there. How has this transition from actual field to the digital field been for you?
Paolo: I was in Cabo Delgado between 2017 and 2018. So I was there for about a month when the insurgency began. I traveled around and went to Pangane and to Mucojo in late 2017, early 2018. I was doing research on Ningore. I don’t know if you heard about him. It’s a very fascinating history. He was the biggest witch hunter of Cabo Delgado, and maybe in the country, who operated in the 1980s. It was a mass movement, the Ningore movement. I haven’t written about it yet. But basically Ningore made the rounds of the whole province to exorcise witches with a machete. There was a deep connection between this exorcism and reactivating practices that were done in the colonial period. But he cleansed people during the civil war. And I think there was a connection between that and the anxiety about the enemy. So, we were interviewing the Ningore family, which was from Mucojo. I could see, especially because I’ve been to Pangane before, how the place has changed. It was a gut feeling, but also I spoke to some people. There was a sense of Islamic radicalization in Pangane. It was very, very palpable.
Then I went back last year (2019) for the Pemba conference. Not to do fieldwork, just to attend. And I wanted to go to my Muidumbe. It would still have been possible. The roads were a bit dangerous, but not too bad. I couldn’t go because my plane ticket didn’t allow it. And then COVID-19 came. So, 2020 for me was like these places I have known don’t exist anymore. Myangalewa, I spent three weeks in that village researching this and that, it was taken off the map. People don’t live there anymore. Shitashi, I spent quite some time there. There was a massacre. People don’t live there now. Mbau, Nakitenge, I had a very good friend from there, we spent weeks there. They were the first to go.
So I tried to phone people. The line between personal concern and fieldwork is very thin. You’re just phoning people to see whether they’re alive or not and then they tell you stories. At the beginning of the year, there was this huge trouble in communication due to a surveillance system that the government had put in place. Someone told me it was Chinese software, but basically after you made a few phone calls to specific areas they identified your phone. And then you heard a voice that said with an Asian accent: “Hello, hello, I cannot hear you! Hello, hello!” And then they hung up. I couldn’t phone anybody because my phone had been targeted. So I started changing phones. I used my wife’s phone, then someone else’s. Then after a while your phone works again, so you can phone again. Or else they recorded you. There was a conversation where you talked with somebody for two minutes and then the conversation began again. You heard the person say: “Kaka, umumi?” Brother, how are you? The person told me this a few minutes ago: why is he repeating the same thing? To sum up, there was this blockage of information.
And then the big anxiety, I couldn’t travel because COVID-19 had arrived. I had plans to go to Maputo. I had some hopes to go to Cabo Delgado. In April, when Muidumbe was attacked, I got to talk for the first time with friends. So that’s when the social media thing kicked in. There are several chats. There’s the Pinnacle News Chat, which is amazing. And there are Makonde chats. The media that are most shared are these little voice notes that people send from the war zones. And I can listen to and understand those in Makonde. I don’t have access to any others. They really give you a sense of practical information, or emotional information, or judgment about things.
Just to mention a few that were deserving of analysis. One of them generated the news about the 117 insurgents killed in Awasi by FDS. It was a recording. There’s an intellectual point here to be made about orality. You can sort of gauge the trustworthiness. People always ask, well, where’s the sound clip? A written message isn’t trustworthy. But if you hear somebody saying, my friend, here we are, they are bombarding, throwing this and that from helicopters, the people believe it. And there’s a reason for that. People can read the local codes; people can read the accent of the person. People can understand from the message whether the person knows the local geography and so whether the person is from there or not. People have ways of gauging the information.
Another example is an eighteen-minute clip from a militiaman from a village in Muidumbe, who describes with an extraordinary amount of detail the first hours of the attack and his own experiences. It’s an amazing document that came through social media.
Carmeliza: Now there’s a law against disseminating messages via social media. You’re liable for any message you disseminate. If a person didn’t give consent, they can take you to court. Technically they can take anyone who has disseminated a message to court. You shouldn’t be sharing without consent.
Paolo: That’s interesting. There’s also an interesting ethical discussion to be had about this. I’m one of those who’s against ethics by regulatory committee. How can you regulate anthropology and field work by filling in forms? What happens if I phone a family member to find out how the situation goes and the family member doesn’t know that the call is being recorded? The person phones in good faith because they want to know if the family member is alive. At the same time, they record the conversation, and they share it with the world without any kind of ethical clearance. And that lands on my cell phone. What do I do with this? It’s an ethical quandary if the person who gave that information did not agree.
Carmeliza: Technically, from what I understand, you shouldn’t record or disseminate things from others, even if you share them in a public group. And I think the intention is in a way to control information, the circulation of information related to the war and other things. Because social media is extremely powerful in Mozambique.
Paolo: Yes. If you look at how this information is being generated., one of the major actors at the moment is Pinnacle News. It’s this little independent news agency based in Nacala. And it’s all basically posited on sharing. The way it operates, it has a lot of groups and people who post. Sometimes they just tweak the message. For instance, the news of the massacre in Mwatibi, we still don’t have clarity about that, but it made the BBC and Al Jazeera. That was Pinnacle News; it came from social media. Somebody has either voice messaged or texted Pinnacle, and the news jumped from there to Carta de Mocambique, from Carta de Mocambique to Al Jazeera.
People are following Pinnacle. But it’s very wobbly. It’s a very anarchic space. But when you read news by Pinnacle, it means somebody has said it. And there’s a sort of checking. More, sometimes there are jokes. There was one in May that people were debating whether it was a fake. It was a sort of gallows humor. There’s this guy who phones:
“ – Hello. Who’s there on the phone?
– Who’s there?
– Who’s there?
– No, who are you?
– No, the owner of this phone is dead. I cut his throat. He was my uncle. No, I cut his throat.
– Who are you?
– I am an Al-Shabaab.”
The person who speaks is clearly a Makonde. One speaks in Makonde and the other speaks Makonde with a Mwani accent. He goes on and verbalizes what the Al-Shabaab are going to do. Now we want to get to Mueda, to kill Nyusi [the president], to kill Pachinuapa [a veteran general owner of mines in Namanhumbir – both Makonde], to destroy everything. It was very popular. Through gallows humor, it was a popular interpretation of the reasoning of the Al-Shabaab.
Carmeliza:There are two clips of the insurgents when they came into the Mocimboa and Quissanga, in which there’s apparently popular support for the Al-Shabaab. There’s this clip about a Mwani kid from the islands who kept saying “You know me, you know who I am. I am a child of the land, and I am here to liberate you because this government is unfair. It’s not treating you fairly.” It’s the first time that something is mentioned about the unfairness of the government and the like. I’m not talking about what’s discussed in the Makonde closed channels, but what’s going around in public channels. There’s not been much mention of the reasons for this war.
Paolo: When it comes to this insurgency, there’s a lack of understanding of its ideological underpinnings. I think that partly it’s because we have a Marxist or post-Marxist field that’s so saturated with the idea that everything boils down to economic causes. Surely the economic forces are there, but I think there’s work to be done on the specific ideological underpinnings. And I think that especially in the initial phases of the insurgency, there was too much dismissal of the Islamist side. People have now changed their minds. Eric Mourier-Genoud stressed the local much more. Yussuf was a bit skeptical about the Islamist factor, but now he’s worried. Hanlon did not change his mind. But I think there has been a shift into acknowledging that it is an important factor. But we still do not know clearly what the ideology is exactly. But it is not an incidental factor. This is my take, my sense.
I was listening to Liazzat Bonate talking at ASA the other day,[6] and talking to another colleague of mine, Andrea Brigaglia, who’s a specialist on Boko Haram. There seems to be something very peculiar about the kind of Islamic State ideology that’s different from the al-Qaida one, insofar as there’s much more emphasis on chaos, on Armageddon, on the end of the world. And that seems to be the modus operandi at the moment. This is something that Salvador Forquilha mentioned as well. They don’t do it like RENAMO did, finding support. They aim at emptying out the space.
There’s work to be done in that respect, but from somebody who understands Arabic, Swahili. Somebody who has a good grasp of the longue durée histories. And I think Liazzat is the one who’s best placed to do that.
Carmeliza: In a way, I understand why there was this reluctance in centralizing Islam. Because in an Islamophobic world, to centralize Islam becomes dangerous for the Muslim people who aren’t involved, for the non-radicals, even for conservative non radicals. There are a lot of people who are extremely conservative Muslims, but they’re not Islamist radicals. The point that was made by Liv Tønessen was an important one: that to be a Muslim, if we take this as an ISIS standpoint, is a very narrow vision of who is Muslim. Which means that everyone can be a victim. So rather than a clash between religions, it’s a purification of Islam—a point that Liazzat also made.
Paolo: There’s the whole war on terror discourse that one easily falls prey to. That’s something else you see on social media. In the Makonde social media, you begin to see Islamophobia. With the destruction of Nangololo there was a lot of grassroots Islamophobia. And that’s definitely something that it is very risky.
Another point for which I don’t have clear proof, but one that also needs to be considered, is the history of banditry as a possibility. That’s how RENAMO operated. That’s something that was said a lot, last year especially. That some people adhered to this to make a life out of banditry. It’s a possibility.
[1] The Mozambique Institute was created in 1963 in Dar-es-Salaam by FRELIMO, the liberation front. It was managed by Janet Mondlane, the American-born wife of FRELIMO’s leader, Eduardo Mondlane. It collected funds and oversaw the humanitarian works of the front, chiefly education. The troubles were a student rebellion against Janet Mondlane that occurred in 1968–69. They protested the predominance of white teachers, being forced to go to the war’s front lines, and political assassinations on the Cabo Delgado front (see Costa, C., 2018. ‘O Instituto Moçambicano e o Estado Social dentro da FRELIMO.’ Tese realizada no âmbito do Doutoramento em História. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto).
[2] More has been published since the interview: see Macalane, J. and Jafar, J. (2021). Ataques Terroristas em Cabo Delgado (2017–2020): as causas do fenómeno pela boca da população de Mocímboa da Praia. Universidade Rovuma. Extensão de Cabo Delgado.
[3] An incident where around 100 people affiliated with the opposition were suffocated after they had been crammed into a small jail cell in a prison in Montepuez.
[4] This refers to an incident where four gunmen beat and shot dead a woman that they accused of being an insurgent. They filmed the incident, which went viral on social media and spurred international condemnation and a report on human righst violations the incident by Amnesty International.
[5] The Oficina de História was part of the Center for African Studies (CEA) at the University Eduardo Mondlane. Created in 1980, it set to rewrite Mozambican history using oral sources and focusing on subordinate historical actors such as peasants and guerrilla fighters. The focus of the Oficina was contemporary history, “focusing on the old liberated zones in the post-independence era, the socialisation of the countryside and the cooperativization of communal villages” (see Fernandes, C. 2013. History writing and state legitimisation in postcolonial Mozambique: the case of the History Workshop, Centre for African Studies, 1980-1986. Kronos, 39(1), 131–57).
Ruth Finnegan in her Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection (2002) explains that human face-to-face communication is characterized by multimodality, that is, by the fact that we always communicate using a variety of interdependent channels at the same time. The tone of voice, the effectiveness of the gaze, facial expressions, body posture, hand and arm gestures, the regulated use of touch, the evocative sense of smell, the symbolic power of clothing – all of these are elements of human interconnectedness.
Communicating is thus a highly polysemic process that is difficult to define and describe as it involves an extraordinary quantity of interdependent elements, in which the participants form an active and creative relationship.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdown have caused an unexpected restriction of the multiple modalities of human interconnection, reducing both our extraordinary and our daily social relationship to what can be communicated to the two dimensions of a screen.
As a consequence, the sense of sight is enhanced compared with others, leading to a persistent visual overexposure that tires and depresses us, causing, in the long run, the sensation of a loss of energy. As a secondary schoolteacher confided to me during an in-depth interview on remote teaching:
… the particular thing that we have all noticed: you put energy in there but it does not return, whereas in a direct relationship energies return; whenever you enter a classroom you feel that the energies do arrive, what you give comes back to you somehow, you feel tired but emotionally fortified; in there it is pure exhaustion, total alienation.
Furthermore, in digital communication, sight and hearing no longer work in synergy but produce a kind of continuous cognitive dissonance since, online, there is always a time lapse, more or less accentuated, between what I see (the speaker’s face) and what I listen to (the words that come to me a little later, sometimes slowed down, sometimes accelerated); the sense of touch, then, locked up in our homes, is reduced to typing on a keyboard, clicking, scrolling or even to frantic washing and disinfecting for fear of infection.
There is an even more direct relationship between Covid-19 and our senses: the symptomatology of the disease manifests itself in several cases with ageusia, the loss of taste, and anosmia, the loss of smell.
Much has been said about the obligation, imposed by the need to contain the spread of the disease, to maintain a physical distance and not to touch each other, and much has also been said about the social suffering caused by these prohibitions. However, less attention has been paid to the loss of smell and taste. Yet smell and taste are the most intimate senses, anthropologically defined as “proximity senses”. We do not have a standardized system of coding and verbalization for them as is the case for the “remote senses” – sight and hearing –- though they operate, more widely than the other senses, at the emotional and affective levels of experience.
A person’s smell is part of their uniqueness – it suggests mutual intimacy and can form a special, close bond with another person; the smells of the places we frequent represent a particularly emotive basis for the sense of belonging to a community, for social inclusion and exclusion (commonly, the foreigner “stinks”). Moreover, the sense of smell comes into play during ceremonial and therapeutic moments, those most linked to the symbolic and even ritual dimensions of culture. It is able to stimulate the deeply moving memory of places, people, situations.
Taste is the sense that most subtly and unconsciously binds us to our tradition and cultural memory. As Le Breton writes in Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses, our favourite flavours constitute a secret and timeless bond that reminds us of the table of our childhood and, even further, to our feeding mother. Taste metaphorically defines pleasure – expressions such as “to savour life” or “to taste the beauty of a landscape” are frequently used – and besides, a beloved food or drink produces instant, intense, satisfying well-being.
Symbolically, the pandemic, just as it takes our breath away, takes away not only the most emotional and intimate parts of our senses, but also the most mysterious side of human relationality. As it temporarily makes these senses dormant in the infected, so it hides them from social life, since taste and smell are precisely the senses that cannot be experienced and communicated through the digital channel, which now characterizes most of our daily communications. If we can share our ideas through remote meetings, view a photo or listen to good music on our social networks, we cannot share aromas, perfumes, fragrances, flavours on a digital platform.
Therefore, the symptomatology of Covid-19 involves the loss of the sense of proximity and leaves some open questions: does it foreshadow the future of a humanity without smell or taste, senses to be considered as superfluous for digital humans? Or does it urge us to pay attention to that irreducible background of physicality, which we have rediscovered as an important component of human interconnection? Or, finally, does it remind us that communication, and therefore sociality, implies not only a cognitive level but also affective and emotional processes that we are unwilling to give up?
The film “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code” is based on the book – “Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago”.[1] The title of the film is a powerful depiction of the heatwave that ravaged across the city of Chicago in 1995.
The opening lines by Judith Helfand – “what is the best way to prepare for a disaster” – sets the tone well for what to expect in the film. The film begins with Helfand’s own experience during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Helfand explains that possessing a disaster preparedness kit can be a luxury for millions of people. During Sandy, Helfand uses her social capital (family) to move to safety and highlights that millions of others do not have the same social capital and safety nets. Further, the majority of the people do not have access to basic disaster preparedness kits. Later, the focus in the film shifts to the devastating heat wave in Chicago in 1995. The film shows the disproportionate impacts of the heatwave on the elderly and the Black and African American communities in poor neighborhoods. These impacts are clearly linked to poverty and the systemic construction of risk and vulnerability. Although the film effectively discusses “unnatural disasters”, it reiterates the use of the term “natural” disasters. Social science disaster research has provided ample evidence for decades that disasters are not natural. Hazards are natural.[2] A natural hazard becomes a disaster when it interacts with factors of risk, vulnerability, and exposure. The factors of vulnerability are rooted in historical systems of power and injustice, access to resources (financial, social, political). The various factors of vulnerability determine the level of disproportionate impacts different communities might face during disasters. By using the term “natural” disasters, we give an easy escape route to governments and corporations to blame nature or the climate instead of addressing issues of risk and vulnerability.
Disasters reveal layers of societal inequalities[3] in the form of disproportionate impacts. The COVID-19 pandemic has further unfolded this story across the world.[4] In the film, taking a deeper analysis of the Chicago heatwave of 1995, it is made clear how root causes of vulnerabilities such as systemic racism[5] play a central and significant role in disaster impacts.[6] The interviews and powerful accounts of many individuals in the film are examples to show the real causes of these disproportionate impacts on certain groups of people. For example, poverty and lack of access to resources make it almost impossible for some groups to prepare for disasters. Yet, after every disaster, governments and other actors continue to rebuild status quo and sometimes create new risk in this process of disaster recovery. Briefly, the film also highlights the impact of the Hurricane Katrina of 2005 showing similar patterns of disproportionate disaster effects on different communities. Although Katrina occurred a decade after the Chicago heatwave, it appears that not much has changed with regard to vulnerability of some groups of people. Disaster related memories seem to be short and learnings from disasters seem to be minimal. The film highlights an interesting conversation on the need to redefine disasters. Helfand raises the question – why isn’t poverty termed as a disaster? As Tierney highlights, “the patterns of differential vulnerability and differential impacts in the Katrina disaster mirrored those documented by social scientists in other hazard and disaster contexts, particularly those who conduct research within the vulnerability science paradigm” (p. 208).[7]
In response to the Chicago heatwave, Helfand shows different interventions being taken in under privileged neighborhoods. However, these interventions are fragmented and do not address issues of risk, vulnerability, and discrimination which are the underlying causes of disasters that need to be solved to reduce devastating impacts. The film challenges the need to spend big money on disaster simulations and trainings. Here, the critique against the system should be that disaster risk management is primarily response oriented. In a changing world, we need to be prepared for disasters while we continue to address root causes. The film also shows some of the mitigation related efforts taken by the city (for example, green roofs) in the aftermath of the heatwave. While mitigation activities are important, they are not sufficient. We need to continue investing in planning and preparing to ensure that hazards do not turn into disasters and societies need to be prepared at all times to respond. The core message must be – leave no one behind!
Overall, the film highlights many important questions that need to be addressed both at higher policy levels and at an operational level. Indeed, political decisions have a huge impact on how risks and vulnerabilities are transferred over different generations. This aspect could have been better discussed in the film so to build a narrative on why some communities are historically disproportionately affected. Disasters are political and are related “to an amalgam of household and neighborhood level activities and networks for disaster response that happen outside of the gaze of the formalized governance arrangements but underlie and affect such arrangements and practices nonetheless” (p.215).[8] These invisible forms of governance very much shape the everyday life of people, i.e. the construction of risk and vulnerability. Further, given the context of climate change and extreme weather events, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) must be kept in mind. Disasters often set back years of development and complicate efforts to achieve the SDGs. A strong concerted effort to address the SDGs is needed with a strong focus on dynamics of risk and how to enhance societal resilience. The film does a good job in highlighting the real causes of disasters and the need for policy makers to pay attention to risk reduction and development.
[1] Klinenberg, E. (2015). Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
[2] O’Keefe, P., Westgate, K., and Wisner, B. (1976). Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters. Nature 260(5552):566–567.
[3] Raju, E., and van Niekerk, D. (2020). Why Do the Impacts of Coronavirus Disease 2019 and the Response Surprise the World? Jàmbá – Journal of Disaster Risk Studies, 12(1).
[4] Raju, E., and Ayeb-Karlsson, S. (2020). COVID-19: How Do You Self-isolate in a Refugee Camp? International Journal of Public Health.
[5] Bolin B., and Kurtz L.C. (2018). Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Disaster Vulnerability. In: Rodríguez H., Donner W., Trainor J. (eds) Handbook of Disaster Research. Springer, pp 181-203.
[6] Wisner, B. et al. (2004) At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters. Routledge.
[7] Tierney K. (2006). Foreshadowing Katrina: Recent Sociological Contributions to Vulnerability Science. Contemporary Sociology, 35(3):207-212.
[8] Hilhorst, D., Boersma, K., and Raju, E. (2020). Research on Politics of Disaster Risk Governance: Where Are We Headed? Politics and Governance, 8(4):214–219.
Ather Zia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Gender Studies Program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines the Indian military occupation, settler colonialism, and women’s collective political and social challenges in the disputed Indian-administered Kashmir. Resisting Disappearance is a powerful narration of the effects of oppression and political disputes on people’s everyday life. The book is engaging and shrewdly written. It effectively summarizes the broad and committed scholarship behind it. An excellent example of anthropology’s capacity to both inform and inspire.
Read below to learn more about Ather Zia’s work.
Antonio: What’s Resisting Disappearance about?
Ather: The political resistance in Kashmir predates the formation of India and Pakistan. In the last 40 years or so, from an international dispute involving Kashmiri people, the Kashmir issue has been relegated to being a bilateral dispute or a “border issue.” An issue that India from time to time even undermines as an internal problem or labels it as “terrorism,” negating the genuine political demands of the Kashmiri which are on the UN agenda and mandated by its resolutions. This book focuses on tracing the neo-imperial project that India has had in Kashmir effectively starting in 1947. My analysis deploys enforced disappearances that have been effected by the Indian army and other government militia and vigilantes as a way of tracing the project and policies of the Indian occupation. The ethnography centralizes the voices of Kashmiri activist women from the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) who have been searching for the 10,000 + Kashmiri men subjected to enforced disappearance by the Indian forces. As a Kashmiri myself it becomes supremely important to center and amplify Kashmiri voices. Even though Kashmiris have been vocal and active in every decade since 1947, they have been increasingly invisibilized and their resistance criminalized by India. The power of ethnography lies in storytelling and this book tells the story of Kashmir through the voices of Kashmiri women, activists offering a critical feminist and political analysis of Indian occupation in Kashmir.
Antonio: Enforced disappearances disrupt families and society. What is the current state of the military occupation in Kashmir?
Ather: Kashmir is one of the most densely militarized zones in the world. There are more than 700,000 Indian soldiers on Kashmir soil at the moment. As the world fights the Covid-19 pandemic, Kashmir, without a break, continues to reel under the brutal Indian occupation. In early 2020, Kashmiris were hobbling back to life from a long military siege and communication lockdown that had been imposed by India on August 5, 2019 when it unilaterally and militarily removed Kashmir’s autonomy. During the pandemic, India has not stopped any of its counterinsurgency operations. The cordon and search operations (CASO) are going on. During CASO the Indian forces enter neighborhoods and communities under the pretext of searching for militants. It is an operation filled with soldiers creating mayhem in people homes; arresting, beating, humiliating, physically and sexually harassing civilians. Armed encounters with militants are also continuing during the lockdown. Routine surveillance, patrolling, frisking at checkpoints and convoy movement have not ceased and they are even growing. All this despite the United Nations calling for cessation of violence in conflict zones across the globe. The India government followed the removal of Kashmir’s territorial sovereignty and autonomy with a brazen amendment in Kashmir’s own domicile act, which marks the manifest beginning of Indian settler colonialism. Thousands of Kashmiris are illegally arrested, raided and detained and media is fully gagged by imposition of new statutes. The Indian necropolitical policies are growing; never the ones to sit silent, India has enforced silence in Kashmir and the fear of state terrorism, dispossession, incarceration, and ecocide is growing.
Antonio: How does mourning become not simply a coping strategy but an active form of engagement with political violence?
Ather: In the brutal political repression that exists in Kashmir, the simple act of remembrance is a marker of resistance and can invoke the wrath of the Indian nation state. Thus, to embark on public mourning is to invite danger and death. Yet, the APDP activists have been doing it since the late 1980s and formally since 1994. Mourning in the context of military occupation ceases to just be only a mode of coping, it becomes a revolutionary act of resistance. In the book, I propose the analytic lens of “affective law,” which is in contrast to the sovereign’s law that prevails over Kashmir and that has caused the enforced disappearances in the first place. I urge readers to see affective law as a paradigm, which manifests the quest for justice by the activists, as not just accidental but a deliberate effort to reclaim some power to get justice, despite the dangers to life and scarce legal options. This law is born of mourning, which is effectively a mode of politics and not just routine commemoration. APDP’s mission manifests creation of counter-memory, practices of remembering and forgetting that become crucial for resisting oppression and oppressive dominant ideologies. These counter memories as subjugated knowledges which are produced by a deeply brutalized people will often remain hidden behind dominant statist versions. So they need to be scrupulously traced and told. My analysis makes manifest in how they appear both in archival and performative modes, in documentation and in public mourning. APDP’s activism becomes a resistant memory against amnesia forced by a repressive occupation. By highlighting these subjugated knowledges, my ethnography illustrates how the APDP activists expose the Indian governments’ policies to control Kashmiri dissent and its genuine demand for self-determination as mandated by the UN.
Antonio: Poetry is a key component of your work. Can you tell us more about how you see your work at the intersection of ethnography and poetry?
Ather: Anthropology has a generous heart in allowing creative genres to become part of our analysis. For me, the poems written while doing ethnographic work acted as a moment of surfeit, where reason sought the logic of surplus and escaped measured words. As a poet who could not stop writing poetry while doing fieldwork, the poetic process to be part of research journey enabled greater empathy, an experiencing, and a witnessing which otherwise was not possible as part of my methodological toolkit. As a mode of contemporary ethnopoetics, the poetic aspect becomes part of the movement for strengthening the turn towards what Renato Rosaldo describes as “antropoesia,” bridging the cultural and social scientific fields of poetry and anthropology.
Antonio: What are your future plans?
Ather: I am working on a collection of ethnographic poetry based on my work in Kashmir. It is tentatively titled, Field-in-Verse: Writing under Occupation; and also a set of short stories; a novella if time permits. I am also co-editing a volume titled Dreams UnderOccupation. My current research interest is the increasing Indian settler colonial project and that is where I am ethnographically parked at the moment.
The interview was conducted in January 2021, but this text also incorporates some extracts from previous and later conversations. The text has been edited and amended for clarity by Heidi Mogstad and Zekria Farzad.
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Introduction: In humanitarian (and some scholarly) discourses, refugees are often portrayed as passive and powerless victims stripped of political agency and opinions. However, those of us who have worked in refugee camps, or with refugee communities, know that this is very seldom the case. On Lesvos, where I conducted fieldwork intermittently between August 2018 and December 2019, there was a plethora of state- and non-state actors seeking to assist the asylum seekers stuck in limbo on the Greek island. Yet, the refugees they sought to help were not passive and helpless recipients. Nor were they reduced to the conditions Agamben famously described as ‘bare life’: life confined to mere bodily existence or a physical struggle for survival (Agamben, 1998). To the contrary, many of the refugees on Lesvos protested or spoke out against European asylum policies, the EU-Turkey deal and the unsafe and undignified conditions in the former Moria camp. They demanded that their rights as refugees and asylum seekers should be respected, attention and responsibility from European leaders and publics and, more than anything, to be recognised and treated as human beings. While living in a place notorious for its extreme overcrowding, violence and abjection, residents of the Moria camp also acted ingeniously and collectively, creating pockets of community and normalcy inside and outside of the fences of the former military base. Some built makeshift businesses including mini-markets, barbershops, religious spaces, food stalls and bakeries selling tasty falafels or bread made in home-made clay ovens (reputedly the best on the island!). Others volunteered for NGOs or formed their own teams and organisations to fill crucial gaps in service provision including cleaning, security, education and recreational activities. These refugee-led initiatives have been particularly important during the last year, after new government regulations, threats from local fascist groups and Covid-19 pushed many foreign NGOs to leave Lesvos. What follows is an interview with the Afghan-born journalist, father-of-five and humanitarian entrepreneur Zekria Farzad. After arriving with his family in what he describes as the ‘dark hell’ of Moria, Zekria decided to start a school for the children living in the camp. He later founded Wave of Hope for the Future(hereafter Wave of Hope), a refugee-led humanitarian organisation with a mission to support education for refugee children on Lesvos and elsewhere. In this interview, Zekria describes his family’s hazardous journey to Europe and the birth and trajectory of his school and humanitarian organisation. Zekria also shares views on European asylum policies and reflects on the dehumanisation and devaluation of non-white bodies on the move. The interview ends with Zekria reinstating his belief in a radical humanism.
Heidi: Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your background?
Zekria: I was born in Kabul in 1979 in a family of nine children. My father worked for several international organisations, while my mother was a housewife. I grew up mostly in Kabul, but my family lived some years in exile in Rawalpindi in Pakistan during the Taliban regime. After I graduated from Ansari High School in Kabul, I started to study journalism at a private university while working as a contractor of the US army. I loved my studies and dreamed about becoming a professional journalist or diplomat for my country, but the threat of the Taliban made this impossible. But I used my education and experience to start my own magazine: ‘Farda eZeba’ (‘Beautiful tomorrow’ in Farsi). The magazine writes about cultural, historical and political issues and is distributed in rural Afghanistan to inform and awaken the younger generation, and encourage them to be part of the resistance against the Taliban and other terrorist groups. I also established an educational project for children in Pakistan and was part of several civil society and activist groups mobilising for social justice in Kabul. In 2005, I met my beloved wife at a wedding party. She was a midwife, and I went to see her several times in her clinic before we decided to get married. We now have five children between the age of 4 and 12. My oldest boy and girl are very eager and talented students but regrettably, we had to flee from Afghanistan before they were able to graduate.
Heidi: When did you arrive on Lesvos? If you like, could you tell us a bit about your family’s journey to Europe?
Zekria: I left my beloved homeland in March 2018 with my wife and five children. The journey was extremely tough, especially for my children. The smugglers made us change vehicles many times, from small pick-up cars to motorbikes. We also had to cross some of the borders by foot. I was constantly afraid that we would be ambushed by the Taliban or thieves hiding in the desert. However, we did not face any problems before we reached the border between Turkey and Iran. There, we were kidnapped and held us hostage under a bridge for two nights. It was snowing, and my children were sick, so I ended up paying the kidnappers 5000 US dollars to let us go. After walking for ten straight days, we finally arrived in Turkey. However, our asylum applications were denied, so we had no choice but to continue our journey towards Europe. During the next eight months, we participated in ‘the smuggler’s game’ about ten times. We first tried to get on a large ship to Italy, but we were exploited and deceived by the smugglers on multiple occasions. During one of our attempts, we were kidnapped again and held hostage in a remote house in a forest along with several other refugee families. The kidnappers were armed and tied the hands of all the men. They told us that each family had to pay 40 000 euro, otherwise they would keep us here until we died. Of course, neither of us had that kind of money. However, in the middle of the night, I was able to help one of the other men in the group –a young single refugee from Afghanistan– to escape. I told him that he must run to the police and get help. I was so afraid that he would not keep his promise, or that the kidnappers would find out what we had done and hurt my wife or children or the other beautiful women and children that were held hostage with us. But thanks to the brave young man, the police showed up and arrested the kidnappers. After 12 days in police custody, they transferred us to refugee camps. I was placed in a closed camp for only men, while my family was sent to another camp far away. The authorities tried to convince me to sign a paper agreeing to be deported back to Afghanistan, but I refused. After 25 days of continuous refusals and negotiations, I was finally released and reunited with my family. The young man who saved us was deported back to Afghanistan, but has fled again, I wish him the best. We were all exhausted and scared, and my children had started to develop mental health problems, but we could not stay in Turkey. After three more failed ‘games’, we were finally able to get on a dinghy to Lesvos in February 2019. The hours we spent in that flimsy boat on the cold Aegean Sea was the worst night of my life. There were perhaps 50 people in the dinghy, and very few of us knew how to swim. My brave wife and I held our five terrified children as close as we could and prayed that we would arrive safely. Not long before we reached the North coast of Lesvos, the boat crashed into some rocks and started to sink. At that time, I was sure that we were all going to die and started to visualise our dead bodies floating in the sea. However, thank God, we were able to get out of the boat before it sank and got onshore. It was a very distressing moment: I remember I frantically counted all my children –1-2-3-4-5 – before I could finally breathe again. All of us had survived, and we were standing on European soil. But not everyone was as lucky as we were; a ten-year-old girl from another family drowned. We also lost all our documents and belongings including our passports, money, mobile phone and diplomas.
Heidi: You arrived on Lesvos in February 2019, nearly three years after EU’s deal with Turkey in March 2016 which intended to curb so-called irregular migration to Europe. The deal, combined with Greece’s overburdened asylum system and policy of geographical containment, made thousands of asylum seekers trapped on the Aegean islands under appalling conditions while awaiting decisions on their applications. You and your family had to live in the notorious Moria camp: Lesvos’s official Registration and Identification Centre (RIC) and the far biggest camp on the island. Before it burned to the ground in September 2020, the Moria camp was described as the worst refugee camp in Europe due to its severe overcrowding, lack of police protection and sanitation facilities, and high rates of untreated mental health problems (for a more detailed discussion of the history and structure of Moria, see Rozakou, 2019). The mayor of Lesvos and Pope Francis both likened the Moria camp to a concentration camp, while residents typically described it as a prison or living hell. In response to the permanence of the Moria camp, its worsening conditions and spillover-effects on the local community, both refugees and Greek islanders organised demonstrations and strikes, calling for immediate evacuations or ‘decongestion’ of the island. Yet despite this, and despite repeated warnings and appeals by UNCHR, MSF and other humanitarian organisations, the situation for asylum seekers on Lesvos only further deteriorated after you arrived in February 2019. In fact, the subsequent summer, Lesvos saw the biggest increase in boat arrivals since 2016, putting additional pressure on the scarce and inadequate facilities. What was your experience of arriving and living in the former Moria camp with your family, and what made you decide to build a school for the children in the camp?
Zekria: When we first arrived in Moria, I was still in shock and just grateful that my family had survived. But I soon realised that, while we were still alive, this was not a proper life. The conditions were far worse than I had ever imagined. The official camp was full, so we were first allocated a flimsy tent in the ‘jungle’ [the informal spillover tent camp in the olive grove outside of the official structure of the Moria camp]. Apart from the obvious lack of proper shelter, food and sanitation, I also discovered another fundamental problem: there were children everywhere, but they had no access to education! When I asked the camp authorities about this, they said children must wait for at least 3 to 6 months to be enrolled in a school. I was shocked and dismayed. But I am not the kind of person who just sits back and watch when something is missing in my community –even if the community is only a temporary refugee camp– so I decided to do something about it. The next morning, I went to the city and bought a whiteboard and some markers. When I returned to the camp, I found a space outside under an olive tree and started providing basic lessons for my children and other children in the camp. This was the beginning of Wave of Hope.
Heidi: That’s such an inspirational story and I know it does not end there. Could you please tell us about the development of the school and your organisation? I am also curious: why did you choose that particular name?
Zekria: The name has an important philosophy. Those of us who crossed the sea in one of those small dinghies knew with 100 per cent certainty that it was not a good choice. But we had to try. The waves were dangerous and frightening, but they also symbolised hope, because they could bring us forward, to safety. Personally, I believe it was God’s hand that saved us, but the point is that we survived and are now in a position to help others. Now we can bring others hope like the waves that nearly swallowed us.
The school expanded very quickly. In the beginning, people walking around the camp saw me teaching under the olive tree, got interested, and started to bring their children. The parents were very supportive. Some of them let me use their private tents so we could have a quiet space and protect the children from the sun. After only a few weeks, I had seven classes and decided that I needed more help and structure. At the beginning of May, I thus gathered a team of refugee volunteers and together we started the Wave of Hope. We used our own money to buy materials in town and built three classrooms with wood frames, tarpaulin roofs and rugs on the floor. Rumours about our work spread quickly. We received more and more students and many refugees volunteered to be teachers. Before the old Moria camp burned down in September 2020, we had more than 2700 students and 44 teachers!
We worked really hard to fill the gaps in education, although we knew that it was not a substitute for formal schooling. While focusing primarily on providing education to children, we also offered various language classes, including Greek, Arabic, Farsi and English. We also opened a library and a community centre providing recreational activities like arts and music. As you know, many children and adults in the camp have mental health problems, so we tried to create a safe and positive space where they could learn, be stimulated and think about something else. I am very proud of our accomplishments. After only a few months, the simple school I started under the olive tree had become a humanitarian institution by refugees for refugees!
Heidi: What has been the best and most challenging part of running Wave of Hope? As far as I know, the school is run entirely by refugees on Lesvos, but can you also say something about your relationship to Greek authorities and other organisations?
Zekria: As a human being, I consider it to be my obligation to do something good in this world. But helping people also makes me feel joyful and relaxed. Being a teacher is a luxury and a gift in my life. When I stand in front of the class, I feel very happy. But starting a school and organisation as a refugee in a foreign land has also been challenging. In the beginning, we received many warnings from the Greek police and camp authorities; they told us we do not have the right to start a school in their country and asked us to stop our work before they did it. However, after several months of discussions and negotiations, where I explained the purpose and importance of the school for our children and community, they finally accepted it. While the majority of the people in Moria was very supportive, there were also bad people and bullies in the camp who threatened and attacked me, interrupted our classes and broke our whiteboards.
From the very beginning until this day, Wave of Hope has been an independent and refugee-led organisation. Eventually, we also started to receive some international volunteers, however about 80 per cent of my colleagues are still from our own refugee communities. I have never asked anyone outside of our community for help, but words about our organisation travelled fast. Many people have come to visit our school and subsequently offered to help or collaborate with us. We also have individual donors across the world. I am very proud of our independence, but I also happy that Wave of Hope has become a global family. And our organisation continues to grow. After some of our teachers were moved from Lesvos to camps on the Greek mainland, we started new schools there. With help from some of my dear friends and family in Afghanistan, I am also building a school for 800 children in one of the country’s rural area.
Regarding other organisations, I have mixed opinions. Some organisations, like Doctors Without Borders, are doing good work, but I do not like the UNCHR’s policies on Lesvos. I think most of the volunteer organisations act better than the UNHCR and provide good services for refugees, but some exploit the situation to make money.
Heidi: During the last few years, people from Afghanistan have made up the largest portion of asylum seekers on Lesvos. This is partly a result of the fact that Syrians have been prioritised: both by the Greek registration system and by the asylum policies of other European states – and in some cases, also by humanitarian actors and activists. The lack of attention and priority to non-Syrian refugees demonstrates how hierarchies of worth and deservingness in European refugee politics are not only based on factors such as gender and age but also nationality. In the case of Syrian refugees, nationality is also linked with racial- and class-based biases and assumptions (Cabot, 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016; Rozakou, 2017). What do you think is the largest misconception people in Europe have about Afghanistan or Afghan refugees?
Zekria: It’s a good question, actually. I cannot generalise about all Europeans, but I think many European politicians believe that Afghan people are terrorists, or that we are not eligible for asylum because Afghanistan is a safe country. Neither of this is true. The majority of Afghan people do not support the Taliban, but are innocent people stuck in a war zone. And Afghanistan is a very dangerous country. Every day we are just waiting for news that our loved ones have died. But most governments in Europe do not realise how dangerous Afghanistan is, and therefore place Afghan refugees at the bottom of their lists.
Heidi:That’s very true. And this includes my own country Norway, which officially prioritises Syrian families, while frequently deporting Afghan refugees, including families with children who have been raised and schooled in Norway and speak fluent Norwegian. And which does this, I must add, without addressing the country’s own role or complicity as an active member of the NATO-led invasion in Afghanistan (Bangstad, 2019). Regarding misconceptions, I also think many Europeans are largely unaware of the rich Afghan and Persian culture. For instance, the poet Rumi has become very popular in the US and Europe, but I suspect that many are unaware that he came from Afghanistan.
Zekria: There are so many good poets from our region. I love Rumi, but also Sadhi, Hafez, Khaiam, Rodaki, Jami, Sanee, Bedil Dehlevi, Eqbbal, Ghaleb, Aasi, Parvern, Etesami, Shamlo and Khalili. We also have many talented singers and musicians like the famous Ahmad Zaher. Most refugees bring with them lots of talent and value from their countries, including music, food and entrepreneurship, however, for some reason this is hardly ever talked about.
Heidi: You are right. Refugees are very often described as either burdens and problems or pure and abstract victims without personal histories and resources. I want to return briefly to your personal story. Contrary to popular perception, about 3/4 of Afghan refugees in Greece is in fact granted refugee status and some form of asylum protection. Nevertheless, your family’s application was rejected. Why do you think it got rejected, and what did you do when you learned about this?
Zekria: I do not know why, but I sometimes think the rejection had to do with my work in Greece. We appealed once, but when our lawyer informed us that we would receive a second rejection, we were advised to leave Lesvos to avoid being deported back to Turkey and Afghanistan. We managed to get to Athens, where we had to live illegally without any identity documents. This was not a safe and good life for my family, so I decided to once again ‘play with my life’ to reach Northern-Europe. The journey was too dangerous for my children, so I left alone, hiding under a truck to Italy. From Italy, I managed to get to Switzerland, where I was granted a temporary asylum visa. I have now been alone in Switzerland for over a year. Life here is better, but I really miss my family. I have been told I have to wait three years before I can bring them here. When my dear father died in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, I could not even go to his funeral. It was hard to accept, but it is part of life when you are a refugee in this world. On the bright side, I can do some work from here and I have friends who help to support my family in Athens so my children can go to school.
Heidi: I want to ask you about the current situation on Lesvos, and how it has impacted the work of your school and organisation. For the asylum seekers stuck in limbo on Lesvos, the last year has been characterized by a several overlapping crises that have exacerbated existing vulnerabilities and rights violations. Crudely summarised, we might start with the Greek government’s announcement to establish closed camps on Lesvos and four other Greek islands in November 2019. The announcement exacerbated local tensions on Lesvos and led to a series of strikes and protests by refugees as well as Greek islanders. During February and early March, law and order collapsed on the island: locals fought riot police sent by the central government, police teargassed protesting locals and refugees (including young children) and local fascist groups threatened and violently attacked refugees, NGO-workers, volunteers and journalists, prompting neo-Nazis from other European countries to come to Lesvos (Fallon, 2020). Shortly after, Covid-2019 started to spread across Europe, leading Greek authorities to restrict the freedom of movement for the island’s refugee population (on the biopolitics of Covid-19 on Lesvos, see Jauhiainen, 2020) and issue further barriers and regulations for foreign NGOs operating in the country. As a result of these developments, most international NGOs either left Lesvos or scaled down their operations significantly during the spring of 2020. In my understanding, this made Wave of Hope’s work even more important. It also led to the establishment of other refugee-led organisations seeking to protect the refugee population from the virus including Moria Corona Awareness Team and Moria White Helmet. Despite these laudable efforts, managing social distancing in the overcrowded camp was impossible and the first cases of Covid-19 in the camp were detected in early September 2020. And then came the fire. During the night of 8th of September, the Moria camp –at that time filled over four times capacity– burst into flames, causing residents to flee in panic. It should be said that several smaller fires had broken out in Moria previously, causing deaths of both adults and children. Yet, this time, the entire camp burned to the ground. The Greek prime minister announced a four-month state of emergency on the island, while a new tent camp was built to re-house the residents of Moria. The new camp, which came to be known as Moria 2.0, is located at a former military shooting range and commonly said to have even worse conditions than the previous site. Not only is the new camp located right by the sea and thus more exposed to wind and flooding. There is also no drainage and sewing system, no showers, electricity and heating, and even less access to medical and legal assistance. Many humanitarian actors have complained that they have greater difficulties accessing Moria 2.0, and that a new ‘confidentiality law’ prevents them from publicly sharing information about the camp’s conditions and potential abuse. Can you say something about how Covid-19 and the fire that burned down Moria camp in September 2020 has affected the work of Wave of Hope?
Zekria: Part of what happened during this period was that our schools became important support platforms for community organisation and emergency aid. For instance, when Covid-19 started to spread across Europe, we established an awareness team to inform refugees about the virus and distribute life-saving protection equipment like face masks, disinfection gel, gloves and hand soap to the refugee community. After the old Moria camp burned down in September 2020, we also organised emergency food distributions. However, gaining access to the new camp has been very difficult. We have tried to negotiate with the camp authorities to get a space inside the new camp, and attended many joint meetings with UNHCR and other organisations, but we are still waiting for a positive response. While waiting, we built a new school outside the camp, at the premises of another organisation (One Happy Family), but because of the lockdown, the school had to close. At the moment, we are running some children activities and classes inside the private tents of people in Moria 2.0 and at the premises of the old Kara Tepe refugee camp. When the lockdown was lifted, we also managed to open an art exhibition and run some classes and an office in town with support from other organisations. It has been very frustrating to lose, not only our physical structures but also our access and independence. It seems to me as the Greek authorities are using the Coronavirus as an excuse to further restrict the work of NGOs like ours as well as the rights and movements of refugees on the island. Another problem we face on Lesvos is the local fascist groups which remain active on the ground and very intimidating.
Heidi: The people of Lesvos was celebrated for their hospitality during the beginning of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, but many local residents are growing increasingly frustrated and angry with the situation. Regardless of their politics and attitudes towards refugees, many locals say they want ‘their island back’. Have you had many interactions with Greek people on Lesvos and do you understand their grievances?
Zekria: Yes, I have lots of good Greek friends, and I understand why the local people are angry about the presence of refugee camps on their beautiful island. The problem is not the refugees or the locals, but the authorities and politicians who make life hard for both sides. It should be a piece of cake to relocate all refugees from Lesvos but for the politicians, our lives are just a political game.
Heidi: Whose authorities and politicians are you referring to? Or, to put it differently: who do you blame for the current predicaments of refugees in Greece?
Zekria: EU and European politicians carry the heaviest responsibility; it is they who have closed their borders and criminalised refugees seeking asylum. After them, I think the Greek government is responsible for the lack of security in the camps. I believe Greek authorities are deliberately trying to make Moria a bad and dangerous place to attract financial support from other European countries. As a result, refugees are living worse than animals in Western countries. There are no human rights for us; refugees are treated as pieces in a game played by Turkey and European countries.
Heidi: That brings me to the next question: What ideas and hopes did you have about Europe before you came to Lesvos, and what are your thoughts and opinions about the EU and European countries today?
Zekria: Before coming to Europe, I always read about the continent’s development, stable economic growth, democratic system and human rights. Therefore, seeing what I saw in Moria was a big shock to me. I still cannot believe that from 2015 until this day, the big and powerful EU has not been able to improve Moria or assist the refugees in Greece. But I have come to realise that Europe is unable to bring change around the world and that all their human rights slogans are nothing but commercial advertisement.
Heidi: When you spoke earlier about the symbolism of the name of your organisation, it reminded me about the poem Home by the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. In this poem, she writes: ‘No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than land.’
Zekria: I agree with her 100 per cent. We were all trying to find safe land, and if we had a better option, we would never have risked our lives and the lives of our children getting in that boat.
Heidi: It is a brilliant poem. But what it does not address is why refugees like yourself and your family are forced to take this enormous risk in the first place. And the reason is, as you know, that European countries do not offer safe and legal routes for refugees to reach EU and apply for asylum (apart from family reunification which is an extremely slow and demanding process). As Mbembe (2018) puts it, this illustrates a central contradiction in liberal thought and politics: that some people’s movements are configured as freedom, while others are deemed improper and conceived as a threat. Rather than a contradiction, we can of course also call it European falsehood or hypocrisy as indeed you did earlier. Staying on this topic, I thought I should end the interview by asking you about some of the posts I have read on your Facebook page. In one of the posts, you wrote: ‘globalisation is a dream, not a reality’. In another post, you reflected on the hundreds of refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean earlier that week when attempting to reach Europe. You suggested that, if the people in the boats had been white, they would have been immediately rescued. You also asked why people –including those on the Left and those who have rightfully protested against the murder of George Floyd– were so quiet when hundreds of black refugees were letdrowned while seeking refuge in Europe. You asked, very appropriately in my opinion: ‘do these black lives not matter?’ and said that you hoped your criticism would hurt.
Zekria: Yes, and I stand by what I said. As long as some people do not have access to human rights, and are not treated as human beings, we cannot speak about the world as a global village. The problem is not at the level of discourse or ideas, but rather that some people and countries do not practice what they preach: it is a discrepancy between people’s ideals and actions. Black lives, Afghan lives, Syrian lives, Yemenis lives, all lives matter –but politics, racism and discrimination divide us, and deny some people full equality and humanity. The result is what we see are seeing today, in Moria and the Mediterranean and many other places.
Heidi: In the introduction to his book, The Displaced (2018), writer and former refugee Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that for refugees, ‘the past is not only marked by the passage of time, but by loss – the loss of loved ones, or countries, of identities, of selves.’ On the one hand, your story challenges this narrative of loss, as you have overcome multiple hurdles and reconstituted yourself as a teacher, political critic, and leader of a humanitarian organisation. In Arendt’s words, you have demonstrated that ‘refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples’ (Arendt, 2007:274[1943]; see also Horst and Lysaker, 2019). However, when we spoke earlier, you partly contested this reading, emphasising that your story is not simply ‘incredible’, but also ‘very tough’. It is not only that traumas endure, but also the fact your life is still on hold: so far you have only received temporary asylum in Switzerland and you have been told you have to wait three years before you can reunite with your family. What are your thoughts and dreams about the future, for yourself and your family? Do you think you will be able to return to Afghanistan, or do you prefer to build a new life in Europe? And how do you imagine the future of Wave of Hope?
Zekria: I’m very worried about Afghanistan and our people; the current situation is more critical and dangerous than ever before. About a year ago, the American government signed a peace agreement with the Taliban, but this was not a peace agreement with the Afghan government or people. If real peace comes, and the world wants Afghanistan to be a peaceful place, we will return to our beloved homeland Afghanistan/Khorasan. But until that day, I will work hard to create a future for my children in Europe. But my dreams are not only about my own family. In fact, I consider all of humanity to be my family, and contributing to the happiness of people as the true meaning of life. Regarding my organisation, I hope that the organisation will continue to grow and that my colleagues from different countries can be waves spreading hope across the word. As an organisation, we also hope that the politicians in this world will see our work as a symbol of peace and unity and take lesson.
Heidi: Despite all the inhumane practices you have witnessed and experienced, you don’t seem to have lost your faith in humanity? At the very least, you still say you work in the service of humanity, which you refer to as your larger family. This language resonates with that of many humanitarian workers and volunteers in Europe, including those I have worked with and researched. Yet I think there is a crucial difference. Contra the European citizens who seek to assist their ‘fellow human beings’, you and other refugees seeking asylum in today’s Europe cannot take your status as human beings for granted. Moreover, as you and other refugees on Lesvos have made very clear, your demands for change and recognition arise, not simply ‘in the name of humanity’, but in response to the violent denial of your humanity. As such, you expose the contradictions and limits of European liberalism and human rights talk as well the violent exclusions of political communities organised on the basis of xenophobic nationalism (see also Gilroy, 2005; 2019). Perhaps a parallel can be drawn to the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, whose humanism was radical and insurgent, yet still profoundly optimistic?
Zekria: Yes. We know that political games, racism and discrimination divide humanity, treating some people, like refugees, like animals. But by taking matters in our own hands, we reclaim our humanity, while also fighting for others. I wish for a peaceful world for all: not just for the west, the east, the north or the south.
Heidi: As far as I know, the Quran also emphasises the unity or oneness of humanity, and the idea that it is human societies who have violated that principle by created divisions amongst ourselves. To what extent are your thoughts and values of humanity shaped by your religious beliefs?
Zekria: I am a Muslim, and Islam is the foundation of my thoughts and beliefs. However, the prophet Muhammad is not my only role model. I am also inspired by other people like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Ahmad Shah Masoud, Napoleon Hill and Charlie Chaplin. What Islam has taught me is to work for humanity and see no borders between people. I say, with Rumi, that I am ‘Not a Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen’, ‘not from the East or the West’, but first and foremost a ‘breath-breathing human being’.
Heidi: Thank you so much Zekria for sharing your time and insight.
References:
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Arendt, H. (2007). ‘We refugees.’ In Kohn, J and Feldman, R. (Eds). The Jewish Writings. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 264-274
Nguyen, V. (2018). The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. Abram Press: London
Jauhiainen, JS. (2020). Biogeopolitics of COVID-19: Asylum-Related Migrants at the European Union Borderlands. Tijdschr Econ Soc Geogr. 111(3):260-274.
Rozakou, K. (2017). Nonrecording the “European refugee crisis” in Greece: Navigating through irregular bureaucracy. Focaal, 77:36-49
Rozakou, K. (2019). ‘How did you get in?’ Research access and sovereign power during the ‘migration crisis’ in Greece. Social Anthropology, 27(1):68-83.
Dopo il colpo di stato militare del 1 febbraio 2021 da parte del Tatmadaw (le forze armate del Myanmar), il 2 febbraio e’ stato nominato lo State Administrative Council, ovvero un nuovo esecutivo di governo formato in parte dai militari stessi e in parte da politici di varie fazioni.
Gli esponenti del partito risultato vincitore alle elezioni dell’8 novembre 2020, il Nation League for Democracy (NLD), sono stati incarcerati e tra loro la stessa Aung San Suu Kyi, leader de facto del governo eletto.
Le forze militari hanno colto l’occasione per reclamare il potere e destituire il governo a seguito della compromessa validita’ delle elezioni stesse allorche’ nell’ottobre 2020 la Union Election Commission nego’ la possibilita’ di voto ad oltre un milione di cittadini limitandosi a dichiarare che, a causa dei violenti conflitti interni, non vi erano le necessarie condizioni di sicurezza per recarsi alle urne, senza fornire ulteriori spiegazioni, senza impegnarsi nel trovare soluzioni alternative e nascondendosi dietro ipotetiche raccomandazioni ricevute direttamente dal governo, dalla Defense and Home Affairs Ministries, dai militari e dalla polizia.
Una cospicua parte delle minoranze etniche del paese non ha potuto esprimere la propria preferenza elettorale e tutto cio’ ha ulteriormente inasprito il rapporto estremamente teso tra le minoranze etniche del Myanmar e il governo in carica dal 2015 sotto la leadership del NLD. Le forze militari hanno dichiarato lo stato di emergenza per un anno affermando di dover prendere il controllo del paese per indagare i brogli elettorali del novembre 2020 e preparare la strada per nuove elezioni democratiche.
Questo governo non godeva del sostegno delle minoranze etniche in quanto ritenuto fare gli interessi della maggioranza etnica Bamar e dei militari stessi. Dal 2015 non sono inoltre stati fatti concreti sviluppi nel processo di pacificazione del paese. La popolazione che non si e’ sentita rappresentata ha perso fiducia nelle istituzioni governative e ha iniziato a guardare ai vari gruppi militari armati quale via percorribile per le proprie rivendicazioni.
Il governo eletto a novembre avrebbe dovuto insediarsi in aprile, quindi i tempi erano probabilmente maturi per una offensiva delle forze militari impegnate non solo nella sistematica repressione dei numerosi gruppi armati, ma pronte ora ad un colpo di mano a fronte di un neo eletto governo non in grado di rappresentare le incalzanti istanze delle minoranze.
L’incertezza prodotta dall’attuale situazione complica la condizione umanitaria. La popolazione civile e’ sottoposta da anni alle violenze dello scontro tra esercito e gruppi armati: arresti arbitrari, torture, esecuzioni da parte dell’esercito e sequestri, lavori forzati, e reclutamento di bambini soldato da parte dei gruppi armati. Le vie d’accesso per gli interventi umanitari erano gia’ estremamente complicate prima di questo colpo di stato per via dell’instabilita’ politica del territorio e per le condizioni di abbandono delle minoranze, non solo Royingha, di cui il governo sembra non essersi occupato a sufficienza. Per esempio, dall’inizio del 2019 l’escalation del conflitto tra i militari e l’Arakan Army, che rivendica la rappresentanza della popolazione etnica Rakhine, ha incrementato drammaticamente il numero di profughi e ridotto in parallelo l’accesso agli aiuti umanitari.
Non e’ ancora possibile quantificare l’impatto che l’attuale crisi politica in Myanmar avra’ sulle possibilita’ di intervenire a livello umanitario per sostenere la popolazione stremata da anni di conflitti etnici armati e violazioni dei diritti umani. Intanto, nelle principali citta’ sono iniziate manifestazioni di protesta contro il colpo di stato militare e per la comunita’ internazionale sara’ presto ora di definire una linea politica rispetto alla dittatura instauratasi che pero’ non rappresenti una ingerenza e non comprometta interventi di aiuto umanitario.
Saumya Pandey (SP):Shall we start with your research journey? How did you come to write about the lives of migrant workers from Northeast India?
Dolly Kikon (DK): My work that we are speaking about relates to the second book I wrote with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India. If I have to contextualise this book, the idea started during the time of my PhD, which became my first monograph, Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. In many ways the work that we do, the books and articles we write are always connected. That comes with the training as researchers, thinkers, and as people who are engaged with a very diverse and complex country like India. During my PhD research I found out that many young people did not want to get into cultivation and mining. They aspired to leave their home and become migrants. The topic of land and displacement kept coming up. In the extractive landscapes (coal and oil), the story of land is central for the indigenous/Adivasi people in India. After I finished my thesis, I wanted to work on indigenous migration and migration. I am not a migration scholar in the sense that this is not something that had set out to do. I was looking at the political economy of resource extraction and land, that was the source of my research puzzle. Also, I graduated with a law degree and then worked as an activist associated with the civil rights movements including the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights in Northeast India. This meant that I had a very different set of political frames to adopt. It was a learning experience.
When I started doing fieldwork for the second book, I followed migrants from Northeast India to locations across the country. For instance, I was in Kerala, and engaging with newspaper reports and stories from Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai. During my field visits I was often confused as a worker at the hospitality sector because I am also from the northeast. These were reflective moments for me. As a young adult I became a tribal migrant in Delhi in the mid 1990s but I never saw myself using words like ‘migrants” to describe myself. I was still grappling with terms like citizenship, ‘chinky,’ and tribal people. So many memories from my Delhi days came back to me during my fieldwork. Writing the second book was almost autobiographical in some way. Not in a sense of looking at my own experiences or grounding it, but autobiographical in a sense of a collective autobiography, and what we go through as indigenous migrants in India. That became very central. The issues about racism, violence, discrimination, and militarization, comes up in the book.
I could have, as an anthropologist with the skills of articulation, having read ‘theory’ and done fieldwork, written in a particular way. Maybe either pity them or patronize them? The world of hospitality is quite exploitative as I saw it through the eyes of indigenous migrants. But everyone I spoke to – from the server, housekeeping staff, to the employee at the beauty salon – had aspirations and dreams; to be upwardly mobile; to have a salary; to have a better income; to be able to send more money home; and to have a good life. Yet there was always a block, a ceiling determining the nature of the work they could take up. They were struggling. And one of the things many young migrants that I spoke to would do was that if they found a place that was horrible, they would leave the job and go somewhere else in the hope that the new experience would be better. Sometimes it was worse. They landed up in more difficult situations. This kind of aspiration was founded on precarity. As we have seen during the pandemic (in 2020), the first industry that was hit in India and around the globe was the hospitality sector. The hotels closed down, and the first batch of migrants from mainland India who returned to Northeast India taught us new lessons. Whether it was Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, or Assam, the return of migrants not only brought the fear of the virus with them, but also the anxiety of an uncertain future with them.
The state governments across Northeast India have played a very important role in promoting entrepreneurship and skills. However, the focus on soft skills have been detrimental given the precarity in the hospitality industry. Soft skills were something that grooming agencies and government bodies were providing young people. In my book I urge both the reader and the government bodies to reflect on training prospective migrants with skills to make them employable. Especially, for vulnerable groups like indigenous/Adivasi communities, we need to realize that one of the things about soft skills is the gendered aspect, and the exotic and sexual element of it. In my book I examine how it was easier for indigenous women in the hospitality sector to find employment. Men either work as security guards or gatekeepers. If they are cute or smart, they find work as servers.
I am often questioned what is different about migrants from Northeast India. Everyone migrates! That is the general feeling. I always say that what is exceptional as migrants from Northeast India is the history of militarization and armed conflict. Migration from the region escalated after 1997 – when the Naga armed groups signed a ceasefire agreement with the government of India – leading to a series of similar ceasefire deals with other armed groups in the region. Very quickly young migrants from the region – from towns and villages that had witnessed extreme violence – were being asked to look pretty and presentable and serve drinks, sell designer shoes, or provide massage across metropolitan Indian cities.
The psycho-social trauma and inter-generational trauma were not addressed. Imagine the kind of violence that children from armed conflict villages experience as they grow up. And consider how they move to cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata, and serve ice-creams or provide pedicure with a smile on their faces. Indigenous migrants from Northeast India carry experiences and memories of militarization and violence with them; many of them suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the structural violence they encounter though racism and discrimination across metropolitan India makes it brutal for them. So, yes. Definitely, these realities need to be considered when we study and write about migration from Northeast India and similar militarized regions in the subcontinent and beyond.
This is a cycle of violence needs to be acknowledged. Across South Asia — especially Sri Lanka and Nepal with a history of armed conflict — the respective governments have worked on social rehabilitation of the communities that have been affected by the violence. I know there is much left to be done, but at least there is an acknowledgment. In India, the story is different. Government refuses to acknowledge the scale of conflict and violence on its own citizens. For instance, the Indo-Naga conflict is one of the world’s longest armed conflict, but there is a refusal to accept how communities have been affected across generations by militarization and violence. We have to connect this bit of the story to the surge in outmigration from Northeast India. The consumer world in neoliberal India consists of as global fashion beauty and food. As consumers crave and desire for a world class lifestyle, the story of the labour force that drives this economy, the experiences of the most vulnerable of citizens are erased. And along with that, the histories of the region and their homelands are erased. An important story of migration from Northeast India is also this. It is not just the racism and violence, but the rejection and erasure of an entire history that takes place in the moment of exchange services and material goods. There is a pretension that it is all normal. This is how we in turn normalize violence and militarization while consuming that service.
Writing this book was challenging because I wanted to write respecting the lives of migrants and in solidarity with the young people who are migrants, at the same time make it clear about the exploitative nature of soft skills and the hospitality sector.
SP: Leaving home or one’s place of belonging is deeply linked with questions of state reclamation of resources and indigenous lands. What are some of the historical and political disturbances within which indigenous migrations occur?
DK: The migration experiences I trace in my book is a post-1997 development as I noted before. I am not saying that there was no migration before that, but my co-author and I were making a specific point about indigenous migration in the hospitality sector and affective labour. We were writing about the scale that we are witnessing now. 1997 is important because on the one hand, we see political negotiations starting after 1997, and on the other hand a rhetoric of remoteness and development that the state agencies and the development agencies adopt. When you see an Assam rifles camp in Manipur and see a board which says, ‘Assam Rifles Friends of the Hill People,’ that is a post-1997 campaign. Here, civility, development, and militarization are all normalized in a single moment. When you hear the governments across the northeast region say that ‘we need development, and for development we need peace,’ it captures a moment where a regime of extractive projects are being envisioned on the foundations of violence, but without acknowledge the trauma and the need for reconciliation. These are all post-1997 stories from Northeast India.
For instance, in my 2015 article, Making Pickles during Ceasefire: Livelihood, Sustainability, and Development in Nagaland, I wrote about the development programs that were emerging during the time of ceasefire in Naga society. I was asking: how is it that the villagers who were in the interrogation rooms pre 1997 shifted to livelihood workshop rooms post 1997? What did it mean to teach them livelihood skills like making pickles, without addressing the political and psycho social rehabilitation? For the Naga people, the long decades of armed conflict meant experiencing militarization across all social and cultural spaces. Especially, the experiences of violence within us — fratricidal killings between rival groups, among warring clans, along tribal lines – these were tragic and heartbreaking violent histories we have inherited as part of Naga history today. However, what Naga people have gone through is nothing extraordinary because we share this experiences with many militarized communities across the Indian subcontinent and beyond. As a human rights activist and an engaged anthropologist I see that members from traumatized and violent societies begin to devour one another by inflecting violence on one another. Often, in many instances, the only way members are able to relate to any violent situation is through violence.
If you look at Mahmood Mamdani’swork, or ethnographic research on militarized societies, it shows that at the height of militarization and violence in human societies, we also start taking it out on each other. Post-1997 as development initiatives were rolled out, as armed forces adopted the language of ‘peace and development,’ there was a whole section of population — mostly young people — who were trying to escape the militarized environment. That is when they started leaving the land. It was also the time when the rhetoric of development began to romanticize agriculture and encouraged young people to that go back to the land and work. The larger question in India and across the Global South is about how do indigenous people/Adivasis connect with the land? What is the emerging story? Being connected to the land does not mean working on the land. If land is the custodian of indigenous identity and history, how do we make sense of this respect and connection that emerging indigenous youths and communities establish with the land the younger generations like indigenous migrants are giving up working on the land? Many migrants said that they did not want to become farmers and preferred to educate their children and make them peruse professional jobs. During interviews I found out that no subsistence cultivator, no Adivasi who was living off the land would tell their children to work on lands, because they saw that being subsistence cultivators was often humiliating and equated with a life of poverty. The story of being displaced as a result of various development programs also emerged.
This is linked with other developments across the Himalayan region. There is constant conversation about how we need to create jobs in the mountains, or how we create jobs for indigenous communities, etc. But all these sounds strange for me. It is not like the mountain communities don’t have jobs, Many households work on the land, they work in the field or tend cattle. It takes enormous labour force and time in the mountains to farm and eat from the land. It takes up their entire day. Think about the life of a farmer or a cattle-rearer in the hills in Uttarakhand, Sikkim, or in Arunachal Pradesh. Or Across the hills of Manipur and Nagaland. People work continuously. The idea is not about creating jobs but about reflecting what exactly what we are telling these communities and the future generation to do. On the one hand, there is talk about the creation of jobs but on the other hand their traditional knowledge and work remains unrecognized, or their connection with the land is erased and disrespected. Their practices and connections with the forests, rivers, and their idea of medicinal plants is considered ‘savage’ and ‘primitive.’
Instead, the younger generations are given soft skills to become servers, shop assistants, sweepers, maids, and janitors. Some of them are also in the construction sector. Connecting and working on the land is not a job, it is unemployment. Connecting and living off the forest continues to categorize many indigenous/Adivasi communities as thieves and encroachers in India. therefore, this conversation about soft skills and migration takes us back to issues of land, dispossession, and humiliation that is taking place. This is something that really moved me. It deeply disturbed me. In 2018, I was invited to Azim Premji University in Bengaluru to talk about my work on indigenous migration and the hospitality sector in India. When I arrived at the hotel, the security guard who carried my bag from the cab to the reception was Boro, the receptionist was a Khasi, the janitor was from the Hajong community — all were tribal migrants from Northeast India. I learnt that the janitor who came to clear the bathroom was an intern. If he succeeded at his task, he would be made a full-time employee. It was a 6 month internship and his job was to clean toilets. On his hand and knees picking hair from the shower cubicle, he told me he was paid Rs 5000 a month for his internship. It made me think about how the hospitality sector was framing the language of service in a caste and class ridden country like India. How was it that indigenous migrants were being made to enter a highly exploitative world that reproduced caste and class privileges in neoliberal India? When I share these stories people often say ‘what’s the big deal about it? That’s how things function.’ My point as an anthropologist is that that’s not how it’s supposed to be. That you take the most vulnerable indigenous people and give the tag of ‘employment’ by exploiting them.
SP: You have drawn attention towards the way in which workers from Nagaland are thought of as loyal, hardworking and ‘exotic’ in an ‘un-Indian’ way — racial attribute which is used to mark them as ‘different’ yet desirable for the booming hospitality sector. This is in sharp contrast to the earlier image forged by the colonial and post-colonial state that used labels such as barbarous, unruly, and savage to define indigenous communities (although both the references build upon this idea of ‘otherness’). When and how did this image transition take place?
DK: That is an excellent question. Let me put it this way. It is the dictionary of imperial disposition that the postcolonial Indian state inherited without interrogating it That is what happened to the resource extraction regime like tea and oil in Northeast India. There was a mere transfer of power from white colonization to colored neo-colonization. That is what happened to other privileges as well. Royal families still enjoy their royalty across India. As citizens, we continue to be enamored with titles like rajas, nawabs, and the erstwhile princely classes. India is a strange country. In scholarly writings, we talk about postcolonialism as a moment of citizenship. During this period of democracy in India that many are calling it a crisis of governance and the surge of the right wing in the country, citizens and commentators are referring to the Indian Constitution as a revolutionary text. But the Constitution and the everyday lived reality of ordinary people remains deeply fractured. The entitlements of the postcolonial Indian state went to a handful upper caste privileged collectives. For many tribal communities from Northeast India, Dalits, and Adivasi communities from central and Eastern India, the fact that the privileged intellectuals and well-meaning liberals from the heart of the country are scrambling towards the Constitution speaks volumes about their good intentions to make the country accountable and keep it together. But at the same time, the level of violence and the brutality is nothing new for many of us. Throughout the 1990s across India, and even before that, or in case of Naga people since 1947, the unspeakable brutality and violence was often cast aside as a “marginal” thing. Well, the Frankenstein democracy we are witnessing now was designed in the so called geographical “margins” like Kashmir, Northeast India, Chhattisgarh, and Punjab. This monster was created in the houses of poor Dalits and vulnerable Muslims since India’s independence.
Returning to the dictionary of imperial disposition in relation to indigenous migrants, it is extremely colonial. The Naga migrants are both suspicious and hard working. They can switch between the “lazy native” and the “loyal employee” seamlessly. It is quite common in India to see how employees are accepted as family members, and therefore we often come across stories that ‘loyal servants’ are didis (elder sisters) and just like family. But the moment there is a disagreement, these employees/family members become ungrateful and wretched people. The definition of loyalty/unloyalty is dictated by the exploiter and the oppressor. Thus, tribal migrants are hardworking, lazy people, simple people, and also buddhu (dumb). We are all of that. This mentality is reflected in the captions that follow pictures of indigenous people across Northeast India. For instance, some of the twitter feeds and Ingram texts of indigenous people selling produce on highways selling from the region have captions like, ‘such innocent people, they should stay that way.’ But the reality is that life is very hard. They are selling the produce to feed the family and not because they are innocent. It is hardship and poverty. Of course, it is another story how many consumers demonstrate their hypocrisy by bargaining for the produce. It is right there, in that encounter, that the practice of labelling indigenous people and migrants as loyal/savages/unruly takes place. This is what I refer to as the dictionary of imperial disposition in postcolonial India. The power to use and abuse labels and terms in a way to benefit the entitled and privileged.
SP: This also brings me to your conceptualization of affective labour, and how that can sometimes be more exploitative than physical labour as it runs the risk of alienating the labourer from their own feelings. What are some of the ways of understanding the notion of ‘affective labour’?
DK: Raymond William, Purnima Mankekar, and Sarah Ahmed are scholars who had laid the ground for affective labour. Our work was in conversation with them both conceptually and theoretically to extend it. In our work, the notion of affective labour was something that was everywhere. For instance, once you enter a restaurant the waiter or waitress will come up to you a dozen times asking about the service. As a consumer one is overwhelmed. Or the salesperson seem too eager to please you. One wonders why they are doing that. This is part of soft skills and the manner of speaking and offering “good service” is taken as always being at the service of the customer. This is why they try so hard to please you. During my fieldwork I found out that many employees in the hospitality sector are trained with a target to please customers. Their mood, feelings, including the body language, are directed towards offering ‘good’ service. This kind of training stays on. Some of them start having nightmares too; bad dreams that affect their mood and create anxieties. The kind of labour/service they perform begins to seep into their system and shape their personality. Even if the employees are exhausted, when a customer comes to them, they have to smile. In big hotels, there are secrets in frontline desks: some senior employees from the hospitality sector told me how it is rare to find a woman who is above 35 at the reception desk. Front desk employees have to be pretty and presentable. So many of these subtle practices became clear. References to “shelf life” which means the age of front desk employees etc became clear to me.
Airlines are a very good example. Female flight attendants of Air India, the national airline company of India, fought in the Supreme of Court of India to retain their jobs after marriage in a landmark case in 1981, but the practice of agism, gender discrimination and inequality remains entrenched in the hospitality sector. As feminist anthropologist and scholars we should be going back to those cases in the to look at what is affective labour, and thinking about interrogating the arbitrariness of how ‘good’ service and customer ‘satisfaction’ are assessed. Imagine how we have made it normal to think that airline customers expect beautiful faces, straight teeth, perfect skin in an altitude that can make one nauseous, fart, burp, and throw up. How did we get to that level of sexualizing labour? Another example is the expectation that the person who is serving food should bow, smile, and make direct eye contact but in a non-threatening way. What are we consuming? Is it the food or that effectiveness of servitude? Instead of normalizing it we need to ask what is it in the name of service that we make each other? Why do such services make customers feel good?
In the book on indigenous migration, my co-author and I traced the world of indigenous migrants and affective labour. In a sense, we extended and developed the idea of affective labour to include the indigenous experiences as well. It may be connected to moods, and to feelings but for many indigenous migrants, the history of violence, land, and dispossession was central to it. Thus, affective labour in our book became a lens to examine structural violence, capitalist violence, and gender violence besides aspiration and exploitative labour. Affective labour in India is so heightened because of the caste, communal, and class foundations. In the book we write about indigenous servers from Northeast India in high diners and their experiences with rude Indian customers who are suspicious about the service. For instance, when certain customers enquire about vegetarian/organic/halal food, they demand ‘real Indian’ servers to explain the menu and refuse to let indigenous migrants who look “non-Indian” to serve them food. Caste violence is so embedded in the hospitality sector in India.
SP: The migrant ‘crisis’ in India is often narrated in mainstream media and policy discourse as an interstate mobility issue. It creates an impression that development is the key issue that compels people to migrate from ‘backward’ regions to urban landscapes for better opportunities. While what gets sidetracked in the process, a point which you drive home through your remarkable work, is the problem of corporate exploitation in urban markets, unequal capital-labour relations, and the economic hardships and racial vulnerabilities that it creates for the indigenous migrants. How do we move out of this impasse?
DK: People have always migrated. Our ancestors migrated. The point is not about keeping people in certain places. But how do we understand this deadlock?
We hardly recognize migrant workers as employees. I am referring to the server from Manipur making your juice in a beach town like Varkala, or that migrant from Nagaland who is a masseur in Goa. They should be given holidays, medical benefits, provision for families. There are also other problems. Do they have a bank account? And what about pension? Where do they register their grievances? It is a country that makes it almost impossible for migrant workers in new cities to get a connection of LPG cylinder without heaps of paper work. Even as the state is obsessed with paperwork and documents to provide a basic gas connection, majority of the hospitality sector work on sub-contracting and erasing traces of paper works to continue with highly exploitative practices. These systems make migrants – indigenous and those from marginalized communities – extremely vulnerable under the present circumstances.
As long as we let capitalism and free markets define the terms of labour, service, and customer satisfaction, it will not work. Instead, encouraging laws and policies to safeguard employment, call out harassment, and all kinds of discrimination is key. Adding the experiences of indigenous migrants in India forces us to engage with land and loss of land not solely as an economic matter, but as an issue of justice and citizenship right. So many indigenous migrants from Northeast India work without an employment contact, without being paid for months, being sexually and physically abused. As an anthropologist that is the reason why I feel that our work must connect with policy makers and advocacy works. The ability to move out of this impasse is to keep engaging – by this I mean write/speak/share/practice what you write and work on. The trouble with academics is the world of text we inhabit. Are lawyers, policy makers, activists, poets, writers, and journalists about to connect with our work?
SP: What are your suggestions for early career researchers who want to contribute to the study of labour, exploitation, capital and development?
DK: Don’t play it safe, be courageous. Know the power of your voice, but learn to listen and engage. And Don’t go to the field with a set of smart methodology and questions to prove yourself as an expert, but be ready to unlearn, to critically reflect on your entitlements and privileges. And find/create a community of mentors and peers who will nurture and reach out to you. As a first generation anthropologist, I cannot stress the nurturing and care I receive from my amazing friends. And as a result, I also am conscious to call, write, or reach out to early career researchers and encourage them and read their work, or connect.
We come from a region like South Asia, a country like India, where labour, capital and development are so steeped in political movements, and in people’s struggles. The fact that thinkers, poets, and activists are often sent to prison because they support people’s movements, and are against corporations speaks volumes about the task at hand. Being an engaged scholar comes with a price. The academy is filled with entitled and ruthless scholars who mock and ridicule engaged scholarship. They will pay lip service but if you look at their lives, the boundary they create between the “field” and their “real” life is astounding. It is a fake world. Remember, scholarship – irrespective of how smart/neat/articulate it is – ultimately comes across as shallow and meaningless if it is all about analysis, argument, soulless theories, and reiterating star academics and trendy theories. Be bold to refer to poems, songs, find meaning in texts and authors who are relegated to and are from the “margins”. Practice solidarity and politics with humility.
The task of being an engaged scholar as early career academics is hard, but my request is to engage and learn to listen. Take your time. Don’t be in a rush to become a star because your greatest moments are those when your peers and readers witness your work. When the community you work with accepts and recognizes you as an alley. That takes time. It takes a long time.
Second, write in a language that is accessible. Let the story from people and the field you are writing about have a life. Ethically and morally if you write about difficult and complex subjects you must ask yourself why you are writing about it. Who are you writing it for? I increasingly find it difficult to engage with smart abstract conversations which are removed from ground reality. That’s who I am. If people you write about cannot relate to your work, what is the point. Do you have the courage to take back the work to the community you work with? The life that we live is greater than the research project. It is about how we connect our life and with all our engagements. We leave a piece of our soul in all that we engage with.
El 2020 no fue un año fácil para el Perú. Este país, considerado hasta antes de la pandemia de COVID-19, como una como una estrella en ascenso por su desempeño macroeconómico, es una de los países con mayor incidencia y mortalidad por COVID-19 de Latinoamérica el mundo. La pandemia ha afectado profundamente la economía del país, de hecho, Perú es uno de los países más afectados del mundo, con una contracción en el Producto Bruto Interno (PBI) de -12%, en el 2020 según proyecciones de Banco Mundial. Como si esto fuera poco, el Presidente de la república, Marín Vizcarra, enfrentó dos procesos de destitución, vacancia por incapacidad moral organizados desde el Congreso. El segundo proceso, terminó con la destitución del Presidente Vizcarra el 9 de noviembre 2020. Este fue el cuarto proceso de vacancia impulsado desde el Congreso Peruano desde 2016 (los dos primeros fueron contra el Pedro Pablo Kuczynski quién terminó renunciando al cargo en marzo de 2018).
La destitución de Vizcarra, y la toma de poder de un nuevo Ejecutivo, presidido por Manuel Merino, generaron una impresionante ola de protestas a nivel nacional (sobre todo entre el 9 y 15 de noviembre). Estas marchas, sobre todo las organizadas en el centro histórico de Lima, fueron reprimidas utilizando un innecesario y excesivo nivel de violencia por parte de las fuerzas de seguridad tal y como lo ha documentado la Oficina de la Alta Comisionada de la ONU para los Derechos Humanos en un informe publicado en el 2021.
En noviembre, unas semanas después de las marchas me “reuní”, por Zoom (estamos en pandemia) con Carlos León Moya, politólogo, analista político, para conversar sobre sus impresiones de lo que acabábamos de vivir. A continuación les presentó algunos extractos de esta conversación.
Una de las primeras cosas que hablamos fue sobre cómo se llegó a esta situación, y si bien es posible identificar hechos en los últimos años que han contribuido a la crisis, para Carlos hay elementos más recientes que crearon las condiciones para esta tormenta:
Yo me remontaría como para entender esto hasta el año pasado, hasta setiembre del año pasado cuando Vizcarra cierra el Congreso, convoca nuevas elecciones complementarias para el Congreso y comete esta decisión semi suicida de no mandar a su propia bancada (grupo parlamentario), no mandar una lista al Congreso (elecciones de Enero del 2020), pero no manda una lista al Congreso no solamente por un error de cálculo sino también ese es un indicador de la precariedad de la lista política peruana, Vizcarra no tenía partido, su partido PPK no era su partido, era el partido de Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, cuando Pedro Pablo Kuczynski queda vacado se vuelve el partido de Gilbert Violeta, de Salvador Heresi y de Juan Sheput, que era un partido que termina rompiendo con el propio presidente, o sea, el presidente, su partido que son 4 personas termina rompiendo con él, entonces, Vizcarra no tiene partido, Vizcarra no tiene inscripción. Tienes que el presidente más popular en los últimos 20 años no tenía partido y quizás por eso sea tan popular.
Y luego van a nuevas elecciones, tienes un Congreso bastante fragmentado, pero en el cual el propio presidente no tiene una bancada propia, tú podrías decir que el Partido Morado era lo más parecido a una bancada propia, pero no tiene una bancada, entonces ahí institucionalmente lo que te dice la teoría es que esa parte tenía que pagar pato (irle mal), entonces, por angas o por mangas le podía ir mal.
Algo que hay que entender del contexto peruano es que los congresistas actuales, elegido en enero del 2020, a diferencia de sus antecesores, no van a poder ser reelegido, como consecuencia de una reforma constitucional, promovida por el propio Martin Vizcarra, para Carlos esta no reelección, sumada a la crisis del sistema de partidos fueron piezas claves en la destitución de Vizcarra
Me parece que hay otro elemento que es que su comportamiento no tiene sanción inmediata, ellos pueden hacer lo que le dé la gana y no hay problema, ¿por qué?, porque nadie los va a reelegir porque Vizcarra prohibió la reelección, digamos, no la prohibió, hizo un referéndum para que se prohíba la reelección inmediata y esa fue una de las cosas que se prohibió, su intención no era evidentemente ello, su intención era cancelar al cúmulo de personas que salen del Congreso anterior, y era una medida popular, el 80% del país estuvo de acuerdo, quizás más, decir que la reelección estaba bien era una afrenta casi en ese momento, pero varios señalaron con razón que el no permitir la reelección podía ser muy costoso, me parece que este es un ejemplo. Son congresistas que tienen año y 4 meses solamente y tienen casi que aprovechar el poco tiempo que tienen de la mejor manera y una de esas mejores maneras era para algunos intentando vacar al presidente.
Por otra parte, es cierto que en el Perú creo que hasta la mañana del lunes nadie pensaba que iban a vacar a Vizcarra, en buena cuenta porque no tenían los votos y eso se debe a que César Acuña, líder de Alianza para el Progreso había dicho que no iban a votar por la vacancia y a lo largo del día va cambiando esto, va cambiando y al final se voltea. Esa también es otra prueba de la precariedad, por una parte un presidente que no tiene partido y que no tiene bancada logra el acuerdo como un actor político importante como César Acuña, van a Palacio (Palacio de Gobierno, sede del ejecutivo peruano), se reúnen en palacio, logran una pequeña alianza y a las dos semanas la alianza se rompe, según Acuña porque sus congresistas se le sublevaron y le dijeron, “yo voy a votar como quiero, yo quiero votar por la vacancia”, y Acuña ya no pudo hacer más y se sumó, es ridículo, o sea, pero eso te muestra, ese último acto, centrándose en Alianza para el Progreso, tu institucionalidad dependía de un partido cuyo líder no puede sostener su palabra porque ni si quiera puede manejar a su propia bancada, o sea, así de precaria es la situación política, el aire político en el Perú.
Así como muchos no imaginábamos en la mañana del 9 de noviembre la vacancia, tampoco imaginábamos protestas tan grandes a nivel nacional. Esto no estaba en los cálculos del nuevo ejecutivo, presidido por Manuel Merino, que como señala Carlos, no contaba con apoyo ni dentro ni fuera del país.
Creo que si el lunes (9 de noviembre) alguien te preguntaba qué venía, o sea, qué iba a pasar, tu decías, sí, la gente va a salir a las calles y ya está, pero yo creo que nadie se esperaba tal avalancha de gente en las calles a nivel nacional con tantos jóvenes, con tanta fuerza, … la cantidad de gente que ha habido en las calles es la más grande en los últimos 20 años y con componentes especiales, muy joven, por fuera de los partidos, por fuera de los sindicatos, por fuera de las estructuras de antes….
En general, creo que ellos no esperaban un rechazo público de esta magnitud, creo que muchos esperaban, lo que suele pasar en el Perú, que es que la gente rechaza al Congreso y ya está, ¿no?, y no salen a las calles, o sea, las encuestas de opinión de los últimos 20 años son, no quieres al presidente, no quieres al Congreso, pero sigues en tu casa. Lo que ha pasado en esa semana fue, “no quiero al Congreso que tiene ahora el Ejecutivo y salgo a marchar todo el tiempo que pueda y salimos en todo el país”.
Además, era tan débil también este gobierno, digamos, fue tan burdo en su intento de vacancia que Manuel Merino no tenía el apoyo de nadie afuera del Perú y adentro tampoco tenía mucho apoyo, no te apoya la Iglesia Católica, no te apoyan los organismos, entre comillas, independientes, Defensoría del Pueblo sí te apoya, pero luego dice, “bueno, no lo sé”, el único respaldo fuerte que tuvo en su momento fue la policía.
Y es que, como describe Carlos, el ejecutivo de Merino se vio rápidamente aislado, con casi que un único aliado, y es está alianza y la desesperación por mantener el poder, y nuestra herencia autoritaria las que terminan alimentando y permitiendo una represión brutal, y con ello el aumento del rechazo hacia el ejecutivo que termina renunciando. La violenta represión policial acabó con la vida de dos jóvenes protestantes, dejó cientos de heridos, muchos de ellos con lesiones muy serias y permanentes.
Los elementos que a mí me parece que hacen que la furia (de la población) aumente por decirlo de alguna forma son, primero, el nivel de represión, o sea, ellos (el gobierno de Manuel Merino) podrían haberse mantenido sin tanto nivel de represión, han podido hacer que la policía salga y no ataque, si eso hubiese pasado, no habrían sido tan costosas para ellos las marchas… Qué hubiese pasado si estos señores hubiesen decidido no reprimir con esa fuerza, si hubiesen dicho, “no reprimas, contén nomás”?, posiblemente su caída no hubiese sido tan rápida, quizás ni si quiera hubiesen caído porque lo que genera eso )la represión), me parece es más furia, es cierto que temor, genera temor, pero también genera en algunos más decisión, o sea, la gente igual siguió saliendo, la marcha el sábado fue más masiva incluso que la del jueves. Y aparte ese nivel de represión les genera costos hacia adentro, por ejemplo, con las Fuerzas Armadas. Las Fuerzas Armadas no se quisieron plegar a esas represiones policiales y se mantuvieron al margen hasta el final.
Movilizaciones ciudadanas, tan grandes como las ocurridas en el Perú en noviembre del 2020, llevan a preguntarse, y ahora qué. ¿Se ganó? ¿Qué se ganó? Perú sigue siendo uno de los países más afectados por la pandemía de la COVID-19, tenemos elecciones generales en abril del 2021, y los actores políticos que van a participar son los mismos que tenemos en el actual Legislativo, y que tanto rechazo generan a la población. Como le dije a Carlos, vengo de una generación que salió a marcha a finales del los 90´s y el 2000, y sentimos que recuperamos algo valioso, “la democracia”, “las instituciones”. 20 años después, las cosas no están bien, y como señala Carlos, algo importante de estas protestas es que son mucho más críticos a esta idea de democracia liberal
Hay una diferencia clave entre una y otra (por las movilizaciones del 2000 y 2020) que es la insatisfacción con la democracia, ahora no hay esperanza con la democracia, la recuperas, pero es con lo que te quedas, pero no hay esperanza, hay insatisfacción fuerte y que en los 2000 no era así. Recuerdo en el 2003-2004 en la Católica (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) el rechazo que se le daba a Velasco porque era una dictadura. Y cuando ya han ido pasando los años he visto, en los últimos 15 años, cómo esa generación ha cambiado y en la generación de mi hermana que es 10 años menor que yo, todos sus amigos le tienen como mucho cariño a Velasco, ¿por qué?, porque fue el único que hizo cambios, pero fue dictadura, bueno, pero hizo cambios, eso era impensable en la Católica en el 2003, eso era impensable y eso era como mi indicador Velasco de la insatisfacción con la democracia. La insatisfacción tras 20 años de democracia, es un elemento que no había antes, creo que en el 2000 había más esperanza , es que “bueno ya hemos estado 10 años sin democracia, la hemos recuperado”, o sea, hay libertad de expresión, hay independencia de poderes, en sí no me van a desaparecer si digo algo pues ya está, ¿no?, en cambio ahora es como ¿hay otro tipo de…? ya tengo libertad de prensa, ya tengo independencia de poderes, pero no me basta pues, no me sirve pues porque igual elijo y no me hacen caso, igual roban, igual hacen lo mismo que en los 90 pero con independencia de poderes.
Perú conmemora 200 años de independencia este 2021, en medio de una crisis sanitaria, económica, y política, pero como dice Carlos, las protestas de noviembre nos dan un rayito de esperanza, que tenemos una generación una generación políticamente activa, y con otros valores, que es crítica y exige reformas.
Questo articolo riesamina brevemente l’attuale critica all’umanitarismo occupandosi di approcci alternativi allo spazio umanitario pubblico, alla figura dell’antropologo-umanitario, alla politica dell’umanitarismo e all’antropologia della sofferenza. Il caso studio qui riportato riguarda l’accoglienza terapeutica dei bambini di Chernobyl presso famiglie ospitanti italiane(1).
Dallo spazio umanitario pubblico a quello privato
Uno spazio umanitario è generalmente inteso come un campo per rifugiati o un centro di accoglienza. Gli abitanti di questo spazio sono sia rifugiati o richiedenti asilo (soggetti bisognosi di aiuto) sia organizzazioni internazionali, nazionali o locali (soggetti soccorritori). Questa visione è stata criticata in quanto genera involontarie conseguenze negative di un umanitarismo che produce la miseria di vite prive di senso (Ticktin, 2014: 278). Può una famiglia ospitante, ovvero uno spazio privato piuttosto che pubblico, diventare una soluzione migliore per i problemi umanitari?
Una famiglia ospitante è costituita da una famiglia (soggetti soccorritori) e dai suoi ospiti (soggetti bisognosi). Gli ospiti possono soggiornare per un periodo di tempo limitato, nell’arco di più anni. Mentre i rifugiati nei campi profughi sono isolati dalla popolazione locale, i bambini invitati nelle famiglie sono accolti dalla società. In seguito al disastro nucleare di Chernobyl, i bambini provenienti dalle aree piu’ afflitte hanno potuto soggiornare in Italia ogni anno per uno/due mesi fino all’età di 18 anni. Le famiglie ospitanti hanno fornito ai bambini cibi non radioattivi, vestiti, materiale scolastico, medicine e denaro contante.
L’accoglienza all’interno di una società influisce sulle conseguenze dell’umanitarismo. Per alcuni bambini di Chernobyl, l’esperienza in una famiglia ospitante ha significato una successiva migrazione in Italia per motivi educativi, lavorativi o matrimoniali. Alcuni ragazzi hanno scelto professioni riconducibili all’esperienza italiana (ad es. interpreti), altri hanno deciso di ricevere il battesimo cattolico, mentre altri continuano semplicemente a tornare in visita in Italia anche in età adulta. Una famiglia ospitante rappresenta uno spazio che parte con un obiettivo a breve termine di sollievo dal disagio, ma che può successivamente trasformarsi in un progetto a lungo termine di supporto alle relazioni umane e di impatto sulle scelte di vita.
Oltre l’antropologo-umanitario
Ticktin chiede: che posizione morale si occupa allorche’ si intenda criticare un movimento moralmente ispirato come l’umanitarismo? (2014: 277). Ticktin sostiene la posizione dell’antropologo-pragmatico che svela le conseguenze non intenzionali o impreviste degli interventi umanitari (2014: 278). Tuttavia questa visione non salva gli antropologi dal privilegio di essere accademici di istituti occidentali, che viaggiano in luoghi meno privilegiati, studiando persone meno privilegiate.
Esistono ancora nell’antropologia delle categorie che sono sottorappresentate, come ad esempio quelle dell’antropologo sopravvissuto, dell’antropologo auto-etnografo o dell’antropologo-subalterno. Nel mio lavoro, l’essere un’antropologa sopravvissuta al disastro nucleare di Chernobyl emerge dalla mia personale esperienza di soggiorno in Italia durante l’infanzia. Tuttavia, non tutti i sopravvissuti a disastri o guerre possono diventare antropologi. Come possiamo sostenere la possibilità di diventare antropologi per le persone che hanno vissuto una catastrofe e, in particolare, per le persone che hanno un passato meno privilegiato?
L’apoliticismo nell’umanitarismo
Il rifiuto verso l’uso della politica, all’interno dell’umanitarismo, è dettato dai principi di neutralità e imparzialità. L’umanitarismo viene tuttavia criticato per i suoi legami con il capitalismo, il militarismo e per i suoi interessi personalistici di governance neoliberale.
Recenti ricerche hanno evidenziato come sia possibile migliorare l’umanitarismo piuttosto che rinnegarlo. La questione non riguarda la struttura che l’umanitarismo può riprodurre (ad esempio il capitalismo, il militarismo), ma come l’umanitarismo può mettere in discussione questa struttura.
L’aiuto fornito ai bambini bielorussi di Chernobyl ospitati in Italia era un’iniziativa apolitica. Ė stato di fondamentale importanza portare avanti questo progetto, nonostante i disordini politici legati alla transizione post-comunista, in cui sia la Russia sia le potenze occidentali hanno cercato di influenzare le scelte della Bielorussia. Il paese ha scelto di mantenere stretti legami con la Russia e ciò ha provocato un conflitto geopolitico con l’Occidente a partire dalla metà degli anni ’90.
Mentre la cooperazione tra stati a livello europeo era bloccata, i legami personali tra Bielorussia e Italia crescevano. Per anni, la distanza dalla politica, ha permesso alle organizzazioni benefiche italiane (e ad altre occidentali) di promuovere interazioni interpersonali.
La lingua italiana è diventata la terza lingua straniera più studiata in Bielorussia, dopo inglese e tedesco. Nelle aree contaminate i giovani parlano meglio l’italiano che l’inglese. Ciò ha contribuito a sviluppare la cooperazione tra l’Italia e la Bielorussia a livello statale, in particolare in campo economico e culturale. Rimane la questione di come queste iniziative possano aiutare a risolvere il conflitto geopolitico tra la Bielorussia e l’UE e se le relazioni stabilite in campo economico e culturale possano trasformare le relazioni in ambito politico (cioè la cittadinanza partecipativa).
Verso l’antropologia del bene?
L’antropologia umanitaria è stata letta attraverso le lenti dell’antropologia della sofferenza (Robbins, 2013). Ticktin (2014) sostiene che l’umanitarismo può essere indirizzato verso l’antropologia del bene e diventare un nuovo tipo di antropologia morale. Mentre Ticktin si concentra principalmente sulla moralità e il benessere, Robbins (2013) considera anche l’empatia, la cura, la speranza e il cambiamento. In che modo i temi sollevati in questo blog post – famiglia ospitante, categorie di antropologi sottorappresentate e apoliticismo – possono essere compresi attraverso l’antropologia del bene?
L’empatia e la cura sono legate a come le persone agiscono per creare del bene nelle relazioni sociali (Robbins, 2013: 457). Una famiglia ospitante è uno spazio umanitario privato in cui le relazioni sociali vengono create, mantenute e trasformate. Teorie dell’antropologia dell’umanitarismo quali il biopotere (Foucault, 1978) e la “nuda vita” (Agamben, 1998) risultano poco rilevanti per comprendere le dinamiche di una famiglia ospitante. Si rendono necessarie altre teorie per studiare questo fenomeno.
L’antropologia del bene dà attenzione anche a tempo, cambiamento e speranza (Robbins, 2013: 458). Collocare l’antropologia dell’umanitarismo nell’antropologia del bene significa accettare che le conseguenze inattese dell’umanitarismo non siano sempre negative. Il compito dell’antropologo diventa quindi il ricercare la costituzione del bene e del male nei progetti umanitari, piuttosto che la contraddizione tra loro. Riconoscere la vulnerabilità umana e l’interdipendenza di tutti gli attori dell’umanitarismo può, sul lungo periodo, trasformare le politiche, la geopolitica e la cittadinanza partecipativa.
Note
(1) Il disastro nucleare di Chernobyl si è verificato nel 1986 in Unione Sovietica. Il paese più colpito fu la Bielorussia (con il 35% della sua popolazione). In Bielorussia furono 500.000 i bambini sopravvissuti al disastro nucleare di Chernobyl. L’Italia ha ospitato oltre 460.000 bambini bielorussi tra il 1990 e il 2015.
Bibliografia
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.
Robbins, J. (2013) ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 447–462.
Ticktin, M. (2014) ‘Transnational Humanitarianism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 273–289.
