Weltzeit 1-2022 | Special journalistic operation: War in Europe

Special journalistic operation

War in Europe

DW is Germany’s international broadcaster. Our job? Ensuring freedom of opinion around the world with unbiased news and information. Over 289 million people rely on our TV, online and radio coverage each week to make up their own minds. DW Akademie trains journalists worldwide and supports the development of free media. DW’s global staff is made up of nearly 3,000 people from more than 140 countries.

Weltzeit is published by DW and covers freedom, democratic values and our commitment to unbiased information.

A dark hour for Europe

While Russia’s war against Ukraine is raging within the borders of a sovereign European country, the collateral damage is global. In this special edition we highlight some aspects of a conflict that is likely to be triggering enormous effects within Europe and far beyond. While the full assessment of the consequences will take time, some immediate effects are already obvious.

We are witnessing an exodus of millions of people from Ukraine seeking safety in other European countries. They are added to the UN’s statistic of more than 100 million people around the globe who are refugees or internally displaced persons as a result of armed conflicts.

Before the war, Ukraine was an important supplier to the world market for crops. This vital contribution to the support of nations facing dire food shortages due to climate change and conflicts of their own will be almost impossible to compensate in the short run. Nations in Africa and beyond will have to suffer the consequences, even if international organizations are doing what is in their power to prevent the worst.

Our reporters and crews on the ground have been covering the war of aggression against Ukraine from day one, February 24, 2022. This is one of the times in history when journalism can prove its relevance. We cannot stop the war, but we can contribute to decisive political action by keeping the fate of hundreds of thousands of people in the headlines.

Two Ukrainian journalists have been essential in bringing to light the atrocities committed by the Russian aggressors.

Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka are receiving the DW Freedom of Speech Award this year for their singularly impressive reporting from the besieged city of Mariupol. Their reporting changed public perception of this war in a fundamental way.

Support for the people of Ukraine in this dark hour for Europe so far is impressive, but it needs to be lasting. Hopefully, this war will come to an end soon, so we can start reporting about the rebuilding of Ukraine and the prosecution of war

crimes. A large-scale international cooperation has been launched to collect evidence.

Covering developments inside Russia has become a bit more difficult for DW, since the Russian authorities forced us to close our bureau in Moscow. Our team is now working from temporary exile in the Latvian capital Riga. One day, we will be back in Moscow.

Nevertheless, even while we temporarily had to close shop there, our reporting about Russia continues to be comprehensive and to the point. Our audiences don’t have to miss a beat. Thankfully, Russia’s attempt at blocking independent media on the internet so far is not too successful. Providing effective tools for the circumvention of censorship will remain high on our agenda. DW has actually gained additional users in Russia, which is an indication for the great interest in objective information, as more and

more people in Russia understand that all they are getting is propaganda.

The challenge for independent journalism in times of crises lies in digging through the growing amount of disinformation and not to get drowned out by ever more effective propaganda tools. The number of governments that are choking freedom of opinion and a free press around the world is growing. Free media have to deliver unbiased news and facts. The media also need to hold those accountable who are posing a threat to peace and stability, depriving millions of people around the world of their rights and perspectives.

Cordially,

Peter Limbourg Director General @dw_Limbourg

The challenge for independent journalism in times of crises lies in digging through the growing amount of disinformation and not to get drowned out by ever more effective propaganda tools.

© DW/J. Röhl

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Putin told you so

Putin’s system has at its core the secret police, the ex-KGB in its post-Soviet edition. It is not an accessory to the Communist party or the elected president, but the country’s topmost and ultimate authority itself. This is the first such regime in history.

GLOBAL IMPACT

64 Beyond Russia

The real threat to human rights is from China

87 The future is in identity media Interview with Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy

ASIA

30 Facts will win again Erdoğan’s Gezi gamble

68 India-Russia ties

The key to understanding its stance on the Ukraine war

90 I am everything they hate!

116 The Olympics lost their innocence

WAR IN EUROPE

38 The renaissance of human material

42 Lessons of the Information War

Essay about public perceptions of the war

45 Can Russian independent journalism survive the war?

58 Cyber wars

WAR IN EUROPE

78 High time for action

There is no peace in Afghanistan after the Taliban took power. This could have devastating consequences for the West. If we do not want to leave the field to China and Russia, we must change our strategy.

ASIA

94 How Russian propaganda dominates Chinese social media

In China’s cyberspace, Russian propaganda continues to influence the discourse over the war in Ukraine.

97

Be different and show it!

Diversity strengthens individuality and social freedom

100 Against the culture of fear

Raif Badawi’s case is collective, not personal

50 Propaganda and the identity of Russians

The research supervisor of Russia’s only major independent pollster Levada Center explained in a DW interview why the majority of Russians support the invasion in Ukraine and do not resist propaganda narratives.

after the show is before the show

MaY 2023

Eskandar Abadi

“Who really cares about the problems of the blind? There are so many annoying stereotypes we are confronted with that oftentimes result in people feeling very insecure,” says Eskandar Abadi, an editor for DW’s Persian Service. Abadi was born in southern Iran and has been blind all his life.

He first came to Germany in 1980. He then studied political science and German language and literature at the University of Marburg and was a lecturer there from 1991 to 2002. Having worked at DW since 2002, he values DW’s commitment to independent journalism especially for providing valuable information to people in Iran who have restricted access to media.

His new book “Aus dem Leben eines Blindgängers” (The life of a blind man) is a journey through the past 50 years in Iran, that focuses less on Iran’s authoritarian regime and more on the people living under a dictatorship, including the blind and their everyday struggles.

Abadi hosts a music podcast and has worked for years as a representative for people with disabilities. When he is not writing or immersed in literature, he picks up his violin or plays his drums.

His new project for DW Farsi involves a podcast and video format on the topic of “living with disabilities”. Working alongside a colleague, he conducts interviews and contributes the ideas. The podcast is set to start in the second half of 2022.

+90

Three years on

In April 2019, DW, BBC, France 24 and Voice of America launched +90 with the aim of strengthening freedom of speech and press freedom in Turkey.

The YouTube channel +90, named after the international dialing code for Turkey, provides independent and trusted information and features a broad range of perspectives on sociopolitical topics. The reports, background stories and interviews have been well received by the followers: The most streamed videos, some of which were translated into German, have been viewed over 2 million times.

Isil Nergiz, head of +90 at DW: “Our unique, cross-border +90 media cooperation delivers innovative and inspiring constructive journalism.

HER — Women in Asia Breaking stereotypes

The multimedia format HER Women in Asia features courageous female protagonists who share their opinions on the challenges they face and what unites them. Season 2 of the successful series includes three new regions: Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

Now, a year before the elections in Turkey, we will start focusing more than ever on hot-button political, social and economic issues that affect the daily lives of our diverse, young Turkish target audience.”

“When we launched the new YouTube channel +90 at the end of April 2019, we hoped to fill an information gap in Turkey. After three years, we realize that we have not only closed a gap, but are THE medium that provides a platform for minorities in Turkey and a mouthpiece for those who are oppressed. All of us at DW can be proud of that,” says Erkan Arikan, Director of DW’s Turkish Service.

plus90 | plus90

Living the life of a man to make ends meet without a husband, but with a child in Pakistan. Fighting for a work culture that encourages and supports families in Hong Kong. And caring for an autistic child in Indonesia: HER portrays the lives of women from all spheres of Asian societies. In each episode, three women share their perspectives on universal issues concerning women, like motherhood, finances or women in the digital sphere.

The multimedia format can be accessed on-demand on dw.com, on TV and on DW’s social media channels in six languages: English, Hindi, Mandarin, Indonesian, Urdu and Tamil. Protagonists featured in season 1 come from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Taiwan; season 2 also includes stories from Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

“This format does a fantastic job of bringing our audiences close-up reports and powerful insights into the lives of women in Asia,” says DW editor-in-chief and HER

Executive Producer Manuela Kasper-Claridge. “Users in important target regions have given us great feedback on our first season, and that’s all the motivation we need to keep up the good work in season 2.”

The co-production between DW and its Asian partners, including PIK Film in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, Scroll Media in India and film maker Omer Nafees in Pakistan, is available on 25 partner platforms in Asia.

DW editors Bettina Thoma-Schade and Michael Wetzel are the producers behind HER Women in Asia. Bettina Thoma-Schade:

“Season 2 aims to reach even more Asian women to give them a platform to share their experiences and voice the challenges they face. With a diverse range of new topics, we are happy to be building on the success of season 1.” Season 3 is scheduled for 2023.

Guardians of Truth

A journalist digging in the soil

DW’s new documentary series Guardians of Truth shares the stories of journalists dedicating their lives to uncovering the truth. One of them is Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernández her topics: drug cartels, corruption and government abuse of power.

Guardians of Truth follows Turkish exile journalist and author Can Dündar as he meets journalists around the world — the first of which is Hernández, who has also been living in exile in Italy since 2017. Dündar was charged with treason following his reporting on Turkey’s arms deliveries to Syria, Hernández has received numerous death threats for her years of investigations on drug cartels and their links with the changing governments.

What is it like for Hernández to return to her home country a country that is the most dangerous in the world for journalists? What is it that drives her, that makes her pursue the truth despite the risks? How does it feel to say goodbye to her little son every time she makes the journey, not knowing if she will be able to return safely?

“It’s my home and we journalists are the country’s prosecutors. There is no independent judiciary, no justice. The people need to know what is happening,” Anabel says. When asked why she puts herself in danger for her investigations, she says that this is a question she asks herself every time she goes to Mexico, but “my country is still my home. I love my country, I love the people that live there.”

The film shows the difficult conditions of her work as an investigative journalist in Mexico: Hernández meets informants, including victims, but also drug lords. Some of her sources have even been

killed just for talking to her.

Dündar also meets a man named Mario, who is looking for the remains of his brother, who disappeared. Every day, risking his life, he drives to the region where his sibling was killed by drug dealers and digs in the ground with a stick. Journalists like Hernández, Dündar says, are digging in the soil in a similar way but with a pen instead.

In each episode of Guardians of Truth, Can Dündar meets activists risking their safety to fight for human rights.

Watch “Guardians of Truth Can Dündar meets Anabel Hernández”

© DW/J. Roehl

© DW

Germany premiere of the DW documentary “Guardians of Truth.” fLTR: Linda Vierecke, Peter Limbourg, Anabel Hernández and Can Dündar.

The new podcast age

Podcasts are booming in many of DW’s target regions and have become a strategic priority. But what are the secrets of successful production? A look inside the engine room of format development and the creation of “Love Matters with Evelyn Sharma”.

Text Alina Fichter, Head of Digital Format Development and Lab, Laura Döing, Project Manager Podcast Digital Format Development and Lab

India is one of the fastest growing podcast markets worldwide and a high-priority country for DW. With around 57.6 million monthly listeners, India presented a great opportunity to make DW even better known as a brand among a young target group.

But how would young Indians even discover podcasts among the myriad of other products on audio platforms? That’s one of the biggest hurdles in establishing podcasts, as popularity is still driven primarily through recommendations from friends. That’s where it helps to have a media partner with a long reach that gives the podcast immediate visibility in the target market. Indian Express is one of the largest and most respected daily newspapers in India. It was also just looking to expand its own podcast portfolio and was involved in the development of “Love Matters” from the beginning.

The ingredients

A well-known host also helps a new podcast to establish itself quickly. That’s why Evelyn Sharma, Bollywood actress and presenter of the DW program Euromaxx, was the perfect fit. Because the Indian Express, just like DW, had set itself the goal of using podcasts to address younger target groups and, above all, younger women.

To find out what moves the young, Indian target group and what topics keep them up at night when they think about love, the interdisciplinary podcast team at DW conducted interviews with local users.

Some phrases from these conversations remain memorable:

“My mother tells me, ’You can date whoever you want.’ The main thing is that you don’t date a Muslim!” (Chandini, 23)

“My parents have no idea that I have a girlfriend, they wouldn’t allow it. I have to come up with an excuse if I want to meet her.” (Dhruv, 21)

The recipe

The beneficiary interviews quickly revealed a pattern: In India, love is a highly controversial topic. While many young people have a clear idea of who they want to be with and how they want to live, it’s often not allowed by their family and society. But what should a young

person do now, if he or she has fallen in love with someone who belongs to the “wrong” religion, for instance? It quickly became clear that young Indians have a great need to talk about love but no one to talk to. The topics are taboo.

That was the opportunity for the podcast: to offer a protected space for exchanging ideas about relationships, where listeners can find out how others deal with the pressure that weighs on them. In each episode, host Evelyn Sharma lets listeners have their say and discuss their problems with her celebrity guests or influencers who have been through a similar situation. Like singer Benny Dayal and his wife Catherine Dayal, who are in a long-distance relationship. Or Indian influencer Leeza Mangaldas, who describes herself as “India’s leading content creator of pleasure-driven content”. She wants to create awareness about sexuality and the body and especially about women’s sexual pleasure. The goal: practical, constructive tips on how to deal with the situation coupled with entertainment. It is precisely this inspiring exchange about individual relationship problems that seemed to be missing from the young target audience until now. So, the podcast is about interfaith relationships, a positive attitude towards one’s own body and divorces without shame.

The fact that the podcast is so close to the lives of its listeners was also reflected in its usage: “Love Matters with Evelyn Sharma” made it into the top 10 of the Indian Apple Podcast Charts. The podcast hit its target audience squarely, with 95 percent of usage coming from India.

“Podcast offers a very good opportunity to learn about love and taboo topics in a protected place, because ’Love Matters’ can be listened to privately with headphones. We are pleased to offer a product in the growing podcast market in India, which is of particular interest to young women,” says Melanie von Marschalck, Deputy Head of Life and Style at DW.

“The format is great. It really provides an opportunity to get into the conversation,” says Anant Sharma, Head of Podcasting at The Indian Express.

DW’s Digital Format Development is already working on the next regionalized podcasts for audiences in South Africa and Colombia. A vodcast in Russian will be launched later this year as well.

Listen on Apple Podcasts © KovtunArt/Adobe Stock

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could mean less bread on the table in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world where millions already struggle to survive. The region is heavily dependent on wheat supplies from the two countries which are now at war and any shortages of the staple food have potential to bring unrest.

© Berkah via Getty Images

We’re all living in a world of collateral hunger

It might seem jarring to speak of markets when bombs are killing Ukrainian children, destroying hospitals and kindergartens, and burning families from their homes.

But the WFP knows from its work in nations scarred by conflict that marketplaces are key stabilizers in a troubled world. When a town marketplace is hit by a missile it kills store holders, customers

and suppliers. It destroys infrastructure and deters commerce. It wreaks havoc on supply chains that have been carefully forged over decades and which ensure that food is brought as efficiently as possible from farm to table. It drives up prices as people seek to re-establish orderly supply, at much higher replacement cost.

This explains why the consequences of the war in

Ukraine are sending a shockwave around the world in energy and food commodity pricing. But the impact of this violent disruption is all too real and is being felt on almost every table around the world. We’re all in this together, from Yemen to Berlin and Los Angeles to Tokyo.

Rising food and fuel prices hurt the vulnerable the most. In Lebanon, before the

Text David Beasley, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP)

Ukraine war, food prices had already risen by 570 percent since 2020. Three quarters of its people now live below the poverty line and over 50 percent depend on assistance. For people living hand-to-mouth, tiny increases in the cost of food have an outsized impact. Wheat prices, now at a 14-year high, will spike the prices of bread, pasta and a bowl of cereal globally. Double the price of wheat and the cost of that bowl of cereal either doubles or you consume half as much.

A couple of months ago I was in Yemen. A collapse in funding meant that we were already slashing food for 8 of the 13 million people we feed there. Children were getting the equivalent of a bowl of cereal and now, unless we can find the cash in a COVID cash-strapped world, they’ll be getting half a bowl of cereal. Before Ukraine, we were already taking food from the hungry to feed the starving. Now we’ll be taking from the starving to share with the starving.

The war in Ukraine has also pushed other crises off the front pages. For example, food insecurity in Afghanistan is soaring, driven by the impact of decades of conflict, the economic crisis, and recurrent drought. Despite the eyes of the world being focused elsewhere, WFP remains on the ground to offer a lifeline for millions of people in Afghanistan and in dozens of other nations around the world.

But our task is becoming ever harder. With grain ships due for the Middle East and Africa tied-up in Black Sea ports and many months until Australia and Argentina plant extra crops to fill the gap in global supplies, painful price rises in an unstable market ultimately find their mark in the mouths of hungry children across the world.

The link between food and social stability, even in the most conflicted circumstances, is why the WFP was awarded

the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. In citing the fact that the WFP cultivates the conditions for peace, the Nobel Committee acknowledged an intuitive fact that we all feel that people will do whatever is necessary to feed their families, be that gruelling work, migration or going to war. Bread shortages and hunger have a well-researched role in igniting revolutions.

Moreover, a destabilized commodity market will certainly spark an ugly scramble to corner available grain for national interests, ignoring the consequences of destabilizing poorer countries. Already battered by COVID, climate change, and often conflict, poorer countries are struggling the most to recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout. About 60 percent of low-income countries are currently in debt distress or close,

David Beasley

As Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley works across political, religious and ethnic lines for economic development and education.

Before taking his leadership position at WFP in April 2017, Beasley spent a decade working with leaders and managers in more than a hundred countries on projects to promote peace, reconciliation and economic development and was governor of the state of South Carolina from 1995 to 1999.

The food crisis in Yemen, due to the sevenyear civil war between the government forces and the Iranian-backed Houthis, is growing with the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine.

© Abdulnasser Alseddik/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

double that of 2015, including a hit-list of the world’s most fragile states, like Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen.

Yet what must not be forgotten in this new scramble is that we are our brother’s keeper, not just for the sake of ordinary compassion, but because a stable market helps keeps inherently unstable countries on their feet. Wealthy nations also have an “interest” in that.

Yes, the WFP is all hands on deck in Ukraine and surrounding countries, dealing with the hunger fall-out of this war for people trapped in cities. But our work must continue for the hundreds of millions of those most exposed to starvation who live far away from Kyiv. We must stabilize markets in

Internally displaced people wait for food distribution in a bunker at a factory in Severodonetsk, eastern Ukraine.

order to preserve and promote peace in the deeply fraught countries in which we serve.

Our leaders have to acknowledge that food security is inextricably linked with social and political stability. Fighting hunger therefore requires not only sufficient funding to relieve immediate suffering, but also long-term investment to address its root causes and help prevent future crises.

If we do not act now, we risk multiplying and amplifying the instability already wrought by two years of COVID pandemic, by conflict, by the burgeoning effects of climate change, and now by the menace of runaway costs hitting a ring of fragile countries circling the globe.

Wheat prices, now at a 14-year high, will spike the prices of bread, pasta and a bowl of cereal globally.

© Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

Unlocking the stalemate

The struggle of returning to peace negotiations between Israeli and Palestine.

Text Alexandra Senfft, author and publicist

“You’re investigating who might restart the Middle East peace process? It’s going to be a short article!” says Gershon Baskin and laughs. For decades, the 65-year-old has been one of the important grassroots Israeli actors trying to reach an understanding with the Palestinians. In 1988 he founded IPCRI, the IsraeliPalestinian Center for Research and Information. Today, Baskin is co-director of Holy Land Bond, a fund that invests in Palestinian housing projects in East Jerusalem and in integrated Jewish-Palestinian housing projects in Israel. The passionate mediator, who

describes himself as a social and political entrepreneur, has mediated several times between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and remains a tireless advocate of the twostate solution. He makes this clear again and again in his weekly column for the Jerusalem Post.

At the moment, however, Baskin sees no signs that renewed peace negotiations are even being considered, because Benjamin Netanyahu’s government pushed the issue off the political map; Naftali Bennett’s new government attaches no importance to this either. Foreign Minister

Yair Lapid, with his Yesh Atid party, advocates the twostate solution, but takes no steps. On the contrary, Baskin knows that he has forbidden his party comrades from holding talks with Palestinians. Meanwhile, left-liberal parties and the “Joint List” are fighting more for their own survival. “Israel’s former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin and Gadi Eizenkot, until 2019 chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, have publicly identified conflict resolution as the number one priority,” says Baskin, “and they are right about that. But no one wants to promote that in politics.”

Palestinian protester yells at an Israeli soldier as he confronts him atop an army vehicle during a protest against Israeli forces conducting an exercise in a residential area near the Palestinian village of Naqura, northwest of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, on September 4, 2019.

A

© Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images

After four parliamentary elections in just two years, the Israelis replaced Netanyahu as prime minister in March 2021. Bennett’s governing coalition, fragile from the start, has wavered significantly since losing its majority in April 2022. In this ongoing crisis, nobody is talking about the two or one-state solution, especially since there is currently little interest on the part of the EU or the USA and only minimal pressure is being exerted. For Baskin, the slogan of “two states for two peoples,” which some Israeli politicians and foreign diplomats continue “to parrot” (Baskin), seems like a mantra no one seriously believes in. For years there has been a status quo: the administration of the occupied Palestinian territories and the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Violence flares up again and again, as it does every year around Passover and Ramadan at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, up to and including

war between Israel and Hamas, with devastating consequences, especially for the encircled civilian population in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the Palestinians continue to deteriorate. As early as 2015, the United Nations warned that the Gaza Strip would soon be uninhabitable. In the West Bank, the economic situation is also precarious, and all development is stagnating.

Twenty-nine years ago, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, which initially nurtured hopes for peace and a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was created, which has since administered the zoned West Bank jointly with Israel. By 1999, the remaining outstanding issues such as the Jewish settlements, the future of the Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the final borders and water resources would be negotiated. But none of this happened. Instead,

Israel created a barrier to the West Bank, now more than 700 kilometers long, and pushed ahead with building settlements on Palestinian land. The creeping annexation of the Palestinian territories unofficially proceeds in this way. Palestinian acts of terrorism, for their part, helped fuel mutual distrust. In 2000, negotiations at Camp David under Clinton’s US administration collapsed and the second intifada broke out. The negotiators did not get any further in Taba in 2001, either. All other plans such as the Arab Peace Initiative, the Road Map or the Geneva Initiative came to nothing. The opposing sides last met across the negotiating table in 2009.

US President Donald Trump finally presented his “Deal of the Century” called “Peace to Prosperity” in 2019, in which the Palestinians were no longer involved at all. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, had ended ties with the United States in 2017 after Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The US Embassy was relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The US administration also froze funds for the PA and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA. Emboldened by this bias towards Israel, Netanyahu threatened to annex parts of the West Bank in 2020. At the same time, the Abraham Accords came about agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which aim to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world.

All of this increasingly weakened the Palestinian position, not to mention the geographic and political separation between the West Bank and Gaza, which is also a consequence of the Oslo Accords. In addition, the Palestinians are politically paralyzed. President Abbas is now old and rules the self-governing authorities despotically. His mandate expired in 2009 and

© Mohannad Khatib @Mediumshot via Getty Images

The Dome of the Rock, a mosque with a golden dome that dominates the skyline of Old Jerusalem. The "rock", from which the Prophet ascended to heaven can be seen inside the mosque.

Israeli watchtower on the border wall of the West Bank, in the streets of Bethlehem, with signs of attacks and an Israeli flag.

Alexandra Senfft

after reading Middle Eastern Studies, she worked as an independent Middle East consultant for a parliamentary group in the German Bundestag and later as a UNRWA observer in the West Bank to then become the UNRWA spokeswoman in the Gaza Strip. Senfft has been a contributor for international newspapers since 1991. She has worked on the Körber Foundation’s dialogue training program in Israel “Storytelling in Conflict”. Senfft promotes the importance of the biographical approach to conflict resolution. She is the second chair of the Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust.

also an influential actor. However, most Palestinians do not stand behind them, because the PA is now only perceived as Israel’s corrupt subcontractor and has lost its credibility.

the PA and PLO have continued to lose their democratic legitimacy since 2006. The PLO, once representative of all Palestinians, including those in the diaspora, has become irrelevant. The PA repressed oppositional Palestinian parties, institutions, unions and popular committees, which were also supplanted by the growing number of internationally sponsored NGOs. This led to depoliticization and a representation vacuum.

In 2021, the presidential and parliamentary elections longed for by over 80 percent of all Palestinians were supposed to finally take place. But Abbas again postponed elections indefinitely critics say he knew he didn’t have the public support and he would have lost.

Officially, Hussein el-Sheikh, a senior member of the PA and the PLO Secretary- General since February 2022, is considered a potential successor to Abbas. Majed Faraj, head of the Palestinian secret service, is

“Anyone who doesn’t respect the rights of the population hardly has the legitimacy to negotiate with Israel on our behalf,” says Samer Sinijlawi, head of the Jerusalem Development Fund. The 49-year-old is a member of Fatah’s shadow leadership and is pushing for reforms towards more transparency and legitimate political representation including younger and more female politicians. The discourse has shifted, says Sinijlawi, a Palestinian state is no longer at the top of the list of priorities, but a change in leadership: “Because the current government is blocking any developments in this direction.” In his view, the PA should not have boycotted the Abraham Accords. Instead, it should have used them to break out of international isolation and make demands on Israel to get the parties back to the negotiating table.

His goal and that of many like-minded people is to revitalize Fatah politically and actively bring politicians like Mohammed Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, Nasser al-Qudwa, Salam Fayyad and especially Marwan Barghouti back into the political process from which they were expelled/ driven into exile, with the exception of Barghouti, who has been in Israeli custody for 20 years. He is considered the most promising candidate for the presidency and trusted to bring the Palestinians back to a confident and united stance with Hamas on board and persuade them to resume peace negotiations.

Dalal Erekat is the daughter of Saeb Erekat, who was the secretary general of the executive committee of the PLO and chief Palestinian negotiator until his death in 2020. She is assistant professor in diplomacy and conflict resolution at the Arab

© German Meyer via Getty Images

American University in Jenin/Ramallah in the Westbank. Erekat is deeply concerned with the ongoing unchecked violence of settlers against Palestinians. She considers this a serious potential danger to the whole region. “Palestinians resist and are steadfast in the face of such aggression, however, they are extremely frustrated with the situation which could any time explode internally or externally,” she explains.

Erekat suggests a shift in thinking from a micro to a macrolevel: “As a prerequisite for resuming negotiations the borders of Israel should at last be defined; at the same time the occupation should be ended and the State of Palestine recognized.” She relates the fact that the international community helps maintain the status quo to its fear that Hamas could win any future elections although analysis has shown that this would not be the case if free elections and plurality were guaranteed. ”The continued silence of the international community is contrary to the values that it is advocating and against its legal and ethical obligations. Where it comes to Palestinian rights, double standards and lip service have become the norm.”

Gershon Baskin and Samer Sinijlawi, both agree that the EU should not continue to support the PA to the same extent because it is thereby financing the occupation and the status quo. The two-state solution, so they reason, only makes sense if Palestinian elections finally take place and the state of Palestine is recognized internationally, not least by Germany. It must be made clear to the PA that this recognition is linked to free elections. The two men are not the only ones who have visions and proposals for the future and practice coexistence. Despite the fact that many Palestinians avoid contact with Israelis in order not to encourage the normalization of the occupation, there are countless joint projects at

grassroots level, many of them carried out by women.

Young Palestinians and Israelis in particular are breaking new ground. They are countering the deadlock at the official level with a flood of extra-parliamentary activities. The focus here is on solidarity, education and demilitarization and, above all, on “unlearning” ideologies and enemy images. The actors take the concerns of the other side seriously and perceive them as equal. “True peace means that you recognize how the other is different from you, not how the other is the same as you are” said Israeli psychologist and mediator Dan Bar-On.

Meanwhile, there is little exchange between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. ECOPEACE, a Palestinian-Israeli-Jordanian environmental NGO, still mediates between the two levels and is often criticized for this. In November 2021 Israel and Jordan signed the largest ever cooperation agreement which

was first proposed and developed by ECOPEACE under the umbrella of its regional project Green Blue Deal. According to the agreement Jordan will supply electricity generated from solar power to Israel in exchange for water from an Israeli desalination plant to Jordan. The Green Blue Deal entails rehabilitating the shrinking Jordan River shared by all three countries. The NGO is also promoting public awareness and education particularly directed towards Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian youth. One of the main aims is to build regional trust through environmental issues that create mutual interdependencies. Palestinian Director Nada Majdalani is convinced: “Through joint water and energy security projects, we can bring it home to the people in this region which is particularly threatened by the climate catastrophe that we are all in the same boat and can only survive if we work together.”

This region is particularly threatened by the climate catastrophe, we are all in the same boat and can only survive if we work together.

© Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images

Music? It can’t be destroyed.

Culture

The National Socialists purposely used classical music for their propaganda. DW documentary director Christian Berger has been preoccupied with this topic for some time and now he’s making it the focus of his new documentary. Berger, a longtime editor with DW, shows on the one hand how star conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and other well-known music makers were involved in the Nazi system and on the other, how young cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was able to survive the Nazi terror in Auschwitz thanks to music. “Klassik unterm Hakenkreuz” (Classics under the swastika) is the latest project in a long series of award-winning films from DW’s Culture and Lifestyle that breaks new ground: for the first time, unique archive footage including from concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, has been restored and colorized. The color is key to making it possible to experience the events in a new way and bring them into the present.

Production for the new film is in full swing. Even though the complex processing of the archive material will still take several months, the award-winning director and his team are providing a look behind the scenes of this unique project. Berger’s documentary on the significance of classical music under National Socialism uses scores of period archive material that is currently being digitized.

The historic black-andwhite footage first has to be restored. After that, the majority of the black-andwhite images will be extensively colorized. “I wanted to bring these moments in music history into our time through color and make them more tangible, thereby also getting ’non-music specialists’ interested in the historical subject,” Berger says. Images showing the concentration camps Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Bergen Belsen are deliberately left in black and white.

Archive researcher Linn Sackarnd has painstakingly collected material from

Text Gaby Reucher, DW

24 different film archives in Germany, Europe and the USA. The particular problem with this genre: films from before 1945 are predominantly silent. “That was a challenge. You research archival films for a documentary about music — and there is often no sound in the sources.”

Other period documents pose the opposite problem. Sound recordings are available, but no images to go with them. This is the case, for example, with audio recordings of then 19-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a main protagonist in the film. Christian Berger illustrates her voice with detailed shots of a microphone from the 1930s.

Music in the concentration camp

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the last survivor of the “Girls’ Orchestra of Ausschwitz.” She spent the last half year of her imprisonment in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where British troops liberated her in 1945. In a BBC radio interview, she recounts matterof-factly what she experienced in the concentration camps. “I witnessed everything with my own eyes. We heard the screams all the way in our barracks. There was always music to go with it. I myself was in the band. Music was put to the most terrible things.”

“For me, this interview with her was the most fascinating document; how precisely she analyzed the situation as a young woman. She was already afraid back then that people would not believe her at all about these monstrous events,” says Berger.

He visited 96-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at her home in London. She remembers clearly how in Auschwitz, she had to play marching music when the prisoners went to work. On weekends, they held concerts for the commanders. Among them was Josef Mengele, camp doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, who

was involved in the murder of tens of thousands of people. He wanted to hear Anita Lasker-Wallfisch play Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei”. She is often asked whether she can still listen to this music today, even though it is connected with these terrible memories. “Of course!” she answers. “Life has two sides for me. One was hell and the other was normal life. The Nazis managed to destroy a lot. But the music, you can’t destroy it! You can try, but it’s impossible!”

Wilhelm Furtwängler: “Hitler’s Conductor?”

The film’s second main protagonist is star conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who died in 1954. There is archival footage of him, including the scene of him conducting on a stage decorated with swastika flags and then shaking hands with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The original blackand-white footage appears later in the film in the original colors of the time. “There’s

something timeless about music,” says producer Bernhard von Hülsen. “When the Berlin Philharmonic performs this timeless music in color and good film quality in front of a Nazi audience, we immediately realize how close that time is to us. The magic of Furtwängler’s conducting, as well as the Faustian quality of his handshake with Goebbels, affect us that much more directly.”

In the 1930s, Wilhelm Furtwängler was sponsored by the National Socialists. One of his great performances was that of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which he conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1942 for Hitler’s birthday in the old Berlin Philharmonie.

How the National Socialists appropriated music

Immediately in 1933, “Minister of Propaganda” Joseph Goebbels founded the “Reich Chamber of Culture” with the subdivision “Reich Chamber

I wanted to bring these moments in music history into our time through color and make them more tangible.

of Music”. Its first president was famous composer Richard Strauss, with Wilhelm Furtwängler as his deputy. Both were considered cultural figureheads of the dictatorship. Works by Jewish composers or political opponents were banned.

For the film, Christian Berger sought out musicologist Albrecht Dümling, who reconstructs the National Socialists’ so-called “degenerate music” exhibition. He says, “Music was considered the most German art, the art that speaks directly from the so-called ’racial soul’. And since music was so important, it had to be promoted even more. There had never been so much money spent on music by the state before.”

This did not come about suddenly or by chance. With the founding of the German Empire in 1871, Emperor Wilhelm I saw himself as the steward of the cultural heritage. He already wanted to tie “German” culture and music to the government and expand their status. International recognition of composers such as Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner played into his hands.

The National Socialists took up this tradition. The Berlin Philharmonic toured abroad as the Reich Orchestra. They filled the concert halls with German works by Beethoven, Liszt and Wagner. Adolf Hitler especially appreciated the music of Richard Wagner, who was also an anti-Semite who had written inflammatory pieces against the Jews.

Christian Berger sees Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Wilhelm Furtwängler as two ends of a spectrum. “On one end is the star conductor courted by those in power. On the other side is a musician who made music in a concentration camp under fear of death. The contrast could hardly be greater.”

The documentary “Classics under the Swastika” is scheduled to premiere in fall 2022.

I was the only cellist in the girls’ orchestra

After first having been in prison in Breslau, you were transported to Auschwitz in 1943.

The prisons were completely overcrowded back then. And why would one want the Jews to occupy that space? One day they called me and said that I was being sent to Auschwitz. I got there at night. The next morning there was a reception ceremony. There were many prisoners who did the reception ceremony with us, so to speak.

What did this ceremony look like?

and Alma Rosé asks me: “Where did you study, what did you study?” And that’s how I got into the orchestra. I was the only cellist. Alma managed to make something out of the girls’ orchestra that was acceptable. If our music had been deemed too bad, that would have been the end of us.

On what occasions did the orchestra play there?

Mainly our task was to play marching music when thousands of prisoners marched out early in the morning to work in the factories, and the same in the evening. And when that was done, we went back to the block and learned the repertoire. Because on Sunday there were concerts for the amusement of those in power. The prisoners could also hear the concerts and the reaction varied greatly. It was an insult to some, but I’ve also read of people saying that the music gave them a chance to dream their way out of hell for a few minutes.

Are there any pieces of music that you still associate with that time? For example Schumann’s “Träumerei”, which was performed for Joseph Mengele.

Yes, but don’t think I’m about to faint. It is such a crazy idea when you ask: “Can you still hear Schumann’s Träumerei?” Of course! Life for me has two sides: one was hell and the other normal life. The Nazis managed to destroy a lot. But the music, you can’t destroy it! You can try, but it’s impossible!

How did you feel back then, in 1945, when the war was over?

Interview

© Johannes Imdahl

The girl who was in charge of me asked, “What’s your name, where are you from?” And she also asked, “What did you do before?” I played cello. “Fantastic! There’s a music ensemble here, stay here,” she said. I was already undressed, with a toothbrush in my hand, and she ran away and fetched the conductor. That was the violinist Alma Rosé. She was immediately enthusiastic. “Finally I have a cello!” There was no cello in the girls’ orchestra. I had arrived at the right moment. It was an absurd conversation. I was rigid, naked

We had been liberated, but we had problems. The English divided the people in Bergen Belsen into nationalities and said “go home”. If you ask me what I am, I’ll say I’m German. And if they asked, where is your home? Then I said in Wroclaw, which is Polish. So, in other words, I didn’t have a home. I am the typical “displaced person”. They didn’t know what to do with these people. We sat in Belsen for months until I found relatives in England and that’s how we finally ended up in England.

As part of the DW film project “Classics under the swastika,” DW documentary director Christian Berger spoke to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch about her time in the Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps.

Christian Berger, documentary director

The German- British cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is one of the last known survivors of the Auschwitz girls’ orchestra. In lectures and at schools, she still reports today on her experiences as a victim of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

Erdoğan’s Gezi gamble

Text Bülent Mumay, DW editor, Turkish Service

The milestone in the books to be written on both the political and media history of Turkey in the future will be a common one. After the protests that started in Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul in May 2013 and spread all over Turkey, nothing has been the same. Erdoğan’s decision to move Turkey to autocracy and his declaration of war against independent media coincides with this milestone.

After Erdoğan came to power in 2002, he made reforms that were pleasing to the West in order to liquidate the domestic power centers. However, as soon as he felt that he had reached the peak of his power, he broke the

bridges with democracy. After his re-election with 50 percent of the vote in 2011, he took the judiciary under full control with the constitutional changes he made. The antidemocratic steps he took with this self-confidence led to a huge wave of protests in May 2013. An environmentalist protest that started with Erdoğan’s announcement that he would build a military barracks and a shopping center in the only green area in Taksim Square, the heart of Istanbul, turned into a national rebellion with the participation of all segments that Erdoğan had victimized. Like every “autocratic” father, this wave of rebellion inflamed his anger even more.

A woman asks riot police to stop as they clash with Turkish protesters on June 1, 2013, during a protest against the demolition of Taksim Gezi Park, in Taksim Square in Istanbul.

Upon his instructions to the police, the government’s reaction to the riots resulted in the deaths of about 10 young people. It was not only the protesters who lost in the end, it was a process in which the mainstream media in Turkey died out as well. Erdoğan, who took steps such as getting some journalists and columnists fired and suing cartoonists who drew him like a cat, managed to completely dominate the media after he had bloodily suppressed the Gezi protests. Mainstream media outlets, which also included opposing views, were taken over by businessmen who had become rich through government tenders. This is how the process that made 95 percent of Turkey’s media completely dependent on the Palace began.

However, this process which started with the Gezi Resistance in 2013, contrary to Erdoğan’s goal, also led to two positive results in terms of the public’s freedom of information. First, alternative media outlets that were born or grew up with the rebellion began to fill the void of independent information created by the now controlled mainstream media. Television, newspapers and internet sites, which started out with very small opportunities instead of big media organizations, started to meet the news needs of citizens in Turkey. The second positive result of Gezi for the media was unexpected. International public broadcasters offering journalistic content in Turkish began to appeal to much wider audiences due to their liberal understanding of journalism and the opportunities they had. Foreign broadcasters, including DW, BBC and VOA, gained great momentum with Gezi. With the employment of talented journalists who lost their jobs with Turkish media under the pressure from Erdoğan, they offered news and information with an effective reach. This is exactly why these international news

Clashes between police and protesters in Taksim Square. Police fired tear gas and water cannons in Taksim Square on June 11, 2013, the 11th day of antigovernment protests in Turkey.

outlets are being targeted by Erdoğan these days. A state agency established to control and basically censor radio and television in Turkey has imposed a license requirement for domestic and foreign news websites, including DW Turkish. DW may soon face an access ban as it refuses to be institutionally subject to such an audit.

The preparations of the Palace to restrict the press organs that it cannot control are not just the imposition of licenses. Very strict legal regulations have been made for digital media. Any news item the government does not like is blocked by decisions of the

very busy judiciary, which is completely dependent on the Palace. Social media platforms are also being suffocated under the pretext of fighting “disinformation”. Sharing or reporting content that is considered “disinformation” will also be punished with imprisonment. Of course, the government will determine what constitutes disinformation.

However, as Erdal İnönü, a former Turkish politician, said: “The truth has a strange habit of coming out.” Since 2013, none of Erdoğan’s interventions against the media have prevented the truth from coming out. The light somehow leaked, enlightening the

© NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images

public. Moreover, the media that he cannot control are no longer a marginal or alternative factor as it used to be. Together, they have enough influence to fill the void of the mainstream. Despite its large output volume, media under the control of the Palace have a serious credibility problem. Despite substantive funds being transferred from public sources, none of the mainstream television channels under the control of the Palace can reach the ratings of an opposition channel like Halk TV. Despite employing thousands of trolls, the agenda on social media is still determined by channels outside of the Palace’s control. DW Turkish is breaking its own click and view records. At first, we only had an urban and youthful profile. Today, DW reaches the entire spectrum of Turkish society. With the 2023 elections approaching, which are of

vital importance to Erdoğan, he began to toughen his game plan, which he has been implementing since 2013. The prospect of him losing these elections has become a realistic possibility. The deterioration of the economy did serious damage to the support for Erdoğan and his ruling party AKP. The odds are not bad for an effective opposition bloc, which is forming against him, of actually winning next year’s elections.

For this reason, Erdoğan is now exploiting the Gezi protests as an instrument of power. The protests in 2013, in which some 8 million Turks took part, are now being put on a level with a terrorist crime. The judges appointed by the Palace, one of whom was even an AKP deputy candidate, handed down the highest sentence that the Turkish Penal Code could impose on the Gezi Resistance.

Hundreds of people, including many Turkish Americans and members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, protest in Zuccotti Park in solidarity with demonstrators in Istanbul.

Human rights defender Osman Kavala was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment for organizing the Gezi protests. Seven intellectuals were each sentenced to 18 years in prison. Erdoğan critic Canan Kaftancioglu, head of the Istanbul branch of opposition Party CHP, has been sentenced to five years in jail for insulting Turkey’s president on social media. This is seen as part of a crackdown on opposition to Erdoğan ahead of next year’s presidential elections. With these steps, Erdoğan intimidates both the opposition and the domestic media. However, as a Turkish proverb says: “The sun is not covered with mud.” Neither censorship nor pressure can prevent the truth from getting to the public. History books also show that the truth has not changed with court decisions, it still is…

It was not only the protesters who lost in the end, it was a process in which the mainstream media in Turkey died out as well.

© Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Vladimir Putin considers himself to be an honest man. He likes to tell his opponents: “I warned you, but you did not pay attention to my words.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is just the latest in a series of his actions that took the West by surprise. By the time this piece is published, he might well make good on his threat to strike NATO convoys delivering military aid to Ukraine or even use tactical nuclear weapons (although I do not believe he will). This was not destined to be so, if over the years Western political and business leaders were not so naive, cynical or weak (and sometimes all three) in their dealings with the Kremlin.

Much was said already about corrupting Western business and political elites with “special deals”, relentless propaganda and inventive use of social media to influence Western public opinion. But maybe the biggest miscalculation of

most Europeans and Americans was to treat Vladimir Putin and his circle as a kind of new version of the Soviet Politburo authoritarian, for sure, but rational, cautious because of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, more or less representative of their country and defending its national interests.

This approach totally missed two important differences with the Soviet era, not even mentioning the brief Yeltsin period of flawed democracy. Putin’s system has at its core the secret police, the ex-KGB in its post-Soviet edition. It is not as it happened before an accessory to the Communist party or the elected president, but the country’s topmost and ultimate authority itself. This is the first such regime in history. It considers trust between citizens, communities or states ephemeral and superficial. It looks at everything through the prism of a zero sum game: politics is either about total gain or total loss.

I warned you, but you did not pay attention to my words.

How and why the West misread the Russian strongman’s intentions.

Text Konstantin Eggert, DW editor

© Pavel Krychko

Konstantin Eggert

MBE is a columnist for Deutsche Welle and host of DW’s Russian language interview program Trending.

No compromise is possible. All this means that politics is turned by this regime into a never ending series of special operations where no word is safe to keep and no agreement is permanent.

Another mistake was to disregard the simple but frequently overlooked fact. As opposed to Russia’s rulers of the past: Putin and his inner circle not only rule Russia they also own it! The nation’s oil and gas, diamonds and arms factories, coal and platinum, steel and copper are either directly controlled by the Kremlin or nominally belong to the so called oligarchs who hold these assets at Putin’s discretion. Russia’s most prominent political exile billionaire Mikhail Khodokorvsky learned this the hard way. Between 2003 and 2013 he spent 10 years in jail and a penal colony for daring to disagree with the president. Russia’s rich got the message and remained fully obedient and totally loyal ever since.

This arrangement means that Putin and his cronies are not concerned with Russia’s real national interests, at least not as priority, but first and foremost with the survival of the regime and its vast economic and financial assets. Everything else is subordinated to this goal.

The Russian regime measures friend or foe alike on a simple “strength-weakness” scale. This results in either “respect” or “contempt” for the other party. Any offer of a compromise so natural for a Western mind means only one thing for the Kremlin: a sign that it can increase its demands, whatever they are. One may say this is not unlike the mafia attitude. This is a valid observation. Secret policemen and organized crime have a lot in common in their psychological outlook suspiciousness and secretiveness are their main traits. In their world, for example, 80-million strong Germany is weaker than the Czech Republic. Because

the government in Prague was bold enough to expel the majority of Russian diplomats in the wake of a suspected sabotage of a major arms depot by Russian agents. It also banned the Russian state owned corporation Rosatom from taking part in a tender to build a nuclear power plant in the country. At the same time German authorities took ages to react to the assassination in central Berlin of a Georgian citizen that Moscow deemed a “terrorist” with no economic consequences whatsoever.

It took Putin’s full scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022 for Berlin to finally say goodbye to the “Nord Stream-2” pipeline which the Central Europeans, the Baltic States and the US long deemed a threat to Europe’s energy independence and an economic weapon against Ukraine. In the same vein, Putin took careful notice of Barack Obama drawing a “red line” at the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria only to forget about it when these weapons were indeed deployed against civilians. “Weak” was the Kremlin’s verdict. In September 2015, Russian fighter jets, special forces and the “Wagner Group” mercenaries went into Syria to bail Assad out of his troubles.

President Joseph Biden made the same mistake in 2021 when he treated Putin as if he were Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Gorbachev undemocratic and unelected, but still a responsible and wholly rational leader of the world’s number two nuclear superpower. In response to Moscow provocatively massing its troops along Ukraine’s border in a threatening fashion, Biden invited Putin to a summit in Geneva last June. “Weak” was the conclusion again. Ukraine is now paying the price for Washington’s miscalculation.

Putin always saw and will continue to see unpredictability as a tool to be used against adversaries. With Russia’s GDP being comparable to

Another mistake was to disregard the simple but frequently overlooked fact. Putin and his inner circle not only rule Russia — they also own it!

that of a mid-sized European Union country like Spain, low industrial productivity, omnipresent corruption, demographic decline and mediocre armed forces, unpredictability (combined with pervasive lies made into an art form) is pretty much the only real weapon the Kremlin has in its possession. But in true mafia fashion, Putin likes to send cryptic warnings of his impending action only to feign surprise later.

US president George W. Bush evidently misunderstood Moscow’s threat of a so-called “asymmetrical response” to the US recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February 2008. Russia’s invasion of Georgia and de facto occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia breakaway regions followed in August 2008.

When in summer 2021 the Russian strongman published a 5000-word article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” most foreign observers were baffled. “A president of a country acutely

suffering from a major epidemic can not have the time to concentrate on obscure historical details of 17th century Russian-Polish rivalry or suchlike!” was the nearly universal response of the majority of Russia watchers. Today it is clear this long treatise laid an ideological foundation for the February 24 invasion. It rationalized Putin’s desire to effectively eliminate Ukrainian statehood and finish what he started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbass.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Central European and Baltic states continuously voiced alarm over the Russian regime’s real nature and objectives. They were mostly ignored, especially by western Europeans. This convinced the Russian leadership that the West was weak and had entered a phase of irreversible decline. February 24, 2022 finally vindicated those warnings. It jolted the EU into real and tough action. This was probably the

A Moscow court on December 30, 2010 sentenced Russia’s former richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky to 14 years in jail in his second fraud trial, a verdict slammed as cruel and absurd by rights activists. The reading of the verdict in the packed courtroom was the culmination of the most controversial

trial in Russia’s post Soviet history which critics said was staged simply to punish Khodorkovsky for daring to oppose Putin.

first time that the West played Putin’s own unpredictability trick on him. The Kremlin was evidently unprepared for this unpleasant surprise. Sanctioning all of Russia’s elite including the rare step of blacklisting even foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggests that the real nature of Russia’s ruling kleptocracy finally became clear, its lies finally called. For Putin with his perceptions of chronic Western, especially European, weakness this is a very rude awakening.

Putin’s only hope (if he survives these challenges) is that the US, the EU and their allies will not have enough patience to see through their tough policies, that they will eventually be distracted by another crisis. “Ukraine fatigue” will kick in, “engagement” with Russia will reappear on the agenda, powerful business lobbies will spring into action, and things will eventually become better for the Kremlin. It is the West’s next challenge to ruin these calculations.

© Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP via Getty Images

The renaissance of human material

When public attention is sustained on one issue, there are dangers. This is especially true when that attention is combined with a strong and dominant narrative, as in the case of the war in Ukraine. The Russian attack on Ukraine, which seemed out of time and therefore surprised many, is a political impetus in the West, the seeds of which were planted in today’s generation of politicians as they sat at their desks in social and civics classes. Back then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the shadow of the Slavic world hung over Europe. Freedom and democracy had to be defended if necessary robustly. The Red Army withdrew from East Germany without firing a shot. But of

course people like it when what they learned as a child later proves to be valid.

Freedom and democracy, extended by civilization, law and humanity, must be defended with armed force in Ukraine. That is the dominant impulse in German politics, from Anton Hofreiter to Friedrich Merz. Cautious dissenting voices are drowned out by the thunder of the howitzers delivered to the Donetsk Basin and warning letters to the Chancellor are pushed into the morass by the tracks of the Cheetah tanks rolling east, even if the epistle is signed by well-known names.

The media-compatible smoothness of the aggressor’s face has turned out to be a

mask that archaic brutality and cynical calculation had successfully hushed up for too long. Being against Putin, the unmasked, is a common denominator that many can agree on, even if they otherwise follow rather heterogeneous everyday slogans such as “free market economy” and “climate protection.”

Skepticism is ignited by the torrent of flat ideology that accompanies debate and political action. Freedom and democracy must win in the war over Ukraine. This is no longer just a value judgement, but a practical certainty since the Russian advance has been successfully stopped and the battlefield has been limited to the east of the country.

Text Stefan Buchen, journalist, ARD © Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

People clean up debris as they return to their destroyed homes after the army regained control of Hostomel city, 15 km from the capital Kyiv, Ukraine on April 14, 2022

Simply continuing to write with the present in mind has often turned out to be a mistake, especially during the war, when the wagons rolling unhindered through Belgium implied the coming great victories. The dictatorship of the present, a phenomenon accompanying liberal democracy that critical observers recognize as problematic, could now unfold its power in the geopolitical challenge of the Ukraine war.

Political wise guys always knew how to use such situations well to do things for which they would otherwise have been censured internationally. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can now count on his campaign against the Kurdish PKK in northern Iraq not attracting much attention. Exactly on September 12, 2001, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched a multi-week military operation in the West Bank. Despite their real importance, these are literally sideshows. Whether blood is spilled in Yemen or Ethiopia or people die of hunger is of little interest. The central interests of the West are not affected by such fringe events.

In literary exaggeration, Erich Kästner showed that world attention has its blind spots, especially in times of crisis. In his novel “Fabian” from 1931, a Berlin newspaper editor had to quickly fill a white column with a short message. He simply made it up: “In Calcutta, street fighting took place between Moslems and Hindus. There were 14 dead and 22 injured, although the police soon got the situation under control. Calm has been fully restored.” The objection of a volunteer that there were no riots in Calcutta was answered by the editor in Kästner’s book: “Do you want to prove that to me first? There are always riots in Calcutta.”

But that’s beside the point. Central are the weaknesses of the dominant narrative used to portray the main theme, the war in Ukraine. The struggle

for freedom and democracy emphasizes an idealistic motif rich in subjectivity. One fact is in danger of being lost in the sea of solidarity with Ukraine. Between the Donets and the Dnepr there is not only one empire that started the war, the Russian one, but also a second one that wants to defeat the aggressor, the American one. President Joe Biden wants to restore the global standing and power of the United States after the Afghanistan debacle. He dug out the classic textbooks on interventionist foreign and military policy, blew away the dust of the Trump years and, as the supreme coach, drilled the content into his staff. Biden has the Chinese rise in mind more than anything else. The current competition between imperial powers is reminiscent of the situation before World

War I, which was characterized by a series of smaller wars, for example in the Balkans.

Biden has sent his Secretary of Defense Lloyd James Austin to the US airbase in Ramstein, Germany, to summon his European counterparts. In this gathering in the field, far away from the capitals’ diplomatic parquet floor, where Austin set the western course of action in Ukraine, there is a message. The US sees Europe as a military marching ground that could turn into a major battlefield at any time. Much will depend on whether or not China ultimately takes the same stance on Russia as the Wilhelmine Empire did on Habsburg in 1914. In any case, objectively more will depend on that than on the weight of the weapons that Germany is delivering to Ukraine today.

A man walks by a destroyed T72 tank in the ruins of central Mariupol.

A broken mannequin seen in the debris caused by Russian shelling in Kharkiv.

© Maximilian Clarke/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Strengthening Europe’s defense capacity and building up an independent, credible armed force has been discussed for a long time. Words have lingered as political rifts deepened within the Union. The nuclear power Great Britain has left, Poland and Hungary are openly challenging democratic principles such as the separation of powers. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which came as a surprise to Germany in particular, burst into this situation. In Berlin, there is a “chicken coop problem in foreign policy,” as an experienced retired politician put it in a confidential conversation. The West’s route is set by the Biden administration. Your closest partners in Europe are the Eastern European EU members apart from Hungary and, of course, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi.

The rough front lines divide the world into good and evil. The antagonism could make one forget something very important, the unity of the epoch. Vladimir Putin can be credited with breathing new life into a concept that seemed to belong to a bygone era: human material. It was not without reason that the “language-critical action,” which is a genuinely German organization, declared it the “most ugly word of the 20th century.” Since the massacres of Mariupol, Chernihiv and Bucha and since our contemporary dictator Putin proved that he can send tens of thousands of young soldiers to their deaths without having to fear a revolt, the term has become terribly topical.

Karl Marx coined the term human material as an ironic commentary on the social self-confidence of the property-owning, exploiting

class. The German warlords and heads of concentration camps of the 20th century objectified the term, stripping it of all irony. Putin doesn’t even put it in his mouth, lets the revived concept of human material speak alone and through his actions, post-cynically, you could say.

Democracy has set itself the task of protecting the freedom, dignity and autonomy of the individual. And of course everyone who is outraged because Putin is trampling on these rights and the actual right to life is right. The renaissance of human material is the horrible harvest of the Ukraine war.

And yet it would be wrong to attribute the trend solely to the Russian Empire. Whether human freedom and autonomy actually thrive in existing democracies must be questioned. The human material can also be reincarnated in variant guises, as a mega traffic jam on a freeway, as a crowd on a cruise ship, as a target group and consumer of superfluous goods and services, as exploited factory workers, seamstresses, and perhaps as well-equipped and combat-ready soldiers after the turn of eras again also here among us.

Whether the free and enlightened human being is able to fulfill his responsibility to preserve the natural foundations of his own existence is something that some commentators have seen as the key question of the 21st century. Now the challenge is being radically reformulated. It is about the conflict between the political systems, between democracies and autocracies. It sounds a bit like a collective escape. As if one did not trust oneself to pass the actual test from the outset. It seems more appealing to regress and run into the ground as human material. It’s like suicide for fear of death. The unifying element of the epoch lies in this general trend, across all systems and trenches.

Democracy has set itself the task of protecting the freedom, dignity and autonomy of the individual.

© Alex Chan Tsz Yuk/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Lessons of the Information War

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky speaks in connection with the shelling of the territory of Ukraine by Russia, after the start of the Russian military invasion.

There are, it turns out, two rival parallel realities shaping the public perception of Putin’s war of aggression. The first one resides in the analog world. Here, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are being killed, on the run, in a hail of bombs, hounded and hunted. Here, in the end, it is clear who holds the balance of power, despite the desperate courage with which Ukrainians have defended themselves and the fact that no one expected their resistance to last, the way it did, for weeks and months. Putin, in this reality, has every opportunity to have the powerless shot down, just as he, indeed, has cold-bloodedly and ruthlessly done. His military victory, should his armies continue the attacks, is merely a matter of time, despite the arms deliveries and sanctions. Success, in this context, means: the powerless shall suffer defeat.

In the second reality the communications-based network reality however, the balance of power, since the start of the war, has been decisively different. In this realm, Putin marches toward defeat, for here the rules of the game are fundamentally different and the West is united in a rare show of solidarity. Success here, in the online world, means establishing your narrative, asserting your prerogative of interpretation and effectively promoting your own model of society and life. It is here that the military imbalance of power between Russia and Ukraine is no longer perceptible. For here two journalistic powers confront each other online. One of these is the totalitarian power embodied by Putin. He presides as commander, in charge of a largely amorphous collective which seldom exhibits an individual face. His

mercenaries set out to have the Ukrainian president assassinated. His media write about a military operation. The words war and invasion have been banned, the media severely curtailed and the opposition harshly suppressed, with ever new laws aimed at abolishing independent journalism. On the one hand, armies of trolls roam the social networks to shout down dissenters, simulate opinion majorities, spread fear and terror, threaten the Ukrainian civilian population.

On the other hand, these days and weeks have seen a sudden surge in the power of the networked many, led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has emerged as an expert in strategic communication on social media. Each day, he posts multiple videos and messages on his channels, which people in Western countries everywhere translate and disseminate. He is seen in very different roles and in very different places, sometimes at night in front of the presidential palace, sometimes together with his ministers in a bunker. Sometimes you see him in a military green T-shirt, then again in a sweater, unshaven, pale, and exhausted. Here, existential authenticity takes the place of the violent authority of a Putin. It is precisely this charisma of vulnerability that is the secret of Zelensky’s fascination.

Where does the Ukrainian president’s media power lie, and how can his influence on public opinion in the Western world be explained? In narrative terms, it is the famous, archetypal David-versus-Goliath story that is at work here. In terms of world ideology, the Ukrainian president has long appeared as a symbolic figure of the open society. From a moral point of view, it is his risking his own life, his refusal to flee,

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed its own interpretive battle online, an unprecedented confrontation of military force and media power. In this essay, media scholar Bernhard Pörksen analyzes public perceptions of the war and makes a case for normative self-assurance in driving communicative action.

Text Bernhard Pörksen

© leksandr Gusev/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

that struck a chord with and drew the admiration of people around the world. And from a media-analytical perspective, Zelensky has become a very familiar figure on social media; as if the public knows him, as if he has become precisely through the familiarity created by the media a relative, a friend whose courage they admire. The key aspect is this: it is through their presence on social networks that he and his people have mobilized. They encourage the formation of a community, which — unlike a strictly hierarchical collective with welldefined internal-external boundaries — could be called a connective. Meaning: an organization without organization, created with the help of digital media and by sharing information with a common focus. The appeal of such a connective is the mixture of openness and purposeful participation, of individual visibility and a sense of belonging. People working together feel committed to one cause.

But, in this context, exactly who is involved in the defense of Ukrainian independence? Difficult to say. And equally difficult to control. There are those who network on the ground and across the country via Facebook, taking down street signs to mislead the attackers. As well as those who post videos and documents inspiring civil courage, who spread instructions on how to build Molotov cocktails, who give tips on Twitter on how to build roadblocks and plan escape routes. One could list many more initiatives and

players, all of which belong to the connective, this new type of a globally networked public sphere.

It is here, in the digital media of the Western world, and in the second reality of communication, where Putin has lost. Globally networked connectives are structurally far superior to the collective of a stringently hierarchical propaganda state when it comes to the color, diversity and intensity of their staging possibilities. This is good news. However, while this communicative prowess inspires and fires the Western world’s solidarity and will to sanction and accelerates the ostracism of Putin’s aides all over the world, it has yet to save people in Ukraine. They are being harassed and killed in the first reality of the war and this first reality is the decisive one.

In view of this war, however, it has become clear that social networking is one instrument that can certainly be used to humanize and democratize the situation. This, however, requires certain prerequisites. It requires strong determination, collective focus and possibly the willingness, on the part of the individual, to risk it all. And it needs, more than ever, to give some basis for normative self-assurance of open society, which must readily discern what in Ukraine is being bombed and what faces existential danger. It is our own cosmos of values, our own model of life and coexistence in diversity and freedom that are also at stake.

Bernhard Pörksen

is professor of media studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His new book, Digital Fever: Taming the Big Business of Disinformation (Palgrave Macmillan) is out now.

© Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

A mobile billboard truck displays signage from Media Matters For America warning potential advertising partners about Fox News’ coverage of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine outside Fox Studios on March 23, 2022 in Los Angeles.

Can Russian independent journalism survive the war?

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Meduza evacuated a third of its editorial staff from Russia, more than 20 people. In just a few days, our editors and journalists, who lived in various Russian cities, had to pack their bags, get cats and dogs chipped, get their partners to agree to their departure, say goodbye to friends and parents and to their former lives.

By that point, Meduza had gone into 24/7 mode, though we had never been able to afford it before due to a lack of resources. Despite the evacuation, work in the newsroom did not stop for a minute. But as difficult as it was, it seems to us that the problems Meduza has faced pale in comparison with what the staff of many other Russian publications has been going through.

Text Ivan Kolpakov, editor-in-chief, Meduza

Kovalev

We launched Meduza in 2014 in Riga, the capital of Latvia. We decided to do media in exile because we did not believe that the situation in Russia could change for the better. Almost all of Meduza ’s journalists and editors had experienced pressure from the authorities. Our publications were shut down and editorial offices were dispersed; we and our colleagues were fired and persecuted for political reasons. We were shocked by the annexation of Crimea and the Donbass war and crushed by the emergence of a “Crimean majority” in the country that fervently supported the “return” of the peninsula to Russia.

We were sure that our site would be blocked someday most likely soon and that we would inevitably have to evacuate reporters from Russia, if we still had them there. That is why we launched Meduza first of all as a mobile app and only then as a website (the app is almost impossible to block) and why we immediately began to build a multiplatform infrastructure, which is difficult for the authorities to deal with. The editors initially prepared for the worst, and eight years later this strategy has helped us survive at least until now.

Russia is apparently losing the war in Ukraine. But it has won the war against its own independent journalists inside the country. This war began immediately after Putin became president. For 20 years, the state has been pushing the quality press to the margins of the market. First, the government took full control over television (presumably, the key reason for this was the critical reporting by television journalists on the Kursk submarine disaster, during which Putin looked like a helpless and weak leader). Then the owners and editors-in-chief of major newspapers and internet publications were replaced with loyalists or unfit people (often both together). We Russian

journalists were boiled like frogs slowly increasing the fire under the cauldron.

However, even after 2014, when the space in which independent Russian media operated began to look more like a ghetto, journalists in Russia continued to launch notable projects. Mediazona, which analyzes the state of the law enforcement system; Wonderzine, which has made the feminist agenda part of the media mainstream; the teams around Yuri Dudy, Katerina Gordeeva, and other journalists forming alternative television on YouTube; OVD-Info, which helps people involved in protest actions; Project, Important Stories, and The Insider, which investigates corruption and political murders. The list could go on and on. The existence of these projects seemed puzzling to many observers abroad: it seemed that authoritarianism had finally taken hold in Russia, so how could a truly independent press function in these conditions?

Vitality and ingenuity have become the main characteristics of independent journalism in Russia. A new generation

We have to give them more than just news. They need empathy and support. And hope — more than ever.

Police officers seen as people gather for a rally in support of Russian journalist Ivan Golunov who was earlier released from custody; Golunov, who works for the online news portal Meduza, was detained on June 6, 2019 in central Moscow on suspicion of drug dealing; the police has dropped the investigation against Golunov due to lack of evidence.

agents” in turn; Meduza was its first target. Despite this heavy discriminatory status, in the end only one publication was shut down the rest continued to resist and survived (and what was shut down was later relaunched under a new name). As for Meduza, immediately after we were declared a “foreign agent” we lost almost all of our advertisers (business in Russia has always tried unsuccessfully to remain “out of politics”), but as a result we ran one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in the country’s history. We were literally saved by our readers.

of media projects refused to contact the authorities; they stopped pretending to believe in the rules of the game proposed by the state, and editors and journalists themselves learned to work in accordance with absurd laws, while remaining principled professionals able to defend their position. On the eve of the invasion, there was a tiny but very interesting independent media market in Russia.

A perfect example of this vitality was the authorities’ unprecedented campaign against independent media last year, when the most important media outlets in Russia were declared “foreign

Nevertheless, by now the process of destroying independent journalism has come to an end and one might say quite successfully for the Kremlin. Immediately after the start of the military invasion, the authorities introduced military censorship: as is well known, even the word “war” is forbidden in Russia (but it is even more dangerous to speak out in support of peace). A law on fakes was passed that outlawed any honest reporting on the war in Ukraine. Tens of thousands of journalists are at risk of criminal prosecution and heavy prison sentences. Some independent media outlets have closed or suspended operations; all others have been blocked. Organizations with any resources evacuated their employees. Thousands of journalists fled the country without any support and without much hope for a secure future.

Meduza survived. It was easier for us than for other publications to get people out of Russia: we have been working in Europe for eight years now and migration of employees is commonplace for us (although, of course, the evacuation of a third of journalists and editors in just a few days was a test of strength). Despite the blockage, we continue to be read in Russia. First of all, our app knows how to bypass it. Meduza has already been blocked in

© picture

alliance/dpa/TASS/Sergei Savostyanov

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and these events have allowed us to accumulate positive experiences of “life after death”. Since the war began, hundreds of thousands of people not only downloaded our app, but also subscribed to our other platforms, such as our Telegram Channel. Finally, Meduza is a social and political publication with the largest young audience in Russia. Half of our readers are under the age of 35. This means that many of them are well-versed in technology and, for example, had already installed a VPN before the invasion began.

At the same time, Western sanctions have been a heavy blow to Meduza and many other media, political and civic organizations created by Russians (this is not an attempt to evaluate their effectiveness in terms of fighting Putin’s regime, but simply a statement of fact: we are collateral damage). In particular, the disconnection of banks from SWIFT paralyzed our crowdfunding campaign. We lost more than 33,000 regular donors from Russia the people who ensured our stable existence, because monthly payments are the key component of any crowdfunding campaign.

Since the invasion began, we have completely refocused our crowdfunding campaign on the West. Meduza has reached out to people in other countries primarily in Europe and North America to take the place of Russians, who can no longer support us financially. Journalism is a universal value. The events now taking place in Ukraine and Russia are an important reminder of how fragile it is. It takes the efforts of people around the world to protect it. The truth is, it has never been easier. You can simply send money to publications that need it (even a small but regular payment can be a very valuable contribution to support independent journalism). You can write about these organizations in your publications or blogs. Or just

tell your friends about them on Twitter or Facebook. Every action leads to results. We’ve seen this firsthand.

The example of Meduza shows that independent journalism can exist even when it is completely banned. No doubt Russia, if Putin survives this war, will continue to fight a free internet in particular by banning VPNs but we will also find new solutions to deliver information to readers. After all, there is e-mail. As we like to repeat, e-mail will work as long as there is internet in Russia (whether Russia will be cut off from the internet is a separate and debatable issue; personally, I have great doubts that this is feasible). In particular, this is why we are now investing a lot of effort in the creation of mailing lists.

There are other serious challenges facing independent media working for the Russian audience. For example, Meduza no longer has a full-time staff in Russia. Before the war, we worked there under surreal conditions: after years of difficult and unpleasant negotiations, our correspondents were finally able to obtain accreditation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and became “foreign journalists” in their own country. This status, however, allowed them to practice journalism openly and without fear of prosecution. Now we have to rely solely on freelancers (if we are not talking about politics), or partisan reporters (if we are talking about reporting on war and political events). We have reason to believe that this network will grow wider and, over time, its effectiveness will increase because we have spent years learning how to work in the most adverse conditions.

There is another important challenge that seems important to outline. Many people think that the way propaganda works is that television lies and people believe it. The reality, as usual, is more complicated than that. Of course, people who lived in the Soviet Union

Russian police have detained several journalists who protested authorities’ decision to label a top independent TV channel as a “foreign agent”.

Ivan Kolpakov

is editor-in-chief and co-founder of news website Meduza. Founded in 2014 by Galina Timchenko, Meduza is the only major independent Russian media outlet that continues to report on the war in Ukraine without censorship, and still has a large audience inside Russia (despite the fact that its website is blocked there).

meduza.io/en @meduza_en meduzalive meduza_news

(and their children, too) know that “central TV” as it was called in the USSR is not to be trusted. This is why, even now, viewers in Russia do not trust television. It is obvious to them (or they guess) that the news they are shown is a lie. The problem is that many of them don’t trust the independent media either. And the Western press is deemed even less trustworthy, along with Russian journalists working in exile, because they are

We will never know the whole truth.

regarded as “traitors” by some.

A crisis of trust in relations with the audience is experienced by journalistic organizations all over the world. But the situation is especially dire in countries where the authorities either directly or through businessmen close to them control key media outlets. This is, of course, not only about the Russian Federation or Belarus, but also about Hungary, Serbia, Turkey and many other countries. The unobvious result of the propaganda in these countries is that people in principle stop believing anything or anyone. “We will never know the whole truth” is a very popular idea in Russia; it is the one that Russian propaganda has been spreading in recent years in the domestic market in the first place.

Will we, independent Russian journalists, be able to maintain or regain the trust of our readers? Especially given the fact that we are being physically cut off from them through blockades and being forced out of the country? This is a serious and painful issue (and it would be wrong to think of it as a technological one although we will soon have to face many challenges in delivering uncensored content to people living in Russia). At Meduza, we try to find an answer to it every day. Telling people the truth about the war in Ukraine is not enough when readers are not ready to accept this truth, or simply do not believe it exists.

Journalists who continue (or plan to) work for audiences living in Russia, I strongly believe, need to remember that our readers are not people who sit in a cozy chair and read a newspaper to which they can doze off. Our readers are people in trouble (even if they themselves are responsible for what happens to them). We can’t turn a blind eye to that. That means we have to give them more than just news. They need empathy and support. And hope more than ever.

© picture alliance/Associated Press/Denis Kaminev

Propaganda appeals to the collective identity of Russians

The research supervisor of Russia’s only major independent pollster Levada Center explained in a DW interview why the majority of Russians support the invasion in Ukraine and do not resist propaganda narratives.

Interview Anton Sorokin, DW editor

© Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)

A woman walks past huge placards bearing images of Russian President Vladimir Putin and reading “Russia does not start wars, it ends them” in the city center of Simferopol, Crimea, on March 4, 2022

A public opinion poll conducted by Levada Center at the end of March showed that 81 percent of Russians support the invasion in Ukraine. How can you explain such a high level of support?

One reason is strict censorship and the almost of alternative and independent information channels. Some, of course, find the way to bypass the blocking, but only very few people do. The vast majority of the population watches state television, which turned into a powerful propaganda tool. And since people can’t assess the accuracy of this information, they believe everything they see on TV. A smaller part of the population mostly gets information from social media primarily from Telegram channels. They have a different picture of reality, a different understanding of the situation.

There is a direct connection between the respondents’ age and the way they answer the questions. The younger the respondents, the more they view the war in Ukraine negatively. There is the same connection between people’s place of residence and their political beliefs. Moscow residents tend to react with greater indignation, anxiety and depression to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. It’s just that Moscow has a more diverse information background (than do other regions). Previously there were 15 to 17 sources of information for every Muscovite, whereas in the provinces in small and partly even in medium-sized towns there are only two to three sources.

So a very primitive ideology is being instilled in the population: Putin has to preventively order troops into Ukraine to rid it of Nazism and weaken the threat of NATO getting closer. It’s an old demagogy that dates back to Soviet times. But since 2014, it has been largely accepted by the population, especially in the provinces, with the elderly and the less-educated.

But despite censorship and the blocking of independent media and social networks, there is no total information blockade in Russia. If one wishes to get access to alternative sources of information, it is possible. Why do people still believe propaganda?

About half of them believe it. The rest conform, motivated by pure opportunism,to avoid coming into into conflict with the authorities. Because propaganda, of course, is the voice of the state.

It is very important to understand what arguments the Russian state propaganda puts forward. Russia is violating international law by invading Ukraine, but most people say that is the right thing to do because they believe Putin is protecting his own population, and saving Russians from a genocide allegedly perpetrated by Ukrainian Nazis and fascists. This thesis is extremely important, because it appeals to the core elements of the collective identity of Russians. This is the language of the Second World War, of the fight against fascism. Therefore, all these militarist symbols the cult of victory and the rhetoric of victors kick in and displace more rational, and factual considerations, and arguments and, in general, hinder the ability to analyze.

At the same time, propaganda works constantly. It is not so much the presentation of any convincing evidence, but continuous brainwashing. It is extremely difficult to protect oneself from it or to argue with it.

Very few people are able to resist such informational aggression, such demagogy. To do this, one must have very clear views and beliefs, which people basically do not have. For them, it’s a virtual reality, which is not related to their daily lives.

Lev Gudkov

is a prominent Russian sociologist and the research supervisor at the Levada Center, the country’s only major independent pollster. In 2016, the Russian Ministry of Justice put the Levada Center on the list of non-government organizations designated as “foreign agents”. In November 2017, Lev Gudkov was awarded the Lev Kopelev Prize for peace and human rights in Cologne.

In order for the Russian society to wake up, political and public organizations are needed, as well as public discussions. All this is blocked now.

Does that mean that the results of public opinion polls on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are accurate? Or are people just afraid to tell the truth considering that any dissidence in Russia is being persecuted?

It’s a myth that people are afraid to tell the truth. For them to be afraid, they must have other beliefs. And where can these beliefs come from if people have been brainwashed for 20 years? If totalitarian institutions are being restored in the country and a very powerful propaganda system is working?

The size of audience for independent media, including social networks and Telegram channels, amounts to 10 to 12 percent of the population at best. The majority of people watch television and consider it the most reliable source of information and interpretation of what is happening. In addition, the entire education system is subordinated to the current state ideology. If people are afraid to answer questions, it is those who are against Putin, and this is still a minority.

How has public sentiment changed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

We don’t see euphoria like in 2014 after the annexation of the Crimea. People

reluctantly approve of what is going on, but they don’t feel joy about it. Despite declarative support, people do not want this war. They support the actions to protect Russians, but they don’t support or approve of the war as such. Moreover, it scares them. They are scared that it will turn into a great world war, into a clash with NATO. And they want the fighting to end more than anything.

Is there any chance that the Russian society will wake up at some point and start asking critical questions about the deaths in Ukraine and the actions of the Russian authorities?

In order for the Russian society to wake up, political and public organizations are needed, as well as public discussions. All of this is blocked now. People face great risks. The destruction of open discussion platforms, persecution by the police all that drives people into fragmented zones of private living, depriving them of any chance for public discussion and public action. We are seeing that protest sentiment has declined sharply over the last year.

The more or less liberal-minded class in Russia has shrunk significantly.

Emigration has increased extremely. These are mostly well-educated, more energetic, younger and more adventurous people, who feel their civilizational and political incompatibility with the current regime. Of course, they will discuss this; they will be horrified by what is happening in Ukraine. But in Russia it is becoming more and more difficult to do this.

I am not talking about the majority of Russians who have no compassion towards Ukrainians or an understanding of what is going on. The situation is very difficult. And I don’t think that Russia will be able to get out of this situation very soon.

What will this depend on?

I think that economic consequences will be the first impetus. They will be felt by the middle of summer, not earlier. The second thing and it’s a very important moment is spreading the information about the real losses of the Russian troops, despite military censorship and the blocking of mass media. The third moment, if this happens, would be Russia actually losing the war. These are the factors that will likely play a role. But it is still too early to tell.

On March 15, 2022 Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of the main Russian news channel, Channel 1 ran onto the stage with a sign reading ”No War” and “They’re lying to you here”.

Art in times of war

Between propaganda, protest and pacifism.

There is a war raging in Europe. A fact, which artists have also been grappling with. Since time immemorial, art played a pivotal role in questioning the point of war. Here is a look into art produced during times of war and DW’s coverage of wartime artists.

Text Annabelle Steffes-Halmer and Manasi Gopalakrishnan, DW editors

“Guernica”, by Pablo Picasso.

©

Bombs explode in the skyline and the droning sounds of fighter jets fill the air. Corpses lie by the wayside as people flee and find shelter underground. Such images have become common on television or on social media since Russia invaded Ukraine, beginning a war on Europe’s doorstep. The Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa seems to have had a premonition of the Russian invasion on his country in 2018 itself. In his film “Donbass” he demonstrates how Russian television used actors to stage a massacre and justify a military takeover.

“Liberal democracies in the West were sleeping when Russia shaped itself anew; as Russians attacked Grozny and Chechnya, then Georgia, then annexed Crimea and marched into the Ukrainian Donbass,” he told Arts 21, DW’s weekly Culture and Lifestyle magazine. “What we are experiencing now, are in a way the consequences of this slumber, the missing reaction of the West,” Loznitsa added.

The film director is neither a prophet nor a politician, he admits. Through his films, he wants to demonstrate how he sees the world and war. Nevertheless, some scenes of Loznitsa’s film are eerily close to reality.

Indeed, Vladimir Putin and his supporters are aiming to spread false information and propaganda. Targeted spreading of fake news in social media has also led to many Russians in foreign countries believing the Kremlin’s propaganda.

DW is reporting about artists worldwide, who are openly speaking against the Russian invasion and who thematize war in their work.

Artistic rebellion against Putin’s invasion

The UK-based Russian hip-hop artist Oxxxymiron alias Miron Yanowich Fyodoroc, in protest against Putin and his propaganda has canceled his Russia tour. Instead, he is on a “Russians Against WarTour” in Europe, to educate people about the invasion.

“I have many Russian friends and it pains me to see how many people do not grasp what is happening,” he told DW at a concert on April 6 in Berlin. “It is painful. I don’t feel hate, only pain.”

In his home country Russia, Oxxxymiron’s protest show would have been punishable by law. Anyone there who speaks against the war faces up to 15 years of prison. Oxxxymiron was arrested once in January 2021 for protesting against Putin’s regime.

picture alliance/Photo12/Archives Snark

Artists have long been creative against war. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens created the “Consequences of War” in 1637 as an allegory for the tragedy caused by the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In Rubens’ painting, “Venus”, the goddess of love tries to pull back Mars, the Roman god of war.

Nearly one and a half centuries later, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya created his “Disasters of War” series consisting of 82 prints that showed the gruesome crimes perpetrated by Napoleon’s army on the Spanish population.

Never again war

As World War I ripped through Europe between 1914 and 1918, the Colognebased painter Käthe Kollwitz became a vehement pacifist, reminding people of the horrors of violence. In 1918, her poster “Nie wieder Krieg” (Never again war) was printed in the socialist magazine „Vorwärts“ (Onwards). The sketch is one of her most popular creations and was made in the memory of her fallen son.

Kollwitz was the first woman to be accepted in the Prussian Academy of Arts. She spoke up against social injustice and positioned herself clearly against the Nazis. When they took over in Berlin 1933, they forced her to resign and declared her art as “degenerate”.

Kollwitz was not the only artist whose creations were discredited in this manner. According to the Nazis, “degenerate” art consisted of expressionism, impressionism, dadaism, new objectivity, surrealism, cubism and more. Works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Otto Dix or Max Ernst, as well as other artists were banned.

Artworks were by no means the Nazis sole target. The fascists also organized book burnings in 1933 in Berlin and 21 German cities. Works by Jewish authors or by authors who did not get along with the ideology of the Nazis, were to be destroyed completely. Musicians and their works were also victims of constant defamation by Nazi cultural policies.

Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels were aware of the influence of art. With targeted propaganda they supported artists whose aesthetics played into their hands. The most famous example is filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose films like “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” show sportspersons as heroic supermen and superwomen.

In contrast, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso shows a completely different image of human beings in his famous anti-war painting, “Guernica”. During the

Liberal democracies in the west were sleeping when Russia shaped itself anew.

Graffiti artwork by My Dog Sighs.

© mydogsighs.co.uk

by Grande Flagello

Spanish civil war from 1936 to 1939, the Nazis supported the right-wing Dictator Francisco Franco and bombed the city of Guernica in the Basque region of northern Spain. The massive painting in grey, black and white tones shows the suffering of people after the attack: a mother cries over her dead child, people flee as the bull the symbol of Spain watches passively.

“With the outbreak of the revolution there was a gap between what was happening on the street and what was being expressed and reported in the media, especially early on,” Street artist Ganzeer told DW Culture in an interview. Thus, he felt “compelled” to create street art and close this gap, he added.

Not only painters, but other cultural figures as well have expressed themselves on war-related issues. The Syrian musician Aeham Ahmad, for example, became world-famous as the pianist who played among the ruins of Yarmouk.

Solidarity for Ukraine

Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv celebrated its annual music festival at the beginning of April this year, amid massive destruction and intermittent bombing by Russian forces.

Singer and hip hop artist Oxxxymiron performs in a charity concert titled “I’m Going to Sing My Song”and held at Moscow’s GlavClub Green Concert in November 26, 2018.

“Guernica” is not the only painting in which Picasso criticizes the war. His other works, like “Massacre in Korea” and “The Charnel House” depict the horrors of violence. Unforgotten and world-famous, his doves are a synonym and symbol for peace and freedom globally.

Art as an expression of freedom

Since March this year, a large image of the street artist My Dog Sighs decorates the wall of a house in Cardiff, England. The picture shows a teary eye in the national colors of Ukraine. Within the iris, one sees the silhouette of the St. Andrew’s church in Kyiv with smoke clouds rising on its right side. In a Twitter post showing the image, the artist wrote, “We’ve all sat and watched this hideous situation unfurl and while it’s not much, I wanted to do what I know best, (throwing paint) to highlight my sadness and anger over the Ukrainian invasion by Russia. I stand with you, Ukraine.“

All over Europe, street artists are expressing their solidarity in this manner. The DW program Euromaxx has an entire Facebook series dedicated to these artists. The artists capture the public space and leave clear messages.

A good example are the images of protest left by graffiti artists during the Arab spring of 2011, when Egyptians protested against the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

People came together in subway stations and listened to the consoling sounds of music. Vitali Alekseenok, the festival’s artistic director, has been living in Germany for the last 10 years and leads the Abaco orchestra at the University of Munich. Alekseenok is actively helping refugees and organizing projects for escaped artists from the Ukraine and Belarus in the Trinity Church in Bonn. He also helped Ukraine’s greatest living composer, Valentyn Silvestrov to escape to Berlin.

In an interview with DW’s television magazine Arts 21, Alekseenok said he picked up the composer from the border. “He was very, very tired, but he held up. He is 84 years old. And he is still composing music. He also continued to do so during his escape,” Alekseenok said. “And when we reached Berlin, he played the tune for us immediately. That was really touching.”

As soon as he reached the German capital, Valentn Silvestrov began preparing for a charity concert in for people in his home country where the war rages on. While Russia’s Vladimir Putin desperately tries to justify the invasion of Ukraine by suggesting, the country never existed and claiming it was part of Russia and does not have its own culture.

“The world is so loud and is guided by the idea of growing ever more monumental,” he told DW. “This monumentalism is unbearable. And one wants to go back to the quiet, softly, softly. One has the strange feeling that one is weary of the monumental.” The freedom struggle of artists like Silvestrov reveal Putin’s clumsy lies. Meanwhile, many artists are showing how lively and important Ukrainian art and culture is, especially in times of war.

© picture alliance/dpa/Sergei Petrov

“Love Beyond Borders”

Cyber wars

In free media markets, many costly practical hurdles to information dissemination have fallen thanks to digital technology. There, journalists and editorial teams in traditional media companies have irrevocably lost their classic “gatekeeper” function. What is published and what is talked about is no longer decided by them alone and now often not at all: Today, any person, group or institution can feed content into the global information world.

Journalists with expertise and quality criteria are no longer needed as intermediaries with the target groups and are even openly rejected by some recipients. Institutional media

suffer from the changes in business models and the loss of social trust. They are now fighting for attention with an almost infinite number of other content producers especially during crises and wars.

On the one hand, the chances for a better understanding of the world have increased due to this almost inexhaustible flood of information. On the other hand, this blessing of free and diverse information in free media markets has also become a curse for many people: now everyone must keep track of and orient himself in this information (over)supply in order to distinguish the important from the unimportant, to

Text Ingo Mannteufel, DW Head of IT and Cybersecurity

distinguish facts from lies. The algorithms offered as aids by search engines and social networks for organizing information have not only failed to solve the problem of information noise. Rather, new opportunities for disinformation and the manipulation of public opinion have emerged, such as fake news websites, trolls on social media platforms, and filter bubbles or echo chambers in chat groups.

The opportunities offered by the huge and unregulated flood of information have also been recognized by dishonest actors. In particular, authoritarian states have used the situation in the digital world for novel propaganda and disinformation operations. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has given rise to a war that a revisionist Russia under President Putin has been waging for years in the cyber and information space against Ukraine, but also against all liberal democracies and the transatlantic-European peace order.

A hallmark of these Kremlin activities is the clever combination of cyberattacks, hacking, propaganda, and disinformation to achieve a political-military goal. Unlike intelligence cyber espionage or traditionally conceived war, which implies the use of destructive weapons with a kinetic effect, “hybrid warfare” is usually a non-kinetic tool. To be sure, such cyber-attacks may also aim to disrupt or even destroy infrastructure and services (e.g., power and energy supplies, communications). But primarily, disinformation and propaganda serve to cause confusion and purposefully

manipulate opinion formation.

Propaganda, agitation and disinformation have always been part of armed conflicts. What is new is that the digital media and information world that has emerged in recent decades has made these activities much easier and more targeted.

The objective is to induce is political paralysis or uncertainty that seeks to undermine democratic decision-making processes and discredit and delegitimize democracy as such.

It is important to make a clear distinction between illegitimate interference and legitimate influence on free opinion-forming processes.

Foreign state interference is illegitimate when it disseminates misinformation in a concerted and covert manner via dubious websites, inauthentic social media profiles or online ads to manipulate political discussions and opinion-forming processes in democracies.

A clear distinction must be made between this and the legitimate processes of influencing opinion-formation in other states by transparent media companies that operate with ethical standards and quality criteria, clearly state their origins and are governed by public law. After all, “open societies” in the sense of the great Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper gain through dialogue with other societies. The transparent and factbased exchange of opinions between societies and mutual influence are desirable and enrich both sides.

However, authoritarian states such as Russia are currently using the digital possibilities of an “open society” to combat them. Instead of desired enrichment of public discussions, “active measures” are used covertly and secretly to interfere in the democratic opinion and decision-making processes. This is a new form of expansive digital authoritarianism that threatens liberal democracies.

© Jorg Greuel via Getty Images

Now everyone must keep track of and orient himself in this information (over)supply in order to distinguish the important from the unimportant, to distinguish facts from lies.

In their own national media spaces, on the other hand, they take repressive action against independent and critical media from their own country and abroad. Russian state media, on the other hand, has consistently and aggressively propagated Kremlin narratives that are underpinned with lies and half-truths. As a result, much of the population in Russia now lives in a parallel world created by the Kremlin. In the wake of the war of aggression against Ukraine, repression against independent Russian or foreign media has once again increased significantly in Russia. Almost all independent media are banned or blocked on the internet. The Russian state tries to censor unwanted information. For example, DW and other leading international information providers in Russia have been banned and obstructed on the internet since February 2022.

But the biggest challenge for independent media is not to technically circumvent internet censorship. That can be easily done by technical means. Since the increased internet censorship, many Russians have been using VPN software, the Tor browser or circumvention software such as Psiphon to access the global internet again without problems. Others use temporary mirror addresses of blocked websites. The internet address is for example 26394.info and leads directly past the censors to the DW website. As soon as this mirror address is blocked by the Russian supervisory authority, a new mirror address appears.

The biggest challenge is therefore not to overcome the technical internet censorship, but to reach the people in Russia mentally in the first place. The Kremlin has created a mental firewall against Western information and views with its propaganda narratives and this mental firewall is very stable, especially in the last weeks of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

But democratic societies must consider it their duty to break through Putin’s propaganda. People in Russia have the right to get independent information and make up their own minds about the war, about Ukraine, about the actions of European states. Reporting in Russia and other authoritarian states must not be left to state propagandists. All people have the right to free information to decide freely.

Twitter of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine is displayed on a mobile phone screen photographed for the illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on February 15, 2022. The Ukrainian government has accused Russia of being behind a cyber-attack on dozens of official websites.

© picture alliance/NurPhoto/Beata

Zawrzel

All people have the right to free information to decide freely.

A new European voice

The pan-European project ENTR tells digital stories from Europe. The focus is on young people, their experiences and the cross-border dialogue about how they want to live in Europe.

For a year now, the multimedia project has been publishing content on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in six program languages English, German, French, Portuguese, Polish and Romanian.

The young media makers are forming a pan-European editorial team. Whether from Berlin, Lisbon, Paris, Krakow or Bucharest, the journalists work together daily across borders, discussing relevant content ideas and new formats. The content is specifically for and about young Europeans. It is a niche that has hardly been filled yet, is desperately needed, says ENTR Head of Content Patrick Große: “If you want to report in a European way, as a medium you have to deal more with the realities in the neighboring countries. That’s what we try to do in our daily editorial work, and we want this to be reflected in our reporting, of course.”

The project comprises a total of nine European public and private media houses, including Radio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP), the Romanian RFI Romania and G4Media.ro, the Polish online

platform Onet, MyCountryTalks, the Genshagen Foundation, and the media collective Are We Europe, as well as the broadcasting group France Mèdias Monde, DW’s long strategic and ENTR partner. DW is coordinating the project, which is funded by the EU Commission and the German Foreign Office.

Thematically, the focus is on Europe, but the aim is not so much to explain politics and the EU explicitly, but to present political connections and possibilities for shaping them, based on the realities of young people’s lives.

People are the stories — Europe is the common ground

ENTR emphasizes deep and profound stories, which are then adapted by the partners according to their local target groups. Often the program centers on a major guiding question, such as: What kind of society do you want to live in? Or, is democracy important to you?

The editorial motto “We appreciate differences and celebrate similarities” puts a strong focus on constructive storytelling.

“We look at what the situation is like for individual people in their country, how

they deal with challenges, and then compare it with other countries in the EU and show possible solutions that may be found in their own or other countries in Europe,” explains Lukas Hansen, who heads the editorial team for German and English at DW.

By juxtaposing a wide variety of fates, experiences and political attitudes across borders, the aim is to give people a voice. On the other hand, it also aims to create space for dialogue and debate, ideally generating a debate about the present and future lives of Europeans, as well as about common European values and ideas.

Strengthening civil society

Debate is also part of everyday life in the editorial office. Personal viewpoints and perspectives have to be reviewed again and again and discussed with colleagues in other countries. “We don’t want to look at problems from the outside, but rather understand what people in the countries think. Pan-European editing also means constantly questioning oneself and letting others have their say. It’s an exciting and challenging task,” says Patrick Leusch, Head of European Affairs at DW and Project Director of ENTR.

Rebecca Berker, for example, takes ENTR on one of the ships of SeaWatch the rescue service for refugees from the Mediterranean Sea. She coordinates the search and rescue of refugees on the high seas who come to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. ENTR also accompanies climate activists or people who stand up against homophobia or bullying.

ENTR does not stand still

The next step for ENTR is to launch its own TikTok channel this year. The use of content on social media varies greatly from country to country, according to Große, and TikTok is growing strongly across Europe: “That’s why TikTok is particularly interesting and the next step in ENTR’s development: young people from all over Europe meet there, and soon they’ll meet us there, too.”

Text Tim Schauenberg, ENTR journalist

Beyond Russia

Text Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch @KenRoth

Can international human rights and humanitarian law survive when the major powers ignore it? That is the question posed by Russian forces’ widespread summary executions and indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Ukraine. In the case of Ukraine, at least, many governments seem determined to reinforce international standards. Forty-three countries so far have requested an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation of the alleged perpetrators of these war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, which the ICC prosecutor has begun. The United Nations General Assembly and Human Rights Council have condemned the atrocities and the council has opened a parallel inquiry. But we have not always seen such resolve in the global response to grave abuses by the most powerful nations.

The reaction to Russian atrocities in Ukraine stands in stark contrast to the lackluster response to the Chinese government’s repression in Xinjiang. There, aided by the world’s most intrusive surveillance system, Beijing has detained 1 million Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims to force them to abandon their religion, language and culture. Human Rights Watch and others have concluded that

these mass detentions and other systematic abuses amount to crimes against humanity. And that is just one aspect of the worst repression nationwide in China since the 1989 massacre of Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protesters.

There has been some international response to this repression. Groups of governments have repeatedly condemned the Chinese government’s abuses in Xinjiang most recently, in a joint statement by 43 governments from all regions of the world including Germany. And the representatives of 50 UN special procedures that is, independent experts rather than collective UN bodies have issued parallel condemnations.

But the main United Nations institutions have been understated at best. Neither the UN Human Rights Council nor the UN General Assembly has held a debate, adopted a resolution or started an investigation on Xinjiang. UN Secretary- General António Guterres’s cautiously worded statements of concern about Xinjiang have fallen far short of the seriousness of the persecution.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, continues to withhold a long-promised report on Xinjiang that her staff has completed. Her spokesman said in December 2021 that it would be published within weeks. Instead, she agreed to visit China for what the Chinese government insisted would be a “friendly visit” and dialogue rather than

© Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR/laif

The real threat to human rights is from China.

Gulzira Auelhan, a Chinese-born ethnic Kazakh woman who was interned at four different facilities in Xinjiang and subsequently forced to work in a factory.

the unfettered investigation in Xinjiang that she had rightly asked for.

The trip was a gift to Beijing. Bachelet held various quiet conversations with Chinese officials including Xi Jinping but exerted none of the public pressure that alone has a chance of forcing the Chinese government to ease its repression. She issued no forceful condemnation, praised other aspects of China’s human rights record, adopted Beijing’s false “counterterrorism” narrative, and despite contrary evidence, accepted without question

Beijing’s claim that the detention centers were now closed. She trumpeted a new dialogue with the Chinese government, but it has long been Beijing’s strategy to substitute such quiet backroom conversation for any public criticism.

The US government has barred all imports from Xinjiang as presumptively tainted by Uyghur forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise (which given the opacity of supply chains in Xinjiang is virtually impossible). But the European Union has yet to follow suit. The United States, Britain, Canada and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions regarding the repression in Xinjiang. But European Union leaders, with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the EU presidency, tried to push through an investment agreement with China without demanding an end to the forced labor. It took the European Parliament to quash that idea.

The problem isn’t only China. The US government also has been reluctant to hold itself to international human rights standards. When the ICC seemed posed to investigate US torture in Afghanistan, the administration of Donald Trump outrageously imposed sanctions on its prosecutor at the time. The ostensible reason was that, while Afghanistan had joined the ICC treaty, the United States had not, even though the treaty confers jurisdiction over crimes such as torture committed by anyone on the territory of a member country.

President Joe Biden has since lifted those sanctions. In the case of Ukraine, which has granted the ICC jurisdiction over crimes on its territory, Biden has endorsed and said the US government would cooperate with the ICC investigation of potential war crimes by Russian forces, even though Russia has also not joined the ICC.

It remains to be seen how the US government will react to any potential future ICC investigation of US personnel in a country where the ICC also has territorial jurisdiction. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress are now endorsing the ICC investigation in Ukraine, laying bare the hypocrisy of the past US position. The US shift was undoubtedly facilitated by the ICC prosecutor’s announcement that, as he continues his Afghanistan investigation, he intends to de-prioritize for the time being his inquiry into alleged US crimes.

An ethnic Uyghur women look through a security fence to the Grand Bazaar which remains closed as Chinese soldiers look on in Urumqi, in China’s farwest Xinjiang region on July 9, 2009. Riot police and soldiers kept a strong presence in Urumqi after days of bloodshed, as some businesses re-opened in tentative signs of normality.

© Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

Chinese President Xi Jinping has used the trilliondollar Belt and Road Initiative to purchase support for his anti-rights positions at the United Nations.

More imminently, the US position will be tested by the ICC investigation of Israeli war crimes, such as its illegal settlements in Palestine, given that Israel has never joined the court, although Palestine has.

Yet the good news is that, even without the major powers, a broad array of governments has repeatedly supported and even advanced international rights standards. The ICC is the product of a large coalition, even though the United States, Russia and China never joined. These major powers were similarly absent as the rest of the world banned anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions. Yet, today, the ICC enjoys international credibility and the norms against landmines and cluster munitions, both indiscriminate weapons that endanger civilians, remain strong.

In short, it may be in the nature of major powers to seek to exercise their power unconstrained by the enforcement of international law, but strong global support for those standards and the institutions to enforce them can generate intense pressure to comply, regardless of major-power proclivities.

Yet we should not be complacent at the strong international response to Russian outrages in Ukraine. Russia is a significant military force though apparently a less impressive one than most people thought before its invasion of Ukraine. But the Kremlin has relatively little economic influence. China is another matter.

The Chinese government is an economic powerhouse that has shown no

reluctance to use its clout to oppose scrutiny of its conduct and to undermine the international human rights system. When the Australian government proposed an independent investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing responded with punitive tariffs. It earlier had retaliated against Norway when the Oslo-based Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the imprisoned Chinese pro-democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo, even though the Norwegian government has nothing to do with the decisions of the private Nobel Committee. And the Chinese government threatened to withhold COVID-19 vaccines from Ukraine until it removed its name from a joint statement criticizing Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang a blackmail tactic that UN diplomats told Human Rights Watch the Chinese delegation has used to scare other countries into silence as well.

Similarly, Chinese President Xi Jinping has used the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, ostensibly an infrastructure development program, to purchase support for his anti-rights positions at the United Nations. The lack of transparency for Belt and Road loans, like financing from other Chinese institutions, make them ideal vehicles for Beijing to buy the outcomes that it wants.

Beyond trying to silence critics of its repression and to undermine broader enforcement of human rights standards, the Chinese government is trying to weaken the standards themselves. In its view, human rights should never be enforced by pressure, just by “win-win” (for the abusers, not the victims) polite conversation.

If Beijing had its way, human rights would be reduced to a measurement of growth in gross domestic product. It would brush aside economic and social rights, which require examining how the worst-off segments of society are treated, as well as civil and political rights, which are needed to ensure that a government remains accountable to its people. Russian atrocities in Ukraine are appalling, but given the world’s reaction to them, they do not pose a threat to global standards. Indeed, they may even end up consolidating support for those standards. Rather, the real threat to rights comes from Beijing, which appears determined to undermine those standards altogether. So far, the world’s response has been inadequate. The economic cost of standing up to the Chinese government is real, but it is a cost worth bearing, because the very foundation of the international human rights system built over the past 75 years is at stake.

The ICC is the product of a large coalition, even though the United States, Russia and China never joined.

© Guang Niu/Getty Images

A Uyghur woman stands in front of her house on October 17, 2005 in Yining city of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China.

India’s stance on the Ukraine war has left the West baffled and frustrated. While India has repeatedly denounced war and called for cessation of hostilities, it has not called out Russia’s aggression.

At the United Nations, India has abstained from one resolution after another aimed at censuring and isolating Russia for the invasion.

The West has tried to nudge, coax, express despondency with and even scare India, but it hasn’t succeeded in getting the latter to change its view. In fact, and as an indication of Europe’s desperation, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederikson even appealed to India to try to influence Russia to end the war during India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to her country in May. But India has been steadfast in its refusal to make any changes to its position.

India’s ties with Russia

Why has an aspiring superpower risked international opprobrium over appearing to be on the side of an aggressor country in the wake of war? After all, even Europe has been able to rise beyond its crippling dependence on Russia for gas to take a stand on the war, condemn Russia’s actions and even impose sanctions on the latter. If Europe can do it, why can’t

India? The answer to that question lies as much in India’s history as in its geography.

During the Cold War era, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru got together with the then President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito, Egypt’s second President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s first President Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesia’s first President Sukarno to create a group of nations that refused to join either the Western or the Eastern bloc. However, India faced a peculiar problem that was to become a permanent challenge for its foreign policy. To its north and west lie India’s two difficult neighbors, China and Pakistan, with whom the country has such acrimonious border disputes that have led to five full fledged wars in total and several near-war situations.

Text Charu Kartikeya, DW editor, DW Hindi Service

India’s history with Russia is key to understanding its stance on the Ukraine war.

IndiaRussia ties

Things became more difficult for India when the US started its efforts to establish Pakistan as its major ally in South Asia and started providing it military aid. With two hostile neighbors always ready to breathe down its neck, India needed a bigger partner and so, it turned to Russia.

Close defense ties

This was the beginning of a close bilateral relationship that was to eventually stretch from areas like politics and defense to trade, civil nuclear energy and even space. The Soviet Union started supplying several weapons systems to India in the 1970s and remained India’s largest defense importer for decades.

After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991, its inheritor, Russia, continued this legacy.

Some estimates suggest at least 65 percent of India’s defense needs are met by Russia alone. The Stockholm-based defense think tank SIPRI estimates that as of 2021, Russian weapons still constitute a lion’s share (46 percent) of India’s total defense imports.

As recently as 2018, India ignored the risk of US sanctions for purchasing a heavy missile defense system from Russia in a multi-billion dollar deal. Now, the bilateral defense relationship is not only limited

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (C), Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) and Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj hold the 16th meeting of the foreign ministers of China, Russia and India in Wuzhen of east China’s Zhejiang Province, February 27, 2019.

© Weng Xinyang

Xinhua/eyevine/eyevine/laif

to the importation of weapons, but it also includes joint research and development, training and military exercises.

Political support

During the 1962 Sino-India war, the Soviet Union stayed neutral in spite of China’s objection. In 1965, when Pakistan attacked India, the Soviet Union served as a successful peace broker between the two sides.

In 1971, when India helped East Pakistan in seceding from West Pakistan, leading to the creation of an independent Bangladesh, the Soviet navy sent nuclear submarines to help India counter the threat posed by US and British warships in the Bay of Bengal.

As recently as 2020, a bloody skirmish between Indian and Chinese soldiers led the countries to the brink of yet another war. Both sides deployed troops and military equipment in large numbers on the border, and it took months before de-escalation started.

Though neither New Delhi nor Beijing have admitted that Moscow brokered peace between the two hostile neighbours, it is a fact that at the height of this stand-off, Moscow hosted a string of multilateral summits in which top political leaders of India and China, including the defense and foreign ministers, met and sat for talks.

It is not for nothing that India keeps abstaining from UN resolutions aimed at censuring Russia. Since the 1950s, Russia has used its veto powers in the UNSC on multiple occasions to consistently block resolutions against India. Russia also supports India’s claim for permanent membership of the UNSC.

In international politics, no relationship is cast in stone and with the changing

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, left, escorts Russian President Vladimir Putin, on arrival for a bilateral meeting at Hyderabad House, December 6, 2021 in New Delhi, India.

global order, the India-Russia relationship is also changing. India’s defense imports from Russia are going down and the country is gradually finding a place in Western clubs, like the Quad, too.

However, India has clearly enunciated its position in the Ukraine war and has demonstrated, so far, that it will not condemn Russia’s aggression only because the West wants it to. Given that nobody knows when the war will end, it is anyone’s guess how long India might continue its tightrope walk between Russia and the West.

It is not for nothing that India keeps abstaining from UN resolutions aimed at censuring Russia.

Crisis as opportunity

Corona has shown development potential in Africa.

Text Bettina Rühl, journalist

The international vaccination program COVAX failed: Africa could not be sufficiently supplied with vaccine. Poor logistics and great vaccination skepticism further contributed to the fact that only 17 percent of the population is fully vaccinated (as of May 2022), with only 1 percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Kenya, the rate is higher, with just over a third of the population dually vaccinated. During a site visit to the private M.P. Shah Hospital in the capital Nairobi, the head doctor Shamsa Ahmed told me in March that the clinic no longer had a single COVID patient. The positivity rate in Kenya was at 0.6 percent at that time, she said. The crisis seems to be hitting Africa weaker than feared. Nevertheless global vaccine discrimination, as great and justified as the outrage over it was, also served as a brutal wake-up call for Africa, as John Nkengasong put it. The virologist heads the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and had convened a crisis meeting in April 2021:

“It was the first summit on vaccine

production in Africa. As a result, we have committed, as a continent, to end our dependence on vaccine production. Our goal now is to produce 60 percent of our own vaccines by 2040.”

This is not only about vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, but also against other diseases. Currently, African countries produce only 1 percent of all the vaccines they need themselves 99 percent are imported. In South Africa, scientists are working on developing the first mRNA vaccine in Africa. In addition, several pharmaceutical companies want to set up production facilities in African countries, including BioNTech and Moderna. The US company was also the first to waive patent protection for its coronavirus vaccine in 92 low and middle-income countries. African governments want to become more independent not only in vaccine production, but also in the purchase and import of medicines. In the first year of the pandemic, they set up a foundation to pay for the vaccine doses as soon as the industrialized countries released them.

A Kenyan medic gives a dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, during a mass vaccination drive at the Dandora Health center in the Nairobi’s informal settlement on August 10, 2021.

Our goal now is to produce 60 percent of our own vaccines by 2040.

They created a task force that has been organizing the purchase ever since. At their recent summit in February, the African Union member states agreed to establish an AU-wide health authority called the African Preparedness and Response Agency, or APRA an important step for John Nkengasong. “The authority will enable the AU and the Africa CDC to better coordinate the response to future pandemics. Data sharing and the acquisition of quality health data should become more effective.”

Immunologist Kondwani Jambo from Malawi is among the scientists collecting this high-quality data on the continent. Jambo is concerned with the extremely interesting question also globally of why Africa has come through the pandemic so comparatively well so far, despite low vaccination rates and weak health systems. “We have found out, for example, that a group of cells called monocytes are also important for the defense against COVID pathogens. We compared samples from adults in Malawi and the UK. The population in Malawi seems to have monocytes that respond much, much faster. So there’s evidence that there are differences in immune response depending on where people live.” Contributing to this scientific data exchange is Congolese molecular biologist Francine Ntoumi, actually a malaria specialist. After many years of research in Europe, including at the University of Tübingen in Germany, she returned to the Congolese capital Brazzaville in 2008 and founded the first molecular biology laboratory there. “My place is here, in Brazzaville. In Germany there are many excellent researchers, my contribution is not really needed there. In contrast, there are only a few scientists here in Congo and this is especially true for my field, molecular biology.”

There are differences not only between Europe and Africa, but also between African countries. Morocco, Egypt and South Africa had many severe cases. In South Africa, this could perhaps be due to the fact that many people are HIV positive.

There are still many mysteries about the different courses of the disease. But it is clear to Ntoumi that Africa needs its own answers: “Most African countries have simply adopted what was decided in the North. They did not adapt the measures to the current situation on the ground, did not use local scientists and did not consider together with them how the measures should be adapted to the local situation. On paper, of course, the

Bettina Rühl

is a freelance journalist and one of the most renowned German Africa reporters. She has lived and worked in Kenya’s capital Nairobi since 2011. For her work, especially in radio, she has been honored with several prestigious media awards and in 2020 with Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz)

African scientists were involved in the development of the national Corona strategies, but in reality, this is what happened in Congo: France decided this and that? Two days later we do the same thing and that’s it.”

Nevertheless, many African governments have trusted Western researchers more than their own, Ntoumi regrets.

“I hope our politicians have now realized that we need to invest in science. They need to rely on their scientists. And more than that, we need to build trust between African researchers and our governments. At the moment, they don’t have that trust, so they act in a ’copy and paste’ way. We need to change that for me, that’s one of the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic.”

Her Malawian colleague Kondwani Jambo agrees. He too hopes that African governments will invest more in research and science in the future. And that there will not only be sufficient vaccine for the next pandemic, but also strategies for containment that are not simply adopted from the industrialized nations. That the coronavirus crisis was indeed a wake-up call with positive side effects.

I hope our politicians have now realized that we need to invest in science. They need to rely on their scientists.

Military coups threaten liberal media

The tactic isn’t new and the script is often the same — soldiers pick up arms, battle those loyal to a democratically elected sitting president and seize power in a coup.

Decades after such scenes got played multiple times in the post-independence era of most African countries, the plot doesn’t seem to be losing any steam, instead gaining appreciable momentum and appetite especially in West Africa.

In the midst of a devastating pandemic in 2020, Mali was plunged into a political crisis when President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was forced to step down when soldiers seized power. What should have appeared as an isolated event quickly ignited a flame of other putsches in the West African sub-region. Soldiers in Guinea last year also took a leaf from Mali to overthrow President Alpha Conde. A coup attempt in neighboring

A woman walks past a torn billboard of former President of Guinea, Alpha Conde, in Conakry on September 16, 2021. Colonel Mamady Doumbouya’s special forces on September 5, 2021 seized Alpha Conde in a Coup, the West African state’s 83-year-old president, a former champion of democracy accused of taking the path of authoritarianism.

Text Isaac Kaledzi, DW editor, Programs for Africa

© John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images

Guinea-Bissau was foiled early 2022, but there was success for soldiers in Burkina Faso a few weeks later. Coups have also taken place in Chad and Sudan and this is getting many worried on the continent.

Coups are of grave concern

In February this year, Nana Akufo-Addo, Gana’s president and current chair of the West African regional bloc Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), expressed concern over the resurgence of putsches in the region. He told his fellow heads of state at an ECOWAS summit that they needed to “address this dangerous trend collectively and decisively before it devastates the whole region.” AkufoAddo described the trend as a “matter of grave concern” that must be tackled seriously.

topple democratically elected governments is bad for the development of any country. “Democracy, no matter how bad it is, is better than military rule,” says political analyst Ibrahim Alhassan from Ghana. He blames the regional bloc for failing to be proactive in ending such putsches. “In the sub-region we see leaders are living it up while the population suffers in abject poverty. If ECOWAS is unable to address that disconnect, that insensitiveness on the part of the political leadership, we will continue to record these unfortunate happenings,” he said.

ECOWAS chair Akufo-Addo also stressed that the evolution of coups “challenges the democratic way of life we have chosen. We need to stand firm to protect democracy and freedom in our region.”

Free media under threat

But while there are calls for a serious approach towards dousing the rate of coups, there is a growing sympathy for putschists and military juntas across Africa among ordinary citizens.

Scenes of jubilation always welcome such takeovers as citizens claim to crave for a change even if it means the toppling of democratically elected governments. By the time soldiers seized power in Guinea last year, many citizens were experiencing economic hardships. The military takeover came at the right time for some and gained support from some ordinary people who were pinning their hopes for better living conditions on the new military rulers.

Coups are always bad

For some analysts, no matter the motive and rationale for soldiers, taking up arms to

Coups have a direct impact on the media. The absence of a democratic dispensation often means a difficult time for liberal and democratic media. It becomes increasingly difficult for journalists to hold those in power accountable. When soldiers seized power in Mali, it didn’t take them much time to express their distaste for critical media outlets. Shortly after the coup in 2020, the Media Foundation for Africa (MFWA) said in a report that within the space of 19 days (September 10-29, 2020) five violations were perpetrated against a number of journalists and a media house. The violations ranged from denial of access to information, arrests, threats and physical assault.

In March this year the media regulator in Mali suspended two French public broadcasters, Radio France International and France 24. This was after media reports of a mass grave and the indictment of the military alleged to have committed some human

Soldiers from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by General Hamdan Dagalo, deputy head of the Transitional Military Council in Sudan, secure a rally attended by the general.

rights violations in collaboration with Russian mercenaries. African media researcher, Kobby Gomez Mensah says that the trend is very concerning. “Nobody should be interested in the situation where free expression is clamped down upon. That is what we are seeing.”

Arbitrary arrests of journalists

In Sudan where soldiers are also in power, journalists are being arrested and state media has been placed under military control. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the clampdown by the armed forces.

It said Sudan’s continuous clampdown on the media

presented serious consequences for the freedom to report the news and for access to information. Sudan’s military leadership still continues to maintain extremely tight control over all information about the takeover. Reports about the violent crackdown on protests are punishable and the internet is frequently being shut down.

The story is no different in Burkina Faso where on January 23, a freelance reporter Henry Wilkins and Associated Press reporter Sam Mednick were arrested and detained at a military camp in the capital. The journalists told the International Press Institute that they were covering the recent military coup, which ousted President Roch Kabore.

Blocking access to the internet is also a phenomenon associated with Burkina Faso supressing free media. Free press in the country keeps deteriorating, a situation that is compounded by the security crisis there.

In the aftermath of the failed coup attempt in GuineaBissau, a group of men in military uniform stormed a radio station called Radio Capital FM, destroying equipment and injuring journalists in the studio. At a press conference on February 8, the president of the Journalists Union of Guinea-Bissau, Indira Correia Baldé, said that there was a threat to journalists following the attempted coup. “Hooded people with guns entering a radio station shows that we are facing danger,” he said as he called “on the international community to stand by and continue to support Guinea-Bissau and media professionals.”

No end to the struggle for liberal media

According to the African Development Bank, there have been over 200 coups and attempted coups in Africa since the years of independence.

“At the beginning of these coups you see euphoria among the population and then a few days later you don’t even hear of the population,” says African media researcher, Kobby Gomez Mensah, on the deliberate suppression of free media.

The slightest encouragement for military takeovers, according to Mensah, will further weaken any remains of protection for journalists. Weak democratic systems mean journalists are exposed to attacks and abuses. Journalists continue to struggle to freely report even under some democratic governments. Countries falling under military leadership after a coup worsen the situation, dampening any shimmer of hope for free media in Africa.

Sudan’s continuous clampdown on the media presented serious consequences for the freedom to report the news and for access to information.

Afghanistan nine months later

High time for action

There is no peace in Afghanistan after the Taliban took power. This could have devastating consequences for the West. If we do not want to leave the field to China and Russia, we must change our strategy.

The radical Islamist Taliban have been in power in Afghanistan for just under nine months now. In this time, they have managed to erase all the progress made in the last 20 years. Democracy, rule of law, human rights and women’s rights. All of that no longer exists. Ever since Afghan girls were banned from going to school, it should have become clear to everyone that today’s Taliban are the same Taliban of the 1990s.

What does this mean for the people of Afghanistan now? Due to the desolate economic situation, the majority of the Afghan population is suffering from a devastating hunger crisis that has already claimed thousands of victims. Less than a year after the takeover and the withdrawal of NATO troops, women have been completely pushed out of the public sphere. Not only have women been banned from the majority of professions, they must now completely veil themselves even on television. Repression,

Text Waslat Hasrat-Nazimi, DW Head of Dari and Pashto Service © picture alliance/dpa/Sayed Mustafa

Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers on May 7, 2022 ordered all Afghan women to wear head-to-toe clothing in public — a sharp, hard-line pivot that confirmed the worst fears of rights activists and was bound to further complicate Taliban dealings with an already distrustful international community.

torture and even murder of journalists restrict the media massively. Editorial content is heavily censored and newspapers are not allowed to print human images. There is no freedom of the press. Members of the Hazara ethnic group and Shiites are persecuted and targeted. In addition, the Taliban are unable to guarantee security in the country. During the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, ISIS-K, an offshoot of Daesh, attacked several Shia religious sites and neighborhoods where Hazara predominantly live. Previously, the Taliban had claimed that that would be the first peaceful Ramadan in 20 years.

But the end of Ramadan also turned into a bitter disappointment for Afghans. Every year after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, Muslims around the world celebrate Eid-ul Fitr also called Eid, which some countries do not celebrate on the same day. Normally, Afghanistan, like most Muslim countries, follows Saudi Arabia. But not this year. The Taliban proclaimed the end of Ramadan a day before Saudi Arabia did. They had sighted the moon in several Afghan cities, they announced. This was an unprecedented situation for the population, some of whom continued to fast in confusion and refused to comply

Waslat Hasrat- Nazimi

is Head of DW Dari and Pashto Service. Born in Afghanistan, Waslat emigrated with her family to Germany as a child and today she considers both countries to be home. Her journalistic work in Germany and Afghanistan along with her own story of integration helps her to build understanding between cultures.

@WasHasNaz dw.com/dari dw.com/pashto

The Taliban cannot represent Afghanistan and its people.

alliance/Associated Press/Petros Giannakouris

with the Taliban. However, according to reports from several cities in Afghanistan, the Taliban forced people to break their fast and celebrate Eid against their wishes. A blatant invasion of privacy and desecration of one of the most important holidays in Afghanistan. The Taliban cannot represent Afghanistan and its people. They merely represent their own ideology, which has little to do with the Islam that is practiced in Afghanistan, and they are willing to impose this ideology by force.

It is not enough to say that there was no other solution, and that the Afghan people supported the Taliban seizure of power. Did the majority of Afghans demand an end to a NATO presence and thus an end to bloody fighting, drone attacks, night raids and arbitrary arrests? Yes. Has that come to pass? Nine months after the Taliban retook power, we know that the previous violence has only been replaced by new violence. The hope for peace has not materialized. Instead,

Afghanistan could once again become a haven for terrorist organizations like ISIS. This can have devastating consequences. Moreover, the majority of Afghans already want to leave the country, so new migration flows from Afghanistan can be expected to form.

The West must realize that its previous strategy in dealing with the Taliban has not worked. Disappointed by a lack of international recognition, the Taliban have turned to Russia and China, which have welcomed them with open arms. Neighboring Pakistan has always funded the Taliban. If the West wants to stick to its promise and not leave Afghanistan alone, it is time to act and put more pressure on the Taliban, including sanctions specifically targeting Taliban leaders. Financial and military support for the Taliban from neighboring Pakistan must be stopped. If Western nations do not take action now, not only will history repeat the Taliban takeover, but so will the terror that followed.

Afghan girls participate in a lesson at Tajrobawai Girls High School in Herat, Afghanistan on November 25, 2021. In a surprise decision the hardline leadership of Afghanistan’s new rulers has decided against opening educational institutions to girls beyond Grade six, a Taliban official said Wednesday, March 23, 2022 on the first day of Afghanistan’s new school year.

Nine months after the Taliban retook power, we know that the previous violence has only been replaced by new violence.

What do murdered journalists leave behind?

Text Anabel Hernández, journalist

Miguel Angel López Jr. and Regina meet in the courtyard of an old white house in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City at the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists. They don’t know it, but their fates have followed similar paths for the last eleven years, and on this rainy afternoon, their paths have crossed.

Both are the children of journalists in Mexico, the country that tops the shameful ranking of the most dangerous for journalists, with more than 150 murdered in the last 20 years and another nine disappeared. Eleven journalists have already been murdered this year because the killers and instigators know that a system of corruption guarantees 98 percent impunity for murdering a journalist and 100 percent for a disappearance.

By silencing the free press, criminal or other interest groups decide what gets published in order to control

citizens through disinformation in a country where over 60 percent of the population lives in poverty.

Amid all this, hundreds of additional victims have been made invisible, abandoned, and re-victimized by the prevailing criminal system. They are the relatives of the murdered, disappeared, and threatened journalists. They are the thousands of other journalists who see their colleagues dismembered, dumped in garbage bags in the middle of the street or shot at the door or even in their own homes. Those thousands of eyes and ears receiving the message, “You could be next.”

Miguel Angel López Jr. is the son of Miguel Ángel López Velasco, also known as Milo Vela. A legendary journalist from the Mexican state of Veracruz. Once world famous for jarocho songs like La Bamba, it is now known for holding the record for the most murdered journalists in the world: 25 since 2007.

Journalists take part in a protest to mark one month since the murder of their colleague Javier Valdez, a noted expert on the country’s drug cartels and AFP contributor whose death appears far from being brought to justice in downtown Mexico City on June 15, 2017.

© Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

Milo Vela was a crime reporter and worked for Notiver, the largest newspaper in Veracruz. He worked in the police news department and wrote an opinion column, “Va de nuez.” He had more than 30 years’ experience in journalism. “We are like the mailman, we deliver good and bad information, but we don’t create it,” he used to say.

In 2006, brutal violence erupted in Veracruz, as it did in the rest of the country. President Felipe Calderón supposedly declared war on drug trafficking, although it later turned out that this was a farce. His government, as well as other state and local governments, were involved in the criminal organizations they were supposedly fighting.

Milo reported on kidnappings, extortion, executions, oil theft and human trafficking.

On Sunday, June 19, 2011, Father’s Day, the journalist and his three children and wife were celebrating at their home. The next morning, an aunt called Jazmín to tell her that there had been a break-in at her parents’ house. She wanted to know what had happened and called home, but no one answered.

Miguel arrived at the scene as the police were inspecting the house. On the second floor, he saw his mother’s dead body, executed with a mercy bullet, his father’s face disfigured by bullets, and his brother face down with his skull also smashed to pieces by bullets.

Jazmín tells how many people attended first night of the funeral, but the next day they were all alone: No one from the authorities, no legal advice, no psychological support. They were alone.

“We were like human garbage; like they would be killed, too if they got too close,” she recalls.

Afraid of becoming the next victim, Miguel Angel Jr. had to leave Veracruz the day after the funeral and flee to Mexico City. Balbina Flores,

head of Reporters Without Borders (ROG) in Mexico and very active in protecting journalists and seeking justice, was the only person who showed compassion and brought Jazmín to see her brother.

However, the distance between Veracruz and the capital was not enough to ensure his safety. Miguel Angel Jr. had to seek refuge in another country, where he applied for political asylum. This meant that he could not return home or see his family again for 10 long years. He can now return, at least for visits, but the massacre of his family remains unpunished.

Lucía Lagunes is a journalist and a member of the Council of the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists of the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, created in 2013 to prevent further killings. She knows firsthand why, although the government has instruments to protect journalists,

they are not effective.

Currently, 545 people are protected by the program in Mexico, forty percent of whom are journalists, and thirty percent of whom are female journalists. Protection measures range from escorts, bulletproof vests, shelters, and food to a panic button that can locate the person in real time.

To address the inefficiencies of the protection program, care units were created in 2017 to coordinate protection efforts between the governments of the 32 states and the federal government. “What are these units? It can be a single person with authority to carry out a request of the protection program,” says Lucía Lagunes. (Testimony of Lucía Lagunes at the hearing before the People’s Tribunal in Mexico City on April 26, 2022).

As if being threatened for their journalistic work were not bad enough, endangered women journalists also experience sexual harassment by

Photos of murdered journalists were placed during a protest to demand justice, in front of the Interior Ministry Office, in Mexico City, Mexico on January 25, 2022.

© Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Men pass away, but their ideas remain.

Giovanni Falcone

Anabel Hernández

their own bodyguards. Until now, the protection program has ignored such complaints. “They don’t understand what it means for a female journalist … to have to watch out for those who are supposed to be watching out for her,” Lagunes recounts.

“Until four years ago, we could say that the protection mechanism saved journalists, but today we can no longer say that,” Lucía Lagunes adds emphatically.

Regina knows the pain of surviving. She was barely 15 and her brother one year old when their lives changed radically. A group of powerful and corrupt police officers had plotted to murder her mother, a journalist.

Since December 2010, Regina had to live with bodyguards. Although she only had to cross one street on her way to school, she had armed escorts. It wasn’t until

January 2011, after an attack on her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins in a cafeteria, that she understood the danger her entire world was in. Her mother was all she had, but she inexplicably grew increasingly distant. While she had been immersed in her research on drug trafficking for years, in the end she was always there. But now, instead of a mother, there was only a ghost at home.

No one could explain to her what had happened. She only had a notion. She listened to some interviews her mother gave to the media to find out what was happening to her, but she was only 15 and could not understand the scope. She began to isolate herself to protect her mother. She didn’t go to parties, and then she wasn’t even invited because, like Jazmin, she was considered a risk. Her home became a prison.

is Mexican investigative journalist who received the DW Freedom of Speech Award in 2019 for her reporting on corruption and the collusion between government officials and drug cartels in her home country. Her book “Los Señores del Narco” (Narcoland), published in 2010, documented these illegal relations and gained Hernández international recognition. Forced to leave her home country following severe harassment and death threats, Hernández now lives in Europe and is a regular contributor to DW.

© DW/R. Oberhammer

One day in December 2013, when she was on a family trip with her little brother and mother, her mother received a phone call. From the look on her face, it appeared to be an emergency, bad news. That same night, she exchanged plane tickets, and they arrived home the next day.

Although her mother was in the government protection program, that did not stop a group of eleven armed men from surrounding and entering her home, thinking they were there. Regina had not known, until reading an article about her mother, that months earlier decapitated animals had been dumped in front of her house and an informant of her mother’s had been killed in broad daylight. The arrival of these men was more than a final warning.

A few months later, she, her brother and her mother had to leave Mexico to survive, like so many other journalists and their families. She left her friends, her school, and her family. She was so used to hell and confinement that it felt

like a miracle when, for the first time in four years, she was able to move without an armed escort.

None of the people who attacked and intimidated her family are in custody. She knows that she can only return to her country if there is justice. Miguel Angel Jr. also knows this. Perhaps hope brought them together and led them to sit and speak with other relatives of murdered or threatened journalists at the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists. With the support of ROG, Free Press Unlimited and the Committee to Protect Journalists, the People’s Tribunal is seeking justice.

The older, more experienced Miguel told Regina that it was fate that they had met. They talked about how similar their lives were, how they had suffered very similar things as children of journalists and concluded that their paths had crossed so they can know they are not alone.

He asked Regina to understand her mother. “Certainly, your mother made many sacrifices, and she didn’t always show it to you, but she was probably more afraid than you were. Maybe you didn’t understand it then, but now that you have a chance to build a life for yourself, you know she was right. She was fighting for something bigger, which is the truth.” These words were not only for Regina, but for himself as well. He understood the reason for his father’s death and that the ideal he believed in lived on.

What did the murdered journalists leave behind? Their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, siblings and the legacy of their work remain. If their families are helped to recover and live on, they will be an indelible symbol of their victory.

They are not dead, they must live on in the collective memory as symbols of resistance, in times when crime and political and economic powers seek to dominate a nation by silencing the truth.

They are not dead, they must live on in the collective memory as symbols of resistance.

©

picture alliance/dpa/Str

Journalists from the Mexican state of Michoacan protest holding banners against the murdering of one more of their collegues in the region, Morelia, Mexico, July 8, 2010.

The future is in identity media

Belsat, the only independent Belarusian language television station, is celebrating its 15th anniversary in extraordinary times.

Since the beginning, we had no doubts that launching a television program for viewers living in post-Soviet Belarus was the right thing to do, but we were initially uncertain about the effectiveness of our project. However, the events that followed have more than validated our idea. Massive protests after Alyaksandr Lukashenka falsified the results of the last election, two years ago, followed by a brutal suppression of those protests, definitely demonstrated the justification for our channel’s existence. As members of the public in Belarus were becoming increasingly active that summer, we observed that more and more people turned to Belsat for news and information. When the protests started spreading, our audience swelled to millions of people. This year, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine served as another test. It proved that Belsat television was relevant for more than just Belarus, a relatively small nation of 8 to 9 million people; our channel’s

popularity extends beyond Belarus, to Ukraine and Russia as well. Coverage is always tailored to a specific type of audience and we at Belsat know the post-Soviet audience very well.

Belsat has always targeted the Belarusian market, which was met with enormous resistance from the Minsk government. Lukashenka bluntly stated that this project was stupid and useless. Given the current conditions of state-mandated terror in Belarus, is operating an independent Belarusian television station possible at all?

We started with satellite broadcasting, then we launched our website, and finally we branched out to an increasing number of social media networks. We have developed an extensive system for distributing our content and reaching out to our viewers. When you look at the number of views of our videos and the number of unique users of our YouTube channels, Belsat’s success becomes clearer. In sum, about a million and a half people have subscribed to our channels and several million unique users have visited our channels. I believe that we provide the

most complete and comprehensive coverage.

Due to the increasingly harsh persecution of independent journalists, our capacity to produce our own video reports in Belarus is quite limited. When we were starting, we recorded programs using large professional cameras. Nowadays, in many cases, small high-end smart phones or tablets substitute for these large cameras; and they can covertly transmit content to our studios via mobile internet connections. We also rely on archival footage and short videos which our viewers submit to us online.

The situation in Belarus is no longer on top of international news, due to the war south of the border. What is your opinion on the level of awareness from outside of the countries of the former Soviet Bloc?

This war has confirmed the assessment that served as one of the founding premises of our television station. Namely, that there is no such thing as a separate Belarusian issue. Indeed, the problem with Belarus is only one of a host of issues stemming from the broadly defined foreign policy of the

Interview Christoph Jumpelt, DW

Russian Federation, which is an imperial, and, as we can see now, a criminal power. For the Belarusians and the Ukrainians, the current developments are just another episode in the long history of Russia’s imperial ambitions. A mantra about the need for stability in the region and the need for guarantors of that stability is repeated many times in different political circles. Now it turns out that it is impossible to secure this region’s stability in a way that was previously envisaged.

There is the myth about the Belarusian people’s support for Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Back in 2010, Lukashenka may have had a chance to win elections without breaking the law, but, according to our research from that period, his margin of victory would have been very slim even then, even 12 years ago. The next blow to his popularity occurred in 2017 and the Western media almost failed to notice it. That year, many Belarusians protested a government tax imposed on the unemployed. Lukashenka was under the impression that people who did not work in Belarus were, in fact, making money in Poland or Russia, so he wanted to squeeze the money out of Belarusian citizens working elsewhere. It turned out that the people were desperate because there really was no work in the provincial areas of the country. Lukashenka had no clue about the actual level of unemployment in his own country, which just emphasized how the post-Soviet Belarusian elite was increasingly detached from reality.

How would you describe Belsat’s current impact on the discussion in the Belarusian civil society?

I think that we have contributed to an extremely important cause—namely, to ensuring that ultimately Alyaksandr Lukashenka did not order his army to join Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. This was not an act of good will on his part, but rather he was afraid of how the people of Belarus would react should he decide to send the Belarusian armed forces to war. It appears that this shift in public opinion has resulted from the presence of free media of which we certainly were a part in recent 15 years. In addition, the ideal of pacifism, which is an important characteristic of the Belarusian population, has also played a role in these developments. One of Lukashenka’s main slogans that resonated with the people was: “Maybe

our country is not too affluent, but our situation is stable and at least we are not at war.” We should remember that even today the Belarusian people continue to experience World War II trauma that is incomparable to any Western country. Putin can use his imperial slogans to pull wool over the eyes of people on the other side of the Ural Mountains, those who sign up to fight in Ukraine on military contracts, or their parents, who have been raised on state television for decades. In contrast, Russia’s imperialism is hardly inspiring to the Belarusians, who are unlikely to be motivated to risk their lives or murder other people in pursuit of Putin’s goals.

Belsat has aimed to counteract Russian propaganda in particular ever since Russia’s annexation of Crimea. What are the main issues?

Looking at what is happening now in the East, one has to agree with Alexei Navalny’s opinion that Russia’s disinformation campaign, in misrepresenting news and facts, constitutes yet another crime in a series of many war crimes committed by that country. Civilized people have no language that would be insulting enough to describe Russian propaganda. It is not even propaganda anymore. Even the word “disinformation” seems too weak to describe it. It is an absolute lie—a narrative that is the complete opposite of actual reality. Unfortunately, that deliberate perversion of the truth was poorly understood in the West until recently. In order to counteract this onslaught of lies, we must reject and denounce the lies, but we also have to tell the real story. This has been the fundamental mission for us, ever since we started Belsat. Russian disinformation dominates in Belarus, and it still dominates large swaths of the wider territories of the former Soviet Union. It reaches Belarus directly through Russian television channels and, simultaneously, it is repeated word for word, or redistributed in slightly different forms, by the media controlled by Lukashenka.

I think that our audience believes our narrative is true and cohesive. We do not comment on the lies. Saying something that is true is much more than merely negating this gigantic lie that is propagated by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. People talk about pro-Russian trolls, but, in reality, we are dealing with an entire mythical world

invented by our enemies. In order to appeal to our audience, we must also address issues that concern the audience in a real and honest way and gain their trust.

Traditional media, whose role is merely to convey news and information, will no longer suffice. The future is in identity media, built around the values that attract a faithful audience and surrounded by tools for social interaction. We have been able to accomplish this amazingly well in Belarus. Now it turns out that our narrative is so strong that it has spread even beyond the territory of Belarus. Belsat has viewers in Russia and Russian-speaking eastern parts of Ukraine. Some of our programs are now produced in Russian for the residents of those regions.

Our work is difficult, we can say that without a doubt, but it is certainly more rewarding than working for the Russian or Belarusian propagandists. We do not have to conjure any fake reality. Our only real task is to come up with ways to “package” the truth to make it sufficiently attractive and competitive because, as the old adage goes, “before the truth puts on its shoes, the lie will manage to run around the world.”

Not long ago, distinguishing between a truth and a lie was mainly the domain of moralists. I have heard more than once that in politics there are no such concepts as the truth, falsehood, or morality, because only interests matter. Or, that everyone lies and the only difference between people is the extent to which they lie. However, as we look at the war in Ukraine, we know that values still exist, and they still pertain to completely material, non-esoteric issues. Good and evil, truth and falsehood, are real. The media needs to find themselves on the side of light in this epic battle.

Belsat started as a satellite channel as part of Telewizja Polska, aimed at viewers in Belarus, initiated by journalist Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy. The channel was designed in response to the demand expressed in Belarusian democratic circles for a television channel independent of the Minsk authorities. Belsat’s stated mission is ensuring that Belarusians have access to independent news on the situation in their country. In Belarus, the network is officially blocked by the authorities, but is being watched regularly by a large percentage of the adult population nevertheless.

Before the truth puts on its shoes, the lie will manage to run around the world.

© Belsat

Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy is the founder and director of Belsat TV, the only independent television channel broadcasting in Belarusian from its studios in Poland.

I am everything they hate!

extravagance of the glamorous and glittery palace life, misery and poverty have darkened the lives of tens of millions in the country that they rule. AKP has created a Turkey where 16 million of its people try to survive in extreme poverty and 50 million live below the poverty line. This government has normalized corruption and poverty as a fate to be endured by society.

I started to ask undesirable questions again… Education and health sectors took a hammering, the Turkish lira suffered the greatest loss of value in its history, the unemployment rate spiked to double digit level, society is rapidly hitting bottom in an unstoppable economic depression. The politics of the AKP and MHP alliance consist of marking those who voice problems as the problem itself, instead of solving those problems.

Kabaş was briefly detained last year and faced up to five years in prison for telling her Twitter followers not to forget the name of a prosecutor who dropped a corruption and bribery probe that implicated people close to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The spectrum of risks journalists are facing in Turkey has continually grown in more than 20 years under the regime of the AK Party: Censorship, self-censorship, political pressure, mobbing, forced unemployment, criminal complaints and threat campaigns that government trolls continue day and night on social media, police raids on your home in the middle of the night, imprisonment or even getting killed…

This is a country ruled by politicians whose crimes have pervaded international borders and whose transgressions have breached the ends of this world. As they are enjoying the blessings of the very symbol of

In December of 2013, allegations of money laundering and bribery shook the ruling AKP government to its roots. Many oppositional media members of the period called out the events as “the power struggle between the AKP and the Fethullah Gülen movement” or “a coup against the government.” The general concern was that if you reported otherwise, it was almost inevitable that you would be accused of being a “Gülenist”.

I listened to my conscience and posted a one-sentence tweet: “Never forget that the prosecutor of the Gülenist movement, Hadi Salihoğlu, had decided not to prosecute the December 17 corruption investigation.” So, they raided my house early one morning, confiscated my mobile phone, my computer, my 5-year-old son’s iPad and detained me. Since I made the police wait for a short while in front of the door, the police also brought a separate public lawsuit against me alleging “insulting and resisting the police”. In total, they wanted to sentence me to more than 10 years of

An Istanbul court has acquitted Kabaş of charges of “targeting a public servant” for posting a tweet suggesting a cover-up in a government corruption scandal.

Text Sedef Kabaş, journalist

imprisonment. I was acquitted in the first hearing of these cases.

When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was running for president in the 2018 general elections, I wrote a tweet “We don’t want a president without a diploma, but more importantly, we don’t want a dishonest President.” I was once again taken to court on the charge of insulting the president. I denied the defamation charge because a four-year college degree was a constitutional requirement for the presidential candidacy. And no such diploma existed that Erdoğan could provide. His diploma(s) presented in the press were regarded as fake. Moreover,

The ox and the palace

SedefKabaşTV

no official statement was made in this regard. I was handed a nine-month and 20 daysprison sentence, which I have appealed. The final judgement has not been spoken yet, the trial continues.

On April 21, 2021, during the live broadcast of the AKP party meeting, President Erdoğan publicly targeted me: “The ’Where are the 128 billion dollars?’ question is a big lie and this woman told CHP to parrot this lie!” Images taken from my TEDx talk titled “It Is The Brains That Are Being Conquered, Not Lands”’ were deliberately distorted and then montaged together with the well-known quote of Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbels, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, as if the words belonged to me. This time, I was the one who brought a case to court. I filed a lawsuit against President Erdoğan demanding 128 cents in compensation. Needless to say, at first we had difficulty in finding a prosecutor and then we were faced with an immediate “non-prosecution” decision. If necessary, we are determined to carry it up to the European Court of Human Rights, in order to set a precedent.

They ultimately incarcerated me under the pretext of insult through a proverb I used. Long story short, they say “SHUT UP!”

This trial, which is now known as the “Sedef Kabaş Case” in Turkey’s political and legal history, actually served as a litmus paper for our dying democracy, our judicial system, which has been turned into an apparatus of the government and our media, whose voice is getting weaker. What had been obvious has now become blatant. Journalists are being abandoned in the face of oppression by a fascist government. Maybe for the first time different segments of the society met on a common ground through which a stronger resistance

In January, Turkish journalist Sedef Kabaş was detained and her house was raided following a statement she made in a television talk show. Because she used the proverb “When an ox enters into a palace, it does not become king. Rather the palace becomes a stable”, Kabaş was taken to court on the charge of insulting president Erdoğan. After spending 50 days in jail, she was released from police custody. The decision about her having to actually serve the 28-month prison sentence is still pending. Meanwhile Kabaş continues to publish on her YouTube channel.

We don’t want a president without a diploma, but more importantly, we don’t want a dishonest President.

© picture alliance/Associated Press/Uncredited

could be put forward. Social media posts managed to keep the issue on the agenda for 50 consecutive days and to create public pressure. The strategy of arresting and silencing the “impudent” female journalist, as the government was intimating, backfired. Taking a journalist into custody at midnight because of a proverb she used in a live broadcast one week before, remanding her despite the lack of suspicion of escape and of spoliation, incarcerating her for 49 days and demanding her to serve 12 years and 10 months in prison was found excessive even by those who usually prefer to stay silent or to turn a blind eye. Had this woman committed murder, traded drugs, or been a member of a terrorist organization? Wait a minute!

In today’s Turkey, 95 percent of the media is structurally, economically and politically pro-government, that is, they comprise only spokespeople of the government. Their only mission is to make news that will perpetuate the power of the current government. In this respect, issues such as freedom of the press, the imperative of the journalist to be an opponent, to be the checks and balances of the government and the fifth column for the state is completely out of the question. The rest of the media, which are considered as “opposition”, are far from taking a consistent and determined stance in protecting their own rights or their members for fear of reprisal.

Another reality, which has become very clear, is that when Erdoğan utters the words, “She will pay the price for this”; the laws, the Constitution, the decisions of the ECHR, the ministry of justice, judges, prosecutors and lawyers become redundant and invalid. In the current state, the government is trying to turn the judiciary into an instrument against dissent. It has become the larger crime to declare theft, rather than to

A woman looks out of her window behind a banner of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, following Erdogan’s speech at a rally of his ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) in Istanbul, Tuesday, March 5, 2019, ahead of local elections scheduled for March 31, 2019.

commit the act itself. On the television screens, politicians claim that the judiciary is independent; however, as it can be seen in my case, this does not prevent the Minister of Justice from making a de facto verdict “She will receive the punishment she deserves” even though my given statement to the police had not even been finalized. This single-handed administration recognizes no rights, no laws and no justice or the separation of powers to keep them accountable.

Another issue that has become very clear is that a journalist, who has no power other than that of his word and pen, is seen by the current government as more dangerous than

an entire enemy army.

All in all I write this piece as a journalist, who was scapegoated overnight as a “terrorist”, “traitor”, “spy”, as “impudent”, “shameless”, who was sentenced to prison for two years and four months and on top being sued by Erdoğan for damages. Look at me, I’m still writing… while I am walking on a minefield, at the risk of another blowout that might be caused by another article or tweet, or by another comment that I make… And I do so, sincerely believing that the truth-saying, spirited journalist of a new era could play a key role in achieving better, more just, more prosperous days for my country…

© picture alliance/AP

Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis

How Russian propaganda dominates Chinese social media

As Russia continues to spread its propaganda about the war through different channels, a cyber monitoring group in Taiwan found that pro-Kremlin propaganda has also been spreading rapidly on Chinese social media.

According to a report released by Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab in April, the close relationship between Russian and Chinese state media has helped to amplify Russian propaganda on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo. Analysts think it is part of Beijing’s efforts to

encourage solidarity between China and Russia as it deals with “foreign forces interfering in its internal affairs” and “foreign-funded Nazism”.

Russia has repeatedly used the threat posed by NATO’s expansion and the rhetoric of neo-Nazis in Ukraine as reasons to justify its

In China’s cyberspace, Russian propaganda continues to influence the discourse over the war in Ukraine. Experts say the efforts could be Beijing’s attempt to trigger anti-Western sentiments.

Text William Yang, DW correspondent

invasion. China insists that it remains neutral about the war and Beijing has yet to openly criticize Russia’s actions in Ukraine. China’s partnership with Russia has “no limits”, according to Chinese President Xi Jinping, and this has also raised skepticism among democratic countries about Beijing’s real stance on Moscow’s military aggression.

Jerry Yu, an analyst at Doublethink Lab, claims in the report that since the invasion began on February 24, Chinese state media and influential accounts on Weibo have been circulating Russian propaganda about Ukraine, while building the connection between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim of “Ukrainian Nazism” with the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong.

“Chinese state media (Global Times/CGTN etc.) picked up Putin’s anti-NATO expansion reasoning upon the outbreak of hostilities, and later went on to focus on the denazification angle themselves, citing Russian government officials’ speeches and statements”, he wrote in the report.

Some experts view the efforts as strategically beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “Clearly, there are at least parts of the party apparatus that have decided that strategically it is to CCP’s benefit, if not China’s, to support Russia’s invasion and narratives about what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Sarah Cook, research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House.

“Once that decision was taken, the propaganda and info control apparatus has moved in that direction, be it in terms of state media coverage, directives to media and online platforms, on what content is permissible and even should be amplified, or censorship of alternative views and information sources,” she added.

Other experts think the propaganda efforts are also an attempt to spark up nationalistic and anti-Western sentiments in China. “I’ve seen a lot of pro-Russia rhetoric that is also very much linked to and overshadowed by the antiWest sentiment of challenging the legitimacy of the United States, the West and NATO,” said Maria Repnikova, an assistant professor in global communications at Georgia State University.

How Russian propaganda proliferates on Chinese social media?

The Doublethink Lab report points out that the Chinese public wasn’t familiar with the discourse surrounding “Ukrainian Nazis” prior to the war, and relevant subjects didn’t attract much media attention in China.

Days before the invasion, Chinese authorities issued a directive that asked domestic media outlets to only publish content from official media outlets such as the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television, which signed cooperation agreements with Russian state media in 2015.

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Chinese state media outlets and the Chinese Foreign Ministry began to push out content that reiterated Russian media’s claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had

left Kyiv or Ukrainian soldiers had surrendered. Other content cited Russian officials’ assertion that the Ukrainian government was a Nazi-led administration.

Linking Ukraine and Hong Kong pro- democracy movement

The report also highlights that on the third day of the war, influential accounts on Chinese social media platform Weibo began to recycle false news from 2019 that claimed the US government had funded members of Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion and that the money was then used to participate in the 2019 anti-extradition bill in Hong Kong.

“This tactic successfully linked the discussion of Nazism and the longstanding trope of foreign forces interfering in China’s internal affairs in Chinese online discourse, influencing public opinion to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Yu wrote in the report.

Overall, the report identified Russian state media’s Chinese language social media accounts, Chinese domestic media, influential accounts on Weibo, and Chinese accounts on Western social media platforms as part of the influencers spreading Russian propaganda in the Chinese-speaking world.

“As various media and internet platforms ban Russian officials and Russian propaganda channels, the impact of discussions on Weibo on the wider Chinese-speaking diaspora should not be underestimated,” the report stated. “Chinese discourses continue to spread Russian political propaganda through Weibo, Douyin, YouTube and other platforms, creating a negative image of Ukraine among Chinese users.”

On March 24, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin refuted NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg’s assertion that China is spreading

lies and misinformation about the war in Ukraine. “Accusing China of spreading misinformation related to Ukraine is in itself disinformation,” he said during a press briefing.

How effective are China’s propaganda efforts?

Professor Repnikova told DW that even though there are some critical messages and fact-checking efforts on Chinese social media to counter the dominant anti-Western rhetoric, those critical messages are often quickly censored. “The strongest voices tend to be nationalistic and anti-Western messaging which aligns with the pro-Russia statement,” she

said. “Other voices that have tried to challenge that have been quickly censored.”

Freedom House’s Sarah Cook says that, in addition to amplifying the Russian propaganda, muzzling dissenting voices is equally essential for the propaganda to be effective.

“If the voices within China, including some very prominent intellectuals, or content liked by a Chinese resident in Ukraine, were not being restricted, then the propaganda would be much less effective,” she told DW.

While China may officially be taking a neutral stance, its online maneuverings suggest a very different position regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A man walks into an office of Sina Weibo, widely known as China’s version of Twitter, in Beijing on April 16.

Chinese discourses continue to spread Russian political propaganda.

© Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images

Be different and show it!

Diversity strengthens individuality and social freedom.

Text Nasim Saber, DW editor, Dari and Pashto Service

“Every one of us has their own story. It explains why we are the way we are. And that is fine. Because it makes us unique.” This is what the young German-speaking writer Isaac Öztürk says about life. Diversity and individuality in life can hardly be described more beautifully, even if these two categories may initially seem like a contradiction. In this way, diverse people around the world make individual decisions and design their own special life, which is unique in this way and if compatible with their own catalog of values and conscience can break through the boundaries of their own tradition and origin. Every person belongs to different realities of life and can carry different characteristics of diversity and represent them (consciously or unconsciously) to the outside world. This includes age, ethnic origin, gender, sexual identity, religion or philosophy and many more. As we go through life, at crossroads we meet people with similarities and differences.

In a nutshell, this is also the world that I encountered as a young person at DW almost 20 years ago. At that time, I was researching and presenting topics for a youth program for DW’s Dari/Pashto Service. Not just reporting about other people and simply recording their individual perspectives, but making an effort to understand what the individual person actually wants to tell me maybe that’s the core of what journalism should ideally look like and also my personal aspiration. This also has to do with diversity: if you want to report about a person with a physical or mental disability, for example, you should try to imagine the world from this individual’s perspective and listen carefully.

The redefinition of the “we feeling”

Finding and promoting these intersections can help with redefining the “we feeling” in a society and to calibrate and readjust interests and overlaps. As a member of DW’s diversity work group, I try to provide food for thought and to write about diversity and inclusion in everyday journalistic life. Doing good deeds and talking about it is important to me. But you have to expect to also meet people who have no understanding of these connections or their own individual identity. In my almost two decades of

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journalistic life, I have had to put up with astonished faces and the phrase “did you write that?” again and again when I wrote a piece in German. With respect, this is not just a preconceived notion, but actually a good deal of racism, since a person is not believed to be capable of articulating or communicating in a certain language at a high level due to phenotypic peculiarities. Another example is when people are consciously or even subconsciously excluded from our systems because of their origin or their social, ethnic or ideological background, their disability or other characteristics.

Diversity demands and promotes empathy, understanding and acceptance

By clearly dealing with the topic of diversity, journalistic products are closer to the reality of the protagonists of a story and simply get better. Acquiring this kind of empathy, understanding and a unique and diverse world view of accepting and respecting other people and their life realities is a long and at

in Bonn talked about the second ”United Nations on the Rhine”, a home to people with diverse history and life plans. People working in 32 language departments, bringing with them a wide range of different origins, religions, cultures, world views and individual identities. My colleagues in the Africa and Asia departments, for instance, switch between colorful traditional dresses, or saris and shalwar kameez and a European-style business attire with natural ease. It’s all about modern and enlightened people of the 21st century making conscious decisions and choosing how to express themselves.

Key to individual freedom and contentment

times difficult process. Every person goes through it. And as a society we have to deal with it actively and give the diversity that we encounter every day a chance, while managing opposites and potential points of contention in a proper fashion. Encounters can change a person. Our thoughts form our experience and our individual personality, which are not static structures, but are constantly in flux.

I already noticed back in 2006 that DW is multifaceted and diverse when I completed my traineeship here. Everyone

Diversity is much more than that. It’s about our basic values, about respect, human rights and individual decisions that individual people make for their individual life plans. In this way, the topic of freedom, which is repeatedly used by all sides in politics to legitimize their respective guidelines and decisions, acquires a completely new and diverse meaning. Diversity and inclusion are the key to individual and social freedom and liberality, which are based on conscious decisions and experienced plurality. Diversity is therefore much more than a trend or a buzzword. Rather, it is an ongoing process that creates something new and changes structures.

My appeal: be different and show it! Too much conformity sometimes means manipulability. We should live confidently, respectfully and freely and leave an openminded, liberal and more diverse world to the people of tomorrow.

We should live confidently, respectfully and freely and leave an open-minded, liberal and more diverse world to the people of tomorrow.

© Getty Images

Speaking out: Against the culture of fear

Raif Badawi’s case is collective, not personal

As Raif wrote repeatedly before his words were banned before his website was shut down and he was thrown into a cold prison cell:

“Freedom of expression is the air every free-thinking person breathes; it is the fuel that ignites the fire of thought and free debate. Down the centuries, countries and societies would not have advanced without the work of their intellectuals. They presented their ideas and philosophies to everyone, and people could choose what they wanted from among the different views. They then elaborated upon these ideas to reach the deepest recesses of knowledge, progress and civilization.”

These are just a few lines from Raif’s writings. I selected them to begin this article, because I believe that protecting writers and thinkers ought to symbolize freedom of thought. It should also be a space that guarantees the following right for everyone: namely, the right to differ, to reject censorship in all its forms, and to discuss ideas

with which we do not agree, instead of outlawing them.

It may seem strange for a Saudi woman to be talking about the importance of freedom of thought and expression. Doubtless you agree with me, but I say this as a person who has suffered greatly. We are still suffering as a family — and as an entire people — from the specter of censorship and the policy of suppressing ideas. I say this because freedom has cost my husband and my children dearly. I say this as a woman

who has lived half her life within a culture that does not allow her to express love or emotions; it does not even allow her to leave her home without a male guardian.

Raif Badawi is a pacifist. He believes in humanity and in the freedom of people to live, without interference from religion or state.

He represents everyone in the Middle East and North Africa who wishes to openly express their opinion, to exercise their human rights in thought, religion and expression. He

is arguably an icon for many young people here who are eager to defend freedom and change the world. Raif is a man of today. He is proud to belong to this generation — the internet generation and proud of the opportunities it has given us. This is a free-thinking generation; a generation that bridges the gap between peoples and cultures, inspiring millions with the notion that change is both possible and necessary. And as it happens, the students at this university belong to this very generation.

Text Ensaf Haidar, wife of Raif Badawi

Raif was not demanding revolution. All he was asking was to believe that change is possible and much needed in his beloved country. He was asking for peaceful change, respectful of the individual. There are those who want to portray Raif as a traitor to his country, but who is the real traitor here? Is the traitor the one who warns people of the dangers of extremism and urges them to catch up with the present and the future, or is he the one eager to silence all free-thinking voices and to imprison us in the past?

Raif and those who defend

human rights across the world are not traitors. On the contrary, they are honorable patriots who love their countries and who want them to be part of this diverse world.

Right now, we have two choices; there may not be a third way. Are we ready to stand on the right side of history, or to leave our grandchildren with the awful legacy that we could have changed the world for the better, but we chose not to? I’m a firm believer that changing the world for the better is possible and that it is a dream all young people share. The world today

is full of wars and human rights abuses our dream has become a duty. It is the moral and humanistic duty of us all to stand together in supporting freedom of thought and human rights.

This is the lesson I have taken on board from my husband’s experience. Today, I am not only defending Raif because he is my children’s father, but because I believe more than ever in everyone’s right to express themselves freely. I am even ready to defend this right on behalf of those who disagree with me. This is the one thing of value

that my children will inherit from their father. It is priceless; it cannot be bought or sold: I have learned to say no to everything that demeans people’s dignity and diminishes their rights.

Raif Badawi expressed his concerns with his pen and in his own words. And because his words were sincere, born of his conviction in the possibility of peaceful change, they terrified those who benefit from maintaining the status quo.

Change will not happen as long as we let fear seal our lips. Change will not happen if we remain silent.

© picture alliance/dpa/Alexander Heinl

DW Freedom of Speech Award at a glance

Promoting democratic values, human rights and intercultural dialogue has been at the heart of DW’s mission.

For eight years, the DW Freedom of Speech Award has recognized persons or organizations for their exceptional contribution to freedom rights, notably press freedom and freedom of expression. The award ceremony is hosted at the annual DW conference Global Media Forum in Bonn. Once a year, the GMF organizes talks and keynote speeches, inviting many international experts on media freedom.

Since 2015 the laureates of DW Freedom of Speech Award are: Raif Badawi, Sedat Ergin, White House Correspondents’ Association, Sadegh Zibakalam, Anabel Hernández, independent international journalists reporting on COVID-19 and Tobore Ovuorie.

This year, DW conferred its Freedom of Speech Award to Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy

First laureate of DW Freedom of Speech Award 2015 is Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who was arrested and detained in Saudi Arabia in June 2012 on charges of “insulting Islam”. He has been released March 2022 after serving a 10-year sentence for advocating an end to religious influence on public life.

Maloletka in recognition of their courageous reporting from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Their AP report, “20 days in Mariupol: The team that documented city’s agony”, documents photographs of the devastation of war that became the defining images of the siege of Mariupol. The only international journalists left in the embattled city, Chernov and Maloletka risked their lives daily to chronicle the Russian war in a city cut off from the outside world. Their firsthand account of the deaths, devastation, and the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol reveals the frightening reality of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine and highlights why independent journalism is so vital to counter the spread of disinformation and bring stories that the world needs to hear. They escaped the city with the help of Ukrainian soldiers while being hunted down by Russian forces.

Text Ala Zainalabidean, DW editor

received commitmenttheFreedomofSpeechAward2016inrecognitionofhis topressfreedomandsteadfastnessintheface ofthegrowingcrackdownonfreespeechinTurkey.Ergin acceptedtheawardwhilebeingtriedforallegedlyinsulting TurkishPresidentRecepTayyipErdoğan.

FormerHürriyeteditor-in-chief

DWFreedomofSpeechAward2018wenttoIranianpolitical scientistSadeghZibakalam,anoutspokencriticofthe government’sdomesticandforeignpolicydecisions.In aninterviewwithDWFarsiin2018,heattributedthethen nationwideunrestinIrantothediscontentoftheIranian publicandwassubsequentlyaccusedof“spreadingpropaganda againstthestate”andsentencedto18monthsinprison.

DWFreedomofSpeechAward2017wasconferredontheWhite HouseCorrespondents’Association(WHCA)forpromoting freedomofexpressionandreportingonthefrontlinesofUS PresidentDonaldTrump’sadministration,apresidentwho labeledthemediaas“theenemyoftheAmericanpeople”.

TheDWFreedomofSpeechAward2020honored17journalists from14countriesreportingonCOVID-19.Accomplishedat greatpersonalrisk,theircoveragehascombattedfakenews, revealedpandemic-relatedcorruptionandexposedpress freedomviolations.

MexicaninvestigativejournalistAnabelHernándezreceived DWFreedomofSpeechAward2019forexposingcorruption, drugtraffickingandviolenceinMexico.HerexposésLa VerdaderaNochedeIguala(AMassacreinMexico)releasedin 2016,andLosSeñoresdelNarco(Narcoland)in2010,uncover statecomplicitywiththedrugcartels.Havingsuffereddeath threatsandintimidationaimedatherfamily,Hernándeznow livesinEuropeandisaregularcontributortoDWEspañol.

In2021,investigativejournalistToboreOvuoriewasawarded theDWFreedomofSpeechAwardinrecognitionofherintrepid investigationintoahumantraffickingringinNigeria.Her reporthelpedbringdownatransnationalringinNigeria involvedinsextraffickingandillicitorgantrade.

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© RTHK

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© DW/Elvis Okhifo

© DW/K. Danetzki

© Oliver Berg/dpa

Pandemic, Putin and plotters

Who in Africa has the brightest future?

Text Claus Stäcker, DW Head of Africa Department

The triple crisis of Corona, climate and the consequences of war is hitting the continent particularly hard. Although Russia invaded a neighboring country in violation of international law, it enjoys surprisingly great sympathy. Old alliances from the Cold War are being revived, new brotherhoods in arms are emerging. Autocrats and militiamen of all stripes smell morning air. They often appear to young people as saviors, because only a few democracies have so far succeeded in unfolding their advantages. Because the old elites have not yet been outshined by the new, reliable, convincing ones. The cost of living is skyrocketing and only in a few sectors is the crisis turning out to be a

catalyst for development, in digitalization and in the service sector. Before Corona, Senegal, Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia had made the most progress. Rwanda shows how little is enough to move forward: Stability, vision and reliable leadership. The development that resourcepoor, populous Rwanda has taken since the 1994 genocide could serve as a shining example. President Paul Kagame’s authoritarian leadership style has many friends. At the same time, he shuts out critical, creative minds, does not allow dissent and keeps a tight grip on politics, the media, public opinion and the judiciary. Opposition in Rwanda is life-threatening.

A handout image provided by Sotheby’s on June 14, 2016 shows 1109 carat diamond called ’Lesedi la Rona’ which was auctioned at Sotheby’s London on June 29, 2016.

North-east of Rwanda, in Ethiopia, a country of 110 million inhabitants, the Tigray war, brutal violence and new ethnic and religious conflicts, is delivering a bad example for the fragility of any progress. The state of Ethiopia is only held together by force and provides sad proof of how quickly a country can derail.

It is therefore not development dictatorships like Rwanda that in my deep conviction will succeed in the long run, not coup plotters and military governments that decide at their discretion when to release their country back into the hands of civilians. Countries like Botswana will succeed, even if it is only of limited use as an example because of its special colonial history, its diamond wealth and its small population. But there is still a lot to learn from the Gaborone governments that have been acting calmly for decades: limited terms in office do work, unspectacular changes of power. Above all, changing governments succeed in managing resources wisely and strictly, diversifying their economies and allowing all strata of the population to share in the prosperity. Unlike in Rwanda, a minimum of freedom is given and democratic exercise and success are interlinked.

This creates social security, stability and the greatest satisfaction in Africa. And it pleases investors, because countries like Botswana are particularly predictable. And yet, the flat, sparsely populated country in the south also shows that the crucial thing is to reflect on its own reserves.

The continent must break away from the decades-old logic that only a permanent injection of development aid, foreign investment and cash transfers from the diaspora will have a trickle-down-effect on prosperity. In my opinion, in 60 years of independence this has not been proven. Even the new, so altruistically appearing companion China is

not fit to be a savior. It is true that China’s political-economic clout can be used in the short term and at a pace the West cannot keep up with, for improvements in infrastructure. In the long run, however, this alliance will lead to the same dependency from which many African countries sought to free themselves in the postcolonial era. Cheap Chinese products are already destroying local production of simple consumer goods. Dreams of millions and millions of jobs have not come close to being fulfilled. Between 2014 and 2018, Chinese direct investment created fewer than 140,000 jobs. So the countries that will do best are those that provide stability and social progress, unleash their own creative as well as economic potential and confidently explain to new and old investors what a win-win situation is for them. In my view, the development of creative potential can best succeed in inspiring democracies. But more examples should follow soon.

A fighter loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) mans a guard post on the outskirts of the town of Hawzen in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia.

Old alliances from the Cold War are being revived, new brotherhoods in arms are emerging. Autocrats and militiamen of all stripes smell morning air.

Germination of hope

Africa-Europe relations have entered a paralysis phase during the last decade, despite many new programs. This is even more astonishing because both continents are very closely linked. Moreover, China, India, Russia and other emerging countries are influencing African developments. And, more importantly, the African continent is undergoing a tremendous transformation, characterized by urbanization, new economic dynamics and still major crises: climate and employment crises and significantly increasing food supply problems.

Europe-Africa relations

Already in the shadow of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and France’s announced withdrawal from Mali, the 6th EU-AU Summit was held in Brussels in February 2022. In the final declaration “A Joint Vision for 2030”, the Heads of State and Government of the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) emphasize “the increasing common challenges and opportunities”. They commit to developing a shared vision for a renewed partnership. They want to overcome the COVID crisis and develop a common framework for debt management. In addition, the

Text Robert Kappel

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, left, speaks during a media conference at the conclusion of the 6th EU-AU Summit in Brussels.

states agreed to fight illegal financial flows, to strengthen scientific cooperation and to promote the exchange of students. Cooperation within the framework of the African Peace and Security Architecture is also to be strengthened.

Financial resources were at the center of the discussions. An African-European Global Gateway Investment Package of 150 billion euros will be launched. The investments are intended to help build diversified, inclusive, sustainable and resilient economies and include measures on financing growth, migration, private sector support, climate change and energy transition, digital and transport, among others. The Global Gateway Investment Package, through its infrastructure programs, also aims to contain China’s geopolitically driven “Road and Belt” initiative.

The debates on access to Corona vaccines were controversial. The parties finally agreed on a technology transfer: vaccines are to be produced under license

In Kibera Slums, most residents especially the street vendors, private schools, Nongovernmental Organizations, street lights, and schools are all using the cheap solar energy system which is a more reliable and cheap source of energy.

in six African states. Another fault line in the partnership was also discussed. While the EU and its members never tire of calling for an energy turnaround on the continent, the African states stress that they are not responsible for climate change, but that they suffer the most, for example through the loss of biodiversity. The heads of state and government therefore called for more support in adapting to the energy transition and mitigating the consequences of climate change.

More challenges than ever

In all the talks, China’s shadow hovered over the Brussels summit. For China has clearly positioned itself in the “Scramble of Africa”. The country has become one of the most important economic players and a privileged partner. Russia’s actions in African countries are also of great concern to the EU, because in the Sahel, Russia has advanced to become a strategic counter-power to France and the EU.

Europe and Africa, despite all signs of fatigue, are perhaps closer than they think.

© Donwilson Odhiambo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Robert Kappel

is an economist and works at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Leipzig. He ranks among Germany’s leading Africa experts and runs the Competence Center and Postgraduate Program Small Enterprise Promotion and Training (SEPT).

The summit was an old-style cooperation summit. The EU promises funding and launches more and more new programs. The common agenda focuses on climate and vaccination strategies, but the central challenges on the continent are sidelined: Concepts on the future of work, the fight against poverty, industrialization, challenges of urbanization, restructuring of Africa’s volatile commodity economies and, above all, the further development of the AfCFTA (African Continental Free Trade Area).

The Europeans wanted to take the partnership “to the next level”. Instead of the “New Deal”, the Europeans could have created new trust by anticipating Africa’s great transformation and future challenges and struggling to find common solutions. Unfortunately, no agenda. One could also have expected that the African states would have formulated their conception for a new cooperation. Unfortunately, this was also not the case. So, the summit remains a missed opportunity. It was dominated by the EU, which failed to follow up on African initiatives or to create new coordination mechanisms for cooperation. Europe had presented a partnership Vision 2030 at the summit but failed to involve African governments and stakeholders in advance.

Europe and Africa, despite all signs of fatigue, are perhaps closer than they think, having largely bid farewell to the donorrecipient relationship and are debating the re-alignment of relations. A wide range of actors on both sides youth representatives, industry associations, businesses, civil societies, cultural practitioners, trade experts, research institutions, funding institutions, etc. are meeting in different forums to discuss a future agenda. Never before has the engagement of African non-state actors been so great. They want to help overcome the paralysis of European-African cooperation through soft-power networks and joint activities. A hopeful sign.

© Johanna Geron/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

French President Emmanuel Macron embraces Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta during a meeting on the second day of the 6th EU-AU Summit.

DW News coverage of war in Ukraine

Manuela Kasper-Claridge editor-in-chief

We’ve had to manage a lot, covering the news since the beginning of the year and especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. But our audiences are right to expect a lot from us. Thanks to excellent teamwork by our departments and dedicated contributions from our correspondents, DW has risen to the challenge.

Our reporters have told stories of hard fighting, of destroyed towns, of uncovered atrocities, of hiding in cellars and in metro stations, of finding dead loved ones, of being separated at the border, of fleeing to unknown futures in other countries. And we’ve covered the efforts to stop the war, through diplomacy, through sanctions, and through demonstrations. We have reported on the many ways the war is affecting other global regions too. This is more than just a European war and our comprehensive coverage would not have been possible without preparation behind the scenes.

Yevhen Shylko cameraman

I have covered eastern Ukraine since 2014. Even then, there were many deaths among soldiers and civilians. But I had not seen as many dead bodies, despair, tears, destroyed houses, cars, and technology as I have in these last months. The most terrible thing is when mothers see their dead children. It’s very difficult to film that. You have to live with everything you see human memory cannot be formatted like a memory card in a camera.

Alexandra von Nahmen correspondent

We met Vadim and his family at the border crossing. He took two days off from his unit at the front to get his family to safety. Their last embrace almost broke my heart. Vadim’s daughter couldn’t let him go. His son cried silently, trying to stay brave. Vadim’s wife smiled at me softly through her tears. ’When you’re with your family, you feel better,’ Vadim said. ’Now, I’ll be alone, but I know they will be safe.’

Alexandra von Nahmen with soldier “Lawyer” near Kyiv.

Fanny Facsar correspondent

Waking up to the sound of explosions in our hotel in Kyiv caused a mix of shock and disbelief. Your body wants to run, especially when you see others hastily packing their equipment. But everyone on the DW team stayed and kept working as war became a fact. It wasn’t until later that night in a bunker that I had time to reflect. Our decision to stay and to keep reporting, especially in such a situation, is pivotal.

Working together well ahead of time

Newsgathering and many other DW departments had been preparing since November 2021 to provide special coverage in the event of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That meant already producing content including maps and background pieces. DW set up workflows to make it easier for the Russian and Ukrainian desks in Bonn, the news department in Berlin and other key locations to work together. These key locations included especially the foreign bureaus in Washington and Brussels.

When the invasion began, the DW bureau in Kyiv saw Ukrainian journalists, producers and cameramen, as well as reporters from Berlin and other European bases in place to provide material for television, online and social media in several languages.

Violetta Chaikovska news editor

With the outbreak of war, I had to leave my house and all my belongings except for my work laptop and a few small items that fit in my hand luggage. I took refuge in a safer region of the country – in as far as one can speak of safety in this war. You learn to deal with the emotional roller coaster moving between ’we are all going to die’ and ’life will go on’, when you alternate between writing about the death of a pregnant woman in Mariupol, the Twitter dispute between Elon Musk and Ramzan Kadyrov, Pink Floyd reuniting to record a Ukrainian song, and then to people raped and tortured to death in Bucha.

Christian Trippe director of Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe

Covering a war is never easy, but these are extraordinary circumstances. Some of our newsroom staff have lost relatives in Ukraine. Our Russian and Ukrainian teams work in one department, producing content with strong impact and solid analysis because they tell a complete story. We are frustrating Putin’s propaganda every day with the very effective work our entire department is doing.

©

DW

Kostiantyn Honcharov correspondent

Working around Kyiv in areas that were heavily destroyed in fighting and had been under occupation for more than a month, I was shocked by the Russians’ cruelty to civilians: corpses in the streets, mass graves, destroyed homes and civilian infrastructure. Before, I imagined war as a military confrontation between armies. But what I saw in Bucha and Borodianka showed that Russian troops in the Kyiv region had fought mainly against peaceful civilians.

Mathias Bölinger correspondent

This is the most challenging time of my career. The fear and shock around us, the uncertain future of a country I had just moved to and that was supposed to be my home for the next few years. It felt surreal to see the city that had just been the lively capital of an emerging economy transform into a wartime capital. News was coming in by the second and at the same time we were constantly evaluating how to stay safe and be able to report the news.

Prevented, but never stopped

A few weeks before President Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, DW had been ordered by Russian authorities to close its news bureau in Moscow. DW journalists’ credentials were then all cancelled. The news desk quickly devised ways to compensate for the lack of on-site coverage from Russia and ensure that we could continue reporting the full picture.

Anna Fil correspondent

I have reported on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. But when the same thing happens in your own country, it hurts humanly; journalistically it’s easier, because you know exactly what the story is. I did daily live broadcasts on the war for our Russian viewers as well as for the international program and reported about the human tragedies in occupied parts of the country.

As such, from the early morning hours of February 24 on, DW has produced continuous coverage across all platforms around the clock: The English language TV channel went into a live “rolling news mode” for ten days. DW’s other TV channels and online coverage including social media in 32 languages provided up-tothe-minute information and context for our users around the globe.

Correspondents, producers and crews remain in Ukraine to continue covering breaking news and providing local insights and analyses.

© DW

Bonn Institute founder

Keeping an eye on what people can tolerate

Ms. Heinrichs, the Bonn Institute was founded shortly before the start of the war in Ukraine. Promoting constructive journalism in times of war is that an impossible task or a matter of now more than ever?

When Vladimir Putin’s army invaded Ukraine, our institute was barely four weeks old; our first seminars for journalists were still pending. Against the backdrop of war in Europe, we’ve set out on the challenging path to support media organizations that want to transform their reporting, so it includes more constructive approaches.

Let me be clear: Nothing about war is positive; there is nothing to sugar-coat. And constructive journalism does not mean simply spreading positive news this is a common misunderstanding. Constructive journalism means reporting on both, problems and solutions, and including nuances and various perspectives into the coverage. In times of crises, that’s not only possible but extremely necessary.

How can your institute help analyze reader preferences?

To support our content-producing colleagues, the Bonn Institute will conduct a study on constructive journalism in times of war in the upcoming months. Our goal is to find out what users would like to read more of in the context of war reporting and which newsrooms and desks have best-practice examples that we can share with others as inspiration.

What could constructive war reporting look like in practical terms?

In trying to include various perspectives, we can ask ourselves who is affected by the war and how exactly. The more perspectives we include in our reporting, the more accurately it will reflect what is going on. Then we are in a position to not only ask how this war can be won and by whom, but also focus on efforts to achieve peace. We also need to bear in mind that the average media user does not want

to be preoccupied with the war all day long, as many of us journalists are. Their information needs to differ from ours. By focusing on their actual information needs no matter how basic they may be we can reduce their feelings of powerlessness.

And lastly, it’s important to remember that in real life, even in wartime, there is rarely just black or white. Shades of grey also exist in war. We should therefore use the little word “and” more often, because allowing for complexity brings us closer to the ideal of objective reporting.

What needs to change in newsrooms if they want to adopt constructive approaches?

First, they must acknowledge that truly comprehensive reporting is not actually possible, since selecting topics by definition means covering a mere section of what’s going on. Journalists should therefore ask themselves: If I can’t include everything anyway, why not consciously select constructive topics?

Ellen Heinrichs on constructive journalism in times of war and crisis, her work at the Institute and why she hopes that someday the label “constructive” will no longer be needed.

Interview Laura Schameitat, DW editor

The Bonn Institute

was founded in March 2022 with the support of four partners: Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Rheinische Post publishing group, media company RTL Deutschland and the Constructive Institute at Aarhus University, Denmark. A non-profit organization, the Bonn Institute promotes journalism that is solutions-oriented and rich in perspectives and that seeks to facilitate public debate. It offers workshops for journalists, collaborates with newsrooms on projects and conducts studies that analyze the impacts of constructive approaches. The organization currently has a permanent staff of six. Ellen Heinrichs is the Institute’s founder and CEO. Before launching the Institute, she held various positions at DW.

bonn-institute.org

Second, they must do away with the image of themselves as “gatekeepers” who decide what is important for their audiences. This is because what we journalists think is relevant often does not correspond with what people want to read.

Let’s look at other topics, like the pandemic. Has this helped or hindered constructive journalism?

The pandemic has helped boost constructive journalism. Fact and data-based journalism has been in high demand and media outlets that have applied constructive approaches, have registered more time spent by users on websites with constructive journalism. Every global crisis also has an impact right at home. During war, refugees are welcomed at a municipal level and it is local authorities that have to provide for them and help them integrate. During a pandemic, citizens need to be informed about local case rates, regulations and vaccination programs.

I believe constructive approaches provide local media with a unique opportunity. They are often in a position to pick up on different opinions and initiate constructive debates without much extra effort. A local media organization can mediate between individual groups, thus contributing to the extremely important task of combating societal polarization.

Where do you see constructive journalism in five years?

I am convinced that media companies cannot survive digitalization by focusing exclusively on technology. New distribution platforms are important, but we must also consider what kind of content we need to produce to make sure we are still relevant tomorrow. How can journalism contribute to society? How can it help people improve their lives? If media organizations increasingly take these questions into account in their daily work, we might not even need the label “constructive” at some point.

DW/F. Görner

The fabric of our lives

Censorship has been used by dictators and autocrats for decades to limit access to free information, control the news and use it for their own propaganda. But how can the international press ensure that people in these countries are being offered an unbiased view of relevant events? The first issue is providing the tools.

DW has always worked to provide solutions to circumvent censorship and provide information to the people. For example, people in countries whose governments block or restrict access to independent news can access DW content

securely and anonymously with the Tor Project. Over the past decade, DW has also been utilizing a censorship circumvention system called Psiphon, which works by using a network of different proxy servers.

The second issue is letting people know that these tools are available and that’s where fashion comes in. By sewing a list of tools for censorship circumvention into each garment from our Uncensored Collection, we wanted to promote the topic and provide concrete solutions to an increasingly menacing problem.

How a fashion collection draws attention to one of the most essential human rights: freedom of speech.

Text Clint Waddell, DW Marketing Find

The collection

The new Uncensored Collection was developed by DW in cooperation with Berlin-based designer Marco Scaiano. Along with highlighting an important message, each garment includes instructions for tools to help people circumvent censorship and access independent media no matter where they are.

“Freedom is stitched into everything we do,” said Guido Baumhauer, Managing Director Distribution, Marketing and Technology. “The Uncensored Collection reflects our fight against censorship and our support for freedom of expression worldwide.”

The collection is being sold online to customers worldwide, with proceeds from sales going to support the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

The campaign

To ensure that our message was being heard, we worked on several different fronts to spread the word in different markets and different languages. Along with digital and print ads, the campaign is also being promoted at airport terminals with flights leaving to countries like Iran, Russia, China, Ethiopia and Venezuela. On-air spots were produced and are being run on DW’s international TV channels. We also worked with influencers in each of our target regions to help carry the message to their followers on Instagram, YouTube and other social media channels.

10 million video views in the first month

The results

We had more than 10 million video views and 100 million impressions in the campaign’s first month alone. We used this campaign to isolate the issue in each of the target regions and it worked. Free speech and censorship were hot topics on talk shows and in the comments sections on social media. And items from the Uncensored Collection were sent to customers worldwide.

100 million impressions in the first month

March 18, 2022: Russian rhythmic gymnasts Dina and Arina Averina, and artistic gymnast

Ivan Kulyak (L-R) attend a concert titled Crimean Spring held at Luzhniki Stadium to mark the eighth anniversary of the reunification of Crimea with Russia.

In the photos, the twins are grinning from ear to ear, their Olympic gold medals dangling from their necks. They are standing on a podium alongside other star athletes from their country. But the Russian gymnasts Dina and Arina Averina are not appearing at a medal ceremony. The letter “Z” a Russian military symbol embroidered on their tracksuits is the giveaway. This is a pro-war rally, hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium.

Little more than a month earlier, Putin was one of the few world leaders who had attended the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Many had chosen to stay away in protest of China’s human rights record. Putin, though, would have heard the words of Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), in person: “Give peace a chance.”

The message fell on deaf ears. Four days after the Beijing Games ended, Russia invaded Ukraine.

IOC looks the other way

The Olympics lost their innocence

Putin has long been accused of using sport to burnish his own image and project Russia’s strength on the international stage. So desperate is the desire to succeed that he was prepared to sabotage his own country’s Winter Olympics, in Sochi in 2014, with an elaborate doping scheme that continues to cast a shadow over world sport, even today.

Despite branding the doping scheme a “fundamental attack on the integrity of sport,” the IOC appeared unwilling to rock the boat, ignoring calls to kick out Russian athletes from the Olympics and other major international events. Only now, in the face of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, has the IOC decided to act, pushing sports federations to ban Russians and Belarusians from their competitions.

Text Jonathan Crane, DW Sports

But in many ways, Russia’s invasion and the shockwaves it has sent through sport is the culmination of a long series of events that have raised uncomfortable questions about the cosy relationship between sport and politics.

“Sports organizations were warned,” said Minky Worden, a director at Human Rights Watch. “They were warned over a period of two decades that partnering with very serious human rights abusers is a recipe for disaster, and that you have no successful Olympics where there are serious human rights abuses.”

A controversial decision

The decision in 2015 to award Beijing the Winter Olympics seven years after it hosted the 2008 Summer Games was controversial. For starters, the Chinese capital has very little natural snowfall, meaning it was entirely reliant on environmentally unfriendly artificial snow. And then there was the issue of human rights, the elephant in the room from the moment Bach opened the envelope to reveal the name of Beijing.

“That period coincides with some of the worst human rights abuses in China in the post-Tiananmen Square massacre period,” Worden said. “That includes the forced internment of as many as a million Ugyhurs, and severe repression including forced labour, torture and the unjust jailing of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”

Unlike at the 2008 Games, when the IOC and others argued the Olympics would improve democracy in China, critics were under no illusions that this time around, they were dealing with a far more belligerent Beijing.

The Uyghur community in The Netherlands keeps demonstrating against the celebration of the Olympic Games in Beijing. In Amsterdam, on February 5, 2022.

“The human rights situation in China is now much worse than in 2008,” said Teng Biao, a Chinese dissident who was forced to flee the country after being targeted by authorities. “In 2022, the Chinese government did not even pretend to be open to the world. It became more and more totalitarian and aggressive.”

Inside the Beijing bubble

The coronavirus pandemic provided Games organizers with an excuse, if they needed one, to put those of us who travelled to Beijing on a tight leash. Athletes, coaches and journalists like me were confined to a closed-off bubble, effectively a city within the city, and we could only travel between our accommodation and venues in special Olympic buses. Uniformed police, themselves monitored by cameras, guarded padlocked gates to the bustling metropolis beyond.

The sea of hazmat-suited workers that greeted us at the airport gave a clear indication of what was to come: Daily PCR tests and the requirement to track our temperatures in an app did little to ease concerns that Big Brother was watching. Indeed, a report shared with DW ahead of the Games by cyber security group Citizen Lab found the My 2022 app contained vulnerabilities that could lead to hacking.

Unable to roam freely around Beijing to conduct interviews, we were reliant on scheduled daily briefings for the chance to challenge our hosts. But as I and my Western media colleagues soon discovered, no sporting organization can filibuster like the IOC.

Big questions left unanswered

“All IOC and organizing committee press conferences are very, very stilted,” said Olympic historian Philip Barker. “The journalists never get a chance to ask more than one question, and there’s never a dialogue, a cut and thrust, a to and for. The whole way the press conference is set up militates towards the control that you saw in Beijing.”

The hour-long briefings were all too often eaten up by monologues and presentations from the stage, aided and abetted by softball queries from Chinese journalists. As a consequence, arguably more important questions went unasked or were left unanswered.

Whenever we tried to press the IOC on China’s human rights record, Bach and Co. kept falling back on the organization’s need to be politically neutral. “If we are

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach makes remarks at the closing ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at the National Stadium.

© picture alliance/dpa/TASS/Sergei Bobylev

© picture alliance/NurPhoto/Romy Arroyo Fernandez

getting in the middle of tensions, disputes and confrontations of the political powers, then we are putting the Games at risk,” said Bach, who never once publicly commented on the plight of the Uyghurs.

Yet the seeming hypocrisy of that stance was laid bare when Yan Jiarong, a Beijing 2022 spokeswoman, used her final daily briefing to dismiss human rights abuses in Xinjiang as “lies” and to insist that Taiwan is part of China. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing: It was an extraordinary outburst.

“What I want to say, there is only one China in the world,” Yan opined, completely unprompted. The IOC response to her claims was muted to say the least, but of course, the show must go on.

“The IOC has clearly violated the Olympic Charter by keeping silent on atrocities committed by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Teng said. “It became complicit in Beijing’s suppression of freedom. Being politically neutral between a dictatorship and the suppressed is the politics of supporting the dictator.”

Double standards in sport

The term sportswashing describes how sport is used to launder a reputation, to make the viewing public forget an uncomfortable truth. While the word’s usage may be relatively new, the concept is not. According to Barker, there were “notions of nationalism” from the earliest Olympic Games. “It seems to have been, if not ever present, in the background,” he said.

Perhaps the most infamous example in the Games’ modern history is the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which took place at a time when Adolf Hitler was waging a campaign of persecution against Jewish people and other minorities in Germany. Barker says the so-called Nazi Olympics were probably the first example of sportswashing, as Hitler sought to normalize his brutal regime and promote its Aryan ideals.

“It was seen as part of the charm offensive, a coming out party for Nazi Germany,” Barker said. “The IOC doesn’t come out of it terribly well. [Former IOC president Avery] Brundage looked at Nazi Germany through blinkered eyes — ’Is the competition being run OK in the venues?’ — and not really caring about anything that was societal at all.”

It has taken a different war in Europe for the IOC to finally get off its apolitical fence. Cynics could be forgiven for wondering why some atrocities, such as those committed against the Uyghurs, are mostly ignored, while the invasion of a European nation is not.

All of which now begs the question: Can the idea that sport be kept separate from politics still be justified when for too long, dictators and authoritarian regimes have benefitted from its prestige?

HRW director Minky Worden, for her part, is clear what has to happen. She says the IOC must urgently adopt a human rights framework, and that there needs to be a serious reckoning with the legacy of the recent Olympics. Otherwise, she says, it may lead the IOC to think it can do it again.

“That means we’re going to be looking at the Saudi Arabia Olympics,” Worden said. “It is absolutely the case that the world’s most serious human rights abuses are coming for its biggest events. The narrative from the IOC is that Olympism is a substitute for human rights, and it is not. Olympism itself, as the world has seen, is a way for the worst regimes to use the rules of the Olympics to silence critics, while also covering themselves in global glory.”

The journalists never get a chance to ask more than one question, and there’s never a dialogue.

DW correspondent Jonathan Crane reports during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, February 4, 2022 in Beijing, China. Putin attended the Olympics as a guest of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

© DW

A hive of activity

“Bonjour chers collègues,” writes Awa Ouedraogo in the new app’s digital editing group chat. After the development team fixed a bug, it’s now even easier to log in.

Ouedraogo is a journalist at one of the best-known online radio outlets in Burkina Faso, Radio Vénégré. The station is one of 23 community radio broadcasters, local media outlets and media organizations among 13 countries in Africa and Latin America that developed Colmena together with DW Akademie and its Mexican partner organization REDES A.C. “The software is not an external offer but rather a joint solution with local media, suited to their needs,” highlighted Erick Huerta Velázquez, Head Coordinator, REDES A.C.

Colmena Spanish for beehive is a digital toolbox for community radio stations and local media that enables them to reliably continue to reach their audiences in challenging times. The project is part of the DW Akademie and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative “Transparency and media freedom Crisis resilience in the pandemic”.

When everything’s down, Colmena works

Nationwide lockdowns and individual quarantines were both showstoppers for media makers, whether in a radio studio or in a small and local media outlet. The pandemic made one thing clear: an

inclusive solution is needed, so that community reporters and local news staff can stay in contact digitally and continue to produce news coverage.

“In times of crisis, reliable information can save lives. Local media contribute greatly, overcoming distances and language barriers,” says Natascha Schwanke, Head of Media Development, DW Akademie. “Colmena strengthens local media so that they can strengthen their communities.”

Open, secure, no fee

Colmena is currently available in six languages: Arabic, English, French, Kiswahili, Portuguese and Spanish. Colmena is 100 percent open

source and is also open to everyone who would like to be involved with its ongoing development. The project aims at a lively community of users. However, it is not only about producing together, but also about early adopters sharing their knowledge with new users.

Awa Ouedraogo and her colleagues at Radio Vénégré have taken on this role, assisting their partner station, Community-Radio La Voix de Paysant, through the first steps of using Colmena. They have already produced a few radio segments which can be heard on the project’s website. It’s the beginning of a new productive journey.

blog.colmena.media

Colmena software enables a new way of working for local media to reliably report during crises, DW Akademie has developed an app which functions like an on-the-go editing room.

Text Nils Brock, Vivienne Gager and Jasmin Rietdorf, DW Akademie

© Colmena/Gabriela Racines

G.

One day the thaw will come

Оттепель наступит

Irgendwann ist wieder Tauwetter

Refuge in Riga

Following the forced suspension of DW operations in Russia, DW has temporarily relocated its Moscow news bureau to Riga in Latvia. The bureau will be a hub for DW’s formerly Moscow-based staff who will provide coverage from there. A team of correspondents and producers will be working from Riga to produce journalistic content for DW’s television and online channels to serve the needs of DW’s Russian-speaking audiences as well as other DW foreignlanguage services.

Juri Rescheto, DW’s Moscow Bureau Chief, said: “DW is committed to providing a credible, uncensored alternative to Russian media for its Russian-speaking audience. Currently, there is particular focus on giving viewers and users the full scope of Russia’s war on Ukraine. From Riga we will also cover the Baltic and Scandinavian countries.”

On February 3, Russian authorities closed DW’s Russian operations and revoked the press credentials of DW’s Moscow staff and on March 4 they restricted access to DW websites.

dw.com/ru

DWrussian

@dw_russian

dw.russian

DW.novosti

DWglavnoe

Text Juri Rescheto, DW Bureau Chief, Riga © DW/J. Rescheto

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A Berlin view on foreign a airs

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Would you like to know more about how Berlin and Brussels perceive the world? Are you looking for European voices that shape the international a airs debate?

Then take a closer look at INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY (IPQ).

SpringThe2022 Issue

IPQ is the English edition of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK (IP), Germany‘s leading foreign a airs magazine, published by the German Council on Foreign Relations/Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP). A new issue appears every three months and we also provide ongoing coverage about what’s shaping German and European foreign a airs with regular columns on our website.