David Leask's Four Corners: Insight on Russia, USA, Tajikistan and Italy

Russia

Why indigenous children who can’t drink milk now go hungry

IN the north of the Urals, close to the entirely arbitrary eastern frontier of Europe, there is a little town called Polunochnoye (midnight in Russian).

It is home to a residential school, including for the children of one of the Eurasia’s smaller indigenous ethnic groups, the Mansi, a nation historically made up of reindeer herders, hunters and trappers.

There are now fewer than 12,000 Mansi, a people once called Voguls who speak a Ugric tongue related to Finnish. But the Mansi of Polunochnoye speak an endangered dialect of the language. There may be as few as 40 of them left.

Last week, this tiny community made national news in Russia. In stories with real echoes from more serious abuses at residential schools for indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere, it emerged that pupils were going hungry because they couldn’t stomach the food they were served.

The row started with a teacher called Anna Voronkova. A specialist in minority languages, she had come up the Urals to do some volunteering with Mansi youngsters.

“I was doing some work with the children, making postcards,” she told independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, “when one drew a picture and wrote on it in Mansi ‘I want to eat’.” That image has been widely shared on mainstream and social media.

Many Mansi are lactose-intolerant, Novaya Gazeta explained. The young people were not able to process the milky cereals they were given.

There are only eight children, aged between 12 and 17, from this group of Mansi and their parents live and work more than 100 miles away in the forest. 

But education is compulsory so like many other northern indigenous people they are packed off to residential schools. 

Voronkova ended up being hauled into the local police station to explain her complaints.

But parents, some of whom had been unable to visit during Covid, added spoke up: “The pandemic has turned the school into a prison,” Voronkova  told the paper. The linguist, who works for the Russian Academy of Sciences, also claimed children who did not understand Russian were shouted at.

The school’s head accused Voronkova of encouraging complaints and dismissed criticism.

However, one senior local official has already agreed to demands from parents for their children to get moose and deer meat they can digest. Human rights officials have scheduled inspections.

Most Mansi live in the resource-rich Khanty-Mansi autonomous district on the other side of the Urals.

This area is sometimes called Yugra, the ancient name for the lands of the Ugric-speaking peoples before they were taken over by an expanding Russia in the sixteenth century. A campaign for more devolution for Yugra in the early 1990s failed. 

Last week, Canadian Catholic bishops publicly apologised for the treatment of indigenous children separated from their parents by force and put into residential schools right up until 1996.

“We acknowledge the grave abuses that were committed by some members of our Catholic community – physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, cultural, and sexual,” they said.“We also sorrowfully acknowledge the historical and ongoing trauma and the legacy of suffering and challenges faced by indigenous peoples that continue to this day.”

Such institutions were run by various churches and organisations. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called them an act of “cultural genocide”. 

USA

Pennsylvania is set to undo prison gerrymandering ... and the electoral map as it does so 

THEY cannot vote. But for decades America’s more than two million men and women behind bars – who are disproportionately people of colour – have been helping to elect largely white Republicans.

Ever since its war on drugs in the 1980s, the United States has had one of the world’s highest incarceration rates. The Home of the Free has more of its citizens in jail than Communist, authoritarian China, whose population is five times bigger.

Now, authorities in several states are starting to understand that their penal system is distorting their electoral one. It is not just that more black and brown people are disenfranchised as part of their punishment.

It is that locking them up far from home is literally being used to manipulate constituency sizes because inmates are counted as “residents” where they are incarcerated, boosting the size of that electoral district, and not where they grew up. But they do not get a ballot where they reside. Experts call this “prison gerrymandering”.

There is a growing move to stop this. American commentators describe it as a pitched battle over the landscape of the nation’s democracy between liberals and conservatives.

A cascade of states, including giant Illinois, are changing rules. The American Civil Liberties Union this summer called on more authorities to use new data from the US Census Bureau to redraw electoral boundaries with jailed people recounted where they live, not where they are serving their sentence.

“In an era of mass incarceration, where people are counted has a profound effect on our democracy – with downstream ramifications for under-counted communities,” the ACLU said. 

“Incarceration facilities were largely constructed in rural areas, ensuring a steady flow of captive constituents to those wards and districts. Representatives of those communities, in turn, don’t see themselves as accountable to their non-voting, incarcerated constituents.”

Last week, The Washington Post reported on just how big a deal prison gerrymandering is in one of America’s key swing regions: Pennsylvania. 

The state – well, commonwealth, technically – has a legislature where Republicans dominate despite losing the popular vote to democrats. 

The newspaper cited new research from Villanova University in Philadelphia that found more than a quarter-of-a-million people in the state were living in districts which would be too big if prisoners were added back into them. 

That included 100,000 African Americans in Philadelphia. Experts reckon black parts of the city would get two extra seats in the state legislature without prison gerrymandering.

It’s not just about prisoners or their families, Rory Kramer from Villanova told the paper. 

“It’s the person down the street, it’s the victim of their crime who lives in the same neighbourhood, it’s grandma down the street who’s lived in that neighbourhood for 70 years,” he said.

“It’s actually harming all of their representative power.”

His colleague Brianna Remster equated the gerrymandering to the original US constitutional compromise when enslaved black people were counted as two-thirds of a person for census purposes.

“This is very reminiscent of the Three-fifths Compromise, of how black and brown bodies are still being used to this day in most places around the United States to advantage White votes and White political influence,” she said.

Pennsylvania is set to undo the gerrymandering and America’s electoral map as it does so. 

Tajikistan

How a tiny former Soviet republic became a safe haven to opponents of the Taliban

AMERICA, Britain and their allies may no longer wish to stand up to the Taliban. But there is one country which does. And it is right next door to Afghanistan.

The government of Tajikistan has emerged as the main regional bulwark against the new regime in Kabul. 

The tiny former Soviet republic has given safe haven to opponents of the Taliban, such as the National Resistance Front, many of whom are ethnic Tajiks.

“The whole weight of the negative consequences of the international coalition departure is falling on the shoulders of the neighbouring countries,” Tajik president Emomali Rahmon, who has effectively run his country since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a 1990s civil war, said last month. 

He added: “Various terrorist groups are actively using the unstable military-political situation in Afghanistan in order to strengthen their positions.”

Small, poor central Asian nations like Tajikistan are braced for the fallout of the departure of US-led Western troops from Afghanistan and the fall of the government the West supported.

Officials in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, fear a new wave of refugees and drug trafficking. 

They also worry the Taliban could support islamist opponents of their own government. 
Rahmon, who has long secured the lifetime title of Peshvoyi Millat or “leader of the nation”, is widely seen as an authoritarian.

The Financial Times last week quoted an unnamed Western diplomat in Dushanbe on concerns Rahmon will use the Afghan crisis as a pretext to crack down on opponents, most likely citing counter-terrorism.

So far, the confrontation between Rahmon and the Tajiks and the Afghan Taliban has been verbal. But the war of words has been heated. A senior Taliban figure last week told Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera: “We will not allow any neighbouring nation to interfere in the internal matters of Afghanistan.” 

More junior figures in the movement have said they will take no lectures on democracy from Rahmon after his 27-year uninterrupted rule.

Some regional watchers fear a cold war could get hot. Russia, which has thousands of troops in central Asia, carried out border exercises last week. It also called for calm. The Tajik defence ministry is understood to be preparing for a potential mobilisation, drawing up reserve lists.

The Taliban might not be in a position to invade – and they have denied a build-up of their forces on the border – but they could still use force to try to influence Rahmon.

“Large-scale provocations on the border could be viewed by the Taliban as a means of putting pressure on the leadership of Tajikistan and to force it to change its position and withdraw its support for the National Resistance Front,” analyst Parviz Mullojanov told regional news website Eurasianet.

There are strong linguistic and cultural links between the two countries

The Persian spoken in Tajikistan is almost identical to Dari, the lingua franca of Afghanistan, and Farsi in Iran. Dari-speaking ethnic Tajiks in Afghanistan have played a key role in fighting the Taliban, whose main recruitment ground has traditionally been among speakers of Pashto, another Persian language which is spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. 

However, there are Pashtuns who oppose the Taliban and Tajiks who support it.

Radio Free Europe late last month reported officials in Dushanbe were concerned Tajiks who had fought with the Taliban were filtering through the nearly 900-mile-long border between the countries. 

Tajikistan has not just sheltered ethnic Tajik fighters from Afghanistan but also commemorated Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban and was best known as the “lion of the Panjshir” after the valley where he put up a last stand against Russian invaders. 

This is also where opponents fought a rearguard action against the Taliban before surfacing in Dushanbe.

Italy

Left expected to gain major victories as ‘crisis of nerves’ grips Italian voters 

ITALY’S populist right goes into key local elections today facing what one of the country’s biggest papers called a “crisis of nerves”.

The once seemingly unstoppable Matteo Salvini of Lega – an admirer of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – has collapsed in the polls and failed to cement an alliance with the far-right Fratelli d’Italia.

Lega has been rocked by revelations of sex and drug parties by Salvini’s spin doctor, a man much credited with helping the politician build up a social media campaigning machine.

Salvini and the leader of the Fratelli, Giorgia Meloni, botched a photo opportunity in the key city of Milan last week – failing to show up at the same time in what left-leaning La Repubblica on its front page said was a symbolic split two days out from the polls.

Meloni said her plane was late and Salvini claimed he could not wait for her – but their proxies engaged in recriminations in the media. 

The pair on Friday tried to make up – with a public hug – at a meeting in support of a single rightist candidate for mayor of Rome. “We are destined to govern together,” Salvini declared.

Almost certainly not in Rome, however. The candidate they and their ally, former premier Silvio Berlusconi, are backing is not expected to occupy the mayor’s office on the Capitoline Hill.

Lawyer and radio journalist Enrico Michetti has likened Covid to flu and called for Italians to use the Roman salute – a gesture many associate with fascism and the inspiration for the Hitler salute – to greet each other during the pandemic. 

Incumbent mayor Virginia Raggi, from the anti-establishment populist Five Star Movement, has become deeply unpopular amid a Covid-era litter crisis which has seen wild boars enter the Italian capital to forage in piles of rubbish.

But polls suggest that a left candidate, Roberto Gualtieri, will take Rome.

Pollsters now predict the centre-left will take most high-profile cities in the first elections since, mid-pandemic, Italian lawmakers appointed technocrat Mario Draghi as premier.

Salvini’s Lega slipped back from around 34 per cent at its peak in 2019 to around 20%, about the same as the centre-left PD or Democratic Party and Meloni’s Fratelli.

The PD and Lega, along with the remnants of Five Star, are both officially part of Draghi’s rainbow coalition government. Salvini, however, has distanced himself from Draghi’s vaccine passports while Meloni has harried the administration from opposition. 

Aside from Rome and Milan, up for grabs are mayor posts in cities like Naples, Bologna and Turin as well as hundreds of smaller towns up and down the country. The left is expected to win in the major cities – but it may have to wait for run-off elections later this month to finalise victories.