Daily Brief Audio Series
With the coup in Niger just barely two days old, we’re at a familiar stage with such situations internationally.
There’s condemnation from all the key bodies: the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, and the United Nations. And there are still key diplomatic players – in this case, for example, France – who want to talk about “an attempted coup” to avoid sounding like it’s a done deal.
It’s a bit of a diplomatic dance that mixes outrage with hope. Everyone wants to signal that coups are unacceptable and it’s not too late for the coup leaders to change their minds. But, of course, everyone also realizes that, with each passing hour, this hope fades.
On Wednesday, Niger army officers of the self-proclaimed National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (Conseil National pour la sauveguarde de la patrie, CNSP) announced on national television the overthrow of the government of President Mohamed Bazoum.
Speaking on behalf of the coup leaders, major-colonel Amadou Abdramane proclaimed that the constitution had been dissolved, all institutions suspended, and the nation’s borders closed. He said his forces had toppled Bazoum because of the deteriorating security situation, as well as “poor economic and social governance.”
Many then took to the streets in support of Bazoum, who was elected president in 2021 in Niger’s first democratic transition since it gained independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Soldiers supporting the coup fired warning shots to disperse them.
Yesterday several hundred people gathered in front of the National Assembly to show support for the coup leaders, calling for the departure of French troops and for the intervention of Russia.
This is the fourth coup in Niger’s history since 1960, and the latest in a string of recent military takeovers in the Sahel region and West Africa. Since 2020, there have been four military coups in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso. In 2021, military coups also occurred in Chad, Guinea, and Sudan.
Niger can ill afford further unrest and insecurity. The country already suffers from attacks by armed Islamist groups, as well as floods and droughts due to climate change. Niger is in the midst of a complex humanitarian crisis, with 4.3 million people, about 17 percent of the population, requiring humanitarian aid.
While the international community condemns the coup and pushes for its reversal, the people of Niger have to deal with the situation as it is on the ground. And, as everywhere, whoever’s in charge on the ground is who’s responsible for protecting people from harm. That means respecting human rights.
Rabia Djibo Magagi, a prominent human rights defender in Niger, told Human Rights Watch what she’s hoping for right now:
“The unrest generated by the coup should not create a void in the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms. The new military authorities should ensure that the human rights of all Nigeriens are upheld.”
About the only good thing that can be said about authoritarian regimes is they make no secret of their basic nature. Even when they try to throw on the trappings of democracy, they are almost always so bad at it, it fools no one.
The latest example comes from Cambodia, where this week we’re seeing that classic authoritarian favorite: transferring power from father to son.
After almost four decades in power, Prime Minister Hun Sen is passing the torch to his eldest son, Hun Manet. It’s as obvious as it was unsurprising – this transition has been in the works for years.
The announcement came a few days after the ruling Cambodian People’s Party took all parliamentary seats in a national show they called an “election.” That word has to be in quotation marks, because it wasn’t really a contest. There was no serious competition allowed. Hun Sen was boxing alone in the ring.
In the run up to this “election,” Hun Sen used every repressive tool at his disposal to rid Cambodia of all political opposition. The government harassed and even arrested members and supporters from the only serious possible competitor, the Candlelight Party.
We’ve seen it all before. In the 2018 “election,” Cambodia’s politicized courts simply dissolved the main opposition party ahead of time.
Uncompetitive elections and the handing of power from farther to son – the most textbook of authoritarian moves – would be almost comically cliché, laughable even, if the reality in the country weren’t so tragic.
People in Cambodia suffer under draconian laws, and authorities use arbitrary arrests, government-controlled judicial harassment, and violence to silence dissent. Politically motivated mass trials have been held for opposition members and human rights defenders. Cambodia still holds more than 50 political prisoners.
Its authoritarianism is as brutal as it is obvious.
The Most Serious Women’s Rights Crisis in the World, Daily Brief July 26, 2023
Daily Brief, July 26, 2023.
A wave of recent international media attention on the Taliban’s closure of beauty salons in Afghanistan has too often missed the point.
My colleague and women’s rights expert, Heather Barr, sets folks straight:
“This isn’t about getting your hair and nails done. This is about 60,000 women losing their jobs. This is about women losing one of the only places they could go for community and support.”
Since taking control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have crushed the rights of Afghan women and girls. The list of Taliban abuses against them is long and grim.
They have banned girls and women from education above the sixth-grade level. They’ve banned women from most employment. They’ve imposed severe restrictions on women and girls to travel and even leave their homes. They’ve banned women and girls from competitive sports.
The Taliban have also completely dismantled the system that had been developed to respond to gender-based violence in Afghanistan. That’s actually a key reason why the closure of beauty salons is so devastating: It was one of the last havens for mutual support among Afghan women.
The Taliban have also been conducting a brutal crackdown against women who have protested against these abuses. This includes the torture of these women.
This all adds up to the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world.
There’s been international concern about these abuses – and many others by the Taliban – but much of this concern has been weak and uncoordinated so far. Even two years after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, many governments still seem at a loss as to what to do about the Taliban’s thuggish barbarity generally and their crimes against women specifically.
One possibly hopeful move that could change things came in March with the UN Security Council mandating an independent assessment of the international approach to the country.
It seeks to address “human rights and especially the rights of women and girls,” along with other key issues the international community is trying to deal with. Remember, Afghanistan is also one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The independent assessment should provide recommendations for an integrated and coherent approach among key international actors, in a report to the Security Council in November.
If it does its job well, the independent assessment should both help restore global attention to the situation in Afghanistan and propose concrete steps for holding the Taliban and other abusers accountable.
To be successful, it must undo the fact that, as my colleague Heather Barr says, “Afghan women and girls and others suffering under Taliban repression feel abandoned by the world.”
When a new government comes to power, you expect it to make changes, but you don’t expect it to erase history – especially not your family’s history.
And yet, this is exactly what is happening in Italy today: The government is removing parents from their children’s birth records.
A state prosecutor in northern Italy has ordered the cancellation and reissue of some birth certificates for no other reason than that they aren’t in line with the new government’s ideology.
Authorities are sending letters to 33 people, telling them they are being retroactively removed from the most fundamental record of their child’s birth. Their family history is erased and rewritten.
Only the “gestational” parent will be on the new document. If you didn’t actually carry the fetus inside you before the birth, you don’t count.
This radical rewriting of history will not affect all “non-gestational” parents equally, however. Tens of millions of men who never carried a child or gave birth are spared.
The government’s intolerant ideology is focused on a small minority of parents in this case: lesbians. The revised birth certificates are being issued listing the name of only one of the child’s parents, the gestational one, not both.
Along with the Kafkaesque, the psychological trauma of the authorities deciding to write you out of your child’s life and the reissue of these documents has grim, practical consequences, endangering access to medical care and education.
The government is tearing up Italy’s international obligations, too. The right to create a family is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Italy has ratified all of these, yet the government now ignores them.
The latest move by the state prosecutor in northern Italy will affect “only” 33 couples, but it’s clearly part of the government’s general direction. It follows the government’s January order for state agencies to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples.
It’s a relatively small minority of people, but hate-driven political movements always focus on punishing small minorities as hate targets. The political program of this government (and others in Europe) is to whip up anger against minorities – refugees, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks – and try to transform that artificially intensified anger into electoral success.
And you can’t build up public anger and then not follow through with policies to match. Inevitably, the politics of hate demands others be sacrificed and their rights crushed.
But, of course, punishing minorities never solves any of the real problems voters have in their day-to-day lives. So, to distract voters from that eternal truth, the politicians hit those hate targets harder and find new targets to lash out at. The attacks on human rights mount.
If their supporters just stopped for a second and thought about it, maybe they would ask why their fellow citizens are being written out of history. And then ask – simply in their own interest and the interest of their own families – who’s next?
But the constant drumbeat of political hate rarely pauses to allow such reflection.
“I was at the market when the shooting started,” said a 28-year-old man describing events in the village of Ouenkoro, Mali.
“I saw three military helicopters flying low, one of them firing. People fled in all directions. I took my motorbike and rode as fast as I could. I saw two people falling on the ground behind me, shot from the helicopters.”
Malian armed forces are committing serious abuses like this in village after village in their military operations against Islamist armed groups. The military has summarily executed and forcibly disappeared civilians, as well.
They are not acting alone, however.
Foreign fighters are assisting Mali’s armed forces in these operations – and taking part in the abuses, too. They’re white men who don’t speak French, and witnesses to their destruction describe them as “Russians” or “Wagner.”
Yes, Moscow’s malevolent military machinations apparently reach all the way to Mali. A new HRW report offers further evidence of the Russia-linked Wagner Group operating in the country.
The mercenary outfit under Yevgeny Prigozhin is, of course, better known both for its long-running brutality in Ukraine and a short-run insurrection against Moscow in June. But Prigozhin has acknowledged Wagner’s presence in Africa, and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has a admitted at least twice the Wagner Group “provides security services” to Mali’s government.
What these “services” look like can be seen in the assault on the village of Séguéla, Mali, in February. Survivors describe how a large number of “white” foreign fighters in uniform carried out the attack, which resulted in beatings, looting, and the arrest of 17 men. Eight of their bodies were later found.
The overall situation in Mali is made more worrying by the impending withdraw of the 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, at the request of Mali’s government. One part of the UN mission has been to monitor human rights violations.
The future absence of that international attention may please both Mali’s forces and its Russian allies – and also their enemies, the abusive Islamist armed groups. But it will do nothing to help Mali’s long-suffering people.