Mo: People talk about it all the time, how stillness and quietness and silence have such a heavy weight, especially because we were blindfolded, so we didn't know where we're being taken.

Host: This is Mohamed Osman, or Mo.  In the last episode, Mo told us about getting arrested in Khartoum, after a pro-democracy protest. About a year later, Mo got into trouble… again!

Mo: We were doing some work with civil society for like legal support, especially for torture survivors by security forces.  They raided the office and then we got picked up from there by the security services. And then we've been taken, you know, you're blindfolded all the way.  We don't really know what's happening or what's going to happen next.

Host: Mo has this sort of lowkey affect when he speaks.  But the things that Mo has witnessed and done are hardcore.This was 2013. The genocide in Darfur had taken place about a decade earlier. The man mostly responsible for all that killing, Omar al-Bashir, was still in power. And Mo was about to learn a lesson about the nature of that power.  After he'd been questioned, Mo’s interrogator had him and a few other detainees brought to a room…

Mo: … And the room had in one of the side walls, painted by chalk, this big bicycle. And then he asked us - or he asked me first, to ride it.

Ngofeen: So there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a chalk bicycle, a bicycle chalk, like a drawing of a bicycle on a wall.

Mo: Exactly. Yeah.  So there was this moment when he asked me to do this. And one of the detainees who were clearly was quite roughened and beaten started actually giggling. Because like, so what do you mean, we can't, it doesn't, it's not a real bike, we cannot do it.   And in a very calm way, the interrogator said again, ‘go and ride that bike’.  And after back and forth, he just laughed he's like, ‘well, you know, we're going to make you stay enough here to know that if we told you to do something, you will do it.  It's not about the reality of it’.

Host: So that was the power Mo was fighting against in Sudan under Omar al-Bashir. When they told you to ride a bicycle drawn in chalk on the wall, you behaved … and believed …   like it was a real bicycle…

Mo: And that was very clear, you know, the psychological aspect of it, of subjugating people to do things. You know, losing the critical faculty of realizing what's real or what's not.

Host: Several years later, in 2018,  Mo became a researcher for Human Rights Watch, and since then he’s been fighting that power by investigating and documenting what’s real and what’s not in Sudan.

Mo: This is a power conflict. This is a conflict about regional interest, about global interest. This is a conflict, when there is a world that, you know, years and decades ago said, ‘never again’, and it happens again and again and again.

Host: This is Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele.

This is the second in our two-part series on Sudan: our attempt to explain what’s going on in that country. Because, as you probably know, the news has been bad. Really bad. Fighting in Khartoum, mass killings in Darfur again, another possible genocide in the works.

Archival/France 24: It began a little over a year ago as an argument between two top generals, it’s now become a full-blown civil war….

Dr. Christopher Tounsel: I think the numbers now are approximately 14,000 people killed, but then 10 million displaced.

Host: In part one, me, Mo, and another member of the African diaspora, historian Dr. Christopher Tounsel…

Tounsel: …right…

Ngofeen: …we brought the story up to about 2019. The backstory of what led up to the current crisis. Which we’ll now do our best to explain. It’s kinda complicated.

External Narrator: Recap: The Dictator is Deposed.

Archival/Vox: On December 19, 2018, a revolution started to spread throughout Sudan.

Host: The democracy movement that started with the Arab Spring and that Mo had been a part of… it hadn’t gone away. But neither had the dictatorship.

Bashir/AP Archive: [Arabic, vowing to safeguard safety and security] [Fade under]

Ngofeen: Omar al-Bashir stayed in power by spending lavishly on security–coup proofing, it’s called. There were two main players. The Sudanese Armed Forces or SAF–they had about three hundred thousand soldiers. And then two, the second group was the RSF or Rapid Support Forces, with about 100,000 soldiers. And for years, it had worked! That bicycle stayed chalked on the wall…

Archival: [more Bashir in Arabic]

Archival: sounds of protest…

Ngofeen: BUT!

Tounsel: But the price of bread had gotten so high [fade down]

Host: The economy was tanking, and by late 2018 Bashir started looking very weak in the face of ongoing pro-democracy protests…

External Narrator: Question number 1: Who Deposed Bashir?

Tounsel: So in 2019,  Hemedti, who was the head of the Rapid Support Forces, and General Burhan, who was the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces…

Host: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Super important names in this story!

Tounsel: They see that the writing is on the wall for Bashir.

Archival/Vox: So on April 11th, 2019, they made a move that surprises civilians and Bashir…

Tounsel: Hemedti and Burhan…

Archival: Sudan’s longest serving leader has been arrested.

Tounsel: …arrest Omar Al Bashir.

Archival: Protestors celebrating

Host: This was celebrated in the streets of Khartoum. But here you have a very uneasy political situation. The pro-democracy movement has succeeded in pushing Bashir out of power, but it was Bashir’s lieutenants, Hemedti and Burhan, who actually had the power to arrest him. Up till now these two men had been working with Bashir to suppress protesters. Even killing scores of them in Khartoum. Within hours of arresting Bashir, these same guys they suddenly to civilian leaders and say, ‘hey we wanna work with you to restore democracy’…

External Narrator: Question number 2: Who are these guys?

Archival/France 24: [Hemedti speaking Arabic] Translator: We want free and fair elections and for the Sudanese people to pick who they want.

Host: Remember our two generals? Well, that’s one of them: Hemedti, the head of RSF, the Rapid Support Forces. From videos I’ve seen, he’s tall, thin, with hair closely cropped like Obama’s and a sometimes-you–see–it–sometimes–you–don’t mustache.  He seems very unassuming… and, for someone with his CV, he looks surprisingly young…

Archival/France 24: Known by the nickname Hemedti, he hails from a camel trading family in Darfur, where he rose up the ranks of widely feared Arab militias. As chief he caught the eye of President al-Bashir, who asked him to lead a campaign against the Darfur insurgency. Part of the notorious Janjaweed, his militias rampaged the region, leaving mass murder and rape in their wake.

Archival: [Burhan speaking Arabic/Al Jazeera interview] [fade down]

Host: And this is the other general, General Burhan of SAF. He’s fleshy, thickly mustached, and in videos he’s often in uniform wearing aviator sunglasses and a beret. So Hemedti: slight and unassuming, General Burhan: big and blustery…

Archival: [Burhan in Arabic, fade under]

Host: General Burhan had fought in Dafur, where he worked closely with Hemedti and the Janjaweed. Here’s another bit of important information. Burhan and Hemedti aren’t just military men. They’re rich military men…

Archival/Vox: To maintain the RSF’s loyalty, Bashir gave Hemedti financial autonomy, and allowed him to take control of some of Darfur’s gold mines… [fade under]

Host: Hemeti controlled gold mines, rented out RSF soldiers as mercenaries, and cultivated a network of foreign leaders and businessmen. General Burhan and the SAF made money in a kind of crony capitalism.

After they depose Bashir in 2019, Burhan is named chair of the governing council and Hemedti vice-chair. The idea was to share power with civilians until a democratic process could be put into place.

Tounsel: And so i n the interim from 2019 until 2021, you had this kind of transitional council where you had a joint civilian, and military unity government, right? It was agreed that there would be a transitional council where the army would be in charge for 18 months, but then they would hand over power to civilians for 18 months.

[Sounds’s of Tounsel’s child in background.]

Um, hold on one moment.

Host: …OK, pause here. Burhan and Hemedti have been in charge for close to 18 months, and they’re about to hand over the reins to a civilian government for the next 18 months… and Professor Tounsel’s kid just entered the zoom room. We’ll be back right after the break.

[ad break]

External Narrator: Question number 3: What Could Go Wrong?

Tounsel:  In 2021, the Sudanese military led by Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces stage a coup.  So the two men responsible for kicking Bashir out stage a coup in 2021 to basically undermine the kind of civilian process, right?

Ngofeen: So they're with the civilians in 19, ‘cause the civilians are protesting, they're with the civilians, everyone's like, alright, let's get Bashir out, Bashir’s out,  but by 2021, they're like, just kidding, we're in charge.

Tounsel: Exactly.

Mo: I think what makes it more unfair that there were years when we were there. Like, we ousted the dictatorship, we were building a democracy that got hijacked. And I think that even make it harder, moving from this place of hope when Sudan was really a beacon of hope in the region of a vibrant civil society and vibrant activism. And then that got snatched by military dictators under, you know, the watch of the world that allowed it to happen in the first place.

Ngofeen: You said, under the world's watch.  Do you feel that people outside of Sudan failed Sudan?

Mo: Yeah, I mean, I think we can even quickly track that to the last few years of al-Bashir dictatorship, right, which is like kind of isolated, you know, he's wanted by the international criminal court, U.S. sanctions.  And then in the last years, we start seeing Al Bashir and his regime more and more coming closer to the U. S. because of intelligence and counterterrorism cooperation. We start seeing the regime at that time getting a bit more concessions because of the support to the EU migration control plans. And this is the moment when people are like, but what about the human rights issues that you stood for and you said, well, we are against this dictatorship because it oppresses people. The moment you see your own benefits, you're like, then you start conceding very quickly.

Host: When the revolution happened, Mo says, the Sudanese people wanted accountability. They wanted justice for victims of the regime. They wanted that chalk bicycle on the wall to be erased…

Mo: Most of the international actors, you know, from the European Union, the United States, did not really prioritize that. They prioritized the question of stability. You know, over and over people told them, stability cannot be sustained if you have people who are not willing to see a transition reach its final, you know, final station around achieving sustainable democracy that just never happens.

Host: It’s still 2021. Burhan and Hemedti have arrested some of the civilian leaders in the government, and the military is now fully in charge. And as Mo just said, the international community just sort of lets it happen without much protest. But Burhan and Hemedti have their own problems. They have to figure out how to share power between them, between the SAF and the RSF. And this is where things really start to go south…

External Narrator: Question Number 4: How did all hell break loose?

Tounsel: Okay, so the issue that basically explodes in April 2023, during the twilight of what should have been the period of when Hemedti and Burhan are in power before they give power to a civilian council, there was disagreement between Hemedti and Burhan about the integration of the rapid support forces into the Sudanese army.

Host: Burhan wants Hemedti’s RSF to merge with the Sudanese Armed Forces in 2 years. 2 years. Hemedti disagrees.

Tounsel: He's thinking, well, now I'm going to lose all of my basically political capital.

Host: …and probably a lot of capital capital, too. Hemedti makes a counteroffer -- a merger in 22 years. The civilian leaders split it down the middle and say, ‘hey, 10 years.’ Room for compromise, right? Nope.

Tounsel: And so it's in the midst of that disagreement that the rapid support forces begin launching coup operations last April 2023.

Archival/ Al Jazeera: We begin with some breaking news coming in from Sudan where we’re getting reports of heavy gunfire across the capital.

Archival/ Al Jazeera: The army and the RSF have been battling it out to have the upper hand in the capital. [gunfire]

Archival/Africa News: Sudan’s Army Chief Abdul Fatah al-Burhan made his first appearance outside the army’s general command since the clashes erupted with the Rapid Support Forces

Archival/Al Jazeera: Talks to find an end to the bloodshed have failed to produce results.

Archival/Africa News: [Burhan/Arabic] VO: Anyone who says there’s an agreement or a deal with the RSF or someone is helping is delusional. We don’t strike deals with traitors or any party that betrays the Sudanese people.

Tounsel: As with all wars there have been massive civilian casualties…

Archival/Al Jazeera: In Khartoum alone, fighting killed at least 30,000 people.

Host: Civilian deaths in Sudan have been hard to count, but that number is almost certainly an underestimate. So this the beginning of the conflict that’s still going today, right now, with massive displacements of civilians and with the UN warning about a potential genocide.

External Narrator: Question number 5: Given all that, why does the media almost always give the impression that this an ethnic conflict?

Host: As Mo said earlier, the roots of this conflict lie in this struggle over power. But he also said something else…

Mo: I think I always believed that this war is war against Sudanese civilians by far and large. And I think this is the starting point of defining it. This is not a tribal conflict of having two tribes who just woke up one day and decided that they need to, you know, exterminate each other.

Host: If it’s NOT a tribal conflict, why is this the way the violence Western media, including in the New York Times often depicts this conflict. Well, here’s one reason…

Archival/Al Jazeera: The RSF also took over much of Darfur…

Host: Darfur! Because a lot of this killing is happening in Darfur. The same as 20 years ago.

Archival/Al Jazeera: The UN has accused the paramilitary group of ethnic cleansing and war crimes in West Darfur when it and ethnic militias targeted ethnic Massalit tribesmen. [Gunshot.] The international agency says in that state alone between 10 to 15 thousand people have been killed and more than half a million displaced by violence…

Host: Quick reminder from the last episode: the RSF emerged in 2013 out of the Janjaweed, the ethnically Arab militias Bashir used in the genocide 20 years ago. The RSF seems to be engaging in ethnic cleansing operations in the Darfur now, in the midst of the nationwide conflict. It’s an aspect of the conflict Mo knows well. He is a principal researcher on a recent Human Rights Watch Report,  Th’e Massalit Will Not Come Home: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in al Geneina, West Darfur’. But…

Mo: I mean, look at ethnicity as one factor. It is definitely there in certain parts of Darfur as a driver for the conflict, but it's not the only factor driving this, this violence. This is a power, this is a power conflict.

Host: Mo sees it as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism…

Mo: I think in a way to look at what's happening now or what's happening since April 15 last year. The Sudanese people at that time were fighting a coup that took place in 2021.  The coup by the military leaders of the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces decided to hijack the democratic transition for different reasons. It was a democratic transition that was very challenged. From the first hour people took to the street very spontaneously said like, no coup anymore. It continued till 2023. There were different negotiations. Sudanese people were like, no return to a military rule. We're not going to share power with human rights abusers and perpetrators. We cannot co-exist. Democracy cannot co-exist with abuses.  And the same military leaders, they decided that they cannot co-exist among themselves. So they, on April 15th, they went into a war with each other, and Sudanese people have paid the price for it.

Sudanese people basically, their fight towards democracy have been again being taken, hijacked, and it's basically a fight for survival. Um, trying to find safe routes to flee. While at the same time trying to provide food, um, other services, health care, uh, education, um, refuge to the people in Sudan. But still people in a way trying to organize and to find their own path outside of this conflict. The thing is the world is not listening to them.  Um, it's again and again we're seeing the world listening to the military leaders, the political elites in different sides. There is really no inclusivity for people who are actually on the ground. Many of them are facing daily risk of being bombed or shelled, or arrested, detained, tortured, who work with very limited resources. Since there is really no humanitarian response to the crisis taking place in Sudan, these voices are sidelined.

**HRW Ad Break**

Archival Song: Save Darfur

External Narrator: Question number 6: Why doesn’t the world care so much this time?

Host: So, I just want to zoom out for a second. Starting in about 2003, the violence in Sudan’s western region of Darfur caught the world’s attention…

Archival: In many ways it's unfair, but it is nevertheless true that this genocide will be on your watch.

Host: And as I’ve been working on this episode, I’ve been wondering. What has changed? Why is this new conflict–in the same part of the world! with some of the same actors!-- not getting near that amount of attention today? History might have something to do with it…

Christopher Tounsel pointed out that twenty years ago the Darfur crisis came right after 9/11, at the beginning of the war on terror and the Iraq War…

Tounsel: And so, within kind of Western media, this was the height of widely circulating polarizations, right, where people were pitting Christianity against Islam, some people were framing Arabs and Muslims threatening to national security interests.

And so when Darfur happens, we know that this was one of those odd moments where you had kind of bipartisan support for oppressed Sudanese people. Because Darfur became a kind of microcosm for some people to say, look, in this country, Arab Muslims are persecuting black people.

Host: That framing is still there. News reports still center on this ethnic aspect of the conflict. But Mo thinks the lack of interest might stem from something else…

Mo: One of the things that I would realize in the way most of the Western media would cover Sudan for years is probably the inability to deal with complexities and nuances. It's maybe fear that the audience may not really comprehend the complexity and not what I really want to engage with it.  And I think our work aims in so many ways to appreciate the complexity and say, yeah, it is complex. And we're not going to give you all the answers, but we're not going to deny it is complex. And we're still going to dig in and try to do our best to bring you some facts about what's happening on the ground.

Host: This is a complicated story.

SFX: paper sounds

Host: I want you to imagine for a second that you’re holding a piece of paper. So I told you guys on this show I’m an etymology nerd. And the word complicated, it just means that’s it’s something that comes with folds. And in order to uncomplicate it we gotta just unpack those folds.

SFX: paper sounds

Host: And that’s what Mo is trying to do. He’s trying to get us to figure out that this isn’t some conflict that’s way beyond our grasp. It’s something that if we just look at it closely, and unpack it, we can understand it.

As for actionable next steps, Human Rights Watch is recommending that the UN and the African Union deploy a civilian protection mission to Sudan, and call on their respective institutions to press the warring parties to ensure trapped civilians can safely flee.

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, and Anthony Gale. The archival clips in this episode are from Vox, France 24, Africa News, the Associated Press, The National News, The Daily Mail, and Al Jazeera.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. See you next time.

Ngofeen: Robert Taylor. You were born in 1940.

Robert: Yes.

Ngofeen: And you grew up in St. John the Baptist Parish. I think it's about 30 miles west of New Orleans, just north of the river.

Robert: Yes.

Ngofeen: Describe the town. Like, who lives there? What kind of place is it?

Robert: It was a town that was actually created by the sugarcane industry. I can remember going out the backyard and pulling a sugar cane out the ground and eat it.

[Ngofeen laughs.]

Host:  I want you guys to meet someone I spent some time with recently.   Robert Taylor.   He was in Louisiana, I was in New York City.    It was almost like a porch chat, but virtual. We talked about his life, and all the changes he’s seen in the place where he grew up…

Robert: I lived about a half block off the refinery itself in housing that was provided by the company for its employees.

Ngofeen: At that time when you're growing up, how do you know that you live in Sugar Land, you know? Sounds like you're literally eating the food.

Robert: Yes, exactly. Well, I didn't know anything else. Uh, I don't know, by the time I was a teenager is when I began to realize there was a world outside of sugar. But, uh, I was quite happy and content as a kid living in that environment and in that culture. It's what everybody relied on. That was our way of life.

Host: Robert grew up along the Mississippi. The Great American River where something like 40 percent of the land in this country - the lower 48 drains.   From as far north as Montana, all the way across the Midwest -- so, the Great Lakes, the Wabash River, the Tennessee River -- all the way through western Pennsylvania, even to the edge of states like North Carolina, that whole stretch of land. It drains all down one channel, one funnel, the Mississippi River.   All the sediment slides through there.

For a lot of reasons, the land around the Mississippi river is valuable, precious. So many people have wanted it. Traders, slavers. And for almost the last near century, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry wanted it. 

They dug up graves, exhuming the bones of the dead. Sometimes, they built right on top of graves and cemeteries. They dug a vast network of oil and gas pipelines. They carved into the land, cutting across wetlands, across various ecosystems. Some of that carving took place when Robert was a young man. 

Ngofeen: Ok, so if I’m walking around in that area, how do I start to notice that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry is coming in?

Robert: Well, the first time it was brought to my attention, it was by my wife. I can remember her asking me, Bobby, ‘what's that, what's going on over there’ on what was then Belle Point Plantation, which was just a few blocks from our house. And I hadn't noticed the construction, even me being in construction, but she did.

And, uh, I didn't know -- this was 1963, the year that we got married. So by the time our fourth and last child was brought home, that plant has been built and went into operation the year that Raven came home, our baby.   But growing up, as the kids growing up, they would always come in complaining about odors, about chest pains, because of some odors and smells they were getting. But all of that was new to us.

Host: The area where Robert lives has one of the highest concentrations of fossil fuel and petrochemical plants in the Western Hemisphere. It’s got the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the country. It’s called Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of land along the tail end of the Mississippi River, from the capital Baton Rouge, which is inland, to New Orleans, where the nation’s rivers pour out like a bowl into the Gulf of Mexico.

In Robert’s corner of the River, there are people, there are communities, there are houses and schools just across the fence line from giant refineries.

And that’s what I wanted to talk to Robert about.

This is Rights and Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch. I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I am a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer. Human Rights Watch asked me to look at the human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of the people on the front lines of history.

Ngofeen: So you grow up there, you get into the construction business, you get married, you get your own land. Why did you want to buy a plot of land?

Robert: Well, that was the American dream -- to own a home. You know, if you're thinking about marriage and a family, for me, that's what really drove me to make sure that I did have something.   A legacy, something to leave for my children, you know, which is one of the things my father used to always say to me that it was unfortunate, that he felt bad about it, but, uh, I thought he did a wonderful job.   But he instilled that in me, to plan ahead for my, for our children in our future.

Ngofeen: What was your father, what did he feel regret about?

Robert: Well, he and my mom separated when I was four years old. She left him. Uh, and so he moved away and he wasn't able to have me as close to him as we were in those first four years, which was precious to me, the memories of the love and care that he gave me. And so, uh, by ten years old, I found him again. And he vowed never ever to lose contact with me.

And, uh, he worked very hard, worked on the railroad. He bought land and built the family home that he gave to my mother and the new guy she was living with. Because, uh, we weren't doing very well without him. So he extended his help anyway to us. And that's when he always would tell me, you see how hard I got to work.   I want you to go to school and get a good education so that you can take care of your family and don't have to work as hard as I 'm working.

Ngofeen: And can you just tell me about the importance of owning land to your father?

Robert: He knew about slavery.  He was born in 1898. His dad was born into slavery, and his grandfather.  What he wanted for us, for me -- his emphasis was on education and economics.  Uh, you have to acquire land and make sure that your children understand that they need to work towards the future -- the future of their children to keep our legacy whole. So acquire land. First make your peace with God.   He was a religious man.  And uh, and then go about building your family in a way that they could live happily.

Ngofeen: I wonder if you could just actually just like describe that plot of land to me, like, what does it look like?

Robert: The plot that I acquired? 

Ngofeen: Yes, sir.

Robert: It wasn't anything where I could do farming. It was a, uh,  60 by 90 foot plot of land, and I could build a home on. The initial home that I was able to acquire, it was a nine thousand, a nine hundred and twenty square foot, three bedroom home. But immediately, uh, I, uh, I started to expand on that.  And in two years, I turned that into a seven bedroom home. I had learned the building trade, so that's why I was able to do that. But I was encouraged by my wife because she was right at my side, whatever I was trying to do.  And uh, it was, it was a two story building. And people would pass by and see me and her, she would be on that roof right beside me. People would actually stop and scream up there, tell her to get down from there. ‘You must be crazy. What are you doing on that roof?’ You know? No, but she, she, uh,  we did everything. We, we worked hard and we were able to build a real nice home for our family. And when I say a home, I'm talking about the community. Our home was the center of activity in the community.

Ngofeen: When you got your plot of land, you know, is that sort of what, what it meant to you, like, what's going through your mind is like, you got, you got that thing that your dad had told you…

Robert: Very, very much so. What really was a blessing to me and I hope to him, was in his later years, he got ill and couldn't work anymore. But I had built a home, and uh, when we went to visit him and found out in the hospital, and they told us that he was going to have to go from there to a nursing home, and my wife wouldn't hear it, you know.

She said, ‘no, dad is coming home with us’. And we took him home with us. Our children fell in love with him. And I'm, I'm thankful that we were able to have him in his latter years. He died happily with us. And all of us was happy to have had him.

Ngofeen: So, at 25 you get this plot of land and eventually your dad comes back, settles there, which means your kids grew up with him around.

Robert: Yeah.

Ngofeen: So as you're buying this land, buying it, and building at that same time, the petrochemical industry is starting to come into the region.

Robert: Yes.

Ngofeen: What do you think at that time, is that like, you know, when companies come in, usually that means jobs. What are you thinking about it at the time as it's coming in… initially?

Robert: I really didn't have much thoughts in that direction because I had always been self employed, and I never worked in the parish. But there was one guy, my next door neighbor, who did get a job at the plant. And they were very prosperous. He would buy a brand new Lincoln Continental, you know, and park on his driveway.

And as the kids grew up, he would buy them nice expensive cars. Yeah, you could tell the difference in some, you know, in our community, somebody who's got a good job like that. And his lifestyle was, was decidedly different from the rest of the people in the community.

Ngofeen: So I want to bring in -- for the listeners, they don't know -- there's another person here with us, your daughter, Tish. So you had four kids?

Robert: Yes.

Ngofeen: Tish, what number are you?

Tish: Number one.

Ngofeen: Oh, you're number one. Okay. Okay. Eldest!

Tish: Yes I am.

Ngofeen: And so Tish, when your dad mentioned the Lincolns, the new cars, you were nodding your head. Do you, do you have any memories of sort of like either the new cars or how the, the neighbors who were working at the plant, they had, like, they seemed a little bit wealthier.

Tish: Absolutely. They were the family that had it. [00:12:00] It was the nice cars. Now, what my dad didn't mention was that he was also a musician. So he had a band.

Ngofeen: Okay.

Tish: Now they had nice cars and they probably had nicer clothes, but across the street from them, we had it going on. We were like, we had the swing set, we had the musicians every Tuesday and Thursday. The cars are lined up, people in the street listening to the band practice. So we had it going on over there, um.

Everybody came over to the Taylor house. So the whole community watched him add onto that house with cash because he did not believe in getting in debt. So first the front was brick, then it had arches. And then it was next thing in week, tore the roof off and put a whole new roof. And everybody was just Like, ‘wow, when is it going to stop’? And he was like, I got a family, we, we have to have room. We have, we need this to be the compound, which it turned into the family compound.

Host: Ok so near this house, the family compound, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry built a plant. Robert and Tish and everybody who lives there refer to the plant as Dupont, but in 2015 a Japanese company called Denka bought it. It makes neoprene, a synthetic rubber that’s used in things like wet suits, fan belts, boots, leggings. The process releases a toxic pollutant called chloroprene.

Ngofeen: Can you describe, Tish, your childhood memories of what the plant looked like?

Tish: I thought it was a beautiful city. And I thought when we passed there that I knew I was close to home because it was a city with all those bright lights.

Ngofeen: What did it smell like?

Tish: The smells were not all the time. It's just like certain atmospheric things happening. You know, when it's really foggy, most of the time at night, you get the smells, raining and stuff like that. I guess when the, you know, atmosphere is heavy, it kind of hovers low. So we would get the smells then.

You know, it'll give you a headache, you know, you, you know, it wasn't comfortable, but it was just what we knew. I was four when they started the neoprene plant, and obviously all the smells came from there and somewhere in that process, you know from the production of the neoprene because chloroprene is actually odorless. A lot of the chemicals that we're exposed to are odorless. 

Tirana Hassan: Hi. This is Tirana Hassan – the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. At Human Rights Watch, we investigate and report on abuses happening in every corner of the world. We’re journalists, country experts, lawyers and other professionals who are doing everything we can to expose perpetrators and to help protect vulnerable people. We’re a nonprofit, but to keep our independence, we don’t take money from governments. That’s why we rely on support from people like you. If you value what we do, please donate. Go to hrw.org/podcast/donate. That’s hrw.org/podcast/donate. Thank you.

Ngofeen: Did you have any health problems when you were, when you're growing up?

Tish: Just sinus problems allergies sinuses I was taking sinus medicine by the time I was in fifth grade and all of us had that.   We all were taking prescription medication for sinus infections at young ages.

Ngofeen : Okay.

Tish: Well, you know, that's just the area we live in. That's what they said, ‘that’s just the area we live in’. Because as I was growing up, there was more and more industrial facilities being built.

Robert: My, my sinus problems were so severe that my doctor would have to treat me -- once a week he'd bring me in and rub cotton on a stick and stick it all the way up my nose and make me sit in his office for a half hour with it.  

Then one of my wife's cousins came from Los Angeles to visit, and she saw our house that I had built.   And she asked me, ‘Would you come to California and do this to my house?’ You know. When I went to California, my sinuses disappeared. And the minute I came back home, it started over again because of the environment that I was living in.

Host:  As Tish mentioned earlier, over time the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry built more and more plants in the region.   Now there’s an estimated 200 plants in Cancer Alley. I asked Tish, how did you figure out that in the community as a whole, people were getting sick?

Tish: Well, first our next door neighbor across the street, um, was diagnosed with cancer.   He had throat cancer. So he talked differently after he had the surgery, you know, he had like a whisper almost kind of voice, you know? And so that was the first time we ever heard of cancer. And then my grandmother was diagnosed with bone cancer. One of the neighbors a few houses down was diagnosed with cancer.   And it just started like, the conversation in the community itself was ‘all these people are getting sick and that wasn't like that before.   It's got to be all these plants that's coming in our neighborhoods that's doing this’. And that was it, because we felt helpless anyway, there's no way we can do anything about it. But it was like, under the surface, we all felt the same, that all the illnesses were, were not, you know, that, that was a whole generation of things that we had not experienced.   Daddy's generation had not experienced it, but now people are getting very ill. My brother, um, had kidney disease, um, he was in and out of the hospital all our childhood. My sister always had problems with digestive problems. Years later, she was diagnosed with gastroparesis, which is her stomach was paralyzed and then her large intestine.   And when she went and actually got some serious in-depth testing, she was diagnosed with some rare autoimmune disease. My generation, our generation of families were having miscarriages. But as we grew into being adults, we started having more of our generation, having cancer in their twenties and thirties.

And, uh, it's like we're burying our classmates and they're 30 years old. We're burying classmates from then on. It was just normal for us to have, you know, this one had cancer or they survived cancer and other rare autoimmune diseases.  

Host: Tish went on and on about all the sickness in her family and community…

Tish: … it's rampant, but we always hear someone say rare diseases. My mom was diagnosed with thrombocytosis where the blood platelets in her bone marrow make too many platelets so her blood is thick. And she's taking leukemia medicine, it's a blood disease. Um, and then later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Host: …She talked about illnesses among workers in plants, including Tish’s ex-husband.

Tish: Prostate cancer, kidney cancer, colon cancer. A lot of them have passed.

Host: …she went on for like 5 minutes!

Tish: And our next door neighbor across the street, he had prostate cancer.

Ngofeen: Did it ever cross your minds to be like, maybe we got to sell this and leave?

Tish: No, it was home. And we didn't know that it wasn't like that anywhere else. Because we were a small community. We didn't travel a lot. We might have went visit somebody, but we were right back home. And you visit someone along the river, and everybody's living the same life.

And you have to remember, this is not the time of having social media or anybody investigating anything. There's no data that we could look up, even though we might not have had the capacity to look it up anyway, we weren't involved politically and another plant came in and another plant came in and we just were getting sicker.

You know, I, I love telling this story about my dad. My mom calls me one morning. She was like, ‘your dad has lost his mind’. And I'm like, ‘what's going on’? And she said, ‘your daddy called 911 on DuPont’. And I'm like, ‘stop the madness.   What do you think they’re going to do, arrest them?’

But Daddy tell them what else happened.

Robert: Yeah, I called 911, you know, which we had been instructed, if we smell strange odors, to call. So I call 911 and the fire department showed up. They always get there first. The police come. Then here come the fire chief about five minutes later.

And we're all out in front of the house and he jumps out of his car and comes towards us. And he stopped dead in his track and he look around. And he said, ‘Oh my God, how do they expect you people to live like this’?

He was shocked at the power of that odor. There’s just something about it. And especially for people like him, you know, he's a professional, he'd been in these, but he don't live in Reserve.   All of the whites had moved out north of the Parish. North of the airline highway. Didn't get the direct effect like this.

Ngofeen: Why did they leave? Or like, how'd they know to leave?

Robert: They started leaving in 62 and 63 at the start of construction. By the time, uh, 69, when that plant really went into effect, our population had switched.   Man, the demographics of our pop -- that had changed dramatically. All the whites were gone. 

92% of the victims in cancer alley are black. That's not coincidental. In every parish you go in, the white population is secluded off in the safest area in the parish. There's no way around that. That is too obvious.

Knowledge is key. So you have to inform yourself so that you, how can you protect yourself if you don't know that you are being threatened, and you don't even know who your enemies are? See, you don't know that it's the hand that is supposedly feeding you that is really poisoning you. What are those people working in this industry here, what do they do when they find out that the, uh, those little jobs is going to cause the destruction of their generations?

Not just them, but generations of our people are going to be destroyed because they're able to buy a new car every few years. One or two people. I think it's horrible for those people to say, well, we brought jobs to the community. I mean, what, what are they talking about? You can kill all this amount of people just because you gave a handful of people a job? How do humans begin to sit and weigh somebody's health and life and the generation against this person who's working and got a job?

Ngofeen: In 2010, after a whole lot of studies, the Environmental Protection Agency came out and they classified chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen, and they set a limit: .2 micrograms. And that was a, that was a really big deal. So you had this like official, finally, an official statement from an official source being like, this is the correct level, or, or this is the level that is tolerable. Since then, and even before then, you guys have been engaged in all kinds of activism and advocacy to try to change the situation.

Robert: I mean, you mentioned a 0.2 suggestion that the EPA made. That was a suggestion. And as the head of the Louisiana Department of Health, Mr. Jimmy Guidry, told us that there is no such thing as a safe level of exposure for a human being to chloroprene.

When we entered into this fight, specifically because of what DuPont Denka was putting up on those poor, unsuspecting school children, hundreds of times over the level, which we know that level was hundreds of times too dangerous anyway. And then now they are getting away with not even adhering to that 0.2. And then those people were licensed by the state of California to -

Tish: Louisiana.

Robert: state of, who did I say?

Tish: California.

Robert: Oh my God. The state of, of Louisiana. That's what DuPont brag about right now. Oh no, we're within the law. Your government said we can dump, uh, this amount of poison. Oh, yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's a couple thousand times over what is a safe level. But so what? Who are the victims of it? Oh, well, that's the sacrifice zone. Don't you understand?

Ngofeen: So what we have here are two very different standards. The federal government, or the EPA, wants to see tighter limits imposed on emissions of chloroprene, but the state of Louisiana is not enforcing that standard. And Denka, the new owner of the plant, has continued to release chloroprene at many, many times the EPA’s recommended level. The children Robert was talking about go to a school right near the facility.

Robert: Kindergarten through fifth grade, black kids who are bussed in from all over the parish to that school …

Host: When we asked Denka for comment, the company replied, quote “There is no ‘imminent’ endangerment near the Denka Performance Elastomer (DPE) La Place facility”. The quote continues, “Real-world evidence backs that up, as borne out by Louisiana Tumor Registry data demonstrating an absence of increased cancer in the community, a finding vetted and confirmed by EPA itself”. Denka also said, quote, “Since purchasing the facility in 2015, DPE has invested over $35 million to reduce chloroprene emissions, which have fallen by 85 percent and now sit at the lowest level since the plant began operations. The fenceline monitoring system confirms that chloroprene emissions remain at historically low levels. DPE remains firmly committed to its ongoing efforts to reduce emissions while continuing its operations”, close quote.  

New EPA rules give Denka 90 days to reduce its emissions of chloroprene.   Denka is suing the EPA in federal appeals court and they responded to us by saying that the EPA has quote “singled out” the company and quote “unlawfully imposed a 90-day compliance period that is impossible to meet”. Denka said it was challenging the 90-day timeframe along with what it described as quote “EPA’s steadfast refusal to consider the most recent science on chloroprene risk in setting the requirements of the rule,” close quote.   According to Denka’s website, the company believes that the EPA’s 0.2 limit overstates the risk of cancer by a factor of one hundred and thirty times.

‘Reveal’ Promo: Samuel Miller; 40 acres on Edisto.   Fergus Wilson; 40 acres on Sapelo Island.   Primus Morrison; 40 acres on Edisto.  

More than 1,200 formerly enslaved people got land from the federal government and then had it taken away. 

This was a betrayal. 

I’m Al Letson, host of the Reveal podcast.   Our new series ‘40 Acres and a Lie’ is available now.   Subscribe to ‘Reveal’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Meanwhile, policymakers in Louisiana debate to what extent there’s any cancer risk at all.  

Lambert:  The Mississippi River is, you know, full of petrochemical plants as well as grain elevators because they are truly the gateway to the world.

This is Republican state senator Eddie Lambert. He’s the chairman of the Environmental quality committee. Just this past April,  the PBS NewsHour journalist William Brangham interviewed Senator Lambert about Cancer Alley.

Brangham: I'm sure your committee has seen the number of studies that have linked living in these areas to disproportionately high negative health outcomes. You don't accept that as a, as a premise.

Lambert: I don't accept that as a -- as a complete truism. I mean, you know, there may be some, uh, some correlations. I mean, I'm going to tell you, let's start looking, you know, uh,  vaccines. You know, we've had an explosion of vaccines in the last, you know, 20-30 years. Now you have autism. You know, is there a connection there? I don't know. There's a lot of people who think there are.

Brangham: There's a lot of people who think there are, but there's no good evidence that they are connected.

Lambert: And, and, you know, and that may be the same thing with some of the situations with the chemical plants. There's, you know, circumstantial evidence that's there. But you know what, let's really dig down and see what is the real, you know, what is there.

Host: Human Rights Watch recently spent a lot of time looking at what’s there.   They interviewed Tish and Robert -- that’s how we found them -- and dozens of other residents.   They also looked very closely at many health studies on the effects that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has had on the region.   And it’s been devastating, with Cancer Alley having the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution of any location in the entire nation, at 7 times the national average.   

Host: In 2016, Robert founded Concerned Citizens of St. John, a non-profit that is fighting with residents and groups throughout the region and the state for the health and safety of Cancer Alley’s residents.

They want the state of Louisiana, or failing that, the federal government, to pass tighter regulations. Other local residents have called for a moratorium on new fossil fuel and petrochemical plants in the region.

These community organizing efforts are bearing fruit. Robert and Tish have been to the White House to attend a ceremony with President Biden strengthening federal environmental justice provisions. They’ve led Michael Regan, the head of the EPA, on tours of Cancer Alley.  They’ve seen the EPA pass new rules restricting the pollution these plants can emit, and monitor more tightly.

In spite of all this, Robert doesn’t live in the house he built anymore. In 2021, a hurricane destroyed the home. Robert didn’t have the insurance to rebuild. Meanwhile, Robert’s been at Tish’s house nearby in LaPlace.

Imagine yourself there for a second.   From Tish’s house you can hear the sounds of trains carrying fossil fuel and petrochemical products day and night. Fly up into the sky and look out further. See hundreds of fossil fuel and petrochemical operations dotting the land on both sides of the river.

In the areas with the worst pollution, hear the children born with low birth weight at three times the national average. Preterm birth rates, almost two and a half times the national

average. Preterm birth is a leading cause of infant mortality.

Now come back down to the ground.

Ngofeen: You talked about your dad having given you advice of how to sort of steward, you know, go to school, build this thing for your family. What do you think if your dad was able to see the situation?  What kind of advice do you think your dad would have given you?

Robert: My dad was a, was a, was an ordained minister. He was a very religious man. And the, the level of evil that's involved here, I don't think he had conceived that. I tremble at leaving my children that property over there as an.   And this is going to continue to be a sacrifice zone. Then if my children stay there, they'll be sacrificed. There's no future there.

Ngofeen: Human Rights Watch has released a detailed report of the impact of extreme pollution from the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry on residents of Cancer Alley. You can read the report, which includes a list of recommendations on how to solve this problem, you can watch a video in which Robert and Tish appear, and so much more, via www.hrw.org

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch.   This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, and Anthony Gale.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. See you next time.

Sophie: Just a heads-up: this episode talks about some difficult subjects, including rape and murder.

Host: Human Rights Watch issues a lot of reports. Like, up to 20 a month. Some of the recent ones are on mass relocations in Tibet, crimes against humanity in West Darfur, and another one’s on migrants crossing Darien Gap. 

Deutsche Welle: Human Rights watch has accused Saudi Arabian border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopians since March, 2022. [fade under]

Reuters:  [fade up] Saudi Arabian border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants who’ve attempted to enter the kingdom. [fade under]

It gets a lot of attention and coverage from news outlets around the world... 

France 24:  This rare footage captures the hell faced by those trying to cross from Yemen to Saudi Arabia, as filmed by the migrants themselves. This man has serious injuries in the legs and in the back…

There was video. There was satellite imagery. There were statements from survivors. But that kind of evidence? It's pretty common in Human Rights Watch reports. So what was it about this particular story that grabbed the world’s attention? 

    
This is Rights and Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch.

I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I’m a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer.

Human Rights Watch asked me, as a journalist concerned with human rights, to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of the people on the frontlines of history.

On this episode, what’s been happening on the Saudi Yemen border? Why, in a media saturated era, did this story break through?  That’s what you’re about to find out. Because finding out will tell you a lot about the practical side of human rights work.

***************

Ngofeen: Hello, who are you?  
Nadia: So, who are you? Um, I am Nadia. Nadia Hardman. I am a migrant rights researcher here at Human Rights Watch.

Host: Nadia Hardman. She’s the principal author of the report. For a few years, she’d been working on what’s called the “eastern migration route.”

Nadia: Which is people trying to leave, from the Horn of Africa, but predominantly Ethiopia, traveling through war torn Yemen, to Saudi Arabia. And I've done a number of reports over the years because the route is long and there are abuses all along the way.

Host: One of Nadia’s colleagues at Human Rights Watch had reported on “infrequent” killings on the border.  But then, Nadia was in her apartment…

Nadia: I was working in my bedroom. Yeah, I remember I was working at my desk, which is right by a window. It was the morning, and I was like flicking through my emails, and my colleague sent me these UN letters.

Host: The letter were by some folks called “special rapporteurs” or special experts. There were two of them. One addressed to the Saudi government. The other to Houthi rebels, who control the north of Yemen…

Nadia: And I remember opening, like scanning them. And I’m thinking, uh huh, and then as I read it I got more alarmed but also had this disbelief reaction of like, ‘oh wow, this is wild, this level of abuse potentially taking place is massive’. And one of the things that I think jumped out at me was that there was, I think this paragraph or the sentence which basically said that there was potentially a mass grave of up to 10,000 people.

The numbers of deaths, basically that were cited in these letters was just like high, like nothing I'd ever read before. But for one reason or another, these letters didn't make any headline.

Host: Nadia told me the Saudi government denied everything, saying that in the UN letters there were no dates and locations of the alleged killings. But one thing bugs Nadia. In her experience the UN tends to be cautious and conservative in their claims, so she thought the UN would not have sent those letters if they weren’t sure of their facts. So she set about trying to gather more information and she knew this would not be easy…

Nadia: I mean, this area is out of bounds for anyone to go and investigate the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, it’s just impossible right? And so, I knew we had to rely on entirely remote methodology, and the first thing I did is I've been working with a fixer,  in country, in Yemen, in Sana. He's an Ethiopian himself, he’s an elder, I guess, in his community there. And I basically messaged him and said, ‘Hey brother’, that’s how we speak to each other. A he was like, ‘Hey sister’. And I said, you know, ‘what's happening on the border?’  And he responded, that there were mass killings on the border, and then he started to inundate me with videos and photographs, and they were graphic.

[audio from one of those initial videos]

You know, those images are shocking, you know they were of people who had clearly suffered explosive weapons attacks, like what,  I mean, I'm not trained in any of that. But to the, you know, naked, untrained eye, blast wounds, gunshot wounds, dead bodies, videos from the trail. Which is how I knew immediately we need the digital investigations team to help.

Host: Nadia got in touch with Sam, who works from his home in Berlin. 

Host: One of the things that Nadia needed was for Sam and his team to verify the authenticity of the photos and videos. So how do they do that? Well, as Sam explained to me, there is a whole process…

So once we've done that, once we’ve done the reverse image research and we get no results, that doesn't mean it's real, you know, it’s just kind of the front lines. Like, okay we can dismiss that or no we can’t, we have to carry on. 

Devon: My name is Devin Lum. I am an open source researcher who used to work in the Digital Investigations Lab at Human Rights Watch, and I'm going to be the Visual Investigations Fellow at the New York Times this coming year.

Devon: It means a lot of different things. In the human rights space generally, it means a researcher who uses visual information that's shared online in places like TikTok and Facebook, to determine where human rights abuses have happened around the world and get more information in hard to reach areas.

Devon: There's one video that I remember. It's a large group of people, I forgot how many, maybe around 40 or 50,  that are walking down this hillside, super steep and it's, it's all shale,  so people are slipping, um, and you can hear screaming. Which I think is maybe why it's stuck in my head so much because of the, the auditory part of it, but you can hear screaming before you see a woman, uh, being carried down the hillside and she has blood all over her legs and is crying and,  you know, that, that part of it is awful, but then the camera spins around and you can see people, more migrants looking onward at this scene and their faces are just blank.  Like they've seen it before and they don't have anything left to give at this point emotionally because of just how much they've experienced and  yeah, that one will definitely stick with me.  

But if you can’t find that person, you aren’t quite out of luck. At least not yet. There are other techniques…

Ngofeen: Okay, so, so you, you've got a video but in the video in the background, you see, for instance, like, oh, they're by this mountain peak that has like this bunch of trees or bushes next to it. So then you got to go to satellite imagery and be like, okay, so I think it's by that thing, so let's find that area. And then sort of like scour and be like, can we find that peak with bushes? 

Host: While Devon was analyzing photos and videos, Nadia had begun the most crucial step in any Human Rights investigation. That’ll become a theme on this show. Say it with me: interviews. She started interviewing Ethiopian migrants who had returned from the Saudi border.

Nadia: He basically knows about the migration route very well, and when people are injured or hurt along the way he effectively collects them and houses them. And this time as well, he was doing a similar thing, him and other elders, and other Ethiopian diaspora community members were trying to help the injured and the survivors of these attacks on the border. He kind of plays that unofficial humanitarian role with other people. So he had access to the community, it’s a tight knit community, I guess, as happens in lots of places when you have diaspora in need. You know he's an extraordinary figure. He's, I mean, to be honest, I feel like he's the hero in so many of the reports I do along the route, like nothing would happen without him.

Nadia: We would spend hours just waiting for a telephone number because the networks in Yemen are so bad. And that’s how we collected the stories. 

Host: Human Rights Watch had the interviews translated into English and translators read parts of them.

Host: The stories Nadia gathered were grim.

Ngofeen: So you're on the phone with a 14-year-old. 

Ngofeen: Okay. 

Hamdiya: I couldn’t continue my education – my family has 10 kids. They can only afford to send the older kids to school. Instead of school, I wanted to go and search for money.

Hamdiya: In Djibouti, the smugglers asked us to pay for the boat by sea. I didn’t have any money. 

Hamdiya: They said to me if you don’t pay I will be raped. But this didn’t happen to me.

Nadia: After five days of essentially being beaten and tortured she was allowed to go on her journey, and I guess the smugglers understood and, we'll find out later why and what they do with people who don’t have money, but she eventually got to the border. Now she told me that basically, she would cook and clean for some of the smugglers and traffickers in order to pay for her way. That's what they said to her, you can cook and clean for us, and then you will be allowed to go on the crossings. She did that for a period of time, and then eventually she was told that she would be trying to cross the border the following day. And she told me that basically people who can't afford, who don’t have the fees to pay to smugglers are put at the front of a group. 

Nadia: So this 14 year girl was put at the front of the group essentially to absorb whatever attack first that might come.

Host: Nadia says that other survivors eventually helped Hamdiya and she was taken back to Yemen, to Sana, where she remains to this day, severely traumatized.

Host: As Nadia told me this story in the studios of Human Rights Watch in the Empire State Building, my eyes welled up. I tried not to blink so the tears wouldn’t spill out.

Actor portrayal: When the firing stopped the Saudi border guards took us. 

Actor portrayal:  In my group there were 7 people – five men and the two girls. 

Actor portrayal: The girls were 15 years old. One of the men refused. The border guards killed him on spot. I participated in the rape. Yes. To survive, I did it. The girls survived because they didn’t refuse. This happened at the same spot where the killings took place.

Host: The Saudis later released this young man and he managed to make his way back to Sana, where he is stranded, trying to scrape together enough money to return to Ethiopia. We don’t know what happened to the girls and women that were captured with him. For a lot of migrants from the Horn of Africa --  Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti -- returning home is not an economically viable option. Who can afford it?

Host: Ultimately, Nadia would conduct 42 interviews. Forty two! As the nature and the scale of the killings was becoming clearer, Nadia told me she drew various teams within Human Rights Watch into the investigation…

Ngofeen: Middle East, North Africa,

[AD] Tirana Hassan: Hi. This is Tirana Hassan – the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. At Human Rights Watch, we investigate and report on abuses happening in every corner of the world. We’re journalists, country experts, lawyers and other professionals who are doing everything we can to expose perpetrators and to help protect vulnerable people. We’re a nonprofit, but to keep our independence, we don’t take money from governments. That’s why we rely on support from people like you. If you value what we do, please donate. Go to hrw.org/podcast/donate. That’s hrw.org/podcast/donate. Thank you.

Host: Back to Sam Dubberly from the Digital Investigations team, Devon’s Boss. He, Sam, was hearing from Devon, who was finding more horrific videos, and from Nadia, with the harrowing stories she was getting in her interviews.

Host: Using that satellite imagery, the photos and videos taken by the migrants, as well as information in the stories that Nadia had collected, Human Rights Watch was able to pinpoint the exact locations of where some of the killings took place…

Host: Like I mentioned earlier, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi Arabia of mass killings and “possible” crimes against humanity. Which made my lawyer brain wonder…

Nadia: Ok, yeah, yeah.  I mean, so this is, yeah, this is not taking place at a time of war. So they're not war crimes. When, you know, an abuse, when a human rights abuse, and that would be like the excessive use of force and the extrajudicial killings that we're talking about here are widespread, and systematic, right? Those are the magic words.

Nadia: They're widespread and systematic and there is evidence of a state policy, i. e. that they are, you know, a directed, pattern of abuse that is, instructed by a, a centralized system, like a state effectively, then it's a crime against humanity. Once you have a crime against humanity, it means that senior perpetrators can be prosecuted under international criminal law.

Nadia: Yeah, yeah. So once we, you know, once I wrote the report, once the digital team had finished, um, you know, putting together all their digital evidence, you know, we roll it out and, I mean, part of the rollout was getting the media interested. Sending out embargoed versions of the reports and make sure that on the day of release we would get coverage in all of the important leading newspapers that, you know, Saudi Arabia would care about but more importantly countries like the U.S. would put pressure on Saudi Arabia to answer to these incredibly powerful findings. So that wasn't hard, right? Like you, you say mass killings, crime against humanity, murder, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopian migrants, border with Yemen, like people were interested. People understood pretty quickly this was a big story. 

Ngofeen: Do you have any hope for accountability or, you know, or, or even image of what that would look like?

We pushed for a UN backed independent investigation into the killings. We’re  in NGO. It’s incredibly difficult for us to prove in a tribunal way or an independent investigation way that this is a crime against humanity, for sure this is a state policy. So we need, we need a, a proper investigation. Fortunately, in the wake of the report, you know, the world cared. There was tons of coverage and continuing coverage, and journalists did their own investigations. And I know journalists now that are continuing to investigate. 

Ngofeen: how do you respond to the sort of, Why are we picking this thing when, you know, X country is doing that and other country is doing that. Why is it, why are we focused on this one? Like, how do you engage with that, um, argument or question?
Nadia: You know, I mean, I guess the answer is, you know, no one is. No one’s focussing on this. The world needs to care. This is devastating. These are brutal attacks. We probably talking about a crime against humanity here.  And we need the world to care because people will keep on coming.  This migration route is tried and tested. People will not stop.  People are either desperate always to make a better life for themselves or fleeing conflict. And unless Saudi Arabia stops its border abuses people will keep on dying in the thousands.  And I guess, you know, my main response to that would be, you know, to the question you asked would be, if not us, then who?

Host: That was Nadia Hardman, the lead investigator of the Human Rights Watch Report, “They Fired on Us Like Rain: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border.” You can read the report, watch a video and look through maps and other visualizations at hrw.org.
You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, Blaire Palmer and Anthony Gale. The news clips at the beginning of the episode are from Deutche Welle, Reuters and France 24.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. See you next time.

Host: The first thing I saw was a picture of the ships. Imagine a ship the size of the Titanic, even bigger, beached on the shore.   It's made of bare, rusted metals, like the inside of an oxidized car under the hood, or a neglected bicycle chain rotting out into red gritty metal.

The ship is massive. The bottom touches the sand and the top is so high up from the ground, it feels like, like looking up at the goals you'll never accomplish. Then, you notice all around you the beach, it's completely lifeless - no crabs, no fishermen.   And that's when you realize that there's not just one ship, it's ship after ship after ship broken down into husks.   They've been torn apart - what looks like charred bits of shipwreck rubble. And honestly, it feels like you're at the end of the world.  Like the ground looks volcanic, everything is brown, black, there's orange from hellfires burning and gray plumes of smoke.

And then slowly the sounds come to you. The waves, and then the drilling. And then you notice people, some of them are holding drills. Some of them are wrapped in t-shirts. Remember those faces wrapped in t-shirts. They’ll be important.

They kind of look the way that miners look underground - covered in what feels like soot.   And then you notice everyone is brown, and many of them are afraid for their lives. ‘Nails hit us’, they say. ‘Flames hit us’. You can get trapped inside these massive ships and they catch on fire. Pipes explode. One worker describes being blown back in an explosion with so much force that his back breaks.

The International Labour Organization, the ILO, has called this one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.

This is Rights and Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch.   I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. I take you to the places in the world where human rights are most in danger, telling you the story through the experiences of the people on the front lines of history.   

On this episode, we’re talking about shipbreaking

Bangledeshi voice - Babul: It is a tough job. I have burn marks all over my body.

Host: And we are in Bangladesh…

Bangladeshi voice - Farid: Now we don’t have a safe place anymore. So, who will take responsibility? I can’t hold any one owner accountable when I don’t know exactly which ship made me ill. 

Bangladeshi voice - Rehana: He couldn’t tell her my dad had died on the spot. He was at a loss.   But we need our father for protection.

Host: Bangladesh is a country I don't know a lot about going into this…

Ngofeen: The French, they're like a people who love simple food.

Host: And so .  .  .

Ngofeen: The Italians are people who love craftsmanship.

Host: I talked to someone from there and asked.

Ngofeen: The Congolese, where my family's from, they love drama and they love clothes. How would you describe Bangladeshi people and culture?

Rizwana: Bangladeshi people are fish lovers and very noisy.

Host: Okay.   What kind of noisy?

Rizwana: If you come out of the airport of Dhaka, you will never find any other airport that has so many noises to welcome people.  You know, we speak loudly.   There are very few soft spoken people in this country. At times we sound as if we are quarreling, but our language actually is very rhythmic and it's very sweet. I mean, whispering is not in our culture. You know what I mean?

Ngofeen: Yes, I do know exactly what you mean.

Host: So this is Rizwana - Rizwana Hasan. She's an attorney. She told me she's the only full time environmental attorney in the entire country of Bangladesh.  We talked as she was celebrating Ramadan not too long ago.  Rizwana told me about her first trip to a shipbreaking site.

Ngofeen: Is it at a beach?

Rizwana: It is a beach, very much a beach. It is under the sky, in the open, on the beach itself.

Ngofeen: And can you just describe what it looked like that first time that you went?

Rizwana: Huge vessels on the beach. You could see it from, um, you know, say half a kilometer away. It was few workers all working with their hands in different parts of the vessel, trying to dismantle the vessel. You could see the torch lights because they will actually be using the torch to separate different parts of the vessels. So, what was really painful for me to see is people working under the sky in scorching heat. In 36, 39 degree temperature without any shade coming from anywhere.

So the fact that they were working without any protection in that heat just took me back to Dubai, where I see many Bangladeshi laborers. working in buildings, painting buildings, plastering the outer side of the building in scorching heat. And every time I see these laborers, I feel very bad for them.

So now, now I saw this, the same thing happening in my own country.

Ngofeen: And I was just Googling, you said 36 to 39 degrees which is like 96 to 102 degrees Fahrenheit.  That is insanely hot to be working outside.

Rizwana: Absolutely. It's very hot.

Julia: Yes, the violations are happening on Bangladesh's beaches, but the fact that the ships are there is not entirely Bangladesh's fault. The involvement of corporations, the EU and all of the countries in the global North that are sending their ships and other forms of toxic waste to these really poor countries like Bangladesh.

Ngofeen: Who are you and what do you do at Human Rights Watch?

Julia: I'm Julia Bleckner. I'm a senior researcher on health and human rights. I focus primarily on environmental health.   So, the export of toxic substances and toxics like ships to the global South that harm people living there. In like 2011, I was living in Bangladesh, not working for Human Rights Watch. And had gone down to the shipbreaking yards just to see what it was like there. It's a wild thing to behold - it's like giant - these like giant ships that are basically shipwrecked onto the beach.   

Rizwana: People carrying the heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy metal sheets on their shoulder.

Julia: I talked to Rizwana, years later, about where we would actually have some added value.  She really highlighted to me the value of documenting these abuses from an international angle.

Ngofeen: What's the relationship between the ordinary person, let's say living in New York city or Los Angeles Brussels or Berlin or Tokyo and shipbreaking in Bangladesh.   Like, what is the connection point between those two things?

Rizwana: An ordinary people in New York would wear a t-shirt that is made in Bangladesh and would care about how this shirt has been made, what chemical has gone into it, whether any form of forced labor or exploitation has got into it. The difference is, the same New Yorker does not care about when the same Bangladeshi laborer has to break their vessel, just to keep their territory free of hazardous material. The Western people only know that the vessels are carrying the T-shirts for them from Bangladesh. They don't know that when the vessels can't ply anymore, they are not bringing the T-shirts anymore. They rather dump there on the territories on the beaches of Bangladesh, just to destroy our environment and kill our people.

So when they're importer, they're careful about what they're bringing to their country. When they're exporter, they're not careful about what they're dumping. You get so sick working there for two and a half months that you need to go to the doctor, get some medication. Sometimes you lose parts of your body. Sometimes you develop breathing difficulties. Sometimes you get problems with your vision because you use the torch without the glasses.

So it's not employment at all to me. It’s clear exploitation

Ngofeen: And so it's like a co it's like a, it's a couple month contract essentially, but not really a contract…

Rizwana: It's bonded labor.

Ngofeen: Say more about what you mean when you say that.

Rizwana: It’s bonded labor because you are brought to a particular place, with some hope. When you come here, you are told that you will have to do this work. This is your working hour. Okay? There is no agreement given to you. Although the government has now come up with a minimum wage package, but nobody is monitoring as to who is paying that package.

So your salary is dictated by them. Your working hour is dictated by them.  There is no agreement given to you. If you refuse to work, you are not allowed to come back. You can't carry your mobile to your workplace. You can't take a picture with your co-worker because they fear that that way the stories are getting leaked to the outer world. You know? So, you don't have any freedom. See, if you don't have any freedom and all of your job conditions are dictated by a middleman, what else is it if not bonded labor?

Host: The thing about shipbreaking isn't just that it's hot and it’s long. It's that our lives in developed countries and in the West directly influence what’s happening in Bangladesh.  These ships that workers are breaking down, these are ships that come from the developed countries -- from France, from Germany, from Greece, from the United States, from China -- and this is where we're going to have to talk for a minute about science and history.

Sampled audio: Attention! If you or a loved one was diagnosed with mesothelioma, you may be entitled to financial compensation.

Host: So you remember these commercials, right? I remember growing up with them on TV.

Sampled audio: Mesothelioma is a rare cancer linked to asbestos exposure.

Host: I'm a word nerd and the etymology of the word asbestos to me is fascinating.  ‘Sbestos’ is Greek, meaning quenchable and ‘A’ is not. So, unquenchable, not quenchable. And asbestos is a rock, it’s a fibrous rock. It’s thought to get its name from the fact that if you threw it in a fire, it wouldn’t get marred or stained, like corroded.   Inextinguishable.   The minerals were heat and fire resistant, and they were really strong.   They could be woven together or embedded into different products, where their heat resistant and strength qualities are pretty useful. Fire resistant clothing, brake pads, gaskets, pizza ovens. And I’m sure you’ve heard asbestos can make you sick. But do you know how?

So, say you’re a shipbreaker in Bangladesh. One that’s met with Rizwana. Asbestos cloth was used in building ships for years, especially around world war II. One of the things it was used for was to wrap hot pipes so they wouldn't burn ship personnel. Right? So pipes get very hot. You wrap the ship pipe in asbestos.   You won't get burned. Now, you’re taking about that ship in Bangladesh and you breath in asbestos fibers. For some people nothing happens. But for others, the asbestos fibers can basically puncture the membrane of a cell. Within one day, they move to the area where the chromosomes are. And that fiber can then physically come in contact with your DNA and then interfere with the normal process of replication and cell division. And when that happens, that means that your new cells that have multiplied can have a missing chromosome or an extra chromosome or some other form of a mutation and that mutation can lead to cancer of the lining of the lungs. That is mesothelioma.

But here’s the kicker, it can be 20 to 40 years between when the asbestos contact comes in contact with your cells and when the illness manifests.

Sampled audio: Exposure to asbestos in the navy, shipyards, mills, heating…. 

Host:  Mesothelioma is only one issue that can come from this. You can get asbestosis, you can get other things, and the list of symptoms that can result are like the side effects in a pharmaceutical ad. Shortness of breath, persistent dry cough, chest tightness, chest pain, a dry crackling sound in the lungs while breathing and wider and rounder than normal fingertips and toes.

That whole list of symptoms I just gave you, that’s what you find in shipbreaking workers in Bangladesh.

[Montage of Bangladeshi workers using the word “asbestos”]

Julia: Most of the ships being broken down in Bangladesh are about 20 or so years old. So they all are filled with asbestos and, without a face mask, with bare hands, - people are walking over sand that's, like, full of chunks of metal, completely barefoot. A number, yeah, of workers described inhaling toxic fumes and breathing in burning asbestos. but, like, just using, like, their t-shirt to cover their mouths. There’s that but then also just so many heavy metals and PCBs in ships. The paint is really toxic. If it's being broken down right on the sand, it's going into the ecosystem. But also fishermen who live nearby described having to sail further and further out into the ocean over the years because they just couldn't get any fish anymore because they - they were all dying anywhere near the ships and also because the ships were cutting through their fishing nets.

I spoke to one worker who had previously been a fisherman and then was not getting any fish. And he was like, well, I'm not getting any fish because of all these ships. I may as well go work on the ships. Yeah, and then there's also been like tons of studies or not tons, but a lot of studies, including by the Bangladesh government, looking at the level of heavy metals in fruits and vegetables that are grown nearby.   In some cases it's just like so far beyond the levels that are safe to consume that yeah, people are - end up growing food that then is full of heavy metals. And like this, the food is also toxic. 

Host: And just when you think it can't get any worse it does.   Like it literally piles up - the ship's scrap metal itself piles up.

Rizwana: People carrying the heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy metal on their shoulder.

Julia: There's no toxic waste management facility to bring it to at the end. So it ends up actually just being sold in the market.   A couple of workers described as asbestos villages, areas where they've just used asbestos for making furniture or, like asbestos stoves where they make a stove, like out of basically cinder block and asbestos that then people are using to like cook inside of their homes. Everybody who's living in and near the areas also ends up being exposed.   There's no downstream management of waste, which is exactly what, you know, the Basel convention is supposed to protect against.

Host: The Basel Convention is the last part of this story - the sort of legal framework around all of this. Like, how is any of this even possible?

So there was a convention that was put together passed in 1989 called the Basel Convention that was then amended with a thing called the Basel Ban Amendment in 1995.

Julia: It's like, it was a group of like global South countries coming together and being like stop sending all of your toxic waste to our, like to our lands.

Rizwana: When the Basel Convention came into effect, the Western countries and the waste generator of the Western countries knew that if they have to deal with their waste in their territory, it will cost them a lot. So they started bypassing the Basel Convention, created a middle group who would do all the paperwork for them, change the ownership flag of the vessel, so that it no longer is a US, Japanese or European vessel. It rather takes the flag of Tuvalu, or Trinidad Tobago or Panama. And then it can sail off from the European, American, Japanese territory as a vessel belonging to a small island country where paperwork is pretty easy. They used to first send it to the Southeast Asian countries, but when Southeast Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Bangkok, they said, ‘No, it's too harmful for our people and for our environment. We won't, we won't take it’, then the middle people started sending the vessels to Bangladesh.

And they found Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan as suitable for shipwrecking. And they also got the nodding from the Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan administration.   But you know, classic example of Western hypocrisy - they want to keep their backyards clean at the cost of messing up our backyards.

Host: All of this ultimately ties into the idea of greenwashing. The Hong Kong convention is this convention that’s supposed to come into force next year in 2025.   It sort of purports to set a new standard for ship recycling.   But in reality, many shipping companies have advocated for this law in part because the requirements are really really low.  So, no requirement that the receiving country have sustainable waste management practices, and no ban on dismantling ships directly on the beach where the chemicals can seep into the ground, rather than doing it on a platform, say with cranes and safety equipment.  

Given that, I was curious to see for Rizwana how all of this strikes her, as someone who's from the place that's being affected and who has been trying for decades to improve things.

Rizwana: I work with the laborers. My God, I've been working in this sector for 21, 22 years.  I do have sleep disturbance. There are points when I lose my temperament, uh, to an extent that you won't call me a professional person anymore.   But then, but then I talk to myself and my colleagues all understand that I'm stressed because of this, because I take the, try to take, I can't, I should not be saying that, but I try to take the pain of every disabled shipwrecking worker to my heart. I try to solve their problems. I take, try to take them to doctors. I try to raise funds for them. I take their cases to the court.

But I am hopeful because I - you know, there are many people dying, but I don't know about you, Ngofeen, but I, I firmly believe that there is something called natural justice, and there is no way that these people can escape natural justice. And we have exposed them. Nobody respects the shipwreckers as ethical business people, you know.

So yes, it has taken some toll. But then it's okay. I mean, I'm still surviving, uh, in high spirit with hopes for changes. 

Tirana Hassan: Hi. This is Tirana Hassan – the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. At Human Rights Watch, we investigate and report on abuses happening in every corner of the world. We’re journalists, country experts, lawyers and other professionals who are doing everything we can to expose perpetrators and to help protect vulnerable people. We’re a nonprofit, but to keep our independence, we don’t take money from governments. That’s why we rely on support from people like you. If you value what we do, please donate. Go to hrw.org/podcast/donate. That’s hrw.org/podcast/donate. Thank you.

Host: When Rizwana started this work two decades ago, very few people in her community knew about shipbreaking. On top of the individual lives she’s changed, the stories HRW has told, Rizwana’s advocacy has been successful in one really important way: it’s made the industry infamous.

Every part of the shipping process for centuries, has been central to tragedies.  From ship building, and the latent poison of asbestos, tearing up your lungs, to the shipping itself.  Centuries before, ships laden with bodies, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to become laborers in the U.S. And then at the end of ships lives, now in our modern times, those, those asbestos-built ships torn up on coasts where brown people work in, eat food off of asbestos made ovens. 

What looks like a story about Bangladesh is only the narrowest aperture.   When you widen it, countries like France, Germany, other European countries, the U.S.  all come into focus.   The idea of us living separate crises to me, more and more, seems like a complete illusion. The minutiae of our lives in the West, down to our waste management practices can affect the cellular makeup of people in Bangladesh when we throw our ships away.

I keep thinking about the origin of that word asbestos. Inextinguishable. Unquenchable. I wish there was some way to extinguish those fibers. 

Human Rights Watch’s report on shipbreaking is called ‘Trading Lives for Profit: How the Shipping Industry Circumvents Regulations to Scrap Toxic Ships on Bangladesh’s Beaches’.

The report concludes that shipping companies should invest in building stable platform facilities at a standard that fully protects workers’ rights and handles waste disposal. And the EU should revise its rules to close loopholes.

You can read the report on hrw.org.

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, Blaire Palmer and Anthony Gale. Music this episode is by me.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. See you next time.