PRESS BRIEFING NOTES | OFFICE OF THE HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS 31 October 2023 We are deeply concerned by a series of violent incidents during ongoing protests in Bangladesh. As the country heads towards elections, we call on all political actors to make clear that such violence is unacceptable and to avoid any statements or actions that could constitute incitement to violence. As of this morning, at least 11 people have died in connection with the protests in many parts of the country. Among the dead are two policemen, six opposition party staff members and two bystanders. On 28 October, opposition protesters allegedly attacked the residences of the Chief Justice and other judges, and approximately 30 journalists were assaulted by protesters and masked individuals riding on motorcycles, who are thought to have been ruling party supporters. In responding to the protests, police have reportedly attacked protesters with rods, batons, rubber bullets and sound grenades. They have also raided the homes of opposition activists across the country, indiscriminately arresting and detaining hundreds, including the activists’ family members. We urge the police to ensure that force is only used when strictly necessary and, if so, in full compliance with the principles of legality, precaution and proportionality. On 30 October, the head of the opposition BNP, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, was arrested and charged under the Explosive Substances Act in connection with the alleged arson attack on the Chief Justice’s residence. He remains in detention. Several other senior opposition leaders are reported to have gone into hiding for fear of arrest. We urge the Government to observe the greatest restraint to curb political tensions at this critical time, and to take steps to ensure that human rights are fully upheld, for all Bangladeshis, before, during and after the elections. Copyright © 2023 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. All rights reserved.

Tapfumaneyi Masaya, whose body was identified by CCC members at a mortuary. Photograph: Twitter A Zimbabwe opposition activist has been found dead after he was abducted on Saturday during a political campaign just outside Harare, the Citizens Coalition for Change party has said. It was the second abduction in weeks of an opposition party member. Tapfumaneyi Masaya was reportedly bundled into a vehicle by unknown men while campaigning for the CCC’s candidate ahead of byelections on 9 December, the party said. The CCC spokesperson Promise Mkwananzi told Reuters on Tuesday that Masaya was tortured and dumped on the outskirts of Harare. His body was later moved to a mortuary at Parirenyatwa hospital, about 3 miles (5km) from central Harare, where it was identified by CCC members who had been searching for him, Mkwananzi said. Reuters could not independently verify the events. Zimbabwe has a long history of forced disappearances and deaths of political activists dating back to the 1980s. The opposition has often accused the ruling Zanu-PF party of involvement in the torture and deaths of its activists. Masaya’s abduction and killing comes barely two weeks after the CCC lawmaker Takudzwa Ngadziore was abducted, tortured and dumped about 30 miles (50km) north of Harare by armed men. He survived the attack. Police said on Monday an investigation had been launched after a body was discovered in the vicinity of where the CCC said Masaya was found, but that the victim’s identity was yet to be established. A police spokesperson, Paul Nyathi, told Reuters on Tuesday there were no further updates. “We urge the police to do their work and ensure that all these abductors are promptly and effectively brought to justice,” said Mkwananzi. Zimbabwe’s opposition parties have been calling for a fresh election since president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, secured a second term in August. The CCC leader, Nelson Chamisa, described the vote as a “gigantic fraud”. Zanu-PF has denied the fraud claims. © 2023 Guardian News & Media

View of an Israeli settlement from an abandoned checkbpoint in the West Bank...credit William Keo NYTimes Losing Hope on the West Bank The New York Times Nov. 4, 2023 By Nicholas Kristof Photographs by William Keo Mr. Kristof is an Opinion columnist, reporting from the West Bank. When I was a law student backpacking through the Middle East in 1982, I met two Palestinian university students on a local bus in the West Bank. We got to chatting and they invited me to their homes, so I jumped off the bus and spent a day with them in the jumbled alleys of the densely populated Dheisheh Refugee Camp. We had a good time together, for they told me about their Arabic studies at Bethlehem University, and I was then hatching a scheme to study Arabic myself in Cairo. We were all excited by education and full of youth and dreams. I wrote their names in my address book, but we never made contact again — until now. After 41 years, I dug up my old address book and found their names. I wondered: Are they still alive? Have they moved abroad? At this grim moment, what do they think of Israel, Hamas and America? With the help of a local reporter who called around at the Dheisheh camp, I was able to locate them: Saleh Molhem, now 63 and graying, and Mahmoud Qaraqei, now 60. One reason it was possible to track them down is that Palestinian refugees aren’t very mobile. Both were still living in the same refugee camp. They remembered me and invited me to pay another visit. Saleh Molhem and Mahmoud Qaraqei.Credit...William Keo for The New York Times It was wonderful to see them again, but our reunion was also a window into Palestinian frustrations: The world has changed so much in four decades, but while I’ve traveled the world and had a fulfilling career, they remain stateless, stuck in a refugee camp and fearful of Israeli settlers and soldiers. Worse, they have much less freedom today than when I met them in 1982. Back then, they could travel easily around Israel and find work there; on a weekend they could relax on Israeli beaches. “I used to drive to Tel Aviv for the day,” Mahmoud told me. Now they live under a stifling system of checkpoints and passes that make travel difficult even within the West Bank, and the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack has made everything worse. Because of road closings by the Israeli authorities, I couldn’t even get to their homes. We ended up meeting at a Bethlehem restaurant, but to get there I had to leave my Israeli car at a blocked road, clamber over a berm constructed by Israel and then catch a Palestinian taxi. “I cannot go anywhere,” Mahmoud told me. “I want to go to a doctor in Hebron,” also in the West Bank, but he said that’s now not possible because of road blockages. A checkpoint at the West Bank wall, where a man sells grilled meats to people spending the day trying to pass through.Credit...William Keo for The New York Times Israelis say that if Palestinians have less freedom, that’s their own fault. They note that it was a rash of suicide bombings by Palestinians that led to the creation of barriers and checkpoints, here and in Gaza. When I first met them, Saleh and Mahmoud were full of lofty goals for travel and careers; they seemed optimistic. Now they are embittered and quick to believe the worst of Israel. “The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian,” Saleh said, describing his take on Israeli attitudes. Both had hoped to attend graduate school abroad — Saleh wanted to earn a Ph.D. in Arabic studies in Egypt, and Mahmoud hoped to earn a master’s in Spanish in Spain — but they say an Israeli crackdown made that impossible and their chances slipped away. They both became West Bank secondary school teachers, but each said he was fired many years ago by Israeli authorities. Mahmoud said that Israeli officials dismissed him after he was jailed for 18 days for breaking curfew many years ago. Saleh said he was never arrested but was dismissed by Israeli officials for failing to keep students from throwing rocks at Israeli forces. They later found teaching jobs at United Nations-run schools for Palestinian refugees, and both are now retired. I can’t verify their accounts, and Israel’s version may be different. The Middle East is full of alternative narratives, each real to those inhabiting it, and Israel’s is focused on threats from Palestinians. A refugee camp in Ramallah in the West Bank.Credit...William Keo for The New York Times Gaza dominates the news these days, but at least 132 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, including 41 children, the United Nations says, along with one Israeli soldier killed by Palestinians. More than 900 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in that period. These are longstanding problems, but they have gotten worse over the past few years and especially in the past few weeks. “Settlers have been exploiting this war to violently expel shepherding communities,” said Rabbi Arik Ascherman, a human-rights activist in Israel. The United Nations said recently that there had been an average of seven settler attacks on West Bank Palestinians a day since Oct. 7, often with guns and frequently with the support of Israeli security forces. When I’ve spoken to settlers in the past, they’ve argued that they are just protecting themselves from Palestinians and that in any case, God gave them the entire area. “This is the deed to our land,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations told fellow envoys in 2019, holding up a Bible and referring to the West Bank as well as Israel. It was good to see President Biden on Oct. 25 denouncing “extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank.” Settlers “have to be held accountable,” he said. “And it has to stop now.” A Palestinian resident of Ramallah, in the West Bank, uses his garden to house a collection of munitions he said have been thrown at him and his neighbors.Credit...William Keo for The New York Times Jessica Montell, who runs a human-rights group called HaMoked, said that there has also been a wave of arrests of West Bank Palestinians in the past few weeks. One reason Palestinians feel threatened is that Israel’s security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a far-right figure who was once convicted in an Israeli court of supporting an Israeli terrorist group and more recently displayed a portrait in his home of an extremist who murdered 29 Palestinians. “It’s not hyperbole to say the Israeli equivalent of the K.K.K. are sitting in this government,” Montell said. Perhaps for that reason, Saleh and Mahmoud were nervous about meeting me and cautious about what they said — a far cry from the way they had spoken freely when I first met them. They also asked not to have their faces photographed. I asked if Israeli repression accounted for the increase in Hamas flags visible in the West Bank. They didn’t want to talk about that at all. When the conversation did touch on politics, we frustrated each other. They were certain that the explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was a deliberate attack by Israel. Based on my own reporting, I tend to believe the U.S. intelligence assessment that the airstrike was not Israeli. The view of a refugee camp from a grocery store and carwash in Ramallah.Credit...William Keo for The New York Times The conversation became more tense when we got to the Hamas attack of Oct. 7. “People were happy all over the Arab world, not because of the killings and bloodshed, but because it was the first time the Gazans could achieve their dream” of leaving Gaza, Saleh said. I pushed back and noted how brutal the Hamas terrorism had been and how many Israeli civilians had been killed or kidnapped. Saleh and Mahmoud said that they mourned the Israeli deaths, but wondered why the world wasn’t equally outraged that Palestinians have been killed in cumulatively greater numbers. They were disappointed by my focus on the Hamas barbarism, and I was disappointed by their reluctance to unequivocally condemn those attacks. Mahmoud broke the mutual frustration. “We don’t hate anyone,” he said. “Jews, Christians, Buddhists, we don’t hate anyone, we are only seeking freedom to live our lives.” They seemed to be trying to make me understand. “We are not troublemakers,” Saleh said. “We just want to live freely like everyone else in the world.” A refugee camp in Ramallah.Credit...William Keo for The New York Times I asked whether the West Bank was at risk of exploding in anger at the killings in Gaza. The question worried them, but Saleh said, “People are suffocating, and because of that they go out to express their feelings.” He pointed to the soft drink in front of him. “It’s like this,” he said. “You shake it, and it will explode.” After lunch, we said our goodbyes. I joked about meeting in another 41 years. They said darkly that they weren’t sure that they would survive even another few hours. There was a heavy silence. We parted, all of us less spry than we had been the first time. They were fairly ordinary Palestinian men who had mostly kept their heads down; they had avoided politics and had not lost family members to the conflict. But they had lost freedom and dignity. There are untold numbers just like them who never make the headlines but are stewing inside. I remembered two young men full of promise and warmth, animated by hope and inhabiting a world in which Israelis and Palestinians interacted regularly and didn’t much fear each other. It is wrenching to see such change. As Saleh and Mahmoud became dads and grandfathers, they were shorn of a future, of vitality, of hope. And that, I think, is the core of the Palestinian problem. More by Nicholas Kristof on Israel and Gaza Opinion | Nicholas Kristof ‘We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit’ Oct. 28, 2023 Opinion | Nicholas Kristof and William Keo ‘I’m Crying for All the Victims That Are Going to Suffer’ Oct. 25, 2023 Opinion | Nicholas Kristof We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children Oct. 21, 2023 Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in 1984 and has been a columnist since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. You can follow him on Instagram, Facebook and Threads. His forthcoming memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 5, 2023, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Losing Hope in The West Bank https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/04/opinion/sunday/palestinians-west-bank-israel.html#commentsContainer Copyright 2023 The New York Times Company

Republic of Maldives Country Report October 2023 The Maldives is an island archipelago located in the Indian Ocean, 750 kilometres from India. With a population of 521,000, it is the smallest country in Asia. It became a British protectorate in 1887. It gained independence in 1965. Its first President, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom ruled for 30 years. An attempted coup d'état in 1988 was crushed by the Indian military, The Maldives was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. A new constitution with democratic reforms was adopted in 2008. Despite the introduction of more freedoms for citizens, the United Nations reports that the Maldives today has high risks of political instability and insecurity. Islamist terrorists affiliated with ISIS pose threats to democracy and social tolerance. Islam is the state religion. The Maldives has no religious freedom. The country is 100% Sunni Muslim. Individuals of other religions cannot gain citizenship. Members of other faiths cannot practice their religion openly and cannot marry a Maldivian. They are barred from holding positions in state and private institutions such as the Human Rights Commission. Practising yoga is prohibited. Persons who bring non-Islamic religious items into the nation may be arrested. Practising non-Islamic religion is punishable by imprisonment and hefty fines. Apostasy from Islam may be punishable by death and the loss of citizenship. The Maldives rejects all U.N. Human Rights Council recommendations to adopt freedom of religion. The US Treasury department published a list of 20 leaders and financiers linked to Islamist extremist groups in the Maldives. The Maldives is unwilling to investigate any extremist groups and political leaders linked to killings and other crimes. Islamist groups pose threats to politicians, activists, and LGBTQ+ people. According to Global Risk Insights, an extremism monitoring group, following the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami, Saudi Salafist NGOs came to the Maldives on the pretext of helping to rebuild destroyed areas. Members of these Salafist NGOs convinced poor Maldivian men that the tsunami was a punishment for failing to follow the true teachings of Islam. Radical Islamist ideology infiltrated the islands. The Maldives had the highest per capita number of foreign fighters for ISIS of any nation. In 2022 an ISIS cell bombed the home of former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. The Maldives has no education program to combat jihadist ideologies in schools, the military, or prisons. In the elections of September 2023, opposition candidate Mohamed Muizzu won 54% of the vote, defeating the incumbent, Ibrahim Solih. Miuzzu, campaigned on the slogan ‘’India-out.’’ Anti-India disinformation on social media was rampant during his campaign. He accused Solih of not protecting Islam. A third of the Maldives' population are migrant workers of Indian descent. They are barred from Maldivian citizenship. They have no political rights. They have no right to protest discrimination against them. If they join activist efforts, they are arrested. Indian migrants are subjected to multiple human rights abuses, including lack of access to health care and reasonable living conditions. Maldivian laws regulate freedom of expression and association. Human rights defenders are arrested. Protests and strikes are blocked entirely. There is no press freedom. Journalists face harassment, intimidation and attacks, especially when they report on political events. Dr. Muizzu’s affiliation with imprisoned pro-China former-president Yameen has caused fear that more restrictions on political gatherings and privacy will be imposed. Genocide Watch considers The Maldives to be at Stage 1: Classification, Stage 3: Discrimination and Stage 6: Polarization in the Ten Stages of Genocide. Genocide Watch recommends: The Constitution should be amended to include a Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion, with judicial review to strike down laws that violate these freedoms. Education against extremism should be included in curricula of schools, the military, and prisons. The Maldives should ratify International Labor Organization conventions C97 and C143 and other international conventions to protect the rights of migrant workers and their families.

The incidents are among the country's largest mass attacks on reporters in a decade. There was no immediate information on the victims' conditions; they all work for local news sites. Agents from the Chihuahua prosecutor's office check the area where photojournalist Ismael Villagomez Tapia was murdered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Nov. 16. [Herika Martinez / AFP via Getty Images] The Associated Press November 29, 2023 MEXICO CITY — Prosecutors in Mexico confirmed Wednesday that a reporter was shot and wounded the previous day in the western state of Michoacán, the fifth journalist shot in the country in one day. Maynor Ramón Ramírez was wounded along with a companion in the attack Tuesday in the city of Apatzingan, the newspaper ABC of Michoacán said. Earlier Tuesday, four news photographers were shot in the neighboring state of Guerrero. The four in Guerrero were shot near a military barracks after they returned from a crime scene. They had been covering one of the many homicides that occur on a near-daily basis in the violence-wracked city of Chilpancingo. The shooting of five media workers in one day represents one of the largest mass attacks on reporters in Mexico in a decade. There was no immediate information on the condition of the journalists, all of whom worked for local newspapers or news sites. The shooting come just days after three journalists were abducted and held for days in Taxco, also in Guerrero state. They were later released, and there was no information on the motive for their abduction. Guerrero has been the scene of deadly turf battles between around a dozen drug gangs and cartels. Michoacan has suffered similar turf battles between the Jalisco cartel and local gangs. The shootings and abductions on Tuesday mark some of the largest mass attacks on reporters in one place in Mexico since one day in early 2012, when the bodies of three news photographers were found dumped in plastic bags in a canal in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz. Those killings were blamed on the once-powerful Zetas drug cartel. Earlier this month, a photographer for a newspaper in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez was found shot to death in his car. His death was the fifth instance of a journalist being killed in Mexico so far in 2023. In the past five years alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented the killings of at least 54 journalists in Mexico. © 2023 NBC News © 2023 The Associated Press

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him Rolling Stone November 29, 2023 By Spencer Ackerman Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 9/7 on his nomination to be secretary of state, Henry Kissinger pledged to cooperate closely with Congress in conducting foreign policy for a "durable peace." Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100. Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed. McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. “The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.” No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam. Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman. Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who was the most prominent exception to the fawning coverage of Kissinger, watched journalistic deference take shape as soon as Kissinger entered the White House in 1969. “His social comings and goings could make or break a Washington party,” Hersh wrote in his biography The Price of Power. Reporters like the Times’ James Reston were eager participants in what Hersh called “an implicit shakedown scheme” — that is, access journalism — “in which reporters who got inside information in turn protected Kissinger by not divulging either the full consequences of his acts or his own connection to them.” Kissinger’s approach to the press was his approach to Nixon: sniveling obsequiousness. (Although Kissinger could vent frustration on reporters that he never could on his boss.) Hersh quotes H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, remarking that Kissinger was the “hawk of hawks” inside the White House, but “touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.” Reviewing one of Kissinger’s litany of books, Hillary Clinton in 2014 said Kissinger, “a friend” whose counsel she relied upon as secretary of state, possessed “a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.” Kissinger told USA Today within days that Clinton, presumed then to be a president-in-waiting, “ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” The same story noticed a photograph autographed by Obama thanking Kissinger for his “continued leadership.” It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever. Kissinger’s ascent occurred through an obscenity that time cannot diminish. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in tacit recognition of the nightmare he, building on the works of his two immediate predecessors, brought to life in Vietnam. Kissinger, an influential Cold War defense intellectual at Harvard, had access to members of the diplomatic delegation to the Paris talks. He used it to feed information from the negotiations to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign — a campaign whose defeated GOP rival, Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger advised — and despite Kissinger’s closer political ties to the coterie around Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic rival. Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory. “It took some balls to give us those tips,” Richard Allen, a foreign policy researcher on the Nixon campaign, later reflected to Hersh. After all, it was “a pretty dangerous thing for [Kissinger] to be screwing around with the national security.” Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser. Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi. In the hopes of manufacturing one, they came up with the “Madman Theory,” the idea that North Vietnam would negotiate peace after they came to believe Nixon was adventurous and bloodthirsty enough to risk anything. In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By the summer of 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger — who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command — was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 7,000,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower. Cambodia, like Laos before it, was a formally neutral country, meaning that bombing it was an illegal aggression under the United Nations Charter. But beyond the control of Prince Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese used Cambodian territory for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a weapons pipeline not unlike the one America is currently operating for Ukraine. In April 1970, following a coup by American client Col. Lon Nol that overthrew Sihanouk, Nixon ordered U.S. troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia outright. In the air or on the ground, they were unable to destroy the trail, only human beings. Those who survived reacted. “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit the little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge,” a former Khmer Rouge cadre told historian Ben Kiernan, founder of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. Nixon and Kissinger’s failure in Cambodia prompted in 1971 the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, another failure. Kissinger later blamed defeat on the U.S.’ clients, rather than, say, people like himself. “In retrospect, I have come to doubt whether the South Vietnamese ever really understood what we were trying to accomplish,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs. At the time, the secret bombing of Cambodia was a startling offense that prompted substantial political backlash when it became public. One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon prepared by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 held that bombing Cambodia was a constitutional usurpation of Congress’ war powers. But on July 30, the committee ended up rejecting the article, 26 votes to 12, and it never became part of the coalescing impeachment effort that stopped with Nixon’s resignation. Forty years later, and likely as a consequence, U.S. presidents routinely bomb countries the U.S. is not at war with. They provide the barest minimum of disclosure that the bombs have fallen, and often not even that. When the U.S.’ declared wars fail, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, their architects and stewards blame the client militaries and governments they propped up. They cover their troop withdrawals with futile bombing campaigns that kill people so American statesmen can save face. Whether he realized it or not, when President Biden in July 2021 blamed the Afghans for losing the Afghanistan war — “the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight” was a typical line — he was reaching for Nixon and Kissinger’s template. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 2016. Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Kissinger played a role in the deaths of so many different peoples that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book. Here is one example among many of the sort of carnage Kissinger inflicted indirectly rather than by edict. In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging. That perspective typified Kissinger. The Cold War was a geopolitical balance among two great powers. The purpose of Cold War statecraft was to maximize American freedom of action to inflict Washington’s will on the world — a zero-sum contest that meant restricting the ability of the Soviet Union to inflict Moscow’s — without the destabilization, or outright Armageddon, that would result from pursuing a final defeat of the Soviets. That last part explains much right-wing hostility toward Kissinger. Kissinger represented anticommunism without ideological zeal. He was an energetic, even relentless practitioner of the Cold War, the theater of anticommunist conflict. But like George Kennan before him, Kissinger thought viewing the Cold War in ideological terms missed the point. The point was American geopolitical dominance, something measured in impunity and achieved by any means necessary. That permitted Nixon and Kissinger the creativity to reopen China, something Nixon would have demagogued anyone else for attempting. Reopening China was by far the greatest achievement of Nixon’s foreign policy. It was the rare geopolitical initiative where Kissinger was a mere facilitator. Sy Hersh, in The Price of Power, calls Nixon “the grand theoretician” of rapprochement with Beijing, with Kissinger Nixon’s “occasional operative.” Kissinger’s dramatic, secret July 1971 trip to Beijing in advance of Nixon’s visit probably renders that description parsimonious. But, writes Hersh, “there is no evidence that Kissinger seriously considered the question of an American-Chinese rapprochement before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser.” Once it happened, Kissinger became an overnight celebrity, the sort of person destined to be shrouded in myth and apology. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger confer aboard Air Force one. Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anticommunist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. When Kissinger came under attack from neoconservatives and others on the right who couldn’t tolerate detente with the Soviets and rapprochement with the Chinese, neither he nor they recognized that both of them were driven by the Cold War forces that Kissinger stoked when convenient. Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity. Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement. Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.” Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological. Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake. In Southeast Asia, Kissinger destroyed. But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live. On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Protesters shout “Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes” as Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger waits to testify in 2015. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.” Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency. Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it. The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order. Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work. He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others. Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt. In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents. Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order. In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.” Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory. That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be. Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history? Copyright 2023 Rolling Stone

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By Gerry Shih and Anant Gupta (Illustration by Shubhadeep Mukherjee for The Washington Post; Netflix) MUMBAI — Over a three-decade career, the filmmaker Anurag Kashyap often trained a critical eye on his native India as he wove tales about rogue cops, rotten ministers and the hypocrisies of the Indian middle class. He garnered standing ovations at Cannes and received fan mail from Martin Scorsese. He landed lucrative deals with Netflix after the American streaming platform entered India in 2016, looking to produce edgy, Hindi-language shows. But in 2021, Kashyap said, Netflix shelved what would have been his magnum opus: an adaptation of the nonfiction book “Maximum City,” which explores Hindu bigotry and the extremes of hope and despair in Mumbai. When the U.S. streaming giants, Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, entered India seven years ago, they promised to shake up one of the world’s most important entertainment markets, a film-obsessed nation with more than 1 billion people and a homegrown moviemaking industry with fans worldwide. In the last four years, however, a chill has swept through the streaming industry in India as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party tightened its grip on the country’s political discourse and the American technology platforms that host it. Just as the BJP and its ideological allies have spread propaganda on WhatsApp to advance their Hindu-first agenda and deployed the state’s coercive muscle to squash dissent on Twitter, they have used the threat of criminal cases and coordinated mass public pressure to shape what Indian content gets produced by Netflix and Prime Video. Today, a culture of self-censorship pervades the streaming industry here, manifesting in ways both dramatic and subtle. Executives at the India offices of Netflix and Prime Video and their lawyers ask for extensive changes to rework political plots and remove passing references to religion that might offend the Hindu right wing or the BJP, industry insiders say. Projects that deal with India’s political, religious or caste divisions are politely declined when they are proposed, or dropped midway through development. Even completed series and films have been quietly abandoned and withheld by Netflix and Prime Video from their more than 400 million combined viewers worldwide. “Why greenlight it, then change your mind?” asked Kashyap, recalling how Netflix walked away from his three-part adaptation of “Maximum City,” based on the award-winning book by Suketu Mehta. “It’s invisible censorship.” The Washington Post spoke to more than two dozen filmmakers, writers, producers and executives in India and the United States who shared their experiences and details about projects, many of which have not been previously reported. Many interviewees spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships with Netflix and Prime Video. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post. The Post’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board. Commuters in Mumbai travel past billboards in July 2018 for “Sacred Games,” directed by filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and hailed as the “first big, spectacular Netflix series” to come out of India. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images) The trouble began in 2019, when Hindu-nationalist activists first called for boycotts and filed police complaints against Netflix and Prime Video, seeking to curb content they saw as denigrating Hinduism and India. The pressure campaign peaked in January 2021, when these activists nationwide prompted police across India to investigate Prime Video, ostensibly for mocking a Hindu god in a political series called “Tandav.” A top Prime Video executive in India was forced to briefly go into hiding and surrender her passport to police, according to people familiar with the matter. It was a watershed moment. Streaming executives “had to review the projects going forward,” recalled Parth Arora, a former director of production management for Netflix India. “You wanted to make sure that you are not making the same mistakes that happened on ‘Tandav.’” Since then, Prime Video has shelved “Gormint,” a satirical series billed as India’s answer to “Veep,” because it mocked Indian politics, said the series director. And despite investing more than $1 million to produce “Indi (r) a’s Emergency,” a documentary about the 1975-1977 period when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and censored the media, Netflix recently relinquished the rights and will not release the film, which contains veiled commentary about the Modi administration, people familiar with the project said. In 1990, Hindu activists marched to raze the Babri Masjid mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh because they considered its site sacred in Hinduism. “Maximum City,” Kashyap's three-part adaptation of a book by the same name that explores Hindu-Muslim tensions of the era, was shelved by Netflix. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) Sunil Ambekar, a senior leader and spokesman for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu-nationalist umbrella organization affiliated with the BJP, said it was the duty of filmmakers to promote a positive image of India and its culture. “Movies that celebrate Bharat are more liked by the people,” he said, using the Sanskrit name for India. “These days we can see pride for nation, and pride for India, more actively expressed.” In early 2021, the Indian government introduced a system of self-regulation in which streaming companies must resolve viewer complaints within 15 days, or else face regulatory scrutiny by an industry body or a government committee staffed by various ministries. A senior official in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the policy candidly, said the goal was not to squash criticism of the government or to ban discussion of India’s social and religious rifts but mostly to curb profanity and sexual content. He acknowledged, however, that the bureaucracy was often under political pressure from the Hindu right wing and other quarters to censor shows. “We had to think of how to discipline these platforms,” he said. “We want content to be sanitized.” A poster promoting the Prime Video series “Tandav,” which depicts farmer protests and police brutality, is stained with ink and pummeled with footwear by supporters of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in January 2021. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images) Industry insiders say streaming platforms cannot risk their presence in such a crucial market by defying pressure from the BJP or its supporters. The companies’ business is thriving with streaming revenues in India projected to grow more than 20 percent a year from $2.6 billion in 2022 to $13 billion in 2030, according to the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Boston Consulting Group. In a response to questions about political pressure, Prime Video India praised the Indian government’s current streaming regulations for “allowing creativity in the content we create” and said the company’s programming decisions are “designed to serve our incredibly diverse audiences in India.” A Netflix spokesperson said: “We have an incredibly broad range of Indian original films and TV shows, all of which speak to our long standing support for creative expression. This diversity not only reflects our members’ very different tastes, it also distinguishes our service from the competition.” Neither company addressed specific projects they have dropped. A year after the release of “Sacred Games,” seen above in its first season, a Hindu-nationalist activist wrote to police demanding action against Netflix for its “deep-rooted Hinduphobia.” (Ishika Mohan Motwane/Netflix) In many ways, Kashyap, 51, embodied India’s indie spirit and the initial flush of excitement about streaming — and how both have since been subdued. In 2018, he co-directed what Reed Hastings, then Netflix’s chief executive, touted as the “first big, spectacular Netflix series” to come out of India, the crime thriller “Sacred Games.” But in 2019, still riding high from a string of Netflix projects, Kashyap couldn’t resist speaking out against the Modi administration as India became embroiled in nationwide protests over a citizenship bill seen as discriminatory against Muslims. He gave fiery speeches at protests in New Delhi and Mumbai. On Twitter, he called the government “fascist” and “rule by gangsters.” Before long, he came to resemble one of his protagonists. In his films, misfits and troublemakers rise at first by challenging the system. Sooner or later, they stumble. Kashyap at his Mumbai residence. His “Maximum City” adaptation that Netflix shelved explores Hindu bigotry and the extremes of hope and despair in Mumbai. (Atul Loke for The Washington Post) Film festival darling As a child growing up in Uttar Pradesh state, Kashyap recalled, he wrote short stories so dark, his schoolteacher alerted his parents. In college, he didn’t pursue science like his parents wanted, and instead hung out with the leftist street theater troupe, the Jana Natya Manch, and rode a rickety bicycle across New Delhi to watch films by Fritz Lang, Bimal Roy and Tomu Uchida. The brooding, realist movies “made me realize there was nothing wrong with me. These were the kinds of stories in my head,” Kashyap said. “I never fit in. I never thought cinema should be about hero and heroine, song and dance.” In 1992, Kashyap moved to Mumbai, then called Bombay, to begin his career at the bottom of the film industry. By the mid-2000s, his films were catapulting obscure actors to Bollywood fame but Kashyap eschewed mainstream success, instead becoming a darling of the international film festival circuit. Kashyap was perfect for Netflix after it launched a multibillion-dollar international expansion in 2016. The company was then facing hurdles with censors in China, and to win India, another massive, tantalizing market, it wanted offbeat content that would create buzz. In 2018, Hastings joked at a conference in New Delhi that he could acquire 100 million new subscribers in India alone — nearly what Netflix had worldwide at the time — and would invest heavily in local content like an upcoming crime thriller co-directed by Kashyap and his longtime collaborator Vikramaditya Motwane. “You will see a different side of Mumbai,” Hastings promised the audience as a giant screen flashed the promotional poster for “Sacred Games.” “It is not a pretty, happy, dancey one. It is crime and gritty like ‘Narcos.’” Kashyap, center, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May for his new film, “Kennedy,” with its stars, Sunny Leone, left, and Rahul Bhat. The film, which includes some thinly veiled political criticism, hasn’t yet been released in theaters. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images) “Sacred Games” was indeed provocative. Its antihero was a gangster who mocks his pious Hindu father and instigates religious violence. It showed hard drug use and lots of sex. It was a massive hit. Soon, the backlash began. In 2019, a Hindu-nationalist activist wrote to police demanding action against Netflix for its “deep-rooted Hinduphobia,” citing examples such as “Sacred Games” and “Leila,” a “Handmaid’s Tale”-style series about a future totalitarian Hindu society. The police did not take action. The following year, after a BJP party official complained about a Netflix series showing a Muslim boy kissing a Hindu girl in a Hindu temple, police registered a criminal case against two Netflix executives, but no arrests were made. The hashtag #BoycottNetflix began to trend on Twitter. Meanwhile, the head of India content at Prime Video, Aparna Purohit, also came under scrutiny. OpIndia, a right-wing news site, dug into her Facebook history, found she had posted political cartoons criticizing the government and accused her of “giving space for ultra-left radicals and Islamist elements” on the streaming platform. Political activists in New Delhi conduct a January 2021 sit-in, demanding a ban on the Prime Video series “Tandav.” Police across India were pressured to investigate allegations that the series mocked Hinduism. (Amal KS/Hindustan Times/Getty Images) The pressure escalates In January 2021, the campaign against streamers came to a head. After Prime Video released the series “Tandav,” viewers in nine Indian states filed complaints with police. The coordinated complaints alleged that the cast and crew of “Tandav,” as well as Prime Video’s Purohit, had insulted a Hindu god in one scene. But “Tandav” riled BJP supporters in other ways: It also depicted police brutality against student leaders and farmer protests, mirroring real-life controversies that had been dogging the Modi administration. Police from Uttar Pradesh, a BJP-ruled state, descended on Mumbai to interrogate actors and producers. An Uttar Pradesh judge reviewing Purohit’s plea seeking protection from arrest ruled that she was trying to “earn money in the most brazen manner” by mocking Hinduism and undermining India as “a united force socially, communally and politically.” Facing the threat of arrest, Purohit was whisked by Prime Video into safe houses and went incommunicado, two friends recalled. Today, several cases alleging Purohit hurt Hindu sentiments remain in the courts despite Prime Video’s attempts to have them dismissed, and Purohit cannot leave India without seeking permission from the police. Purohit did not respond to requests for comment. The complaints filed against Prime Video and the social media campaigns were organized behind the scenes by activists like Ramesh Solanki, the Hindu nationalist who filed the first police complaint in 2019. In an interview, Solanki described the existence of “hundreds” of WhatsApp and Facebook groups where Hindu nationalists like himself had gathered to discuss how to apply pressure on streaming platforms. The groups’ members were scattered worldwide, he recalled, and offered financial and legal aid to those who volunteered to file complaints against the foreign companies. “They were always criticizing Bharat and the people of Bharat, always criticizing the army, always making shows that were negative,” Solanki said. “They were not good for the image of India abroad.” After the successful “Tandav” campaign, Solanki said, he was flooded with congratulatory messages from BJP leaders and, last year, became a party member himself. Prime Video and Netflix have learned their lesson, Solanki said: “They are aware: If we do any mischief, if we cross the line, we will face the music.” Kashyap lent his voice to protests against an amendment to India's citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslims. Above, a February 2020 sit-in against the legislation in New Delhi. (Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times/Getty Images) Gone without a trace Inside Prime Video, the first show to be dropped after the “Tandav” crisis was “Gormint,” a satire about the absurdity of Indian politics, recalled series director Ayappa K.M. All nine episodes of the first season had already been shot in India, London and Thailand, and they were publicly scheduled to stream immediately after “Tandav.” They vanished without a trace. The director said he didn’t begrudge Prime Video executives because they faced enormous personal risks, but he bemoaned the state of the industry. “It is creative evolution in reverse,” he said. “Only passive, thoroughly sanitized content stands a chance on most platforms now.” While “Gormint” was never put out, Prime Video released what one industry executive called a “make-up” film, about an Indian archaeologist who discovers a mythical bridge described in the Ramayana Hindu epic, prompting him to reconsider his atheist beliefs. Prime Video did not answer questions about the “Tandav” controversy and its repercussions, saying only that the company sought to tell authentic and unique local stories while “respecting and embracing the myriad languages and cultures that make up India’s vibrant tapestry.” “At Prime Video we take our responsibilities seriously and make our programming decisions thoughtfully,” according to a company statement. Scrutiny over Prime Video's “Tandav” at one point led to the service's head of India content, Aparna Purohit, far right, being stashed in safe houses as she faced the threat of arrest. Above, she attends an April 2022 event in Mumbai. (Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images) ‘There’s no fighting back’ Prime Video’s travails also stunned its rival. As Purohit faced the threat of arrest in 2021, the Netflix India chief, Monika Shergill, told the company’s global leaders that its India office should not take risks or they might also face the possibility of jail, said a former Netflix India executive. Shergill did not respond to requests for comment. Another former Netflix India employee said the company decided against releasing a film by the director Dibakar Banerjee about generations of an Indian Muslim family experiencing bigotry even though it was completed, but executives signaled to Banerjee that if the BJP left power, the political climate may be more amenable for the film’s release. Banerjee could not be reached for comment. This May, a Netflix India team gave a presentation to executives from Europe and Latin America, in which they used India as a case study to illustrate how Netflix needed to be “more malleable to local regulation,” the former employee recalled. “The general line is: ‘There’s no fighting back.’” One director who has worked with Netflix and Prime Video said streaming companies didn’t just fear antagonizing the Modi government. They were even more concerned about its right-wing supporters, who might launch mass campaigns calling for boycotts and arrests. “What the government has done very smartly is they effectively say, ‘You self-censor stuff,’” the director said. “There is a gun to your head because at any point of time, it’s so easy to mobilize a bunch of people.” Concerns about self-censorship and revisionism are also surfacing elsewhere. A member of a team that made a podcast for Spotify about the history of India’s space program said executives asked to review the script because it hailed the contributions of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is often condemned by Hindu nationalists as being too conciliatory toward Muslims and Pakistan. Executives also seemed hesitant about giving credit to Tipu Sultan, an 18th-century Indian Muslim ruler who pioneered the use of rockets, but they ultimately did not push for changes. “I was a bit shocked,” the team member recalled. “What is wrong with talking about them? These are facts recorded in history.” In New Delhi, Kashyap addresses participants of a February 2020 sit-in against an amendment to India’s citizenship law that critics called anti-Muslim. It was later that Netflix shelved Kashyap’s “Maximum City.” (Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times/Getty Images) Politics gets personal From the beginning of his career, Kashyap has refused to be disciplined. To get his films released in theaters, Kashyap often fought against government censors who objected to his treatment of historical events and expletive-laden screenplays. But in 2019, he took on the ruling party itself. He mocked Modi supporters on social media during the national election and became a popular target of troll attacks. After the government passed the bill that critics said disadvantaged Muslims, Kashyap made headlines by joining a massive protest in Mumbai. And after a masked mob attacked anti-government student protesters in January 2020, the director flew to New Delhi, picked up a microphone and exhorted the students to fight on. Kashyap, left, expresses solidarity in 2016 with director Abhishek Chaubey, right, and others working on the film “Udta Punjab,” a crime drama that Indian film censors demanded be stripped of all references to the northern state of Punjab. (Satish Bate/Hindustan Times/Getty Images) Back home in Mumbai, he sat every morning at his dining room table and wrestled with “Maximum City.” Kashyap wrote feverishly, filling hundreds of pages of blank paper with his expansive Hindi handwriting. “It was my best work,” he said. “I’ve never done such honest, important work.” But shortly before preproduction was scheduled to begin, the “Tandav” saga upended the industry. A few weeks after that, controversy engulfed Kashyap: Tax officials raided 28 locations associated with his former production company and announced they found unreported income equivalent to $90 million. Under the Modi government, critics say, tax authorities have frequently been deployed to probe political opponents, and opposition parties criticized Kashyap’s investigation as politically motivated. The case is ongoing. Kashyap denies any wrongdoing. Kashyap, at home in Mumbai, struggled after Netflix walked away from “Maximum City.” He drank heavily, experienced depression and suffered two heart attacks. (Atul Loke for The Washington Post) Shunned and heartbroken After that, Kashyap recalled, Netflix walked away from “Maximum City” without providing a clear reason, but he believes either the content became too sensitive to touch — or he did. Kashyap drank heavily and fell into a lengthy depression. He suffered two heart attacks. “Maximum City” “was where all my energy went,” he said. “I was heartbroken. I totally lost it.” Shunned by investors, Kashyap used up his personal savings and borrowed money to finish his next film. He rewrote the drama about an interfaith couple as a more conventional romance. Still, it flopped. After three decades of bruising fights with government censors, Kashyap said he is now even more frustrated by the streaming industry, which submitted to a kind of censorship that was opaque and impossible to appeal. Streaming “was finally the space I was waiting for,” Kashyap said. “The disappointment is it was supposed to be a revolution, but it was not. Like social media, it was supposed to empower people, but it became a tool.” Today, along elevated highways, in chic neighborhoods and on the sides of city buses in Mumbai, advertisements for new Prime Video and Netflix shows are ubiquitous, a reminder that the companies continue to bet big on India despite mounting political constraints. But even liberal filmmakers and Kashyap’s supporters increasingly acknowledge a simple truth: The animating force of Mumbai isn’t art, they say. It’s dhandha — business. Netflix and Prime Video “are here to capture a market of 1.3 billion people,” said Hansal Mehta, a director who has several projects with the platforms. “The more we fool ourselves that people are here for something else, the more we will be disillusioned with the system.” Chastened but not defeated On a recent afternoon, Kashyap padded around in purple pajama pants in his apartment. He emerged from his study clutching the 800-page screenplay for “Maximum City Part III,” flipped through it wistfully, then set it aside. A handwritten, 800-page screenplay for a Kashyap project called “Maximum City Part III.” (Atul Loke for The Washington Post) Kashyap said he was recovering. He was getting back into writing every day on his dining room table, fueled by a steady diet of Kilchoman whisky, hand-rolled cigarettes and takeout biryani. He was even getting work again with Netflix, on a project that didn’t directly touch contemporary issues. “I know I need to stay away from current politics,” he said. He recently completed “Kennedy,” a film about an anguished cop turned hit man that wasn’t funded by Netflix or Prime Video, but by Zee, an Indian conglomerate. Kashyap shoehorned into the script thinly veiled criticism of Indian politicians’ coziness with billionaire industrialists and the government’s handling of the pandemic. It’s not clear if they’ll remain intact once the film is reviewed by censors for theatrical release or prepared for streaming. And Kashyap is still trying to raise funds to get “Maximum City” made. For inspiration, he said, he often looked to filmmakers who made daring works in Iran and China — one a strict theocracy, the other an authoritarian one-party state. India was neither, for now. “They still find ways to do it,” he said. “So why can’t I?” Niha Masih contributed to this report. About this story Design by Anna Lefkowitz. Visual editing by Chloe Meister, Joe Moore and Jennifer Samuel. Copy editing by Christopher Rickett. Story editing by Alan Sipress. Project editing by Jay Wang. By Gerry Shih Gerry Shih is the India Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, covering India and neighboring countries. By Anant Gupta Anant Gupta is a researcher with the India bureau of the Washington Post. He is based in New Delhi. © 1996-2023 The Washington Post

Colombo Fails to Meet Obligations Linked to GSP+ Scheme By Claudio Francavilla Sri Lankan police disperse protesters in Colombo with tear gas and a water cannon, September 24, 2022. © 2022 Tharaka Basnayaka/NurPhoto via AP Sri Lanka’s economy has contracted every year since 2019, but exports to the European Union have increased, providing vital income in desperate economic times. This has largely been due to the EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), which grants Sri Lanka tariff-free access to the EU market so long as it complies with core human rights and labor rights treaties. But, as the EU noted in a new report, the Sri Lankan government is falling well short of the mark. The report identifies two bright spots for human rights in Sri Lanka: the “resilience” of civil society; and the 2022 Aragalaya (“struggle” in Sinhala) movement in which thousands protested for good governance “in the spirit of democracy and freedom of expression and assembly.” Yet the report makes clear that civil society’s “resilience” is necessary in the face of government “harassment and intimidation.” Since President Ranil Wickremesinghe took office in July 2022, the government has adopted a “repressive response” to protests, arresting the movement’s leaders and employing “disproportionate use of force.” This challenges the EU’s policy to assist Sri Lanka’s recovery from its economic, governance and human rights crises. As the report states, “The process of reform will be more sustainable and robust if Sri Lankan civil society is part of it and if the approach is truly inclusive.” Notably, the government has yet to repeal the abusive Prevention of Terrorism Act – a key commitment to the EU – and even broke a moratorium on its use. As the International Monetary Fund noted in September, civil society’s “oversight and monitoring” of government actions is “restricted … by broad application of counter-terrorism rules.” Instead, the government has proposed new counterterrorism legislation that does not meet rights standards, and an Online Safety Bill that the EU says “could lead to censorship.” Other rights concerns the EU highlighted include the “treatment of minorities … hate crimes … allegations of torture … decriminalising same sex relations … domestic violence and child abuse … [and] harassment and threats against human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists.” These and other developments are incompatible with the GSP+ human rights requirements, and yet Sri Lanka’s government continues to benefit from the program. For conditionality to be credible, the GSP regulation needs to be reformed to require clear, public, and timebound benchmarks for compliance. This is what EU lawmakers should focus on: making GSP more effective in fostering human rights progress in beneficiary countries. © 2023 Human Rights Watch

Purchases by Russian defence contractor suggest Moscow was planning to steal vast quantities of Ukrainian grain months before troops ever crossed the border Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a video address ahead of the BRICS summit in August 2023. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Arpan Rai Russia was actively preparing to steal grain supplies and starve the Ukrainian population of food for months before Vladimir Putin ordered last year’s invasion, according to new evidence compiled by human rights experts. When Russian tanks did roll across the border on 24 February 2022 they deliberately targeted grain-rich areas and food production infrastructure first, the new report by international human rights law firm Global Rights Compliance found. GRC found that Russia’s defence contractor began purchasing trucks to transport grain, as well as three new 170-metre bulk carrier cargo ships, as early as December 2021, evidence of advance planning for the pillage of Ukrainian food resources “on an unprecedented scale”. Russia began commandeering Ukrainian farms within less than a week of its invasion, and at its peak was exporting 12,000 tonnes of grain per day from across occupied territories. The evidence of a “highly coordinated level of pre-planning” will be provided by to the International Criminal Court and GRC hopes it will lead to a first international prosecution against Mr Putin for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare. It is “highly likely” Russia will be found guilty, Catriona Murdoch, a partner at Global Rights Compliance, and if so Mr Putin could face another ICC arrest warrant to go with the one issued in March this year for the unlawful deportation of children from occupied Ukrainian territories. “Russia not only deployed a multi-pronged approach by besieging civilian populations, destroying critical infrastructure, but it also pre-planned the seizure and pillage of agricultural commodities in an insidious plan. Moscow has sparked a global food crisis and attacked Ukraine’s agriculture sector as a warfare tactic,” Ms Murdoch told The Independent. The grain pillaged from Ukraine so far has an estimated market value of $1bn per year. Multiple private Ukrainian grain companies were forcibly incorporated into Russia’s state operator, the GRC said. Beyond its impact on Ukrainian citizens, Russia’s invasion has affected millions around the world by increasing global food insecurity – Ukraine was the world’s largest wheat producer prior to the conflict. A farmer in Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine said his grain farm was taken over by Russian forces five days after the full-scale invasion began. “Multiple convoys of vehicles were seen carrying grain in the direction of the Crimean Peninsula in the following weeks, and GPS trackers on farmers’ stolen trucks show them driving through Crimea and into Russia,” the GRC said. Satellite images shared with The Independent by the GRC showed grain trucks at a facility in Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia bearing licence plate numbers registered in occupied Crimea. Other images show train carriages labelled “grain” leaving Beridansk train station in Zaporizhzhia. And another image from March this year shows a newly constructed storage building in Melitopol with grain visible throughout the compound. GRC said that despite the apparent planning that went into Russia’s theft of Ukrainian grain, job adverts seen in Russia suggest the government was unable to recruit truck drivers quickly enough to transport the vast quantities of stolen food. The investigation into grain theft ran up to August this year. GRC said that while Russia has not captured any more grain-rich territory since then, it still controls all of the Crimean peninsula – one of the main regions from which grain is transported by sea to Russia and abroad. Yousuf Syed Khan, senior lawyer at GRC, called Russia’s weaponisation of Ukraine’s grain industry “unprecedented in modern history”. Russia is now appealing to the UN and other global powers to ease war-related sanctions so it can resume grain exports from occupied territory to developing countries hit hardest by the food crisis. The offer of grain to friendly third countries was also part of Mr Putin’s failed charm offensive to get back onto the UN Human Rights Council. “Russia is doing this to represent itself as the legitimate authority of Ukrainian territory, in turn also weakening Ukraine’s national economy,” Mr Khan said.

President of the Congolese Movement for Democracy and Integral Development tries to force entry to the stadium By Rédaction Africanews At least 37 people, almost all of them young people, lost their lives and dozens of others were injured in a deadly stampede that occurred Monday, November 20 inside the Michel-Ornano stadium in Brazzaville. Thousands of young people stormed this temple of sport around 11 p.m. to be among the first to obtain the information sheet the next day to enlist in the Congolese Armed Forces. A large crowd tried to force entry to the stadium, causing several people to fall and be trampled by others. Injured people were transported to the military hospital and Brazzaville University Hospital. The authorities reacted and confirmed the provisional number of deaths in a press release published Monday morning. A crisis unit has been set up. The call for this recruitment of 1,500 young people to serve in the various army corps had aroused popular fervor among a section of the population affected by endemic unemployment. According to the World Bank, the dynamics of social exclusion and factors of fragility in the Republic of Congo exacerbate poverty and inequality. A reality which, according to some observers, could explain the presence of thousands of young people this Black Monday in this stadium. A physical presence resulting from the absence of dematerialization of administrative procedures in the country. The army has not confirmed whether this recruitment will take place after the tragedy or its postponement. On May 28, an entrance exam for the police and gendarmerie was organized in all departments of the country. Although it attracted many young people, its results are still awaited. Copyright © africanews

Burundian children stand behind a fence as they wait to be registered as refugees at Nyarugusu camp in Tanzania on June 11, 2015. By Clayton Boeyink, a research fellow at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and Stephanie Schwartz, an assistant professor in the international relations department at the London School of Economics. John, a Burundian living in Tanzania’s Nyarugusu refugee camp, is the embodiment of the instability that more than 100,000 other Burundian refugees are facing as the Tanzanian government renews threats to forcibly repatriate Burundian refugees if they do not return “voluntarily.” John, who we’ve given a pseudonym for his safety, says, “I have seen a lot of things. I have fled the genocide in 1972 and the war in 1993.” In addition to fleeing Burundi multiple times, John, like many other Burundians, has also been displaced from Tanzania, the state that provided him refuge. During his second displacement from Burundi in 2012, the Tanzanian government forced John and thousands of other Burundians refugees to repatriate. He recalls, “Early in the morning, we found [Tanzanian] soldiers surrounding the camp. They even used firearms. Some [refugees] were killed; some were strongly beaten.” Today, after having been displaced from Burundi to Tanzania for a third time in 2015, John and his compatriots are facing another violent expulsion: “Right now in Tanzania, I am not stable. I think they will force us to leave again.” This instability is a result of the Tanzanian government’s repeated assaults on refugees’ human rights, obstructions to socioeconomic integration, and recurrent threats to force them back to Burundi. When refugees were forcibly repatriated to Burundi in 2012, many were not welcomed back into their communities. Some found their homes and land occupied after having been gone for decades, a significant obstacle in a tiny country where the majority relies on small-scale agriculture to survive. Other returnees ended up in so-called peace villages, where living conditions were dire. Competition for land often turned violent. When another crisis came around in 2015, many of these returnees were among the first to flee to Tanzania again. SHARING A BORDER IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION OF EASTERN AFRICA, Burundians have often crossed into neighboring Tanzania to seek refuge—which Tanzania has provided, sometimes willingly and other times reluctantly. The genocide that John refers to is the 1972 “selective genocide” of Burundi’s ethnic majority of Hutu elites, teachers, businesspeople, which was perpetrated by the country’s Tutsi-controlled military. This conflict launched cyclical wars, crises, and displacements, including a civil war in 1993. During each crisis, hundreds of thousands of Burundians fled to neighboring countries, including Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire). Though Burundi’s war officially ended in 2005, instability and poverty remained, and what’s more, these multiple displacements led to myriad land disputes in the small agrarian country. Consequently, many refugees were reluctant to leave Tanzania. John experienced this firsthand after his forced return from Tanzania in 2012: “My neighbors wanted to kill me when I tried to reclaim my land.” More recently, amid a violent political crisis in Burundi in 2015, more than 250,000 Burundians fled to Tanzania. Brutal repression by the security forces and allied youth militias of all opposition voices means that many of those Burundian refugees do not feel safe returning. Upping the ante on years of threats, the director of the Refugee Services Department, Tanzania’s highest refugee official, warned Burundian refugees in July that if they did not return on their own, they would be forced back—a clear violation of international human rights standards and the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits states from sending refugees to places where their lives or liberty may be in jeopardy. The cards remain stacked against Burundian refugees, who are caught between a rock and a hard place as both the Tanzanian and Burundian governments angle to coerce repatriation. Indeed, beyond Tanzania’s desire to kick refugees out, Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye has been advocating for the return of the refugees as a part of a broader campaign to oppose international intervention and prove that since the 2015 crisis, Burundi’s human rights record has improved. However, rights organizations report that the government’s violent crackdown never stopped; it has just hidden it better, and the international community has chosen to ignore it. WHILE TANZANIA HAD AN OPEN-DOOR POLICY welcoming refugees for decades during parts of the 20th century, the 1990s were a turbulent time across the continent due to large-scale wars and displacements; structural adjustment policies that eroded state resources and capacities; and the advent of new democracies, which introduced electoral politics that often featured xenophobia toward perceived outsiders. All of this resulted in the Tanzanian government ceding refugee governance to international organizations such as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and enacting restrictive and militarized encampment policies, prohibiting refugees’ freedom of movement and rights to work outside designated camps. Forced repatriation has been central to this encampment era. In 1996, the military expelled more than 400,000 Rwandan refugees. The ruling party even pledged in its 2005 election manifesto to make Tanzania refugee-free by 2010. And in 2009, the government announced its intention to close the camps and repeatedly urged Burundians to voluntarily return. In the years that followed, the government restricted refugees’ access to local markets and international aid, and even threateningly stationed army tanks around the exterior of the camps. In 2012, Tanzania violently forced John back to Burundi—along with nearly 40,000 refugees living in Mtabila, the last remaining Burundian refugee camp. Multiple witnesses reported government officials burning down homes, beating people to get them on buses, sexually abusing refugees, and even forcing cesarean sections in the camp hospital to speed up the repatriation process. The international humanitarian community on the ground was complicit in forced returns. Outside Tanzania, few human rights observers even paid attention. Using the Orwellian label of “orderly repatriation,” a group of international humanitarian agencies and nongovernmental organizations, led by the UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration, assisted in the logistics of returning the tens of thousands of Burundians. In the lead-up to the 2012 expulsion, the UNHCR worked with the Tanzanian Ministry of Home Affairs to interview refugees living in Mtabila to see if they qualified for individual protection to remain in Tanzania. Only around 7 percent (based on data from multiple sources) of those interviewed were granted continued refugee status, and the rest were deemed no longer in need of protection and therefore subject to so-called legal expulsion. Given the harsh tactics that the Tanzanian government was already using to try to force refugees to return, supposedly of their own accord, the international community decided to support the logistics of transporting the embattled Burundian refugees across the border. The nongovernmental organization staff members who we interviewed recalled justifying their involvement at the time, believing that if they had not been part of the process, the human rights violations within the camps would have been far worse. Indeed, recent events feel like déjà vu, evoking the traumatic memories of Mtabila. Although Tanzania has enacted more progressive refugee policies over the years—including the decision in 2014 to grant Tanzanian citizenship to more than 160,000 Burundians residing in Tanzania since the 1970s—the defining strategy for the government has remained the same: contain refugees in camps, then force them to return by making the camps a hostile and violent environment. SINCE THEIR ARRIVAL IN 2015, Tanzania’s refugee policy has consistently constricted Burundians, even in comparison to Congolese refugees with whom they share a camp in Nyarugusu. In 2017, despite continued flight from Burundi, the government revoked prima facie, or blanket asylum for Burundians, thus obstructing newly arriving refugees. In 2018, Tanzania withdrew from the United Nations’ Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF)—a plan to loosen encampment restrictions that otherwise stop refugees from leaving the camps—abruptly ended the naturalization program for the 1972-era refugees, and publicly called on all Burundian refugees to return to Burundi. Despite the UNHCR’s warnings that the situation was not safe for Burundian refugees to return, in 2019, a leaked bilateral agreement between Burundi and Tanzania showed that the countries had agreed to organize the repatriation and that “returns would continue with or without refugees’ consent.” Tanzanian Home Affairs Minister Kangi Lugola went as far to say that any organization opposing these plans would “face the wrath” of the president. Similarly, a leaked memo from the Tanzanian Ministry of Home Affairs to U.N. organizations and international NGOs in 2023, seen by Foreign Policy, stated that in response to any organization found to be encouraging refugee integration and not actively promoting voluntary repatriation, “the Government will not hesitate to take actions,” which likely means a shutdown of an organization’s operations, as the Tanzanian government has done in the past. The government has used other avenues to disincentivize refugees from staying. In 2017, the government suddenly shut down an effective World Food Program cash transfer aid program that was highly popular with the recipients. In 2019, the government closed down the vital markets shared by refugees and nearby communities, preventing refugees from engaging in trade to supplement meager food rations. Then came the predation—insecurity in camp became an increasing concern as refugees were subject to increased police harassment, both within and outside the camps, and deteriorating living conditions. In 2020, rights organizations reported that there was a spate of disappearances linked to Burundian and Tanzanian officials. In addition to the difficult economic situation, these kidnappings caused an acute state of fear and terror for camp residents. Victims and human rights organizations claim that refugees have faced torture in police stations, ransoms and extortion calling for payments from friends and family, and forced deportations to Burundian security agents. Today, due to lack of international funding, food rations have been cut to meet only 50 percent of refugees’ food needs, causing extreme destitution across the camps. While tens of thousands of Burundians have repatriated—allegedly voluntarily—human rights organizations report that refugees’ reasons for signing up to return included the fear of forced repatriation, increasing insecurity in camps, poor living conditions, and the market closures. MANY REFUGEES that Foreign Policy spoke to admitted that they would “rather die” than return to Burundi, and that those who have returned have deeply regretted their decision due the lack of economic and social reintegration, but they are now trapped unable to return to Tanzania. As such, forced return is unlikely to be a durable solution. The Tanzanian government should reverse its repatriation pressures on refugees, both in its rhetoric and in its actions. This will not only show respect for international law, but also prevent the addition of more instability to a still-rebuilding Burundi. The international community should not repeat its past complicity in assisting less-than-voluntary repatriation operations and should instead condemn governmental pressures to return, even if it risks operations on the ground. Likewise, international donors need to do more to financially support the Tanzanian government in hosting refugees, which has caused tension and been central to the government’s public rationale for harsh encampment for decades. The recent echoes of Mtabila are a warning: The threat of forced repatriation is real, and the last time that it happened, it received little attention or condemnation from the international community. This must not happen again. Refugees’ acute concerns about their imminent danger must be taken seriously to prevent more violence. Foreign Policy @2023