“Google may have detected government-backed attackers trying to steal your password,” read the text, advising him to tighten his online security.

Though the Google alert did not name names, Alaoudh was sure he knew which government was responsible — the one whose trolls have targeted him repeatedly on social media and which is holding his father, a prominent reformist, in jail. 

Alaoudh is a leading figure in a US-based group advocating for democracy and human rights in the Arab world. Known as DAWN, it was founded by the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before government agents murdered him in 2018. Since then, it has been pressing the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to account for his suspected role in the killing. 

Alaoudh says that he knows of five other dissidents who received an identical Google warning at the same time, suggesting a coordinated attack. 

With Biden about to become president and signaling that accountability for Khashoggi’s death was a priority, “the Saudi government was freaking out,” said Alaoudh. “They’re afraid of Saudi dissidents getting into meetings with decision-takers and having influence again.” 

There was an extra twist to this suspected cyber-attack, though, with the warning coming from Google. Days earlier, Alaoudh had learned of a deal the tech giant had signed to provide cloud computing services in Saudi Arabia, which he and other dissidents fear will vastly increase the government’s ability to target its opponents and control local digital activity.

The agreement with a subsidiary of Aramco, the state-controlled oil company, has had little publicity — possibly because Google made its announcement just before Christmas, ensuring little follow-up during the holiday period. To the surprise of some tech-industry watchers, there has been no significant pushback from Google staff or their recently formed union. 

But, as the news has begun to filter out more widely this year, Saudi exiles who have fled Bin Salman’s repression have reacted with fury.

“Google is helping to whitewash MBS’s reputation, after the murder of Khashoggi,” said Lina al-Hathloul, whose sister Loujain captured international attention with her videos posted on Google-owned YouTube, protesting against a ban on women driving. Since 2018 — and despite the driving ban being lifted — Loujain has been in prison, in what observers believe has been a calculated effort to punish her for speaking out. Other dissidents, such as the writer Raif Badawi, have been incarcerated even longer. 

Speaking from Belgium, where she now lives in exile, Hathloul accused Google of putting itself in position to help the Saudi authorities stifle dissent on a wider scale.  

“Loujain was hacked and tracked before her arrest, so the idea that Google could now be letting its computers be used by the Saudi regime is shocking,” she said.

Evidence has mounted of worldwide efforts by the Saudi government to go after its opponents electronically, sometimes employing Israeli-made spyware. The targets have included Omar Abdulaziz, another outspoken dissident, and, allegedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Any Saudi daring to criticize the state online has learnt to expect a swarm of abuse from masses of seemingly well organized pro-government trolls, often known as “the flies.” One reason Khashoggi may have been targeted — as highlighted in The Dissident,  a new documentary about his murder — is that he was trying to organize an online fightback. Working with Abdulaziz, the plan was to set up a network of “bees,” made up of his supporters, that would challenge official narratives on social media.

Google has released little information about its Saudi plans, but one client does get a namecheck: Noon, a joint UAE-Saudi e-commerce venture, seen as the main regional rival to Amazon. Google is fighting a wider global battle to overturn the online shopping giant’s lead in cloud computing. The murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, may have opened the way for Google, as it led to Bezos — the paper’s owner — cancelling plans to invest in Saudi Arabia. 

Satisfying shareholder demands for earnings growth seem to have outweighed the reputational risk for Google. According to its partner Aramco, the Saudi cloud computing market could be worth at least $10bn by 2030, around two-thirds of Google’s current global revenue from this source. But the financial terms and safeguards on how its cloud computing power will be used remain opaque.

An Aramco statement about the deal, however, mentions the “multiple solutions” Google Cloud offers in areas including “artificial intelligence,” and “smart analytics,” techniques for handling large volumes of data.  

Google’s own principles include commitments not to employ AI “technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,” or “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” 

How those principles can be upheld working with a Saudi government that has shown it is willing to kill its critics remains unclear. Google did not respond to a request for comment for this article. 

The search engine behemoth may have dropped its “Don’t be evil” motto a few years ago, but the stakes are still high. "Google's legacy of marketing itself as an ethical tech company means that their actions help set the standard for the industry,” said Jack Poulson, a former Google research scientist who quit in protest at the company's plan to create a censored search engine in China. After Khashoggi’s death, many global companies cut ties with the kingdom. Some were already returning, but with its stamp of approval, Google has made it that much easier argues Poulson. “By forming a close partnership with Saudi Arabia without clear boundaries, they are helping reverse the post-Khashoggi distancing from its rulers."

Other former Google insiders have expressed dismay that there has not been more opposition to the Saudi deal from within the company — or the new Alphabet Workers’ Union (AWU). In staunchly anti-union Silicon Valley, the organization’s creation is highly symbolic, not least for the fact that it grew partly out of opposition to past controversial projects, such as the Chinese search engine, AI work for the Pentagon and surveillance for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agency.

“Now there is a union, we should hope to see more pushback on this issue,” said Meredith Whitaker, who led an internal campaign against the AI contract with the Defense Department before being pushed out. Poulson is sympathetic, saying he hopes the AWU’s silence so far “is a consequence of their infancy rather than policy."

Past red lines drawn by Google staff would appear to apply directly to Saudi Arabia now. In November 2019, more than 2,000 workers signed a letter calling on the company not to do any deals with fossil fuel producers, as part of wider efforts to tackle climate change. Among global companies, Saudi’s Aramco has the dubious title of being the world’s biggest polluter. 

At the moment, though, the AWU seems more consumed with itself and inter-union politics. “We don’t have time to get (sic) a proper response unfortunately,” said Chewy Shaw, vice chair of its executive council, in a text message, saying that the union was “too busy building up our structures. We won’t be ready to give statements on these types of situations for another few months.”

The Biden administration appears to be moving more quickly. Last week, the U.S. ordered a temporary freeze on multi-billion dollar arms deals President Trump agreed with Bin Salman. Abdullah Alaoudh and other dissidents in the US are also calling for Google to suspend its cloud deal with Saudi Arabia. 

As things stand, he said, “Google is providing its power to a brutal dictatorship.”

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In next month’s ballot, the second of four referendums this year, citizens will be asked to say yes or no to a tax and pension reform and whether to adopt new European gun controls. As they digest the partisan campaign literature that will also be arriving, as well as television and online advertisements, the Swiss have come to rely on the government-issued booklet as a neutral guide in deciding how to vote.

“For me, the booklet is like the Bible,” said journalist Adrian Arnold, explaining how he makes up his mind before voting. It has become a cornerstone of the country’s 170 year-old system of ‘direct democracy’ — which gives voters the power to overturn legislation.

Switzerland doesn’t do political earthquakes. But earlier this month the country experienced a jolt when its highest court took the unprecedented decision to annul the result of one of these regular referendums — a 2016 vote on a tax change for married couples — on the grounds that voters had been misled by the information in the booklet.

Following the vote, the government had conceded that it had seriously under-estimated how many people would benefit from the change, prompting the party behind the proposal to mount a legal challenge to its narrow 49.2 to 50.8 percent defeat.

By European standards, the controversy may count as small potatoes compared to the political wars raging across the continent. The ruling means that for the first time in its history, Switzerland may have to hold a referendum again. Some angry Swiss politicians warn that this could potentially undermine people’s faith in their system.

Perhaps as importantly, the Swiss have cast a spotlight on  the importance of factual information for voters -— a matter with implications well beyond Swiss borders in the United Kingdom.

Legal experts and British political commentators have already used the Swiss example to evoke parallels with Britain’s predicament over Brexit, where disinformation influenced the result of the original 2016 vote, and where there are growing calls for a second referendum to resolve the deadlock.

Unlike in the U.K., there is no suggestion that Swiss voters were deliberately misled. Nonetheless, some legal experts say that the Swiss Supreme Court may have provided a legal and constitutional template for other states to combat misinformation during an election — and in a way that can enhance trust.

“It shows that there are circumstances in which a vote can be overturned according to constitutional and democratic principles in a way that actually strengthens democracy and trust in democracy,” argues Vincent Martenet, professor of law at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Martenet doubts the verdict will lead to other votes being questioned, because it was a unique situation where there were “serious irregularities” which potentially affected the narrow result. But it has served to enshrine the importance of giving voters reliable information, he says: “It’s a very serious issue if people are misinformed by the government.”

Swiss judges focused on this concern in their verdict: “The incomplete and un-transparent information by the government violated the freedom of vote,” they said in a statement. “Keeping in mind the close result and the severe nature of the irregularities, it is possible that the outcome of the ballot could have been different.”

Even before the judges announced their verdict, the government was already taking steps to prevent a repeat of its 2016 error, Swiss political analysts say, instituting more checks on the information it has been putting into voters’ booklets for subsequent referendums.

It has also been putting more effort into making sure it gives equal weight to both sides of the argument, according to Professor Martenet, including in cases where the Federal Government is officially backing one side. “The government has an obligation to be objective,” he says.

Despite the differences with what happened in Britain — where watchdog bodies accused pro-Brexit campaigners of intentionally misusing statistics to influence voters — the Swiss decision highlights concerns worldwide about how good a job states do in making sure their citizens have balanced information, particularly before elections.

It is an issue that Cambridge University researcher Cameron Brick has been looking into. In a post last year, he examined attempts to provide unbiased assessments of the impact of climate change and how leaving the European Union would affect British farmers, but concluded that both academics and policymakers are still operating in the dark. “How well do these attempts really convey the information to key audiences?,” he asks. “It turns out no one knows.”

With its system of direct democracy, Switzerland has particular incentive to want to know more and to make sure voters have all the information they need. And despite the knock the system has received, for most voters the booklet still inspires trust.

“I like to lay out all the campaign stuff I get from the mailbox and then compare their claims to what’s in the booklet,” says Susan Misicka, a journalist with Swissinfo.ch, who reported on the annulled 2016 referendum.  “That way I think I can make the best decision.”

The post Swiss Courts make facts matter again appeared first on Coda Story.

“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews, from various countries of Europe.”

I had joined a guided tour of the Nazis’ largest extermination camp, and by this point the horror of the place was crushing.

On either side of me were the ruins of the two largest gas chambers with their attached crematoria, and the pits where they dumped the ashes. Auschwitz-Birkenau is actually two separate camps, and the tour began with several hours in the claustrophobic barracks and dungeons of the original concentration camp. Some of the barrack rooms have been turned into shrine-like exhibits of the belongings the Nazis stole from each family once they had stepped off the trains. Most disturbing of all is a room filled with mounds of human hair, cropped from each victim for use in stuffing mattresses and pillows. Here and there, little girls’ ponytails poke out from the mass.

As I stood in front of the memorial plaques, silent like everyone else, I thought of the arguments about the details of the Holocaust and why so many still doubt what happened here. And I thought that Auschwitz is not only a warning to humanity. It’s also a monument to facts, and the sanctity of the truth.

Far from exaggerating the Nazis’ crimes — as Holocaust deniers have so often alleged — the custodians of Auschwitz, and Jewish historians, have actually reduced their estimate for the number of people murdered here.

Far from exaggerating the Nazis’ crimes — as Holocaust deniers have so often alleged — the custodians of Auschwitz, and Jewish historians, have actually reduced their estimate for the number of people murdered here, in accordance with the evidence they have gathered.

The plaques you see today, inscribed with the figure of “about one and a half million” murdered, haven’t always been there. If I had visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in the 1980s, I would have seen another set of plaques, saying that "four million" people had died here — describing them simply as the “victims” of Nazi genocide, with no mention of their identities.

That figure of four million was conjured up by Poland’s then-communist rulers. Auschwitz is in southern Poland, and they wanted to emphasize Nazi atrocities against communists, particularly their own people. The Jews were edited out of this narrative, even though it was clear even then that the Birkenau death camp had been set up to exterminate them, as part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” This attempt to rewrite history has echoes even today, in Russia’s efforts to ignore Nazi atrocities against Jews on its own soil.

There’s no question that Poland suffered grievously under German occupation during World War II: as many as three million Poles may have died. And because the Nazis initially set up Auschwitz — which is in southern Poland — as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, it became one of the focal points of communist efforts to memorialize the country’s suffering. But most of the Poles who perished at the hands of the Nazis died elsewhere, not in this death camp.

By 1989, when communism collapsed in Poland, Auschwitz and Jewish historians had already worked out a more accurate estimate, based on the Nazis’ own transport records of who they rounded up and put on the trains from across Europe.

That is where the figure of 1.5 million on today’s plaques comes from, including at least 1.1 million Jews, as well as Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and some 5,000 nationals of other countries. And in the early 1990s, Poland’s first post-communist prime minister agreed to install new plaques at the memorial.

Despite this strict adherence to fact and evidence, the lies keep coming. And as the annual day of Holocaust remembrance approaches — on 27 January, the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army — anti-Semitic attacks are rising worldwide.

The day before my visit I had been at a conference in Warsaw, listening to warnings about the corrosive effect of the tide of propaganda and division sweeping the world. A journalist from Hungary reported how the label “traitor” was now being slapped on anyone who tried to counter the falsehoods of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Who can forget that among Orban’s favorite invented enemies is a Holocaust survivor, George Soros. But when the leader of the free world can be so free with the truth, it is contagious. The tide keeps rising.

The story of Auschwitz-Birkenau is also a parable of what happens when lying becomes institutionalized. When the Nazis rounded up Jewish and Gypsy communities across Europe to be transported to the death camps, they told them they were being resettled (they made them pay for the journey). That’s how they kept them calm as they packed them into the cattle-wagons.

That’s why the Auschwitz museum is now so full of pots, kettles and other cooking utensils that Jewish families packed into their suitcases, the basics for a new life.

In the grainy photos on display, you can see the new arrivals look exhausted and bewildered, but not yet terrified. They were starting to realize something was wrong, as SS officers made their selections — one line for slave labour, another for children and those too weak to work, to be led straight to the gas chambers. But no one yet knew their fate.

They realized something was wrong, as SS officers made their selections — one line for slave labour, another for children and those too weak to work, to be led straight to the gas chambers.

But even as Hitler was trying to create a new truth, that the Aryans were a master race, and that the Jews and others barely deserved the term at all, his underlings knew the truth of what they were doing — and it scared them.

As the Red Army closed in, the SS guards tried to carry out a giant cover-up, by dynamiting the gas chambers, burning paper records and destroying the belongings they had harvested from their victims. But they left it too late. When Soviet troops rolled in, troves of evidence remained — including tons of human hair and stacks of paperwork that had been spirited from the flames.

The Nazis were famous for their record-keeping, but they never wrote down the real cause of death. People in Auschwitz died of coronary heart failure, severe gastric infections or pneumonia, never by being gassed, shot or injected with poison.

As we walked back towards the Birkenau gatehouse, now infamous from so many films, one of the people in my group asked our guide why there were so many solitary chimney stacks where prisoners’ barracks had once stood.

Some were destroyed by the SS, but many of the barracks were dismantled in the years after the war for building materials, Zuzanna explained, before anyone had thought of turning the camp into a memorial. And, she added, with the same dispassionate voice she had employed throughout the tour, “the chimneys were just propaganda anyway.”

Propaganda aimed at who, I asked? The Nazis controlled the camp. The prisoners were destined for death. To whom did they need to lie?

They were worried about visits from the Red Cross, she explained. The Nazis always told Red Cross staff that this was a regular prisoner of war camp, never letting them get too far inside. So they needed to make it look as though all the prisoners had heating.

Zuzanna has been doing her job for more than a decade. “Sometimes, I have to take a break,” she admitted. I thanked her for the way she had told the story of this place. She nodded in acknowledgement, then said: “Everyone should come here.”

The post Postcard from Auschwitz appeared first on Coda Story.

Part 1: Terror in Central Asia

The story of one man caught up in Kyrgyzstan’s homophobic violence. [Warning: Graphic Content]

Part 2: Permission to Exterminate

Activists have gone underground after a wave of attacks.

We knock again, hard. But still there is no sound of anyone coming to the door. A journalist colleague and I had been invited for dinner at the home of Nika, a gay man who recently set up a small LGBTQ support group in Bishkek, the Kyrgyzstan capital. Only after we phone him do we finally hear muffled sounds from inside of first one, then two heavy metal doors being unlocked. “This is how we live now,” said Nika, taking in my glance at his security arrangements.

Two years ago, the Kyrgyz parliament followed the lead of its powerful near-neighbor Russia and introduced a series of amendments outlawing the promotion of same-sex relationships. Popularly known as the ‘anti-gay propaganda law,’ it has unleashed a campaign of violence and intimidation against the LGBTQ community, with a near 300 percent increase in reported attacks since the legislation was announced. Some people have been savagely assaulted, including one gay man we interviewed who was beaten unconscious and gang-raped this year. Several sources told us of lesbians being subjected to so-called ‘corrective rapes’, and many attacks go unreported. LGBTQ activists have gone underground after the Bishkek office of one advocacy group was firebombed.

The names of all the LGBTQ individuals have either been changed or not published, at their request, because of concerns for their safety.

“I get phone calls and text messages saying things like: ‘we’re gonna cut out your tongue and shove it up your ass’ and ‘you are ruining this country,” said Nika. “The new law encouraged everyone to go after us, without fear of being punished.” The police are often accused of being at the forefront, with many LGBTQ individuals detailing instances of officers threatening to expose their sexual identity unless they pay bribes.

Nika showed us into his living room where his other guests are already seated around a coffee table, while others help bring dishes from his kitchen next door. It is a friends’ get-together just like anywhere else—except they say this is now the only safe way they can meet because of the spate of homophobic attacks. “If I could afford it, I would leave tomorrow,” said Slava, one of his guests.

It was never easy being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Kyrgyzstan’s patriarchal, Muslim-majority society. Nonetheless, in a region where the Soviet past hangs heavily and ossified dictatorship is the norm, the smallest of the Central Asian ‘Stans’ was seen as a relative beacon of tolerance and democracy. And while there were occasional attacks in the past, the LGBTQ community was mostly left to itself. Until recently there were even several gay clubs in Bishkek. But over the past few years, internal and external forces have “dragged the LGBT community into a battle for Kyrgyz identity,” said Medet Tiulegenov, chair of international and comparative politics at the American University in Bishkek.

Poor and landlocked, Kyrgyzstan has been a geopolitical and economic supplicant ever since it became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union, always vulnerable to bigger powers. While the US needed the Manas airbase outside Bishkek after 2001 to ferry troops in and out of Afghanistan, the Kyrgyz government tilted westwards. But the Kremlin proved the greater force, unhappy at an American presence in its backyard, and successfully pressed Bishkek to close the base. And since winning power in 2011, President Almazbek Atambayev has cemented this shift away from the West towards Russia. “We cannot have a separate future,” he declared when President Vladimir Putin visited Kyrgyzstan in 2012.

He has been an assiduous courtier, extending Russia’s lease on its own military base outside Bishkek, before enthusiastically copying anti-Western crowd-pleasers in the Kremlin’s legal arsenal. First came a virtual clone of Moscow’s offensive on NGOs, with legislation demanding all groups receiving external funding declare themselves as ‘foreign agents’, targeted at human rights groups, including those advocating for the LGBTQ community. And then, in March 2014, MPs from the ruling coalition announced the ‘anti-gay propaganda’ measures, with even harsher penalties on paper than the Russian version. They were necessary to “protect the rights of the majority rather than of the minority,” said one of the co-sponsors, Talantbek Uzakbaev, a member of the pro-Russian ‘Dignity’ party. “We cannot tolerate gay propaganda.”

These moves had enthusiastic support from powerful nationalist and religious constituencies at home—both Muslim and Orthodox Christian. Self-styled nationalist groups like Kyrk-Choro (Kyrgyz Knights) have been at the forefront of assaults on both the LGBTQ community and sex workers—with its leader claiming he has official backing. (Raids on brothels and prostitutes quickly subsided though, because unlike the LGBTQ community, analysts say, they have establishment defenders.) In effect, being anti-Western and homophobic have become two ends of the same bone in a Kyrgyz version of dog-whistle politics. “Being anti-LGBT has been very profitable for the nationalists,” said Tiulgenov.

But less so for Kyrgyzstan, as Moscow has given little in return for President Atambayev’s fealty. Hammered by low oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine, Russia has instead cancelled several major investments, including plans for a $2.5 billion hydro-power scheme, just as crucial remittance income from Kyrgyz migrants working in Russia has also collapsed. And while it’s been a symbolic boost for President Vladimir Putin to have Kyrgyzstan join the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union; for Bishkek it’s been an expensive let-down so far, as new customs fees have hit its lucrative transit trade with China.

In the meantime, homophobic violence has risen. It’s impossible to get definite figures but staff at one Bishkek LGBTQ activist group—who asked me not to publish its name—said they’ve been helping the victims of 5 or 6 attacks a month in the past year, nearly three times the rate of two years ago. But, says Amir, one of the group’s activists, “these are only the ones we know about.”

The television in the corner competed with the dinner chat as Nika’s guests tucked into a delicious selection of meat and vegetarian dishes. There are nine men and women, from a mix of ethnic Kyrgyz, ethnic Russian and other backgrounds. The conversation though is all in Russian, one of Kyrgyzstan’s two official languages—one of many ways Moscow can be sure of maintaining its influence here, even if it is running low on cash.

Stalin has paid the price for his cartographic crimes in Kyrgyzstan, but Bishkek is still dotted with Lenin statues and streets named after other communist celebrities who were removed from other parts of the former Soviet bloc years ago. So the Kyrgyz government’s manifestations of loyalty were almost like a free handout for the Kremlin, observers say—it already has the mainstream of Kyrgyz public opinion in the bag. “If there was a world war tomorrow, I would be with Russia,” was how one Kyrgyz businessman put it, as we talked about relations with Moscow.

For the LGBTQ community, this only serves to amplify their troubles. Russian TV channels, with their explicit anti-Western, homophobic bias, have a solid audience. “It makes me feel guilty about being gay when I hear some Russian programs,” said Nika. Local media outlets tied to the government and nationalist groups take a similar line, helping stoke an atmosphere of permissive victimization. “‘Look there’s the faggot’ another student shouted out when he saw me in my university café,” said Ilya, one of Nika’s dinner guests. There is no point going to the college authorities, he said, “because that will just bring me more trouble.” And Ilya said he was recently ejected from his gym. “The manager said other clients had complained about me being there. He didn’t say it was because I’m gay, but it was clear that’s what he meant.”

And it’s political suicide to come to the LGBTQ community’s defense, say analysts. LGBTQ advocacy groups would also be hit if the parallel ‘foreign agents’ law is passed—as most receive Western funding—but the rest of the NGO community have conspicuously avoided coming to their defense.

Yet more than two years since the Kyrgyz parliament first introduced the ‘anti-gay propaganda’ measures amid a flurry of pro-Russian rhetoric, it has stalled on actually making it law. MPs gave the bill large majorities on its initial two readings, but no date has been set for the necessary third reading, and it would still need the president’s signature afterwards. There’s similar uncertainty over the ‘foreign agents’ bill targeting NGOs, which was first introduced in 2013. And no one knows if or when parliament will debate them again.

Even so, the police have reportedly been using the anti-gay propaganda legislation to justify going after LGBTQ individuals and then extorting bribes. “They say they are enforcing the law,” said Pasha, a gay man who was forced to hand over 4000 Kyrgyz Som (about $60—a large sum in a country with an average wage of less than $300 per month). Some Kyrgyz journalists have reportedly resorted to self-censoring stories on homophobic attacks, or anything to do with the LGBTQ community, in case they are accused of publishing ‘pro-gay’ propaganda. “The liberal sector in society is coming under increasing stress,” said Medet Tiulgenov of the American University.

I made repeated requests to talk to Kyrgyz MPs and other officials about their Russian-inspired legislative plans, and the associated rise in homophobic attacks. All said they were too busy, or never returned my calls. Perhaps that is a sign of what one diplomatic source calls “buyer’s remorse”, particularly over the anti-gay propaganda measures. “The president has said privately he doesn’t think it’s a good law now,” said the source, “but politically it’s hard to roll it back.”

Viktor had been receiving threatening text messages for several months, messages like: “Why are you spoiling our country” and “Leave, you freak, or we’ll cut your head off.” He moved to another part of Bishkek, hoping he would be safe.

But one evening this January, walking home from work, he was ambushed and beaten to the ground. “I didn’t hear anything because I had my headphones on,” he said. “‘Why are you still here’, they were shouting. ‘We warned you we would find you.’” They kicked him unconscious, and when Viktor came round he found he had been driven to a wooded area, and his attackers were tearing off his clothes. Then they took turns to rape him. “One held my head down so I couldn’t see their faces,” he told me, pausing and sobbing several times as he tells the story.

“From the moment the bill was first discussed, Kyrgyz society took it as permission for extermination,” said Viktor. “Some don’t even understand what it says, but they take it as a call to hunt.” Yet after past experiences of harassment, he never even considered going to the police. “They would just say ‘we don’t take cases from gays and faggots.’”

Several sources told me of cases of lesbians being subjected to ‘corrective rape’, after their sexual orientation was uncovered. “Sometimes it’s the brothers who do it,” said one LGBTQ activist. Some lesbians are forced into marriage; many are reported to have fled Kyrgyzstan for good. Through intermediaries, three victims of corrective rape said they were too scared to talk to us, and activists believe many more such attacks are never reported.

But some are trying to take a stand. On May 17, 2015, activists from a Bishkek group called Labrys and several other LGBTQ advocacy organizations were gathering at a Bishkek restaurant for the ‘International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia’ when it was attacked by a nationalist mob. They stormed the restaurant, chanting abuse as they went, and one woman was injured in the ensuing scuffles. Though it was frightening, compared to other recent anti-LGBTQ violence, it was a relatively minor incident. But this time activists called the police.

With so many eyewitnesses, Evgenia Krapivina, their lawyer, believes the police had no choice but to open a case, and two suspected members of Kyrk-Choro have been charged with hooliganism and property damage. To no one’s surprise, there’s been little progress since, and they hold out little hope of winning, but one of the Labrys activist who was there sees it as part of a much bigger battle. “The LGBT community is not the only target,” he says. “Some of the nationalists who attack us say everyone should speak Kyrgyz, and that there’s no place for Russians here. And tomorrow someone else will be the target.”

The post A violent struggle over national identity appeared first on Coda Story.