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This Financial Times article raises a theme present in the EU referndum, as identified by Koch (2017), of moralising politics. In addition to this insertion of everyday moralities into politics, the leadership of the US government, according to Joe Biden, is a leading example for countries around the world to follow in their own elections. Therefore, the claims of illegitimacy made by Trump damages "democracy globally", as the West is assumed, in this article, to set the precedent of what is a "fair election." I would argue that Trump's unfounded claims of fraud expose the irony in the idea of the West as a leading moral political force.

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Having survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot 16 times in 2017, Tanzania's opposition leader Tundu Lissu wasted no time in fleeing the country last week after receiving a death threat. The warning arrived shortly after Mr Lissu was officially declared the loser of the presidential election to incumbent John Magufuli, who received 84 per cent of the vote.

Mr Magufuli's implausible victory was greeted with scepticism worldwide. The US state department raised alarm over "significant and widespread voting irregularities" that "call into question Tanzania's commitment to democratic values".

The twist is that, back in Washington, President Donald Trump and some other high-profile Republicans have alleged, without evidence, fraud in the US's own presidential election.

From his vantage point, in a country where people risk liberty and even life to fight for basic democratic rights, Mr Lissu finds the situation troubling. "What happens in the US reverberates, rightly or wrongly, around the world," he says. "So for a sitting president who has apparently lost a genuine election to make the kind of claims Mr Trump has made is very, very disturbing."

When countries that are supposedly committed to democracy act domestically in ways that suggest otherwise, it damages their credibility. In September, the UK government declared it would knowingly break international law through a parliamentary bill proposed as part of its departure from the EU. In Europe, leaders in Hungary and Poland have grown more authoritarian even as the EU claims that "universal, indivisible and interdependent" human rights are "at the heart" of its relations with other nations.

US presidential election 2020: You tell us

How do you feel now the election is over? Are you happy with the winner? Do you feel the election process was fair? How do you see the outlook for America? Do you feel positive about the incoming president or uncertain? Share your thoughts with us.

"How can any country be credible promoting democracy and the rule of law when it abuses it at home?" says Rosa Balfour, director of the Carnegie Europe think-tank. "These precedents create templates for other autocrats or would-be autocrats to do the same, further undermining global stability and institutions."

Allegations of western hypocrisy about democracy are longstanding. What is more novel is when western governments denounce the fundamental credibility of their own domestic processes, or are open in their admission about trying to break international or domestic law.

For the US, it has already created several foreign policy contradictions abroad. Hours after Mr Trump branded the US election as a "major fraud on our nation", Washington's embassy in Ivory Coast called for that country's leaders to "show commitment to the democratic process" following the October 31 presidential poll.

On November 9 - as debates raged in the US about the alleged suppression of black voters - secretary of state Mike Pompeo flagged concerns about the disenfranchisement of minority groups in elections in Myanmar. And this week Washington was full of congratulation for Maia Sandu, the new president-elect of Moldova. Yet Mr Trump continues to withhold acknowledgment of Joe Biden's win in his country.

"For decades, pro-democracy activists around the world have relied on US statements to set a reliable standard about whether an election is free and fair," says Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute think-tank. Republican support of Mr Trump's claims of fraud undermine the US's high standards of electoral conduct, she adds. "The US will lose its power as a standard-setter of fair elections, damaging democracy globally."

With autocracy on the rise worldwide, basic messages about respecting the popular will, arguably, matter more than ever. As the US's next president, Mr Biden has quickly pledged to restore his country's "moral leadership" and the "power of our example".

For Mr Lissu, there is still a long way to go. "We are fighting for the ability to vote and be voted for, the right to have one's vote count and be counted, and for the right to have the correct winner declared accordingly," he says. He plans to return to Tanzania to renew his political struggle there once he feels safe to do so. Meanwhile, his plea to the people of the west and their governments is to "live up to their ideals".

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Donald Trump's attack on US democracy hurts everyone

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Having survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot 16 times in 2017, Tanzania's opposition leader Tundu Lissu wasted no time in fleeing the country last week after receiving a death threat. The warning arrived shortly after Mr Lissu was officially declared the loser of the presidential election to incumbent John Magufuli, who received 84 per cent of the vote.

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This party political broadcast by the Green Party exemplifies the ways in hich elections both affirm the status quo and disrupt it. In asking voters to support a political party, the ordinary process of election and governance is maintained. However, the Green Party explicitly attack what has become the status quo within government, such as political in-fighting. It turns away from antagonism (which Schmitt would argue is ionherent in politics) and towards the kind of community involvement that Koch's interlocuters found was missing when they rejected this amoral kind of politics just months later.

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👶 Grown Up Politics - Green Party Election Broadcast (2016)

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In this Ted Talk, Kabakis raises many similar points to Samet's arguments. He lays out, using examples like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, what makes populist speeches so influential. Like Samet, he points to creating an enemy of the "Other", in his example, the immigrant, so as to naturalise the coherent identity of the nation state. Additionally, Kabakis expands on the importance of social instability or insecurity, describing how populists emphasise an unsure future with the current government, by statements that refer to the past, such as "Make America Great Again!"

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Talk like Trump - understanding populist speech and how to overcome it| Christopher Kabakis |TEDxWHU

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An important point is made in this article by David Cormack, former head of policy and communications for New Zealand's Green party. As does the Samet reading, Cormack stresses the importance of the press in exacerbating political divides and inciting discontent. He argues that New Zealand's rejection of populist leaders and a high rate of satisfaction with the current government is because they "no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it’s never taken a foothold.” Here, he echoes Samet and the situation in Venezuela in which a powerful group of media owners and opinion makers helped set the events of April 11 in motion.

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Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's Labour prime minister who was returned to power for a second term with a commanding majority, has often been hailed internationally as a foil to global surges in right-wing movements and the rise of strongmen such as Donald Trump and Brazil's leader, Jair Bolsonaro.

But the historic victory of Ardern's centre-left party on polling day - its best result in five decades, winning 64 of parliament's 120 seats - was not the only measure by which New Zealand bucked global trends in its vote. The public also rejected some political hopefuls' rallying cries to populism, conspiracy theories and scepticism about Covid-19.

The lack of traction gained by fringe or populist movements was due to the majority of New Zealanders' long-term contentment with the direction the country was headed - which had persisted for more than 20 years, through both centre-right and centre-left governments, and prevented populist sentiment from taking root, analysts said.

"When you look at the numbers, New Zealanders have essentially been satisfied with their government since 1999," said Stephen Mills, the head of UMR, Labour's polling firm. That period had spanned two Labour and two centre-right National prime ministers - including Ardern - all of whom had led fairly moderate governments.

Jacinda Ardern celebrates the election win with colleagues on Sunday. Photograph: Hannah Peters/Getty Images

'Basically positive'

Since 1991, UMR has asked poll respondents whether they felt the country was on the right track, with the response staying "basically positive" for the past 21 years, even during the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, which has prompted the deepest recession in decades.

"People were deeply satisfied with the government," during the peak of New Zealand's coronavirus response, said Mills (Ardern has won global accolades for her decisions during the crisis, with New Zealand recording one of the world's lowest death tolls).

"Records were set during Covid with that number in our polls, which is so weird when you think about it, during a pandemic," Mills said.

David Farrar, the founder of Curia Market Research, National's polling firm, also asks the "right or wrong direction" question and has recorded a "strong net positive" result since 2008 - meaning people mostly thought the country was traveling the right way.

"We have a functioning political system, we have one house of parliament and a neutral public service," Farrar said.

In contrast, he said, the US had seen "net negative" results for most of the past 40 years, meaning people felt the country was headed in the wrong direction.

"That's corrosive; 40 years of negative feeling," Farrar said of the United States.

Murdoch-owned press

In Australia - where news outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch have been decried for driving confrontational politics and elevating populist sentiment - "right direction" polls were often negative too.

"A huge reason that our politics is not so extremely polarised and so far out there is because we no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it's never taken a foothold," said David Cormack, the co-founder of a public relations firm and a former head of policy and communications for the left-leaning Green party.

In Britain, a majority had felt the country was headed in the wrong direction before 2016's Brexit vote, in which 52% voted to leave the European Union, Farrar said.

Such sentiment allowed populist movements to gain momentum, Farrar said, something that contented New Zealanders had mostly avoided. It did not hurt that marginal views are often given short shrift in a country that views dramatic public displays as faintly embarrassing.

Advance NZ, a new party in the 2020 election that made its name by campaigning against Ardern's Covid-19 restrictions, vaccinations, the United Nations, and 5G technology, won just 0.9% of the vote, attracting 21,000 ballots from the 2.4 million New Zealanders who cast them.

The result means the party will not enter parliament. Two days before the election, Facebook removed Advance NZ's page from its platform for spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

"They are cynical, opportunistic narcissists and this is absolutely what they deserved," said Emma Wehipeihana, a political commentator for 1 News, in election night remarks that were widely applauded on social media.

'We're not immune'

But Farrar, the National pollster, was wary of New Zealand declaring victory over conspiracy theorists.

"We're not immune," he said, adding that the 1,000 people who attended an election launch for one of Advance NZ's co-leaders "wasn't nothing."

Farrar said the accepted range of political discourse had widened as a result of the party's campaign: "There was strength there which is ripe for plucking."

Winston Peters New Zealand First party failed to win enough votes on Saturday to return to parliament. Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images

One mainstream politician who embraced the moniker of populist during the electoral cycle was Winston Peters, the leader of New Zealand First, whose political career could be over after his party failed to win enough votes on Saturday to return to parliament.

Peters told the Guardian ahead of the vote that it was time for "the end of that nonsense that somehow populism is a suspicious category of person".

His result of 2.6% of the vote, down from 7.2% of the vote in 2017, suggested the help he received in his campaign from the pro-Brexit campaigners Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore did not result in the surge of populist support the men had expected.

Before the election the New Zealand First leader and the "bad boys of Brexit" - Banks and Wigmore were two of the chief architects of the Leave.EU campaign for the UK to leave the European Union - told the media outlet Newshub that they planned to sow "mayhem" in New Zealand's vote through Peters's campaign. It never arrived.

"If there was any real impact on his campaign, apart from slightly gaudier social media and a bit of sort of corny exaggerated combativeness in his online presence, then it certainly wasn't apparent to me," said Ben Thomas, a public relations consultant and former National government staffer.

Thomas added that Peters's naturally rebellious, oppositional tone had not worked once he was part of the government.

"Brexit was an anti-establishment movement and Peters is the deputy prime minister," he said.

Stephen Mills, the head of the polling firm UMR, said Peters's embrace of populism had been the least of his problems.

"It seemed to be a completely incompetent campaign," he said.

Another high-profile lawmaker who has dabbled - inadvertently, he said - in conspiracy theory rhetoric admitted to his "huge mistake" the day after the vote.

Gerry Brownlee, the deputy leader of centre-right National, suffered a shocking loss in his electorate seat of Ilam, Christchurch, which he had held for quarter of a century, and was considering his future in politics.

While the loss was attributed to more than one factor, Brownlee on Sunday addressed remarks he had made in August suggesting the government had known more about a Covid-19 outbreak than it had told the public.

"I made a flippant comment that then quite reasonably was construed as suggesting something that I didn't intend to convey," he told Radio New Zealand on Sunday. "I don't think something like Covid-19 should be treated in any other fashion other than extremely seriously."

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Why New Zealand rejected populist ideas other nations have embraced

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Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's Labour prime minister who was returned to power for a second term with a commanding majority, has often been hailed internationally as a foil to global surges in right-wing movements and the rise of strongmen such as Donald Trump and Brazil's leader, Jair Bolsonaro.

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This talk from Homi K. Bhabha considers the situation of 'unpreparedness' in the face of not just a global health crisis, but also a wave of protest against racial inequality. Bhabha claims that ethno-nationalist and ethno-populist governments "rampant disregard for facts, science, history, and human dignity" encourages citizens to be "actively unprepared" to stand up for their democratic rights and representations. He argues that divisive policies can then be further promoted by these populist governments, as a result of the supression of disempowered portions of the population, as 'the people' themselves are in a state of vulnerbaility and least equipped to resistance to governmental strategies - fear is promoted by the crisis of coronavirus. Bhabha goes on to discuss the importanceof museums, arguing for their ability to translate moments of resistance across cultures, in particular through art such as the murals created in response to the murder of George Floyd. This, in a way, follows a framework as proposed by Duno-Gottberg that calls for a connection to the proliferation of racial tension in the history of coloniaism in order to understand the spread of ethnopopulist rhetoric (p 272).

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The “Unprepared” | In Conversation with Professor Homi K. Bhabha and Eugene Tan

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It would be hard to speak about the notion of 'The People' as evoked by populism and not mention Donald Trump, this week in particular. I was struck, in Stavrakakis' article, when the populist rhetoric of Barack Obama was mentioned, as he framed himself as a "champion of the people" in opposition to the Republican-protected elite. This makes the (momentary) success of Donald Trump, perhaps, ironic. This article discusses the longevity of populism, upon which the US election was percieved as a referendum of sorts. Despite the global pandemic providing damning cause for a turn to expertise, America remains a country largely split between populist and anti-populist rhetoric. As the author notes: "Implicit in [Trump's] demands for an early and arbitrary end to ballot counting in some states was an inherently populist idea: Only my supporters, the 'real people,' deserve to have their voice heard." Again, this only raises questions of who 'the people' can be defined as? or if the possibility of a homogenous people, with similar aims and values, is even possible at all? The recent turn of events in US politics seems to suggest that 'The People' are simply those that support the winner.

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Had Biden won in a landslide, as some polls suggested he might, that of course wouldn't have meant an end to populism, in America or elsewhere. The modern phenomenon predates Trump in a number of countries, many of which feature populists at the head of government (Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines) and in parts of the opposition (Germany, Italy, and France). Still, the U.S. contest was seen as something of a bellwether-one that would indicate whether the world's most visible and powerful populist could eke out a victory running as an antiestablishment candidate despite having spent the past four years reshaping the establishment in his own image. A Trump victory would no doubt buoy like-minded world leaders who see his success as a harbinger of their own, just as it did in 2016. "It makes a big difference if the most powerful country in the world does this," Ruth Wodak, a linguistics professor studying far-right rhetoric at Lancaster University and the University of Vienna and the author of The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean, told me ahead of the election. Were Trump to lose by a wide margin, she added, "it would show that this kind of corruption and the undermining of liberal democracy ... that only works for so long."

By prematurely and baselessly declaring victory, the president not only undermined faith in the democratic process, but provided his supporters and fellow populists around the world with a narrative to hold on to: that the election was stolen from him. Implicit in his demands for an early and arbitrary end to ballot counting in some states was an inherently populist idea: Only my supporters, the "real people," deserve to have their voice heard. Though this sentiment was later repudiated by a number of leading Republicans, the message nonetheless spread, even beyond the U.S.'s borders. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša was the first to preemptively congratulate the president. Other right-wing populist and nationalist leaders, including Italy's Matteo Salvini, Germany's Tino Chrupalla, and France's Marine Le Pen, also voiced their support, though they stopped short of declaring him the winner.
David Frum: The American system is broken
So far, Trump's efforts have failed. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, states are continuing to count ballots as normal. The system . But even without a Trump victory, Trumpism is all but certain to remain in one form or another. The question then for Biden and the anti-populists who supported him is this: What does the decisive defeat of populism in America look like?

If the initial results are anything to go by, it's not by campaigning for a return to a normal, more sensible politics. Though Biden was able to reclaim some states that the former Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, and although beating an incumbent president is a rare achievement in and of itself (the last time this happened was nearly three decades ago, when George H. W. Bush failed to win reelection against Bill Clinton in 1992), his victory might not be considered substantial enough to merit inclusion in the anti-populist playbook.

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Had Biden won in a landslide, as some polls suggested he might, that of course wouldn't have meant an end to populism, in America or elsewhere. The modern phenomenon predates Trump in a number of countries, many of which feature populists at the head of government (Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines) and in parts of the opposition (Germany, Italy, and France).

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This episode of the AnthroPod includes a short interview with anthropologist Bianca Williams about her work in organising Black Lives Matter protests and political action. She echoes Das's sentiments that call for anthropology that doesn't just focus on dramatic stories and events but looks at how such events build into crisis, the "eventfullness of everyday life" (page 218). For Williams, the presence of police violence in US cities and the resistance against it is tied up in all other sorts of issues such as lack of affordable housing. She describes the arrest and murder of Michael Marshall in police custody and refusal of Denver police to release the tape of his death. In mobilising activists through the 2016 MLK Day march Williams helped to organise the community in speaking directly to the city mayor and acknowledging this intersection of physical and institutional violence in black communities in the US. She asserts, "anthropologists have tools that can help people better understand how voice and narrative can be heard."

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Transcript

[00:00:00] [Anthropod Theme Music]

Cory-Alice André-Johnson [00:00:14] Welcome to AnthroPod. I'm your host, Cory-Alice André-Johnson. Today we'll be discussing activism with Bianca Williams and Sophie Chao as part of the new series entitled "What Does Anthropology Sound Like" The series seeks to showcase the wide range of possibilities when fieldwork, methodology, and theory come together into some kind of anthropological product or production. This includes monographs, journal articles, and conference papers. But it can also take the form of poetry, theater, film, social media, social engagement, teaching, and more. Each episode in the series will focus on a different theme, inviting two anthropologists to share their work around that theme. All participants will also answer the same three questions about the relationship between doing anthropology and the theme of that episode, highlighting the various ways that they approach making anthropology. Let's get into it with today's theme: activism.

CA [00:01:09] First, we'll hear from Dr. Sophie Chao, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney's School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow at Macquarie University. She will present some of the work she has done in conjunction with West Papuan communities to resist the encroachment of the palm oil industry.

CA [00:01:30] Welcome, Dr. Chao.

Sophie Chao [00:01:32] Hi there.

CA [00:01:33] So my first question is why did you choose to make this piece and in this way?

SC [00:01:38] I chose to write about maps because making maps with indigenous Marind was one of the best ways in which I came to understand the meaning of the landscape to these communities, the ways in which it's alive with human and more-than-human life, the way it's inscribed with pasts, with memories, and with emotions. So much of mapping is about a tuning to the fine details of the environment of the forest, of its different species and of their movements. So, for me, mapping was really both an ethnographic method and an activist mode of research. This landscape we're mapping is such a contested geography that is very much sought after by the government and by corporations for profit making for palm oil production. But that's also one that indigenous peoples are struggling very much striving to protect and to have their rights recognized to try to, you know, bring out these GPS coordinates, these new metrics, and the way these new metrics were accompanied with sounds of birds, sounds of stories and songs to sort of show, you know, how numbers, stories, songs together participated in giving flesh meanings to these spaces. What I did do is try to really bring out in the text the really diverse array of acoustics that enliven the landscape that we were trying to map. So, from the songs that were being sung by my fellow members to the stories they were telling me about the species that we were not seeing but simply hearing. I also tried to really describe or flesh out the dissonances that we were mapping. So, the sounds of destruction, the sound of chainsaws and bulldozers that sat uncomfortably alongside the cry of birds or the sound of the wind of water, of rivers, and so on. And then thirdly, and just as importantly, the sound of silence or the absence of sound, which is something that has to be recorded.

SC [00:03:37] Many of my informants were adamant about this because it speaks to the impacts of overwhelming human domination over space and the killing of the sounds that embody the multispecies liveliness of this foreign landscape that is now being jeopardized by mono crops, by monoculture, and a homogeneous conception of what nature should be and how productive that nature can be.

CA [00:04:01] Tell us about a particular stylistic element you used and why.

SC [00:04:05] One stylistic element that I thought was powerful in terms of conveying these conflicting ways of understanding and representing the landscape is the section where we've just encountered this bird sitting somewhere high in the canopy. And one of the elders that I'm walking with insists that I map the sounds because this was a very meaningful encounter with a species that this elder's clan shares common descent from ancestral spirits. And so, we were in the forests and I could hear this this whistle somewhere in the foliage. And I was holding this GPS. So, I map with one beep, I map the coordinates of the space we're in. And then my friends start telling me the story of this bird, this black-crested bulbul, or Rau. They began to tell me its origins. They began to tell me its journeys across the landscape. They began to tell me where it rests, where it nests, where it goes to sing its last song or where it goes to die. And then they start crying as they tell these stories because they remember their pasts. They remember the stories of their ancestors. They remember the travels. And all of these different facets of the story lifeway of the bird and the humans I was with, I write one after another in a sort of list of anecdotes that seems disjuncted, but to Marind very much crystallized in that one sound, in that one space. And in that one GPS point. And so, at the end of the paragraph describing, you know, this sort of a multispecies symphony that was the space I was in, I simply write beep, the sound of my GPS, whistle, the sound of this bird kin, then the GPS coordinate itself: S, 7 degrees, 11 minutes, 202 seconds. E, 140 degrees, 30 minutes, 366 seconds, and then finally: khaw, the Marind name for this ancestral bird spirit.

SC [00:05:55] And then I leave it there because I think, you know, the narratives that preceded this listing of the different facets of the place and of the bird form a beautiful contrast with these simple numerics, simple words both in English and in Marind which sort of sit together somewhat awkwardly, but that communicate, to me at least, all of the multiple ontologies that collide or that come together in this one experience and in this one space.

CA [00:06:19] Why is activism anthropological or why is anthropology activism?

SC [00:06:25] I have certainly always been one to believe that anthropology stems from a desire, you know, not just to study and understand the world or plural worlds, but also to harness one's knowledge of one's own world and the ones one has the privilege to immerse oneself and be a guest in order to effect a change for the better for the communities we work for, in line with the ethics, the principles, the aspirations that they themselves have. So, I've always taken that as a basic tenet of my approach. I mean, I suppose the desire to practice cultural relativism, to understand how worlds multiply along the lines of the perspectives of those who inhabit them really is at the core of anthropological practice and in that sense is already a form of activism. The desire to unflatten ontologies from one singular, homogeneous model towards the idea that we may in fact inhabit companion worlds that sits more or less comfortably alongside of each other. I think in addressing the plurality of ontology, anthropology is always activist in the sense that it accounts for the deep power imbalances that exist in and across these different worlds and ontologies. The position of the anthropologist, him or herself, in the first place is often one of power. The ability to be able to visit these places, to live with these communities, the institutional infrastructures that enable us to do the work that we do. And so, for me, really, activist research or doing something back for the communities that host us is really sort of a basic line in terms of acknowledging and harnessing these power dynamics to effect a change in that dynamic. Now, of course, this shift position already is one that often comes up when one thinks about the relationship between anthropology and activism. I personally certainly find it challenging. I came to this research from an activist background.

SC [00:08:21] I worked for a human rights NGO in Indonesia with the same communities that I did my PhD research with. So that required a very sort of nuanced rebalancing or discussion about expectations on the part of the communities as to what my work was about and what it could achieve in concrete terms for them in the now or for them in future generations. And that was a very important discussion to have, because anthropology is not activism. They are not mutually exchangeable roles. But I think having those conversations about the differences between the two, between the synergies across the two are ones that take place most productively in the field with the communities with whom one is trying to practice activism or whom one is trying to support, in my case, in land rights struggles and advocacy. So that relationship, I think, again, is one that one can bring to the field, that one can theorize with or interlocutors in order to find a nuanced, transversal way of working across these disciplinary divides, across positionalities, whilst at the same time never relinquishing, at least from my perspective, the idea that giving back is really a basic tenet of the anthropological ethos that the method as a theory and a way of being in the world.

[00:09:35] [Marind singing]

SC [00:09:48] At the break of dawn, a group of elders from the Marind village of Mirav in rural Merauke Regency (West Papua) headed east to map the customary territory of the Basik-Basik clan. Equipped with two GPS units I had brought to the field and gifted to my companions, we started walking. Basik-Basik elder, Yakobus, led the group, humming tunes of his childhood and regularly calling out our names-a Marind habit that ensures peoples' souls are not captured by evil spirits dwelling in the forest and swamp. I followed Yakobus, picking insistent leeches off my arms and legs as they undulated up from the moist hummus or dropped down from the overhead foliage. Beneath our feet, the forest floor was a colorful patchwork of rotting leaves, scrambling red ants, and bright blue cassowary plums-the favorite treat of the towering forest ratite. Yakobus stopped abruptly in his tracks.

[00:10:47] [Singing stops. Silence]

SC [00:10:48] He stood in silence, looking up into the lush canopy. Suddenly, Yakobus pointed upwards and turned to me, saying, "There it is. That's our first point. You can map that."

[00:10:58] [recordings of mapping with Marind elders play in background]

SC [00:10:58] I could not see anything in the foliage and was unsure what Yakobus was trying to show me, or what he wanted me to map. He said: "Can't you hear it? Can't you hear the whistle of the khaw (black-crested bulbul) up there? That's one of our amai (animal sibling or grandparent) telling us it knows we are here. It sings for us to continue our journey. This is an important place because it is where we met the khaw amai, so it must be mapped. Put it into the machine." Luckily, a technologically savvy friend of mine had set up audio software in my GPS, so I was able to record the shy whistle of the bird whose yellow and black plumage remained invisible to my eyes.

SC [00:11:46] Yakobus proceeded to tell me the story of the khaw amai, which he also asked me to record. How the khaw sprung feet first and head last from the fertile soils of the Bian, marking its crest with dark blotches. How the bird received the power of flight after drinking from the river, allowing it to circle the sun and catch sunlight under its wings, which from that day on were tainted bright yellow. How the whistle of the khaw guided the ancestors of the Basik-Basik clan as they traveled across the land in search of sago. How the bird sings at dawn to mark sunrise, and today still, protects Marind generations as they walk the forest. Yakobus went silent. Then, slowly and in a low, hoarse voice, he began singing the ritual song of the khaw. The other group members lowered their heads in respect and joined in. Tears welled in their eyes as they remembered their childhood, their mothers, and the sago groves that once flourished in abundance around their villages. The GPS continued to record the sound of this place through the stories and songs of human and bird, interrupted every so often by heavy sobs, sighs, and silence. What mattered, I realized, was not so much what my companions could see in the landscape but what they could hear within it, and how this made them feel-happy, sad, nostalgic. I wondered how a single red dot on the map, a series of digits, could convey the affective textures of this multispecies symphony of a place. Beep. Whistle. S 7˚ 11' 202" E 140˚ 30.366". Khaw.

SC [00:13:36] After a few minutes, the song of the khaw grew faint. The mapping team advised that we follow it to other "important places." Guided by the flight of the black-crested bulbul, we roamed the forest as my friends pointed out the fruit trees from which the bird feeds, the sago groves in which it nests, the mound where it first came into existence, and the marshlands where it goes to sing its last song. The coordinates of each of these places were recorded on the GPS as part of an intricate khaw life-map, along with the locations, beings, and events that made the bird and its environment "alive." These included the names of Marind ancestors and peace-making rituals, the death of a wise woman from suanggi or black magic, the gakhul trees from which Marind fashion spears and harpoons, and the ngef shrubs whose white-pink inner bark is used as an analgesic. Landmarks incorporated the sago grove where wild pigs come in search of food, the resting place of the snake amai, and the shallow sleeping holes of the elekh fish, submerged in the wet season.

We mapped as acoustic coordinates various species of birds, the wind, the river, swaying bamboo shrubs, and the sound of sago-pounding in a nearby grove. We also incorporated sounds co-existing awkwardly with the "poetic cartographies of rainforest trails" (Feld 2003, 227)-roaring bulldozers, distant chainsaws, passing trucks, and the call to prayer of mosques built for local Muslim migrant communities. To these we added the solemn toll of the Bayau church bell, the xylophonic Für Elise chime of the state primary school, and the triumphant, if crackly, national anthem, trickling from military garrison megaphones in between shrill crescendos of stubborn static. At the boundary of a nearby oil palm plantation, my friends insisted we map the most deafening sound of all:

"Listen carefully, child," Elder Yakobus said. "Tell me now, what do you hear?" I responded, "I'm afraid I hear nothing at all, Elder." To which Yakobus replied, "Exactly. Map the silence. Put it into the machine."

[00:15:52] [Silence]

SC [00:15:53] The maps produced by Marind land rights activists in the Upper Bian differ from conventional maps in several respects. First, conventional maps, such as the government map described earlier, identify places primarily though the medium of vision-technological or human. In contrast, sound is the primary means through which Marind develop what Feld and Basso (1996, 11) call a "sense of place," or the bodily and affective ways in which place is known, imagined, remembered, and lived. Like other Melanesian societies for whom songs and sounds epitomize and communicate peoples' sense of belonging within the landscape, Marind mappers situate themselves in relation to spirits and species of the forest by way of bio-acoustic encounters, such as those between my companions and the khaw bird. Knowing what to map thus requires knowing how and what to hear within the living landscape, in a practice that Feld (2003) calls "acoustemology," or knowing through hearing (see also Kirsch 2006, 48-60).

Second, conventional maps are relatively stable representations of permanent physical sites and objects in the landscape, which exist independently of the mapper. Their legibility relies on legends or map keys that list the symbols and codes used to classify different types of locations. In contrast, places become meaningful to Marind as the sites of transitory sensory encounters with beings, like the khaw, who are constantly on the move. The referential value of mapped places consists of the stories of the species heard as well as the relations that human mappers entertain with that species. For instance, to follow the call of the khaw is to trace the life-flow of the bird across space and time, as well as its relations to the many humans that have and continue to be guided by its song. Mapping, in other words, is both a kinesthetic and affective practice. It involves tracking moving beings across the landscape and it is deeply moving for those involved (see Casey 1996, 23; Kahn 1996, 168).

SC [00:17:47] Moreover, the sounds mapped by Marind land rights activists also evade categorization because different sounds mean different things to individual mappers based on their own life stories and relationships with the species encountered. Unlike the fixed codes of cartographic legends, the meaning of these sounds cannot be described out of the context in which they are heard. Furthermore, each sound is the crystallization of many other sounds, species, and stories. The protracted narratives that flesh out their dispersed meanings resist reduction to a single and unifying symbol or code.

The primacy of sound in the phenomenology of Marind mapping also arises from certain qualitative properties that differentiate sound from vision. Drawing from his fieldwork among Umeda in West Sepik, Gell (1994) notes that sound is a primary indicatory of presence and activity in forest ecologies where dense vegetation occludes much from sight (see also Descola 1986, 237). In the Upper Bian, these include the khaw perched high up in the sago palms, the chainsaws gnawing away in the concessions, the grumble of the cassowary in sacred bamboo groves, the national anthem crackling in the military garrisons, and the felt-but-not-seen caress of the wind. As they travel across space, sounds also connect humans and forest beings as emitters and auditors, even as they are physically removed from, and invisible to, one another. One cannot see or be in multiple places at the same time, but one can hear different sounds in a single place and moment.

Finally, the sonic coordinates of maps produced by Upper Bian Marind resonate with meaning because of the way they juxtapose the sounds of the forest and the sounds of its destruction. In this regard, they constitute powerful sensory embodiments of the radical transformations taking place within and upon the landscapes mapped. These sounds impact upon those who hear them in spatial and affective terms.

SC [00:19:48] When one hears a sound, one gauges its proximity, approach, retreat, direction, and one's own position in relation to it. Some sounds, such as the song of the khaw, invite one to follow as the bird travels the landscape. People remember with fondness their origins and pasts through the cadence of other beings' lifeworlds in ways that enhance their sense of belonging within the landscape. Other sounds, in contrast, warn of approaching threats which can then be anticipated or avoided-bulldozers hashing away at the forest, military trucks rumbling along the roads, or pesticide-spraying helicopters buzzing overhead, spreading their milky veil of hazy toxins. The deafening silence of the plantation also participates in what Whitehouse (2015, 66) calls the "anxious semiotics" of landscapes overwhelmingly dominated by man. Silence, too, must be recorded, for it represents acoustically the obliteration of life caused by the expansion of oil palm. Sonic absences and dissonances thus capture powerfully the reality of disappearing forests and invading plantations. They produce disturbing cacophonies that mirror the disrupted geographies and lifeworlds of the beings caught in their midst.

[00:21:07] [Marind drumming and singing]

Cory-Alice André-Johnson [00:21:51] Next, we're gonna hear from Bianca C. Williams about her organizing with Black Lives Matter. Dr Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center CUNY. In her book, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women Diasporic Dreams and the Politics of Emotional Trans Nationalism (Duke University Press, 2018), Williams argues that pursuing happiness is a political project for black women, while examining how they use international travel and the Internet as tools for leisure and creating diasporic relationships. She is currently working on two projects, an edited volume with Diane Squire and Frank Tuitt on plantation politics and campus rebellions in higher education and a book on radical honesty as pedagogy, organizing tool, and disciplinary practice. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Williams.

Bianca Williams [00:22:42] Hi. Thank you very much for having me.

CA [00:22:45] OK, let's get right into the first question, which is why did you choose to do this piece and in this way?

BW [00:22:49] Michael Marshall was a person who was living on the streets, who was struggling with mental illness, and he was arrested by Denver police for entering private property and was asked to pay one hundred dollars bond and could not afford it. So he was brought to some downtown detention center and was killed in custody by the sheriff. He was choked to death. His niece, Natalia Marshall and his family had been organizing for months to get the tape of his death, of his killing, released to them so they could see what took place. And the city, including the mayor, was refusing to release the tape. In Denver, one of the largest MLK celebrations in the country is the marade, which is a combination of a march/parade. Over tens of thousands of folks come every year to celebrate MLK Day. And that particular year in 2016, the National and Global Network of BLM asked that chapters participate in an action or a social media campaign or some way of reclaiming MLK. So reclaiming Martin Luther King Junior's dream and his words and actually applying it to today. Many politicians were giving kind of flowery language around equity and equality and diversity. And we wanted to reclaim MLK words to actually lead to some type of economic, political, or social change.

BW [00:24:17] So we decided to use the marade as an opportunity to organize with other community folks, to get the city to pay attention to what was happening around police violence and police brutality. There were numerous cases of police violence in that year and of course, still today. So Paul Castaway was killed that year, Jesse Hernandez had been killed, and their families had been organizing for a while to try to get some form of justice. And we hoped that taking over the marade, redirecting the marade and putting it on a different path than it normally had been, and then making some type of speech would galvanize and help mobilize the community to ask the mayor to release the tapes. The speech you all are hearing is by Amy E. Brown, who was one of my co-founders of Black Lives Matter 5280. The Denver chapter of BLM, which was co-founded by myself, Amy Brown and Rev. Dawn Duval Riley, in May 2015. You hear Amy giving a speech at the Denver marade. So what you hear is the anger and frustration that Amy, our chapter, our community, thousands of people in Denver have been feeling around a variety of issues that were leading to economic and political injustice in the city, not only around police violence and police brutality, but being pushed out of cities because of increase in rent and lack of affordable housing, increased militarization of the police, all these things is what Amy was kind of giving voice to. We wanted to offer an intersectional analysis so that we could demonstrate to the city, especially the mayor, that we understood that these things were intersectional, that they were not separate at all. These issues that we were experiencing as a part of the Denver community as black folks were connected.

BW [00:26:12] For me, anthropology has always been about organizing activism and publics, and emotion is a huge part of that. Emotion is a form of data and knowledge and an energy that can be used to make change in the world. And anthropology that is about the public should be paying attention to both emotion, organizing publics, and activism.

BW [00:26:33] The blog Anthropoliteia asked us to write about a text that we were finding useful to teach during the Movement for Black Lives. And it was part of their Black Lives Matter syllabus project. I'm going to read a piece that I wrote about teaching with anger November 2016 when I was both organizing with BLM, I had also just submitted my file for tenure review. I was having a really rough time during that process, in an ethnic studies department at that, and was also truly saddened deeply by what was going on in our country and was having a tough time, not only myself, but with my students wrapping our heads around what was happening during that election and the campaigns before the election in that month. So I was asked to write about BLM and decided to write about the useful texts of Audre Lorde's "Uses of Anger" and to think about how it was influencing my pedagogy.

CA [00:27:36] And can you tell us about a specific stylistic choice you made and why?

BW [00:27:42] You hear Amy's voice as she's giving the speech. If you go to the YouTube video, you can see that there's five black women standing up there, arms locked with her, protecting her as she is giving this speech. We were worried about safety. We wanted to affirm one another. We wanted to lock arms to make sure that we remain connected. We wanted to show Amy that we were validating and encouraging the fact that she was speaking our truths. Again, as a chapter, I am really thrilled by the work that we did that day because we knew that the structuring, the practice, the hours and days of thinking through how to keep one another safe. It's one of my proudest moments in a demonstration of the emotional, physical and spiritual work that anthropology and organizing have prepared me for. It's the type of change and action that I strive to participate in on a regular basis. And like my mentor, Lee D. Baker, taught me, it's the type of critical observation and participation I try to train my students to be committed to. BLM as a black women led, queer centered organization, it was important for, I thought, I mean, we thought the city to see five black women up on that platform. One person speaking for all of us. What you don't see or hear on the video is the crew of folks holding space for us. The cis men who are kind of surrounding us and creating a circle around us. Make sure no one is able to access the platform. The folks of color allies and the white allies who are also holding space, acting as liaisons with police, ensuring that the police and the mayor's private security who are surrounding us and trying very hard to intimidate us to get off the stage weren't able to actually get near us.

BW [00:29:37] So it was both in the speech itself and the action of redirecting tens of thousands of folks to march where we needed them to march. All of it was a collective and collaborative work that I'm super proud of. And the fact that we were able to help and assist the families organizing and getting that tape released was really important to us. I want to shout out Gino Canella, who is the person who recorded that speech and made that video that you see on YouTube with the subtitles. Gino was one of our allies at BLM who often worked to document our actions in the community. There's another video that Gino did of a solidarity event that we organized with the Minneapolis chapter of Black Lives Matter. After Jamar Clark was killed by two police officers, the Minneapolis chapter and other community members decided to sit in around the police precinct for, I believe, several days, probably almost two weeks. And during that time, white supremacists came and shot at the protesters, injuring five folks and sending them to the hospital. This was in November of 2016. In that video, there is a community member, a black woman, who says that anger is what get stuff done. And instead of stuff, she said another word that I won't say right now. But she was giving voice to something that I felt very strongly about. And that I continue to theorize in my research is that anger, and emotion more broadly, is full of data and knowledge. And it's something that I learned from Audre Lorde's "Uses of Anger" years ago and something that I continue to experience regularly, both in my teaching and my organizing. That emotion is full of data and knowledge. That anger in particular is productive and useful if it is channeled in action.

BW [00:31:35] If we were to talk about sound, activism, and anthropology, I would say that anthropologists have tools that can help people better understand how voice and narrative can be heard. So creating multi vocal and collaborative narratives about how meaning and truth can be affirmed. Talking openly about shared experiences both in written and verbal call and response. That community aspect is important. You hear that community aspect in that video with Amy giving her speech, right? You hear people repeating words she is saying, calling back to her, affirming the experience and the meaning in that moment. And it can be used to hold folks accountable to discuss deep responsibility and accountability as we interrogate power, how people are creating communities, how they experience belonging or not in those communities. I believe that anthropology has gifts that can do that and that we can be recognized. We're having really important conversations about citations and citation practices thanks to people like Christen Smith and Cite Black Women as a collective. And I think that anthropologists who are interested in pushing anthropology and thinking deeply about how power operates in our discipline and making a more equitable world can use voice, sound, and narrative to do these things.

CA [00:32:51] And my last question is. Why is anthropology activist or why is activism anthropological?

BW [00:32:58] For some in anthropology, my desire to be both an activist and an outspoken anthropologist is probably extra. It's probably a bit too much. I've been told that. I'm fine with that. I grow more fine with that every day. But it comes from a genealogy and a legacy of black anthropologists, particularly black feminist anthropologists, who taught me that anthropology should be grounded in activism and advocacy. That that was not something weird or, you know, strange to the discipline. That this is what we do. Where and how those folks protest, advocate, and resist may look different, but for me, this is what I came to the discipline to do. For me, anthropology is an activist discipline. It's how we use it and how we should use it. And I understand that not everyone feels that way and that not everyone agrees or that not everyone is committed to that practice. And that's fine. Folks like DuBois, hurston, Faye Harrison, Katherine Dunham, Deborah Thomas, Gina Ulysse, Lee Baker, John L. Jackson, Johnette Cole, Daná-Ain Davis, Cheryl Rodriguez. You know, A. Lynn Bolles, those folks, they created space for me to be an activist anthropologist in the way that I've always wanted to be. They may not do it like me. I may not do it like them. But we all do it in our own way. Anthropologists continue to push the boundaries of what anthropology is. And these folks hold that discipline accountable while making room for those of us who come behind them to resist, and protest, and interrogate what our responsibilities are as anthropologists and the business of truth telling, truth making, and making a more just and equitable.

BW [00:34:39] Other folks that are already doing this work that I see. I mentioned Christen Smith, Maya Berry, and Sarah Ihmoud and their crew who are talking about fugitive anthropology and pushing us to think deeply about gender and sexualized and racialized violence in the field. Tami Navarro, who is pushing us not to forget the Caribbean and the African diaspora, her work at Barnard's Research Center on art and Caribbean feminisms. Nicole Truesdell and her transformative practice institute that is really thinking through antidiversity, not to be confused with diversity work, but antidiversity work and pedagogy and how they work institutionally within higher education. Nicole is doing that work at Brown. And again, just the countless anthropologists I saw in the streets and on university quads protesting and fighting during the movement for Black Lives. And I feel like all of us are trying to push how we use the gifts of anthropology to do activist work, how we use our tools, not training to do that work.

BW [00:35:38] Moving from anthropology and the classroom to organizing spaces outside the academy forced me to grow in a variety of ways. I had to recognize that failure is a regular part of the job. Organizers know that failure is embedded in the work and will happen more often than not. The point is to learn from it and keep trying and to try your best to learn quickly from that failure. One of my graduate students in my seminar, Reimagining the Humanities for the Good of the Public, Diane reminded me about this. This semester. Diane said that there is a lot of avoidance of failure that happens as we train graduate students to be academics in particular. And I was reminded that those failures are intentionally left out of our stories, our truths as anthropologists. So it would be great to see us be more vulnerable and more open about failure and how failure is actually part of what we do. I cringe sometimes thinking about what I didn't know, the people I chose to cite in the earlier writings, not knowing their politics or even lacking a philosophy or citation practice. The things that guided me and some of my decisions early on, I kind of cringe, do I think about them? It was activism that taught me that the mistakes I make in the classroom, during fieldwork, during conferences, even now in this podcast, if I pay attention, if I admit to them, if I try to be vulnerable with them, they can teach me. I try every day to submit more to that committed learning process.

BW [00:37:05] I learned in my activism that anthropologists can be very good at asking good questions. In my chapter of BLM, I was kind of someone who was responsible for always trying to get us to ask the best questions that would offer us the best lenses to understand what was happening, what it meant, how power was operating and what could be done. This could be a very slow process and can be frustrating for folks who want to get some solution quickly. It is true that many members of my crew were regularly frustrated with me, but I think that asking the best questions is one of the gifts we get from our training and can help us get to the best solutions quicker and more effectively. In conclusion, I would just say that because of its beginnings and the way it has been used throughout time, anthropology will always be readied tool for colonizers and our oppressors. It's in its nature. But I believe that there is room for resistance, protests, activism, insurrection, and rebellion in these spaces, also. I know that more sounds like the ones in this video, the emotion, the intersectional analysis, the affirming call and response, the brave and vulnerable truth telling and truth making, the holding institutions accountable, those things that I saw during the Movement for Black Lives will be hopefully the sounds I hear in anthropology as it creates a new self, a new discipline, new institutions, today. It's anthropology I dream of seeing. It's one I'm committed to help build. It's one I'm thrilled to see colleagues, peers, and my students really begin to participate in and create for themselves. It's anthropological activists work that is about saving lives, saving souls, and being heard. Anthropology may never be a comfy home for most of us marginalized folks. Many of us ain't leaving, though. We've been here. We are here. And we're committed to writing, acting up, reminding you in podcasts, articles, and books, through teaching, organizing, and art that we will use the discipline's tools to do resistant and revolutionary work. And when they no longer are effective, when they no longer can actively be used to do that, well, we'll create new ones, but we will remain anthropologists.

BW [00:39:26] "Every woman has a well stocked arsenal of anger, potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focus with precision. It can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change." -Audre Lorde's "The Uses of Anger."

Protesters Chanting [00:39:44] We can't be silent while our friends are gunned down.

Protester [00:39:47] It is not time for us to be docile here. It is not time for you to sit here and pacify your hearts because anger is what gets shit done.

Protesters Chanting [00:39.56] We can't be silent while our friends are gunned down. We can't be silent while our friends are gunned down. We can't be silent while our friends are gunned down. We can't be silent while our friends are gunned down

BW [00:40:05] There are moments when I can feel anger raging inside of me. If I'm honest, it didn't start with the killing of Michael Brown. It didn't start with Sandra Bland or Michael Marshall or Korryn Gaines or Trayvon Martin. If I think back to identify the moment when the simmering anger spilled over into my belly and I wanted to pull my hair out with frustration, cry deep pools of tears, scream at the top of my lungs, and run into the streets to ask people: what the heck is going on? Are you paying attention? It wasn't two thousand and eleven with the execution of Troy Davis. It was then that I slowly gave myself over to the anger. Day by day, trying to figure out how this well-stocked arsenal could help me do something productive, while recognizing that I also had the potential to eat me alive. Every year since 2011, either on my own or in the classroom. I've returned to Audre Lorde's the uses of anger. While some might challenge whether this essay is anthropological, I argue that the truth in these texts are the result of long term research, deep analysis, and of being there as an insider outsider in the field. It's as though Lorde watches with ethnographic eyes, black women fighting and organizing in our streets, in classrooms, at work, at church, in courtrooms, pushing back against police violence, the criminal injustice system, anti-black racism, heterosexism, and feminisms that continue to neglect us. She observed us when she was alive and now watches from above as we use our arsenals to the best of our abilities. As a researcher interested in black women and emotional wellness, as a professor that teaches critical race and gender studies, and as an organizer with Black Lives Matter 5280, "The Uses of Anger" as our own minder at the anger that shows up as I function in these roles is useful and even vital for societal transformation. Lorde argues that it is not a wasteful emotion or energy. It is essential to the fight that will eventually get us free.

BW [00:42:07] In the increasingly divisive political climate we are living in, both in the US and globally, anger appears in a variety of ways. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how anger shows up in my classroom and activist organizing and how I can use it effectively to teach inside and outside of classrooms. Although I do not have the space here to detail and theorize the complexities of anger in my classroom, the anger from myself and from my students, I will admit that it has been present. I admit this because when we feel anger as professors, particularly those of us whose anger is racialized as black and dangerous and gendered as feminine and irrational, we are frequently made to feel ashamed or urge to be silent about it. We are also encouraged to create safe environments where all students, regardless of identity and disproportionate access to power, can be comfortable and learn without offense. I have written elsewhere about my pedagogical approach: a radical honesty which encourages teachers and students to be honest about the experiences, identities, and emotions they bring into the classroom while examining how these are connected to power and privilege. My point here is that it makes sense that anger is showing up in teaching, learning, and organizing space, in this moment. How would it be possible not to express an experience anger as we seek effective ways to navigate, as Audre Lorde says, "the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill use, stereotyping, defensiveness, betrayal, and cooperation"? How is it possible to learn critical race theory or engage in anti-racist organizing practices or successfully mobilize against structural systems of violence without feeling a fire in your spirit? Lorde's essay does a wonderful job of explaining the politics of anger and that all anger is not mobilized equally. As women of color are made to feel ashamed of their anger, while white women sometimes get stuck in guilt and have white tears, Lorde argues anger amongst potential allies or accomplices can be utilized to build alliances.

BW [00:44:11] She writes, "Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification. For it is the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have great differences and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy." With increasing incidents of white fragility and white rage erupting in community organizing spaces, and my classroom, I try to remember that while all anger is not equal, all of it can be useful for change if properly channeled. If we are willing to engage in the tough, deep, and necessary conversations Lorde describes in her texts, we can move towards a more equitable world. For now is the time the anger of those organizing against oppression can no longer be ignored or simply denigrated. And I ended that with another quote from Audre Lorde that says, "To turn aside from the anger of black women with excuses or the pretext of intimidation is to award, no one power. It is merely another way of preserving racial blindness. [BW: Sorry for the ablest language.] The power of unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. Guilt is only another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people's salvation or learning. But that time is over."

Protester Call [00:45:43] Show me what community looks like.

Protesters Response [00:45:46] This is what community looks like.

Protester Call [00:45:48] Show me what community looks like.

Protesters Response [00:45:50] This is what community looks like.

Protester Call [00:45:52] Show me what community looks like.

Protesters Response [00:45:55] This is what community looks like.

MLK Protesters [00:45:56] [Cheering]

Amy E. Brown [00:45:57] [Speech] What we did not ask permission. We did not get permits. We were not invited.

MLK Protesters [00:46:02] [Cheering]

AB [00:46:04] And we are here to reclaim what is ours.

MLK Protester [00:46:07] Yes!

AB [00:46:09] Do not walk away from us!

AB [00:46:10] [Speech] Black women speaking at the feet of Dr. King. Our mayor turned his back and left.

MLK Protesters Call [00:46:17] Show me what democracy looks like.

MLK Protesters Response [00:46:18] This is what democracy looks like.

AB [00:46:20] [Speech] Because when you reclaim this day and you reclaim the truth of this day, it's scary as hell.

MLK Protesters [00:46:26] Yeah!

AB [00:46:27] [Speech] And we have come to reclaim truth. We have come to unapologetically declare that Black Lives

AB and MLK Protesters [00:46:36] [In chorus] Matter.

[00:46:37] [music playing in marade]

AB [00:46:40] [Speech] Mayor Hancock, will you honor Dr. King beyond your poetic words this morning?

MLK Protesters [00:46:44] [Cheering]

AB [00:46:46] [Speech] Will you honor Dr. King by immediately releasing the tapes...

MLK Protester [00:46:50] Today!

AB [00:46:51] [Speech] showing the Denver Sheriff's deputies brutally murdering Michael Marshall.

MLK Protester Call [00:46:56] Release the tapes.

MLK Protesters Response [00:46:57] Release the tapes.

MLK Protester Call [00:46:58] Release the tapes.

MLK Protesters Response [00:46:59] Release the tapes.

MLK Protester Call [00:47:00] Release the tapes.

MLK Protesters Response [00:47:01] Release the tapes.

MLK Protester Call [00:47:02] Release the tapes.

MLK Protesters Response [00:47:03] Release the tapes.

AB [00:47:04] [Speech] Will you honor him by immediately dismissing the deputies involved in this brutal murder of our brother?

MLK Protesters Response [00:47:14] Dismiss the deputies.

AB Call [00:47:16] Dismiss these deputies.

MLK Protesters Response [00:47:18] Dismiss the deputies.

AB [00:47:19] [Speech] As you pledge to honor Dr. King today, will you honor his legacy of fighting for the poor? Will you return to your work tomorrow and immediately repeal the urban camping ban?

MLK Protester [00:47:31] Today!

MLK Protesters [00:47:32] [Cheering].

AB Call [00:47:34] Repeal the urban camping ban.

MLK Protesters Response [00:47:36] Repeal the urban camping ban.

AB [00:47:38] [Speech] Stop criminalizing homelessness.

MLK Protesters [00:47:40] [Cheering].

AB [00:47:42] [Speech] Elected officials, homelessness is your failure, no one else's.

MLK Protester [00:47: 47] Yes it is. Yes it is.

AB [00:47:49] [Speech] We cannot afford to live here. We have been strategically driven out of our home. Dr. King would be honored if you, Mayor Hancock, would hold developers accountable . . .

MLK Protesters [00:48:03] Yes! [Cheering].

AB [00:48:04] [Speech] to the promise of affordable housing.

AB Call [00:48:06] Affordable housing now.

MLK Protesters Response [00:48:08] Affordable housing now.

MLK Protester Call [00:48:11] Affordable housing now.

MLK Protesters Response [00:48:13] Affordable housing now.

AB Call [00:48:15] Change the name Stapleton.

MLK Protesters Response [00:48:17] Change the name Stapleton.

AB Call [00:48:20] Change the name Stapleton.

MLK Protesters Response [00:48:22] Change the name Stapleton.

AB Call [00:48:24] Demilitarize the police.

MLK Protesters Response [00:48:25] Demilitarize the police.

AB [00:48:29] [Speech] Honor Dr. King's commitment to community by diverting twelve million of our dollars to rehabilitation programs aimed at reducing, reducing our prison population...

MLK Protesters [00:48:43] [Cheering]

AB [00:48:45] [Speech] and providing mental health resources for our brothers and sisters in jail.

MLK Protesters [00:48:50] [Cheering]

AB [00:48:52] [Speech] We demand resources not retribution.

MLK Protesters Response [00:48:55] Resources not retribution.

AB Call [00:48:58] We demand our money be used for resources, not retribution.

Protesters Response [00:49:02] Resources not retribution.

AB Call [00:49:03] Do Black Lives Matter?

MLK Protesters Response [00:49:04] Black Lives Matter.

AB [00:49:06] [Speech] And although he is not here, we declare firmly that Mayor Hancock,

AB, BW, and other women on platform [00:49:12] [In chorus] your black life matters too.

MLK Protesters [00:49:15] [Cheering]

[00:49:23] [Athropod Theme Music]

CA [00:49:28] Thank you for listening to AnthroPod, the podcast for the Society of Cultural Anthropology. My name is Cory-Alice André-Johnson, and I am your host for this episode. I'd like to extend a warm thank you to both Dr. Sophie Chao and Dr. Bianca Williams for sharing their thoughts, insights, and work on anthropology, activism, and organizing. I'd also like to share my deep appreciation for Shelmith Wanjiru, the executive producer for this episode. We hope that you will tune in again to hear more episodes in our new series: "What Does Anthropology Sound Like."

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What Does Anthropology Sound Like: Activism

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00:00:00] [Anthropod Theme Music] Cory-Alice André-Johnson [00:00:14] Welcome to AnthroPod. I'm your host, Cory-Alice André-Johnson. Today we'll be discussing activism with Bianca Williams and Sophie Chao as part of the new series entitled "What Does Anthropology Sound Like" The series seeks to showcase the wide range of possibilities when fieldwork, methodology, and theory come together into some kind of anthropological product or production.

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No Stone Unturned is a documentary which seeks to uncover the collusion behind the massacre of 6 civillian men in a pub in rural Loughinisland, Northern Ireland. Although it often provides (somewhat  gratuitous) images of violence and terrorism in NI, it's central story is so striking because of the supposed distance of Loughinisland from such acts. Interviews with the famillies of the victims and eyewitnesses are reminiscent of We Are All Neighbours - the bartender of the pub described the community as close-knit, as Catholics and Protestants drank together. "The Troubles were something that happened in Belfast," according to one victim, highlighting how violence can be ignored or pushed aside by people close by, in order to live day to day. The themes raised throughout this week are clear at the end of the documentary, after the families suspicions of collusion are confirmed and they are informed that the perpetrators of the violence are free and that some even live close-by (a discovery made by the documentary crew, not the assistance of the police). It is here that the wife of one victim is most visibly distressed, worrying that she could "meet these people at the shops" and not even know who they are. The aftermath of violence is played out in the everyday, domestic sphere, weaving mistrust and threat through even the smallest rural villages.

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RTÉ - IRELAND’S NATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA

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No Stone Unturned | RTÉ One | Wednesday October 2nd

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The question of how to study suicide bombing is one that is taken very seriously and, as exemplified by Hage's uncomfortable e-mail exchange with a colleague, it is a topic that produces a strong emotional response. The comedy, Four Lions, is contreversial in that it takes this typically serious topic and pokes fun. As Hage argues, in researching or attempting to conduct an anthropology of suicide bombing it is often seen almost as an endorsement of such acts - however, they are very obviously condemenable. The refusal to discuss suicide bombing contributes to a strong Us vs Them attitude, in which the suicide bombers (Them) are regarded as homogenous, dangerous, inhumane. In this interview, Chris Morris highlights that in making the film, he wished to shed light on the humanity and vulnerability of these men. This echoes Hage's point, that looks towards an anthropology that aims at finding the root of violence, through understanding its perpetrators.

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A comedy about suicide bombers doesn't exactly jump off the page as a workable film idea. Yet in the 2000s, Chris Morris - creator of the paradigm-shifting comedy shows Brass Eye, Jam, The Day Today, On the Hour and Nathan Barley - decided to spend years researching the subject to see if he could pull it off for his debut feature.

The result was the beloved and quote-packed 2010 film Four Lions, which follows four bumbling wannabe jihadis as they plan to blow up the London marathon. A box office and critical hit, it was a film that focused on farce more than it did ferociousness.

Ten years on from its release, I caught up with Morris, his co-writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong ( Peep Show, Thick of It, Veep, Succession), producer Mark Herbert and stars of the film, Riz Ahmed, Nigel Lindsay and Kayvan Novak, to hear about how it was all made.

The one that really struck me was these guys going to attack an American warship in Yemen. They assembled at the dockside at 3AM, loaded up their explosives, and the launcher sank. I just pictured that very vividly. There was a moment of farce, and I thought, 'That's what it is.' These people make mistakes like everyone else.

Plus, it counteracts the idea that these are people implacably opposed to everything we do in the West, relentlessly pursuing us all to the death. The reality is that the practitioners of this cause are composed of human frailty. Once you're looking at it through that lens, everything landed in place. Time after time I started to see these kinds of events, and they were shot through with human stupidity.

Chris Morris: As soon as I realised I had a funny idea and that it was a group of guys - like a stag-do-gone-wrong - Sam and Jesse, in my mind, were standing there, grinning, waiting to jump in. They are experts in the school of male psychology, plus they have technical expertise and experience of comedy dialogue.

Sam Bain (Writer): We had a couple of meetings with Charlie Brooker and Chris about Nathan Barley series two, and he mentioned this idea. Chris is the kind of figure who sort of inspires people so much that the feeling was, 'Yeah, whatever you want to do, I'm up for it.' There wasn't really much of a dilemma.

Jesse Armstrong (Writer): I had some anxiety about getting the tone right. However, it was evident that his level of research and depth of knowledge about the issues around the topic meant that a whole load of concerns were alleviated. He emanated a sense of confidence with the material that made us feel confident. It was obvious he was aiming for something that was intelligent and bold, but also sensitive.

Chris Morris: I spent years doing the research. I would be off chatting to people from Muslim communities in Gloucester, Blackburn and Halifax, and then just coming back with stories to tell them.

Jesse Armstrong: I remember endless visits to this office, sitting in uncomfortable chairs and having Chris talk for a long, long time. It felt like a university tutorial more than a normal writing room. But a funny one, with some weird, weird, weird stuff you're allowed to bring to the room. A very different tone to usual.

Chris Morris: We were modelling characters together, and we tried various models for the guys to get the dynamic right. The Beatles was actually a useful template, because you've got these very unique and disparate four characters. There was also a tangential connection to a lost Brass Eye sketch called the Paedo Pride March. It was more the texture of the idea, really. The funny thing about that sketch - which we rehearsed, but never filmed - was the tone of the little group of paedophiles who were organising the paedophile pride march. This kind of sad and disappointing tone to discover that, for the 14th night in a row, someone had pushed a turd through their letterbox. But that idea was a lot more abstract, and Four Lions was based more on this permanently moving conveyor belt of real life instances.

Sam Bain: After all the talking, Jesse and I wrote a first draft and Chris then went away and just rewrote it and rewrote it, which was fine by us, since it was his film.

Nigel Lindsay (Actor; Barry): Chris gave me a couple of ideas for Barry and I went off and did my own research. I based Barry on a guy who'd been the janitor at the Finsbury Park Mosque, where Abu Hamza, the hook man, was. He was a Cypriot and he'd been converted while he was there. He was extremely eloquent, but extremely stupid at the same time. He ended up getting six years. I had his voice in my head, although Chris said I sounded more like Ali G when we started, so I toned it down.

Chris Morris: There was a guy who'd been in the BNP and decided he wanted to beat Muslims in arguments, so he bought a copy of the Qur'an and accidentally converted himself. He became a highly pedantic, pro-Islamic caliphate-type character who used to go around universities giving talks about how the world should be under Islamic rule. That went into the formation of Barry.

Nigel Lindsay: Chris and I got a backstory together for Barry. Because you ask: why is he there? He's white, he's from London, everyone else is northern. We decided he'd been kicked out by his wife and was living in a shed at the bottom of the garden, and at night he'd sit in his shed and hear his wife moaning as she's having sex with her new boyfriend.

Riz Ahmed (Actor; Omar): I turned the film down initially. I'd just started out in that world, and done this film called Road to Guantanamo, about real-life situations taking place there, like torture. As a Muslim brown actor just graduating into the industry post-9/11, that was most of the jobs that were out there. I made the decision that I didn't want to do films that reinforced false and negative stereotypes, I wanted to do work that challenged stereotypes. The day we came back from the Berlin Film Festival - where Road to Guantanamo had screened - myself and the other actors were all illegally detained by intelligence officers, harassed and physically assaulted at Luton Airport. I kind of found myself in this post-9/11 circus. I recorded a track about it called " Post-9/11 Blues ", which got Chris's attention. It was totally in his wheelhouse of satirising stuff.

I didn't really know his work - I thought he was someone who pulls spoofs on people, like Ashton Kutcher or Noel Edmonds. I didn't realise what a legend he was, but that was probably for the best because we just struck up a friendship. We'd meet for a coffee every couple of months and I would download him on where my anxieties were as a socially and creatively engaged British Muslim. What I soon found out was that his knowledge of street-level British Muslim life outstripped mine. He knows his shit. A year down the line I got a script and he asked if I wanted to do it, but I was like: nah. He said it would be different and to trust him, that it was a comedy and not more stuff feeding into stereotypes. When I said yes I didn't think anyone would even end up seeing it.

Chris Morris: Kayvan had done some torrid research up in Bradford, that involved some kind of raging all-nighter trying to consume all the things I'd said were typical of the Bradford experience in one 24-hour session. He came back pretty wide-eyed. It was a night of debauchery.

Mark Herbert: Some members of my family thought I was crazy for doing it, thinking I was going to be kidnapped or something. I went to this New York pitching festival thing and, literally, people thought it was a hidden camera gag.

Chris Morris: Time and again the conversation about money was dull, because it was, "Yes, yes, yes - but actually we've had a conversation about it, and no." It was a lot of just: keep going, trim your ambitions, and then just keep going. The Film Council was going to fund us, but they asked us to change the ending. The characters had to fail or something; they couldn't go through with it. It wouldn't be a film about what it's about if they just went, 'Ah, let's not.' The whole point is that you're trying to live inside the heads of people who will go that far.

Mark Herbert: I had a couple of investors who said, "I really love the script, but I'm terrified." I actually had some investors tell me that it was career suicide. I never lost faith in the project, but I questioned whether we'd ever get it made.

Jesse Armstrong: After a while, I do remember feeling like, 'Fucking hell, is this ever going to happen?'

Chris Morris: We started a crowdfunding thing called Funding Mentalism that got over 2,000 responses. In the end we got a final bit of funding and didn't have to ask those people [who had responded to the crowdfunder], but they made us think, 'Oh, this is worth it.'

Chris Morris: I think even the Ibis would have been pure luxury in comparison.

Kayvan Novak: We were always together - we lived together, we got driven to work together. It created a camaraderie that worked so well onscreen. It was a piss-take - a lot of banter. So when it comes to being on camera, you're already warmed up and ready to roll.

Nigel Lindsay: There were no egos on that set at all.

Nigel Lindsay: Every time we were filming outside, it never said "Four Lions by Chris Morris" on the slates. I think it was called "Boilerhouse", and the director was Rodney Bun. We didn't get call sheets, we got party invitations with balloons on them, saying, "Please be at the sewage works at 6.30AM, bring a bottle." Scripts were given back at the end of every day and shredded. I don't think I ever had a full script.

Mark Herbert: Even the vans we had, which would normally say things like "film and television services", we put on fake signs pretending to be removal people. Paddy Considine happened to be up in Sheffield when this journalist got wind of us, so we got Paddy to come to set and give him an interview to divert the attention. We just had to be creative and on our toes. It's quite hard being a complete secret when you've got to blow up fake sheep.

Chris Morris: There might have been some police questioning over a loud explosion we made in a field.

Nigel Lindsay: The police were called a few times. One time we were on a motorway bridge praying, and someone thought we were about to bomb something. Because the camera was hidden a lot of the time, people didn't always know we were filming. Chris would try to hide the cameras when filming in public. I've never been more scared of filming things in my life.

There was one scene where it was market day in Sheffield and I was hiding in a white van dressed as a Ninja Turtle, and on action I had to run into this market square and shout at this woman's tomatoes at her greengrocers' stall - the plot being that I thought her tomatoes had been bugged by the CIA. She was the only person who knew we were filming. I was shitting myself. The cameras were hidden, so all people saw was this six-foot Ninja Turtle running down the street, screaming, "Fuck off!" at these tomatoes. The lady who ran the stall was laughing, so it wasn't usable. Chris told me, for the next take, to go and destroy the stall. I said, "Is it her stall?" "Yeah, it's her stall," he said. I said, "Are you sure I should destroy it?" Then there was a long pause and he said... "She'll be compensated." So I went back and smashed it to pieces, and she was so fucking angry. She couldn't believe it. It didn't even end up in the film.

Mark Herbert: There was one day that Riz couldn't do, and it was the day of the Sheffield half-marathon, so we couldn't re-stage that. I'm roughly the same height, so I was stupid enough to put on this Honey Monster costume. It was absolutely roasting. I went to play football afterwards and literally passed out.

Nigel Lindsay: Chris would sometimes shout things to us during takes, which no director has ever done with me before. There would be a line with someone asking me, "Are you serious about blowing up a mosque?" and Chris would shout to me, "Say, 'I'm serious as beetroot.' Or he'd shout, 'Talk about rivers of milk.'"

Kayvan Novak: After we finished in Sheffield, we had a week in Spain to film the terror camp scenes that were supposed to be in Pakistan. Chris had got really ill and he was on his ass, but he got a flu shot and pushed through. We were at the airport at 4AM, flew at 6AM, then we got to the hotel in Spain and Chris is like, "Great, this is Javier and he's going to teach you how dismantle and put together an AK-47, so he's coming to your bedroom to do that." We were like, "Mate, can't we just get a BLT on room service and have five hours' sleep?" But no, we're assembling AK-47s from Javier the armorer, who doesn't speak any English."

Nigel Lindsay: Chris worked so hard. We'd do full days and then he'd go off scouting for locations at the end of it, or get us to shoot some more martyr videos. I used to look for wires in the back of his head. One day we were filming in the Peak District - by this stage we'd been filming every day for five weeks, getting up at 5.30AM. We were in complete camouflage gear, and the first thing we had to do was roll down a big hill in full army gear. I rolled into a patch of stinging nettles and my whole face blew up. It rained all day and then, at 7PM, when we were supposed to be finishing, there was a river and Chris said, "Right, I think it would be a good idea if you jumped in." I'd had enough by that point and just said: "Why don't you fucking jump in?" He said, "Oh, OK," and jumped straight in. He wouldn't even have an umbrella over him on set. He led by example, and you'd do anything for him.

Kayvan Novak: We'd shoot a scripted version and then Chris would be like, "OK, now let's do the Disney version." So we'd goof around and do something ridiculous. He allowed us to be as indulgent as we liked. There's one line that I improvised that I'm quite fond of: "Fuck mini Babybel." I said it off the back of Riz's speech about the Taste the Difference cheddar.

Chris Morris: It's a deliberately rough-looking film, partly because that was the characteristic of the research footage, and also because it's characteristic of that world - there's a lot of homemade footage.

Sam Bain: I'm very fond of when they're singing ["Dancing in the Moonlight"] in the car. We auditioned a couple of songs for that. The other was "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis, but I always wanted Toploader.

Riz Ahmed: I didn't have a clue if it had worked. The beauty of independent film is that there's no pressure going in. You don't have a sense of expectation; you don't presume there's going to be an audience for it. We didn't have a clue if it would land.

Sam Bain: You do have a gut instinct about these things, but it can often be wrong. It's really hard to know - that's the million-dollar question on any project, because no one knows if anything is going to work. I felt like Chris had a special something, though.

Chris Morris: I didn't have music in mind for the closing credits initially. The Aphex Twin music, "Avril 14th", is the product of starting to see the film for what it actually is, as opposed to the experience of gathering the visual material. That's when your brain starts engaging and thinks, 'Well, you need a melancholia coda here.' Richard James [Aphex Twin] was brilliant. He re-recorded it because he'd sold the rights of the recording. He had it on some old ancient thing - it might have even been on a floppy disk, or something - so he dug that up. He played the piano part and recorded it with mics set up in various different parts of the room, and then he ran it forwards and backwards and in all these various different sequences. Then he sent them over. What a bloody geezer. Really good bloke.

Riz Ahmed: At Sundance, people came out of that screening looking like they'd been to a funeral. People were coming up to me and being really earnest, saying, like, "That was devastating, just devastating." I was like, 'Fuck, I don't think people get it.'

Kayvan Novak: American audiences had trouble with the accents, I think. It's probably quite impenetrable to hear these northern blokes talking about bargain buckets and Boots, the chemists.

Nigel Lindsay: There was silence in the cinema in America. Afterwards, a woman behind me said, "I'm so glad you were laughing, because I couldn't understand what they were saying, so I just laughed when you laughed."

Sam Bain: Sundance wasn't great, to be honest. People seemed a little bit unsure whether they were allowed to laugh. It was a bit of a muted response.

Jesse Armstrong: The reception in America didn't have the warmth that we subsequently felt when we had the UK premiere in Bradford. That Bradford screening was memorably, like, 'Fuck, this is gonna be alright. This works, people get it.'

Chris Morris: Bradford was a real test of the film's authenticity, so I had some wind in my sails after that.

Chris Morris: A miniature version of what we feared may happen a year before release happened a week before release. In classic style, somebody who hadn't seen the film decided to contact the lawyer who represented one of the families of a victim of the 7/7 bombing in London, and asked them, "Do you think somebody should be making jokes about suicide bombers?" Absolutely understandably, some of them said: that doesn't sound funny at all. If the question is framed that way, without having seen the film, how else are you going to respond? A little campaign developed and they were going to blockade cinemas that were showing it, but it never really developed into anything. Due to its popularity, they had to start screening it at more cinemas across the country.

Kayvan Novak: We had to do media training for the release of the film. I knew the film was funny, and I knew the heart of it, but I also knew people would see it was a comedy about suicide bombers and say, "How could you possibly make that film?" Or, "I refuse to find that subject matter funny." Any joke has to be executed skilfully and sensitively, and with the talent of Chris, Sam and Jesse, that was done. People underestimate how moving the film is - it's not just a goofy film. We're invested in these guys emotionally and we don't want them to commit this heinous act.

Riz Ahmed: I remember going back up to Bradford for something on the train, and I was minding my own business, and before I knew it the whole carriage was just full of people standing up shouting, "Rubber dingy rapids, bruv!" I've encountered people all over the world who love this. People in Pakistan love this film, man. There is so much love for it out there. It's considered a classic.

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'I Was Told It Was Career Suicide' - The Oral History of 'Four Lions'

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A comedy about suicide bombers doesn't exactly jump off the page as a workable film idea. Yet in the 2000s, Chris Morris - creator of the paradigm-shifting comedy shows Brass Eye, Jam, The Day Today, On the Hour and Nathan Barley - decided to spend years researching the subject to see if he could pull it off for his debut feature.

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The Sudanese government's agreement to pay billions in compensation in order to be removed from the US terrorism blacklist is an interesting way to consider who takes blame. Sudan's presence on the list is said to have denied them access to "desperately needed debt relief and foreign financing." This raises questions on who can be considered the victim and who is responsible. A country held responsible for the actions of a corrupt leader and various terrorist organisations only pushes people in precarious circumstances further into poverty and desparation. Here, money and power have control over the designation of "terrorism," despite the complicity of Western states in creating these conditions. This echoes Devji's notion of the 'globalisation of responsibility.'

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Washington has removed Sudan from a terrorism blacklist after the country agreed to pay $335m in compensation for its alleged role in the bombing of two US embassies in east Africa by al-Qaida in 1998.

Donald Trump tweeted the news of the deal on Monday. "GREAT news! New government of Sudan, which is making great progress, agreed to pay $335 MILLION to U.S. terror victims and families. Once deposited, I will lift Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At long last, JUSTICE for the American people and BIG step for Sudan!" he wrote.

Sudan's transitional government, which took power following the fall of the veteran dictator Omar al-Bashir last year, has in recent months been under increasing pressure from US officials to pay the compensation.

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, discussed the lifting of sanctions with the Sudanese prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, during a visit to Khartoum in August.
US proposes removing Sudan from terrorism list for $330m compensation
Hamdok tweeted: "Thank you so much, President Trump! We very much look forward to your official notification to Congress rescinding the designation of Sudan as a state-sponsor of terrorism, which has cost Sudan too much."

"This Tweet and that notification are the strongest support to Sudan's transition to democracy and to the Sudanese people... As we're about to get rid of the heaviest legacy of Sudan's previous, defunct regime, I should reiterate that we are peace-loving people and have never supported terrorism."

The US has moved to incrementally restore relations with Sudan over recent years but has insisted that outstanding legal claims are settled before the country is struck from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. North Korea, Iran and Syria remain on the list.

US officials hope the move will encourage Sudan to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel. Trump, seeking to appeal to pro-Israel voters, has pushed other countries in the Arab world to normalise relations with the Jewish state. Last month the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain agreed to ties with Israel following US-mediated deals, despite protests from the Palestinian leadership.

The designation as a state sponsor of terrorism has denied Sudan access to desperately needed debt relief and foreign financing. Meanwhile, the country's economy has been crippled by decades of Bashir's misrule, continuing internal conflict, recent political upheaval and the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people are facing hardship as food and fuel prices have soared.

Sudanese officials have long said the listing as a state sponsor of terrorism, which dates back to 1993 when Bashir was accused of supporting militant groups, should be withdrawn as the country is now ruled by a new administration committed to reform.

However, the payment of compensation is likely to cause anger. Ministers, opposition leaders and ordinary people in the country have previously expressed dismay at the prospect of a multimillion-dollar payment to the US. Some have complained that it would be unfair to force Sudan to use public funds to pay for the misdeeds of a fallen dictator.

More than 224 people died and 4,000 were injured in the double bombing of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 by al-Qaida, then run by Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan. Courts in the US found Sudan guilty of providing essential support to al-Qaida when Bin Laden was based in the country between 1991 and 1996.

Some have contested the basis for the compensation claim, saying Sudan sought to cooperate with the US by expelling Bin Laden. Hassan Abdulrahman, defence minister in Sudan at the time of Bin Laden's stay, told the Guardian in August that Washington refused an offer to hand the extremist leader to them.

"The politicians suggested we send him to the Americans but [the Americans] rejected that ... The Sudanese also said they were prepared to detain or otherwise restrain Bin Laden," Abdulrahman said.

US officials in key counter-terrorism posts at the time have since denied that the Sudanese offer was serious. Bin Laden was eventually expelled by Khartoum and found a safe haven in eastern Afghanistan.

The proposed compensation deal follows an earlier payment of a smaller sum to victims of another al-Qaida attack, on a warship just offshore of Aden in Yemen in 2000.

Congress must still review the deal and analysts say significant obstacles to Sudan's access to international and US aid still remain.

There has also been criticism of the likely distribution of the compensation between victims, with significant differences between the sums received by US citizens and others.

Resistance in Sudan to normalisation of ties with Israel is also likely to be significant. Hamdok said last month that he had told Pompeo he would not link his country's removal from the list with normalisation of relations with Israel. "This topic [ties to Israel] needs a deep discussion of the society," he said.

However, there has been signs of thawing relations between the two countries, which are officially enemies. Sudan's military head, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who is the most senior figure under the country's power-sharing arrangement, held an unannounced meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Uganda earlier this year. While Burhan denied there had been a change in relations with Israel, Netanyahu later said the two governments were "establishing cooperative relations", and Sudan has agreed to allow flights to Israel to overfly its territory.
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US removes Sudan from terrorism blacklist in return for $335m

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Washington has removed Sudan from a terrorism blacklist after the country agreed to pay $335m in compensation for its alleged role in the bombing of two US embassies in east Africa by al-Qaida in 1998. Donald Trump tweeted the news of the deal on Monday. "GREAT news!

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The current Coronavirus pandemic is a poignant example of Mbembe's assertion that sovereignty is the power of states over who lives and who dies. The control of information and, most crucially, distribution of funding and healthcare effectively gives state governments this power. However, the state now acting under such scrutiny exposes how these powers also contribute to a larger framework of structural violence, as coronavirus deaths follow similar patterns to racial inequalities. In neglecting health care for Native Americans, leaving hospitals under-funded and ill-equppied, the American state defines who it considers "disposable." (Mbembe p80).

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GALLUP, N.M. - Melvina Musket stared at her dying father through the cellphone screen. His mouth hung open, his eyes were clamped shut and a beard covered his chin. She heard nurses crying in the background.

"Jesus is waiting for you," she told him.

Musket, 52, had never seen her father with facial hair. Benjamin Musket, 80, was a former Marine, a retired machinery mechanic, a basketball coach and a board member at their church. He didn't do beard

The family had been cautious when the pandemic arrived. Four generations of Muskets lived on a sheep ranch in McKinley County, New Mexico, and her father was an elderly diabetic on dialysis. They didn't shop at their local stores, where too many people neglected to wear masks, instead driving nearly five hours roundtrip to Albuquerque for groceries. When they returned home, they wiped down every purchase and took showers.

The novel coronavirus came all the same. One day in May, Benjamin Musket started coughing. Twelve hours later, he was gasping.

In town, the understaffed Gallup Indian Medical Center, run by the federal government's Indian Health Service, was filled with cases. When the staff saw Benjamin Musket had a heart infection and COVID-19, they flew him to a hospital in Albuquerque, over 100 miles away. A few weeks later, he was dead.

In the days after Benjamin Musket became ill, nearly everyone in the family tested positive.

Melvina Musket was hospitalized with a high fever. The medical center staff put cold compresses under her arms to cool her down.

Her mother was admitted to a hospital in Albuquerque, where she fell into a nonresponsive fog. Melvina Musket's brother begged the hospital staff: "I can't lose my mom this week; I already lost my dad."

On June 11, their mother died, five days after her husband.

"We didn't even know how profoundly sick they were," Melvina Musket said. "It was just too much for their bodies."

Few places in the world have been as scarred by the coronavirus pandemic as McKinley County, New Mexico. By September, the county ranked first in the state and sixth nationally for COVID-19 deaths per capita.

Roughly 74% of McKinley County's 71,367 residents are non-Hispanic Native American, mostly Navajo and Zuni. The majority of land within the county's borders is part of the Navajo Nation reservation. The Navajos, who call themselves Diné, are descendants of people who outlived colonization, smallpox, massacres and resettlement. They take pride in a history of resilience.

Then came the Big Cough, or Dikos Ntsaaígíí-19, as coronavirus is known among Diné tribal members.

The federal government, which oversees health care for Native Americans under treaty obligations, used a modified influenza plan to address the pandemic. And as the COVID-19 crisis began to overwhelm McKinley County, medical experts and others say federal authorities were slow to respond, a judgment call that cost lives and fueled the spread.

This failure was no accident, experts said. It was the direct result of centuries of systemic racism that has left McKinley County's health care system chronically underfunded, understaffed, ill-equipped and outdated. And all in a community grappling with multigenerational housing, preexisting medical conditions, substance abuse and poverty, where many live without running water, electricity or enough food for their daily nutritional needs.

During the peak of the pandemic, doctors at the Gallup Indian Medical Center were forced to reuse personal protective equipment. An emergency room and intubation tents were set up in the parking lot. Mothers in labor were diverted to other hospitals to make room for coronavirus patients.

As the federal facility filled up, some overflow patients went to the one private hospital in the area, which also was overcrowded, prompting nurses and doctors at one point to protest in the street against unsafe conditions. For weeks, critical care patients were flown daily to better-equipped facilities in Albuquerque. Delayed medical care can, in some instances, lead to complications or death.

"I am sure if the federal government had intervened a lot quicker, things would have been a lot better. It's obvious there was a lack of support," said Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo Nation.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, National Indian Health Board, Government Accountability Office, congressional committees and tribal leaders warned for decades that Native American health care was anemic and primed for catastrophe. Yet, year after year, Congress failed to allocate cash to meet the medical need. Centuries after the United States traded land for health care and other services with sovereign, Native nations, federal officials spend nearly three times as much per person on non-Indian medical care than on health services for Indigenous people.

More recently, when Congress passed a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package to help the country get through the beginning of the pandemic, only $714 million was earmarked for the Navajo Nation. That amounts to $4,552 per each Diné on the reservation, compared with $6,703 per capita in stimulus funding nationwide. And most of the money didn't arrive until months later.

"It's really an unbelievable chain of oppression - it's still squeezing us, it still has its grip," said Anna Marie Rondon, executive director of the New Mexico Social Justice and Equity Institute in McKinley County.

"And it's still killing us."

Jamie Barboan could barely hear her mother over the sounds of an oxygen machine.

Whoosh-gush. Whoosh-gush. Whoosh-gush.

The noise dominated their phone calls, overwhelming her mother's soft mumbles.

Barboan, 44, knew the equipment was helping her mom stay alive. But she worried she would hear the sound for the rest of her life.

Barboan's mother, a certified nursing assistant, was the first in the family to be hospitalized for COVID-19. The virus then spread to Barboan's father and younger brother, sending all three to the Gallup Indian Medical Center. They received dedicated care there, but the facility was soon filled with COVID-19 cases. Barboan's mother and brother were transported to hospitals in Albuquerque. Officials quarantined her father in a local motel.

Her brother, Andreas Tolth, was 39. She thought he would be OK. He never drank or smoked. He loved horror movies and always took care of his family.

But she had heard others warn, "Once they're in the hospital, you won't see them (again)."

For Tolth, that was the heartbreaking truth. After a month-long battle, he died from the coronavirus in July.

"Our hopes were so high," Barboan said. "Then all of a sudden, one day you get the phone call that they're not here no more - and it hurt."

Her parents recovered from the illness but had lost a son.

"They still cry," she said. "They still struggle."

The Navajo reservation is the biggest in the nation at 27,000 square miles. It sprawls across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, from the Grand Canyon to Monument Valley. It's a vast, arid outback of red mesas, occasional villages and bone-jarring dirt roads leading to sheep ranches.

COVID-19 spread like a high desert wind in McKinley County, one of the nation's poorest and unhealthiest communities - with high rates of alcohol-related deaths, diabetes and food insecurity, and where many tribal members live with three or four generations in a single-family dwelling.

These underlying medical conditions combine to increase risk for severe illness from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It's a constant cycle of poverty that we deal with. Every single day we have to fight for survival," said Krystal Curley, a Diné who is executive director of Indigenous Lifeways, a collaboration of nonprofits that support Indigenous communities.

Perhaps nowhere are the disparities more visible than in Gallup, McKinley County's seat and only incorporated city. The town, nearly surrounded by tribal lands, is known as "The Indian Capital of the World." The Gallery of Nations Pow Wow is held here, along with the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial and several major rodeos.

As COVID-19 flourished in McKinley County in mid-April, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an order for bar closures.

The move may have set the stage for the explosion of cases, according to Kevin Foley, who heads the town's detox center. Surrounding reservations prohibit alcohol. With bars set to shut down,Foley said, tribal members came to drink in Gallup, home to more liquor stores per capita than just about any place in the nation.

Foley, executive director at Na'Nizhoozhi Center, a 30,000 square-foot, cinder-block building, said 98 people arrived at the center that night to sleep off the hours of drinking. They were given metal-framed beds in large common rooms. Although screening for fevers had begun already, sickness crept inside.

Some staffers got sick or quit, forcing the detox center to shut down during the third week of April. At least 21 clients tested positive and were transported to Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services, Gallup's other medical center. More clients who had been exposed to coronavirus were sent to motels or the streets. Homelessness is also a risk factor for COVID-19, according to the CDC.

Gallup's two medical facilities filled as the virus spread. The hospitals are across the street from one another. The Indian Medical Center, with 99 beds, serves Native American patients under the federal government's obligation to tribes. Rehoboth McKinley operates a private, nonprofit facility with 60 beds.

"We got hit hard and heavy all at one time," Gallup Mayor Louis Bonaguidi said. "I've lost a few friends myself."

At the Rehoboth McKinley hospital, terminal patients were hooked up to several IVs with multiple drip lines. Hospital chaplain Kris Pikaart said she saw 50 patients die during the first six months of the pandemic, mostly of symptoms related to coronavirus. There were so many drip lines that Pikaart would get tangled in them.

As the crisis grew, Pikaart set up final phone and video calls with families, becoming a conduit in the human tragedy.

The first fatality, in March, sticks with her: A young woman with several children, gravely ill and alone, refused for days to speak with her family. Then, near the end, the woman cried and said, "I want to talk with my kids."

"She proceeded to tell each one goodbye and gave them instructions on how they should live without her," Pikaart said. "She rolled out this beautiful, beautiful goodbye."

It was, Pikaart said, the bravest thing she had ever witnessed.

As spring turned to summer, death came to more McKinley County homes.

For Gabriella Lee's family in Gallup, it began with four days of coughing, sneezing. Then came the body aches.

Lee's uncle got sicker and sicker until he could barely breathe. At the Gallup Indian Medical Center, staff put him on a ventilator and then flew him to an Albuquerque hospital for more care.

There, he spoke about an imminent recovery and going out with his wife and son for a "big old steak dinner" once he felt better. He lasted four more days.

The family gathered to say goodbye on video via Facebook Live. He was unconscious. A nurse held the phone to his ear as his relatives gave their final words.

"We said we loved him and everything, how we're going to miss him," said Lee. "And he never came home after that."

After the Civil War, when the United States had wrested New Mexico and California from Mexico and miners and ranchers continued moving West, the Diné's ancestral homeland was besieged by a renewed campaign of violence.

Under an order from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James H. Carleton, villages were burned, livestock was butchered, water sources were destroyed and more than 10,000 Navajos and Apaches were rounded up, starting in 1864.

The prisoners were forced on an up to 450-mile death march known as The Long Walk. Along the way, 200 succumbed to exhaustion and died. An estimated 1,500 more died at the internment camp from sickness and starvation.

Four years later, the federal government proposed a deal: The United States would provide basic services such as health care, housing and education - if it could keep much of the Diné lands. The 1868 Treaty between the United States of America and the Navajo Tribe of Indians allowed the Diné to return to only a portion of their ancestral homelands. The exchange was one of hundreds of American Indian treaties that have been ratified since 1778.

From the start, government officials refused to honor it.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government passed legislation to terminate its legal obligations to tribes and launch an assimilation policy with Native peoples moving away from reservations and perceived dependence. In 1955, Indian Health Service began to oversee health care on tribal lands.

Two decades later, Congress reversed course, abandoning the assimilation model. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Act recognized tribal sovereignty and enabled Native nations to run their own hospitals, schools, police departments and other programs, funded by the federal government. About half the Indian country health care programs today are tribally operated. But still, the money did not come.

"The underfunding has specifically been in areas that would have helped the Navajo Nation deal with the pandemic," said U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, vice chair of the Committee on Indian Affairs.

Ramah Chapter, one of 110 governmental sub-units of the Navajo Nation partly located in McKinley County, sued the federal government in 1990 for inadequate funding of tribal services. That litigation and dozens of parallel suits dragged on for almost three decades before ending last year. The plaintiffs won a series of Supreme Court decisions. All told, the federal government paid out roughly $2 billion to U.S. tribes and their organizations.

It wasn't enough to make up for the decades of decay that left Indian health care starved for hospitals, supplies and staffing, said Lloyd Miller, who represented co-plaintiffs in the Ramah case.

"One of the terrible, continuing consequences to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Navajos is the historic underfunding of the entire Indian health system," he said.

Today, Indian Health Service serves 2.56 million American Indians and Alaska Natives across 574 federally recognized tribes in 37 states.

At the end of March, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act that designated $8 billion for tribes, including $714 million for the Navajo Nation.

Most of the money was delayed, and all of it came with red tape and restrictions.

CARES Act money, for example, can only be used to cover expenses "incurred due to the public health emergency." Tribes have until Dec. 30 to spend it - and even today, activists on the Navajo Nation stress that the money has still not trickled down to the communities that need it most.

The National Indian Health Board and tribal leaders contend the constraints are unrealistic. It's impossible to provide effective COVID-19 relief without addressing overarching infrastructure, they said - and you can't build a hospital, water lines or housing by late December.

They also said addressing the health care disparities within the Navajo Nation will cost far more than $714 million, with a planned replacement of the Gallup Indian Medical Center estimated to cost most of that amount, or $550 million. Providing safe drinking water and basic sanitation for everyone on the reservation would cost another $700 million, according to Indian Health Service.

"Is it any wonder we are in the space we are now?" said Dr. Mary Owen, president of the Association of American Indian Physicians and a member of Alaska's Tlingit band. "Everybody says, 'You have to make do with what you got.' Do we? Really? Well, then, give us back those lands."

Gregory Smithers, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studied the coronavirus assault on tribes, said infection rates, suffering and deaths are ultimately a result of systemic racism, from historical subjugation to contemporary poverty.

"They really weren't ready for this type of storm ... and the reason they weren't ready is because of generation after generation of neglect," Smithers said. "The virus isn't waiting for governments to get their medical facilities ready."

Joseph Kalt, co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, said while there's a public perception that Indians live on the public dole, the opposite is true. Indigenous people get fewer federal dollars for services than other Americans because they lack political clout. With Native Americans comprising fewer than 2% of the U.S. population, tribal members have little power at the polls, he said. And more than a dozen states have no reservations at all.

"If you're a member of Congress in one of those states," Kalt said, "what do you care?"

As the county's coronavirus outbreak peaked in April and May, federal authorities converted the gymnasium at Miyamura High School to a field hospital for patients who were improving.

Patients struggled to walk to the bathrooms in the locker room. Volunteers placed chairs along the way as rest stops and posted encouraging signs in English and Diné: "Gramps, you got this."

Two older patients walked laps around the football field with their oxygen tanks, determined to build strength and go home to their families, said Sanjay Choudhrie, incident commander at the gym.

The gym never housed more than 10 patients at a time because a decision was made to assign nearly all available doctors and nurses to the two area hospitals.

"From the get-go, our problem was a shortage of medical staff," Choudhrie said.

The Gallup Indian Medical Center was also short on resources. At one point, patient flights to Albuquerque were taking off hourly, with Indian Health Service paying for each trip and costly medical care.

Doctors said they provided the best care they could. Families with loved ones in local hospitals were called frequently with updates. And over 1,000 COVID-19-positive outpatients have been quarantined at area hotels and motels since March, where they've received both complex physical and mental health care, according to Dr. Jennie Wei and Dr. Mia Lozada of Gallup Indian Medical Center.

"I can't say we were perfectly ready, but we were building our system and learning as we went," said Dr. Jonathan Iralu, the Indian Medical Center's epidemiologist and chief clinical consultant for infectious diseases at Indian Health Service. "People did an amazing job. ... We were able to take on this huge public health threat. And I think it's inspired people."

The hospital is the largest run by Indian Health Service for the Navajo area, handling 5,800 Native American inpatients and 250,000 outpatients each year. But the facility is outdated and undersized. Local officials said there has been talk of building a replacement medical center for two decades.

Even in better times, crucial health services were not offered. For example, the 50-year-old medical center has no dialysis center despite the fact that adult tribal members suffer from diabetes at nearly three times the rate of white, non-Hispanics. Diabetics are among the highest-risk coronavirus patients.

In 2018, the Gallup facility's accreditation was threatened based on failures in multiple categories that posed "a threat to patients." Among them: transfusion errors, medical labeling, use of safety alarms on medical equipment, risk of hospital-borne infections and hygiene. The medical center addressed the issues, and accreditation was granted.

Michael Weahkee, director of Indian Health Service and an enrolled member of the Zuni Tribe, described the Gallup hospital as a "dilapidated infrastructure" that is nearly five times older than the average non-Indian medical facility.

Weahkee said IHS funding levels are 49 percent of what would be equitable using national health expenditure data as a benchmark. Asked if the chronic under-funding of indigenous healthcare constitutes systemic racism, Weahkee replied, "The federal government resources its priorities, and Indian healthcare has not been a priority."

"We're doing the very best we can with resources provided to us," said Weahkee, who is married to a Dinè and was born in New Mexico just north of McKinley County.

Laura Hammit, director of infectious disease prevention with Johns Hopkins University's Center for American Indian Health, said Indian Health Service and Navajo Nation employees were buying supplies with their own money, making PPE on days off and delivering provisions to tribal members in remote areas as the virus peaked in May.

"It is really unfair to chronicle their response as anything other than heroic," said Hammit, who is based in Gallup and helped fight the Navajo Nation outbreak. "If we want to point a finger anywhere, it needs to be at the federal government."

Dr. Phillip Smith, 70, spent most of his career as a national Indian Health Service administrator before retiring to head Utah's Monument Valley Health Clinic, which also got hit hard by COVID-19. He said Gallup Indian Medical Center has long lacked lab support, supplies, repairs and technology.

Smith, who is Diné, said his diabetic sister, Florence Dick, tested positive for COVID-19 while staying in a Gallup nursing home. The Indian Medical Center quarantined her in a motel until her condition deteriorated and she was sent to a hospital in Albuquerque, where she died within days.

"We grew up together," Smith said softly, recounting her death.

The Navajo elder lay in his hospital deathbed and stared at the phone. About 20 members of his family lined up outside their hogan, a traditional dwelling, to pay respects through the screen.

When the last relative had said goodbye, the man died.

It was a "miracle moment," said Pikaart, the chaplain at Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital who arranged the call.

For six months, Pikaart has been surrounded by critical illness and death.

High-flow oxygen pumps made it difficult to hear feeble patients even when they shouted. Pikaart knew she should stay six feet away to protect herself, but she couldn't resist leaning in two inches away from patients' faces to catch their final words.

"It was the only way I could hear them," she said. "And they have things to say."

As she helped patients and families, others on the Rehoboth McKinley hospital staff were overwhelmed by the patient surge, according to Dr. Rajiv Patel, who supervised the hospital's eight-bed intensive care unit.

Patel said 17 nurses were laid off in March before the outbreak, leaving a staff short on experience to deal with the pandemic. The hospital has about 520 employees, according to David Conejo, the medical center's formerchief executive.

One night in early May, a ventilator alarm went off during the graveyard shift. The staff, unfamiliar with the device, couldn't figure out what was wrong, Patel said. When Patel arrived the next morning, he said he discovered the patient's tracheal tube had shifted and wasn't delivering oxygen into the lungs.

The tube was reinserted. Two days later, the alarm problem recurred - and so did the confusion.

"That's when I decided we had to transfer people out. For this to happen twice was just unacceptable," Patel said. "We were kind of in over our heads."

The ICU was mostly shut down. All but one patient in the unit were flown to hospitals in Albuquerque.

The man with ventilator woes remained, too ill for travel.

Given the patient's precarious health, Patel said it is unclear whether flawed medical care contributed to his demise, "but it didn't help."

A "statement of deficiencies" report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, obtained by USA TODAY, describes repeated problems with a "maladjusted" ventilator tube that slipped out of the patient's windpipe "rendering it useless for hours. The patient died in the following days."

Patel, ​whose wife is Diné, resigned citing safety concerns. Other employees cast a no-confidence vote against Conejo, who was subsequently fired, according to court records.

Ina Burmeister, a Rehoboth McKinley spokesperson, said 15 contract nurses were laid off after the CDC recommended hospitals delay elective surgeries and other non-essential procedures because of the outbreak. Burmeister did not respond to questions about the patient's death or Conejo's dismissal, but she said under new management "we have strengthened internal controls and implemented new administrative policies to ensure the clinical quality."

In a federal lawsuit against the hospital and some employees challenging his firing, Conejo alleges the Rehoboth McKinley board directed the nurse layoffs, and he blamed subordinates, including Patel, for accepting an overload of COVID-19 patients from the detox center.

In an interview, Conejo reiterated those points and portrayed himself as the victim of a "mutiny" by self-interested employees.

Medical officials got no clarity from federal authorities as the pandemic arrived in Gallup in March, Conejo said. Training was offered at a command center, he said, but after the session was over an instructor told him: "You realize I'm making all this up, don't you?"

Conejo said about 20 key hospital employees got infected, were quarantined or quit, which compounded the staffing crisis.

At that point, Conejo said, he became the fall guy: "As soon as the shit hits the fan, everybody says, 'The CEO did it.' "

Randy Chatto navigated the long, dirt roads until he found it: a red, mobile-home-like structure in the middle of open desert. He hopped out of his truck and called out a Navajo greeting: "Yá'át'ééh!"

Gilbert Martinez, a Navajo elder, has lived alone in this home for years. He has no running water and the closest store, a gas station market, is miles away. Freshly returned from herding his sheep, he was happy to see Chatto, mostly because he had run out of food and water that day.

Since February, Chatto and his team have worked with local nonprofits like Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund and McKinley Mutual Aid to bring supplies to people who live in Ramah Navajo land - where Chatto is from - in areas so remote that some die en route to the hospital.

Diné prophecies have for generations told of a devastating illness that would require the community to come together. Many tribal members said these stories predicted COVID-19.

After the pandemic hit, young children wrapped up bundles of medicine for their elders. Diné in other states sent medical supplies and food to relatives on the reservation. As for community leaders like Chatto, he said he knew better than to wait for federal relief.

"We said, 'We have to start helping our people,'" Chatto said. "Time is crucial and lives are at stake."

Ira Vandever, incident commander for Baca-Prewitt Chapter of the Navajo Nation, said it was the community response - not government relief - that saved lives.

"That's just resiliency - that's just a reaction of our own culture to get through this," he said. "We've been dealing with diseases and [injustice] since 1492, when Columbus came. And we're still here."

Diné activists like Dr. Crystal Lee, CEO and founder of United Natives, a nonprofit aimed at supporting Native American youth, stress the power of turning to the community for culturally competent answers while recognizing the need that persists.

"A lot of our solutions are within ourselves, within our communities," said Lee, pointing, for example, to an intertribal quarantine site United Natives co-created as part of COVID-19 relief. "But what if we have the knowledge without any resources?"

Other volunteers from across the United States stepped in to make up for the lack of health care.

Doctors and nurses from the University of California-San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, New Mexico's Medical Reserve Corps, the state's National Guard and elsewhere rushed to McKinley County to bolster medical staff and deliver supplies.

Gary Morsch, an emergency doctor from Olathe, Kansas, recognized the pandemic threat early and founded a nonprofit known as COVID Care Force. After bringing volunteer medical workers to New York City in early April, the former Army physician shifted to Gallup and Shiprock later in the month. Morsch said his teams filled in for doctors and nurses at Gallup Indian Medical Center who were sick or quarantined, helped remaining staffers who were exhausted and monitored patients in motels and nursing homes.

"It was tough - busy, busy, busy," Morsch said, referring to conditions at the Indian Medical Center. "Every room was full."

As money and resources arrived, the Navajo Nation and New Mexico adopted get-tough policies to enforce lockdowns and pandemic protections. Gallup was locked down May 1, with roads leading into town closed and nonessential businesses shuttered for 10 days. In the first two weeks of May, Navajo police issued nearly 500 citations to curfew violators, according to The Arizona Republic.

But, in recent weeks, cases have increased on and surrounding Navajo Nation land.

"Our health care system on the Navajo Nation cannot handle another large surge in cases," Nez said in an Oct. 3 press release.

And for many families, the Big Cough has already wrought its destruction.

After Melvina Musket's parents died, it wasn't easy for family members to arrange a double funeral. There were so many deaths in McKinley County, the cemetery staff couldn't immediately provide a date for the burial. As a safety precaution, there would be no service.

"None of the people at the funeral home wanted to touch him," Musket said of her father.

When the time came, the family gathered at the Rehoboth Cemetery, a barren tableau of white crosses and sagebrush right outside Gallup. Only 10 mourners were allowed; other family and friends stood at the graveyard entrance, six feet apart and wearing masks.

In Navajo culture, when someone dies, there is a long wake where people gather, tell stories, eat, pray and make donations. But in light of COVID-19, that wasn't possible. Musket placed onto the casket a small Bible her grandmother had given to her parents when they wed. The casket was covered with earth. Flowers were heaped on top.
Contributing: Mark Nichols, Jasper Colt

Explore the series "

Deadly Discrimination

Racist policies mean many Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous Americans are poorer and sicker than white Americans. COVID-19 makes these inequalities deadly.

This six-part USA TODAY investigation shows how the policies of the past and present have made people of color prime targets for COVID-19. Reporters travelled to five counties that embody the effects of systemic racism to bring these stories to light.

It's really an unbelievable chain of oppression - it's still squeezing us, it still has its grip. And it's still killing us.
- Anna Marie Rondon, executive director of the New Mexico Social Justice and Equity Institute in McKinley County

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'Still killing us': The federal government underfunded health care for Indigenous people for centuries. Now they're dying of COVID-19

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GALLUP, N.M. - Melvina Musket stared at her dying father through the cellphone screen. His mouth hung open, his eyes were clamped shut and a beard covered his chin. She heard nurses crying in the background. "Jesus is waiting for you," she told him. Musket, 52, had never seen her father with facial hair.

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The Mother and Baby Homes Commission was set up in Ireland to investiagte the discovery of child remains, buried in a septic tank in the grounds of a Mother and Baby home in County Galway, Ireland. These homes, ran by the Catholic Church, housed and cared for unmarried mothers, with the aim of covertly giving babies born up for adoption. Allegations of abuse and misconduct are common, and the BBC reports that a child died in these institutions every two weeks between the mid-1920s and 1960s, most commonly from malnutrition and neglect. The Irish government has now voted for a bill that will make public access to information the investigation has uncovered far more difficult, despite being widely protested as many hope to gain information and closure on family members. This is obviosuly an example of real, physical violence, resulting in the deaths of countless women and babies - but also Farmer's structural violence which proposes that "Erasing history is perhaps the most common explanatory sleight-of-hand relied upon by the architects of structural violence. Erasure or distortion of history is part of the process of resocialization necessary for the emergence of hegemonic accounts of what happened and why" (308). Studies which only account for the living would let this story fall between the gaps, only ensuring the power of the Church in Ireland - investigations into covert abuse are increasingly common and reveal an insidiuous culture of coverups and secrets.

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The Minister for Children, Roderic O'Gorman has responded saying the bill is "needed to preserve access to invaluable information now and into the future, and not to put it beyond reach as has been reported".

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Worry over plan to seal records of former Irish mother and baby homes

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The Minister for Children, Roderic O'Gorman has responded saying the bill is "needed to preserve access to invaluable information now and into the future, and not to put it beyond reach as has been reported".

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These images of the various protests across Latin America on Columbus Day are striking. The protests encapsulated sometimes grew violent, with testimonies of tear gas and water cannons used on Mapuche demonstartors in Chile. It is important to use Abi-Lughod's approach here and use these protests as a lense through which to view power. Indigenous people have been subjugated to colonial forces of power across the world from the moment of contact to the present day, and the inequalities produced by ethnic discrimination persist. Here, then, we see not only resistance against the celebration of Colombus, the America's infamous coloniser, but against the conditions in which indigenous people are living today. Encroachment of government and coroporate forces into indigenous land, disproportionate levels of health inequality and unemployment, and increased instances of police violence are just some of the ways in which this historical power remains ever present in indigenous lives. Resistance is an answer to this, an angry call for recognition and justice.

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In Pictures: Indigenous people protest on Columbus Day

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Indigenous people across Latin America gathered for an annual protest that marks Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

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It would be remiss to discuss resistace today without drawing upon the recent Black Lives Matter movement and the wave of protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in May. This article argues why the use of the term 'riot' within popular media is a dmaaging one, sensationalising resistance. Riot connotes meaningless violence, argues Steinmetz, and has historical roots in racial tensions in the US and how the media has sought to exploit them. This is reminiscnet of the techniques of Egyptian revolutionaries as depicted in The Square (2013). Here, we saw increasingly violent protests along with a government that, seemingly successfully, worked to cover up brutality. The revolutionaries here, as well as BLM protesters and organisers, realise that they must take the representation of their actions into their own hands. Who controls the media is an important question, as they are not always sympathetic and, when they hold a monopoloy on public opinion, can be dangerous.

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'A War of Words.' Why Describing the George Floyd Protests as 'Riots' Is So Loaded

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People have had to make choices about how to characterize widespread, evolving unrest. Are we in the midst of uprisings? Rebellions? Riots?

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Island of the Hungry Ghosts is a brilliant documentary which follows Poh Lin Lee, a trauma counsellor who is permitted to treat ayslum-seekers detained in the grim, prison-like camps off the coast of Australia, on Christmas Island. The documentary sheds light on questions of care and 'bare humanity', as asylum-seekers are cared for on the most basic level. The permittance of trauma counselling seems to be performative, half-hearted at best, as Lee's patients are often moved to other centres with no prior warning - their existence is reduced to biological necessity. In crossing the border, asylum-seekers are acting 'illegally' and their punishment is legitimised. In locating detention centres on islands off-shore, people are caught in a liminal space, in between where they came from and where they were turned away. The documentary poignantly visualises feelings that Khosravi articulates, of "honour and shame" (p. 331). We see Lee's seemingly idyllic life with her family on the beautiful Christmas Island, while we are always uncomfortably aware of the close proximity of a centre which holds a dehumanised population of migrants who are to be shamed for their illegal status.

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"The best documentary award goes to a film that demonstrates extraordinary mastery of the full symphonic range of cinematic tools: cinematography, editing, score, sound design and, perhaps greatest of all, an exquisite use of metaphor. To a film that moved us deeply, impressed us immensely and made us feel we were witnessing nothing less than the emergence, fully formed, of a major new cinematic talent"
- Tribeca Jury
"[A] poetic profile of the forgotten asylum seekers detained on Christmas Island... Lush cinematography... Timely subject matter."
- Laurence Boyce, Screen International
"Gorgeous... [A] beautifully rendered portrait of an alien landscape... Reality is suspended and in its place Brady's surrealist dreamscape, shot breathtakingly by Michael Latham, becomes an all-encompassing tribunal on man's inhumanity to man in a clandestine landscape filled with lost spirits."
- Pamela Cohn, Filmmaker Magazine.com
"A fascinating metaphoric collision."
- Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine.com
"[A] standout... This is a film that lingers with you long after it's gone."
- Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary.org
" Island of the Hungry Ghosts is one of the year's most impressively made documentaries, a film that's as occasionally surreal as it is persistently moving. Island of the Hungry Ghosts is a true discovery."
- Joshua Brunsting, Criterion Cast.
"There is a true ruminative beauty here in Brady's impressionistic portrait of this haunted island out of time."
- Chris Barsanti, The Playlist
"A documentary overflowing with empathy, poetry, and elemental power."
- Hubert Vigilla, Flixist
"The magic of documentary filmmaking comes alive in this film... A thunderstorm of sensation... A powerful statement."
- Briana Atkins, The Knockturnal
"Hauntingly beautiful."
- Helen Kaplow, Indie NYC
"Hauntingly beautiful Island of the Hungry Ghosts combines multiple narratives...into one glorious whole... Powerful cinema... A mesmerizing work of visual wonder, the breathtaking images forming an evocative setting for a vital discussion of human rights... A rapturous viewing experience... A stunning, visceral first feature, announcing the director as a major talent to watch"
- Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Film Festival Today TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL
Award for best documentary film
VISION DU REEL
Buyens-Chagoll Award
EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL
Special Jury Mention
MUMBAI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Grand jury prize for best film
IDFA
Human rights award
CRESTED BUTTE FILM FESTIVAL
Award for Best documentary
ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Winner best documentary film
ZURICH HUMAN RIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL
Winner Mercurius prize
VALETTA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Award for best documentary film
DARWIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Award for best documentary film
FESTIVAL DES LIBERTES
Winner best documentary film
CINEMA EYE AWARDS
Nominee, Spotlight award
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA AWARDS
Nominee, best sound

Nominee, Best cinematography
BRITISH FILM AWARDS
Nominee, Best music

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"The best documentary award goes to a film that demonstrates extraordinary mastery of the full symphonic range of cinematic tools: cinematography, editing, score, sound design and, perhaps greatest of all, an exquisite use of metaphor.

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This interview with authors Ayad Akhtar and Laila Lalami highlights many of the key points this week about citizenship and who is excluded from this. Both write about the experience of being a Muslim American and the feeling of ambiguity in this. Lalami particularly touches on the way her citizenship is accepted and rejected; she is American when she is grateful, when she is critical she is told to "go back to you country." I think this starkly identifies an attitude that was emphasised in the lecture, and the Windrush documentary - the enforcement of citizenship by individual actors outwith the geographical institution of the Border and border control. This indignation at a Muslim woman speaking out against gender discrimination in America, for example, is also made from Orientalist pre-assumptions of the treatment of women from other countries.

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On the Shelf

Laila Lalami and Ayad Akhtar

In Laila Lalami's " Conditional Citizens," the Moroccan American author tells a story both sweeping and intimate about what it means to be American. It's her first book of nonfiction, a swift intellectual history that nails the present moment in the context of our nation's pockmarked past.

Ayad Akhtar, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play " Disgraced," is mirrored in the narrator of his new novel " Homeland Elegies." The multilayered narrative features a prize-winning writer, his Trump-loving father, his disenchanted mother, the frustrations of being a broke artist and the seductions of neoliberalism. Akhtar's creative interests are part of his public life; in September he was named President of PEN America.

They joined The Times via Zoom to talk about their new books and more; the conversation has been edited.
Laila, your book is nonfiction but you've included more of your life than you typically do.
Laila Lalami: There really was no other way to write about the experience of citizenship and the boundaries of Americanness.

AA: I can't imagine the book without that. I felt connected to the struggles that you were articulating. Without that personal point of view and the poignancy of those episodes, it would be a very different book.

LL: Thank you very much. Ayad, I started reading "Homeland Elegies" this week. It's the sort of book that arrived at the exact time that I needed it.
Both of your books deal a lot with how America has defined who is "us" and who is "them." What inspired you to begin?
LL: I was watching the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala, showed up to talk about their son. When he pulled out his pocket Constitution, it got me thinking about citizenship - who gets to be American and under what circumstances. It was very clear that for people like him, and people like me, who are naturalized citizens, you get to be American when you are grateful. But if you exercise other freedoms, like the freedom to criticize, then everything changes. Suddenly you hear things like "Love it or leave it," "Go back to your country," and so on. That's where the adjective came from, that we're conditional citizens.

AA: The overture of "Homeland Elegies" is the argument of the book. Yes, I'm Muslim, whatever that means. And yes, it's been hard for folks like us post-9/11. But it wasn't the exclusion on the basis of identity or race or religion that awakened an understanding of the sources of our crumbling republic. We are in a situation which transcends the individual dilemma of even this Muslim writer, who's going to tell you about all the consequences of America's inability to deal with its own tragedy. Even though that's the narrator's perspective, there is still even a bigger perspective when it comes to us as Americans, which is that our country is crumbling. And so the argument is less about belonging and more about what's happened to us as a nation. Which is not to say that the belonging thing isn't an important part, but I think I'm trying to straddle both things.
When you say trying to straddle both things, what do you mean?
AA: I knew that no matter what I write, everyone's going to be like, Oh, it's about some Muslim thing. [Laila laughs] I could write about the interiority of a snail brilliantly, and it would be, Oh, it's some reflection of Muslim consciousness, right?

LL: You can say "this shirt is red" and people say, how does that relate? [laughs]

AA: Yes! And so I had to own that, and I wanted to write a book that spoke to my fellow American citizens, all of them. By enfolding the dilemmas of belonging and the contradictions of American identity into the substance of the book, it enabled me - I hope, I believe, I devoutly wish that that is a conveyor to a bigger picture.
Ayad, you weave in questions about America's history as a site of wealth extraction, which is basically about capitalism. The father in the book is enamored with Donald Trump, who has tricked everybody into thinking he's rich and now taken over the nation.
AA: You know, I think of Trump as the expression par excellence of contemporary capitalism, because he's the expression of what debt makes possible. His career is an impossibility without the franchise of debt. The gap between real value and perceived value in debt is actually the exact same gap between truth and appearance in Trump. In a way the book makes a case that America is a casino and my dad and I are marks.

LL: [laughing] I love that!

AA: To me, Trump is not the problem. He is our president. He is who we have watched for 14 seasons pretend to be a boss. We are the people who have somehow substituted entertainment for thinking, and entertainment for politics. He didn't do that. We've done that. So this idea of blaming Trump to me is just - it's not going to get better until we understand what we've done.

LL: I like the fact that the father is a Trump supporter, because I recognize this character. Even though Trump overwhelmingly is rejected by American Muslims, he still managed to get a small portion of Muslim votes in the last election. One of the things that I was amused by as the father here is a cardiologist, obviously a very educated man. So you wouldn't expect that he would fall for Trump. My parents happened to be visiting me during the last election and they didn't go to college, and they were onto him. They saw right through the whole thing - and that's because they have experience with crooks! [laughs]

AA: Right. [laughs] That's great.

LL: The appeal of Trump doesn't necessarily have to do with education. It has to do with familiarity and what people see in him. My parents saw a crook but the character in this novel sees a highly successful businessman, someone who, in some sense, he hopes to replicate. I do agree that Trump is very much a symptom. He didn't come out of a vacuum. But I don't know that the blame for him can be laid squarely at the foot of some "us." You can't really talk about his success as a reality television star without talking about all reality TV, the corporatization of media. All of these things are connected. It's not entirely the choice of consumers or citizens.

AA: I think it's an important distinction you're making, and I think it's an accurate one. Trump doesn't represent everybody. Right? His vulgarity is not reflective of the personal vulgarity of the entire American nation - though I think there's a case to be made for that. But I think the wholesale changes - politically, legislatively, economically, at the level of ideology - we are responsible for those things. We are responsible for the fact that we sit on our phones and our consciousness is monetized upward of seven hours a day now. I do believe we have a greater responsibility. Now maybe, as human beings, we have limited agency. Well, then let's stop calling ourselves an enlightened democracy. If that's the truth, then let's start calling ourselves a corporate totalitarian system, or whatever it may be.

LL: I think we both agree and disagree. If we are all responsible, all it would take would be: I delete Facebook, I delete Twitter, I delete Instagram. I stop watching TV. I have freed myself! I think that's idealistic and admirable; I don't know how practical it is. We are hitched to everybody else in the social contract, we are all stitched together.

AA: Sure, but I don't think I'm suggesting that social media is the only reason that we have the political situation that we do. Maybe a more synoptic way of putting it is that we seem to evince less and less interest in citizenship and more and more interest in consumerism. We are less citizens of the republic now and more customers to reality. That's on us. And yes, there's no way to just stop that. It's been so many years in the making. But I think I can't absolve my own participation, my parents' participation; all of that has gone into the country we have become.

LL: Yes, our status and our duties and our roles as citizens are the only things that stand between us and being essentially only consumers and nothing else, basically having no other rights.

AA: On my end I only hear agreement.

LL: We did actually agree!
Both your books include incidents of white audience members asking not-smart questions at literary events related to being Muslim. How often do you face those kinds of questions?
LL: To go back to something we were talking about earlier, it's impossible for me as a writer not to come across questions about being Muslim, or at the very least questions about politics. That is the lens that is applied because of accidents of birth: the fact that I'm a woman, the fact that I'm brown, the fact that I'm a naturalized citizen. I sometimes feel envious of writers who get to go to literary festivals and talk about craft.

AA: The way that I deal with that is the general strategy of answering the question you wish you were asked. That requires a bit of rhetorical gymnastics from time to time.
Ayad, one of the characters tells the narrator that he wants him to stop telling complicated stories about Muslims because they are so under attack in America.
AA: I think his critique is valid. I mean, I'm not going to listen to it but I think it's valid. It's a debate that happened between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance, where Langston was very clear about the responsibility of artists of color to represent their own kind in ways that the white folk were not going to take advantage of, and Zora's response was no, the only thing that matters to me is art. I think there's a third position, something like social and philosophical truth. We all stand in the light of truth; we are all implicated; we're all flawed, we're all capable of great goodness. To me, that's the purview of great literature.

LL: I think this is something nonwhite communities go through. The idea is that you're writing for everyone else, first of all, is an interesting assumption. Ayad's work engages with issues that are relevant to American Muslims, but it's also very different from my experience growing up in Morocco, my experience of being Muslim. The writer Viet Thanh Nguyen has this concept of narrative plenitude. When you have only a handful of stories, there's so much pressure on them to represent everybody's expectations. You can easily have Sidney Poitier syndrome, where people want you to have characters that are perfect in every way. That is not real.

AA: If I could just add something to what Laila said very eloquently, I think that increasingly we're in a dilemma. Artists are being asked, increasingly, to become cheerleaders or advocates for points of view. Audiences are increasingly reading work for its representational politics, as opposed to the aesthetics of craft or narrative storytelling, and that what is good is no longer necessarily a good story. And I think that is dangerous for me creatively. I've been trying to figure out how to do something good my whole life, not how to do the right thing my whole life. It's a very complicated moment.
Kellogg is formerly books editor of the Los Angeles Times.

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Is Trump our fault? Two authors spar over citizenship, identity and complicity

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On the Shelf Laila Lalami and Ayad Akhtar In Laila Lalami's " Conditional Citizens," the Moroccan American author tells a story both sweeping and intimate about what it means to be American. It's her first book of nonfiction, a swift intellectual history that nails the present moment in the context of our nation's pockmarked past.

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This article ties in with points made in the lecture on the language, and so, implications, of police and policing. Although Glasgow is progressive in its drug strategy, as Scotland continues to push for the decriminalisation of drug use and possession, this article continues to frame such acts in terms of 'policing.' Describing how "people who use drugs have been far more visible" during Coronavirus, Glasgow's Superintendent states that the police are able to work more closely with crisis teams and prevention workers - however, this is still framed as ' appropriate policing.' If drug staretgy in Glasgow is focused on the prevention of drug related deaths through safe consumption and community outreach, then why is there any need for police presence and their lack of enforcement? I suggest, people who use drugs have been differentiated and categorised as 'delinquent' or 'undesirable', separated from the law-abiding in society, and so, they remian of police interest despite the decreasing power of the police.

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THE pandemic has boosted police efforts to deal with drug addiction in the Scottish city with the highest tally of deaths because lockdown made addicts more visible to emergency teams, a senior officer has said.

Superintendent Gary I'Anson, who is heading up a new strategy which aims to take a more compassionate approach to problem drug use in Glasgow rather than automatic enforcement, said the public health crisis had also helped focus emergency teams involved in referral and treatment.

Figures show there were 1,187 drug deaths in Scotland in 2018 and the numbers for last year could be even higher.

Glasgow had the highest number of drug deaths, at 280, although the rate of death was slightly higher in Dundee."

Detective I'Anson has previously said officers "can't arrest their way out of' Glasgow's drug issues.

READ MORE: Ministers say Glasgow's mobile 'fix room' is illegal

He said it is too early for any hard data, showing the impact on drug deaths but said the response anecdotally from crisis teams on the ground, "had been favourable".

He said: "During lockdown people who used drugs were far more visible.

The pandemic has actually helped in terms of closer working relationships.

"Because of that increased focus it is helping us police the right way.

"Instead of having an enforcement approach we were doing it, co-ordinated with drug and alcohol partners. It (the pandemic) has actually meant the drug strategy group has met far more regularly.

"There was up to 30 of us chairing a meeting looking at particular areas of concern and considering where do we need to direct appropriate policing.

"What that did was allow us to focus on where our increased training for officers needed to be, where the areas of concern were.

"We could brief officers who were in that area. It meant that we were better co-ordinated, whether it was needle exchange, so they could police appropriately.

"But still carrying out enforcement activity where it was absolutely necessary.

"What we weren't doing was flooding an area with police officers to displace drug users therefore they couldn't access harm reduction teams who were operating in that area."

READ MORE: Watch: Scottish Government told to stop watching drugs crisis through 'constitutional lens'

NHS crisis support services for drug and alcohol addiction have not experienced the same level of cuts as other services, perhaps due to fears that the pandemic might lead to an increase in dependencies.

Mobile units providing needle exchange have been increased in the city centre.

The police chief said he was unable to give his opinion on the stalling of a plan to house the UK's first Safer Drug Injection Unit in Glasgow, saying "there is much that can be done within the current legislative framework".

He said there is no evidence that a reduction in crime during lockdown had allowed more officers to be deployed to areas such as drug use though, saying police had still be tasked with policing temporary measures brought in as a result of Covid.

He said: "I suppose in many ways there's still been a huge demand but it's just been in a different way.

"There is still significant levels of crimes and offences right through the pandemic.

"You had the new parts of Covid legislation that were brought in."

READ MORE: 'Click and collect' life-saving drug kits being sent to addicts' homes

He said the pandemic had led to some aspects of the strategy, launched six months ago, being delayed such as a plan to put campus police officers into schools to educate pupils on drugs.

The next phase will involve former addicts being despatched into custody units to support drug users in a bid to help tackle re-offending rates.

Susan Brown, who is charge of the Positive Outcomes Project, said: "The ultimate aim is to stop re-offending but you won't stop re-offending unless you target the core issues which is usually drug addiction, trauma in childhood.

"That's why we are looking at peer mentors. Their experience is their life experience, they've been through it themselves.

"We've got two excellent peer mentors selected who have been the exact same experience.
"They have been through police custody, they have experienced addiction.

"They have come out of it and they have been in recovery for many years.
"We don't go in saying, 'you must stop offending'."

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How Coronavirus lockdown 'helped' police tackle drugs crisis in Scotland's worst-hit city

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THE pandemic has boosted police efforts to deal with drug addiction in the Scottish city with the highest tally of deaths because lockdown made addicts more visible to emergency teams, a senior officer has said.

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This article reveals the violence committed by the police in their coercion and torture of LGBT+ people in Egypt. It exemplifies how, as Han describes, policing becomes a condition of life as it is diffuse in all aspects of life, including the traditionally personal. In Egypt, the police excert extreme violence against those in society they have differentiated, in surveilling particular people and places - in this way, they work outside of the law and are not questioned as LGBT+ peoples status as ‘delinquent’, or outside of the norm, legitimises punishment.

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In a brutal effort to "clear the streets" of the LGBT+ community, security forces are entrapping Egypt ians using dating apps, throwing them into jail, and subjecting them to systematic torture and abuse, a new report has found.

Using social media and apps such as Grindr, Egyptian police are creating fake profiles that they use to meet gay, lesbian, bi and trans people, at which point they are picked up off the street and arbitrarily arrested, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday. Police then unlawfully search through the content of their phones to justify keeping them in detention and bring charges against them.

"Yasser", 27, told the group he was arrested when he met another man in Giza Center City after chatting with him on Grindr, a same-sex dating app.

"When they came back with a police report, I was surprised to see the guy I met on Grindr is one of the officers. They beat me and cursed me until I signed papers that said I was 'practicing debauchery' and publicly announcing it to fulfill my 'unnatural sexual desires'."

While in detention, all of the fifteen people interviewed by the rights group said security forces subjected them to physical and verbal abuse, "ranging from slapping to being water-hosed and tied up for days".

Political activist and transgender woman Malak el-Kashif, 20, said she was arrested and "put in a cage-like cell" the size of a freezer after attending a protest in March 2019. Security forces questioned her about her private life, her sex-reassignment surgery and her relationship with other activists, she said.

"I suffered the worst verbal abuse I have ever encountered by police officers and they forbade me from going to the bathroom for two days. They subjected me to a forced anal exam. They sexually assaulted me," she said.

Eight were victims of sexual violence while five were forced to undergo anal examinations, the New York-based rights watchdog said.

One 28-year-old trans activist said she bled for three days after police officers subjected her to forced vaginal and anal examinations as part of so-called "virginity" tests, according to the report.

Another of the victims, "Alaa", said he has been forced to use a crutch because of injuries from being brutally beaten and serially raped by other detainees.

"'Virginity' and anal tests constitute cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment that can rise to the level of torture and sexual assault under international human rights law," HRW said.

The attacks come amid a fierce anti-LGBT crackdown in the country following the 2017 Mashrou' Leila concert, when a picture of Sarah Hegazy raising a rainbow flag among the crowd was widely circulated. She was quickly detained by police, who tortured her for months and incited fellow detainees to beat and sexually assault her. Hegazy killed herself three years later, sending waves of shock and solidarity worldwide.

Rights groups say that since the concert authorities have stepped up arrests and prosecutions against LGBT+ people using vague discriminatory "debauchery" and "prostitution" laws.

"Egyptian authorities seem to be competing for the worst record on rights violations against LGBT+ people in the region, while the international silence is appalling," said Rasha Younes, HRW's LGBT+ rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa.

"Egypt's partners should halt support to its abusive security forces until the country takes effective steps to end this cycle of abuse, so that LGBT+ people can live freely in their country."

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Egypt police 'using dating apps' to find and imprison LGBT+ people

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In a brutal effort to "clear the streets" of the LGBT+ community, security forces are entrapping Egypt ians using dating apps, throwing them into jail, and subjecting them to systematic torture and abuse, a new report has found.